Two Women in Rome

by Elizabeth Buchan

  ‘Of course you must see her if you wish, but you must tell me.’

  ‘Lottie, I’m sorry. It was innocent.’

  She leaned over and pinched a sprig of lavender between her fingers. The calming aroma. ‘Being married and living together is different from just making long visits. But there are things I know will threaten us.’

  ‘I agree. For you, it’s Clare and we will sort it. For me, it’s worrying that you are becoming too involved with the case of this dead woman.’ He thought for a moment and then said in a low voice, ‘Lottie, you must not be frightened of being abandoned. That part of your life is over. There’s no need for a substitute. We’ll make this marriage work.’

  Only Tom would ever be allowed to say anything like that to her.

  ‘Then don’t go behind my back. Don’t deceive me. It’s better I know.’

  He made no move to touch her. ‘I promise.’

  ‘OK,’ she said after a moment. ‘We have cut the labels off the baggage.’

  She got up from the chair and went to bed, leaving him on the balcony with the swifts.

  Over the next few days, Tom went out of his way to be tender and considerate, but the contentment Lottie had experienced on first arriving in the city was no longer on tap.

  It had consequences. She and Tom rowed over the lamp.

  ‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘It has to go.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. It does its job.’

  ‘Even if it did, and it doesn’t, it’s so ugly. Is it a family heirloom or something?’

  He was reluctant to answer. ‘Clare and I found it in a junk shop.’

  Her breath was suspended for a second.

  ‘It must go,’ she said. ‘Don’t you see? Especially after our last conversation.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Lottie. What’s happened to you? It’s a lamp.’

  Later, as she lay sleepless beside Tom, sadness crept through her.

  ‘Lottie.’ His voice sounded extra loud in the hush.

  ‘Yes.’

  If she was hoping Tom would offer a resolution, or even a diplomatic treaty, perhaps touch her gently, lovingly, she was disappointed.

  ‘Be careful with the Nina Lawrence business.’

  Bunching the sheet around her shoulders, she rolled away from him and stared into the dark.

  Walking to work the following morning with Nina’s notebook in her bag, she found the traffic fumes were stifling and the sun too hot. Tourist numbers had swelled overnight and there were too many of them.

  Perhaps it was the still unsorted job situation at the Espatriati, which she was beginning to find intolerable. Perhaps she had too much time to chase after Nina Lawrence’s story. Plus, her feet were sore and her stomach painful.

  Analysing unhappiness was difficult. It had many shapes and feelings. Many manifestations. In the past, she had been unhappy, deeply so. She recognised its grip.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LOTTIE CAUGHT A LATE-AFTERNOON TRAIN TO SETTEBAGNI, alighted and walked up a street lined with small food shops and cafés. The hibiscus was in full flower, jasmine threaded through iron railings and an umbrella pine reared up at the end of the thoroughfare. It struck Lottie that her one-sided acquaintance with Nina had borne fruit. She was beginning to take notice of flowers and shrubs.

  A man, whom she took to be Signor Livardo, was settled at a window table in the Caffè Alighieri. Stocky, wearing a checked short-sleeved shirt and baggy trousers, he looked amiable enough. At Lottie’s arrival, he stood upright and extended his hand.

  They exchanged greetings. On sitting down, Lottie was subjected to an inspection so penetrating that she revised her impression of his being amiable. She asked: ‘The signora?’

  He raised both hands. ‘Scusate. My wife had to attend her cousin at the last minute. She’s not well. They are close and need each other.’

  Lottie would have bet good money that he had never mentioned this meeting to his wife.

  They settled on an early-evening aperitivo. As an opening gambit, she produced her business card and handed it to him over the table. He placed it in his shirt pocket.

  She studied him. Someone – his wife – ensured that his hair was well cut, his eyebrows trimmed and his shirt impeccably ironed.

  ‘You wish to talk about the English signorina? She was a very nice woman. Very nice nature. Always helpful. A good woman. She and my wife were friends. Good friends. They … we … helped each other. We were shocked. Very shocked.’ He let a pause elapse before adding, ‘But, you know, these things in the past … they really should be left there.’

  The aperitivo was served, along with a bowl of heavily salted crisps. Signor Livardo took a large handful. The crisps were soon a memory and a crumb lingered on his chin. Lottie sipped her drink, taking in as much detail as she could without alarming him. He drank and ate and greeted acquaintances, giving off every appearance of a man who enjoyed retired life.

  She pushed an enlarged copy of the passport photo towards him. ‘Is this Nina Lawrence?’

  He made a play of dusting salt off his fingers and looked everywhere but at the photograph.

  ‘Signore?’

  The slight widening of his nostrils as he studied it informed Lottie that it must be Nina. To be sure, she produced a similarly enlarged copy of the Lake Walkers and placed it beside the first one. ‘Is this Nina?’ At first he tried to deny it but changed his mind. ‘Sí.’

  ‘The smaller girl with dark hair?’

  He slid the photograph back to Lottie. ‘I don’t know who the other people are.’

  She waited patiently.

  ‘My relationship with the Signorina Lawrence was formal,’ he said. ‘Not friendly. It was my wife who knew her best.’ He retrieved her card from his pocket and read it. ‘I had to be careful with the women lodgers.’ He shrugged. ‘You will understand …’ The gesture was intended to include Lottie in a collegiate conspiracy.

  The waiter fussed around the table. Laughter sounded from the next table and ice chinked in a glass.

  Lottie was interested to note that he was sweating.

  ‘No one was ever charged with her murder. Either then or later?’

  ‘How would I know, Signora?’ He shifted irritably.

  She considered pointing out that the Livardos had lived in the same apartment block, but had no wish to compromise this delicate exchange by annoying him further.

  ‘Nina Lawrence is owed some justice. An explanation.’ She produced a newspaper cutting dated May 1979, which stated that the case had been closed and no further action would be taken. ‘Nobody tried to keep up the momentum.’ She took careful note of his reaction. ‘Why would that be, do you suppose? Why was she not worth bothering about? Was it because she was foreign?’

  Signor Livardo had polished off his aperitivo with some speed and ordered a second. ‘The foreigners,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of them. But she was a nice girl and it was terrible what happened.’

  ‘Girl?’ Lottie was puzzled.

  He checked himself. ‘A slip of the tongue. She was young when we first knew her. Late twenties, perhaps. My wife and I had just got married and we moved into the apartment on the ground floor; she was already living there.’ The tended eyebrows drew down over the bridge of his nose. ‘We were there ten years or so before she was … murdered.’

  ‘If you knew her for ten years, you must have known her reasonably well.’

  ‘We knew the signorina …’ He extracted a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. ‘And we didn’t know her. That’s how it was.’

  Evasion lay behind the bland gaze, but of what exactly? ‘Yet you considered she was a good woman, and your wife thinks of her as a good friend.’ Signor Livardo was silent. ‘Did it strike you as a dereliction that the police didn’t do more?’

  ‘It’s easy to criticise the police, especially when you don’t know the details.’

  She acknowledged the point but pressed on. ‘But they interviewed you and your wife.’

/>   He shifted restlessly. ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘It’s recorded in the papers we’re archiving.’

  The moment the words left her mouth, she felt a chill. A touch of menace.

  The waiter appeared with the second aperitivo. Signor Livardo fussed with the ice cubes. ‘You were asking about the police. Naturally, they asked us a few questions but nothing more.’ Lottie made a gesture to prod him on. ‘Whether we had seen her that night.’

  ‘Wasn’t it odd they didn’t question you more closely? She’d been brutally murdered.’

  ‘I know nothing about police matters.’

  ‘That’s odd, too,’ said Lottie, ‘because when I was researching who you were, I learned that you worked in the police records department for thirty years.’

  On the train back to Rome she watched the landscape rattle past: the umbrella pines, overhead lines, a huddle of buildings. A flash of burnt umber and ochre on houses. Each detail seemed to want to impress itself on her memory, and she put this down to the fact she was living in a landscape, both exterior and interior, that was still strange.

  At one stop, a bunch of teenagers spread noisily through the carriage, each wearing a uniform of tight jeans and grubby trainers. At the penultimate stop a mother and her small son got on and sat down opposite Lottie. The little boy found Lottie fascinating and stared. Lottie returned the scrutiny, touched by his beauty and innocence.

  After a while, he extended his hand to Lottie. Glancing at the mother, she took it and they sat for a few seconds with her clasping a small hand in hers.

  What do you want? Signor Livardo had demanded, all bonhomie incinerated.

  He was on the back foot. Yet she was fully aware that she had only one shot at getting anything out of him.

  Leaning forward across the table, she asked for the second time why there was no full-scale inquiry into the murder and who took the decision to bury Nina in the Protestant Cemetery.

  He dusted his fingers and shook his head. ‘I have said enough. That’s all.’

  At the earliest opportunity in the office, Lottie wrote up her notes of the encounter. One, Signor Livardo had lied. Or, tried not to tell the truth. Two, he had access to information. Three, he had given her something before he clammed up entirely, albeit in coded form.

  ‘Those who took the decisions went to the funeral,’ he had finally admitted.

  The Anglican priest was to be expected – just as a representative from the British Embassy might be. But what were Bishop Dino and his assistant doing there?

  Turning back to the documents, she studied the dog-eared, faded witness reports from other occupants of the Trastevere building that she had scanned into her laptop.

  ‘A modest person …’

  ‘She wasn’t the sort you noticed …’

  ‘She was very quiet. I can’t remember any visitors …’

  Lottie began to rough out Nina’s life.

  Nina Lawrence lived in the Via della Luce in the Trastevere from 1968 in a second-floor flat. She had been a landscape gardener, working to restore plants and gardens that had been destroyed during the war. She completed projects in Rome, Lazio, Tuscany and Umbria. Her last publication had been an article on the narcissus N. poeticus (apparently mentioned in Ovid and Pliny), which had been well received by her peers.

  There was also a photograph of the body. A battered and frail-looking Nina had been laid out on a mortuary gurney, a sheet drawn up to her shoulders. It did not hide the throat injury or the bruises on her face. Lottie found she could not bear to look for more than a few seconds. It was a violation – an ultimate no-go area – and the sight was pitiful and shocking. It also poked a finger into the stew of her own anxieties.

  Mirella phoned with a summons to Valerio Gianni’s office. ‘Would it be possible to come now?’

  ‘Give me five,’ said Lottie.

  ‘Lottie, my father liked the cakes very much,’ Mirella added. ‘It was kind of you.’

  ‘I’m so pleased.’

  Valerio was ensconced in his state-of-the-art office chair behind a desk covered by office accessories in exquisite leather: diary, penholder.

  At her entrance, he got to his feet and fussed over Lottie. Was she happy? Comfortable? The wait for her to take up her full position was inexcusable, but it would soon be over …

  He took five minutes or so before he got to the crux. ‘Such a pity about the painting,’ he said. ‘There is much regret.’

  ‘Why don’t we frame it properly and have it on display?’

  Valerio frowned. ‘No,’ he said. Flatly. ‘No.’

  The dismissal seemed over-emphatic and she was curious to know why. ‘Then I will stow it with the rest of the papers.’

  ‘Please do.’ He nodded. ‘On the subject of the papers, did you come across anything that struck you as … contentious?’

  Lottie’s protectiveness towards Nina’s secrets continually surprised her. ‘Depends what you consider contentious.’

  Valerio fiddled with the penholder. ‘Her lifestyle, perhaps.’ He was clearly annoyed. Or was it rattled?

  ‘Would you care to go through them yourself?’

  His gaze evaded Lottie’s. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I trust your judgement.’

  He did nothing of the sort, thought Lottie as she left his office, wondering if it had been Giuseppe Antonio who had asked Valerio to find out information.

  Which suggested information was there. Either she had not looked in the right place or she had not looked in the right way. Both were possible.

  Back in her office, she decided to keep the journal under lock and key in her desk drawer.

  The now familiar and pleasing leather and paint smells in Gabriele’s workshop greeted Lottie as she let herself in and skirted around a partially opened box of books on the floor. A jacket was draped over the chair back and a shabby briefcase parked by the bookshelf.

  Surrounded by papers, Gabriele was at his desk; he looked tired and irritable.

  They exchanged greetings. Lottie enquired if he was working on anything special. ‘A history of the world.’ There was a trace of humour. ‘I’m shelving it under “tragedy”.’ He noted the package Lottie was holding. ‘A project?’

  She unwrapped The Annunciation and the photocopy of the illustration from The Determined Traveller. ‘I have some final questions before it goes into the archive. You’ve concluded that it’s a modern pastiche but I—’

  ‘Are you questioning the conclusion?’

  He had taken the half-uttered query for criticism. ‘No, but—’

  ‘Perhaps I didn’t make it clear. The old masters only had earth, stones and organic berries and plants to make their paints. The pigments here,’ he pointed to The Annunciation, ‘contain metal oxides that came much later.’

  His touchiness was revealing. ‘I’m not questioning your judgement,’ she said. ‘You are the expert. I’m here because—’

  Again, he did not stop to listen before launching into an extemporary lecture on medieval painting, larded with references to the techniques of the period.

  A professional wound had been prodded. Pride? A mistake in the past that had sensitised him to even mild criticism. Or … She observed that his hand was not quite steady … was it a personal wound?

  ‘Furthermore, the depiction of the Virgin Interrogatio was not fashionable at the time Pucelle fils was painting. Painters were instructed to show her either submissive or rejoicing,’ he said.

  Everyone had their secrets, of course. Their areas of vulnerability and their flash points.

  ‘Gabriele, could you stop? Please.’ She indicated The Annunciation. ‘It isn’t authentication that I wanted to talk about.’

  He breathed in sharply. ‘Scusi.’ Obviously nonplussed, he went over to the expensive-looking coffee machine in the corner of the workshop. ‘Scusi.’

  She placed the illustration from The Determined Traveller beside The Annunciation and addressed his back. ‘Tell me if I’m wrong, but m
onks … priests … do not consort with the opposite sex other than in a pastoral way?’

  He fussed with the dials on the coffee machine. ‘In theory, in the Catholic faith a priest or a monk has to be totally open to God and strive to have no outside interference. They become his vessel. Nothing and no one should get in the way. Money, power. Sex. Love for someone else.’

  ‘But it happened, of course.’

  He swivelled to face her so abruptly that the paint pots on his desk rattled. ‘Then temptation has to be resisted.’ He ferried the coffee to his desk. ‘Please, sit.’

  She shot him a look. ‘It must be very hard when times are difficult.’

  ‘As always, when rules are set they are often broken.’

  ‘So … is it coincidence that these paintings both feature the monk and the woman with the blonde hair? Could it be the same painter? Our EK? Or are the pair of them a well-known story that’s often painted?’

  Catching up the loupe, he studied it. When he stood upright, the pale, taut look was back. ‘Do you know where the original of this might be?’

  ‘The caption in the magazine cites it as from a fifteenth-century miniature. But I think it’s the same person who did The Annunciation and not an original.’ She ticked off on her fingers. ‘The woman and monk in the background. The unusual green-eyed rabbits in both. The same setting.’

  He barely glanced at the illustration. ‘The background is Palacrino.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘Famous for its narcissi in spring. Families go there to picnic. I’ve been there in the past. To escape.’ He dropped the loupe into a drawer and shut it. ‘But I haven’t been back for years.’

  Lottie gathered up her things. ‘At your suggestion, Tom and I went to Palacrino. It’s a gem of a town. We ate at Mario’s.’

  ‘There are similarities between the two,’ he admitted, after a moment, ‘which, as you say, suggests the second one is also a pastiche.’

  ‘You know that a genuine Pucelle fils was discovered in Palacrino during the seventies and put on display there until the early eighties when it was brought to Rome?’