by Rosanna Ley
‘So will you go ahead?’ Millie looked worried. ‘Can you afford it?’
‘Yes to both questions.’ Tess accepted some bread from the basket Millie handed to her and helped herself to some calamaretti – baby squid with pine nuts, parsley, garlic and breadcrumbs – that she had first tasted at one of her lunches with Giovanni. If she was going to keep the villa and make it into a business, then the work had to be done, and she was damned if she was going to let Giovanni railroad her or Tonino frighten her away. She was a big girl now. She could make her own decisions.
‘They did an excellent job on converting the hotel,’ Pierro said, turning round to survey his pride and joy. ‘And if anything should go wrong, they are always reachable.’
‘Probably because we always pay on time,’ Millie commented. She crossed her legs, letting one of the black pumps fall to the floor.
But Tess couldn’t help feeling that Pierro’s recommendation was worth a hundred of Giovanni’s …
Millie popped a stuffed mussel between her red lips and chewed it thoughtfully. She frowned at Tess. ‘But how will you manage to pay for it?’ she said, as if talking to herself.
Pierro shot her a look. ‘That is not our business, my love … ’ But before he could say more, his mobile rang and he got up with a gesture of apology to answer it, wandering away from the table and talking in rapid Sicilian that lost Tess completely.
Millie leant forwards confidentially. ‘Have you come into some money, darling?’ she enquired. ‘How wonderful.’ Her eyes – green and gleaming – seemed to invite confidences.
But Tess was wary. That sensation of being watched when she’d left the villa this morning had unnerved her. And it wasn’t the first time. She’d paused on the steps, looked around. Life was continuing as usual in the baglio (though Tonino was nowhere to be seen) and there were just a few people down in the bay. She thought she saw the glint of something – the sun on a camera lens maybe – on the hills behind the village, where she had walked with Tonino in the olive grove. But …
It was probably her imagination. Still, after Giovanni had threatened her in the cafe, after Tonino had told her to go home, she had decided: she would tell no one here about David’s money. Not Giovanni, not Tonino, not even Millie. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust them, it was just beginning to irritate her that here in Cetaria everyone seemed to know everyone else’s business.
So, ‘Something like that,’ she told Millie, and gave her a secret smile. She helped herself to some bean salad and gamberoni.
Her friend looked a bit put out, but thankfully Pierro returned to the table at this point and she let the subject drop.
During lunch they talked of other things – the weather in England, what had been on the world news, how Tess was planning to manage the B&B and finally of Pierro’s mother, who was threatening to come and stay with them – indefinitely.
‘A fate worse than death,’ said Millie, rolling her eyes.
Tess didn’t mention Giovanni – she’d already decided to keep quiet about that too. She didn’t want to make too much of it, didn’t want to cause any more trouble with him. She knew how much damage an unthinking word could do.
At 2 p.m. Pierro excused himself and Tess made to go, but Millie kept her there for another forty-five minutes, chatting aimlessly, with dolce – home-made almond biscuits – and fresh coffee. You would never imagine that she had a hotel to run, Tess thought.
‘I really must be off,’ Tess said at last. ‘I need to contact the builders and get things moving.’ Plus she wanted to do another dive. After the storm and the earth tremor, the sea had looked fresher, brighter, more inviting than ever. Once the builders got started there’d be less time for diving. And anyway, who needed an excuse – Tess wanted to be in there.
She tore herself away from Millie, who suggested that she call in on the builders pronto and even gave her directions to the office, which was only a few streets away. ‘Sicilians prefer to do business face to face rather than by phone,’ she told her. ‘Better to strike while the iron is hot, as they say.’
But once she’d left the hotel, Tess changed her mind and decided to return to the villa and do the dive first – even builders had siestas in Cetaria.
The baglio certainly was sleepy in the early afternoon heat, the shops (including Tonino’s studio) all closed. But again, she felt it. That sensation of someone watching.
Ridiculous, she told herself, starting up the steps. Finding her key, she let herself in the side gate and walked round by the white jasmine to the front of the villa, her mind already planning the dive she was about to do.
She opened the front door, stepped inside the hall and stopped abruptly. Listened. Something wasn’t right. She frowned, took another step inside. She could hear a noise – like a drill, then a hammer, then the soft murmur of voices. Someone was here in the villa.
She hovered by the kitchen doorway. She should leave immediately, get help (but no one was in the baglio…), perhaps even run back to the hotel for Pierro if Tonino wasn’t around. She remembered his words: ‘I cannot always be here to protect you.’ No. She couldn’t ask Tonino.
And besides … she took another step inside. All her instincts were telling her not to leave, to find out who was here, to find out what was going on. This was her house, damn it.
Who’s there?’ she called. Silence. ‘Who’s there?’
CHAPTER 63
The food was the security and the sense of continuity.
Granite di caffè, Flavia decided. Put the water and sugar into a pan, heat until the water dissolves. Boil for one minute, simmer, add the coffee, blend, take off the heat. Add the vanilla pod and the cinnamon. Mix well. Cool. Freeze for two hours taking out to stir every fifteen minutes. It should, she wrote, be a fine granular consistency, almost mushy at the end. Whip the cream and icing sugar until stiff. Divide your granite between however many glasses, add the cream and serve with warm brioche.
One day, when Tess was three years old, Flavia received one of Peter’s letters.
‘I don’t know how to tell you this, Flavia,’ he wrote. ‘I even thought about not telling you at all.’
Even after all this time, Flavia felt icy fingers clutching at her heart.
And she was right.
‘I have cancer,’ he wrote, ‘lung cancer. Should have given up the weed years ago, but … ’
She’d never even known he smoked. Flavia blinked at the words on the page. How could she not have known such a small, such a fundamental thing?
He hadn’t smoked in Sicily, had he? – at least, he never said. He hadn’t smoked when he came to the cafe that day.
I never knew him at all, Flavia thought. I don’t know him now.
‘I want to see you,’ he wrote. It was the first time he had suggested a meeting in all these years. ‘Could you? Would you?’
Could she? Yes, she could. Lenny had never been a possessive man. He didn’t question her movements (though to be fair, they were usually around the kitchen of the Azzurro) and he respected her privacy. Would she? That was another thing. She did not want to betray her husband. She did not want to lie to him either. But where was the harm? And Peter … Peter was ill. Peter needed to see her. Could she refuse him?
She met him in Lyme Regis in a tea shop on the seafront. The tide was high and the waves were wild and grey; anything less like a Sicilian sea she couldn’t imagine.
She told Lenny she was going shopping with a friend. Alice, a woman she’d met at Tess’s nursery, someone Lenny hardly knew. Lenny would collect Tess from nursery, and look after everything at the Azzuro. Flavia cooked the day’s meals in advance and arranged cover. Lying to Lenny was the worst part. But … She hated the guilt that settled over her as she tried to meet his frank and open gaze. “Of course you should go, love,” he said, making it easy for her. Oh, Lenny …
She could – she supposed – have told him she was meeting Peter. She could have told him about the letters too and that Peter was il
l and that he wanted to see her. Lenny – being Lenny – might have understood. But he might have understood too much. He might have understood why she had agreed to go, and Flavia didn’t want to hurt him. He was a good man. He didn’t deserve it.
Peter was thinner. His hair was thin too, fine like baby hair. And soft, she thought. His face had new lines and pouches of loose skin – especially round the eyes – and his mouth was harder. His eyes were as blue as the sky, as blue as they had always been.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. And he held her hands across the table as if they were lovers.
They drank tea and ate toasted teacakes and talked – for hours it seemed like. Not just about his life and her life over the past years, but about the cancer. When he talked, she thought she could detect a shortness of breath, and her heart went out to this man she had loved. They were both in their forties now – middle-aged, she supposed, though she didn’t feel it, especially with a young daughter to look after and a business to run. But Peter’s life had not worked out the way he hoped. And now it would be cut short before he was fifty.
‘I must go,’ she said at last. ‘Lenny will worry … ’
He shook his head. ‘Who would have thought it? My Flavia, so English … ’
My Flavia …
‘I have been here twenty-five years,’ she reminded him. ‘I think in English these days.’
‘And do you think – my lovely Flavia – that you would do me one last favour – for old times’ sake?’ he asked. He had hold of her hands again.
She knew she couldn’t refuse him. She might never see him again. He was staying at the big hotel on the hill.
‘I’m not asking you to let me make love to you,’ he said. ‘But I can’t die without holding you. Just once. I can’t, Flavia.’
She knew exactly how he felt. Hadn’t she thought the same thing years ago? So she walked up the hill with him to the hotel. She waited by the reception desk as he collected his key and she went up in the lift with him to his room.
Inside the room, he turned down a corner of the sheets and quilt and left her.
Shivering, Flavia took off her clothes – her warm black overcoat, her suede boots, her thick skirt and her stockings. She took off her cardigan and her blouse and the silver cross Lenny had given her when they married. Silently, she asked her husband to forgive her for what she must do. She took off her under-things, she slipped under the covers and she waited for Peter, just as she had waited for him before.
CHAPTER 64
They came through the door on the other side of the kitchen, the door that led through to the living room.
Giovanni Sciarra and another man, older, wearing a grubby shirt and dungarees. Giovanni himself looked cool in jeans and a white linen shirt. As if he’d been invited round for Sunday tea.
‘Giovanni,’ she hissed. ‘What the fuck’s going on? What do you think you’re doing?’
A myriad of expressions passed over his face, as if, she thought, he couldn’t decide who to be.
‘You are back early, Tess,’ he said. He shook his head mournfully.
Back early? What was he talking about?
‘Too early for your own good.’
She tried to push down the fear that was rising in her, making her legs weak. He wouldn’t dare. Not with a witness. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded. ‘What are you looking for?’
But she knew – of course. And she knew why Giovanni had been so angry that she didn’t want his builders. He thought it was here, in the villa. Il Tesoro. He was convinced of it. That’s why the place had been in such a state when she first arrived. Edward Westerman hadn’t left it like that – Giovanni had.
‘Where is it hidden?’ he muttered. ‘Il Tesoro?’
So he’d never believed that story he fed her about Il Tesoro being handed in to someone by Tonino’s grandfather in return for money. He’d just been trying to cause trouble between them. ‘Giovanni,’ she said. ‘You seem to have forgotten something – this is my house and you are trespassing.’
He muttered something she didn’t understand.
‘Please leave. Now.’ She watched them as they came further into the room. The guy in the dungarees was holding a pneumatic drill, for God’s sake … So, Giovanni had already searched in the obvious places, and with the prospect of the building being refurbished, he had been hoping to dig deeper, so to speak. Now that she’d rejected his builder …
‘Ah, Tess,’ he said.
Again she felt the sliver of fear. ‘It must be very special,’ she said. ‘Il Tesoro. But what makes you think it’s here?’
Giovanni shrugged. He spoke to the man beside him, who slunk away past Tess, into the hall and out of the front door.
Tess let him go. Now they were alone. She was scared and she was angry. But she wanted to get to the bottom of this. She wanted the truth.
‘Where else could it be?’ Giovanni was watching her closely. ‘It is the obvious place to hide it, no?’
‘I don’t see why,’ she snapped. ‘It could be anywhere.’
‘For example?’ Giovanni’s voice rose. ‘ Scopi questo! Wherever it was hidden, it would have been found by now.’
Tess had spent enough hours already thinking back over the story. Alberto Amato had been asked by her grandfather to hide it during the war. But why? Why hadn’t her grandfather just hidden it himself? That way he could have been sure of not being betrayed; that way, only he would have known its whereabouts … It didn’t make sense.
‘Even if it was here,’ Tess said, treading carefully now, ‘what gives you any claim to it, Giovanni?’
He swore softly. ‘It was owed to the Sciarra family,’ he said. ‘It is our right.’
A piece of the jigsaw clicked into place. He had told her this before, hadn’t he? About the debt owed by the Amatos – which would be a debt owed by Luigi Amato in particular. Protection money for his business. But why would Edward Westerman end up with Il Tesoro if it had originally belonged to Luigi Amato? And then she got it. Millie had told her, without meaning to tell her. Luigi Amato was gay. Edward Westerman was also gay. This gave them at the least a common bond and possibly even a relationship. Was Edward Westerman the only person Luigi could trust? Did he give it to Edward for safekeeping because the Sciarra family meant to have it?
‘Where did Luigi get it from, Giovanni?’ Tess asked. She’d gone too far to back off now.
‘Clever girl.’ He smiled. ‘It was unearthed when he was building the foundations for his stupid little restaurant,’ he said. ‘But we have eyes everywhere, you know, and even if we didn’t, his gossiping sister could not keep her mouth shut. Like most women.’ He scowled. ‘So. It belongs to Sicily, to Cetaria.’ And he straightened up, looked almost proud. ‘To the brotherhood,’ he said, so quietly, she almost missed it. The brotherhood?
‘And you would give it to Sicily, would you, Giovanni?’ she asked. Because she would gladly give it to Sicily. To be truthful, she had no interest in the bloody thing; it had just caused a load of trouble as far as she could see.
‘What do you know,’ he spat, ‘of Sicily? Some English tourist, walking in here like she owns the place …?’
He seemed to have forgotten that she was half-Sicilian, Tess thought. That her mother had grown up here just as his had, had played with his own aunt in the same streets. And that she did own the place. This place.
‘That’s enough.’ She held out her hand, palm up.
He looked at her enquiringly. ‘What?’
‘The key, Giovanni. Give me the key to my villa and we’ll say no more about it.’ She didn’t feel scared now, just angry.
He grinned, took a step closer. ‘Come and get it, Tess.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She turned away.
‘No, I mean it.’ Closer still. ‘Come and get it.’ He raised his hands. ‘Come on. I’ll make it easy for you.’
She glared at him. ‘Who do you work for, Giovanni?’ She couldn’t imagine that he was a one-man
band. He was far too self-assured. And he knew too much – how had he known she’d be out today, for example?
Giovanni hadn’t bothered to answer her question. Or perhaps he already had. The brotherhood … He was still grinning, laughing at her. The poor Englishwoman, just a tourist and utterly out of her depth …
‘I suppose you’ve been having me watched?’ She fired a shot in the dark.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Now, why would I do that?’
‘To see when I go out – so that you can break into my house?’
He laughed. ‘No need, my dear Tess.’
Ah yes, because he had a key.
‘I have other ears,’ he continued in a whisper. ‘And other eyes. And we care about Il Tesoro. We want it. It cannot have simply disappeared.’
‘Well, I don’t have it,’ Tess snapped.
‘Hmm.’ He regarded her thoughtfully. ‘The problem being that we do not entirely believe you. Which is why we cannot leave you alone, no?’
Tess thought of Tonino. Did he too want Il Tesoro? It had, after all, once belonged to his family. Was that why …?
But it couldn’t be. If that were so, he would never have broken off with her, would he?
‘The key is in my shirt pocket,’ Giovanni whispered. ‘Here.’ He pointed.
Tess could see the shape of the heavy metal outlined under the white linen. The shirt was undone at the neck, his dark chest hair visible, the faintest sheen of sweat on his olive skin.
‘Take it,’ he said.
Tess’s gaze fixed on to his. She knew he was goading her. Nevertheless, she reached up for it.
He snatched her hand as she did so, pulling her roughly towards him. He grabbed a handful of her hair.
‘Get off me.’ Her voice was shaking. His face was almost touching hers, his eyes cruel and cold.
