The elegant little building did have the odd Viennese touch, plush comfort to counteract the desolate look of the empty terrace where tables and chairs had been stacked to be put away for the winter. Inside it was cosiness itself; a small wooden bar and a curved bay window facing out across the city with little golden chairs set at round tables. Behind the bar a stout middle-aged woman in an apron and an elderly bowtied and waistcoated barman observed their entrance, possibly the only customers they’d had all week. Luisa felt revived just by the smell of wood and fresh coffee. She plonked herself at a table, and when Giulietta went to get two cups and fished in her ragged purse for coins, for once she didn’t remonstrate.
Giulietta took her time, rattling off questions at the old barman’s back while he made their cappuccini. While she waited Luisa took out the folder, a touch damp but intact, and withdrew the newspaper cutting.
When she got to the table with two brimming cups, Giulietta said, ‘Cat Lady’s got a screw loose, is their opinion, though she used to teach anthropology at the university, so I suppose she can’t be stupid. They say she’s here every morning, regular as clockwork, feeds the cats and talks to them, eleven till twelve-thirty, sometimes comes in here and asks for a glass of tap water at twelve thirty-five or so before she goes off home clanking like a rag and bone man with all her cans and forks and whatnot.’
A woman of regular habits, thought Luisa, musing on the similarities between Fiamma diTommaso and Claudio Gentileschi. Cautiously she sipped the cappuccino; she was fussy about her coffee, and if it was made with longlife milk she wouldn’t drink it – but it was good.
She set the cup down. ‘Did you ask them about Tuesday?’
‘Hmm,’ said Giulietta. ‘She was feeding the cats Tuesday lunchtime, says Roberta.’ She nodded at the elderly woman, who gave her a stiff smile. ‘Didn’t bother with coming in for her glass of water, though. Which was odd, as she’s a bit obsessive about it, and it was a nice warm day, Tuesday.’
Something or someone upset her routine, mused Luisa. Scared her off?
‘They were both working? Did you ask them about the girl?’
Giulietta nodded, plucking the newspaper cutting from Luisa’s hand; Luisa let it go, because there was something else she needed to check. She withdrew the carabiniere report. ‘Says here that Cat Lady brought the bag in at five,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Not midday.’
‘That her?’ said Giulietta curiously, peering at the grainy photograph of Veronica Hutton. ‘Doesn’t look dumb. Looks like she knows her way around.’ She peered at the bag. ‘What else you got in there?’
‘Nuh-uh -’ said Luisa, holding up a finger. ‘One thing at a time.’ Giulietta snatched up the cutting with a pout, and flounced to the bar with it.
Luisa turned and looked away, out through the big bay window at the red roofs in the drizzle, the windblown umbrellas on the terrace below them. In the back of Luisa’s mind an idle thought began to form, but it did not have time to take shape before Giulietta was back, plonked next to her and rummaging through the bag.
‘They’d already seen the photograph,’ she said, holding the buff folder aloft. ‘What have we here?’ Luisa shook her head, and held out a hand for the folder. Thanked God she’d left the post-mortem photographs of Claudio Gentileschi back at the flat. Giulietta was tough, but not that tough.
‘This isn’t a game, Giuli,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Giulietta, sheepishly. ‘Sorry.’ She put the folder down.
Luisa sighed. ‘You can look,’ she said, and after a moment’s hesitation Giulietta pulled the folder onto her lap and opened it. She stared, stared so hard Luisa followed her gaze to the dog-eared photograph that was clipped to the top of the folder.
Reverently Giulietta tugged the photograph from its resting place and held it up.
‘Giuli?’ said Luisa. Giulietta’s face was slack, afraid.
‘It’s never him?’ she said. ‘The suicide? Not our Claudio?’
‘Our Claudio?’ Luisa took her hand. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Our Claudio,’ said Giulietta, slowly. ‘Lives next door to the Women’s Centre in the Piazza Tasso. Our Claudio.’
Chapter Seventeen
As She Closed The door behind Sandro Cellini, Iris suddenly felt completely wrung out. She’d known immediately that she had seen him before. It had taken her a second or two to place him but then there it was; the dejected-looking man who had been standing bareheaded in the rain, at the gate to the Boboli gardens. And with familiarity had come a sudden rush of relief; the relief of not being alone, the relief of finding out that Jackson had been telling the truth and that therefore when she had believed him – and by shameful extension when she slept with him – she had not been making the most stupid move she’d ever made. Just the relief had left her feeling like a jelly even before Sandro Cellini had told her the old man was dead. She sat down.
He’d taken out his mobile and looked at it, just to cover the shocked silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said, ‘I’ve got to go.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘I’m going to talk to your teachers.’
‘Teachers?’ she’d said, alarmed. ‘You mean Paolo Massi?’
‘Who else is there?’ he’d asked, curiously, and she’d explained to him how it worked, about Antonella Scarpa, and studio visits and life classes. He’d seemed to take it in, nodding intently, but he was obviously in a hurry, now. He apologized again; shook her hand. ‘Contact me,’ he said. ‘Please. If anything occurs to you.’
She’d liked him. Grumpy, suspicious Sandro Cellini, with his notebook and his way of looking at her under his eyebrows, impatient and solicitous at the same time. It had been weirdly comforting, having him in the flat, watching him look around curiously at the stuffed eagle in its case, the mounted antlers and the tattered gold damask curtains, then his look returning to her, Iris, with something like respect. That she could live in this weird Gothic set-up, without freaking out completely? She’d liked him, but even with him on the case, it wasn’t looking good, was it? And now he’d gone Iris felt the place reassert itself around her, settling and creaking.
The old man Ronnie’d gone to meet had been found dead; what was worse, it looked like he’d committed suicide. The conclusion was logical.
The doorbell shrilled, startling Iris on to her feet.
It was the contessa, on the landing. She was wearing a curious kind of housecoat.
‘Ha,’ the old woman said with hostility. ‘Another visitor?’
Iris folded her arms, not budging from the threshold to let her past. ‘Signore Cellini,’ she said, as icily polite as she could manage. ‘I think you know him?’
‘His wife,’ said the contessa with a contemptuous sniff. ‘I know the wife, a shop woman. I give her number to Mrs Hutton.’
‘So you know,’ said Iris, ‘that he’s trying to find out what happened to Ronnie. To Veronica.’
The old woman inclined her head. ‘He didn’t come to ask me,’ she said, her mouth set in an ugly line.
‘Do you have anything to tell him?’ Old bat.
‘How can he know, if he doesn’t ask?’ She sniffed again.
Something occurred to Iris. ‘On Friday night,’ she said, ‘did you see anyone? Did anyone call?’
‘Anyone, what do you mean, anyone?’ said the contessa, her eyes like a small, suspicious animal’s.
‘I think someone was in the apartment on Friday night.’
The Contessa Badigliani drew herself up. ‘Absolutely negative,’ she said. ‘Do you think I would allow any stranger into my house? My concern for security is paramount.’ Her creaking, antiquated English made her sound mad.
Iris looked at her, because there was something about the way she said it. ‘Not necessarily a stranger,’ she said. ‘Did anyone come here?’
The old woman puffed herself up. ‘This is my house,’ she said. ‘I admit whom I wish. And while we are speaking of these things, I do not permit the visits of young men, who leave in the middle of the
night.’
Iris froze, furious; she expected the blush but it didn’t come. Slowly and deliberately she closed the door on the Contessa Badigliani’s nasty old face, then rested her back on the door. Behind her there was an outraged muttering, some threatening Italian, a silence, then the clang of the elevator door.
Iris got her bag, her keys, her phone. She texted Hiroko: on my way.
She called a cab.
Sandro noticed straight away that no expense was spared at the Scuola Massi. The entrance was in a narrow, pretty street between the church of San Niccolò and the peeling burnt-orange stucco of the Palazzo Serristori. It was one of the highest-priced areas of the city, and the most picturesque, even in the November rain. Perfect for making a good impression on foreign visitors, as was the facade of the school, which was newly painted in rich ochre, the pietra serena around windows and doors wire-brushed and pristine, and the brass nameplate gleaming.
When he had come blearily to the phone that morning, Pietro hadn’t had much to say, or at least not on the subject of the investigation into the finances of the art school.
It had been inconclusive; there were country properties that had aroused suspicion but none of them were in Massi’s own name; the school did well, every course fully subscribed, some students even came back for several years running, three of the big American universities used the place exclusively. The art school enjoyed goodwill, because the Massi family had that record during the war, the father printing leaflets in his cellar for the partisans. Of course they were doing well, and if the Guardia didn’t dig too far down to investigate whether all those students actually existed, well, they were a busy bunch. A huge corruption case had erupted while the investigation had been going on, half the officers had been transferred to it, and the whole thing petered out.
‘Plus,’ Pietro had said almost as an afterthought, ‘it was a woman denounced him to the Guardia.’
‘So what? Sandro had said.
‘Come off it,’ Pietro had said. ‘You know what that means. Ex-girlfriend, spurned lover, whatever. Ulterior motive.’ ‘They know that for sure?’
Sandro could picture Pietro’s world-weary shrug. ‘She started as a life model for the school then started doing bits of work for him, and I believe it might have turned into something more, very briefly. I gather he’s rather attractive to the ladies.’
‘Ah,’ Sandro had said, filing this little nugget away for possible future use. Gossip never quite counted as fact, but it sometimes led somewhere, all the same.
‘Did you have any feeling, though,’ he had asked Pietro, ‘for whether they had cause for the tax fraud investigation?’
‘I don’t like the man,’ Pietro had said. ‘So I’d have pursued it.’
The woman who let Sandro in – Antonella Scarpa, as she introduced herself with a firm, dry handshake – struck him as exactly the kind of woman a jealous wife would select as a secretary, for example, if she wanted to keep her husband out of trouble. Crop-haired, handsome enough, slight but severe in her white coat. She reminded him of something or someone, but he couldn’t think what. A police technician, maybe, with that serious look; then again perhaps he was recognizing a type, clever, tough, hard-working: balls of steel, gender notwithstanding. The archetypal Italian female.
‘The director is not here yet,’ Scarpa said. ‘He thinks perhaps five minutes? The traffic is bad on the viale, with all the rain.’ Sandro grunted in sympathy.
As the woman led him inside, through the stone-vaulted entrance hall where uplighters shone on a series of – even to Sandro’s untrained eye – exquisite engravings of Florentine landmarks, he remembered where he’d seen her before. He was good like that; the memory would always click into place, in the end. He’d seen Antonella Scarpa only yesterday, hanging paintings in a gallery in the Via Romana.
‘You’ve got a gallery space, too, am I right?’ he asked casually, and Scarpa turned to look at him over her shoulder.
‘Yes,’ she said politely, as if talking to a prospective customer. ‘We exhibit students’ work there at the end of their course.’
‘Is it also run commercially?’ he asked. It was surely too grand a premises just for student efforts.
They had come to a small lobby with low seating and she gestured to him to sit down.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘We sell. Can I offer you a cup of coffee?’
While she fetched the coffee, Sandro tried to think of a way of putting her at her ease. Five minutes wasn’t much time to extract information from a tenaciously loyal and fiercely discreet employee – and even in the few moments he had had to observe Antonella Scarpa he had registered these characteristics – but it might bear fruit.
‘Have you been with the Massi school for long?’ he asked, by way of preamble.
‘Eight years,’ she said. So she arrived the year after the tax case. Is she in love with Massi, thought Sandro, and doesn’t know it herself? Eight years as a married man’s sidekick. He didn’t have to ask if she had a family of her own, because she was here, wasn’t she? On a Sunday. He looked around; there was a wall of glass beyond which he could see a vaulted studio space; it looked as though she had been halfway through setting up easels around a podium.
‘Do you usually work Sundays?’ he asked, and she shrugged.
‘Now and then,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to get things done with all the students here.’
Cluttering up the place, thought Sandro; maybe she’s really interested in the other side of the business. ‘What kind of art do you sell?’ he asked. ‘In the gallery?’
Standing with arms folded while he sat, she looked at him curiously. ‘Do you – excuse me -’ she said, ‘do you know anything about fine art?’
Sandro shrugged, smiling amiably. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Humour me.’
Scarpa looked at him sternly. ‘We source original drawings and engravings of the Renaissance for international dealers,’ she said, ‘for the most part American and German, although increasingly we have some Russian clients,’ as if reading from a rubric. ‘And we are dealers for some contemporary painters and conceptual artists.’ She mentioned a few names, which he noted, but Sandro had never heard of any of them. Conceptual art, as far as he knew, was a matter of pigs’ heads and wrapping the Ponte Vecchio in tinfoil; was there money in that?
‘I must come and have a look,’ he said. ‘Would that be permitted?’ It seemed to him that Antonella Scarpa’s attention sharpened at the request.
‘I’m sure,’ she said warily.
‘Maybe this afternoon,’ mused Sandro, as if to himself. Was she being professionally tight-lipped, protective, or something more? ‘A bit of a treat for a rainy Sunday.’ And he smiled at her.
‘Well, you’d have to talk to the Direttore about that,’ she said with alarm, and in response to that hint of panic in her voice he resolved that that was precisely what he would do, although whether out of a desire to cause trouble or sound detective instinct he couldn’t have said. And then on cue the grating sound of an iron key in the heavy lock interrupted them.
Paolo Massi was handsome in the Florentine patrician manner, and Sandro took an immediate dislike to him, from the hand he held out, unsmiling, to the wings of distinguished dark and silver hair, to the deepset green eyes. Sandro gave the offered hand the briefest of touches.
‘I want to be every help I can,’ said Massi earnestly, ushering Sandro into his office, which was on a mezzanine floor up a flight of iron stairs. From where he sat Sandro could see out through the studio space and into the courtyard beyond, where some large gardenias in pots were dripping in the rain. Sandro imagined the space full of bowed heads, eager foreign girls labouring away at their easels.
What did they come here for, these girls? Romance? Escape from the parents or the school, a bit of instant growing up?
‘Of course,’ he said, not thinking, to Paolo Massi. He transferred his gaze from the studio to the interior of the man’s office; another row of
beautifully framed pictures, pages from a mediaeval manuscript of some kind. A desk with nothing on it but a photograph in a silver frame, of the wife. A bit of a beauty, dark hair and eyes, fine nose; Luisa had been right.
‘What do you think’s happened to her?’ asked Sandro, on impulse, as if confiding in the man, ‘because the police and the mother don’t seem to be all that worried, so far. They seemed to think it would be characteristic of the girl to – well, just bunk off for a bit. Have something of an adventure.’
Aren’t you worried? he wanted to say. What if some lunatic’s got her in his cellar? Massi looked down his nose. Sandro wanted to shake him by the throat.
‘I just don’t know,’ said Massi eventually. ‘I suppose we have to consider the fact that harm might have come to her.’ He looked grave. ‘But isn’t there the hope – I mean, there’s still the hope that it could be some – man? That she’s gone off on some holiday?’
Sandro nodded noncommittally. ‘Do you think that would be typical? I mean, did you get to know her at all?’ he said mildly. ‘Did you get that impression of her, that she was wild?’
Massi looked at him, and sighed. ‘I can really only talk of her as a student of art,’ he said. ‘I can tell you that she wanted to be good but she wasn’t used to hard work. She liked to enjoy herself; she was impulsive. One day she wanted to be a great painter. . .’ and he spread his hands ‘. . . the next she wanted to stay awake for twenty-four hours drinking with strangers.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s not uncommon.’
He seemed to be trying hard.
‘So you think she was impulsive enough, what, to just run away?’
‘There are so many students,’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘You know, she seemed a nice enough girl. Many of them are impulsive, or lazy; they are very young.’ There was something studied, Sandro thought, about his cool manner; distancing himself already, he thought, in case of any bad publicity.
‘I bet they cause you any amount of trouble,’ said Sandro, trying to sound sympathetic. ‘Not turning up, that kind of thing.’
The Drowning River Page 21
