We honeymooned in Siena, her family’s city of origin. She hoped for children but it didn’t happen. The Spanish flu. I joked it could be worse. I knew of people who had contracted sleeping sickness through the influenza and hadn’t woken up yet. She didn’t find me funny. She got depressed. Blamed me. Blamed herself. There were rows. She had a fiery temper.
Oswald Mosley founded his fascist party and I joined straight away. I wore the blackshirt uniform with pride. I was interested in a better Britain. My wife and I visited Italy when we could. Mussolini was doing great things. He was keeping the Socialists down. The trains ran on time.
Her brother was wary of my uniform but reluctantly accepted me when he discovered we had something in common. Hatred of kikes. The big Jew and the small Jew, as Sir Oswald described it. I hated them for bringing our country down. My brother-in-law hated them because the Italian gangs were at war with Jewish ones for control of Soho and the racecourses.
Her brother warmed to me further when I saved him from a beating at Brighton racecourse. He was openly a gangster now. I happened to be around when a man came at him with an open razor. Man? He was little more than a teenager but with an evil face — a long razor slash down one side of it. I knocked him to the ground without really thinking twice, but he had two older men nearby who I could tell knew how to handle themselves.
We squared off but then it all drizzled away.
My wife put on weight as only Italian women can. Screamed at me. I took mistresses. One in particular. She knew the Chinese method. It was whispered Wallis Simpson knew it too. If it made a king abdicate, what chance did I stand?
My brother-in-law saw us together one day. I was expecting a beating — knuckledusters and coshes.
‘The racecourse thing?’ he said. ‘We’re even.’
I killed my mistress for her infidelity. There was a knock on the door. I let my wife in. I didn’t ask what she was doing there. I’d long suspected she was having me followed.
She stood by the radiogram looking at the body on the rug, the blood thickening around it. She pointed at the saw on the table.
‘What were you intending to do with that?’
‘What do you suppose?’
She looked at me for a long moment. Looked at the apron covered in bright red flowers.
‘And then?’
I raised my shoulders slowly. Let them fall.
‘I hadn’t thought that far.’
She nodded.
‘Do you have any knives? Kitchen knives?’
‘A set,’ I said.
‘Good. But we also have to do some shopping.’
‘What are we buying?’
‘We’re buying a trunk.’
My wife and I were standing looking down on the open trunk and the body beside it, the knives and the saw on the table, when the apartment door opened. Her big and burly brother entered.
‘I asked him to help,’ she said.
He was carrying a parcel of brown paper wrapped in twine and a large can of olive oil, presumably from one of the Sabini brothers’ restaurants.
‘Let’s get to it,’ he said, scarcely glancing at the body.
Later, on the drive down to Brighton, I asked him: ‘What’s the plan?’
He smirked.
‘You’re mine now.’
We were trying to get the trunk out of the car, parked on the cliff edge across the road from the racetrack, when I spotted a middle-aged couple watching us suspiciously.
‘Change of plan,’ he said, pushing the trunk back into the boot and slamming it closed.
When I got home, late in the evening, my wife was waiting in the kitchen with an open bottle of Chianti. She handed me a glass.
‘Welcome home,’ she said.
I drank the wine. It tasted coppery.
‘Keep the apartment on for another six months,’ she said. ‘I’ll take the legs and feet in a suitcase to King’s Cross luggage office tomorrow. When it’s discovered, the police will think it’s the White family’s handiwork.’
The White family ruled Islington and King’s Cross, though it also had a piece of Soho.
‘Then our life can resume.’
I put my glass back on the table. I had to ask.
‘What did your brother do with the head?’
SIX
When the trunk was found at Brighton left luggage office, the press dubbed it ‘The Brighton Trunk Murder’. A few weeks later there was a second so-called Trunk Murder. That had nothing to do with me.
By then there had been a knock on my own door. A routine enquiry from a bored local policeman. The people near the racecourse had noted the registration of my car. I expected this. My brother-in-law had tutored me.
I told the bobby my car had been out of my possession at the time. Stolen. The policeman was satisfied with my answer. He did not even ask to see the vehicle.
It was the last I heard from any policeman. The torso was never identified. The murder was never solved.
For the next three years I devoted my life to my work but my wife and her brother ruled me. Then my wife and I went on holiday to Italy. We visited her family in Siena. We never went back to England. My wife never went anywhere again.
A terrible accident, I told the polizia. Horrible, I said. I had actually photographed it, I said.
We had gone to Spoleto, set among high, wooded hills, for me to see the magnificent fresco cycle by Fra Filippo Lippi in the cathedral. Such things did not interest my wife so her mood was not of the best, especially after an uncomfortable drive. After a late meal in our hotel dining room, we had slept in separate beds, though in the same room.
The next morning, I suggested we ignore the extensive Roman ruins in favour of the medieval aqueduct. She was interested in neither but reluctantly agreed to my plan.
We went to the east of the town and up a steep cobbled street. It was a hot morning and we moved slowly through promenading family groups.
We walked through a crumbling Roman arch and followed a path round the town’s curtain wall. The ground fell steeply away into a deep wooded ravine. It was spanned by the Ponte delle Torri, the half-mile-long bridge and aqueduct.
My wife peered down at the silvery thread of water in the very bottom of the ravine among a dense growth of ilex. I knew it to be a 300-foot drop.
‘Quite a feat of engineering,’ I said, squinting down the length of the bridge to a tower among the trees at the far end. I looked at the dozen thick pediments that held up the bridge and down at their foundations so far below.
‘Fourteenth century but built on Roman foundations,’ I said, though I knew my wife wasn’t interested. Her feet hurt from walking on the cobbles in her high-heeled shoes. I pulled my camera out of my bag. ‘I want to get a picture from the other side.’
‘I want to go back into town,’ my wife said. ‘It’s not like you to be so interested in taking snaps.’
I gestured at the bridge.
‘It’s spectacular. Look — there’s a walkway along the side. You want to come with me?’
‘I’ll wait here.’
‘Come on — I need you in the picture for scale.’
The bridge was essentially to carry a water pipe, which was cased in a ten-foot-high wall of brick. The walkway to the left of this casing was about four feet wide. As protection for people on the walkway, there was a low wall topped by a rail. The wooded ravine was an almost perfect V.
We had scarcely gone more than hundred yards when my wife, glancing down at the trees and the river so far below, lurched.
‘Vertigo?’ I said with concern.
‘I’m not going any further,’ she said. ‘This wall is too low.’
‘“Have ye courage, O my brethren? He hath heart who knows fear but vanquishes it, who sees the abyss but with pride.”’
My wife looked at me as if I was mad.
‘Nietzsche,’ I said. She snorted.