Christobel Kent - A Darkness Descending

‘Photographs?’ Enzo said, after she’d hung up.

‘One autopsy photograph,’ she said. He was even paler. ‘There was something written on Flavia’s hand,’ she said. ‘A number.’

Nervously Enzo clicked on his email, send and receive. Nothing.

‘So what were you going to tell me?’

He clicked again, and the message began to load. ‘High resolution, I expect,’ he said, still fidgeting.

She just looked at him.

‘I found some photographs,’ he said, shame-faced. ‘On — on my memory stick.’

‘Ah,’ she said.

The message was through: Enzo opened the attachment, and there it was.

A blown-up image of Flavia Matteo’s dead hand filled the screen, the fingers curled inwards, the flesh bloodless white, puffed from water immersion. What drew the eye was the wound, on the lower edge of the frame; a razor had done it because the edges were clean, gaping across the wrist, scored to the bone, tendon freed. And the faded remains of a line of numbers, written across the creases of her palm. Enzo leaned down, enlarged the image, zoomed. He tipped his head on one side. He pulled a piece of paper towards him and wrote the numbers down: five numbers visible: it looked as though they were the last five. He looked back at Giuli.

‘Give me the phone,’ he said. ‘You said you’d got her phone?’ She handed it to him and he opened it. ‘If this is the number she was calling,’ he said, ‘if she left the number in her address book on the mobile, with five out of ten numbers, we can match it. You want to know the odds?’

‘First show me your photographs,’ she said.

They were looking at them, shoulder to shoulder, when Luisa walked through the door with Gloria.

Sandro didn’t have to ask, why here? He knew his friend was ready to talk.

Out of uniform, Pietro looked smaller somehow, less visible; he was standing in the porch of the church of San Marco, in the big square where all the buses converged. Beside him the austere facade of the monastery hid its treasure, the monks’ cells, each with its glowing fresco, and fleetingly Sandro thought, maybe there’s something in it. A little white cell, daily observances, brotherhood. Maybe that’s what we should have opted for, Pietro and I, no fretting over wives or children. Mortification of the flesh, and communion with God, though: they might have been tricky.

On the adjacent side of the square stretched the deep umber stucco of the university buildings with their long, handsome windows, a gaggle of students in the doorway. Pietro was watching them as Sandro approached.

‘This way,’ his friend said without turning his head, and heading north out of the square they fell into step. The crowds fell away behind them. They walked in silence as far as the bar opposite the Botanic Gardens, then they were inside, behind the ornate gilded facade.

The place was close to empty, only one khaki-clad soldier propping up the bar today, though it was almost lunchtime. Silent as the grave. Sandro looked around, then he thought of the chaos around Santo Spirito and wondered. Would the army have been called in? Had it got that rough? Then something else came to him, the detail he’d been trying to recover, on and off, since Luisa had told him about the man she’d seen Pietro talking to in the street … the detail he’d confused with Flavia Matteo’s autopsy and the number written on her hand.

The lad with a tattoo on his wrist: he’d seen a man in this very bar, raising a coffee to his lips and his sleeve falling back to expose a blue-black snake tattoo. Pietro wouldn’t have chosen this bar by coincidence, would he?

‘I couldn’t tell you,’ said Pietro, pushing the coffee cup across to Sandro. ‘You understand that?’ They were seated in the dim recesses of the back of the bar: opposite them the wide window was filled with a view of the green jungle of foliage behind the garden’s high railings.

‘But you can now?’ Sandro asked quietly. ‘Has there been an edict from above? Have you asked permission?’ He didn’t say, You couldn’t tell me what ? Pietro looked at him, his eyes turning hard and angry, and then the look was gone. He exhaled.

‘Start from the beginning,’ said Sandro.

‘An arson attack,’ said Pietro. ‘That was the start. A routine investigation: an arson attack on the house of a Frazione supporter. A police matter: only then a man from AISI came calling. He was waiting in my office at eight the following day. Sitting at my desk.’

The secret service. Sandro listened, admiring, fearful, almost envious. Almost. If he’d been a younger man, still in the service, might he have refused? An undercover operation, they’d have used all the buzzwords. Inter-disciplinary co-operation, a merging of skill sets, cross-fertilization. Plus, of course, you didn’t get a choice.

‘There’s an agenda,’ said Pietro. ‘There’s always an agenda. You know that, I know that. You think, are they really looking for these people, this right-wing cabal, or am I just a patsy? Have they picked me because I’m the cleverest cop they could find, or the dumbest? Or just because I happened to be the investigating officer on the arson attack, and they want to put me off the track?’

Sandro remembered it, dimly. A petrol bomb had been lobbed into the garage of some teacher from a left-wing liceo who’d been vocal in his support of the Frazione.

‘And so you just have to make the best of it, because orders are orders. It came at a bad time, too: it wasn’t long after they approached me that Chiara started going out with this guy.’ As he said it, Pietro’s expression tightened, closed, warning against Sandro’s questions. ‘And I was distracted. Bad-tempered. Just when I should have been talking to her, I cut her off: it didn’t help that she’d got involved with the Frazione too. What was I supposed to do? Every time I tried to hint that she should be careful, she thought I was coming on as heavy-handed fascist dad.’

‘So the guy Luisa saw you with-’

Pietro rubbed the back of his neck uneasily. In front of them their coffee cups were long empty. ‘Matterazzi. Informant turned undercover operative. Used to be a soldier.’

‘I saw him in here.’

‘You would have done.’ Pietro’s mouth clamped shut.

Sandro felt suddenly weary. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to force anything out of you.’ In his pocket he gripped the phone. ‘But this is turning nasty for me. This morning the office got broken into and this time my computer’s gone. It’s one thing when politicians steal and spy and all the rest amongst themselves — but I’m just trying to make a living here.’

‘They broke into the Via del Leone?’ Pietro’s face was grim.

Sandro leaned across the Formica towards him. At the bar the soldier was taking his time drinking the coffee. The barman was wiping a glass for the umpteenth time very slowly.

‘Why did you bring me here?’ he asked. ‘And to tell me what?’

‘What did you find out about Flavia Matteo’s death?’ Pietro asked softly in return. Sandro straightened.

‘She killed herself,’ he said, and he felt the sorrow that had sat inside him since he entered that awful shuttered bathroom harden and fuse with something more like anger. ‘That was clear to me. But I think — we think — she was targeted. Almost certainly her suicide was incidental, although it probably will have served someone’s purpose well enough. Someone who wanted to bring Niccolo Rosselli down. To dirty that shining armour of his.’

‘Targeted?’

‘Groomed. Someone thought she’d be ripe for a sex scandal and they went after her.’ He swallowed, not wanting to say it, not even to his oldest and most trusted friend, because once it was out, it was out. ‘Niccolo Rosselli, paedophile. Flavia Matteo, whore. It’d be graffitied on a hundred walls, whatever Bastone thought.