The Summer House

by Christobel Kent

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Rose Fell's friends think she's taking a big risk when she leaves the security of home and career to move to the beautiful but isolated village of Grosso, near Genoa. But after a year of emotional turmoil Rose no longer has any ties back home, and she relishes the challenges of a new start.

Making a home, however, in the ravishing, haunted landscape of Italy's Riviera coast turns our to be lonelier than Rose had anticipated. And it is only when she is asked to write a profile on one of her reclusive neighbours, the once-glamorous film star Elvira Vitale, that Rose feels her new life is really beginning.

But when a young girl's body is found on the local beach, and the following day Elvira's hard-working cleaner, Ania, goes missing, Rose finds herself embroiled in a murder investigation that threatens the idyll she has worked so hard to establish.

Release date: June 7, 2018

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

Genova sprawls on the northern Mediterranean between two mountainous spurs that dip into the sea, a snarl of industrial steel, bridges, tunnels and peeling tower-blocks. Between the buildings swoop the motorways, roaring through the centre of the city inches from bathroom windows and washing lines; arterial routes coming from across the top of Italy from Venice and Eastern Europe, down from Turin and the Alps, here to join the coast road to the south or heading west to the glitz and sophistication of the Côte d’Azur. And even where the land flattens and slips into the water, where ships slide in and out, jetties and pontoons and harbour walls creep out from the city like fingers encroaching on the Mediterranean itself.

Above the glittering, roaring city one of Europe’s last great forests stretches unhindered and almost impenetrable across the border, through France and all the way to the Camargue. From the funicular that climbs the hills away from the sea the extent of the forest becomes apparent. It lies across the inland hills for as far as the eye can see, its canopy of pine and acacia, rowan and holm oak velvet-black as the light fades on an August evening.

Down by the water, though, in the deeper twilight that lies at the foot of the cliffs, a shabby little train is winding its way out of the city to the east. The noise it makes comes and goes, the irregular rattle of ageing rolling stock, only occasionally audible from up high as the train creeps through the tunnels and over the bridges that lead out from Genova towards the rarefied atmosphere of the Cinque Terre. The train, its dull beige paintwork emblazoned with graffiti that glow luminous in the gathering dusk, seems sometimes to defy gravity, hanging suspended over the sea before disappearing into a dark hillside; impossibly slow. Once, when the geography and poverty of the region didn’t allow for the construction of roads, this railway line was the main artery of Liguria; without it many of the villages and fishing ports scattered along the coast would have been accessible only by boat.

Motorways have been built now, in abundance, but the trains still run, and although the occasional shiny Intercity darts like a snake along the coast to Naples, for the most part they shuffle along. The notorious regionali and locali stop every five or six kilometres along the coast, at every fishing village and seaside town, their paintwork peeling and their upholstery worn thin, carrying another load of bottom-rung travellers: prostitutes, backpackers and itinerant workers, fare-dodgers, illegal immigrants and students.

But this hot evening at least the train is moving, however slowly, and at La Spezia it will turn south to leave the industry and civilization of the north behind. Until that point, that bend where the Italian boot begins to stretch out from mainland Europe towards Africa, the train will run along the coastline of eastern Liguria, a place of sunshine and holidays, scalloped prettily with little bays and promontories, ornamented with wrought iron and stucco. It is the week of Ferragosto, the public holiday that marks the Assumption of the Virgin and the zenith of the holiday season across Europe.

In her darkened bedroom perched on the hills above the small seaside town of Levanto, Elvira Vitale, the Contessa, comes to. Her head is muzzy from wine and sleeping pills, and as often happens when she wakes she is not absolutely sure where she is, nor even whether it is early morning or late afternoon. Through the door, which is ajar, a thin silvery light is visible that could be dawn or dusk; what gives it away, as Elvira lies and gazes without focusing up at the embroidered canopy of her bed, is the sound of the insects. They are singing in the umbrella pines on the hill behind the house, a shrill high sound they only make once the sun has begun to go down.

Slowly Elvira gets off the bed. There is not a sound in the house; is Jack there? She doesn’t know where he is, her handsome husband, but that isn’t unusual. He could be drinking cocktails by the sea or asleep in his room; distinctions between night and day don’t mean anything much to Jack. He thinks it very middle-aged to keep regular hours. Elvira walks out on to the balcony and looks down.

She is known as the Contessa in the town below, a town which was once no more than a fishing village, because when she bought this house, a million years ago when she was twenty-five, smooth-skinned, full-breasted and flush with success, she was married to a Count. The tide has stuck – something, perhaps, to do with Elvira’s natural authority – although they all know the Count is no more, dead of a drug overdose in a London hotel room one long-ago August. Elvira had left him by then, but even now she doesn’t like to think of him looking out through dusty hotel windows at some dismal city view, a lightwell or a fire escape, London in August.

Elvira always spends that month here, by the sea, and, increasingly, adds on some of July and September too. They hurtle down through France on the Autoroute du Sud, Elvira gazing silently at the blur of scenery, willing them southwards. Elvira’s heart always lifts when she sees the glittering sea, and as they wind up around the narrow hairpin bends, leaving the bougainvillea and hibiscus that overhang the high stone walls fluttering behind them; even now she feels the return of the old familiar excitement. The colours of her own country, the flowers all electric blue, magenta and burnt orange, carelessly bestowed by nature in such glowing profusion on this glittering shore. But most of all the knowledge that holiday time is here, that anticipation of a month or more of benessere, the glow of the sun on her skin, the sting of salt water; even if they do wrinkle and roughen, Elvira can’t resist.

The Contessa has arrived, the residents of Levanto would say, with her English boy no doubt muttered under their breath a moment later. It’s not just that Jack is young that they don’t like; they disapprove of her turning her back on her own countrymen. If only they knew. As they approach the house Elvira likes to eye up each tall iron gate they pass, craning her neck to see whose shutters are still closed, who is in town and who has not yet arrived, whether they have come too early or too late. But each year when it is time to go back to London Elvira spins it out a little longer, tells Jack to go on back without her for a week or two; each year it seems to matter a little less that she should stay on alone, that she should be the last to leave, after Jack, and after all the fashionable summer visitors too. Perhaps because he is English, perhaps because he has never in fact had a proper job, Jack doesn’t have quite the same feeling about the holiday season. Life is one long holiday for Jack.

Outside it is almost dark; the Contessa’s house, as they know it down below, faces away from the setting sun. The long, green-shuttered windows, the stone terrace running the full width of the first floor, look across a steep canyon and down to a tiny inlet where the dark sapphire-blue water turns to foam against the rocks. The Contessa’s view of the sea is oblique, but she prefers it that way; it seems less bare-faced, less vulgar, and it allows her to look inland too, if she wants to. Down the neighbouring hill tumbles the pretty, near-deserted village of Grosso, and across the valley, looking straight out to sea, sit the turreted and balconied summer houses of her rich neighbours. From here Elvira can look at them, but they can’t look back.

The terrace of the Contessa’s house is of generous proportions, tiled, balustraded and densely fragrant with roses, jasmine and honeysuckle. Elvira takes a deep breath, and feels her head begin to clear at last; she walks to the edge and stands with her hands on the stone. The far-off iron rattle of the coast train coming out of a tunnel echoes around the valley inland.

As she looks Elvira hears a sound behind her, coming around the cliff, feels turbulence in the air. The menacing thump of a helicopter’s rotors that grows louder by the second until it is a deafening scream, then the machine and its noise are past her, receding, swooping along the coast and down. Elvira puts a hand to her hair as it is whipped around her head, pulls her gown around her, and watches. A carabinieri helicopter, not the coastguard or the police, it dives like a dark blue dragonfly, down behind the far cliff to sea level. Idly Elvira wonders what they are up to now; a drugs bust, perhaps, a car chase, a smash-up on the coast road. I need a drink, Elvira thinks, giving in at last.

 

It’s late now, close on eleven-thirty. Down in Levanto, at the railway station the platforms are silent and almost empty; the fluorescent lighting makes little impression in the velvet darkness that looms overhead. Ania is waiting for the last train to Genova; she isn’t usually so late but tonight she felt like pretending she was on holiday here, wandering through the streets among happy, sunburned children, having a swim after dark. She watches a train pull in on the opposite platform. A man stands smoking in the corridor, pale and unshaven; he is leaning against the window on his elbows and looking across the tracks at Ania. She stares straight ahead, but as the train moves off the man turns his head to look back at her.

On the platform the few passengers the train has disgorged are making their way towards the exit. There’s an African guy Ania recognizes, wearing a cheap copy of the black and white Juve strip; effortlessly he shoulders a huge black nylon holdall bulging with merchandise. He’s back from a day spent hawking sandals and sarongs on a more upmarket beach; Forte dei Marmi, perhaps, where the rich Milanesi go to stake themselves out in rows on their pre-booked places under expensive striped parasols, and he’s back for the night. Some of the immigrant workers sleep on the beach; some of them, like Ania, have a corner of some semi-derelict industrial building, a warehouse or a cold store or a stockyard made to look like home with a rug and thin, makeshift curtains, a shanty town or trailer park half-hidden from polite view by bamboo thickets.

Ania watches as a couple of youngish men with baseball caps pulled down over their faces hunch their shoulders and mutter to each other at the exit, making some hasty arrangement. Ania tightens her headscarf and averts her eyes, looking down the track after the receding train, waiting for hers to arrive. She wants to go home, although that’s not where her train will take her.

It’s after midnight when the train clanks sullenly into Genova, and Ania is so tired she could lie down and sleep right there in the empty carriage but she rouses herself. It is only when she sees an old man on the west-bound platform with his daughter that Ania wants to cry. The girl looks pale and tired and he has his arm around her, protecting her, it seems to Ania, from all the things that she herself has to steel herself against every day; from the dark, from the noises that echo around the cavernous station, from strangers. He is taking her home. Ania, alone on her platform now, turns away.

It was, of course, too late by the time Rose Fell began to wonder whether she’d done the right thing. The house was sold by then, and the money divided up, the leaving party held, the promises made to call, to visit, to commission a column. They’d all been trying to warn her, it seemed to Rose in retrospect, even at the leaving party; the careful congratulations and worried looks: why had she so easily persuaded herself they were just jealous?

After all, Rose couldn’t deny it had been a kind of rebound thing, out of the divorce courts and into exile, a way of putting it all behind her. Running off to a place in the sun, where she had no roots, no contacts, no friends. A mid-life crisis; the features pages and television schedules were full of them after all, disastrous attempts to start a new life abroad, plucky little Brits battling against foreign customs and hostile legislation, doomed to failure and humiliation. At least she could speak the language; surely that was something?

It hadn’t taken Rose long, everyone remarked with the definite implication that she had been hasty, to find her house in Italy. And it was true, anyone else she knew who thought about buying somewhere abroad, even a little holiday home, seemed to mull the idea over for a few years until either they found what they proclaimed to be the perfect place or, much more often, the idea was quietly shelved. But Rose had decided on her area (the nearest part of Italy, not far from the sea), had gone to the internet, found a handful of websites that offered pictures and booked herself on a cheap flight to Genova.

She’d looked at a lot of dumps, for the money. She had half the proceeds of the sale of their small terraced house in Lewisham (the only part of London, it seemed, bypassed by the property boom), less solicitor’s costs, some money set aside for Jess at university and a modest financial cushion for Rose’s first year abroad. Which left enough for two bedrooms, a bit of a view but not of the sea, a patch of garden.

Things, it seemed, happened very differently in Italy. There were no estate agent’s details handed out in advance to warn buyers of a flyover past the bedroom window, a view of plastic pipes in a builder’s yard or squalid bathrooms, and all the prettily pictured properties Rose had seen on the net had mysteriously disappeared once she arrived, or morphed into something quite different. Windowless flats in modern blocks, old olive presses without benefit of roof, walls or access, and once, a stuffy third-floor apartment without any bathroom at all, inhabited by an extended family of eight whose cooking smells hung heavy in the air and grubby handprints ornamented every wall.

In two days Rose looked at eighteen houses and flats, smiled politely to disguise her dismay until her cheeks ached. It was quite different, she came to understand, to look at a place with the eyes of a tourist, out of here in a day or two and on to pastures new, seeing only the bigger picture, an exquisite skyline, a purple sunset, picturesque decay. When you looked at a place with a view to permanent residence you started seeing the dogshit and the dustbins, smelling the drains. Rose suddenly couldn’t help noticing how tired and poor people seemed as she looked around, not the centro storico she would have restricted herself to as a tourist but a sun-bleached, dusty suburb or a down-at-heel sidestreet on the edge of an industrial estate. Her heart would sink at the sight of an old woman hobbling painfully up a grimy, pungent stairwell to a flat on the third floor, the acrid stink of cats locked in an apartment all day, a harassed, ill-tempered mother trying to get her children ready for school. Then the agent brought her up here, to Grosso.

A few miles inland and steeply uphill from the buzzing, faintly vulgar seaside town of Levanto, Grosso seemed a quiet place; almost deserted, in fact, despite its picturesque appearance. There was no shop in the village, nor restaurant, although it was said that a private house at the top occasionally offered meals in a rickety sun room overlooking the valley to the few tourists brave enough to make their way inland. There was also, improbably given the series of narrow hairpin bends that made up the route down into the valley, a bus service to Levanto, and in extremis, Rose decided, already persuading herself as she emerged from the house and looked around, the agent by her side, she could walk to the little town in a little under an hour. In time, of course, she might even get a car.

It was the first time she had found herself thinking like this, thinking that it was actually going to happen. She realized that until she saw Grosso she had resigned herself to failure, to an abject return to Lewisham, and her heart leaped at the thought that she might, after all, be able to do it.

There were no roads in the village itself; the road up from Levanto stopped below the church where a handful of rusting vans and mopeds sat beneath faded tarpaulins in the sun. The narrow, claustrophobic paths that wound up between the village houses were patched together, of concrete and cobbles, cracked and mossy, as though the whole place had been put together piecemeal and resisted gravity and disintegration only against the odds. It was afternoon when Rose first saw the place; every shutter was shut and the cats, thin, grey and half-feral, that appeared out of nowhere and wound mewling around her ankles if she so much as paused to catch her breath, were the only visible sign of life.

The house had been empty for some time; the owner, the agent said, had been an elderly widower who had not long outlived his wife, and the children, a son and daughter now in Milan, had not been interested in keeping it for summer holidays. The interior smelled of damp and neglect, and was mildewed and cobwebby, the rafters stained with smoke, the floor dusty with fallen plaster and the dried droppings of nameless animal intruders. It was made of stone, three storeys high with flaking green-painted shutters. But it had a heavy, seamed oak front door, cotto tiles, dark rafters and a cantina, albeit pitch-dark and damp, for storing wine in the rocky bowels of the hillside below. Better still, it was, to her surprise, within her price range.

Rose had stood with the agent on the rocky, uneven ground outside the kitchen door and looked across at the view to the west of another stone village tumbling down another hill further inland, with the flaking yellow steeple and little onion dome of a little church just visible. To the north there was a steep, wooded slope, immediately above her was a straggle of village houses and below her some old olive terraces and a tumbledown pigsty belonging to the land – her land, as she was already beginning to think of it – all overgrown with weeds. You could not see the sea, but Rose imagined that she could sense it shifting, huge and restless, just out of sight, could even detect its wild and salty perfume. She knew it was there, that was the main thing, just around a corner, just beyond the palisaded terrace of a beautiful, decaying villa, a villa belonging to an Italian movie star, so the agent said, naming her self-importantly as though Rose should recognize her. Rose had looked across the valley at the trees, almost black in the August sun, and heard the approaching whine of a Vespa climbing the hill, a sound quintessentially Italian. She inhaled the musty scent of some elusive herb from the warm earth sloping down below her and listened to the creaking of crickets in the trees. A lemon tree in a pot, overgrown with weeds, was in flower on the cracked terrace next door and when a breeze from the sea stirred the air a waft of its sweetness drifted across to her.

Rose had thought of Tom, her ex-husband, and his new home in Chiswick with his new wife, and breathed deeply, deliberately. They held hands, he and the new wife, when they went walking together; Rose had encouraged him to go on the walking tours when he got to forty and seemed to feel that something was missing from his life – or perhaps, from their life. She looked around at the absolute foreignness of the scene, a place where she knew no one and no one knew her, and she thought, all right, then. She couldn’t go back. ‘I’ll take it,’ Rose had said, startled at the sound of the words coming from her mouth. The agent had only nodded briefly, incuriously, as though none of this was any surprise to him.

It seemed to Rose now that she had spent the seven weeks it had taken to complete the deal holding her breath, lest she change her mind, lest she see sense. She had a brusque meeting with the house’s owners, the middle-aged brother and sister, who seemed not on entirely friendly terms with each other but were businesslike (and, Rose intuited, in a hurry to complete where such an unknown quantity as a foreign buyer was involved). The whispered negotiations over price completed, the agent, the notary, the vast tax and removal bills all paid, she had, at first, felt relief, then triumph. It was only now that she was beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t have done things more slowly. Thought about the pitfalls; listened to the warning voices, wondered about why the house had stood unsold for so long.

Perhaps, Rose thought as she clicked on the kettle (being careful to check, instinctive by now, that neither the iron nor the washing machine was on concurrently, for fear of blowing a fuse or perhaps the whole fuse-box, this time), she had reached the end of her honeymoon period. She had arrived in Grosso, with the removal van that had failed to climb the hill more than halfway and had disgorged her possessions on a bend, at the tail-end of the previous summer. A year ago, soon. There had been a week of Indian summer, cool mornings and golden days, then in October it had begun to rain, and the rain had gone on for two months, implacable and relentless.

It had been then that Rose had begun to wonder, as the villas were closed up on the hills looking out to sea, the awnings of the empty market-stalls flapped sadly in the autumn rain, and one by one the bars pulled down their shutters and left them down. She’d wondered whether in fact it wasn’t only she who had no roots here; perhaps no one did. Perhaps, like the sun-bleached deckchairs on the private beaches, the relationships too, the old people standing and talking in the dusty square outside the church, the games of bowls, the cheery restaurateur and his regulars, perhaps they were all folded up and put away for another year, too. But then Rose had written a piece about it, dashed off a few hundred words about seaside towns out of season and filed it; it had been published with a nice picture and she’d felt better. She was working, at least, and when she looked at the photograph of the sparkling sea that accompanied her piece she felt satisfied. Who, after all, could possibly prefer London, in winter? Or indeed at any other time of year?

Rose held her nerve through the short, dead days of November, when the rain began to ease, and December, when there was a brief flurry of activity on the hillside, nets were spread and the olives harvested. She kept her spirits up even in January, when hailstorms whipped the coast and an icy wind blew in through the rattling window-frames. She still had no central heating, having foolishly put its installation off, thinking, this is the Mediterranean, and the fierce winds off the sea blew the smoke back down the chimney into the little wood-burning stove and her sitting room, dulling the newly whitewashed walls. In February the weather turned, the mornings glittering with frost, the sky an incandescent blue. But there was barely a soul to be seen on the streets even of Levanto, the silence was profound, and Rose found herself working ever harder to fight off a creeping sense of isolation.

She had steeled herself and gone on writing, and things had been published, here and there. In April the wild flowers came, blue chicory, poppies and vetch and plenty more Rose didn’t know the names of. She picked them and put them on her wooden table; she wanted to tell someone about them, but there was no one to tell; she wrote to Jess, didn’t expect a response and received none. Her acquaintance seemed to dwindle almost to nothing, and she clung to the human contact she had, two words exchanged with near-strangers in the Arcobalena, the only bar to stay open out of season in Levanto, and the woman who ran the minimarket. Emails from home were scrutinized for news, every drop of warmth extracted from a handful of casual sentences, but no one came to visit over the winter, as she had expected. And all together it didn’t even add up to the most basic sense of community, not even the knowledge there were doors you could knock on, the prospect of meeting a gang of friends for a drink, stopping in the street to chat.

Then there was Jess. Rose couldn’t expect her to phone, no grants these days, couldn’t expect her to spend her student loan on international phone calls. And whenever Rose tried to get hold of her, either the phone rang unanswered in the empty hall or she heard a stranger’s voice, some incoherent, uncomprehending fellow student who promised to pass on a message but obviously would not be capable of doing any such thing. She’d had a card at Christmas, an ironic, glittery Woolworth’s card, cheerful enough. Jess said she’d visit, maybe at Easter.

Easter came and went, and Jess didn’t show, but Rose got a card from Spain. At least she’s happy, Rose thought, and after all, I chose to come out here, to abandon my daughter. She resisted the temptation to write Jess a long, pleading letter, suggesting a holiday in the summer. In May Rose had taken the train along the coast to Cannes for the film festival, and squeezed a couple of articles out of that. She managed to secure an interview with Giorgio Venturelli, an art-house director from Turin who’d made his name in the seventies, with a film premiering at the festival, a film about bourgeois attitudes in the industrial heartland of northern Italy. She’d watched the film with growing bemusement, a sense that perhaps she had moved to Italy under the influence of a grave misapprehension of the national character. The film seemed to suggest the Italians were a repressed, melancholic lot, and when she interviewed Venturelli she wanted to say, you should try England, you don’t know the half of it. But it was unsettling to be reminded of how little she knew about the people among whom she had decided to live. Part of the learning process, she told herself stoutly; getting to know how things really are.

Rose plugged on; she filed a piece about the behaviour of B-movie starlets on the Croisette, something about rural poverty in northern Italy, a cookery feature on focaccia, wrote a couple of hundred words to accompany someone’s photographs of Art Deco Italian beach bars. But the serious commissions she’d hoped for hadn’t come along, and deep down, she wasn’t surprised. That must have been what those guarded expressions at her leaving party meant; it won’t be easy, you know. It’s a hard slog, freelance. So Rose was branching out.

The little stone pigsty at the foot of her steep, tumbling garden was to be converted, never mind the fact that she hadn’t got around to making a quarter of the changes she’d planned for her own house. Rose was going to try her hand at B and B, in season. The fact that she wasn’t much of a cook nor a housewife was not, she decided, going to deter her; it was to be an experiment, she told herself firmly. She had just enough money in the bank, the last of her settlement, to cover the builder’s estimate for the work; he would come and start, he said, after Ferragosto and the work should be completed before the rain arrived, October or November.

Rose took her mug of tea – it never did taste the same, perhaps it was the rusty mineral-rich water of the hills, or the dusty foreign teabags, filled with a lower grade of floor-sweepings than even English teabags – and walked outside. The sun was up, although Rose’s terrace was still in the shade of the steep, uninhabited green hill opposite her house. A haze rose off the road below even this early in the morning, and Rose could feel the sweat forming on her upper lip in the heat; she hadn’t been prepared for that, the heat. She still found it unnatural to sleep without the weight of a quilt or a duvet on her; a sheet seemed too insubstantial, but even that was a layer too many on some of these August nights. Rose didn’t sleep well, turning in the bed, wishing she’d had the money for air-conditioning, opening the shutters then closing them again when they admitted not a breath of air.

It was very quiet this morning; it always was. The narrow alleys of Grosso were not only closed up and deserted during the siesta hours; most of those shutters, she now knew, never opened at all. But although it was not long after six she could see a tiny, bowed figure toiling far below her among the silvery olives; Gennaro. Rose sat down with her tea steaming between her hands and watched.

It was close on ten when Elvira wandered out of her room and looked around the door at Jack; the sun that burned its way through the long muslin curtains on the landing hurt her eyes. It was early for her, but she’d been woken before the sun was even up by another helicopter, and hadn’t been able to settle.

Sometimes Elvira thought her life was spent watching her husband sleep. Did he do the same for her? He lay face down on the vast bed, his head against the pale pigskin of his headboard. Elvira had had this room rede. . .