The Flood

Wednesday, 5 November 1986

Morning, just after eight in Fiesole. There was a portable TV in the kitchen. Black and white and old. He’d got some fresh eggs from the chickens and made frittata with tomatoes and onions bought from a store in Florence the night before. He got coffee, orange juice, some bread, took it all upstairs, the food on a tray, the TV in his left hand.

The room at the front, where they kept the dope and the guns, was bright in the morning light. Outside he could see lines of puffy grey rain clouds gathering across the watercolour-blue sky. The weather was going to be temperamental for the next few days. He’d heard that on the radio. The coming afternoon threatened a heavy downpour, one that would last for hours, until well after midnight.

Space to think. To plan. Time to flee.

He plugged the little TV into the wall, adjusted the circular wire aerial and played with the tuner. The best he could get was a crackly news channel, the face of the woman reading the bulletin distorted by the weakness of the signal. Her voice was tense and cracked. Clear enough, though.

He turned up the volume all the way and listened, nodding as he took in the details.

They weren’t saying it but the Carabinieri knew nothing beyond the obvious. He wondered if his real name would ever be sufficiently notorious to find its way into the news. If anyone would know it, recognize it, understand who he really was. This seemed unlikely, whatever the outcome. Small people never mattered much in Florence. They were cannon fodder for the whims of their masters, who watched them bleed and die from the walls of their fortress homes.

He’d left half the frittata, cut neatly down the middle through the yellow egg. There was a second cup of coffee going cold and a half-glass of extra orange juice. He hadn’t been in the other room since the night before. Something there frightened him. Was too close, too real.

Still, it had to be faced.

He unplugged the set, picked up the tray and walked in. Then he bent down to a power socket on the wall, got the TV going again, turned down the volume a touch and placed the food and drink on the bed. Got the saucepan he’d left by the bed the day before, walked it to the bathroom, emptied it, washed it like a servant.

Left it there and came back.

The signal was better near the back window. The TV newscast was still running. You’d think they had nothing else to talk about. Same old story, same old empty words, going round and round. One dead, that was all. So what?

She was watching, rapt. Couldn’t take her eyes off the thing.

Finally he turned and looked at the bed and said, ‘I did it for you.’

She was still tethered loosely to the iron posts, half naked beneath the coverlet.

‘For your honour,’ he insisted.

Her long curly hair was getting greasy. As he watched, it moved, and her face, sour and bossy, turned on him. Chavah Efron said, no warmth, no gratitude in her hard voice, ‘You can’t just leave me in here for hours on end.’

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘I need the bathroom!’

Loud voice, woman’s voice. That always made him cower.

He went back and got the gun from the other room, tucked it into his waistband.

She stared at him when he returned. ‘Does that thing make you happy?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You don’t even know how to use it.’

He didn’t speak.

‘Does it make you feel safe?’

‘Safe as anyone.’ He glanced at the window. ‘Here. For a while.’

‘You’re a lousy liar.’

He wanted to argue. Wanted to shout at her. Control her. But she still wasn’t scared of him and never would be.

‘I need the bathroom,’ she repeated.

He untied her wrists, watched as she got out of the bed, saw her nakedness, wondered about it. She kept the door closed. A long time. He heard running water. The shower.

To drown out the noise and the thoughts he sat on the bed and watched the TV again. After a while a kids’ cartoon came on and he laughed at that, found himself briefly in another place, one that was warm and sunny, a long time ago. An empty hut in a hidden corner of the Boboli Gardens, no lone mother to shriek at him, to watch where his curious fingers might wander. A little space to himself, and an imagination that could run wild watching this funny couple, cat and mouse, beat the living hell out of one another.

Men and women did that too. All the time.

When she came out she wore nothing but a towel round her waist tucked in over her small breasts. Another was wrapped round her hair. The intimacy of the small, damp bedroom, too hot from the fire he’d stoked in the kitchen below, was disturbing. He’d never been this close to a woman like this, one who was confident with her nakedness, didn’t mind him being there.

She reached up and took the towel off her head, then rubbed her hair vigorously.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.

He’d used those same words the night before in the Loggia dei Lanzi. Same threatening tone. She might have been in his head, doing the talking for him.

‘Nothing,’ he mumbled, and realized his voice sounded like that of a kid, one caught watching Tom and Jerry when he was supposed to be doing something else. Washing the dishes, bringing in the coal from the heap outside. Being the slave.

‘Does it turn you on?’

The TV was back with the news. The same story.

She pummelled her hair again, then threw the damp towel into the space beneath the window. There was a fragrance about her. Flowers and scent.

‘I did it for you,’ he said again.

He wasn’t answering that question.

‘Where did you kill him?’ she asked.

‘Outside.’ He nodded at the window. ‘In the barn.’

‘Did you clean up afterwards? The Carabinieri will be here soon, you idiot. You just gave them an invitation. They didn’t give a shit about Ari. Now…’

‘I cleaned up. All the mess I made.’

‘And the guns? The dope? The Semtex? Jesus…’

Damp hair on the pillow, she stretched her sturdy bronze legs out over the sheet, closed her eyes, let out a long sigh.

Then, to his astonishment, she began to laugh. A light, soft, girlish sound. It made his head spin.

‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.

She stopped and looked at him directly. She had green eyes. Dark green. The colour of the snake that wound itself round the tree behind the couple in the Brancacci Chapel, not the cheap fig leaves he used to cover the vile nakedness there.

Her hands went behind her head. He stared at the shape of her.

‘You’re really not that bright, are you?’

‘I killed that bastard. The one who…’

He didn’t go on.

‘Who what?’

‘You know.’

‘You watched, didn’t you? In that place when I danced. I saw you. I saw the look in your eyes.’

‘He murdered Ari.’

‘Because Ari got mad and went out there to kill him. Which was stupid. Never part of the plan…’

‘He…’ The words were hard. They had to be used. ‘They took you. Raped you. I heard you screaming. I…’

He could still picture it in his head, and remember the way he’d watched from the shadows, fascinated, horrified. A part of him envious, too.

Those green eyes glittered at him.

‘Didn’t I ask for it? Dancing for them? Whoring myself…’

‘I did it for you.’

‘Did what?’ she spat at him. ‘Killed a single worm among many?’

‘I’m just one man.’

‘Not even that,’ she said, and started drying her taut, muscular body through the bath towel round her torso. ‘Show me your hands.’

He held them out. They were grubby. Stains beneath the fingernails.

‘You’re filthy. Take a shower. There’s a towel by the bath. It was Ari’s. Use that. Use his clothes. He was big and stupid too. Here…’

She went to a drawer and took out fresh jeans, a black shirt and sweater, some underclothes. He saw her nakedness as she moved. She knew it, and didn’t mind.

‘Put these on when you’re done. You stink.’

She took a deep breath, rolled her head back against the wall.

‘After that we need to talk.’

There was a new look in her eyes. He couldn’t name it. Doubt? Surprise? Recognition?

‘Maybe there’s a reason you’re here. Not that I believe in all that shit.’

He had the gun. He was bigger than her, stronger. Physically anyway. Yet somehow none of this mattered. She’d seen something in him. Recognized the weak tic of fear, of servitude.

Once that happened he always obeyed. Didn’t know why. Didn’t ask for a reason. Just couldn’t find a way to say no.

She was playing with the towel, showing herself to him, grinning.

‘Do as I tell you and maybe good things happen. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ he answered, and heard the uncertainty in his own voice.

She waited. He put the gun on the bedside table and walked into the bathroom. It was spotless and smelled of her. The cracked shower unit had hanks of brown hair in the drain hole and on the neck of the rusty head. Long curly brown strands stuck to the broken white tiles.

In his head he could see the Brancacci again, what lay beneath the fig leaves. That was supposed to stay hidden but it wouldn’t. It was with him, with her, always, bringing the itch of temptation, the offer of that red heat in the head that stopped you thinking about everything else there was in the world.

‘Tornabuoni, Tornabuoni,’ Pino Fratelli muttered as they sat outside the captain’s office in the Ognissanti stazione. ‘This can’t be right.’

She sat by his side, silent, trying to come to terms with the news they’d both watched on the TV that morning. A man’s severed head had been found attached to Cellini’s statue of Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi, long hair wound into the bronze serpents of Medusa. It almost seemed like a bloody joke, real death superimposed upon the fictional.

The victim was Vanni Tornabuoni, the city art commissioner she was supposed to have met the previous morning in his office in the Pitti Palace. The TV said he was a bachelor, forty-two years old, though he looked younger: a handsome, slightly effeminate man. He had not been seen since leaving his office the previous evening. Officers had checked his secluded house in Bellosguardo, the exclusive green suburb behind Oltrarno. There were signs of a struggle. It seemed clear he’d been attacked at the property long before his severed head was found in the Piazza della Signoria. The Carabinieri, who had taken full control of the case, had yet to find any indication of where he was murdered.

‘Why are you so sure this is connected with the Brancacci?’ she asked.

Fratelli was lost in his own thoughts and didn’t seem to hear. This obsessive certainty of his worried her. The confessions of the previous night — about his illness and then the death of his wife — had changed him. There was something intensely cathartic in his words, the way he unburdened himself of the past. If he was to be believed, these dreadful doubts and fears had been locked inside him for twenty years. So she was the first to hear the full story of how Chiara had died, since Fratelli had collapsed completely after her murder, the distraught husband in him defeating the carabiniere.

According to his story, he’d stayed with Chiara’s body until discovered, and was so distressed and incapable of speech that, for a time, the investigators suspected he was responsible. Weeks in sedation, either silent or ranting, followed. The tone of blame in Fratelli’s explanation told her he knew himself this was more than mere grief. There was something in him — a flaw; mental, physical perhaps. With hindsight, it might have been the tumour in its infancy or a disturbing remnant of his strange childhood history. Real or psychological, this wound healed only on the surface, remaining fragile and easily reopened. To the world he seemed such a calm, sane man. But another, wilder, more uncertain creature lived beneath, one that never spoke much in the months after Chiara’s death, even to Walter Marrone, his friend and colleague, who took over what was to prove a fruitless murder investigation.

This was the flood inside him, Fratelli said, as she listened in the overheated living room, on a hard chair next to the record player, music playing softly in the background. Something that beckoned the muddy brown waters of death and uncertainty into Chiara’s too-brief life, staining them both forever. There was no point in arguing against his certainties. The facts, in Fratelli’s head, spoke for themselves. After her murder he was briefly insane, so the husband never thought to mention the small details that the carabiniere would have found so important. Those strange marks on his dead wife’s face, the red smears making a downturned frown around her mouth, he never disclosed to Marrone. The overworked pathologists in the morgue failed to pick them up too, since they had other clients to deal with, and a rape victim, which Chiara clearly was, needed little in the way of explanation.

When Fratelli was released, he began to believe these visual images were all part of the madness, one more piece of delusional, psychic trauma left behind by that terrible night, like a tidemark inside his head, or that sign she’d noticed scattered around the city high up on the walls of houses, offices, churches… on the fourth of November 1966 the waters of the Arno reached here.

And, in the case of Pino Fratelli, never fully receded.

Julia remembered so clearly sitting next to him in the cold Brancacci Chapel two days before, wondering why he was shivering so much in his heavy winter coat as he stared at those paintings on the wall. He wasn’t. He was trembling with shock and fear and the horror of a returning memory. The sight of the scarlet daub of chicken’s blood on the mouths of the two Eves had taken him back to that night twenty years before. It was a miracle he’d kept his composure at all.

‘They’re connected,’ Fratelli said, coming out of his shell with an abrupt nod.

‘What…?’

It took a moment for Julia Wellbeloved to drag herself back to the bare, chilly anteroom of the Carabinieri station and the reasons they were there: to tell Marrone about what they’d seen in the Brancacci and to offer her possible glimpse of Tornabuoni’s killer. To get Pino Fratelli back inside the Carabinieri. That was a part of his plan too. Not that he’d mentioned it.

‘They’re connected. But I thought he’d kill a woman. I felt it was women he hated and feared. That ought to be the case.’

‘You talk as if you know him,’ she said.

Fratelli smiled and tapped his head through the white hair. ‘Mad as a mole.’

‘No you’re not. And there’s no such turn of phrase in Italian. I checked.’

‘See. You become more of a detective with each passing day. Yet I do know him. He’s been in my head for twenty years, with the flood. Perhaps.’ His eyes lost their focus for a moment. ‘Perhaps it’s in his head too and like me he refuses to listen. Wants it to be a bad dream. Part of the craziness. Things would be so much simpler that way. Life a lot more… acceptable.’

A fierce look of frustration gripped him.

‘Then something surfaces to revive it. But what?’

After he’d spoken about his wife, Fratelli had shown her some of his books, the ones he’d taken to show Walter Marrone that afternoon. Told her about Lilith and some myths about the Fall. If she’d been able to pull herself out of that room, think rationally about all this, she knew she’d dismiss these ideas as nonsense, fantasies stretched out of a few old and flimsy facts: the memory of a scarlet stain on his dead wife’s lips, the reappearance of something very similar on the walls of the chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine.

Yet she crawled into bed at three that morning feeling the same unshakeable conviction that had gripped him from the moment he saw those smears on the face of the innocent Eve, and the halo above the serpent’s golden hair. Fratelli had talked earlier about how he looked for links from the past to the present, from one act to another. It was exactly the kind of connection Julia hoped to make at some stage in her own work, the dissertation that was still hovering out of her reach. The unseen, elusive thread that ran from Chiara’s death on the stone stairs of the house in Oltrarno to the daubs of chicken blood on the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel was real. As real as Pino Fratelli himself, in all his perpetual, gentle confusion.

A few hours later she’d been woken by him hammering on her door. He’d been listening to the early morning news on the radio, something he did seven days a week since his wife’s murder. Not long after, they set off for the Carabinieri station in Ognissanti. Julia found she could barely look at the plain stone steps of the house as she walked down them.

‘It had to be a woman,’ Fratelli repeated, shaking his head as he sat hunched on the bench outside Marrone’s office. ‘Not someone like Vanni Tornabuoni. A…’

He stopped short of saying it.

‘A what?’ she asked.

‘Tornabuoni was a homosexual,’ Fratelli said with a shrug. ‘Gay, I think they call it these days. Or perhaps liked a little of both. So what? Everyone knew. No one minded. He was one of the aristocrats. The men who run this city. Even if they did mind, no one would say a thing. Could this be a part of his madness?’

He scratched his head.

‘Our man is unforgiving, judgemental. He must hate homosexuals. This is not uncommon. Savonarola did. He wanted them executed…’

‘I can’t see a link. It may not be him—’

‘Those answers exist,’ Fratelli broke in. ‘We simply fail to see them. Women, women… It must come back to them. That dreadful statue of Cellini’s where he hung poor Tornabuoni’s head. It’s full of a hatred of femininity too. You see this? Perseus — and that madman Cellini — wishes to destroy Medusa because she’s strong. Not the weak, submissive sexual toy he lusts after. Just like Lilith…’

‘I see it,’ she agreed and thought: do I?

The question needed to be asked again, even though she knew Fratelli had no answer.

‘Do you think it was him, Pino? The man I saw? In the loggia last night. Did he kill Tornabuoni? Was he the same man in the Brancacci?’

He considered this idea, and when he did she could see the carabiniere surface; thoughtful, cunning, never saying anything he didn’t wish to disclose.

‘Who can know?’ Fratelli answered in the end. ‘But you must tell Walter when they finally have the sense to let us in there. Tell him everything.’

‘What’s there to say?’

‘He frightened you.’

‘Anyone would. Coming out of the dark like that.’

What are you looking at?

A figure in a cape and hood, with an aggressive, terrifying manner. Perhaps a murderer who’d decapitated a city councillor of Florence, a man of some wealth and position, not long before, and come to the heart of the city, carrying his severed head in a bag.

‘I didn’t see him,’ she complained. ‘Just a glimpse of a pale face. And a black hood.’

‘He was carrying something. A pole. A bag. See? There are always other details a witness forgets. Perhaps important ones.’

Fratelli thought for a moment and said, ‘You felt you recognized him. Didn’t you say that?’

‘Yes, but it’s ridiculous. It was dark. I don’t know what I saw really. I thought… I recognized something…’

But what it was she didn’t know.

A tall, heavy young man was walking down the corridor towards them. It took a second or two for her to realize it was Luca Cassini, the station junior from the day before. That awkward, revelatory conversation by the lampredotto stall in Sant’Ambrogio market seemed very distant somehow.

Fratelli leaned over and whispered in her ear.

‘I believe our time has come. Tell Walter everything, please. Except…’ He winked at her and tapped his nose. ‘Not the Brigata Spendereccia. That will only complicate matters.’

‘But…’

She didn’t have time to finish. Cassini was there, ushering them into Marrone’s office.

‘I don’t think a few damaged paintings are on the captain’s mind right now,’ the young man said cheerily.

‘We’ll see about that, Luca,’ Fratelli told him with a smile. ‘I hope you’re ready for a busy day.’

Walter Marrone was pale and drawn, staring at his unwelcome visitors with sad brown eyes. Papers lined his desk by the window overlooking Borgo Ognissanti. Two younger officers, Albani and Nucci, dressed in smart suits, sat next to him making notes. The phone cut into their conversation constantly. Fratelli fought to make his ideas heard against the constant flow of interruptions. It wasn’t going to be easy. The captain was one of Fratelli’s oldest friends, but at that moment Marrone clearly wished them elsewhere, even when he was offered something Julia thought he would welcome: a witness.

‘You saw what?’ Marrone demanded gruffly.

‘A man,’ Julia said hesitantly. ‘At the back of the loggia. He had a bag and what I thought was a boathook. He was tall. Bald, with a very striking pale face and a cloak, a robe. Almost like a monk’s.’

‘When?’ asked one of the younger officers.

‘Just after six, I think.’

The other man sighed and looked at his watch. ‘You think?’

‘Six fifteen or so. I took a taxi and met Pino for a drink at six thirty. So that’s an accurate estimate.’

The officer glanced at his colleague, eyebrows raised.

‘Tornabuoni’s head didn’t go up there until after nine o’clock,’ he said. ‘It can’t have been him.’

‘Your reasoning?’ Fratelli wanted to know.

‘Someone would stay there for three hours? In the loggia? With a head in a bag?’

Pino Fratelli shrugged his shoulders and glanced at Marrone. ‘Why not? Who’d search him? November. A cold night. He had all the time in the world.’ He glanced at the captain. ‘It’s a mistake to ascribe the motives and actions of a normal human being to a psychotic criminal. A man who inhabits a world that looks like ours but isn’t. Walter? You know this as well as I do. They may not teach these things in detective school any more—’

‘Don’t start,’ Marrone broke in with a scowl.

‘Walter. You know—’

‘A man with a severed head?’ the captain interrupted. ‘Hiding at the back of a public square? For three hours? For what possible reason?’

‘Because he doesn’t want to be seen. So he waits until there are no people. Or he has some magical connection with the number nine and wishes to hear it from the church bells. You’re creating doubts out of thin air, with nothing to support them.’

‘He was asleep,’ Julia said suddenly. This conversation had made her think about the incident again. Fratelli was correct: there was more to be recalled, and perhaps there always was. One needed the prompt, the perspective that brought it into view. ‘That’s why he reacted so oddly. I thought he was a tramp, asleep there. Something I did woke him.’

Fratelli opened his arms as if to say… There.

‘So a murderer with a head in a bag goes to sleep?’ Albani or Nucci, one or the other, asked with a sarcastic side to his thin and weedy voice. ‘Not once, but twice; more than that maybe.’

‘Perhaps he was exhausted,’ Fratelli said. ‘Physically and mentally. I doubt he’d decapitated a man before.’

He glared at Marrone then waved a hand at the two young officers.

‘Am I wasting my breath? Have these two not heard a word I’ve said? We’re dealing with a psychotic individual here. One who feels he’s outside our world. Any idea of logic, of rationality… some idea that we can comprehend his actions, predict them even… This is nonsense. The man can’t manage that for himself. Why should others expect they can do it for him?’

‘This is about the Brancacci, isn’t it?’ the captain asked wearily.

Fratelli folded his arms and took a deep breath. Then he said in a low voice that was close to breaking, ‘No. It’s not.’ His right hand went to his forehead for a moment. ‘Well, not entirely. It’s about…’ His head was shaking, a little too rapidly. ‘Something I should have told you long ago.’

He stared at the younger officers.

‘Something personal,’ he added.

Marrone’s face became a turn more miserable. He ordered Albani and Nucci out of the room. They left with a mutinous ill grace.

‘Then tell me now,’ the captain said patiently when they were gone. ‘But I warn you, Pino. You’re treading in unfamiliar territory. We already know a lot more about Vanni Tornabuoni than we did yesterday. His… friends and associates have been very forthcoming now he’s dead. This has nothing to do with your frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. Nothing at all. There’s no need to hunt for complicated explanations; Hebrew myths and tales about serpents that are half snake, half woman. It’s a mundane matter. A bloody and squalid affair, but murder often is. I’m sorry. Still, if you wish to speak…’

Fratelli seemed lost for words.

‘The cockerel’s part of the crest of the Tornabuoni family,’ Julia said. ‘I read that in one of Pino’s history books.’

Fratelli and Marrone stared at her.

‘So perhaps it was a message. Saying that somehow Tornabuoni was connected with the Brancacci. With—’

‘It was no message,’ Fratelli interrupted. ‘Nothing as simple as that, anyway…’

It was his story to tell, she thought. No one else’s.

‘Then tell the captain,’ Julia urged, jogging his elbow. ‘Tell him what you told me.’

‘What’s going on?’ Fratelli demanded of Marrone, scarcely seeming to hear her. ‘I know you, Walter. I can read you like a book. There’s some secret here. Something you don’t wish to share.’

‘Dammit, man!’ the captain snapped. ‘Don’t try my patience.’

‘Why not? You’re trying mine.’

Walter Marrone took a deep breath and played with some of the papers on his desk. Then he stared gloomily at Fratelli and Julia Wellbeloved and said, ‘If either of you breathes a word of this outside the station I will know and I will not be happy.’ He folded his bulky arms. ‘We have a man in custody for Tornabuoni’s murder. A lover of his.’ The captain scowled. ‘One of many. Vanni Tornabuoni led a colourful life.’

‘What does he look like?’ Julia asked straight away.

Marrone watched her. ‘Not tall. Not bald. He’s a young man. Very disturbed. As one might expect.’

‘How old?’ Fratelli asked in a shaky, expectant voice.

The captain looked at a document in front of him, puzzled by the question.

‘Twenty-six. He was Tornabuoni’s gardener. Lived in a shack on his estate. Performed other duties, it seemed.’

‘No,’ Fratelli said. ‘No, no, no. Twenty-six… is impossible. That would have made him a child. No, Walter!’ He was on his feet now. ‘I am telling you…’

‘We found Tornabuoni’s body outside his shack,’ Marrone said gently. ‘The gardener was with it when we went to the place. He was cradling it, for God’s sake. I’ve kept this from the media for the moment. Until we have a confession from the man. Right now…’

His words drifted into silence.

‘Right now, what?’ Fratelli wanted to know.

‘He’s difficult to talk to. Upset. Psychotic, you’d say. Or so I imagine.’

Julia sat there, wondering what to think.

‘Pino,’ she said, rising to take his arm. ‘You need to tell the captain. About Chiara…’

‘What was that?’ Marrone asked, not quite hearing.

‘Sounds as if you don’t need us then,’ Fratelli grumbled.

‘Tell him!’ Julia shouted.

But Fratelli was leaving already, only turning to say, ‘You heard the captain. He’s a busy man. He has his suspect, who one day may even talk. Why should we waste his time?’

The most cursory of glances at Marrone followed.

‘Do I still get to keep Luca Cassini? I assume your gardener is not under suspicion for what happened in the chapel. Given your low opinion of that young man, I imagine he is no use in a murder case, even one so quickly solved.’

‘The boy’s all yours,’ the captain said, then answered the ringing phone.

In the bathroom he stepped out of his clothes with a rigorous, childlike precision, placed them in a tidy heap, then stepped inside the shower and ran the water.

He found a small bar of soap, rubbed it all over, ran it under his fingernails, did his best to get rid of the blood there. Smeared some of her sweet-smelling shampoo on his hair, put his head beneath the stream. The water was turning from lukewarm to cold but it didn’t matter. He was hard, the kind of insane, uncontrollable hardness that stole away his mind. Then the cold turned icy and still the hardness stayed. So he got out, dried himself, kept the dead man’s towel round him, and carried his pile of clothes back into the bedroom.

She was still on the mattress, looking as if she were sleeping. A hairdryer was beside the bed. He could smell the hot plastic. Smell her too — warm hair, perfume, skin, and something strong and physical he didn’t want to think about.

Chavah had got dressed while he was in the bathroom. A long, flowing maroon skirt. A thick sweater, green covered with flowers, threadbare at the elbows.

‘Get dressed.’ She pointed to the black shirt, sweater and jeans at the foot of the bed. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t watch.’

He snatched at the clothes, fought with them and the towel to maintain some modesty.

She didn’t move. Just looked at him, hands behind her head, smirking, emerald eyes bright, amused.

‘What’s your real name?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Is this what you want? You go and kill someone. Then show me what you’ve done, like a cat bringing back a mouse?’

Eyes wide open, smart and incisive, as if they could see through everything. Green and old and knowing.

Her hand went out and touched him over the cheap cotton fabric of the towel. ‘What are you then? A saint with a hard-on?’

‘Just a man.’

‘Man enough?’ she asked.

‘I killed that bastard, didn’t I?’

‘It’s something, I guess,’ Chavah Efron said, got up off the bed and pushed it back towards the window; one single, strong movement.

The floorboards beneath looked old and loose. He could make something out between the cracks. Glinting in the daylight.

‘We’ve work to do, before they come,’ she said. ‘Things to hide. Stories to concoct…’

She opened the bottom clothes drawer, took out a crowbar, eased the edge beneath the nearest, loosest plank. Four more came up as she worked at them. The weapons and the dope in the next room were nothing next to this. Five machine guns. Ammunition belts full and ready to be used. Bayonets and military daggers. Long, black semi-automatics. More plastic bags full of dun brown material.

An armoury for war. And, rolled up in the corner, what looked like a crimson flag.

As he stood there, watching, trying to think, she reached in, took hold of the fabric, unfurled it.

‘You hate them, just as we did. You want to do something too. I see it in your face. I hear it in your voice.’

She got up, came close.

‘There are so many things I could teach you.’

That laugh again; he was starting to be fascinated by the strength and determination inside her hard, foreign voice.

‘They never knew about me. I’m American. A hippie. A Jew. The rest they think are dead. Like Ari, who was rash and foolish and didn’t do as he was told. Dead or safe in jail.’

The red flag rolled to the floor. He looked at the icon there, and the words.

‘Just me left now. Struggling and alone.’

She was so close he could smell the sweetness of her breath.

‘Brigate Rosse’, the flag said, in crude, blocky writing, one word about a circle and a star, one word beneath.

The Red Brigades. They’d murdered politicians and industrialists up and down Italy for more than a decade. A force for chaos and violence and retribution. Death and vengeance inflicted on the idle rich and the corrupt political classes who supported them.

‘Alone,’ she said, her warm, damp breath in his ear. ‘And then along you come.’

‘I’m not—’

‘You’re what I make you,’ she cut in. Then reached into the store of weapons, took out a shotgun and a belt full of shells. ‘We’ll move these to the wood now. The gear from the other room. Before they come—’

‘I’m not…’ he began again.

She marched up to him, thrust the weapon in his face.

Silence.

Closer again. She reached up and kissed him on his cold cheek. Damp lips against his skin. Then the slowest, gentlest touch.

‘You’re not a man who thrives on choices,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve saved you from that. Be grateful. Now do as you’re told.’

‘We can run,’ he said, hoping.

She stood in front of him, reached up and stroked the black wool of his sweater.

‘Not yet.’

Luca Cassini looked pleased he was still assigned to work with Fratelli and Julia. Less so when the older man told him what he wanted.

‘You’re trying to get me in trouble,’ he complained as they stood huddled together in the station corridor, ignored by all who passed.

‘No,’ Fratelli insisted. ‘I intend to salvage your career.’

Cassini folded his big arms and said, ‘I’m not so sure about that…’

‘Luca.’ Fratelli gently took his elbow. Julia smiled at the tall, muscular young man. This made him blush. ‘There’s a murder case here. Are you a part of it?’

‘You know the answer to that already.’

‘And why?’

He didn’t say a word.

‘Because they don’t want you around. They…’ Fratelli shrugged. He didn’t like saying this. ‘They don’t think you’ve got what it takes. Know something? Come April when those newfangled assessments they love so much arrive… you’ll be out of here. Looking for a job. Do you doubt me?’

‘I’ll get something. They never gave me a chance.’

‘That’s their loss more than yours.’ A pat on the arm, that seductive smile. ‘But I’m giving you one now. Go back into the detectives’ office. Find out what you can about the Tornabuoni case. Make a little small talk. Be inquisitive.’ He smiled at the young man. ‘Curiosity is the greater part of being an investigative officer, you know. Not rules and procedures, custom and practice. This!’

Fratelli tapped the side of his head. Cassini stared at the older man’s white hair and looked downcast.

‘What’s wrong?’ Fratelli asked.

‘You, Pino. A lot wrong there, I reckon.’

Julia looked at the floor.

Fratelli laughed. ‘A man who speaks his mind,’ he declared, and slapped Cassini on the shoulder. ‘If I was still running a team here you’d be on it and that’s the truth. But I’m not. So the only friends you have are Julia and me, the mad maresciallo.’

‘I didn’t say you were mad. I said you were sick.’

‘Whichever it is, I’m the only one making you an offer. Will you do it?’

Cassini shook his head. ‘I don’t deserve the sack.’

‘You don’t,’ Julia agreed.

‘How would you know?’

‘Julia has friends in the English constabulary,’ Fratelli chipped in. ‘She’s knowledgeable about these matters. Haven’t you noticed?’

Cassini glared at them.

‘And if anything’s been typed up,’ Fratelli added. ‘Get a photocopy.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Tell them it’s for Marrone or something. Improvise, Luca. Be bold…’

‘It’s stealing.’

Fratelli tilted his head to one side and fixed him with a look that said: disappointed. ‘This is why they don’t want you. No spirit. No initiative.’

Cassini prodded him in the chest with a fat forefinger. ‘My granddad told me about you. Last night. He said you were a shit-stirring troublemaker.’

‘How is he? Mellowed in retirement, I gather.’

The young officer chuckled at that. ‘He also said you were the best detective they ever had. Not that they appreciated it most of the time. Mainly because you were such a pain in the arse.’

‘Very perceptive of him. I won’t argue.’

‘Luca,’ Julia interrupted, taking the young officer’s other arm. ‘You mustn’t do anything you don’t want. If it bothers you at all… about what might happen…’

Cassini shook his head. ‘You two are a right pair, aren’t you? Him pushing me on. You making like I’m gutless if I don’t do it.’

He glanced down the corridor, back to towards the incident room where the murder case was being assembled.

Julia smiled at him and winked.

‘And then?’ Cassini asked.

‘Then you meet us at the lampredotto stall in the central market one hour from now. Where I will buy you as many panini as you wish. Oh.’ Fratelli scribbled something else on his pad and passed it over. ‘And check out one small detail too. It’s an old record. No one will argue there.’

The young officer nodded. Lampredotto. He seemed to like that idea. ‘Give me an hour,’ he said, and walked back towards the offices.

Sandro Soderini sat at his desk in the Palazzo Vecchio listening to the steady tramp of tourists work their way through the building. It was approaching midday. Outside, in the corridors of the council offices, the initial shock over Vanni Tornabuoni’s murder was giving way to a sense of grief and outrage. These things weren’t supposed to happen. Especially, thought Soderini, to someone in such an elevated and privileged position.

After putting out a statement of condolence to Tornabuoni’s mother, an elderly widow living on Capri, he’d stopped all incoming phone calls, pulled down the blinds, stayed in the dark trying to think. In truth, he hadn’t much liked the man. Tornabuoni was one more aristocrat he’d inherited, a foppish pseudo-intellectual in need of a job. He’d worn the right suits, made appropriate speeches, fawned when demanded, crawled when told. Then wisely left the real work in the culture department to the civil servants beneath him, most of whom treated their director with quiet, unamused contempt.

Lightly informed delegation from on high. That was the way things happened in Florence. Soderini possessed a detailed and informed sense of history from his former profession as a lecturer at the university. He appreciated all the many forms of government that had been tried in the city over the centuries, from the Signoria and the Twelve Good Men, the Sixteen Gonfaloniers and the Great Council of his ancestor’s day, to the soi-disant oligarchy of the Medici, which was a monarchy in all but name. Then, much later, came the brutal fascist tyranny of Mussolini. Life was simpler still in 1986. A form of benevolent dictatorship had quietly come to descend upon Florence; one founded through the certain knowledge the majority would vote a predictable way whatever the policies or name on the ballot paper. Once those crosses confirmed the status quo, power passed from broker to broker, through private meetings and conclaves, clubs and associations, mutual dependencies and the occasional exchange of hard cash.

It was a ritual, like much of life in Tuscany. A perpetual dance of money and influence, patronage and persuasion. Life and death. The seat of mayor had been handed on to him by a relative, a rich and corrupt uncle who, during the war, had quietly sided with the Fascists, secretly sitting behind Mussolini as he took tea with Hitler on the newly built lookout of the Ponte Vecchio while publicly proclaiming himself to be above politics, dedicated to the people of the city alone.

This masquerade was uncommon only in that it was opaque. Most such deceits were transparent, performed with a nod and a knowing wink. The Florentines were a proud and occasionally unruly people, too worldly wise to expect any direct, controlling voice in their own affairs. Nevertheless, it was important not to flaunt such impotence in the faces of the ordinary men and women who tramped the cobbled streets and went to work in offices and fashion houses, leather workshops and tourist restaurants. Soderini was groomed to be mayor by way of birth. So he too had found himself introduced at an early age into the clubs and secret societies, the brotherhoods and lodges through which an elite of aristocrats, industrialists, financiers, church officials and the occasional crook kept their fingers tight on the windpipe of the nation.

Most were tedious. The Brigata Spendereccia, when he found the time for it, rarely.

Now Vanni Tornabuoni, one of its most ardent supporters, was dead. Found murdered in the most extraordinary and public circumstances one day before the group was due to meet again. This was not simply wrong. It was offensive. Impudent.

Soderini stared at the paintings around him, the gilt furniture, the rich desk with its walnut veneer and the globe in the corner, commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent. He was mayor of Florence, duke in all but name. Heir to the Medici and those who went before, all of whom had walked down the Vasari Corridor for one reason or another, whether to find solace and protection behind the rusticated fortress walls of the Pitti Palace or, in recent times, for more pleasurable reasons.

This city belonged to him and he was not to be cowed.

Caution was in order, however. He picked up the phone, called Marrone’s private number in the Carabinieri stazione in Ognissanti, and demanded the dour captain give him a report on the case.

It was brief and uninformative. No more than Soderini might have gleaned from the news.

‘When will you charge the man? The gardener?’ Soderini demanded.

There was a silence on the line. Then Marrone cleared his throat and said, ‘This is a legal matter now. It’s for the magistrate to judge how we proceed. Not me.’ That pause again. ‘Not you.’

‘Don’t tell me my job, Marrone,’ Soderini barked back at him. ‘I put you in that seat. What I give today I may take away tomorrow.’

The silence again then, ‘I can tell you no more than I’ve said. Which went beyond what is proper, I might add.’

‘This gardener? I hear he was Tornabuoni’s lover.’

‘That much is on the radio, I believe.’

‘If everyone Tornabuoni slept with starts talking to the gutter press, we’ll have a pretty picture soon. Put an end to this. Drag this sorry layabout into court and silence all speculation. I want no more adverse publicity. About this or that other matter.’

‘What other matter might that be?’

‘Rovezzano. Don’t play clever with me. You’re not up to it. We’ve got reporters from Rome sniffing at our door already. Don’t give them dog shit to chase. They thrive on it. Feed them and they’ll never leave.’

‘Sir—’

‘Florence is a piece of theatre, Marrone. I want nothing that detracts from the show. Those Americans with their dollars do not come here for this filth. If they find it they’ll be gone, to Venice or Rome, and no one wants that.’

‘I’m an officer of the Carabinieri,’ Marrone replied. ‘Not the tourist board. I have a man in custody suspected of murder. It may be we will charge him before the night is out.’

‘Does he admit it?’

‘No,’ Marrone replied with some reluctance.

Soderini hesitated for a moment then asked, ‘Did he do it?’

This brought the longest silence of all, one that Sandro Soderini found informative. It never came to a close, either. He was forced to continue himself.

‘Your lack of cooperation in this matter is noted, Marrone. I find your intransigence offensive and ungrateful.’

‘I’m an officer of the Carabinieri,’ the man repeated. ‘My duty is to the law, and to finding and prosecuting Tornabuoni’s murderer.’

‘Your duty is to the city and to me!’

These angry tones echoed around the room. The noise sounded strange to him. He was not a man given to shouting.

‘Is there anything else?’ Marrone wondered.

‘As you know,’ Soderini said, ‘there’s a meeting planned for tomorrow night.’

‘Surely not now…’

‘It’s fixed.’

‘Is that wise?’

‘I judge it so. Vanni Tornabuoni was one of my kind. I knew the man and you didn’t. This is what he would have wanted.’

Was that true? Soderini wondered. No. It was the kind of ridiculous nonsense politicians were forced to say in such circumstances. No one knew what the dead might say. Or desire. Such things were beyond them.

‘I can’t rule out the possibility that Tornabuoni’s private life… his night-time activities contributed somehow to his death,’ Marrone told him.

‘We don’t have gardeners at our gatherings. No fear on that score.’

‘For the sake of decency—’

‘I do not need lectures on that subject from a captain of the Carabinieri whose every step up the ladder has been dependent upon our patronage.’

‘Out of common sense then!’

‘You know what I require, Marrone. Keep your men away from our business the way you’re supposed to. Throw this gardener of yours around the cell a little. Make him talk. He’s your man. I’m confident of it. Then bury this story as surely as we’ll bury Tornabuoni in a day or two.’

‘And how are you sure, Mr Mayor?’

Soderini thought for a moment, then said, ‘Vanni was a squalid little animal at heart. It was his idea of fun to dally with scum like that. He brought this end upon himself. We’ll mourn him, then return to our business.’ In his mind’s eye he could see the cavern already; the lights, the food, the entertainment. A new guest too, from England. There would be a brief note of grief. And then the riotous wake. ‘Make sure you go about yours.’

He put down the phone before the Carabinieri officer could say another word. The gardener. Tornabuoni would sleep with anything that moved, man or woman. He disappeared to Rome and Naples some weekends and came back drained, his face pale from whatever dope he’d consumed alongside the debaucheries. Sandro Soderini was above this kind of behaviour, such vile and physical company. This could not happen to him.

All the same… He got up and walked to the door of his office and turned the key. Then he went back to the desk and unlocked the private drawer at the bottom, the one with the reinforced metal lining, a kind of small, hidden safe.

The letters were there in cheap envelopes, the messages scrawled in blue biro. Each rising in hysterical tone. All addressed to the sprawling house in the Via Maggio in Oltrarno where he lived alone, equidistant between the goldsmiths of the Ponte Vecchio and the bums of Santo Spirito. It was a property that had been in the hands of the Soderini for three centuries; a handsome mansion, the exterior etched in dark, ornate frescoes that made it stand out among the plainer properties around.

His private fortress, his place of safety.

When the first envelope had dropped through the door he’d laughed. The words were so strange, so ridiculous. When the fourth arrived he’d sat brooding alone, wondering what these cryptic messages meant, what kind of man might have sent them.

The first read, ‘The Signoria must make a law against the dreadful vice of sodomy. Make a law against it! One that shows no mercy, so that the beasts who behave so are stoned and burned.’

The next: ‘You must ban games and taverns and public entertainments, the sordid nature of women’s dress, everything harmful to the health of the soul. Everyone must live for God and not the world.’

The third: ‘I cannot tell you everything I feel inside because you are too proud and indisposed to hear it. Oh! If you knew all you’d see that I am like a boiling vessel of liquid sealed up, bubbling but unable to escape! There are so many locked-up secrets behind our walls, Soderini, Florence would not believe them! Yet you know… You…’

The last was a threat, plain and forceful. He read it again and found it impossible to laugh, as he had when, the previous Saturday, it landed through his letterbox, delivered by hand, not the postal service.

‘I shall spill flood waters upon the earth. You shall drown in them, and in that torrent shall flow your blood.’

All four were bastardized Savonarola. Most had been adapted from the Haggai sermons the fanatical friar had given from the pulpit of the Duomo in his Advent sermon of 14 December 1494, when the city was still in thrall to his theatrical power of speech, and working its way towards the purges that would lead, first, to the bonfire of the vanities, then, a few years later, to the violent downfall of the monk from San Marco himself.

‘A lunatic,’ Soderini murmured.

But did gardeners read the sermons of a fanatical fifteenth-century monk?

He reached further into the drawer and retrieved the compact Beretta semiautomatic pistol he’d got from Marrone, a spare in the Carabinieri armoury. It was thirty years since Soderini had done his national service, spending a year as a privileged, idle officer in the leisurely barracks in Sicily his mother had fixed for him — chasing women, mostly; building links with useful criminals and avoiding the odd irate husband.

He still knew how to use a gun.

The stall in the central market was called Nerbone. It had been there, the sign said, since 1874. Judging by some of the old men shuffling at the counter, getting stuck into panini of tripe and lampredotto and other mysterious pieces of meat, so had much of its clientele.

Cassini turned up on time, ordered a bowl of tomato and potato soup called Pappa al Pomodoro, a tripe panino and a can of Coke. He had a blue document folder underneath his arm and an air of happy release about him.

‘Aren’t you having something?’ he asked, his mouth full.

‘We’re fine,’ Fratelli responded immediately. ‘Watching you eat, Luca, is like… eating yourself.’

‘No argument there,’ Julia declared, then retrieved the blue folder from beneath Cassini’s arm.

Fratelli reached over and spread out the photocopied papers on the glass counter of the stall.

‘Are they going to charge the gardener?’ he asked Cassini.

‘Not yet. The bloke isn’t coughing to anything.’ The young officer twirled a finger around his ear. ‘Funny in the head, they said. Babbling mad stuff.’

‘What kind of mad stuff?’

‘Rubbish.’

Fratelli groaned. ‘You must learn to be precise. Did the gardener see anyone?’

Cassini laughed out loud, the criticism bouncing off him as if it counted for nothing.

‘He said he saw a monk hanging round the night old Vanni went missing. I ask you! A monk! How many of them do you get up in Bellosguardo?’

Julia Wellbeloved caught Fratelli’s eye.

‘A monk?’ she repeated.

Fratelli went back to the documents and ran through them, a quick finger ticking off each line.

‘As I thought,’ he announced when he’d finished.

They waited. Nothing.

‘As you thought, what?’ Julia wanted to know.

Fratelli glanced around. They were out of earshot of Nerbone’s customers. It was safe to talk. She thought he looked paler than usual this morning, strained and perhaps in pain. His tics — fiddling with his hair, scratching his cheek — were more marked.

‘The gardener. It’s ridiculous…’ He took a sip of his glass of fizzy water. ‘Walter must know this too. Why’s he playing these games?’

‘They’re talking to the lawyers about charging him,’ Cassini said. ‘They don’t think it’s ridiculous.’

‘Luca, Luca, Luca…’ Fratelli sighed, shaking his head. ‘Julia. You too. Listen to me. Think about this.’

They came closer.

‘Tornabuoni was supposed to meet Julia in the Pitti Palace, yesterday morning. He never came in to work. So we may presume he was taken before that. Some time during the previous night. Last night his head appears in the Loggia dei Lanzi. It takes a long time to identify the man, naturally. A severed head does not look like a living one, I suppose. Tornabuoni is a bachelor. He has a bohemian lifestyle. No one seems much surprised when he fails to turn up at work, if one can consider what he did to be work. Some might argue—’

‘Pino,’ Julia began.

‘Bear with me. He’s taken two nights ago. Murdered. Decapitated. Finally, we work our way round to his mansion in Bellosguardo in the early hours of this morning. And what do we find? The gardener. One of his several lovers. Weeping by the side of his body.’

Cassini polished off his sandwich. ‘So?’ the young officer wondered.

‘So why would the gardener still be there if he killed Tornabuoni?’ Julia said before Fratelli could speak. It was obvious when she thought about it. ‘After all that time?’ She stole a corner of Cassini’s bread. ‘Is that what a murderer would do? Cut off someone’s head, drive into the city to hang it somewhere public, then go back to sob by the body?’

She shrugged. ‘Doesn’t sound right to me.’

Pino Fratelli beamed at her.

‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Did I get something wrong?’

‘Not a thing.’ Fratelli turned to Cassini. ‘Listen to me, Luca. I was the detective the stazione turned to when a murder case came in. I’ve talked to, joked with and jailed more homicidal brutes than you’re likely to encounter in a lifetime.’

‘Show-off,’ Cassini threw back at him.

‘No. I’m telling you something from experience, and experience is the way we learn in this business, not through classes in cadet school. Sooner or later, almost every murderer is appalled by what he or she has done. They wish to rationalize it. Excuse it. To bury it, more than anything. They don’t want that reminder of their deeds around them, that bloody picture in their heads. Why do you think so many corpses end up in woods or rivers? Even the most hardened of killers is aware they’ve done something shameful, however much they seek to justify the act. They carry the guilt around with them, every waking moment. Why make it more real, more painful, by leaving the evidence so visible a day, a day and a half after they’ve killed?’

‘Quite,’ said Julia. ‘It doesn’t add up.’

‘As you knew instinctively.’ Fratelli raised his glass of water. ‘Salute.’

‘They did find this chap with Tornabuoni’s body, though,’ Cassini pointed out. ‘And he blurted out that they were…’ The young man blushed. ‘You know…’

‘Were what?’ Julia asked, determined to get him to say it.

‘You know… Doing it,’ he grumbled.

‘Thanks to the Napoleonic Code, homosexuality hasn’t been a crime in Italy since reunification more than one hundred and twenty years ago,’ Fratelli pointed out. ‘Except to the Catholic Church, and happily the Pope has finally found better things to occupy him than running our judicial system. The fact that Tornabuoni and his gardener are queer—’

‘Is relevant,’ Julia interrupted.

Fratelli stared at her, then raised a single grey eyebrow. ‘How?’ he demanded.

‘I don’t know. It has to be. You said yourself, the man who defaced those frescoes in the Brancacci feared women.’

Fratelli put a finger to his cheek and said, quietly, ‘Actually, I said he hated them. But I prefer your word.’

‘Well.’ She shrugged. ‘If you felt like that about women, perhaps you’d have the same loathing for someone who was gay. Both must have a reason, I imagine. Must stem from something…’

She couldn’t get Fratelli’s story about his wife out of her head.

‘Something horrible,’ Julia whispered, looking at him.

She wondered about that dreadful night two decades before when the chill and filthy waters of the Arno rose to swamp the city. In the river’s icy embrace, Pino Fratelli’s beloved wife died somehow. Fratelli said himself he felt the poison in his own head stemmed from burying the truth of that grim event deep inside himself. Was it possible the man they sought was shaped by a similar grief? Good and evil, right and wrong seemed difficult to discern sometimes. Life was not like those frescoes in the Brancacci, divided neatly and cleanly between light and dark. Most of us lived in the middle; in the grey, smudged area, swamped by a little of each. Fratelli more than most, and he knew it.

‘I remain unconvinced,’ he said, paying for Cassini’s food, not returning her gaze. ‘Something prompted this act. Something recent. There’s also a very practical matter before us. A visible reason why this cannot be as simple as Marrone would have us believe.’

‘Which is?’ Cassini asked.

‘The blood. Where is it?’

Fratelli placed on the counter a set of photocopied photographs. Even in black and white, rendered crude by the process, she found them so deeply disturbing she had to turn away. A stiff, headless corpse lay by a small greenhouse on a patch of lawn next to a neatly tended vegetable patch, arms outstretched, legs akimbo. He wore what appeared to be elegant pyjamas — silk, perhaps. Uniformed Carabinieri bustled round looking variously bored or disgusted. There was a trail of blood across the vegetables, spattered on the leaves of cabbage and leeks and cavolo nero.

The young officer came in close, interested suddenly. Luca Cassini so desperately wanted to learn.

‘And where’s the weapon?’ Fratelli asked.

‘Haven’t found it yet,’ Cassini said. ‘Maybe he chucked it somewhere when he brought the head into town.’

Fratelli’s right forefinger stabbed at the images. ‘Why throw away something like that if you intend to stay with the body till you’re found? It makes no sense.’

‘Cutting someone’s head off makes no sense, Pino,’ Julia said gently.

‘Vanni,’ Fratelli went on. ‘Giovanni, as he was christened.’ He eyed Julia Wellbeloved. ‘Who’s the patron saint of Florence?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ she replied, astonished by the question.

‘Everybody knows that!’ Cassini cried, laughing.

‘I’m not religious, Luca. I’m not from Florence. I’ve no—’

‘San Giovanni Battista!’ Cassini said.

John the Baptist. He was everywhere. On canvas in the Uffizi, carved from stone in the Duomo. San Giovanni Decollato. Murdered on the whim of Salome, his head brought to her on a silver platter.

‘That’s a stretch,’ she complained. ‘What about that cockerel and Tornabuoni’s family crest? You don’t like it when I see something you don’t.’

‘Nothing to see,’ Fratelli said with a shrug. ‘Merely an interesting coincidence. If it’s our man from the Brancacci we’re sure he knows his scriptures. Let’s stick to the facts for the moment. Vanni Tornabuoni wasn’t murdered in the garden where he was found. He was killed elsewhere and his body returned to his mansion in order to allow his killer to remain free. And a gardener…’

Fratelli stopped, frowning at something. Cassini, keen as ever, said, ‘Well?’

‘Men often murder according to their profession, Luca. When we have more time I will take you through the educational case of the butcher of Scandicci and his unusual recipe for finocchiona. I would expect a man who works the land to use the tools of his trade. A spade, a mallet. To bludgeon and then to bury. Not to decapitate. Besides, you read the initial autopsy. Julia, take a look.’

He picked up the photocopied sheet and handed it to her. ‘Tell me what stands out,’ he ordered.

They waited as she read through the document, line by line.

‘Oh,’ she whispered.

‘Oh what?’ Fratelli asked.

‘He was shot.’

The older man stared at the younger. The expression in his eyes was clear: why didn’t you mention this?

‘I read that,’ Cassini objected.

‘And?’ Fratelli said.

‘And he was shot. Someone murdered him. I don’t get…’

‘Don’t you normally behead people in order to kill them?’ Julia said. ‘I mean really, Luca. Isn’t that very, very odd? Seems so to me. He’s either rubbing it in. Or…’

‘Or?’ Fratelli wondered.

‘Or frightened somehow. Ashamed.’

‘Suppose,’ Cassini grumbled.

‘To behead a living man,’ Fratelli added, ‘is a dreadful thing. To defile the corpse of a murdered one is… quite extraordinary. Didn’t he have the courage to kill him that way outright? Does this indicate some reticence — guilt, even — on his part?’

‘You can’t know that, Pino,’ she said.

‘Of course not. But we can make intelligent guesses. Also, we must ask ourselves what kind of man would possess the physical strength to commit such a terrible act. Most murders are simple, bloody affairs. A knife, a gun, a flurry of fists. Butchering a corpse like that requires…’

His eyes strayed behind the counter where another bowl of grey meat was being ladled on to a split panino.

‘A farmer. A slaughterhouse worker. A man who works with meat.’

He was so sure of himself it seemed pointless to argue.

‘To return to my original point,’ Fratelli added. They waited. ‘Blood. Tornabuoni was a tall man, of average build. I’ve seen him myself, at meetings. I would estimate his weight at perhaps seventy kilos. That’s about…’ He counted on his fingers. ‘One hundred and sixty of your English pounds.’

‘Wait a minute…’ Julia began.

‘Patience.’ He waved her into silence. ‘As any homicide detective worth his or her salt knows the volume of blood in a healthy person is around one eleventh of their body weight. Or something like four point seven litres, on average.’

He picked up the plastic bottle of water on the counter.

‘That’s almost five of these. To sever the neck involves cutting the carotid artery, not to mention much else. We’ve all seen Cellini’s statue. That thug knew what a decapitated man looked like…’

He stabbed his finger on the photo from the garden and said, ‘Well?’

Luca Cassini finished his panino and said, through a half-full mouth, ‘Not enough, boss. Nowhere near.’

‘Quite,’ Fratelli agreed. ‘That’s why he waited until nine in the evening in the loggia. He had Tornabuoni’s body in his vehicle and couldn’t return it to the man’s home until later for safety. Any arguments?’

Not a word.

Then Luca said, ‘I suppose you’re right about him being strong too.’

Fratelli waited. When there was nothing more he asked, ‘Because?’

‘He might have been a pansy, but he wasn’t a pushover. He had form, that Tornabuoni. Kind of.’

Another mouthful of guts and bread. Still they waited.

‘What do you mean?’ Julia asked.

‘I mean they only pulled him over that murder last week. Out in Rovezzano. The weirdo hippie we found shot. You remember, Pino? I know you’re not on the job. But I mean… how many murders do we get? A couple in two weeks. It’s like New York here. Quite exciting really…’

‘What murder?’ Fratelli asked, a little too loudly.

People were looking. He took Cassini’s arm, dragged him towards the corner of the market, Julia close behind, and whispered, ‘What murder?’

‘Some hippie bloke called Aristide Greco. Came from Calabria. Sounds a bit dodgy if you ask me. Funny old business. Drugs, probably. Don’t know why they pulled in Tornabuoni but he was out again like a shot. Mistaken identity. I mean, if it wasn’t, they’d be sending someone out to the dead bloke’s farm, wouldn’t they?’

‘And they’re not?’ Fratelli asked.

Cassini grinned. ‘They’ve got their man, haven’t they? Why bother?’

‘I don’t suppose,’ Julia said, ‘you’d happen to have the papers on that, would you?’

Luca chuckled. Then he reached into his blue folder and pulled out a few sheets of paper stapled together.

‘I’m not daft, you know. I just wanted to see your faces…’

Fratelli snatched them from his hand. ‘Three sheets? Is that it?’

‘Hippie from Calabria,’ Cassini repeated. ‘Shot dead, left in a ditch. Murder squad seemed to think our dead mate Vanni had something to do with it. Then it turned out he didn’t…’

‘How do they know that?’ Fratelli demanded. ‘What cleared Tornabuoni?’

Cassini shuffled from one big foot to the other, uncomfortable.

‘Search me. They thought they found something at the scene that was Tornabuoni’s. Or supposed to be. And then he was out of the stazione, free as a bird.’ A pause. ‘Maybe he had an alibi.’

‘Maybe?’ Julia asked.

‘I don’t know, OK! I stuck my neck on the line for you, Pino. But I’ve got my limits. Sod this. I need a pee.’

He wandered off to the toilets, looking miserable.

‘What was that about?’ Julia asked when Luca was out of earshot.

‘Probably nothing,’ Fratelli said. ‘There’s an address for the dead man here. It said he lived on a farm with his American girlfriend. Out near Fiesole. Not far from Rovezzano where he was shot.’

She knew what he was thinking and it worried her. ‘Marrone said you two could work on the vandalism in the Brancacci. Nothing more.’

Fratelli looked around the busy market hall. ‘Do you see Walter here?’

‘No, but…’

‘Good. Let’s get Luca to take us for a drive. You need some country air, young lady. You’re looking terribly pale.’

The farm lay on a slope so steep the wizened olive trees clung to the rocky grass, rising at a diagonal from the dun earth. At the top of the hill lay a shallow indentation like a crater, full of thorny bushes and tangled weeds dying back for the winter. A narrow path led through the olives. She let the dog off the lead. The animal followed them there and back, a route it knew.

No words. No objections. He did what she said. Had no choice. So between them they spent the best part of two hours ferrying dope and guns, ammunition and explosives, boxes of fuses and things he didn’t understand, up into the crater, followed by the happy, yapping dog, as if this was all a game. When everything was moved they covered the crates and dumps of weapons with blue plastic crop-gathering sheets from the barn, then threw broken branches across the top.

It wouldn’t fool anyone if they looked hard. But there was so much. Enough for a small war. The last of the Red Brigades’ weapons from Tuscany, she said.

When they had finished, they stood together on the rim of the indentation, looking at the broken branches and the blue plastic peeking underneath.

‘What’s your real name?’ she asked.

He didn’t answer. He was staring at his wrist. The brambles had caught him along the way. Deep scratches, blood, a sharp wound turning scabby. She looked at him, took out a tissue, wiped the dirt away.

‘You need to wash that,’ she said. ‘You need a plaster on it. Come on…’

‘We could run,’ he said again.

She smiled at him, laughed. Not so unkindly this time.

‘We could run,’ he repeated. ‘Get in the van. Go somewhere. Anywhere.’

She shook her head, then went down the hill, back into the farmhouse. He followed her into the bedroom. Chavah Efron put a hand to his head. Two days now without shaving. The stubble was returning. On his face. On his scalp.

In a drawer she found a cheap electric razor.

‘Just your face,’ she said. ‘Not your head. I want you to look different. Why do that anyway?’

He didn’t answer.

‘For God’s sake, talk to me.’

She ran her fingers across his scalp. His body was shaking.

‘My name is Aldo Pontecorvo,’ he said in a low, calm voice. ‘I’m thirty-seven years old and I come from Oltrarno. No one left there any more.’

‘Someone must have really screwed you up.’

He glared at her and said, ‘Your excuse?’

Laughter again. ‘I don’t have one. I was born like this.’

Her fingers ran across his cheeks, his chin, working the razor.

‘There’s a man I read about,’ he said. ‘They hated him. Burned him in the Piazza della Signoria. Long time ago.’

‘They don’t burn the people they hate any more. They shoot them and leave them in ditches. Then shrug their shoulders and walk away. We want the same thing, Aldo. Don’t we?’

‘I shall spill flood waters upon the earth,’ he recited. ‘You shall drown in them, and in that torrent shall flow your blood.’

‘My blood?’

‘Everyone’s. In the end.’

She leaned against him, her hips against his thighs. Hands on his chest.

‘Then we should make the most of the time we’ve got left.’

Fingers reaching. Inside the black woollen sweater. Rising. Curling. Twisting. Tempting.

He didn’t move.

Then there was a sound outside. Tyres and a car door opening. A voice. Male. Crying her name.

The smile disappeared from her pretty dark face in an instant. ‘Damn,’ she said.

She looked around. Walked back on to the landing, reached up and pulled on the lanyard for an opening into the roof space. A ladder there. Steps.

‘Best I can do,’ she said, then walked back into the spare room, got a handgun they’d kept back, gave him the weapon and a box of shells. ‘Get up there. Stay silent as a mouse. If I need you, I’ll yell.’

‘What is this place?’ Fratelli asked, climbing out of the car. They came crammed into Cassini’s rusty white Fiat Cinquecento. The young officer was too junior to be allowed use of a Carabinieri vehicle.

A black mongrel ran to the length of its chain and barked at them wildly. Straight away Luca made cooing noises, walked over, pulled a packet of sweets from his pocket, calmed the animal with one.

‘You have unexpected talents, Luca,’ Fratelli observed.

‘My uncle Silvio’s got an olive farm. Big press, too. We go round picking up crops for other people. You’ve got to deal with dogs. Fact of life.’

Gingerly, he tried to pat the animal on its head, then thought better of the idea.

‘Now this is a place run by people who know nothing about farming,’ he said confidently, looking round the fields and the ramshackle, muddy yard.

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘Dead right I am. You townies think farms are just shit and graft. But with olives, let me tell you: everything needs to be neat and spick and span. Specially when it comes to cropping.’

Cassini pointed at the ancient, rusty tractor. ‘Uncle Silvio reckons you can always tell a farmer by his machines. If you’re doing a good job you’ve got lots to harvest. Can’t do that with a load of old junk, can you? Proper tools pay for themselves.’

Fratelli nodded, pleased with the answer.

‘It’s just olives,’ Julia said, coming to join them. ‘Can you live on that?’

Cassini checked his notes. ‘Says they were doing this newfangled organic thing. Maybe what you save on pesticide you make up for on price. I dunno.’ He scratched his head. ‘Looks a dump to me. Just the sort of place a hippie would dream about. Nature don’t grow of its own accord, you know. It’s what we make of it. I mean…’

He stopped. A woman was marching towards them from the door of the two-storey house, little more than a tumbledown cottage with peeling white walls and a roof that looked as if it needed tending.

She was about thirty, attractive and gypsy-like, with wayward, curly black hair, fierce eyes and a lined, tanned face. In spite of the cold she wore a long maroon skirt and a green jumper and wellington boots as she tramped through the mire. A shotgun was broken over her right arm. She looked as if she knew how to use it.

‘Signora…’ Fratelli began. Then he waved at Cassini, who pulled out his Carabinieri ID card.

‘What do you want?’

‘About your husband…’

Her stare stopped Fratelli as he spoke. The woman was looking at Luca Cassini’s decrepit white Fiat.

‘Where’s your ID?’ she asked, then nodded at Julia Wellbeloved. ‘And hers?’

‘These are discreet inquiries,’ Fratelli said carefully. ‘We don’t want to make a fuss. Please. If we could go inside for a moment. And talk…’

He took a step towards her. She moved back and in a single, swift movement closed the shotgun, held it in her hands, barrel to the ground.

‘All this time you bastards have waited. You do nothing about Ari. And then you come to make…’ Her face creased with sour anger. ‘Discreet inquiries.’

‘We interviewed you in the stazione, didn’t we?’ Cassini objected. ‘You didn’t say much there. I mean… if we had something to go on.’

‘My husband goes out to work and then winds up dead in a ditch. You know more about this than I do.’

‘I doubt that,’ Fratelli intervened. ‘Perhaps something’s occurred to you since.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Such as did he know a man called Giovanni Tornabuoni?’ Julia asked.

‘Is he a farmer?’

‘Not exactly.’

She shook her head.

‘Ari never mentioned anyone like that. No. Who is he?’

Fratelli smiled at her. Kept looking round the yard.

‘There’s a nasty rumour abroad that your husband was involved in drugs, Signora. It would be very useful if we could take a look around. Disprove such a thing…’

‘Did this Tornabuoni deal in drugs?’

‘Maybe bought them,’ Cassini grumbled.

She didn’t move. ‘Why are you here? Where are your papers? I see only one ID and that’s for a junior officer.’

‘We’re trying to work out who killed him!’ Cassini snapped.

‘Here? I’m struggling to eke a living out of this place. On my own. I don’t need this shit.’

Pino Fratelli took out a large, clean handkerchief and blew his nose, once again looked round the little farm with its crippled olive trees, its silent, watchful dog, the dilapidated cottage.

‘Will you stay?’ he asked. ‘It’s a lot of work for two people to run a farm. Even a little place. Just one of you…’

‘What I do is my business. Not yours.’

The shotgun waved at him, then the car.

‘If you’ve nothing to tell me,’ she said, ‘you’d best go.’

‘Of course,’ Fratelli agreed. He gestured to Julia and Luca Cassini, who seemed surprised that he deferred so easily. ‘I’m sorry if we disturbed you. It’s an unfortunate habit of ours, I’m afraid.’

He smiled, took Cassini’s notes, looked at them. She seemed puzzled.

‘Signora Efron. An unusual name. Is there anything you wish to ask us?’

A moment of uncertainty between them. No words.

‘Get out of here,’ she said.

Fratelli packed the notebook into his jacket. ‘I apologize again. Good afternoon.’

Then he walked back to the car and waited for Cassini to get behind the wheel, Julia to climb into the back. They set off down the stony track, towards Fiesole.

‘Your radio, Luca,’ Fratelli said, holding out his hand.

Cassini passed it over. ‘Useless round here. Won’t get a signal until we’re nearer home.’

‘Stop at the first phone box we find, then.’

‘Won’t be till Fiesole. Is that a good idea? Should we hang around?’

Fratelli stared at him as the car bounced down the rough lane, then emerged on to the narrow single-track asphalt road towards the town.

‘What makes you ask that?’ he wanted to know.

‘You spooked that woman, Pino. Julia?’

‘You spooked him,’ she agreed from the back.

‘I reckon she’s probably planning to scarper right now,’ Cassini added.

‘Possibly. Find me that phone box.’

‘That woman’s going to hop it!’ Cassini cried.

‘She didn’t kill her husband, Luca. Or break into the Brancacci and deface those paintings. We seek a man for those things.’

‘All the same…’ Julia chipped in.

‘She’s a foreigner. No money. Only a beat-up van that doesn’t look as if it would make it much beyond the autostrada. If she flees, even Walter’s idiot detectives from this morning could find her. Chavah Efron in herself is of little importance…’

The two of them grumbled at that.

‘Oh!’ Fratelli cried. ‘So now I must provide proof. No. You shall do it. I wish each of you to tell me one thing you learned during that exchange, please.’

‘Are we on a bloody training course then?’ Luca Cassini demanded.

‘Yes. You first.’

‘She’d no intention of letting us set foot in that house. I know that.’

Fratelli grunted, ‘Pah!’

‘What do you mean, “Pah”?’

‘We could have got into the house if I’d pushed it. She just didn’t want us there. Anywhere on the farm. Good place to hide things, by the way. Perfect, if you ask me. Julia!’

‘That woman was lying through her teeth. It was quite obvious.’

Fratelli rubbed his eyes and sighed.

‘Don’t you dare say “pah” to me,’ she added.

‘I’ll do my best but really… of course she lied to us. She’s a criminal of some kind. We’re the people who are supposed to apprehend her. What do you expect? An instant confession? Even the average innocent citizen lies to us as a matter of course. The fact someone is less than honest tells us absolutely nothing—’

‘We should have insisted,’ Cassini broke in.

‘We couldn’t!’ Fratelli barked. ‘You’re a junior officer attached to a vandalism case. One that, for Walter Marrone, has nothing to do with a two-week-old murder. Indeed, so convinced is he of that fact, he expressly forbade me to go near anything remotely connected to it.’

‘Oh, thanks for telling me that now!’

‘As if you hadn’t guessed. Don’t play the fool with me, boy. I know that’s nonsense. Had we barged in there and found nothing, Walter Marrone would have had your badge. And probably thrown Julia and me in jail for a day or two to boot. We’d no warrant, no accreditation, no legal right to question that woman at all. I think she knew.’

He patted Cassini’s shoulder, then turned to look at Julia in the back seat. ‘I don’t intend to allow my personal obsessions to affect your lives or careers.’

‘They have done already, thank you,’ she observed.

He didn’t respond to that. The car was winding down a steep hill back to the little town of Fiesole. There would surely be a phone box soon.

‘So what should we have noticed?’ Cassini wondered.

‘Her husband was murdered two weeks ago,’ Fratelli repeated. ‘She’s aware we’ve made no progress, have no clue as to who the perpetrator might be. Which is, one might add, very much the case.’

He glanced at both of them then asked, ‘Well?’

‘Why wouldn’t she ask something?’ Cassini said with a big, wide grin. ‘I mean… his wife… why wouldn’t she say… how are you doing? Why the bloody hell don’t you have the bastard in a cell right now?’

‘Because she knows who killed him,’ Julia Wellbeloved said in a quiet, firm voice.

‘The culprit being Tornabuoni,’ Fratelli added, beaming at both of them. ‘Very good. One other thing there was worthy of note too. Anyone?’

They were silent.

‘Mud,’ Fratelli declared, checking his watch. ‘Words are all well and good, but you must learn to use your eyes too. Look at things. Consider the mud. Chavah Efron is a sturdy, active woman but small in stature. Even her boots were quite small. Say a size thirty-eight.’

He glanced at Julia, then at Cassini behind the wheel. ‘She didn’t object when I said she was on her own. Yet most of the recent footprints in that yard, including those that went to the dog, were much larger. A man’s. Probably about a forty-seven, I’d guess.’

‘Mud,’ Cassini said and shook his head, laughing.

‘Find me a telephone, Luca. I want to talk to your captain.’

The young officer looked worried suddenly.

‘Don’t fret,’ Fratelli reassured him. ‘All I have to offer is a small morsel of peripheral information picked up on our travels. I won’t involve you. I promise.’

She walked back into the house, went upstairs, watched from the window. The lane to the farm was visible to the single-track road at the bottom. The white Fiat went all the way, then turned left towards Fiesole, disappearing out of sight.

They would need to call in help. She had some time — half an hour. More, perhaps. No room for hesitation.

The shotgun was still in her arms. There was no sound from the roof space. She wondered what to do.

Couldn’t leave him. If they found him he’d talk. Couldn’t take him far, either. He was slow, strange, unpredictable. A liability.

‘Aldo!’ she cried, then banged on the attic flap with the barrel of the gun.

She heard him scrabble across the timbers, then watched as he drew back the wooden covering. A querulous face. Not scared. Not anything, really. He needed to be told.

‘We’re leaving,’ she said. ‘You’re coming with me. We’re going to need some things.’

He didn’t move.

‘Now!’ she shouted at him. ‘They’ll be back. More of them. With papers this time. They never wanted to look before. I don’t know why…’

He ran down the folding ladder, took it step by ponderous step, stood next to her, tall, muscular, waiting.

‘This is your doing,’ she said. ‘You brought them here. They’ll be back. Maybe they think I killed him. Maybe…’

There was something about the old, silver-haired cop that bothered her. It was as if he wasn’t much interested in Ari or Tornabuoni at all. He was looking for something different altogether, and not seeing it.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t curious. ‘I’ll tell them what I did,’ he said. ‘You run. I’ll stay. They can take me.’

She laughed. ‘Oh, such a hero.’

His pale face, now beginning to grow stubble, become more human, watched her, puzzled, not knowing whether to be flattered or offended.

‘The job’s not done, is it?’ she said. ‘You know that. I thought I was alone. And now…’

Coincidences happened, and with them opportunities.

‘I want you to help me collect some weapons and some ammunition. What money we have. Then we take the van into the city. Dump it.’

The ideas kept racing through her head, so quickly she couldn’t possibly grasp all the flaws and lacunae.

‘We need somewhere to stay. Just tonight. That’s all. Where do you live?’

‘Nowhere.’

He closed his eyes and she felt a sudden and unwanted pang of sympathy. This question pained him. It was the first time she’d seen that in his face.

‘Aldo… Tomorrow. The first Thursday of the month.’

She stepped closer to him, touched his arm, not roughly, not possessively, but because she wanted to.

‘Ari and I were supposed to do it then. Don’t you understand? I didn’t dance there for the money. I did it to get inside. To see them at their worst. To think. To plan…’

She sighed.

‘And then the idiot goes and spoils it all through his stupid jealousy.’

Her hand reached out and touched his cheek.

‘You understand now? What was it you said? I shall spill flood waters upon the earth?’

‘You shall drown in them,’ he murmured, picking up the refrain. ‘And in that torrent shall flow your blood.’

‘Their blood,’ she said. ‘Not ours. I was alone. And here you are.’

He looked around the landing, at the bare floorboards and the bedrooms. ‘What weapons?’ he asked.

‘I’ll deal with that. We need somewhere to hide. We can’t stay in the van. They’ll have the number.’

He didn’t move, didn’t speak.

‘We’ve got to leave. You’re from the city. Find us somewhere…’

‘How long?’ he asked.

‘A night. That’s all.’

‘And then?’

She smiled. There never was an after. Not in any of their plans. Only a present, and an objective. ‘And then… I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We’ll see.’

Cassini’s radio stayed resolutely useless. They had to drive to the centre of Fiesole, the modest Piazza Mino, before they found a working phone box.

Fratelli rummaged through his pockets, then looked at them and said, ‘Moneta, moneta!’

Cassini held out a pocketful of change.

‘I should have a squad car here with a radio that works,’ Fratelli muttered, taking the coins without a word of thanks. ‘And a team of men. Dogs. Specialists.’

‘Civilians don’t get them,’ Cassini said patiently. ‘Or have you forgotten?’

‘For how much longer? We shall see! There’s a café over there. Get yourselves something to drink. I’ll join you.’

‘If you’re calling Walter Marrone, I’m the only serving Carabinieri officer here,’ Cassini objected. ‘I’m not being left out…’

‘Would you let Julia buy her own coffee then? Off with you. There are no secrets. I’m merely briefing our friendly captain. I’ll report back in a minute or two. A macchiato for me. It won’t take long.’

A bright, broad grin and then he marched over to the phone, waving at them as they slunk off to the café.

It took a little persuasion with the switchboard before he was through.

‘Walter!’

‘Oh, wonderful,’ Marrone grumbled.

‘Don’t sound so glum. I have news about the Tornabuoni murder! You must send me a squad car to the Piazza Mino in Fiesole immediately. No. Make that two. Armed officers please. And some men with spades and dogs I think…’

Silence. Then a small explosion occurred in the handset. Fratelli held it away from him.

‘Tornabuoni!’ Marrone roared. ‘I gave you that boy so you and your English girlfriend could play detectives over that nonsense in the Brancacci. Not poke your noses into a murder case…’

‘And if the two are linked?’

‘They’re not.’

‘But if they are?’

‘Where the hell are you? What are you doing with that fool Cassini?’

‘Two weeks ago, a dubious hippie named Aristide Greco was found shot dead in Rovezzano. Our friend Tornabuoni was the preliminary suspect.’

Silence.

‘I am, of course, telling you nothing you don’t know,’ Fratelli added. ‘As you remind me constantly, you’re captain of the stazione and nothing escapes your scrutiny.’

‘So?’ Marrone demanded.

‘So I’ve paid Greco’s widow a visit. Which is more than any of your officers have done…’

‘The woman was interviewed here and told us nothing. Tornabuoni’s connection to the case was entirely coincidental. A misunderstanding. He was released the moment that was apparent.’

Fratelli could picture Marrone speaking these words. He was such a terrible liar, the effort it cost him was even audible in his voice.

‘What was misunderstood?’ he asked.

‘None of your damned business. Get back here. Bring me that boy. My generosity’s over.’

‘The widow’s got something to hide, Walter. I believe she understands full well who killed her husband, doubtless over some drug deal. We both know Tornabuoni dabbled there.’

‘I will not allow this…’

‘Send me two cars. Take her into custody. Allow me to search her farmhouse and the surrounding land. An afternoon at most. At the end of it I will give you some answers.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

‘Don’t get snappy with me. You were just as dubious over that bastard butcher in Scandicci. And the widow Bartolini’s chihuahuas…’

‘If you throw those bloody chihuahuas at me one more time, I swear—’

‘A breakthrough, Walter! I’m offering you a lead, for God’s sake.’

A pause. There was, he thought, perhaps a grim chuckle too.

‘I don’t need your lead, thank you very much. The Tornabuoni case is solved. The gardener confessed…’

Fratelli took a deep breath, then stamped his fist on the phone box wall. ‘Oh! Oh! And can’t I imagine what kind of interrogation that was? Your two monkeys from this morning, was it? What did they use this time? A hood? A few discreet punches…?’

‘I would have thrown you out of the Carabinieri before long anyway, you know,’ Marrone said in a low, cold voice. ‘Whether you were dying or not. Your attitude towards your colleagues…’

‘You’re the one who gave me Luca Cassini because you thought he was an idiot. Don’t play those games…’

‘Tell Cassini to report back to the stazione immediately. You and your English mistress can go and play your games elsewhere…’

‘Will you kindly stop saying that?’

‘Stay out of my hair from now on. That’s a warning. Every last favour I owed you has been spent. If I trip over you pretending to be an officer of the Carabinieri one more time, I will, I swear, lay charges. Against both of you, for interfering in our investigations, for…’

‘Do you honestly think you can bury two murders?’ Fratelli asked. ‘Tornabuoni’s of Aristide Greco? Then the man’s own death at the hands of God knows who… because it certainly isn’t the gardener. Who’s pulling your strings on this one? Need I really guess…?’

‘Enough!’ Marrone cried. ‘This conversation is at an end. As is whatever friendship we had. Goodbye.’

The phone went dead.

Pino Fratelli stared at it for a moment, shrugged, crossed the piazza and found them in the café.

‘That took a while,’ Cassini said.

‘Walter and I are old friends. We rarely have brief conversations.’

Julia seemed worried. ‘Is everything all right? You look pale.’

‘It’s a cold day. Winter on the way.’

The macchiato turned up. In three quick gulps it was gone.

‘Everything’s wonderful.’

‘Marrone…’ Cassini began.

‘The captain’s busy. He said we should go back and take a look at the farm for ourselves. He’ll join us there presently.’ He looked at Cassini. ‘Do they give you a weapon, Luca?’

Luca Cassini laughed. ‘If they won’t give me a car, I’m hardly likely to be allowed a gun, am I? I’m the office boy, remember. That’s why you’ve got me.’

‘No problem,’ Fratelli said. ‘Let’s go.’

Back on the outskirts of Florence, the old VW van belched diesel fumes into the dying afternoon.

‘We’ve got to dump this thing,’ she said. ‘Somewhere a long way from where we’re going. They’re not that stupid.’

They had clothes, some food, a few weapons and ammunition. He’d never left a place in a hurry like that. Never thought of himself as pursued. It felt… good, for some reason. Exciting. Like being in the presence of something bigger, more important. The woman had that effect too.

‘You do know where we’re going, don’t you?’

‘I’ll dump it. Don’t nag.’

He drove on into Santa Croce, through the warren of narrow streets. History was etched into them, in the stones, in their names. Dead warriors, old tribes. Past the basilica itself and the white statue of the stiff Dante, skirting the square with the tents for the olive oil fair she’d never attend again. Down to the bridge and across the Arno into San Niccolò.

There he pulled into the side of the road, not far from the bars in the Via de’ Renai, stopping the van next to a little patch of park between the low cobbled street and the busy riverside road.

‘They don’t have meters here. They won’t notice it for a while.’

Chavah Efron picked up the two bags she’d brought. Weapons mainly. ‘You’re good at this,’ she said.

‘No. I’m not. I’ve never done…’ He remembered Tornabuoni, the head beneath Cellini’s statue. ‘Never done anything before. Don’t know why I started.’

‘Because it was time,’ she said. ‘Because of me.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’re a natural. Ari wasn’t. He was too… proud. He didn’t listen. Didn’t take orders. Didn’t get it.’

He waited, said nothing.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘Somewhere safe.’

‘Nowhere’s safe. Not any more.’ She looked out of the window. The little bars were opening. Pleasant, comfy places for men and women of a certain age to drink themselves into a sleepy oblivion and forget what the world was like outside. ‘Where are we going?’

He picked up the workman’s canvas bag he’d brought from the farm, checked the crowbar there, prayed it would work.

‘Home,’ Aldo Pontecorvo said in a meek, low voice.

The rusty Cinquecento bounced its way up the narrow track to Chavah Efron’s farm once more. The place was, as Pino Fratelli expected, now empty. Front door ajar, back door unlocked. Dog still on the chain, whining, afraid. VW van gone. Two sets of footprints through the mud in the yard. One small, one large.

‘You were right there,’ Luca said, looking at them. ‘She hopped it swiftish, didn’t she? With some bloke.’

‘None of this should have happened,’ Fratelli muttered caustically.

‘I’m sorry…’

‘It’s not your fault, Luca. I wasn’t trying to say it was. It’s mine. It’s Walter’s. It’s…’ He wondered whether Cassini and Julia were ready to hear it. ‘It’s that damned city down there.’

Florence lay in the middle distance, Duomo and rusticated towers, campanili and basilicas, the grey form of the Arno worming through its centre.

‘Shall we take a look around?’ Julia asked quietly.

She was worried about something and he couldn’t quite work out what. His head wasn’t working right any more. It always focused ruthlessly on the task in hand. Now it lacked, on occasion, any peripheral vision whatsoever.

‘Check your radio again, Luca,’ Fratelli ordered. ‘We’re higher up here and… For the love of God, will you leave that dog alone?’

Cassini was with the black mongrel again, patting it on the head as the animal wagged its tail energetically.

‘They left the dog,’ the young officer said. ‘What kind of people would abandon a dog? I ask you—’

‘Your radio?’

Cassini looked at his handset. ‘Sorry…’

Fratelli led the way into the house. Walked round the plain, cold ground floor, looked at the dirty plates, poked at the discarded rock albums and the magazines — political, most of them. Left wing.

‘She was in a hurry,’ he murmured. ‘I should have done something…’

‘Let’s look upstairs, shall we?’ Cassini said.

The front bedroom had some of the floorboards up. In the room opposite, the old iron-framed double bed had been pushed to one side. The floor was up there too.

‘They’ve cleared something out,’ Cassini said.

‘I can see that.’ Fratelli tried to think straight and found it a struggle. ‘How long were we gone in Fiesole? Half an hour? Forty minutes?’

‘Something like that,’ Julia agreed.

‘She was expecting a visit. Before we ever came. They got the things out of here beforehand. Maybe to the van.’

He walked to the front window, looked at the tracks in the yard outside. The dog was still there, staring up at them.

Fratelli looked at the space beneath the floorboards there, then came back to the other room, thought about what might have been hidden beneath the bed.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘we’re going to get a bit muddy.’

Julia Wellbeloved had found something in the corner. Fratelli looked, felt his blood chill. A red flag and a star in a circle. The words ‘Brigate Rosse’.

Luca Cassini stared at it and said, ‘Oh, bugger.’

‘Do you read the orders every morning?’ Fratelli asked.

‘’Course I do.’

‘What’s the status on terrorism at the moment?’

Cassini laughed. ‘All that stuff’s over! We put them in jail. There are no bombs and guns and stuff any more.’

‘Just because something’s stopped, doesn’t mean it’s gone away,’ Fratelli said, his patience fraying. ‘I haven’t been allowed to see anything official in more than a year. What is the status today?’

Cassini frowned. ‘There hasn’t been any mention of it for months. Not since we got that woman of theirs and banged her up. They…’

He stopped. Went from one big foot to the other.

‘What?’ Julia asked.

‘I remember peeking at her papers when they came in. They said something about… maybe there was a couple of them left. Unimportant people.’

‘And weapons, Luca?’ Fratelli asked. ‘What did it say about them?’

Cassini shrugged. ‘Nothing. We never found their weapons. We never do. I mean… if they’re not out there, who cares where they’ve hidden their guns? Who—’

Fratelli marched downstairs. There was a spare pair of wellington boots by the front door. He told Julia Wellbeloved to put them on, then strode out into the yard, followed the line of old footprints, walked past the barn, into the low woodland, and picked his way up the hill.

‘Keep checking the radio, Luca,’ he ordered. ‘We’re getting higher. Maybe…’

Maybe I’m wrong, he thought. Maybe I am going mad.

But their tracks were recent and obvious. Up and down the hill. He had to follow.

They trudged along the Via Pisana towards the Ponte Vecchio for a while, then turned sharp left towards the rising mound of the Boboli Gardens. The private park of the Medici. A vast green paradise of follies and grottoes and groves, full of statues and surprises; so large that most locals had never visited every corner of its sprawling acreage.

A dead-end alley led to a high brick wall with a single door in the corner. A workman’s entrance, little used. He walked to it, turned, looked round.

‘You want somewhere to sleep, to hide,’ Aldo Pontecorvo said confidently. ‘This is it. The garden’s a big place. There are things in there…’

Did he dare tell her? Was this a secret that could finally be shared?

He walked back to join her. Felt something slip from him as the words rose to his throat.

‘I was born here. Thirty-seven years ago. To a woman who hated me. In a gardener’s hovel in a corner they never bothered with.’

‘You don’t need to make excuses,’ she said. ‘We are who we are.’

She held the bag in her left arm, moved it up and down. He heard the weapons rattling inside. Then he went back to the door, took out the crowbar, put it in the crack between the frame and the wood and heaved hard.

Free in two goes. He helped her squeeze through the narrow door, closed it carefully when they were inside.

The police and the Carabinieri kept an eye on this place. It was part of the treasures of Florence, somewhere to protect, to keep from the hoi polloi on the street.

Ahead lay a narrow path strewn with autumn leaves.

The grey day was dying.

‘Follow me,’ he said, holding out his hand for her to take.

A picture in his head. The walls of the Brancacci. The magical, holy couple, inside the garden, expelled from its precious, immortal presence. He never knew which side he belonged to, never would. But this was a kind of home for him and soon she’d know it.

The woman followed him up the winding track beneath the walls of the Belvedere Fort as it meandered through crazily angled corridors formed by high conifers, past signs for grottoes and fountains, the Jupiter Garden, the Ladies’ Garden, the palace itself. Finally they wound behind a low, artificial mound, walked half bent down a narrowing gap between shrubs and trees on either side.

Fruit lay on the ground. Apples and pears and oranges, starting to rot in the November rains.

In an archway of branches stood a tiny shack, brown brick leaning into the hill. A door, crooked, covered in cobwebs, grey and rotting in the wan daylight.

He turned the rusty handle, shone a torch inside.

No one came here any more.

The smell was the same. Smoke and dank earth. He felt he’d been breathing it every day of his life. Aldo Pontecorvo walked into the hovel built against the Boboli Hill, found candles where she’d left them, lit three, set them on the shaky wooden table. Slowly the light cast its dim yellow warmth into the shadows. Two rooms and a door to an outside privy. A washbasin, a gas stove fed from a cylinder beneath. Beyond the door the low double bed where she slept, and next to it the single mattress on the floor that was his.

Back in January she’d died in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, not far from the Duomo; the place, the plaques reminded everyone, founded by another Florentine noble, Folco Portinari, the father of Dante’s beloved Beatrice. There was no love in the face of his mother. Had she owned the strength, he felt sure her dying words would have been a curse.

That was when they threw him out of the grim place on the hill and he found a single room in an Oltrarno boarding house at a price a casual cook could never afford. Coming back, his feelings veered from fear through hatred to a kind of awe. Every childhood had its share of innocence, even his. This lost corner of the Medici’s orchard fed his simple imagination from the moment he could think. As a solitary, fanciful child, never forced to go to school, ignored mostly by his mother and his peers, he’d spent long days here, exploring every hidden inch, learning by heart the maze-like pathways that crisscrossed, from theatre to fountain, grotto to pavilion. At times the Boboli Gardens seemed a corner of paradise abandoned by the gods of the palazzo at the foot of the hill. It was all his, until one black night that would transform him from naive boy to knowing, broken man.

He held up the candle. ‘We’ll be fine here for the night. Two even. No one knows about this place. My mother…’

‘You lived here?’

‘Just the two of us.’

‘Your father—?’

‘I never knew,’ he interrupted. ‘She never talked about him. It was as if I was…’

He thought about the statues hidden in the garden; grinning gnomes and satyrs leering from beneath the bushes. One of these had sired him. Or so he’d always believed as a child.

‘As if I came from nowhere.’

Chavah Efron placed her bag on the table. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Go fetch some food. And wine. Red.’

She looked around, pulled one of the two chairs up to the small wooden table, brushed away the dust with her arm.

‘Red,’ she said again.

They followed the muddy tracks through the bare trees in the wood, then marched to the brow of the hill. The day was failing, street lights coming on all over Florence as they watched; lines of illumination marching down the avenues, worming their way through the narrow alleys in the city centre, along the banks of the Arno.

‘This isn’t a job for two men and a girl,’ Luca Cassini grumbled.

‘Am I a girl now?’ Julia Wellbeloved asked as she clambered through a thicket of brambles, following Fratelli who walked head down, eyes on the ground.

‘Stop being picky, will you?’ Cassini retorted. ‘You know what I mean. We ought to have a team with some proper lanterns. And dogs.’

They said nothing.

‘I’m not leaving that poor thing of theirs here, by the way,’ he added. ‘Whatever happens…’

‘Kindly shut up about the dog and look around you,’ Fratelli demanded.

He’d come to a halt by the side of a saucer-shaped crater. A little like the mouth of an ancient dwarf volcano, filled with the same ragged, untidy scrub they’d walked through most of the way. But when Fratelli turned his torch on the branches below them, flashes of blue were visible. Plastic, by the looks of it.

‘What do you see, Luca?’ he asked.

‘Does teacher ever knock off for supper?’

‘No. Talk to me.’

Cassini and Julia strode to the rim of the indentation.

‘Muddy footprints,’ the young officer said.

‘Something’s hidden there,’ Julia added. ‘Underneath sheets, or something. They put those branches over them. Judging by the footprints, they did it just this afternoon.’

Fratelli put one leg over the edge then scrambled down the side, staying clear of the slippery muddy tracks someone had left earlier. The two others followed. By the time they got there, he was throwing broken branches out of the way.

‘They were in a hurry too,’ Luca Cassini said, pushing to the front, then launching a whole line of twigs and leaves out of the way with his strong arms. ‘What’s this then?’

Fratelli extended a hand to Julia.

‘Be my guest,’ he said.

She lifted up the cold wet plastic sheeting, rolled it back a little. Something was covered in tape and bubble wrap at her feet. A familiar shape. It came off easily and revealed some kind of semiautomatic weapon.

Cassini watched and whistled, then kicked his foot over a few of the identical objects piled alongside. Row after row, box after box.

‘Try your radio here, Luca,’ Fratelli said. ‘We’re higher. Who knows?’

The little green LCD screen of the handset blinked when he held it up.

‘You’re in luck…’ the young officer said.

Fratelli snatched the thing from him, got through to the control room, demanded to talk to Marrone urgently, persisted through all the refusals.

Finally he was connected.

‘How many times do I have to…’ the captain barked at him.

They listened to his angry voice disappear into the thin country air. A clear night was falling. Plenty of stars and a bright full moon.

‘There was a unit of the Red Brigades in Tuscany,’ Fratelli broke in. ‘I know you have them locked up, Walter. Most, anyway. But did you ever find their weapons store? Their guns? Their ammunition and explosives?’

‘What is this…?’

‘Did you find their armoury? How difficult a question is this?’

A pause, then, ‘No. We didn’t.’

‘Join us at the Efron woman’s farm. Near Fiesole. I’ve something you ought to see.’

One hour later. Teams of Carabinieri in dark blue winter jackets lugged floodlights up the hill. Marrone was directing proceedings from a tent erected on the rim of the indentation where the arms cache had been found. The size of the store astonished even the antiterrorist officers brought in for the event. More were on their way from Rome. From what Fratelli could glean, Chavah Efron and her late husband Ari Greco were the keepers of the last remaining significant weapons cache possessed by the disbanded and largely jailed group of criminals who called themselves the Red Brigades.

Not that anyone was handing out much praise to Fratelli and Luca Cassini for locating them. It was a clear, cold night, heading for frost. The two men stayed in the tent with Julia Wellbeloved, watching Marrone and his officers direct the slow and careful recovery of the weapons, shells and plastic explosives. Another team was searching the house. Julia had asked why. Fratelli shrugged. The birds had flown. There was, he suggested, little of interest to be found in this dilapidated farm on the hills outside Fiesole.

Shortly before six, Marrone marched into the tent and ordered all three of them to return to Florence and report to the stazione to give statements in the morning.

‘The morning?’ Fratelli asked, wide-eyed. ‘We’re here now, Walter. I have a registration number for the woman’s VW van, by the way. I noted it…’

‘We’ve got that already,’ Marrone snapped. ‘I need no more help from you. Go home. Stay out of my way.’

‘You don’t seem very grateful,’ Julia observed. ‘I mean honestly, Captain. If it wasn’t for Pino and Luca here—’

‘And you,’ Fratelli added quickly. ‘No false modesty, please.’

‘I’ve no need of amateur detectives,’ Marrone roared. ‘You’d no business being here in the first place. I expressly ordered…’

A figure entered by the tent door. They stopped, looked at him in silence.

‘Why the angry voices?’ Sandro Soderini asked with a smile. ‘This is a happy occasion, isn’t it?’

‘Mr Mayor,’ Fratelli said pleasantly, then walked forward and shook Soderini’s hand. ‘My name is Pino Fratelli. I was passing and stumbled upon our odd discovery. This is a young Carabinieri officer, Luca Cassini. A talented chap. You’ll hear more of him.’

‘Delighted,’ Cassini said with a nod of the head.

‘And my English friend—’

‘You’re a long way from the Uffizi, Julia,’ Soderini interrupted. ‘Is there meat for your thesis here?’

‘Just looking,’ she said. ‘Was it worth tearing yourself away from the Palazzo Vecchio for this?’

His aristocratic face fell. ‘These bastards have been dangling their cowardly threats over us for years. I thought we had most of them dead or in jail.’ He glared at Marrone. ‘That’s what was supposed to happen, wasn’t it?’

‘The fugitive who cached these weapons is an American,’ Marrone said. ‘Her name is Chavah Efron. Neither she nor her husband appeared on any of the suspect lists we had from intelligence. We’ve no reason to believe they were active in any way. Fellow travellers perhaps…’

‘They were sleepers,’ Fratelli said. ‘Of course they didn’t wave around their flags.’

He looked at Soderini.

‘Were there specific threats, Mr Mayor? To you? To your fellow councillors? Like Tornabuoni?’

Soderini’s smile became forced and brittle. ‘Specific? What do you mean, specific?’

‘I mean what it sounds like,’ Fratelli replied brusquely. ‘Did you receive letters? Phone calls? Warnings? Messages that said do this or we’ll… I don’t know.’ A pause. He smiled at the man in the smart suit and raincoat. ‘Or we’ll kill you.’

‘The Red Brigades are history,’ Soderini said. ‘I’m sure it’s as the captain suggests. This was a cache of weapons some timid supporter was storing for a revolution that was never going to arrive.’

‘So they didn’t kill Tornabuoni?’ Fratelli asked outright.

‘The gardener killed Tornabuoni, didn’t he?’ Soderini answered, looking at Marrone for support.

‘Yes,’ the captain replied.

‘And Tornabuoni himself didn’t kill Chavah Efron’s husband by any chance…?’

‘Dammit Fratelli!’ Marrone yelled. ‘That’s enough.’

Sandro Soderini took one step towards them. ‘Giovanni Tornabuoni was a gentleman,’ he said calmly. ‘He had his… eccentricities. But a man like that has no call to murder anyone. Why would he?’

‘So why did we think he did?’ Cassini asked with an inquisitive, friendly smile. ‘Being a cadet I’d just like to know. To learn from things. I like learning. I’ve learned a lot these last couple of days…’

‘We’ll find this woman,’ the captain declared. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

‘And her friend,’ Julia Wellbeloved intervened. ‘She wasn’t alone.’

‘A man,’ Cassini added.

‘A tall man. Quite heavy,’ Fratelli said. ‘Judging by the footprints.’

‘There’s a man with her?’ Sandro Soderini murmured.

‘This is all in hand,’ the captain insisted, then half ushered, half shoved them out into the cold night and bawled at them until they set off down the muddy track back to the farm.

Expelled from the investigation, the case itself — such as it was.

A search for the last and junior member of the Red Brigades, or so Walter Marrone would have it. And an unknown accomplice.

‘Why would Tornabuoni kill this woman’s husband?’ Julia asked when they got to the car.

Luca Cassini mumbled something and marched off towards the farm.

‘Always look for the easy answers,’ Fratelli said. ‘Soderini’s right. It’s hard to imagine the city arts commissioner as a born and willing murderer.’

‘Then…?’

‘Then he was an unwilling one. People who don’t kill out of personality or inclination tend to do so for one reason only. Self-defence. The Greco character hoped to kill him. Tornabuoni defended himself.’

She thought about this. ‘So why hide it? Self-defence isn’t a crime.’

‘Good question,’ he noted. Something bothered him.

‘Pino? You’re thinking.’

‘Soderini,’ he said. ‘The mayor of Florence. Why did he walk up a muddy hillside out in the sticks like this? Any ideas?’

‘None.’

‘Any observations?’

‘Don’t be so cryptic, please.’

‘I’m not being cryptic. You’ve met him before. He’s fond of you, I’d say, judging from the rather genial and familiar way he greets—’

‘Stop it!’

‘Didn’t you notice anything? Something that perhaps connects him to Tornabuoni?’

Luca Cassini was coming back. He had the black mongrel on a chain and was chatting happily to it.

‘You’ve lost me,’ she said.

‘Think a couple of steps ahead. Vanni Tornabuoni killed Aristide Greco because Greco attempted to murder him. We must assume Greco was a trained terrorist. These people regarded themselves as soldiers. They weren’t amateurs with a gun. Well then…?’

‘Tornabuoni had a weapon too. He knew he was in trouble. That was why you were asking if Soderini had been warned.’

‘Not just that,’ he said, opening the doors of the little Fiat.

‘Then what?’

‘Tell her, Luca,’ Fratelli ordered.

‘He had a gun on him,’ Cassini said, sounding shocked. ‘The mayor. Dead obvious. Shoulder holster. Over the right-hand side. Could see it bulging under that fancy raincoat of his.’

‘A man like that isn’t easily scared,’ Fratelli continued. ‘Which means, I suspect, he’s no idea who or what he’s supposed to be frightened of. Only that it’s out there.’ He glared at the dog. ‘What do you intend to do with this animal?’

‘Take it to my uncle’s. After I drop you two off.’ Cassini scratched his head and looked at the tiny car. ‘Someone’s going to have to sit in the back with him,’ Cassini added. ‘He’s a bit pongy…’

‘I’ll do it,’ Fratelli said, and climbed through the tiny door on to the rear seat, watching as the young man persuaded the mongrel to join him.

‘Put an arm round him,’ Cassini advised. ‘He might not like it when we start moving. I had a dog who threw up every time he got in a car…’

Then they set off on the slow, winding road back towards the city.

When he got back she’d lit the fire. Slow flames licked over the old logs in the grate. Smoke rose to the chimney sending a damp, dark aroma through the room.

Something on the table. He looked.

Apples and pears, gathered from the trees outside, which were now shedding their leaves for winter. Two plates, two sets of cutlery. All washed.

There were more candles than he ever remembered. His mother never used them without a need. They had no money. She worked in the gardens, sweeping leaves, planting vegetables, digging, fetching, cleaning. The tiny, dank cottage was the reward. A place where an unmarried mother might live, survive, beyond the judgemental stare of the city outside the walls of the Pitti Palace.

‘How long do we have?’ she asked, taking the bag from his arms, putting it on the table, sifting through the contents.

‘Before what?’

‘Before they know someone’s here?’

They worked the gardens all year round. It was a sprawling estate, now in the hands of the city. Soderini, Tornabuoni when he lived. The Medici’s heirs. They coveted it, enjoyed it. Got others to do the work.

‘Long enough,’ he said.

Two pizzas, plain food. Some ham and salumi. Water and a bottle of Chianti already opened, the cork stuffed back into the neck.

Chavah Efron poured two mugs, left his on the table, swigged at hers, tore off a strip of pizza, stuffed it into her mouth with some meat.

He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten in days. They pounced on the food, finished every last morsel, so quickly he offered to go back down the hill and find some more.

‘Visibility increases risk,’ she said, without looking at him. It sounded as if she were reciting from a manual of some kind.

The fire crackled. The windows began to steam up. Down the hill, through the trees, lights were just visible in the palace.

He got up, drew the tattered curtains, wondered if they’d be thick enough to block out their presence. But he didn’t worry too much. His mother had been here for more than four decades; a hermit, a recluse, tolerated for the work she did. The men in the palace scarcely noticed her.

She filled up their mugs again, raised hers, smiled, toasted him.

Cheap Chianti. Harsh, crude. The kind the poor drank, not knowing any better.

Still…

He liked the way it blurred the feelings in his head.

Then she pounced on the fruit she’d picked, the last of the apples and pears from the summer.

Picked up the biggest of the apples, green with a rosy tint to the skin. Carved it in two with her knife. Held half up to him, grinning.

‘Are you afraid of me?’ she asked in her gruff, accented voice.

Her eyes glittered in the candlelight. The wine had done something. That and the memories. Illicit moments here as a child, wondering what it would be like to be a man. Before the Brigata took his innocence from him. Before the Fall…

‘No,’ he said, and took the fruit from her, bit into the soft white flesh.

She finished hers quickly. Then looked at the low bed in the corner, his mattress next to it. Too small for him. Had been for years. Trying to squeeze his long frame on to it had been awkward and uncomfortable. Not that his mother left him any choice.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Chavah Efron whispered, her sparkling eyes on him every moment.

‘I can’t help that. Tomorrow I can go and steal something. Find some money. Get a car. We can—’

‘Tomorrow we’ve got an appointment. You and me.’

He’d told her where he worked before the Brigata. He was still worried about the way she took that information, seemed to dwell on it.

‘We can get out of here. Go south, maybe. Where Ari came from… In Calabria no one’s ever going to know.’

‘First,’ she said, ‘you’ll do as you’re told.’

He didn’t answer, just poured some more wine. Found his fingers trembling.

‘Tonight too,’ she added.

A pause.

‘Get on the bed, Aldo.’

‘I don’t…’

But she was on him then, her warm damp mouth against his skin.

And he was lost.

After the argument at the farm he wouldn’t go straight home. So the three of them sat with him in the bar in San Niccolò, Fratelli with a Negroni, Julia with a glass of white wine, Cassini sipping at a Coke and grabbing fists of meat and cheese from the plates that came out of the kitchen.

The dog stayed in the little Fiat but its smell came with them.

Fratelli’s mood was black, however much the other two tried to cheer him.

‘Well,’ Cassini declared after a while. ‘I suppose I’d best be going really. Take that mutt up the hill…’

‘Why do you bother, Luca?’ Fratelli snapped. ‘What’s the animal to you?’

‘I bother because if I didn’t, no one else would.’ Cassini sounded cross. ‘You can’t just walk away from things. Not in this job. My grandpa never did when he was in the stazione. He always said you didn’t, Pino. In fact, you were a pain in the arse…’

‘Yes, yes. So you said!’

‘Let’s go,’ Julia broke in. ‘It’s been a long day. I’m tired and grubby. And—’

‘This is all wrong!’

Fratelli’s tumbler of gin and vermouth slammed on the table, spilling drink and peanuts and pinzimonio everywhere.

Luca Cassini scratched his short black hair. ‘I don’t get what you’re so bothered about. I mean, I know it’s not nice of someone to mess around with those old paintings in the Brancacci. But it’s not like killing someone. Or those weapons we found. You can see why Marrone’s more interested in—’

‘It’s not about the paintings in the Brancacci!’

They were getting stares from the woman behind the counter.

Luca Cassini didn’t blink. It occurred to Julia that he had engineered this moment rather cleverly.

‘I sort of thought that actually, Pino,’ he said quietly. ‘But since you don’t want to tell me what it is about, there’s not a lot I can do, is there? I know. I’m just the office boy. Walter Marrone doesn’t trust me. Neither do you really.’

He paused. Waited. Heard nothing.

‘Do you?’

‘It’s not a question of trust,’ Fratelli insisted. ‘It’s a matter of belief. If nobody listens to a word you say…’

‘I’m listening. Have been all along. You’ve put more faith in me than anyone ever did in Ognissanti. But it only goes so far, doesn’t it? I’m still the boy—’

‘Tell him,’ Julia cried. ‘For God’s sake.’

Silence.

‘It’s to do with your wife, I imagine,’ Cassini prodded. ‘I guessed that.’

Fratelli glowered at him. ‘People do talk, even to the office boy. You can’t stop them. They said you went bonkers years ago when she died. From what I heard… can’t blame you. But that’s not all, is it?’

‘Tell him!’ Julia said again.

‘No,’ Fratelli muttered. ‘It’s not all.’

He got up, walked to the bar, talked pleasantly to the woman there, came back with another round of drinks.

Then started slowly going through the story he’d recounted to a horrified Julia the night before.

She found she couldn’t hear this again. So she went outside, opened the little Fiat, took the black mongrel from Fiesole for a walk in the park for a while.

When she returned, there was a man waiting anxiously by the door of the bar, as if frightened to go in. Tall, in his fifties, a downcast distinguished face beneath a black beret. He was puffing a cigarette and looked familiar.

‘I know you,’ she said as the mongrel from the farm pulled on the lead.

A dog collar. A face from another context.

‘You’re the Englishwoman,’ he replied, staring into her face. ‘Fratelli’s friend from the chapel.’

‘His lodger. But yes, his friend too, I imagine. Have you cleaned up your paintings?’

He shrugged. ‘It was just a lunatic who broke in from the street. Nothing at all. The damage was fixed the day it was done. Washed off for good. I’ve forgotten about it already.’

Father Bruno. That was the name.

He nodded towards the bar. ‘Why won’t Fratelli let this go? He’s a sick man. I tried to talk to him with his doctor yesterday. He as good as told me to get out of the room.’

‘I don’t think he regards himself as one of your flock.’

‘He grew up in my parish. In my eyes that’s exactly what he is.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘God knows. I don’t.’

‘I don’t have a line to God.’

‘Oh, very clever! I thought I’d try one last time to persuade him to behave sensibly again. But looking inside…’

Fratelli was talking to Luca Cassini, his face set in the gloomy, determined expression she’d come to know.

‘I’m wasting my time, aren’t I?’

‘You mean he should meekly accept what’s happened to him? Stay in bed until… one day…’

There was an unpleasant cast to the man’s face.

‘I deal with the dying every week of my life, Signora. Don’t talk down to me.’

‘I didn’t. Who asked you to come? His doctor?’

‘I’m the parish priest. Everyone begs me to intercede on behalf of those in trouble. It’s my job. My calling. What I do.’ He looked even more miserable than Fratelli. ‘All I do.’

‘Who asked you to come?’ she repeated.

‘His old captain, of course. Everyone knows Fratelli. Most like him. And we all feel sorry for the man. But what can we do? Every night he’s here, taking solace in alcohol…’

‘He has two Negroni. That’s all I’ve ever seen.’

The priest looked her up and down, as if staring at something of which he disapproved.

‘And when he doesn’t have pretty company he wants to impress? How much then?’

‘I’ve no idea. Do you see what happens then? Does God tell you?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Why would Walter Marrone wish…?’ Julia persisted.

‘A vandal broke into the Brancacci and caused a small amount of temporary damage to those paintings of ours. It’s been repaired. No one will notice. No one need worry about it. The Carabinieri have better things to occupy their time. This terrible business with Tornabuoni…’

‘I thought Tornabuoni’s murder was supposed to be solved.’

‘Marrone told me you were egging him on,’ the priest said coldly. ‘Do you think that’s wise? Do you think it’s good for him? To be encouraged to believe he’s still a working detective? The best in Florence, or so he thinks? Not a dying man engrossed in his own sorrowful delusions? What business is this of yours?’

She was so taken aback by his sudden vehemence she couldn’t think of an answer.

‘And who are you anyway?’ he snarled. ‘A foreigner? Come here for your own amusement. Is Pino Fratelli part of that? Another sight on the Grand Tour? An unexpected discovery for you to take back to England when you pack your bags and leave? Like a picture postcard or a little statue of the Palazzo Vecchio?’

‘That’s uncalled for.’

‘Is it?’

The dog was starting to growl at him.

‘The best thing you can do for Fratelli is to persuade him to listen to his doctor and his friends. His parish priest perhaps, too. To accept his fate and learn to make good use of what time remains to him. Not be consumed with these ridiculous fantasies…’

‘I think you should go and tell him that yourself. If you’ve got the guts.’

‘What’s the point?’ the priest said, stepping back from the black animal, which was pulling towards his feet. ‘He won’t listen to me. Or Walter Marrone. Or anyone.’

The grey, ascetic face lit up for a moment.

‘Except perhaps you. A stranger. That’s the way he is. Always was. Peculiar in the extreme. But I imagine you’re having too much fun to do him that service.’

‘I will not listen to this.’

‘No need. I won’t waste my breath on Fratelli any more. Or you.’

He threw the cigarette into the gutter, patted the black beret in an ironic salute, then said, ‘Good night.’

And was gone.

The dog stopped growling. Fine rain was starting to fall from somewhere. The sky still looked clear but a little out of focus. Or perhaps it was her eyes.

She was startled by someone taking the mongrel’s lead from her hands. Luca Cassini. He looked pale and shocked. Pino Fratelli had now introduced the young man to his secrets and she couldn’t stop herself thinking: how much of this is true? How much only real in Fratelli’s disordered, dying head?

‘I’d best get this little chap tucked up for the night. Out of this bloody city,’ Cassini mumbled in a quiet, fractured voice.

She glanced back. Fratelli was still at the table, clutching what looked like a fresh Negroni.

‘Did you suspect?’ she asked.

‘I knew his wife had died. Poor bugger. All that other stuff about…’

Luca Cassini looked ready to burst into tears himself.

‘What’s going on, Julia? What are we supposed to do? Walter Marrone won’t have him in the stazione after this. Or you. Or me probably. We can’t… Sit!’ He pulled on the lead as the dog struggled. The animal went down on its haunches obediently with one spoken word. ‘We can’t fix all that for him, can we? Even if it’s true.’

She didn’t know what to say.

‘Is it?’ he wondered. ‘True? I mean… why didn’t he tell someone back then?’

‘Because he was in a sanatorium. Lost to the world. Would they have listened if he had?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. You’d still think he would have said something…’

‘He thinks the sickness started then. The tumour. He thinks what happened prompted the cancer inside him. Maybe he’s right.’

‘Maybe,’ Cassini agreed, with little conviction.

‘Leave it for now,’ she said, and touched his arm, tried to smile. ‘It’s been a long day.’

‘How can we leave it? He needs looking after. He can’t go on like this. He looks poorly. It’s driving him mad.’

‘I’ll deal with it, Luca. Take the dog to your uncle’s. Let’s talk tomorrow. And thanks…’ She was struggling with the words and they should have been so simple. ‘Thanks for everything.’

‘Didn’t do bugger all,’ he grumbled, and slunk off, leading the animal to the car.

She went back to Fratelli’s table, turned down the offer of another drink.

‘It’s time to go, Pino. I’m filthy. And tired.’

‘The American woman never went inside the Brancacci,’ he said. His face was pale, his eyes bloodshot. ‘It’s unthinkable that damage was her work. She was ten when Chiara died. The man with her. It has to be. I’ll make some calls…’

‘Who to?’

He hesitated, looked a little sheepish.

‘I… I still have friends. Contacts. Marrone can’t freeze me out of this city. I grew up here.’

She said nothing.

‘Julia. You see things almost as well as I do.’

‘I’m flattered.’

‘You should be. For whatever reason, two weeks ago, Aristide Greco went out to kill Vanni Tornabuoni only to find himself the victim. Another man has taken his place by the side of Greco’s wife. He — or they — then murdered Tornabuoni. The political classes still fear some kind of retribution. Why else would Soderini be there? Armed too? And Walter Marrone wishes to pretend none of this has happened. That it’s all…’

His voice fell; his eyes went to the black night beyond the window.

‘It’s all water under the bridge.’

‘There’s nothing to say this concerns you or Chiara.’

‘Because we haven’t seen through the mist yet.’

‘I want to leave.’

His mournful eyes peered at her. She got up, picked her bag off the back of the chair and walked outside.

The bus stop was by the river. The rain was steady now but there were still stars. Across the Arno the lights stood dim and yellow in the arches of the Uffizi. The ugly castellated tower of the Palazzo Vecchio rose behind in the Piazza della Signoria, exaggerated and comically grand.

Winter in Florence.

Arrhythmic breathing by her side. A cough that had an apologetic ring to it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply. ‘I just thought…’

A shape in the distance along the riverside road. Their bus was bouncing towards them.

‘Come,’ he said, taking her gently by the arm, leading her to the open door. ‘Come, Julia. Let’s go home.’

She made him lie in the centre, head on the fusty pillow, ran her hands over his jumper, pulled it off.

His breath was coming in short gasps. His mind was racing, confused. There were things to think about, plans to make. Yet all these sensible ideas seemed not to matter at that moment. He was with her, drowning in the force of Chavah Efron’s character, her forceful physical presence.

As always he did as he was told. Lay down on the soft coverlet, not moving a muscle as she reached out and, with lithe, slow fingers, dragged the clothes from him then stripped off her own, touching him gently, laughing all the time.

She rolled one leg over his stomach and straddled him, hair falling against his cheeks, the smell of her everywhere, the fatal scent of woman.

‘Don’t tell me I’m the first,’ she whispered.

‘Of course you are,’ he wanted to say, but then she had him, held him, moved closer and took him in. Kept him there, not moving. Trapped like this, he felt he might not breathe again.

‘I am Chavah…’ she said, and rocked him, just the once. ‘I am the woman here. In this place. With my guns. And…’ Her pupils narrowed, like an animal, as he watched. Some emotion, a stirring of passion, detached a little of her sense of control. ‘When I want something, I get it.’

He was somewhere else. Down the hill, two decades before.

‘You with me?’

‘Sì,’ he gasped.

‘This is my world and you entered it without asking. My life. Not yours. Not Ari’s, not…’

She snorted through her nostrils, an animal noise.

It took a minute, maybe even less, and then he grunted like a pig and felt the sharp, sweet stab of release between them.

All the years he’d never known this. And now it seemed such a brief and ordinary thing next to the ordeal that went before.

Still she didn’t move. Her hair was in his face, her breath warm and damp against his neck.

‘Ari came like that,’ she murmured, her voice so close it felt as if she was inside his head. ‘When I made him. I could choose.’

He coughed and tried to force his breathing into a familiar rhythm as he stared at the cracks in the ceiling, trying to count them, the way he did as a child.

She wriggled from him, slipped on to his thighs, stayed there, elbow on the creased sheets, green eyes on him, always sharp, always focused.

Her hand came out and stroked his cheek.

‘Do you still want to save me, Aldo? The lost woman. Fallen. Needing her man to rescue her.’

‘Right and wrong,’ he mumbled. ‘I know the difference.’

‘That’s sweet, in a stupid kind of way. Ari wouldn’t have done that.’ Her face darkened. Her hand moved to his chest. ‘Stood up for me.’

‘Tornabuoni raped you. Your husband wanted to…’

‘Tornabuoni was a minnow. As much a plaything as me. Or you. Ari was mad because he felt he’d taken something that belonged to him alone. It wasn’t about me. It was about him.’

She shuffled over, kissed him once on the cheek, smiled.

‘I don’t think you’re like that. Tell me again. What day is it?’

‘Wednesday.’

‘First Thursday of the month. Every month. Ever since…’ She ran a finger across his brow. ‘Ever since when?’

The beginning, he thought. That first day outside the garden.

‘Tomorrow was when we were supposed to move,’ she said. ‘If Ari hadn’t let his stupid male arrogance get the better of him.’

‘For what?’

She leaned down and whispered hot in his ear. He could smell the wine on her breath, feel her excitement.

‘For the reason we’re here,’ Chavah Efron said as her fingers reached down and played with him again. ‘Fire and blood. For all of them…’

And then she was on him again; nothing could stop her.

The house was dark, too warm and empty. They stood on the landing, stamping their damp feet. She felt filthy. All there was in her room was a small shower crammed into little more than a closet. The water came in a miserly stream — and that only when it was in the mood.

Fratelli watched. Reading her mind, she thought. He could do that.

‘There’s a tub in my bathroom, Julia. Please. It’s yours. I’m Italian. I’m used to squeezing into little places. The English like their baths. I know.’

She went and got her things, passed him going the other way on the landing, didn’t say a word. Went into his bathroom. A white bath, white sink, white tiles, all gleaming; all the bachelor things — a razor, a toothbrush — set on a mirror by the window. Along with a line of medication: four bottles, one pack of tablets. This was the Grassi dragon’s work. Keeping everything spotless, making sure he took his pills. And she’d broken into this precise, fenced-off world. Then — the priest had made this plain — encouraged Pino Fratelli in his madness.

Julia ran the taps. Lots of hot water. Some bath salts. Her own soap. She stripped off her muddy clothes, left them in a pile. Washed her hair under the shower tap and got in. And cried.

Cried freely, with a release of emotion she’d not known in a long time. Not even when her brief and stupid marriage was falling apart. Her mother had died ten years ago now. That was the same, perhaps. But then there was no sense of guilt.

And so she refused to analyse this further, simply sitting in Pino Fratelli’s gleaming white bathtub, washing off the mud and filth of Fiesole, weeping sporadically, sniffing, wiping at her nose with her arm.

How long? Till the water, cloudy and grey with the dirt, started to turn tepid, then cold. Finally she got out, checked her eyes in the mirror. The pinkness there might be excused by the long day and the heat of the bathroom. She dried herself on his fresh towels, climbed into the rather juvenile but practical blue pyjamas she’d bought from Selfridge’s.

Wrapped a towel round her hair. Went back into his living room, feeling her heart pumping. The bath. The day. The heat.

He was in his leather armchair, a long thick dressing gown round him, plaid slippers on his feet. Hairdryer in right hand, blowing his long silver locks. In his left was a book. Another art volume, she saw. On the cover were the paintings of the Brancacci.

She came over and took the book away; sat next to him, half furious, half grieving for an event to come.

‘Here,’ Fratelli said, turning off the hairdryer. ‘I’m done with it. I only let my hair grow long when they threw me out of the Carabinieri. It was a kind of protest. Childish. If I don’t dry it, I look an even bigger clown…’

Then he brightened, put a finger in the air, and headed off into the tiny kitchen. A few minutes later, with her hair just about done, he returned with two steaming mugs.

‘Tea,’ he said. ‘Earl Grey. I gather you English like it. I bought some when they said I had a visitor coming.’

The musky smell of bergamot. A memory of home. She sipped at it, said nothing.

‘Perhaps,’ Fratelli said cautiously, ‘it would be wise if we reconsidered this arrangement.’

She was protesting immediately.

‘No, please,’ he insisted. ‘Hear me out. I’m aware that I’ve monopolized your time since you arrived. The reason you came… your dissertation. I’ve distracted you from it and that’s unforgivable.’

‘You want me to leave?’ she asked sullenly.

He emitted a low, wordless grumble. ‘You’re a very recalcitrant woman sometimes. I never meant to entangle you in this.’

‘Oh, no? You’ve been prodding me all along.’

‘It was… inadvertent.’

‘Like Luca Cassini? You’ve scooped us up, Pino. Infected us. Now we’re as—’

Almost a stumble.

‘Say it,’ he broke in quickly. ‘Now you’re mad too.’

‘I didn’t mean that. What I wanted to say was…’

And another stumble.

‘Was what?’ he wondered.

‘You have to leave this. For God’s sake. I’ve seen it eating at you. I don’t want to watch any more.’

‘Which is why you must go—’

‘No! It’s why you must stop. Walter Marrone’s your friend, isn’t he?’

‘So I thought.’

‘He sent along that priest. To the bar tonight. The one we saw in the chapel.’

Fratelli’s brow wrinkled and she regretted this revelation immediately. It had set him thinking again.

‘Bruno?’

‘He didn’t dare come in. I talked to him when I walked the dog. While you told Luca about your wife. They want you to stop this. It’s breaking their hearts. Can’t you see that?’

‘The heart of a priest I barely know? Why didn’t he come in and tell me to his face?’

‘There you go again! Not listening…’

He laughed, raised his mug to her.

‘But I am. The priest wants me to stop. The captain of the Carabinieri wants me to stop. My doctor. The mayor of Florence… that goes without saying.’

Fratelli hesitated, looked at her.

‘And now you,’ he said in a voice that was close to a whisper.

‘If there’s nothing you can do…’

‘There’s always something you can do,’ he retorted with a sudden vehement conviction. ‘Always. Unless you’re dead, and I’m not there yet.’

She closed her eyes and felt like weeping again. When she opened them there was guilt written all over his face.

‘There. You see. I’m right. You should find new accommodation.’

‘So now you’re trying to drive me out!’

He wrung his hands, let loose an epithet at the low ceiling.

‘I’m asking this for both of us. I don’t want to hurt you, Julia. And that’s all I’m doing. All I’m capable of. Please. I’ll phone the Uffizi in the morning. Find another home for you. Go and see your paintings. Visit San Marco tomorrow. Marvel at its beauty, because it is I think the most lovely place in all this grim city.’

He sipped some more tea, pulled a disgusted face.

‘This is not for me. It tastes strange. Like perfume.’

‘And Soderini’s secret invitation? The Brigata Spendereccia?’

‘Forget it. That’s my advice. It’s doubtless just a little orgy for a bunch of sad middle-aged men who think they run this place. We’ve had them in Italy since the days of Caesar. We’ll doubtless have them for many centuries to come.’

She put her mug on the table. ‘It doesn’t taste right here,’ Julia said. ‘I agree. Goodnight.’

He was still in his chair, smiling wanly at her, when she got to her feet.

‘I don’t want you staying up reading, listening to your records,’ she added. ‘I’ll never get to sleep if I think you’re doing that. Off to bed now.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Yes!’ he said, then strode off to the bedroom, saluting her from the door.

He didn’t move like a sick man. Or a middle-aged one, for that matter. He moved easily, with a firm purpose, a deliberate intent. An energy that was vital because he knew its time was finite.

She smiled at him as he closed the door, then stayed where she was, trying, with little success, to analyse her thoughts, her feelings. It was impossible. She couldn’t see the way forward for the simplest of reasons: she’d no idea what she wanted that to be. After the marriage, after walking out on the job, she’d found herself in an aimless limbo. The idea of academia had appeared on a whim, one formed by joining her love of intellectual investigation with her admiration for art. It was nothing more than a juvenile daydream, a line on a letter never posted to a Santa Claus who did not exist.

The dissertation would never be written. The basis for it — why art attracted violence — was a fabrication created out of desperation for something to fill the abyss that had opened up in her life. When she was faced with her supposed subject in reality, she’d been fascinated not by its intellectual aspect, but the more pressing and exciting one that Pino Fratelli, in his damaged state of mind, had offered.

A chase. A search for an elusive, hidden truth. The thrill of the hunt. A rush of the blood.

The dour priest had hit the spot. She had encouraged a sick and possibly deluded man for her own purposes. To provide amusement; to keep herself from facing the emptiness all around.

And yet…

It had been so wonderful. She’d never felt quite as alive as she had these past few days in a rainy Florence with this damaged and entrancing man, feeling history slip around her like an ancient, damp and musty cloak. Whispering in her ear. Promising revelations in dark corners, surprises that were never to be found in the grey and tedious corners of England she’d always regarded as home.

Julia looked round his tidy, bachelor room, shook her still-damp head, and whispered to herself, ‘Why do you always run away?’

Because I’m frightened, she thought. Of myself. Of closeness. Of risk. Everything that Pino Fratelli embraces so readily and with such visible energy.

She walked over to his bedroom door. It was still half open. He was in his double bed, beneath neatly ironed sheets and a coverlet, a lamp by his side. A book in his hands.

‘What did I say about reading?’ she scolded him.

‘Checking up on me now? You’re not the Grassi dragon and you never will be. Kindly pack your bags and be gone.’

She came and sat on the bed, watching amused as he shuffled over to the other side as if in fear.

‘This isn’t right,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m an old man. Your landlord. You shouldn’t be in my room—’

‘Listen to me. About tomorrow…’

‘Leave at your own discretion. I’ll refund all the rent you paid—’

‘About Soderini’s party.’

His face fell. ‘Oh, Julia. Please don’t…’

‘I have a suggestion. I want you to consider it. I’ll go to the Brigata Spendereccia…’

‘I should never have asked you.’

‘It’s an invitation from the mayor of Florence! How can I refuse? If it turns a touch risqué, I’ll leave. And if there’s something there of use, I can tell you.’

He gave her a baleful stare. ‘What’s the other half of the deal?’

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ she said. ‘Next week you come back to England with me. Just for a few days or so. I told you. My dad’s a doctor. There are people in Harley Street…’

‘I’ve seen every doctor in Italy!’

‘Don’t exaggerate.’

‘What about the money?’

‘Leave that to me…’

‘But why?’

She started to shut the door, signalling the conversation was at an end. ‘Because I want to see what you look like out of here. I want to know if you’re right, and a part of the poison is Florence itself. And, if it is… In London maybe…’

‘Go back to your room and forget this nonsense.’

‘No. I won’t.’

‘You’re the most stubborn woman I’ve ever met. Chiara was a compliant angel next to you. Leave me.’

‘No!’

Another flurry of Florentine curses that she was glad she didn’t quite understand.

‘You won’t ever want to stop chasing him, will you?’

‘Not now,’ he admitted. ‘Why should I? It’s too late.’

‘And if you find him?’

‘Then Walter can do his job. What do you think? That this is about vengeance? Please…’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘Then what?’

‘What if the truth doesn’t just release the poison? What if it takes everything you have?’

He smiled. ‘If poison’s all that’s kept me alive, then I’ll die, and deservedly,’ he said. ‘Which will happen anyway. Unless…’

‘Unless?’

‘Unless something else — a miracle — comes to take its place.’

Julia said nothing for a long minute. ‘Do we have an agreement, Pino Fratelli?’ she asked finally.

‘If you insist, Miss Wellbeloved,’ he replied, and his sad eyes never left hers. ‘Now goodnight.’