Christobel Kent - A fine and private place

And then she saw it, white among the dark trunks, and she had to stop and lean against something and feel the bark against her cheek and listen to her heart pounding desperately and know that there was nothing she could do any more. Someone was coming, she could hear them, but there was nothing she could do.

Pale-faced, Michelle was at the door and pleading: Sandro didn’t know at first if she was urging him to hurry or trying to block his path. She had either hand on the frame, cruciform in the doorway.

‘I didn’t know,’ she said, over and over again, ‘Jesus Christ, I didn’t know.’

‘Michelle,’ said Luca Gallo gently, suddenly at her side with a firm hand on her shoulder; he seemed to Sandro quite transformed. She looked at him as if she didn’t recognize him. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘She’s not your responsibility. Tina is not your responsibility.’ Michelle held his gaze questioningly, the faintest colour returning to her cheeks, and Gallo turned to Sandro.

‘The girl fetching water from the river,’ he said slowly. Sandro looked at him, uncomprehending. ‘Mauro said it,’ Gallo went on. ‘This morning; I thought he was hallucinating, or thinking about another time, maybe. He said he was out on the tractor, and he saw the girl from his house, he said, fetching water.’

‘The villino was his house,’ said Michelle. ‘Once upon a time.’

In his pocket Sandro felt the throb of his mobile, an urgent summons, and before he realized that she didn’t even know his number, for some reason his thoughts turned to Caterina. Was this like parenthood, he wondered for an instant, this constant grappling with where they were, were they safe? He pulled out the phone, its screen blinking at him. Jesus God, he thought, as the pulse of elation combined with the need to get out through that door and find Tina Kreutz, why now? Why does she call me now? But he had to answer.

‘Darling,’ he said with impatient longing, and he saw both of them, Luca and Michelle, turn towards him at the sound of his voice. Luisa, though, didn’t seem to hear what they heard; she was talking urgently about something he couldn’t understand, something about the weak and the strong, as bossy and insistent and constant as she had always been. She the strong and he the weak.

‘You told me once,’ she was saying on the crackling line, ‘it’s not the strong who murder, it’s the powerless,’ and although he didn’t know what exactly she was talking about, Sandro marvelled at it, as though she was inside his head. ‘It’s her, isn’t it? Abusive childhood, it said on the blog.’

‘Darling,’ he said again, whispering with tenderness, ‘I can’t talk now,’ and he hung up.

‘I didn’t know,’ Michelle was saying still.

‘But you know now?’ Sandro asked her quietly. She turned her head and stared back at him and then, finally, she nodded.

‘I knew she hated Loni,’ she said. ‘I always knew she hated her enough, deep down I guess I knew that.’ She looked at her hand on the doorframe as if it held some kind of answer. ‘I gave her the phone to give back. I guess — I even thought, when I saw her burning her stuff, I guess deep down I knew there was something wrong with it.’

Then she looked at Luca. ‘It’s the work, with her, you see. That’s all she ever had, after the family she got, goddamned Lutheran bastard dad.’ And she turned to look at Sandro. ‘You know what it’s like when someone takes something you feel like you spent your life creating, and laughs at it?’

Sandro glanced into her honest, angry eyes, and slowly he nodded. She went on. ‘Holds your baby up in public and says, what d’you call this? Says, is this all you have? Is this all you are? You imagine that. You got nothing but your work, then things get out of proportion. Love didn’t interest her, see. Love, sex, no way.’

Eyes far away, Michelle took a hand from the doorframe and passed it over her forehead and Sandro knew she was thinking about her husband.

Quietly, not wanting to interrupt her thoughts but knowing he had to, he asked, ‘Where is she now?’

‘She?’ Michelle said, then something dawned and a hand came up to her mouth. ‘He went down to her. Didn’t he? We saw him go down to her, Alec went down. Oh, shit.’

The light was going, outside, and Sandro felt a rise of panicked unpreparedness as they emerged at the foot of the staircase, one after the other like rabbits from a tunnel, out into an uncertain gloom. He barely registered Tiziano Scarpa in his wheelchair heading towards them, hardly heard him call, ‘Where is she? Have you seen Cate?’ Not until he was halfway down the path, trying to keep up.

Michelle was faster than him: he observed her strong back, the knotted muscle in her calves as she overtook him easily. Behind them Luca had eased up and was leaning down to talk to Tiziano in the chair, but Sandro couldn’t look back any more. He saw her below him at thewindow of the villino , banging, heard her shout, saw her desperate face as she turned it to him. Michelle. He felt old and useless, but he had to keep going.

The weak, not the strong: of course. Luisa had remembered that, and Tina Kreutz had been weak, until suddenly she wasn’t.

Michelle was on her knees at the door of the villino , doing something with the mat. ‘She keeps a key under here,’ she was saying, and as Sandro drew up at the door, his heart banging, out of the corner of his eye he saw rubbish scattered across the snow, as though a fox had got at the bins.

‘Where is he?’ he said, breathless, of poor, deluded Alec Fairhead: haven’t we all been there, too dumb to know what’s going on in a woman’s head? Thinking it’s all about us.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ he heard from inside the villino , ‘Oh, Jesus.’ And as he came in through the door, he saw that in the middle of the room there was a long workstation like the altar in a church and on the floor protruding from behind it a shoe, a foot in the shoe, a leg, and bending over it Michelle.

‘Come on,’ she was saying, panting, ‘come on.’ He saw the pieces of pottery across the floor, where something big had smashed. Something heavy. And coming around it again saw the whole length of Alec Fairhead’s body. Michelle raised her face to him, and beneath her Sandro saw Fairhead’s head roll to one side on the stone floor under its own weight.

No.

Then roll back, eyelids fluttering.

‘He’s alive,’ said Michelle. ‘He’s breathing.’ And Sandro thrust his mobile at her.

‘And her?’ Sandro said desperately. ‘And her?’ Michelle looked at him, not understanding, but he found he couldn’t explain: explaining would take too long. ‘Ambulance,’ was all he managed. ‘Call 118, ambulance.’

And he ran out; above him, up at the top of the long, long path, the black shape of the castle behind them, he saw Luca and Tiziano, and even at this distance he knew from Scarpa’s face that he wouldn’t find Caterina up there, safe in the kitchen.

Sandro had heard the sound before he’d seen the two men. He followed it down, and then he saw footprints in the snow, scuffed and hasty, so he couldn’t tell how many sets there were. He kept looking down, following the footprints instead of the sound, wishing he couldn’t hear it, wishing he never would have to look up. But then he did.

There was no wind to move her, but she twisted, all in white, a long white gown, a nightdress. The branch bowed under her small weight but the belt she’d slipped over her neck had held, and her bare feet pointed downwards. Tiny feet, the size of a child’s, barely into adolescence, small, perfect toes, perfectly white, perfectly lifeless.

The sound came from Caterina, crumpled on the ground below Tina Kreutz’s small bare feet; a raw, half-swallowed sound of despair. She raised her face to his, her eyes huge and dark.