The Drowning River

by Christobel Kent

  She gazed off through the window to the night sky, where sirens came and went in the darkness. Then she turned back to look into Iris’s eyes and when she spoke she was full of triumph and exuberant, as though she’d never been listened to before.

  ‘It was so easy! I simply accused him of touching her improperly.’ She smiled beatifically, a wide joyful smile.

  ‘Oh, the way he looked at me when I told him to get his hands off her, as if he really had touched her; full of panic, full of guilt!’ Her laugh was almost merry. ‘And then instead of defending himself, he ran away, so incriminating, and she after him. Oh, and when I said – it just came to me, also fate, don’t you think? – don’t you remember, your wife’s dead, such a face! You silly old fool, you lecherous old goat, you might as well be dead yourself.’ She spread her long fingers in a throwaway gesture. ‘What had I to lose? Even if he didn’t do what I wanted him to do and just disappear, just go and kill himself, who would believe a senile old man?’

  ‘You told him his wife had died?’ whispered Iris, trying to understand the casual cruelty of it, knowing that she must not cry.

  Anna Massi shrugged. ‘What good was he in the world? Everyone knew he was losing his mind, Paolo had told me, we might not be able to use him any more. And of course then I understood that the police would believe that if he was demented, he might do – anything. Might molest a girl; most men would, even him, given the opportunity, a little whore like that offering herself on a plate. No marriage is perfect, why should his be? Even if that old fool of a wife might have thought she was all in all to him.’

  Claudio Gentileschi had loved his wife: that much Iris remembered. Anna Massi pursed her lips.

  ‘It was when I took her telefonino and smashed it, that frightened him, and he ran away.’ Iris thought of the violence with which that phone had been destroyed. She was afraid herself; she would run away now, if she could. She looked towards the door.

  Anna Massi didn’t seem to see where Iris was looking; she drew a breath, a satisfied sigh. ‘And then, to deal with Paolo’s little whore was not difficult. She was afraid of me, you see, when I told her who I was. She was crying; she was guilty, and she knew it. And I know where to walk in that place, not to be seen. I told her I was taking her back to the gallery, and she came; only a small amount of force was necessary. I took her back the same way I came, back to the gallery, where she will be punished, as a child. And then. . .’ She made a magician’s gesture in the air, letting Iris’s hands drop. ‘She is gone. I make her disappear.’ She stood, took a pace or two towards a massive stone fireplace.

  ‘I return for Claudio Gentileschi later; Paolo has told me of the bar where he takes a drink after work every day, before he goes back to his wife. Maybe he will be there. And it was fate: he was there. I told him again why there was no point in going home. I could smell whisky on his breath.’ She reached for something on the mantelpiece, and held it up. ‘He even gave me his keys.’

  Iris struggled with the information; she could not bear to stop and think about it because it wasn’t Claudio she needed to know about. Her wrists were free and she knew she should run and she would, but first she had to know.

  ‘Where did you put her?’ she said, hearing herself close to begging, close to crying. ‘What do you mean, you punished her, like a child? She was harmless, you didn’t need to be jealous of Ronnie.’

  And then the sob rose in her throat, when she saw what she had done. Too late.

  ‘You think I would be jealous?’ Anna Massi said with soft, whispering fury and seized her, forced her back down, her mouth so close to Iris that Iris could smell her breath, slightly sour, the chemical smell of madness, of medication, of something wrong deep down. ‘He always comes back.’

  Over Anna Massi’s head a mirrored dreamcatcher swayed and tinkled, and beside her elbow the grey filament of smoke from an incense cone spiralled into the air, chokingly sweet. Iris thought she didn’t want these to be the last things she saw and smelled; she squeezed her eyes shut.

  ‘He always comes back?’ She forced the words out. ‘To this horrible place? Well, more fool him.’ And as one of Anna Massi’s hands moved to her throat she found she couldn’t even cry out, any more, for the open spaces, for hills and trees, to be out of this great, dark, wet, suffocating doom-laden city, to be home with Ma.

  The doorbell screeched again, a desperate, protracted, sound: too late, thought Iris, as the blood pulsed behind her eyelids.

  His new-found confidence evaporated, Jackson was about to turn and go – to the nearest police station, or where? He had no idea – only then the door opened in his face and a middle-aged man came out. The man gave him a curious look, but he didn’t pull the door shut behind him, only let it swing slowly shut.

  Jackson put out a hand to hold it, just in time. He was inside.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  ‘So What Did You do with the body?’

  As Sandro spoke, Paolo Massi sat at the desk, summoning up some ghastly imitation of composure. He didn’t reply, but Sandro saw he was trying to rebuild his position.

  Sandro held up the single caramel-coloured hair. ‘She was here, and now she’s gone.’

  They stared at each other, then Massi spoke. ‘That’s not evidence,’ he said, his voice oddly high-pitched. ‘She was a student, she had been here to the gallery as had all the students, one hair is not evidence. I had nothing to do with her disappearance. You should find her, then you will have evidence.’ He rattled off his defence, ending with something like the old sneer, then he clamped his mouth shut.

  ‘I’ll find her,’ said Sandro, slowly. ‘I’ll find her all right.’ He turned on his heel, walked along the row of artworks, staring blindly at them, a tinted ink sketch of the Santo Spirito, a muddy little oil he couldn’t even make out. He concentrated on what he knew; they had kept her here.

  He turned back to face his audience enclosed in the blood-red room, Giulietta and Luisa, watching him intently from the door to the street, Antonella Scarpa in the shadows, and at the centre of the picture Paolo Massi, downlit, and under interrogation.

  ‘Stay there, she must have said, Stay right where you are, and you did what you were told. Sat obediently at your fine desk, as Gabi over the road will testify, until she came back.’

  Nobody moved. Sandro continued, following his thread through the dark.

  ‘You must have heard them, first, sitting there; you must have heard her dragging Veronica down from the Boboli, through that gate, inside. Your wife must have managed to manhandle her all the way down here after she saw Claudio off. Strong woman, is she? Not only cleverer than you, but stronger?’ Sandro paused to consider the fine-boned features he’d seen in the photograph on Massi’s desk; they could be made of steel, those pretty, highly strung women.

  ‘Did she even let you see the girl? Or did she just lock her in there, in the dark? Did she tie her up? Or did you do it together? You must have helped her, mustn’t you? Are you afraid of your wife?’ Paolo Massi’s twitching face as Sandro spoke told him that he was right.

  ‘I suppose she might have been dead by then,’ Sandro continued regardless. ‘But I don’t think so. There are scuff marks, and nothing else; killing tends to leave a trace of one kind or another.’ He paused, to observe Paolo Massi’s reaction; the man’s eyes were wide and fixed, as if the idea of death had only just occurred to him.

  Sandro went on. ‘You kept her here – how long? Did you have a row, about what she’d done, about the right thing to do next?’ He paused. ‘Did your wife tell you what she’d overheard? Did she say, with Veronica Hutton out of sight, so you didn’t have to look at her, bound and gagged in that hole, did she say, I’m going after the old man? Or something like that. Because by then it was too late, she had to get him to shut up.’

  ‘I don’t know what she did,’ said Massi, pale. ‘She went out, she said she was – she was getting me something to eat. I can’t be responsible – I didn’t know where she went.’r />
  Sandro looked at him with disgust. ‘She left Veronica Hutton locked in that room, that – that cupboard, where she might have suffocated, and she went out in the car to find Claudio Gentileschi, to finish him off. How did she find him? I imagine you must have told her where to look. Did she mean to drive him to suicide, or just to discredit him? The result was the same, wasn’t it?’

  He paused to watch Massi’s composure disintegrate. ‘Was she crying, little Veronica Hutton? Did she beg you to let her out? Or was she already dead?’

  Massi’s lip trembled, ‘No, no, she. . .’ And he faltered, his eyes filling up, overflowing with self-pity.

  Sandro took a step towards him, then no further. ‘You were too frightened of your wife, weren’t you? Did she say, too late to let her go now, think of everything she might say? No one would suspect us, pillars of the community; let the senile old man take the blame, alive or dead.’

  Massi swallowed, and Sandro moved on; his end was in sight and he would not stop for anyone.

  ‘She was seen leaving here by Gabi over the road, in the car; then she was seen talking to Claudio on the Lungarno Santa Rosa, a witness. . .’ and he paused a moment, thinking of the boy, because Massi didn’t need to know what kind of witness he was ‘. . .a witness saw them. Will identify her.’ He barely drew breath. ‘What would your father have thought, eh? Persuading an old man to kill himself, to save your shoddy little business, sucking up to foreigners, selling fakes, sleeping with girls young enough to be your daughter?’

  Paolo Massi remained quiet, though behind him Sandro heard Antonella Scarpa make a small sound of self-disgust.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot, it was all your wife’s fault, wasn’t it? She did everything.’

  ‘She. . .’ Paolo Massi choked on the words, self-pitying. ‘She didn’t like my father.’

  ‘That figures,’ said Sandro, knowing that the man had broken, now: it hadn’t been so difficult after all. ‘But let’s get back to the point, shall we? I want to know what happened next, because I need to find Veronica Hutton, you see. I need to give her back, alive or dead, to the people who love her.’ He felt Luisa’s eyes on him but he didn’t look away from Massi.

  ‘So you decided between you that Claudio Gentileschi would be a very handy suspect when her body was found, eventually? Particularly if he was dead; nothing neater than a murderer who kills himself out of remorse. Was she dead, by then, little Ronnie, by Wednesday evening when you told Antonella not to come to the gallery because your wife was helping? Was she dead when you took her out of the back and bundled her into the car? Or didn’t you dare? I bet your wife would dare.’

  ‘No, she – ’ Massi had the slack-jawed look of an idiot now, but even an idiot knew when to shut up.

  ‘People saw Claudio, or thought they saw him, molesting the girl, didn’t they? And he was losing his marbles, wasn’t he, it’d be easy enough to make it stick. And then she had a better idea, didn’t she? Persuade him he’d be better off dead, what with the shame of it all.’

  Luisa’s voice broke in, clear and firm.

  ‘She told Claudio his wife was dead,’ she said. ‘Fiamma DiTommaso overheard them.’ Massi turned to look at Luisa as she added, ‘She heard her say, Don’t you remember, your wife’s dead?’

  Giulietta was nodding, at her side. Massi turned to look at them, shrunk small, cornered.

  Sandro took over. ‘It wouldn’t have been hard, would it? Dirty old man, you’d be better off dead. What was there for him to live for? There’d always been just the two of them.’

  And as the words were spoken Luisa turned her head just slightly, so as not to look at him, and the chill was there, across his heart too. He forced himself to say what he had to say next.

  ‘And then she held out her hand for his keys.’ Sandro pulled the set of keys Lucia Gentileschi had taken from the scroll-top desk out of his pocket. ‘He had a spare set at home, did you know that? His wife found them, and gave them to me.

  ‘Why did she ask for the keys, Paolo?’ Sandro went on. ‘What proposal did she make to you when she came back here from the Lungarno Santa Rosa, still in her white coat? Remove the evidence, the stock of fakes, worth a penny or two, and then what? Plant a bit of evidence, instead? Just to make sure, when they found the body, that the finger pointed right at Claudio? That must be why you left that Post-it note up in the studio, after you’d taken such care to clear the place out? Very helpful. And what other evidence did you plant?’

  Sandro held up the Yale key. ‘This is the front door key,’ he said.

  The next key. ‘This is the key to the studio.’

  Then, finally, the tiny key, the key to a letterbox, only the building where Claudio had his studio had been too cheap for letterboxes, the post lay on the floor in the hallway. He held it up between thumb and finger, dangling it in Massi’s face.

  ‘And this key? A padlock? Some kind of storage shed, some lock-up somewhere? Outhouse, doghouse, cantina?’

  Giulietta was on her feet, hand in the air as though she was in school. Sandro held up a hand to tell her, wait. ‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘The dog, the boy told me Claudio had a dog, he was worried about the dog. Only there is no dog; Claudio never had a dog.’ Sandro nodded, still intent, fixed on Paolo Massi.

  But the answer came from Antonella Scarpa.

  ‘He kept some stuff in a shed,’ she said quietly, and they all turned; she was looking at Massi. ‘Inflammables, thinners, that kind of thing. I can take you there.’

  Iris was on the edge of unconsciousness when the next sound came; she was at the point of reaching out for it with longing, to ease the bursting in her head. But the sound was so loud she jerked in response, just as Anna Massi’s attention slackened, just fractionally. She managed to free one of her hands from the woman’s grip, her elbow came up and she crashed it, painfully, into the bridge of Anna Massi’s nose.

  Falling back, Anna Massi shrieked, a horrible noise. With the blessed release of pressure from her windpipe Iris was on her feet and bellowing; she wasn’t even aware of whether the sounds she was making were words.

  ‘Iris?’ The voice was muffled and panicky, but she recognized it; it guided her through the dark towards the door.

  Oh, God, she thought, oh, thank you. Jackson. She blundered across footstools and coffee tables, and it wasn’t until she got to the door that she realized Anna Massi wasn’t behind her. She fumbled with chains and bolts, every moment waiting for the woman to lay hold of her again, but there was nothing. The door opened and there he was; she thought she’d never been so glad to see anyone her whole life.

  The first thing he did was reach past her and turn on the light.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  As He Stepped Out of the car, it came to Sandro that somehow he had always known he would end up back here. He had sat in his car gazing up at the Boboli, imagining it as somewhere evil had been done, yet it seemed to him now that it must have been this place that had occupied that space in his thoughts, all along. It had been this dirty, neglected stretch of river that ended in marshland; where the homeless foraged for food in rubbish and weeds, where the city stored its detritus in a shambles of crumbling shacks.

  The place where Claudio Gentileschi had last seen the sky and breathed the city’s polluted, lovely air, one bright November day before the rains began. The Lungarno Santa Rosa.

  Giulietta and Luisa agreed to stay in the car with Massi; on the far side of him in the back seat Giulietta was intent on punching numbers into her mobile. On the near side Luisa gave him a thumbs up through the window as Sandro locked them in, grateful for a car so ancient such a procedure was possible. Sandro failed to return the gesture, so reluctant was he, suddenly, to take another step towards the inevitable. He straightened, Antonella Scarpa stiffly obedient at his side, and forced himself on.

  ‘You know exactly where it is?’ He’d asked the question as they’d crawled through the traffic to traverse the kilometre or so from the Via Romana to
the Lungarno Santa Rosa. They might have walked, but Sandro wanted everyone together, he wanted his eye on them all.

  ‘More or less,’ said Scarpa. ‘Behind the social club, whatever it’s called.’

  ‘The Circolo Rondinella.’

  He’d had to blink away the vision of that place, the pergola under the rain and the Portakabin where someone had been watching him, it made him feel so sick with foreboding.

  ‘I could call Tomi,’ Giulietta had piped up. ‘Comic-book Boy?’

  ‘You have his number?’ Sandro had taken his eyes off the traffic to look back at her, squeezed in the back seat. Next to her Massi’s eyes were glazed with a look Sandro had seen in any number of guilty parties, absenting himself from the here and now, hoping it would all go away.

  Blank denial; the trouble was, sometimes it worked. And then Sandro’d had to stifle the fear that, between them, Massi and his wife had been clever enough to eliminate the evidence, to shove it all on to Claudio. Which was really the fear of finding her; it was what all this was all about, wasn’t it? He wasn’t a police officer any more; he didn’t have any of that apparatus that protected him from the dead, the feel and look and smell of the dead. No latex gloves, no evidence bags, no team of brothers, no jovial forensic technicians with their gallows humour, no fatherly, unshaven pathologist dragged from his bed to attend. Sandro was alone.

  ‘Call the boy,’ he’d said. ‘Yeah.’ But there’d been no answer.

  Standing in the lee of the great wall of San Frediano, Scarpa beside him, Sandro realized that by some miracle the rain had stopped. The air was clear and cold, and without the soft sound of rain to muffle it, the roar of the river below them was like thunder.