by Jill Downie
Yes, she was there, a battered porcelain Madonna concealed in greenery, protected for countless generations in her niche beneath the overhanging wall. Only vestiges of the cobalt blue of her gown remained, and the worn, hollowed-out bowl for offerings must have been empty for decades. Moretti picked a handful of wildflowers and placed them before her. Then, remembering something he had seen his godmother do, he kissed his fingers and placed them for a moment on her time-worn, serene face.
He considered leaving the car at the bottom of the lane and continuing on foot, but decided against it. He had deliberately chosen a powerful car, but it was a conspicuous one, and he was going to have enough trouble explaining his trip to Chief Officer Hanley without having the department budget stretched to replace an Alfa Romeo. The road was overgrown but passable, as far as he could see, and it looked like there had been some clearing of the underbrush. In fact, on closer inspection, it appeared to have been originally a fairly substantial thoroughfare, certainly wide enough to take cars.
“Good. Reassuring,” he said out loud. If the house he was looking for was in San Jacopo, then there had to have been an approach from the road that was more than a cart track. He got back in the car and turned it on to the side road.
The hill climbed steeply and the road curved frequently, like a skier turning to cut the danger and speed of the slope. On each side lay neglected olive trees with dead, dangling branches, and the low stone walls were almost obscured by thickly growing ivy. A week or two of the rains of approaching autumn had spurred them on in their unchecked career, free of human hands. As Moretti moved further away from the main road, the land took on a wilder aspect, and he could see caves and tunnels cut into the hillside. They were almost certainly Etruscan, and would have been used by San Jacopo’s more recent inhabitants for storage of all kinds: wine, oil, livestock.
Moretti turned the steering wheel and took the Alfa Romeo around the next corner, then came to a sudden halt. Ahead of him was a narrow, hump-backed bridge that took the road over a small stream that rippled noisily over pebbles and boulders. He sat in the car and pondered the pros and cons of risking a bridge that looked as if part of it dated back to the Etruscans, and certainly had not been maintained for half a century. The cons won. He got out of the car, not bothering to pull it in to the side of the road. It was not likely to be obstructing anybody and, if it did so, so much the better in the circumstances. If he was on foot, he would just as soon any new arrival was as well.
The bridge marked the intersection of three roads: a continuation of the road he was on, and a smaller path that cut across it. He decided to keep going up the hill, toward what must have been the centre of the community of San Jacopo, for ahead of him he could see the first of the houses — more a tumbled pile of brick than any kind of dwelling.
The going was rough and steep, and Moretti was glad he’d brought solid boots with him. To each side of him lay the crumbled debris of San Jacopo, relics of lives lived, the shells that had once been homes for a vibrant, established community. Little, twisted pathways led off between the ruins, disappearing into the grey distance. It looked as if a storm was coming.
The steepness of the grade was dropping off gradually, and Moretti’s lungs were grateful for it. Making yet another mental resolution to keep off cigarettes, he climbed one last little hillock in the flattening terrain.
And there it was. Suddenly, ahead of him. Just like that. As dramatic as that.
Silhouetted against the thunderclouds of the approaching storm was a house. No, not a house. A mansion. A palace. The Villa Vannoni. He was as certain of it as if it had its name up in lights, or carved in stone over the front door.
Not that he could see a front door — or many windows, come to that. From the towering bulk of its colossal central turret to the extremities of the two great wings to each side of the central block, the entire structure was smothered in wisteria. Tendrils of it shivered in the freshening breeze, reaching out toward him as he stood there, staring. Not even Columbus on the shores of the new world, nor yet Schliemann uncovering the remains of Troy, could have felt greater elation, he was sure.
The crumbled masonry of stables and buildings of various kinds lay around the great house, choked with undergrowth, beyond which Moretti could see what once must have been a formal garden that had encircled the villa, its topiaried evergreens and tended rose bushes now returned to nature. Ahead of him was the entrance and courtyard, and he could see the remains of cobblestones, thick with weeds. He walked slowly forward and stumbled over something solid, lying on the ground beneath a layer of long grasses and ivy.
It was what was left of a massive wrought-iron gate, which presumably had marked the entrance to the inner courtyard of the villa. Moretti bent down and pulled away handfuls of grass and ivy, tearing at them more feverishly as he cleared the pattern in the rusted ferro battuto. Scrolls and curlicues, elaborately detailed, surrounded a giant, ornate letter V.
There was a sharp, clacking sound from the house and Moretti jumped, feeling his heart thump against the wall of his chest. He stood up and moved back against a portion of a wall that remained more or less upright. A window on the ground floor seemed to be clear of creeper, and its wooden shutter, hanging on one hinge, had caught the strengthening wind. Even from where he stood, the creeper looked as if someone had cut or pulled it back. There was no point in looking for cover to approach the villa, there was none, so Moretti cautiously advanced across the cobbles. If someone was indeed waiting for him in the ruin with a knife, he hadn’t much chance, unarmed as he was.
“What the hell,” he said out loud, quickening his steps.
What was left of the massive front door lay on the cracked shards of black and white ceramic tiles in the entrance hall. Much of the wood had rotted, but someone had cut away chunks of the healthier sections — Moretti could see axe marks on what remained. From one of the shadows a scorpion scuttled across his boot to disappear back into the shadows again, and there were animal droppings on the filthy floor.
There were also signs that something or someone had been in the house in the not too distant past, for there were tracks across the dead leaves and dirt on the tiles. Moretti bent down to examine them. They were, unmistakably, the tracks left by a motorcycle. He followed them farther into the villa. From the look of the ceilings above him, cracked and covered with mould, he was more likely, he thought, to be crushed than knifed to death.
The tracks led him into what had once been the stateroom, the central salon of the house. A gigantic fireplace dominated the far wall, and the area around it looked as if it had been swept or cleaned at some time — certainly since the death of the great house. Swaths of faded flowered wallpaper hung like peeling skin from the damp walls, and strips of dingy white plaster trailed from the magnificent ceiling centrepiece that had probably surrounded a chandelier. And, faint as a ghost hovering above his head, was the indistinct outline of an angel painted on the ceiling. Moretti could see the wings, the flowing robes, and something held in now-effaced hands.
A trumpet or a lyre? Possibly. But this could also be an avenging angel, and what he held in his invisible hands was a sword, or a dagger. There may once have been other angels watching over the Vannoni family, but this one spirit was now all that was left of the unknown artist’s design for the stateroom of the Villa Vannoni.
So that was where the wood from the door had ended up — in the fireplace. Moretti went over and touched the ashes and charred remains, although he was sure the visitor to the villa was long gone. Of course, it could be vagrants living rough, or locals who used the place as a shelter. But even as he reasoned with himself, Moretti knew in his heart of hearts, with every fibre of the instinct his partner had told him was admired by his fellow officers, that he was looking at the campsite of the killer of Toni Albarosa and Gilbert Ensor. Beyond the broken shutters the sky was getting darker. Taking out the flashlight he had with him, Moretti went back into the hallway.
The s
tairs that led to the upper floors had almost entirely rotted away, so it seemed unlikely the intruder had gone upstairs. Moretti confined the rest of his inspection to as much of the ground floor as seemed safe. In some rooms, the ceiling had fallen, and Moretti could see through to the sky above non-existent stretches of roof. Nowhere else was there any sign of recent habitation. Nowhere was there any sign of the family who had once lived there, not a fragment of furniture or decoration or personal belonging. The place had been completely, utterly stripped. Or ransacked.
When he had reasonably satisfied himself there was little more to be learned from the great wreck of a villa, Moretti took himself back out into the yard. Now he had to find the church — a more difficult proposition, since it had apparently burned down.
The likelihood was that it had been quite close to the home of the ruling family of San Jacopo, so Moretti started by checking the tumbled-down masonry around the abandoned garden. One of the pathways between the wreckage had a used look, as if something or someone had passed that way in the last little while; the weeds were less flourishing above what was left of the gravel, and there were traces of motor oil on the ground. Moretti found himself on the outskirts of the ruins in the immediate vicinity of the villa, looking across a small copse of ilex and chestnut and some blackened, charred masonry. So little was left standing that it had not been visible from the road.
The fire had been devastating enough to leave very little of what had been a solidly built structure, and Moretti wondered if he should just go back to the car. He could hear thunder beginning to rumble in the distance, and the setting made it seem more foreboding, heavy with menace. But he pushed on through a thicket of blackberry bushes and found himself in what probably had been the nave, the main area where the congregation of San Jacopo had been seated. Only a low outline of masonry marked where the walls had been.
Suddenly, Moretti felt chilled. Afterwards, he would tell his rational self that it was the storm front bringing in cooler air. But his sixth sense would know that what he experienced that day in the church of San Jacopo was not meteorological. It was an awareness of evil, a place that still held between its burnt-out walls the memory of a terrible act. He turned to leave and, as he did so, he saw something on the ground.
Candle wax. Someone had been in the church lighting a candle. Who — and for whom? Moretti had a sudden vision of the priest’s costume and the dressmaker’s dummy from which it came, ripped and slashed. Like a massacre, Betty Chesler had described it. Spooked, Moretti got out of the ruin, made his way back across the blackberry thicket, and hastened down the hill to his car.
Just before he descended the slope that hid the villa from sight, he turned back. The dark clouds behind the massive turret of the villa were suddenly slashed open by lightning, as the first drops of rain began to fall.
By the time he got back into the car he was wet, trembling with cold and with emotion. He was also starving. Collecting his thoughts, he decided to get something to eat on the way back, and to pay a call on the questura, the local police station in Grosseto, to make inquiries. There had to be someone there who knew the local scene, although carabinieri were moved around far more than their British counterparts.
Moretti stopped at a roadside restaurant near the small hamlet of Batignano, just north of Grosseto. The place was quiet, as it was still early for lunch, and the proprietress welcomed him effusively and exclaimed at his wet clothes.
“The rain has stopped now. Give me your jacket, and I’ll shake it out and hang it on the line to dry until you’ve finished your meal. The choices for today are up on the board over there.”
She bustled away, leaving her pretty daughter to take his order: zuppa di fagioli, the traditional Tuscan bean soup, followed by a plate of grilled vegetables. Moretti drank his wine and waited for his meal to come, feeling his body gradually relax.
Over apricot tart, he struck up a conversation with the young woman.
“I’ve been hiking north of here — that’s how I got so wet. Found an abandoned villa in what looks like it was once a village. Do you know it?”
The daughter, who appeared to have been hoping for a more flirtatious conversation, shrugged her shoulders and said, “San Jacopo? Yes. There was something happened there, something to do with the war. I don’t know, really, but I think my mother does. Mamma!” Her mother came back out from the kitchen. “The signor found San Jacopo. He was wondering what happened there.”
“Ah!” Her mother threw up her hands and shook her head. “Such a tragedy. The war brought us such destruction here, with Grosseto being bombed, and no one knowing at the end of it all who was the enemy and who was not. Let me think — the Vannonis, yes, that was the family. I was only a small child, of course, but I remember my mother talking about it.”
In the end it is as simple as this, Moretti thought. She knows what happened, and she’s going to tell me.
“I have an interest in local history,” he said. “Can you take a moment and tell me about it?”
The proprietress needed no further invitation. She wiped her hands on her apron and sat down opposite him.
“Bad years they were, those last two years, after Mussolini was overthrown. People turned on the fascisti here — they were beaten up or worse, some of the leaders were arrested, and some joined the army to fight against the allies. The air raids started — it was terrible in Grosseto. Then the Germans arrived — I remember that, the tanks and armoured cars. They came looking for the prisoners of war who’d been held by the fascisti and then released, and were all over the countryside here. Quite in the open, often, until the Germans came.”
“In the open, you say — you mean, the British prisoners?” Moretti asked.
“All kinds — Americans, Canadians, South Africans, even Turks were here. But yes, the British. After they got out they helped on the farms. My mother said everyone was sorry when they had to go into hiding.”
“Where did they hide?”
“In the hills, some — like the partisans, the young men who’d run away to fight for freedom when the fascist militia started up again. Some tried to get to the coast, to Livorno. And some were hidden by families like the Vannonis.”
“Looks like it was big property,” interpolated Moretti. “Were they important?”
“Important?” His hostess’s ample body shook with laughter at what was clearly an understatement. “They were everything, Signor! They owned land nearly to the coast, and had fifty or more tenant farmers on their property — my father was one of them. Mezzadria — you know about that?”
Moretti nodded. He knew enough to know it was the traditional farming system, now fallen out of favour in Tuscany, where the farmer had his own farm, shared his produce with the owner of the land, who made all the decisions about which crops to grow, but provided equipment and even financial help in hard times. In other words, a patriarchal, feudal system quite like the one that used to exist in Guernsey.
His hostess continued. “They were good proprietors, the Vannonis, my father always said. They took care of you, and when the war came they took care of all those kids whose parents were in Turin and Milan, where the bombs were falling. There were at least twenty little ones out on the property, evacuees, being looked after by the daughter.”
“The daughter?”
“Sylvia. Lovely girl, my mother said — oh, not in looks, you understand, but in character. There was a saying in these parts: beauty goes to the Vannoni boys. So it was, in this case. And, of course, there was the British prisoner of war they hid, right there in one of the stables.”
“So what happened? How was it they left the land and the villa?”
“Well, the story goes that the daughter fell for the British boy, head over heels. They used to meet in the church, so my mother told me. And she also told me the marchesa did not want Sylvia to marry — not just the soldier, but anyone, if you can believe such a thing. She was supposed to stay home and help mamma and pappa in their old age.
It happened in those families, my mother said, and Sylvia was the eldest, not even that young when she met the British soldier. So they kept it a secret from her mother, and she was betrayed.”
“Who by — do you know?”
“The priest, my mother said. But there was someone else who was also betrayed. The schoolteacher.”
“A schoolteacher — where did he fit in?”
“He was the go-between, and that was what finally did them in. He was a Slovene from the north somewhere, a cripple — something wrong, so he couldn’t fight. The children really liked him, but he was suspected by some as being secretly in the pay of the local fascist party. When the marchesa found out about her daughter from the priest — God rot his soul! — she told the partisans that the schoolteacher was a traitor. They found him in the church with the British soldier, asked no questions, and killed them both. It was how it was in those days.”
“Good God.” Moretti sat silent for a minute. “But why abandon their ancestral home? Why give it all up? Doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Ah, everyone wondered about that. To be sure, poor Sylvia killed herself, but it came as a shock when they moved right out of San Jacopo. Lock, stock, and barrel. Cleared all their possessions out of the villa and walked away.”
“The daughter killed herself?”
“Yes, in the church. At night. She set fire to it, and then she killed herself.” The storyteller crossed herself. “There are ghosts up there, they say. Lights in the church and the sound of wailing — not that many people go near anymore.”
“I can imagine. Did anyone stay to look after the property? A housekeeper, for example?”
“Not that I know of. Most of the servants went with them, even though it meant leaving their families. But the farms around here were badly damaged during the war, and the Vannonis were good to the people who worked for them. Many of them came from families who’d been with the Vannonis for generations.”
