The wooden stairs down into the garden were rickety, at every step a loud creak, but her noisy movements provoked no answering sound from the undergrowth. There’s no one there.
It wasn’t completely dark. There was a distant glow from the tennis court floodlights a kilometre away, a square of slatted bedroom lamplight from next door, through closed shutters. But as she moved under the great drooping leaves of the banana palm, Roxana turned on the torch, and cursed. God knew when the batteries had last been replaced; it shone with a feeble yellow beam, hardly enough to illuminate her own hand.
Never mind. She switched the torch off, got out the battery and rubbed it between her hands, leaned against the palm trunk, and listened. She could hear the sluggish gurgle of the river, from here, and something else, something dripping. And she thought. Ma had said that yesterday he had come around the back of the house. But that wasn’t straightforward. The side door was kept locked. The back gate could be accessed only by an overgrown footpath, and you had to go to the end of the street, round the houses, scout around a bit. She’d have said, you’d have to know the area.
The man had called her Signora Delfino, but if he’d known her, Ma would have recognized his voice.
You’d have to know the area — or be determined. Desperate, perhaps.
Roxana sighed involuntarily: was she really taking this seriously? It would seem that she was. Twenty-four hours ago she’d assumed that Ma had imagined the whole thing. But a great deal had happened in twenty-four hours, a great deal that was no one’s imagination. Brunello was dead, his kids were fatherless. Still something dripped in the undergrowth, nagging at her.
She replaced the battery in the torch, turned it back on. The garden was no more than ten metres square, even if it felt like a full-sized jungle in the dark. This was where Roxana had grown up, hide and seek among what had then been stunted shrubs, waist high. The back gate, set in a two-metre fence, had always been kept locked, Ma terrified they’d find their way down to the river and drown. In half a metre of filthy water: it had been known. And an eight-year-old girl had been abducted from the local swimming pool, when Roxana had been twelve, found dead in the river thirty kilometres away a week later. Never, never, never talk to strangers, Ma had scolded, then when it turned out the killer had known his victim, Ma had gone silent and obdurate.
In the dark Roxana moved towards the back gate, knowing she would find it locked and bolted as always and then she could switch off the torch and go inside. Eat dinner and try not to think about Claudio Brunello. As she pushed under the oleander — poisonous, Ma had told them all, over and over, don’t even touch it — the dripping was there, louder. It was getting on her nerves, and — ugh. Something squelched underfoot, boggy, wet overrunning her sandals, mud between her toes. Damn. The torch swayed in her hand, and the feeble beam lit up the garden tap, in the back corner, set against the fence. Dripping. A puddle had formed at the base of the pipe. Roxana sighed; removing her sandals, she stepped gingerly around the water and turned the tap to close it tightly.
Tentatively she tested the only ordinary explanation out for size: Ma had been watering the plants. Well, she could ask, though she was fairly sure Ma had not watered anything since Dad’s death, which was why half the terracotta pots contained only desiccated twigs.
Had the tap somehow loosened itself? It seemed unlikely, despite the regular fluctuations in water pressure. Or were the next-door neighbours, what, climbing over the fence and stealing water? But as Roxana tried hard to restrict herself to only the most innocuous possibilities, almost despite herself she raised the torch beam so that it shone weakly along the now damp leaf mould at the foot of the fence, nearly, but not quite, reaching the back gate.
What was that?
She kneeled, and the movement seemed to alter some connection in the torch because it blinked and faded, before strengthening again, suddenly too bright. Bright enough for her to see what it was that had caught her eye: some regular, familiar indentations in the damp soil.
Footprints.
They ran along under the fence, a walking pace, even weight distribution, Roxana would have said, as if she knew anything at all about the analysis of prints. The police — she considered them briefly, then dismissed the possibility. The police might know about footprints, although she wouldn’t have credited any of the ones she’d come across with knowing more about anything than she did. They might have whole labs of technicians, but none of them would be sent out to investigate a nervous old woman’s fear of strangers, the dark, loneliness.
The steps stopped, feet planted perhaps ten centimetres apart, the impressions deeper, as if he’d stood here a while.
He?
The footsteps were not large for a man’s. But too big to be a woman’s, too wide, too deeply set. A heavy woman with big feet? She could picture no such person; next door was a widow built like a bird. A woman Violetta resented, more experienced in her widowhood, not much heavier than her Persian cat, always pacing and hurrying herself into emaciation, never sitting still long enough to eat. Roxana sat back on her haunches in the warm damp, and shone the torch back towards the house. It was still ominously bright. It would die on her, any minute.
As her eyes adjusted, she could see the slatted rectangle of the salotto’s French doors, a square of light from the upstairs bathroom. A man could stand here and observe.
He’d gone closer to the house, this man with modestly sized feet: a couple more steps then he’d stopped again, and looked. He had called out to Ma, I know you’re in there, Signora Delfino.
There was something about that phrase. Had Ma just — made that up, unconsciously? Given a voice to the man and his intentions, turned him into a bogeyman, repeated a line from a story to frighten children, Little pig, little pig, let me come in? Might he, after all, have been a perfectly innocent delivery man?
He had not come right up to the house; he had stopped. Something occurred to Roxana and she stood, quickly, and before the torch could expire, turned and took her own, hurried, smaller, lighter steps back to where she’d come, only a few metres to the left, to the fence, along the fence-
To the gate. Which was not locked and bolted, as she had last seen it, as it had been for as long as she could remember, but hung just ajar, crippled and askew with one hinge right off. And the casing that retained the bolt was barely hanging from screws torn out of the soft and rotten wood.
Don’t tell Ma, was what ran through her head, as though she and her naughty brother were whispering together in the dark. It might have been an accident. But as she stared, Roxana took in the violence of it, the split and torn wood. This was no accident.
With a last flicker, the torch died.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Damn , thought Sandro. Damn . The bank. I forgot to go to the bank.
He was sitting at the kitchen table, immobile in the heat; he even wished they could turn off the low-hanging light in its stained-glass, stile liberty shade. The coloured glow through the glass seemed to be giving out heat.
It came to him as he followed Luisa’s slow, deliberate movements around the kitchen, trying, as he seemed often to be doing, to interpret her. Luisa needed interpretation because she was in her way a master strategist, a Machiavelli. She didn’t ask anything straight out, she checked the lie of the land. She talked to him over her shoulder as she fiddled with the peeling of an onion, about her own day.
‘The shop was full, can you believe it? We had out the autumn collections, boots and sweaters, and people were buying them.’ Shook her head in mystification. ‘Forty degrees outside.’ She chopped. Onion, carrot, celery, garlic. Parsley.