The Drowning River

by Christobel Kent

  He stared at her; who was she talking about? She flipped up the index finger to join the thumb. ‘Number two. Look at your camera stills, if you like, look at the whole day; I did not go into the Boboli, that camera did not see me. Ask your witness, if your witness really exists; I went the other way; I went back to the studio, where I had told the students I would be from twelve-thirty if they needed me and we would begin working at half past one.’

  ‘Half past one,’ repeated Sandro dully.

  ‘So when your woman in the white coat was on the Lungarno Santa Rosa, I was in the studio with seven, no, eight students, doing tracings of the various proposals for the front elevation of Santa Maria del Fiore.’

  ‘But he said, “It was her”,’ repeated Sandro.

  ‘Another her,’ said Scarpa, and pushed open the last door, behind him, and a security light sprang into live, blinding white around a tiny yard. At the back of the yard was a rusty gate, and beyond the gate a steep and overgrown path, that led up into the Boboli. ‘Not me,’ she said.

  Behind them in the gallery something was happening.

  Jackson pressed the phone to his ear, hunched in an effort to hear every word over the din in the bar. The metallic voice repeating, Received, Tuesday, 1 November, twelve twenty-seven p.m. Then some heavy breathing. Then Paolo Massi, his prim, correct English hurried and jumbled.

  Where the hell are you, Ronnie? Where? I’ve tried to call but you’re not answering, call me back please. I’m sorry I couldn’t talk when you came to the gallery, you could see – I don’t know how she knows, but she knows. My wife is in the gardens. My wife is coming to find you. Ronnie? Ronnie? Just call me – my wife, she’s – just call me.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Tomi Was Very Close to being frightened, in the dark, with the sound and feel of all the water under his feet, but he had ways of controlling the fear; one of them consisted of the rolled-up copies of Lupo Alberto in his pocket, and he could feel their comforting pressure against his leg through the cloth. He had other things; his small stash of business cards, he liked to look through them and repeat the names, and try and make sense of the businesses they represented. Recycling Executive, for example, Social Care Assistant, Private Investigations. That calmed him. His wallet with the cards in was inside his pocket.

  Mamma thought he was on his computer in his room; that was good, because it meant she wouldn’t call him and interrupt his thinking. ‘Where are you? It’s raining again.’ Wouldn’t remind him of all there was to be frightened of, out here.

  He’d thought he wanted to be at home, but he’d found he couldn’t settle, not to his comic books, or his model-making, or his computer games. He had waited until she was settled in front of the televison, then he had opened the front door very, very quietly; he had done it before, you had to use both hands, one for the handle, one for the key.

  He needed to rescue the dog; the thought of the water pulling, pulling at the place where it was locked up did something terrible to his head; the thought of the shed breaking away from the bank and being washed down the river did something terrible, the thought of the dog scratching at the door as it tumbled down the river to the sea.

  Tomi had got through the broken mesh surrounding the Circolo Rondinella’s terrace; he had moved across the tarmac under the dripping pergola and was in among the little cabins at the back. He didn’t know if he could go any further; he could hear the water rushing, rushing, roaring underneath him. There was a police barrier further up the Lungarno Santa Rosa to stop people coming close to the river, but they hadn’t seen Tomi, who had already been inside it. Already inside the Circolo Rondinella, which was how you got to the jumble of little sheds, only the problem was he didn’t know how to go any further. Tomi had not thought that this would not be solid earth; he had not understood that all it was held up by were posts and some concrete poured into the sloping bank here and there, everything held up by everything else. He had not thought what would happen when one brick was removed from the bottom of the wall, or more than one. He thought perhaps it was too late, now.

  The water was like a huge animal; Tomi squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to think of what animal it might be, a black roaring thing, a tremendous black snake, an eel with huge teeth, lashing underneath at whatever it was that held it all up. He had not dared to look over the parapet at it on his way down here. He took a step, then another.

  Tomi had reached a kind of narrow corridor, a wooden landing between two thin cabin walls when it happened, the whole thing shuddered and creaked; he saw the vertical line of a Portakabin shudder and shift in front of him, as he had seen the corner of a room do when caught in a small earthquake in Calabria with Mamma. Tomi took hold of a kind of fence post behind him, part of the pergola, and hung on for dear life.

  His mobile, squeezed from his pocket by Lupo Alberto, fell to the boards with a clatter and he stared as it slid away from him across a surface no longer horizontal. Sliding down the post with his hand, he reached for it, only for the whole platform to take another lurch, down towards the river.

  Prompted by the commotion, Sandro had lunged out of the narrow space and back into the dark, downlit gallery to find Luisa and Giulietta in the street doorway, blocking Paolo Massi’s exit. Massi had one arm between them as he struggled to find a way past and out on to the street, but they stood firm.

  ‘Hold on, there,’ said Sandro quietly. ‘I haven’t quite finished with you.’ He held up the long caramel strand of hair. ‘Recognize this? It’s all we need, you know. This is what the police call hard evidence.’ Paolo Massi stopped struggling, perhaps aware of how undignified he looked.

  ‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ he said haughtily.

  Sandro heard Antonella Scarpa’s footsteps behind him.

  ‘Signore Massi,’ she said over his shoulder, dangerously calm. ‘Tell him that you know I had nothing to do with this.’

  Massi attempted to look down his long, straight nose, but his mouth moved stupidly, a foolish, guilty grin. ‘Antonella,’ he said weakly, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Scarpa turned to Sandro, holding herself very straight. ‘The fakes – well, you call them fakes. They are beautiful. I knew about the fakes, I knew Claudio Gentileschi, I was the one to take him his money, every few months, in his studio. It was business, and if some corporation in Stuttgart or Minsk has a beautiful drawing that happens not to be entirely authentic, no one really suffers.’

  ‘Is she the woman in the white coat?’ Luisa interrupted without ceremony, eyeing Scarpa. ‘I thought she’d be bigger.’

  Slowly Antonella Scarpa flipped one button undone on the white coat, then another, slid it off her small shoulders and hung it up on the hook by the door.

  ‘Tell them,’ she said, looking at Paolo Massi. ‘Tell them what was the first thing your beautiful, jealous wife did when she arrived at the gallery last Tuesday? Tell them why, the next day, you told me that I would not be needed to help in the gallery that night, as had been planned? Was it because Anna would be helping, the devoted wife?’

  Massi said nothing. ‘The first thing she did when she saw me, on Tuesday morning, was to take down a white coat from the hook,’ said Antonella. ‘Paolo won’t be needing you any more, she said, and then she put the coat on herself.’

  Standing very straight, Scarpa pointed a finger at Massi, skewering him. ‘Let your wife pretend she hasn’t a jealous bone in her body. Let her pretend her mind is on higher things, her retreats, her pilgrimages, her theories about the ancient gods. Not her ridiculous obsession with shoes, no one is allowed to mention that, just as no one is allowed to mention her ridiculous suicide attempts or those screaming rows you have, regular as clockwork in the office, after the end of every course.’

  Only then did she take a breath. Luisa and Giulietta were gazing at her with something like respect.

  ‘So it’s not her, then?’ said Giulietta. ‘I could have told you that; she’s a Sardinian through and through, no one coul
d call her an artyfarty Florentine. Wasn’t that what the waiter called the woman at the Kaffeehaus? Listen to the accent.’

  She was right. He’d been right about the coat, only the wrong woman had been wearing it: not Antonella Scarpa, but Anna Massi. And there was something else. Sandro held up a hand and turned a moment to Paolo Massi.

  ‘Your wife went to see Lucia Gentileschi, didn’t she, on Friday evening? To offer her condolences? Or to find out how much the widow knew? Lucia hardly recognized her. And then the Gentileschis’ flat is just around the corner from the Piazza d’Azeglio, isn’t it? And on Friday night, when Iris March had been persuaded by you to spend the night elsewhere, someone let themselves into that apartment, looking for something? Someone, perhaps, who wouldn’t have worried the old contessa; a woman of good family, paying a call?’

  Taken by surprise, Massi seemed unable to speak.

  ‘A shame she didn’t know enough to know that you don’t wipe a computer by just turning it off. And she underestimated Iris March, too; she’s clever enough to know when someone’s been inside her place.’

  Iris March, he thought, and the name triggered a tiny alarm in his head – where did you go, Iris March?

  But Antonella Scarpa was talking again, as if he hadn’t spoken, staring only at her employer, daring him to contradict her.

  ‘So she put on my white coat and said something to – to him, smiling sweetly in that way she does, about Alitalia calling for confirmation of Signore Massi’s flights to Sicily, did he wish to be seated next to his companion, whose flight had been paid for with his credit card?’ She smiled thinly. ‘I expect she was as angry about him paying for the girl’s flight as anything else, wasn’t she? And then what happened? I’d had enough, I was at the door ready to go because, God knows, I had enough to do at the school. And then she appeared at the window. Miss Veronica Hutton.’ She folded her arms across her chest. ‘And then it all really went wrong, didn’t it, Paolo?’

  Massi had slumped to the chair at his ornate desk by now, though no one really bothered to look away from Antonella Scarpa to consider him.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone you’d seen Veronica Hutton come to the gallery that morning?’ said Sandro quietly.

  Scarpa barely even shrugged. ‘Loyalty?’ She grimaced. ‘Stupid.’ She frowned. ‘But I thought it was nothing, a coincidence. I knew he wasn’t capable of killing her, hiding her. Not him.’

  ‘And her?’

  Scarpa gazed at Sandro, pale, cropheaded, like a defiant, angry child. She spoke carefully.

  ‘I didn’t see her go, not out the back into the Boboli; it didn’t occur to me. But I did notice on Thursday, when they allowed me back to help in the gallery, that the gate had been used. It’s never used, I thought the lock must have rusted up, but when I went out the back into the courtyard on Thursday because it had started to rain and there were packing supplies out there getting wet, I saw it was ajar. I didn’t understand it, at the time.’

  She paused, and when she spoke again her fierceness had returned. Despite it all, Sandro found he liked her fierceness. ‘And it would have been just like her to keep her white coat on. Look at me, a serious person. A worker. Money-grubbing, me? Jealous, me? But if you’d seen her, spitting at him when the girl ran off again, you’d have said she wasn’t just jealous but crazy.’

  Antonella Scarpa contorted her face, hissing in imitation of her boss’s wife. Sandro could imagine how the woman must have treated her, all these years. ‘Is it her? It’s her, isn’t it? And she flew at him. It was embarrassing, to tell the truth. That’s when I left.’

  ‘Where was Anna Massi, do you remember?’ he asked softly. ‘When you went? Was she still in the gallery?’

  Antonella Scarpa’s small white oval face was turned up towards him, clever, thoughtful. ‘Inside, yes.’ She nodded. ‘Paolo was saying, it’s all right, she’s gone into the Boboli. Then Anna turned her back on him, and was stalking off. Towards the back of the gallery. In her white coat.’

  Sandro looked at her. Proud, and desolate, and telling the truth. Antonella Scarpa had nothing left to lose. He put one last careful question to her.

  ‘You’ve known Anna Massi a long time.’ She nodded, just barely. ‘And if, say, she heard Claudio talking about the work he did for the Massi family, in detail, to the girl who was sleeping with her husband?’

  Scarpa tilted her head. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She’d be capable of killing them both. Anna Massi would be capable of anything.’

  In the dark, and the wet, and the chaos, the screaming of sirens all around him, Jackson stood at the door to Paolo Massi’s apartment building and looked up. He couldn’t remember which floor the apartment was on, or which direction it faced. First floor? There seemed to be lights on the first floor, very dim.

  Iris was too sensible to come here on her own; he’d seen her send that message. But what if Sandro Cellini never got it? What if he was trapped on the other side of the river, what if he was in a traffic snarl-up?

  Leaning on the bell again, MASSI, Jackson held it down for longer than was reasonable, longer than could be ignored. And again.

  He knew she’d come here; he was sure of it. It seemed to Jackson that for the first time in years his brain had been kickstarted into working properly, right now; it could be adrenaline, but he knew it was because of Iris. Because she needed him to be clever right now. She’d come here, first of all because he’d seen her heading north up the Via Calzaiuoli, second of all because it was a Sunday and she’d assume Massi was at home, not anywhere else, and third of all because she couldn’t have crossed the river even if she’d wanted to.

  But there was no answer.

  Anna Massi had laughed that girlish laugh, straight off, when Iris said it. They were both on their feet now.

  ‘Oh, you silly girl,’ she’d said. ‘Did you think I didn’t know?’

  Her English was good; her husband had been right. She seemed like a different person; her eyes glittered. ‘Do you think she was the first?’

  Inside the dark apartment Iris heard the squeal of the street doorbell, but she couldn’t move. ‘Sit down,’ said Anna Massi, and there was something in her voice that made it impossible for Iris to disobey. She sat; Anna Massi settled herself decorously beside her.

  ‘She was a stupid child. Imagining she was an artist’s muse, no doubt!’

  And she laughed again, only this time Iris heard it differently. It was as though the sound had brought something into focus in her frantically calculating brain. She’s crazy, she thought, and then she thought of Giovanna Badigliani; saying to Paolo Massi, ‘Your wife was looking well,’ in that knowing way. Telling him that she knew his wife was unhinged; telling him in the same breath that she’d seen her.

  ‘It was you,’ said Iris. ‘You came to the apartment. You unplugged the computer.’

  And Anna Massi had tilted her head on one side, black-eyed and curious as a bird after a worm, and Iris, mesmerized, felt the cold hand creep back across hers but could not look down at it.

  The laugh had turned breathy. ‘A wife protects her husband,’ she said.

  Iris had a hand to her mouth. ‘What do you mean?’ she whispered. ‘What have you done?’ It was as though she was in a dream, and wanted to scream but no sound came out.

  A new edge entered Anna Massi’s voice; a kind of petulance. ‘She should not have been there. She shouldn’t have come to the gallery and showed her silly face to me.’ She laughed. ‘Paolo tried to stop me going after her but he didn’t understand. I cannot – there are certain things I cannot allow.’

  ‘You mean, as long as you didn’t have to know,’ said Iris, falteringly. ‘As long as he was – discreet.’

  Anna Massi gave her a long, considering look. ‘The woman from Alitalia who telephoned, even she knew; she was laughing at me, asking me if I thought they should be seated together. Of course, I had to speak to him: I had to go to the gallery.’

  Eyes wide, Iris kept silent. The galler
y beside the Boboli. ‘And then she was there, waving through the window. Paolo ran out to get rid of her, but I’d seen her. He told me she’d gone, into the Boboli. And when I came into the gardens, through the back of the gallery – ha! There she was, walking just in front of me, up the hill. Then it was simple, I had only to follow her, and then, when she arrived at the Kaffehaus to meet that foolish old man, I simply sat behind them. She didn’t know me – and he couldn’t remember if he knew me or not!’

  She laughed unpleasantly, leaning in towards Iris, and then Anna Massi’s stealthy hands were on her again, just bones, light and cool. Iris kept very still. It had come back to her, too late, that Anna Massi was strong; hadn’t she walked a hundred kilometres on her pilgrimage with a forty-kilo pack? And now the woman’s thin, cold hands were closing around Iris’s wrists in a grip so tight it was inhuman, like wire. She wanted to scream, Where is she? Where is Ronnie? But she had to wait.

  ‘Old man? What secrets?’ Iris didn’t understand. Something came to her. ‘She was meeting a painter. Claudio someone.’

  ‘Claudio Gentileschi.’ Anna Massi made a little pout. ‘It was business: you would not understand. Perhaps she thought he was a real painter, not a cheap little Jewish forger.’

  Iris felt her scalp prickle at the ugly insult. ‘What were you going to do?’ she whispered.

  Anna Massi’s head tilted towards her, that predatory bird again. ‘I was waiting,’ she said. ‘I thought, I will know, when the time comes; I was powerful, listening to the two of them, and they didn’t know I was there. Do you believe in fate?’

  Iris stared at her, unable to speak. She is mad.

  ‘Oh, I do,’ Anna Massi didn’t need an answer. ‘When I heard him tell her, that stupid, senile old goat, heard him telling her all our secrets, of course then I had to act. She wasn’t important, she was nothing, but when it ended, her little fling with Paolo, her little Sicilian honeymoon, because he always ends it – then she might tell someone. I couldn’t let that happen, not again.’ She drew herself up. ‘And then I knew what to do, to stop it.’