Christobel Kent - A Darkness Descending

‘This is the Frazione,’ said Luisa. ‘This is Giuli’s lot. Chiara’s lot. The young people’s party.’ Gloria scanned the faces more urgently, but even supposing Chiara had been among them, it would have been like finding a needle in a haystack.

NIC. CO. LO!

On the steps of the church someone had a loudhailer, and a banner that Luisa was not close enough to read. He was calling through his megaphone and the crowd answered him.

Behind him and inside the great church the frescoes stood quiet in their chapel, telling that old story, thought Luisa as she surveyed the scene, of sin and temptation. Adam and Eve, the fallen woman covering her face with her hands as she runs from the Garden of Eden, her mouth gaping in a howl of horror and shame.

Flavia Matteo.

Giuli’s voice had been ragged as she told Luisa on the phone, as though she were the woman betrayed and abandoned. ‘A man came after her. She fell in love with him, with the way he spoke to her, through his messages. He — he seduced her, and she was helpless. She’d never been in love before, not like that.’

Even a modern woman, it seemed, even a woman who didn’t believe in the snake and the apple, could fall: could run out of the garden and die of shame.

Luisa didn’t find it surprising, not for a minute. Didn’t it lie in wait for all of them, the most virtuous woman and the most sophisticated alike?

She spied an opening, round to the side, that would lead them to the Via del Leone. Did Giuli know all this was going on, five hundred metres from the office?

NIC. CO. LO!

The crowd swayed and roared. Luisa quailed at the thought of what would happen when he came.

*

They sat, side by side, the notebook open on the desk in front of them. Enzo’s laptop sat beside it, humming into life.

‘Don’t look,’ said Giuli. ‘Don’t read it. No one should read it.’

She felt as though in that small book was everything any woman had ever had to be ashamed of. The longings and the weakness and the need — all of it.

‘I don’t want to,’ said Enzo, and he took Giuli’s hand. He’d turned his head slightly away from her as he did so, and Giuli understood, with a small pulse of pity and love mixed, that he couldn’t look at her in case she should see he was talking about something precious to him; that he was also too fearful it wasn’t precious to her to be able to look her in the eye.

She just shook her head, mute.

‘How did it start?’ On Enzo’s face she saw pity fighting with disgust.

‘Don’t judge her,’ she said quietly, and he darted her a quick look. ‘She was walking in the Botanic Gardens. She tripped or something, and he helped her. He asked for her mobile number because he was worried about her, he said. And that night he sent her a message, to ask if she was all right.’ Giuli found she couldn’t actually bear to talk about it. She wished Luisa would come.

His last message to Flavia, two weeks after the child was born. The phone sitting on the shelf beside the baby monitor.

Dai, finiamo. Non mi diverto piu.

Come on, let’s finish it. I’m not having fun any more.

He’d kept it going more than a year. That showed stamina. Had it been strategic? Had he been waiting for something to happen before he pulled the plug on her? He had: there’d been a number of things he’d been waiting for.

She’d got pregnant with her husband’s child, that must have slowed things down for him. Flavia had hoped it would cure her, but it hadn’t.

And she’d hung on a month after that last message. She must have looked at that little screen a thousand times a day, waiting. She would have done anything to have that feeling back but it had left her, as a chemical left the body, leaving only its toxic residue. Giuli blinked something back.

‘What’s going on out there?’ she asked. ‘Was that what you were going to tell me? About the demo?’

‘They want Niccolo,’ Enzo said. ‘I was all morning on the computer — ’ he flushed ‘- I was supposed to be servicing the computers at a textile warehouse but I got a tweet. Someone said there was going to be a flash rally, down here, in support of the Frazione. It went viral: the kids are really on to it, you know? The technology.’ There was the briefest inflection of pride, before he sobered. ‘I had to bring up the Frazione’s website on my laptop to monitor activity.’ His flush deepened. ‘The site was crashing every few seconds under the weight of it, so people were tweeting instead.’

He gazed through the window, marvelling. ‘So many people. Some journalist had been stirring it online, gloating over the police raid, and people just flipped.’ He shook his head. ‘They’re sick of being manipulated. By the authorities: the army, the carabinieri, the police, the press — everyone. We’re being watched everywhere. Let them watch us now.’ He was almost on his feet.

‘This was what you were going to tell me?’ Giuli asked.

Enzo sat back down, his face suddenly pale. Slowly he shook his head again.

‘Flavia was groomed?’ he said. ‘That’s what you think? She was targeted.’

‘I think,’ Giuli concentrated on keeping her voice steady, on not letting the rage she felt contaminate her argument, ‘that he watched her in the gardens. She walked every day in the Strozzi, or the Boboli, or the Orto Botanico.’ She frowned. The Orto Botanico was near the university, wasn’t it? Where Chiara studied … ‘He might have seen her in any one of those places: everyone knew who she was, he might have tracked her in all of them. I think he waited for his opportunity. He might have waited a long time before he got his opening.’ She looked at Enzo. ‘She must have been a sitting duck. All that emotion, kept in check all those years. Just a question of pressing the right buttons. A technique some men have.’

‘She slept with him.’ Enzo’s voice was flat with disillusion.

Slowly, Giuli shook her head. ‘We don’t know for sure.’ She couldn’t repeat those parts to him, the hotel room by the sea. And later, when he’d taken her to an empty apartment.

‘He was playing a long game,’ she explained. ‘He took her to the seaside to make her fall in love with him, once and for all. To show her he wasn’t only about sex.’ She blinked. What had Sandro said? The man who saw her come out of that hotel said Flavia had looked like she’d died and gone to heaven.

‘And he wasn’t. He was all about power.’

Enzo opened his mouth, hesitated. On the desk the telephone rang. Giuli stared at it, startled that it should still exist, nearly obsolete technology, untouched by the break-in. She picked up the receiver.

The voice was peremptory, the bad temper of a provincial official begrudgingly giving in to pressure. ‘I’ve received permission from the next-of-kin, and the police have authorized it, God knows why.’

It was the coroner in Viareggio, wanting to double-check the agency’s email address before he sent the image of Flavia’s wrist.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, thinking furiously as she looked at the empty desk, Damn, damn. ‘Look. Our computers are — are down. You’re going to have to send it to a different address. I’m Sandro’s assistant.’

‘This is irregular,’ he said, and she heard the twitchiness in his voice. ‘I don’t want these autopsy pictures getting into the wrong hands. For obvious reasons.’ He wouldn’t want much of an excuse to change his mind, permission or no permission.

‘It’s a number,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it? I was standing next to Sandro when you talked to him. Look, call him if you want.’ Silence. ‘It’s so important,’ she said, because it suddenly seemed that it was, that she couldn’t wait one moment longer to nail this thing. And it might have been that the official heard the anguish in her voice but he let out an impatient sigh and said brusquely, ‘All right. All right then. Give me the address.’