A Florentine Revenge

by Christobel Kent

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

On a scorching summer afternoon in the suburbs of Florence, a small girl goes missing at a crowded swimming pool and is never seen alive again. For fifteen years a terrible crime lies unsolved, becoming one of the city's darkest and most shameful secrets, until one bitter winter night another body is found, at another swimming pool, and the case is reopened.

Celia Donnelly had just arrived in Florence at the time of the girl's disappearance and can remember only too well the face that filled the front pages of every Italian newspaper. When word of the gruesome new discovery breaks, she is in the midst of arranging a weekend of birthday celebrations for a wealthy Englishman's wife. However, as Celia undertakes what ought to be a routine work assignment, she finds herself more closely involved than she could have ever imagined with a tragedy that has haunted her dreams for fifteen years; and it is Celia who is compelled to bear witness when the past returns to exact a brutal and terrifying revenge.

Release date: June 7, 2018

Publisher: Sphere

Print pages: 281

Sample

Across Europe it had been the hottest August for seventy years and in Florence the days were scalding, the city’s streets deserted until night fell. The visitors sought out air-conditioning, sitting in their expensively chilled hotel rooms looking out at the cloudless, blue-white sky, or wandering in the discount designer shopping malls on the outskirts of the city. Almost all the Florentines had gone, to the sea or the mountains if they could afford it, to relatives down south or closer to home, to the woods and waterfalls of the Casentino. Only the very old, the very poor or the frankly mad were on the streets, and even they could only be seen in the early morning, wandering slowly, stunned by the night’s heat.

All month it never cooled down at all, not even at four in the morning, and the tally of deaths crept up, stealthy, ominous, inexorable: old people, babies, pregnant women. In the company of a handful of Italian drifters an American boy drank two litres of red wine on the steps of Santo Spirito one evening and the following morning was found dead between parked cars by the street sweepers. He had vomited, become fatally dehydrated and, his new-found friends having dispersed, suffered multiple organ failure before the sun even came up.

In the suburbs of the city, Galluzzo and Sesto Fiorentino, Scandicci and the Isolotto, the villas breathed quietly in their green gardens, nestling among orange trees and feathery, tropical foliage, but there was no wind. The suburban swimming pools – and there were many of them slotted in alongside sports centres, motorways and housing projects; public and private, grubby or smart – were full. The bodies were packed tidily, this being Italy, but packed all the same, laid out under rows of umbrellas on a new season’s bright towels, side by side like sardines. In contrast to the baked, silent city the air here was cacophonous with splashing, whoops and screams and the hoarse shouts of teenage boys.

In among the Italians at the Olympia Club at around two that long-ago afternoon, when no one without air-conditioning could bear to be inside any longer, there had been one or two foreigners, those who had been taken by surprise by the heat: campers, budget hotel guests. A handful of Germans, an orderly French family, and a young English couple with their small daughter. At their holiday villa the rented pool had cracked in the heat and drained dry and in desperation the owner, had arranged temporary membership at the Olympia for them. It wasn’t an upmarket place, for all it styled itself a country club; the bare-chested barman spent most of his time leaning across the bar to chat up pretty foreigners, and the girl who handed out the baskets for their clothes was an anorexic seventeen-year-old who hardly looked up from her magazine when they arrived.

The English girl was seven years old, her fine brown hair bleached by the sun and her skin darkened just enough to show the outline of her miniature bikini. She ran between the bodies to get an ice-cream from the bar, and came back triumphant, her prize already melting in one hand and the change sticky in the other. She had been so pleased with herself, and this was Italy, after all, where no harm could ever come to a child, that when she said she needed to go inside, Need the loo, Mummy, I know where it is, they had sent her off. Had they watched her go, smiling at her independence, her determination? Had they congratulated themselves on not wrapping her in cotton wool? These were questions no one could ask, and they gave no interviews afterwards, volunteered no information.

What was clear, though, was that after no more than five minutes the girl’s mother, having felt some stirring of silly anxiety, some familiar, ridiculous misgiving, had got to her feet and carefully picked her way between the sunbathers to find her daughter. She had walked on the dimpled tiles past the drained indoor pool, huge and echoing and empty, beneath the dry showers, over slatted boards and into the silent changing rooms. She called the girl’s name and held her breath, always fearful, for the moment when she would hear the small voice call back and all would be well. But there was no reply.

A week later the child’s body was found in the river to the south, caught in an overhanging branch five miles out from the city where the river flowed clear and green between steep, wooded hills. A pretty spot, although for a long time afterwards no one went there, not for pleasure, not to admire the view. Celia Donnelly, twenty-one years old, had only just arrived in Italy, and it had been all over the local papers, a headline pasted outside every newspaper stand in the city when it happened; among the first words of the language she absorbed were those for abduction, murder, drowning. Across the half-empty city those left behind in the heat came out to mourn; flowers appeared at dusty shrines to the Madonna, begging for her intercession; there was a look of confusion, almost shame, on the faces of those who brought them. Suspects were called in, the first of them within hours of the girl’s disappearance, but no arrests were made, no charges filed. The case remained unsolved.

Nearly fifteen years on, Celia lay awake in the darkness and listened. The child that cried every night somewhere along the street had not yet started up; if she dropped off soon perhaps tonight she’d sleep through the sound. The crying always went on for a long time, more than an hour; Celia could not tell the child’s age, or sex; the sound was not verbal, as far as she could tell. She sometimes wondered if, like her, there were those who thought of the child abducted so long ago when they heard crying like that in the night, and it bothered her obscurely that she still barely knew her neighbours, wouldn’t know if she had seen the crying child in the street. After close to four months back in the city she still found herself wondering when she would begin to feel at home here.

Outside for the moment the only sound was the rain falling softly on the terracotta roof over Celia’s head. It had been a long, damp, mild autumn that had lasted all through November, and well into December it was still raining. But they said the weather would change soon, perhaps tonight.

It had been a busy week, and there was more to come. Only yesterday Celia had been up at Como, showing the Liberty villas to a group of peach-soft ladies from Charleston, listening to their sweet Southern accents exclaiming over the wet green lawns, the dark mountains shrouded in mist. It was always hard work when the weather was bad, although in the case of the Southern ladies it had turned out to be nothing a little shopping wouldn’t cure, and she’d sent them home with handblown glass, pigskin gloves and embroidered velvet handbags. And besides, Celia knew yesterday’s group already; they’d been in Italy a year earlier and at the airport in their pastel suits had fallen on her with little cries when they saw her again, pressing their soft, scented cheeks against hers, teasing her that she still wasn’t married. How about that nice driver, what’s his name? He’d be my type, I can tell you, if I was twenty years younger. They were talking about Gabriele, the handsome, laid-back Roman coach driver; lazily he’d smiled at her when he heard them talking.

It might be different, though, on Friday, a different thing altogether. She didn’t know them, did she? She knew almost nothing about them, except that they were rich, but then, most of Celia’s clients were. The usual long weekend in Florence to celebrate a birthday, just a matter of hotel bookings, some gallery visits, a guided walk, all booked. Friday and Saturday Celia would be guiding them, Sunday they’d have to themselves: Mr and Mrs Lucas Marsh. There was no point in going over it, Celia knew that from experience, no need to lie awake worrying over unforeseeable complications. Just a job, like any other. Leave it. Tomorrow was her day off, and there was no need to waste it wondering about a job. As long as the weather improved.

The sound of the rain became lighter, softer, and it seemed to Celia that she could feel the temperature outside dropping even as she lay there, but she didn’t get up to close the window. In the summer, just after she’d moved in, there had been a gardenia in the courtyard below, and nicotiana spilling out of a big cracked terracotta pot, and their scent had found its way up to Celia’s high window. There was an engraver’s studio down there, and in the fine weather the students had laid their work out on trestles to dry under an awning between the pots. They needed the awning because you could never tell in Florence: even on summer nights great thunderheads could balloon up out of nowhere and open over the city like bombs, drenching the lush private gardens and lines of washing left out to dry.

Could she adjust to being back here, among all this unadulterated life? Celia thought of the lime trees she’d seen in the little square between the tiny attic and the Arno, and high up under the roof she turned over in the darkness and thought of lime blossom. June, when the trees would be in flower, seemed a long way off now; the fresh December air smelled only of cold stone and water. The rain had stopped and the temperature was still falling, but still she didn’t close the window. Pulling the quilt up to her chin, Celia lay in the cooling air and listened to the sounds from outside. She could hear someone laying a table below her for a late supper, cheerful voices calling each other to the table. Celia reached up a hand and pushed the window to. Now she could only hear the small sounds inside the flat, the comforting flare of the geyser as it warmed the radiators, the tiny scrape of pigeons on the roof. Perhaps it is turning into my own place after all, she thought dreamily, perhaps this is where it begins to go right. She thought of tomorrow, a day to herself, the first for a long time. And she drifted, at last, into sleep.

 

Out to the west along the river, quite suddenly the grand façades of the city dwindled into nothing and anonymous apartment blocks and seedy parks fronted the Arno. The great dark band of Le Cascine, a pleasure garden from the nineteenth century whose tree-lined avenues might once have rivalled Hyde Park, lay along the river to the north, visible from every vantage point around the city, black and mysterious as a mythical forest. Close up it was less picturesque; Le Cascine wasn’t a pretty place on a night like this, its ranks of sodden black trees dripping in the rain, and it was hard to see who, other than those with an urgent need for privacy, would be tempted down its dank alleys and paths strewn with hypodermic needles. At the centre of the park was a squat, scruffy compound, a handful of low-lying buildings surrounded by a fence. This was Le Pavoniere, an open-air swimming pool whose fin-de-siècle pavilions were looking their age, all peeling paint and lopsided shutters, although the pool itself was a cracked relic of the seventies. Le Pavoniere had a neglected air even in the summer but on a wet night in winter, lit only by the distant yellow gleam of the embankment lights, it was dismal. The dripping, dilapidated iron railings around the pool were crudely chained and a broken plastic sun-lounger lay on its side in the grass grown long and ragged after a wet autumn. There was a wind and the bare, drenched trees stirred and rattled. The pool itself was drained, although a couple of inches of green, brackish rainwater had collected at one end and it was slimy with fallen leaves. At the centre of the drained pool the leaves seemed to have collected into a heap, a dark, humped shape that even in the flickering yellow light looked too oddly substantial to be just wet leaves.

Sometime during the night a fight broke out between two homeless alcoholics lying in the lee of the pavilions in a hopeless attempt to shelter from the relentless rain. At one point the heavier man flung the other against the pool’s link fence, where a dim yellow security light that had flickered and fizzed all night flared briefly into bright white life. For a moment both of them stood there, blinking and cursing and mumbling in the glare. Then the big man grew still suddenly, shaking off the other, raising a hand and pointing through the fence. At the bottom of the pool was not a heap of wet leaves but the figure of a kneeling man of late middle age, hands behind him. Although he was bent forward over his knees the man’s head was flung back at an odd angle, a position that even a pair of sodden drunks could see was wrong. In the sodium glare the stain that spread across his farmer’s checked shirt shone black, and his eyes stared sightlessly up into the overcast night sky.

Only twenty-one, barely out of university with her degree in English, some night classes in art history and half a year’s temping while she looked for a job, Celia had come to Italy, it seemed to her now, out of a kind of panic. There’d been a boyfriend who’d fizzled out after university, under the pressure of finding a job and somewhere to live, the anti-climax of the real world. And then Celia’s father died suddenly of a heart attack, fifty-five years old, and her mother shut herself up in the house, saying she didn’t want to talk about it. With what seemed to Celia now like monumental self-absorption she’d taken her mother at her word and had left the country. At twenty-one, she thought as she looked back, you couldn’t stand still, you didn’t want to be held back by things like parents, or mortgage payments, or responsibility. It was almost a law of physics, something to do with momentum, or biology, perhaps.

There’d been Kate to consider, too, of course, but she was just a worry to Kate, just an aimless younger sister who seemed unable to decide what to do with herself. Looking back, it seemed to Celia now that maybe it was Kate who’d been the odd one, with her life already mapped out before she’d got to twenty-five. Celia had arrived one morning in another strip-lit office and found herself thinking of her mother as she tried to fit her possessions in on the desk top among someone else’s, camping out, temporary. Her mother whose life seemed to be over already without ever having visited America, or India, or even Spain. She had stared at the blinking green cursor on the computer screen for a full ten minutes thinking, This can’t be all there is. Someone had asked her impatiently if she was all right, did she need anything, and without answering Celia had gathered her things together and walked out.

So Celia blew her meagre savings on a course in English language teaching – a move everyone had sighed at, another change of career, money down the drain – and got a budget flight to Italy almost at random. She’d gone to a party where everyone was complaining about work, and someone had mentioned Jo Starling, the school rebel, who’d gone to Florence and never come back. Celia had never been further than windswept Calais on a school trip before then, but then, not many people had; Florence sounded distant and exotic, and she got hold of Jo Starling’s number.

‘Hey,’ Jo had said incuriously as she opened the door of her flat in Santa Croce to Celia six weeks later, as though she lived around the corner and had just popped in for a gossip. She had red lipstick on and an old silk scarf wound around her head; behind her the dim flat smelled musky, of scented lilies and coffee. Jo had had a touch of the Bohemian about her even at school, rising above the jeers of teenage boys directed at her homemade skirts, her hennaed hair; here, it seemed, she had found her element. ‘Come in, then,’ she said. And Celia had marvelled at how different things were here.

That first sweltering August night on Jo’s uncomfortable sofa turned into a week, then two, but soon Celia realized that her presumption that it would be fine to camp out there indefinitely without a job or a prospect of one and a backpack full of unsuitable clothes had been careless. It had lasted six weeks; the flat had been gloomy and stifling and too small for two women. Then Jo, who when Celia had arrived had been loudly proclaiming the bliss of living without a man, the heaven of not being in a relationship, grew bored with her freedom. She started seeing the young mechanic who’d fixed her scooter when a delivery truck reversed over it on the pavement, and Celia’s days in her flat were numbered.

So Celia had moved out. Even then, finding somewhere decent in the city had been a nightmare and for one, then two, and what turned into four years she’d endured a succession of short lets and gloomy, airless, mosquito-infested bedsits before giving in, and moving to the guilty comfort of the suburbs. A cop-out, said her friends; premature retirement. But it was so easy. In days Celia found a pretty, modest villa with a new kitchen and a bit of garden, built by a butcher for a son who preferred to travel the world. She was out of the smell and the din and the dirt of the city, the refuse trucks at six in the morning, the wail of sirens, the pollution. She was safe.

Celia still saw Jo now and again, the odd white hair in her shiny black ponytail these days and still living in Santa Croce, still teaching violin to the small children of the Florentine upper classes and doing some careless proofreading on the side. That was what happened in Florence; you slipped into a comfortable groove, there seemed no need to change things, to progress. The old friends back in London or Manchester who were always restlessly improving themselves, working their way up, getting on the property ladder, going to evening classes to get a law degree or study another language, seemed impossibly, crazily ambitious from this distance. It seemed that in Italy, for the foreigners camping out here at least, there was no need for any of that ambition: you could live pretty well on not much money; coffee and wine were cheap, and the sun was free. Until it all went wrong, of course.

For Celia it had all gone wrong this summer, fifteen years on, and she supposed that wasn’t too bad a run of luck, for Italy. But it had gone wrong in August, the month in Italy when it was most difficult to set anything right, to have a dripping tap mended, to find a new job or a new flat. After more than ten years happy in her suburban villa, Celia’s landlord had said breezily halfway through July that his errant son was getting married, and he’d need the house back.

She put out feelers, that was how you had to do it here; asked around. Something would turn up. She begged some cardboard boxes and began to pack ten years’ worth of accumulated household objects, steeling herself against the changes that came over her beloved little house, the pale patches that appeared on the walls as her pictures came down. This is nothing, she told herself. It’s just a house. But the truth was, Celia was right back where she’d started.

Beate had found Celia the flat in the end, less than a week before time ran out and with the landlord’s son calling every other day to let Celia know exactly when his removal firm planned to turn up. Beate, who had much grander friends than Celia, who had no need to help her out at all, just called her up one evening.

Half-Italian, half-Swedish, and of unguessable age, Beate was one of those people who always made you feel better, just by saying your name. In the complicated hierarchy of the guides of Florence she occupied a privileged position, and not merely because she had studied fine art at the Accademia and history at the Sorbonne; she had something else, too, a quality more rare and sought-after than erudition; something like grace. Tall and dark-skinned, with corkscrew white hair that fell to her elbows and armfuls of bracelets like Nancy Cunard, Beate was recognizable from streets away, never with a gaggle of clients, only ever a select two or three. She would be talking to them warmly in her high, clear voice, her gestures intimate as she laid her long brown fingers on a client’s shoulder or vivid as she swept her arm wide to show the drama of a landscape or the grandeur of a palace.

When Beate phoned, Celia had that moment walked in after a sweltering day in the city; her heart had just dipped at the sight of the house that was no longer her home, her possessions in boxes next to the door. She let her satchel fall to the floor beside her, sat down, picked up the ringing phone; she could hear the champagne in Beate’s voice and wondered where she was. Like her age, Beate’s financial position was mysterious, a matter of some conjecture among the others – although prestigious, being an accredited Florentine guide was not well paid – but one thing was certain: she had expensive tastes. Tonight, Celia thought from the background sounds, some ululating Moroccan music and the hum of conversation in languid African accents, Beate was probably in the Caffè Maroc. It was one of her favourite hangouts, a private club in the Oltrarno done up to look like a medina, all mosaic tiles and fountains and heaps of cushions. They might even have hookahs; Celia could imagine Beate with a hookah quite easily. She looked at her watch. Even at five on a Monday afternoon.

‘Sweetheart.’ Celia sat down at the table, wiped the sweat from her forehead. She’d had a hot day showing fourteen Americans around the Museo della Scienza; no air-conditioning. ‘Yes.’

‘Are you still looking for a place?’ Beate put the question lightly, pretending Celia wasn’t desperate, pretending, kindly, that this was a mere nothing, a tiny favour between friends. ‘I know you don’t want to live in town but – well, it’s a nice area. And if you want it, it’s empty straight away. I don’t know how long for – he’s – what is he?’ Then the line had gone muffled as though Beate had her hand over the phone, talking to someone. Beate’s current boyfriend was an industrialist called Marco, a handsome, silver-haired sixty-year-old. The soft, hoarse voice came back. ‘He’s Venezuelan, Marco thinks. Anyway, he couldn’t renew his permesso di soggiorno, he’s overstayed and you know how that seems to annoy them. God knows when they’ll let him back in and in the meantime, the flat’s there. I think it’s even furnished.’

 

A week later, never having set eyes on it before, Celia had opened the door on her new home. The key had been left for her at the bar on the corner, the last in a succession of casually miraculous arrangements, or almost the last.

Gabriele had offered to bring up her stuff in his van. There was something about Gabriele – perhaps it was because he was from Rome, where they were less fastidious and readier with a smile – but whenever she knew he was to be her driver on a tour – and they’d been to Sicily together, Verona, Elba – she knew she could relax. They simply got on; Gabriele seemed as happy to have her as his guide as Celia was to have him at the wheel, capable, laid-back and cheerful. As she stood there she heard him come up the stairs behind her, three boxes balanced in front of him. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Forza.’ Closing her eyes, willing the key to catch, Celia had turned it one last time and the door opened.

A corridor with a dusty terracotta floor led away from her, and a shaft of light slanted down from an odd little window high up on the right. She stepped inside, passed a dark bedroom to the left and then saw more windows, more light. And although balls of dust had collected in every corner it had a good smell; clean, empty, as though the Venezuelan had barely inhabited the place. Celia’s landlord, Beate had said, was a bookbinder on the other side of town, and as long as the rent appeared in his account every month, he didn’t care who lived in the place.

In the kitchen Celia leaned across the table, pushed the window open, and caught a glimpse of a tall, slender bell-tower with cut stone corners and Roman arches. Even before she’d taken in the view, her hand still on the window frame, she heard another window pulled to sharply in response; already she was invading someone’s space. She looked out cautiously to see who it might have been and saw windows everywhere, the nearest practically at her elbow, but couldn’t tell which had been affronted by her presence. Neighbours; she’d never had to think about neighbours before and now she had a dozen.

 

She’d been here three months when he phoned, but the place still felt nothing like home, nothing like her place; with the bare terracotta floors and high ceilings it had the empty, impersonal feel of a short let, not much more than a hotel room. Lucas Marsh. Someone had recommended her, he had said, although afterwards Celia hadn’t been able to remember who.

She remembered liking his voice. It was to be a birthday celebration for his wife, short notice, three weeks, but he said straight away that he’d send her an advance, a generous sum. He sounded like a man used to things running smoothly but he was not rude or bullying, as very wealthy clients often could be. He asked her to draw up an itinerary, made a couple of suggestions that indicated to Celia he already knew the city, and she thought, yes, I suppose I could do that. Straightforward enough, a walk or two – she offered Fiesole and San Miniato – restaurants, the Uffizi. The only tricky request was for a dinner he wanted her to arrange on the Saturday, somewhere private, exclusive, with a good collection of paintings. It would be a challenge. There was only one little thing that had seemed odd to her at the time, and even that was explicable, she supposed. She’d asked how old his wife would be.

‘Why do you need to know that?’ he’d asked, and she’d heard something in his voice, an edge, a sharpness, although it had, Celia thought, been a perfectly reasonable question. It had to be a special birthday, didn’t it? Flustered, she’d tried to get out of it.

‘I – I didn’t mean, I’m sure —’

‘Thirty-two,’ he’d said shortly, and there’d been a pause while Celia digested the information. Not a particularly special birthday, then. When he spoke again his voice was just as it had been to begin with, calm and easy; it wasn’t the kind of voice you said no to. And thinking of the hole in her bank balance moving house had left, and of the bills gathering behind it, jostling, asking to be noticed, Celia had of course said yes. The thing about being a freelance was, you couldn’t afford to turn anything down, whatever kind of funny feeling you had about it. Just another job.

When Celia tried, later, to recall the precise timbre of Lucas Marsh’s voice, she found it inexplicably difficult. She could only remember, and for some time, the feeling it had given her, that kind of churning in the stomach when you wanted to impress someone and you knew they wouldn’t be easily won over, something complex and guarded in that voice that was intriguing. She began to look forward to the weekend half with unease, half with excitement. Never a good idea to get a crush on a client, not one with a wife, in particular, but still… it wouldn’t be boring.

The day dawned bright and cold; out at Le Cascine striped police tape fluttered in the wind, strung between trees, and a white polythene tent had been set up in the drained pool. At the entrance to the park, half a mile away, police cars were turning away the vans loaded with cheap clothes, cheeses and hams that were arriving for the weekly market. One of the fighting drunks from the night before had been taken off to hospital to have a cut on his head sewn up, but the other, sober for the first time in years, was sitting in a mobile forensic unit, wrapped in blankets. His hands shook as he drank the glass of tea someone had brought him. ‘Throat cut like a – like a pig,’ he kept repeating, ‘like they wanted all the blood out of him.’ Patiently a stocky policeman, who’d been up since five, sat beside him and waited for him to start making sense.

 

Celia could tell the weather had changed even before she opened the shutters, by the quality of the light that spun and danced through the slats. The light changed everything. She listened for the sound of the child crying, but heard only the whine and roar of the morning rush hour on the Lungarno, helmeted girls perched on motorini, delivery vans that had to be out of the city before nine. Celia thought it must be after eight but she didn’t have to get up, not today. She pushed the thought of tomorrow away, into the future, stretched, and opened the window.

It was breezy and cold, but not bitter, not yet. The sky was cloudless and cornflower-blue; Celia looked to the north and saw the hills across the rooftops, visible for the first time in more than a month and rising in shades of indigo, one behind the other. Celia had hardly been here since she moved in, it sometimes seemed, in and out of the city on jobs: Verona, Vicenza, the ducal palace in Mantova, the Palladian mansions of the Veneto, Greco-Roman ruins in Sicily.

She filled the coffee pot and put it on the stove, and as it began to bubble through, the phone rang.

 

The cleaners came in at eight-thirty, and behind long dark blinds pulled down the full length of the plate-glass windows to protect the public from the sight of the shop floor looking anything less than perfect, they went to work. They had a battery of equipment, a dozen different kinds of brush to fit in every cranny, behind radiators,. . .