The Innocent (3 page)

‘All right, all right. I’m not criticising, just asking.’

‘And I’m telling you. I’m a gardener, not a policeman, for goodness’ sake. I ran up here as fast as I could, which is what any normal person would have done. Not fast enough, though, right?’ He cast a cold eye on the green remains of a face. ‘Must have been in there a while. The fish did all right out of it, anyway. It’s an ill wind …’

The marshal took a deep breath and advised himself to be patient.

‘So that was all she said? That she thought somebody had fallen in the pool?’

‘That’s right—no, she did say which pool, for what it’s worth. She said the one with the water hyacinths—that’s this stuff and there’s far too much of it, spreads like a weed but we’ve too much to do, so … There are a few pools and I’d never have thought to look up here, I mean, hardly anybody comes up here, why would they?’

‘Two people did, apparently, if not three.’

‘Three … ?’

That stopped him in his tracks. You had to bide your time with a Florentine who was acting cynical and aggressive to mask any emotional reaction. The marshal was something of an expert at biding his time.

‘How do you mean, three … ?’ His voice had become more subdued. ‘You think somebody—you don’t think she fell in …’

‘How deep is the water?’

‘About a metre, no more … maybe less.’ He started to sink down on to the stone ledge.

‘Don’t. Don’t sit down there. Stand away. Did you touch the body before I got here?’

‘No, I didn’t. I just looked. It took me a while to make out the …’ He faltered at the word ‘face’, whch was hardly surprising. What there was, framed in a mass of bulbous green plants, was mostly bone with a few slimy shreds tangled up in pond weed and floating black hair.

‘You can hardly see it—and you can tell by the plants I haven’t moved it.’

‘But you said ‘she’. You said, ‘You don’t think she fell in.’ How do you know it’s a woman, or a girl?’

‘I don’t know … I suppose because of the handbag.’

‘What handbag?’

‘It was on the ledge.’

‘And where is it now?’

‘I’m feeling a bit—’

‘Not there! Sit on that stone bench.’

‘I’ll be all right in a minute. I’m just a bit out of breath, that’s all it is. What with running up and down this hill.’

‘Sit there a minute and take some deep breaths. That’s it. Now then, this handbag?’

‘I took it with me when I went back down to my office to telephone you. I’ll go and get it.’

‘No.’

‘It’ll only take a minute. I think I’d better—’

‘No. I don’t want you touching it again. We’ll collect it. And we’ll have to fingerprint you, do you understand?’

But the man was clearly on the verge of being sick and the marshal took pity on him. ‘Go and get yourself a glass of water and stay down near the Annalena entrance to give directions to our people and the van from the Medico-legal Institute.’

The gardener hurried off, his head down. Once his footsteps on the gravel had faded away there was no sound except for the chinking of blackbirds, hopping in and out of the low box hedging. It was true that nobody ever came up here. A stroll around Boboli was usually an extra, somewhere for tourists to relax after an exhausting visit to the big galleries in the Pitti Palace. Somewhere, too, for students from the language schools to eat a slice of pizza, toasting themselves on the broad ledges of the amphitheatre, watched by prowling cats. The mothers of Florence had their own well-worn routes. They pushed their prams idly back and forth as they chatted on stone benches under the plane trees of the long avenue or trundled their pushchairs on the gravel to the famous pools. They showed their children Poseidon stirring the waters, threatening the orderly lines of potted lemons with his trident, or the ferocious marble Oceano, ruling his island, and bright goldfish, bigger than the pointing toddlers, who appeared out of the green gloom, hoping for a crust of bread. Nobody climbed up here. A secret place for lovers to meet, maybe … sitting entwined on that smooth warm stone. A lovers’ meeting gone wrong … or a discovery—

This thought was scattered as his memory, with a sudden jolt, threw up a sensation of panic and of his boots plunging into a raucous, flapping sea of hens and ducks …

Oh dear … even now he felt a hot flush of embarrassment at what would have happened if he’d been caught. Would his career in the army have ended before it began? Now he thought not, but at the time … Damn that priest!

It had been his first posting. Twenty-one years old, stuck in a village in the middle of nowhere. The woman was probably in her early thirties and he couldn’t for the life of him remember her name. Face like a madonna and a figure like Sophia Loren. She’d made no secret of the fact that her husband was shamefully neglectful of her needs and that he worked nights. And the church was right opposite. Of course, it was jealousy that made the priest call her husband like that and when she jumped up from the sofa at the sound of his motorbike there was no way out except by the kitchen window. He’d landed in the hen pen. Hens and ducks. Feathers everywhere and the row they kicked up … that was bad enough but at least he was dressed. If the husband had arrived ten minutes later … the risks we take when we’re young …

‘So,’ he murmured to the ravaged skull in its green bed, ‘what risk did you take?’ It could have been drugs, of course, but he didn’t think so. The gardens were closed at sunset, so this happened in daylight. An unlikely scenario. The marshal looked about him, wondering.

Water hyacinths, the gardener had said. Almost the entire surface of the pool was a carpet of pale round leaves and fat bulbous lumps. There was a small patch of dark-green water visible at the far side where a couple of ducks were eating themselves some space—that’s what must have jolted his memory—but apart from that there wasn’t a gap except for this small one. Spreads like a weed …

The marshal moved well away from the body—if there was a body—and got hold of a knot of the lumpy stuff. It bobbed on the water, attached to its neighbours but otherwise floating free on the surface.

‘Hmph.’ Well, that was all for the experts but as the marshal dried his hand on a white handkerchief, he couldn’t help wondering, not so much that this death had happened but that it should ever have been discovered, that a face should ever have appeared from that solid green mass. He sat down on the warm stone bench and looked around him.

This sunken botanical garden was walled with a high screen of laurel hedge beyond the wall. The pool was surrounded by a circle of potted palms and outside that began the low geometrical hedging of a formal garden. Very nicely clipped and so on, but really all this garden offered was seclusion. Whatever way you looked at it, it was difficult to imagine any reason to come here other than in search of privacy.

—Hardly anybody comes up here. Why would they? Well, plenty of people were coming now. The marshal could hear the cars arriving. He stood up as the van came through the iron gates.

Two men got out and started to slide the metal coffin out from the back. They were stopped and made to move the vehicle by the photo-technician who had to take his long shots before coming in closer and saying to the marshal, ‘Is it just a head or …’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Better shift some of this stuff once I’ve done some close-ups.’ But he was changing his lens. Shifting this stuff fell to two young carabinieri from Borgognissanti.

‘What if it won’t come up? We’ll need the proper tools. Isn’t there a gardener?’

‘No, no …’ the marshal said. ‘We don’t want to risk anybody else messing about near the body. Just pick it up, it floats … that’s it. Careful …’

But it was easy enough and soon a body was completely visible. Only the exposed face, neck and hands seemed to have been damaged, the rest, though swollen, was protected by clothing. The photo-technician moved in and the marshal, standing back with the two uniformed men, asked, ‘Has the magistrate been informed?’

‘The captain’s seen to it. Should we go down and meet him at the entrance?’

‘Yes, do. And if you don’t see the gardener who sent you up here, knock on his door, the long low building on your left at the foot of the slope. Apparently he picked up a handbag …’

What with waiting for the magistrate and then the doctor, the sun was going down by the time the body had been removed and the marshal could sit undisturbed in his office, examining the handbag and its contents. The photo-technician had given it back to him after fingerprinting. It was his job to write a report and then send the bag in a wax-sealed box to the prosecutor’s office. He intended to take his time. A woman’s handbag was a treasure trove of information. As he sat and stared at the one in front of him in its polythene evidence sack, he remembered the first such bag to have played a role in his life, his mother’s, a sacred object, never touched without express permission. He could remember one time when he’d been sent to fetch it, though he couldn’t remember the occasion. A funeral, perhaps. The handbag, large, plain and black, only appeared on Sunday for Holy Mass or for weddings, funerals and christenings.

Apart from market day, very much a shopping basket and purse outing, his mother never went anywhere. It must have been a funeral because the memory included the smell of beeswax candles. Probably his grandfather’s death. There was no body in the image, but the absence of one was palpable.

—Bring me my handbag from the wardrobe.

There was no need to specify which wardrobe. There was only one. Standing in his parents’ bedroom, he could hear his own heart thumping. The small low window was open but the outer shutters were closed and the air in the room was musty. A smell of mothballs mingled with the beeswax. The high bed with its crocheted counterpane and the dark wardrobe seemed to him immense and the small lightbulb with its frill of glass illuminated little beyond itself. He could remember nothing except that moment but he assumed now that if the handbag was wanted, then it was to pay something to the priest who was sitting downstairs with the women, drinking a glass of zibibbo. The men were all standing outside. He could just hear their low voices and smell a faint whiff of fresh cigarette smoke drifting up. The money in the handbag was only for church expenses. Coins were given to him and his sister, Nunziata, for the collection at Mass. They had a particular smell, those coins, a mixture of mothballs from the wardrobe, the dab of lavender scent on their mother’s handkerchief and sugared almonds, one of which they were given after Mass. They were always in the bag. They were favours saved from weddings and stayed in their little net bundles tied with a scrap of coloured ribbon. They in turn tasted of the mothballs, the coins and the dab of scent. Still, they were a treat and he was moved now by his mother’s thoughtfulness in making something special out of so little. Had there been anything else in the bag? Apart from her big black rosary and small black missal … there was something that made him shudder … a bottle … not the scent, surely—smelling salts! In a frightening green bottle, a sharp burning stink that could choke you. It had once been used when his sister fainted in church. Afterwards, she had been put to bed, writhing in pain, and from then on he remembered that smell with fear. Nobody would tell him what was happening so he listened in on the whispering women in the kitchen as they prepared camomile tea with a teaspoon of honey in it.

—She’s come on, bless her …

But what did it mean? Something from which he and his father were excluded, it seemed.

He removed the handbag from its sack. It was very different from the one his memory had conjured up, very soft leather, brown with the designer’s initials printed all over it in gold, like printed cloth. Equally unlike his mother’s, with its brief, unchanging inventory, this one was chock-a-block. Listing this lot was going to take some time. He tipped it all out and fished for a document in the pile of stuff. He found an identity card. Annamaria Gori, born in 1969 and resident in via Romana, not far, in fact, to judge by the number, from the Annalena entrance to the Boboli, about halfway between the Pitti Palace and the Porta Romana. Married name Bellini. He didn’t recognise the face but these little photos they did for documents …

‘So, what were you doing in that secret garden?’ he murmured to the unsmiling face.

Mid-thirties … time enough to have tired of Mr Bellini. Not very attractive. Perhaps the rest of the bag’s contents would tell him something. What a pile! The combined address book and diary, much scribbled on in pencil and various colours, contained nothing of interest. There was a dental appointment this morning which she certainly hadn’t kept. Dead three to four days, the doctor had said. He went back a page or two but found nothing that looked like a meeting with someone in the Boboli. He put the diary to one side and pulled his old typewriter towards him to start the report with its long list.

Another address book, older and smaller, bank receipts, a fat wallet and purse with banknotes, change, a driver’s licence and credit cards. Supermarket checkout slips, long ones, lots of them, dry-cleaner’s receipt, a few visiting cards, a letter in a pink envelope, a leaflet from a candidate in the municipal elections, more receipts, restaurant, hairdresser, a very expensive fashion shop, two combs, one broken, three lipsticks, one of them used up, a large bunch of keys, a half-eaten bar of chocolate, an unopened bar of the same chocolate …

On and on went the list, telling of a life in which there was plenty of money, little sense and no order.

Four packets of paper handkerchiefs, two of them opened, five used and crumpled paper handkerchiefs, three plastic ballpoint pens, none working, one gold fountain pen with empty cartridge, two brightly coloured felt tips, the pink one dried out and without its cap … When the list was typed, the marshal pulled it off the typewriter and stretched, yawning. He was hungry. Lorenzini opened the door. ‘Have you a minute?’

‘Mm … come in.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘I don’t know. There’s a document in this bag with an address—just down the road—have you seen her about?’