‘Sorry,’ Pietro had said, shifting a glance at Matteucci, the northern dolt, who had obstinately refused to understand what Sandro was doing there at all. (‘Say that again? He’s who?’) Pietro had spread his hands. ‘Best I can do.’
They had viewed the body.
She’d said six, but Irene Brunello had been there at ten to. From the long window to the small office Pietro shared with half a dozen others and once with Sandro too, they saw her park her small yellow car — a brand-new Punto, so bright, so jaunty, so appropriate for the beach cafes and villas of Monterosso, so grimly wrong for the car park of the big grey police station on the ring road at Porta al Prato.
‘We’ve got the car on CCTV entering the city,’ Pietro had said abruptly as they watched. His eyes had been sad although Sandro hadn’t known whom his old friend pitied most: Sandro for his stubborn resistance to the obvious, messy explanations, the dead man, or the dead man’s wife. ‘A silver Audi. Twelve-thirty, he came through the motorway toll at Firenze Nord. The car, the number plate, his face at the wheel.’
‘Quick work,’ Sandro had said. ‘Good work.’ He averted his eyes. ‘You don’t know where the car is now.’
‘We’ll find it.’
Somehow they had known, he and Pietro and even Matteucci, even before her slim, tanned sandalled foot first touched the ground, her trim, straight-backed figure, that it was Irene Brunello in that little car.
Early forties: a good age for a woman, or should be, the fierce anxieties of youth all done with, the hard work of child-rearing easing off, enough money coming in. Given the right circumstances in life, of course, given health, given family, children, a happy marriage.
To Sandro, far above, and observing her framed in a great window twice as high as he was, Irene Brunello had looked as if she’d had all that, until today.
Sandro had hovered as they’d greeted her sombrely; she had been too distracted to ask who he was. The tears had dried — she seemed a woman of strong character, bound to the proprieties, to not breaking down in public — but they had left their traces. Her handsome face was puffy and the seaside tan, overlaying drawn and anxious features, had the effect of making her look older than her years. This was entirely a grieving widow, he had no doubt. There had been a quick handshake, the exchange of formal greetings that implied condolence but also avoided the word itself, not wanting to make assumptions.
‘Let me see him,’ she had said, a twist of handkerchief at her mouth.
She knows it’s him, Sandro had thought. Some women refused to believe it: I said goodbye to him only this morning, they’d say. It can’t be. Not this wife.
Sandro had stood outside the door, looking in through the square of reinforced glass; he’d seen her head dip as they drew back the sheet. There had been no way of putting that face back together, but there had been enough of it left, so that if it was familiar enough, if you loved it enough — he had seen her nod, twice. He had seen Pietro gesture down towards the hand, with its wedding ring; she had taken the hand between hers.
Damn, he had thought, damn, damn. Her husband was dead, and there was worse to come.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Pietro had said, leading her into the interview room, motioning gently for her to sit. Now from the door Sandro watched her intently: Irene Brunello didn’t cry. She sat very still, dignified; she began to speak before any questions were put to her.
‘We have already been at the seaside for a month — the children and I. My mother’s house.’
In those dark eyes Sandro thought he saw something and wondered how her husband had got on with his mother-in-law. Whether he felt they should be able to afford a seaside place of their own. Did she reproach him with it?
She was going on, doggedly, ‘Claudio always stays on to work until the first weekend in August. Always, he’s-’ She stopped, staring. ‘He was very conscientious. He would come up at weekends, through July. The city’s so unbearable-’
She broke off again, looking from one face to another: Pietro, grave and patient, making notes, Matteucci uneasy — what was the point of all this, you could see him thinking, let’s get it over with. Sandro grim-faced and invisible behind the mirror.
‘It’s all right,’ said Pietro. ‘Take your time.’ Turning to Matteucci, ‘Could you get Signora Brunello some water, Officer?’
Matteucci left the room, the set of his shoulders saying he didn’t care, at least he was out of there.
Pietro turned back to Irene Brunello. ‘He came out for weekends?’ he prompted.
She nodded, compressing her lips as she looked down at the handkerchief in her lap. ‘But once he was out for August, he was out. He wouldn’t go back to work, that was it, he was ours.’
Her eyes widened, and in that phrase all that they had lost was encapsulated. The family table, on a shaded terrace overlooking the sea, the mother laying food in front of her husband, the children on his lap. Journey’s end: the reward for a year of hard work.
And yet this man had been leading a double life. There were two women mourning him, another family waiting for him.
A double life: was that reason enough for suicide? Two women in love with you, enough money, a child about to come into the world? And Sandro, who thought he had long since ceased to rage against his own childlessness, found a version of that fury rising in him. What laziness, what selfishness. What monstrous ingratitude.
And yet. Something was not right.
Irene Brunello’s husband was a good provider, a loving husband and father, a hard and conscientious worker. The man Anna Niescu trusted, whose child she carried — she had thought of him in similar terms, at least in prospect. Would such a man walk into traffic on a busy road to escape his responsibilities? Would he do it this way, would he do it at all? Nonsense. It was nonsense.
‘But this weekend?’ said Pietro gently.
Irene Brunello straightened on the uncomfortable chair, and when she spoke it was calmly. ‘He arrived on Friday night, as he always did, the first Friday of August, at about eleven o’clock in the evening. He’d stopped for something to eat at the bar near work, and the traffic had been bad, he said.’
She was a good witness: she was clear-headed. Sandro found himself nodding, and by instinct stopped himself, as if she could see him through the one-way glass and would know what he was thinking. Eleven o’clock: that would have given him time for close to an hour with Anna Niescu, who’d seen her lover at seven, out of the city by eight. He tried to remember what the traffic had actually been like that evening.
She was still talking. ‘He brought some things for the children, as he always did. It was our tradition. A new beach toy — every year it must be a bigger one, this time it was an inflatable crocodile — and a big cake from our favourite pasticcere, on the Via dei Mille. Everything was fine. Everything was normal.’
‘And then?’
Matteucci came back in with a bottle of water and a plastic cup; he filled the cup and set it on the low table. Irene Brunello didn’t even look at it.
‘And then on Saturday morning he took the car and said he was going to drive to La Spezia to do a big shop. There’s a giant supermarket there, much cheaper.’
‘Was that normal?’ La Spezia would be an hour’s drive, at least, from Monterosso, right at the other end of the Cinque Terre. A long drive on a Saturday morning.
She shrugged, uncomfortable for the first time.
‘Not really.’
She fiddled with the handkerchief again, not meeting anyone’s eye, then finally she looked up.
‘Usually we do our shopping in Monterosso, in little places, you know.’ She was talking nervously, trying not to think. ‘There’s a greengrocer, there’s a butcher, they’re good people. Or, at most, around the coast to Levanto. The supermarkets are small, they’re more expensive, but we’re on holiday, you know? But he had mentioned money, the night before. He seemed — preoccupied. He was saying, perhaps we should think about letting the holiday home next year. My mother’s home.