Some Bitter Taste Read online

  ‘They’ve thrown something out, like one of those big black rubbish bags …’ The young carabiniere’s voice was shaky. You could hear him trying to swallow. He knew it wasn’t a rubbish bag but wanted it to be one.

  ‘Get out and put the triangle in place. Then stay on the verge.’ Lorenzini pulled over to the right as far as possible, warning lights flashing.

  The dark bundle had stopped rolling. They had it in sight. It shifted and rose up in the road, alive and on all fours.

  ‘Look! There on the left!’

  ‘Triangle! All we need is an accident now!’ The lad ran back with the red warning triangle. The marshal and Lorenzini got out and lifted their hands towards the girl.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ Lorenzini called. ‘It’s incredible, she looks like she’s not hurt at all. She’s on her feet … .’ He stepped into the road, shouting, ‘Stand still!’

  Her clothes must have been black or nearly so. They could only see her face, small and white. She swayed and took a step towards them.

  ‘No! Lorenzini, get over there. Get hold of her!’ Oh no, no …

  Lorenzini started across and stopped as headlights came from his right. To the left came others, a spinning blue light, a siren.

  Lorenzini was silhouetted against the lights of the car speeding at them from the right, holding up his hand. The marshal’s eyes were fixed on the girl’s face, willing her to react, knowing that she wouldn’t, seeing she was stunned, realising what would happen. It was a child’s face that he saw as she tottered towards him. She seemed to be speaking but the siren coming nearer on the left drowned out her voice. In the seconds before the car coming from the right hit her, she met the marshal’s gaze, reached out her hand to him, and smiled.

  She spun in the air like a dummy in an action film, then flopped into the road. The car, its brakes screaming, ran over her with a loud crunch and stopped.

  There is a moment immediately following any disaster which seems interminable, a moment when the world around you holds its breath. A crack has opened up in life’s surface which will swallow up some and to which the rest must adjust. But first the shocked pause. Then, if it is a road accident, the unbearable silence is filled with shouts for action, murmurs of distress, or cries of panic. Windows crash open, a crowd collects, the right uniforms are summoned, black ones and white. The right noises are heard—sirens, brakes, the clatter of stretchers lowered from the backs of ambulances—another moment of silence, this one heavy with interest, as the dead or injured are collected, then a slower, duller scene as numbers are recorded and measurements taken. All but the most assiduous spectators start drifting back to their houses, their jobs, their interrupted topics of conversation. The unaffected, the unknowing, press in and want to press on, their horns hooting at the inexplicable, irritating delay. The last scene is dull and brief. Someone tosses sand or soapy water over a blood slick, damaged vehicles are towed away, and traffic resumes its normal route as life absorbs the event and flows on.

  But a motorway at night is a desolate place, a no-man’s-land, the marshal thought, as they waited out in the hot darkness for the ambulance, with only two sets of car headlights and the blue light on the roof of One one seven circling in the silence to illuminate trees, a pylon, a man vomiting in the grass verge, a barrier being set up down the dark road, trees, the car with a twisted bumper standing crooked across two lanes, trees, a pylon, a man vomiting, a barrier …

  Under the car with the twisted bumper a torch had revealed a widening pool of blood that issued from a white patch in the girl’s skull. Somebody had felt for and found a faint pulse in the neck. Nobody dared risk moving her or the car. She was bleeding to death.

  The marshal didn’t speak. He breathed more easily once the ambulance and the fire brigade arrived and there was strong light, movement, voices. They said she wasn’t trapped and the car was moved. They said she was alive, and a doctor inserted a needle in her arm and held a bottle of colourless liquid above her. They put her on a stretcher, and the marshal glimpsed a small white face. When they were moving her, the body looked too limp and formless to be a live body. Yet they said she was alive. The floppy little limbs conjured up an image of his father dumping the flaccid, still-warm body of a rabbit onto the kitchen table for his mother to skin. A sliver of skull showed as white as the small face. She looked too young to be out alone at night. If, when she had got to her feet, stunned but evidently not much hurt, she had taken two steps in the opposite direction, she would have been on the grass verge when that car came by. But she hadn’t. Probably attracted by their car lights, by the figure of the marshal holding out an arm in her direction, she had moved towards him, saying something he couldn’t hear, and smiling.

  Six

  ‘There’s really no point in your waiting about—unless A you can identify her for us.’ They had found no documents on the girl, as was to be expected.

  ‘I can’t identify her now but I’ve an idea I’ll be able to later.’ The marshal would have liked to ask the nurse about the limbs, flaccid and out of alignment, like those of a corpse, a little dead rabbit, when they transferred her from the stretcher to a hospital trolley, but he hadn’t and he didn’t know how to broach the matter now. ‘We’ll wait to hear what the doctor has to tell us, then we’ll go.’

  ‘Well, as long as you’re not expecting her to regain consciousness, make a statement about what happened.’

  ‘No, no … I’m afraid we know what happened. We were following the car.’

  The nurse had no time to comment. Ambulance men were bringing an overdose case in, followed by two policemen. A man had just been pronounced dead on arrival after a heart attack and his wife was sobbing and protesting, beating her fists against a young doctor’s chest. Three or four people with minor injuries were sitting on a row of plastic chairs, their faces grey, their energy sapped by waiting as more urgent cases were wheeled past them.

  Lorenzini said, ‘I’ll get us a coffee from the machine,’ and they, too, settled on hard red chairs and sipped the boiling coffee, burning their fingers on the tiny plastic cups. ‘Will you get in touch with Dori?’

  ‘I’ll try. I’m hoping she’s married by now but if she’s not this should tip the scale whether this girl’s her friend or not.’

  ‘D’you think so? She always looks to me like somebody who can take care of herself.’

  ‘They always look tougher than they are. What they are is brutalised, hard-shelled.’

  ‘You may be right. Here. There’s a bin at this end.’ Lorenzini tossed their cups and yawned. ‘God, what a long day. How did your visit to the villa go?’

  ‘It didn’t. At least, I went up there but Sir Christopher wasn’t well. He’s had a bit of a stroke recently and now he can’t stand any exertion or excitement. He told me he had rheumatic fever as a child.’

  ‘Ah, like my mother. She had two or three minor strokes before the one she died of. Does for the heart valves, that’s what it is, bits floating free, blocking the circulation. Does that mean you’ll have to trail up there again? Three visits for a stolen hairbrush or whatever it was? One law for the rich…’

  ‘Mmph … But not one rheumatic fever for the rich …’

  As a matter of fact, though he hadn’t seen Sir Christopher, the marshal’s visit had at least served to satisfy a little of his curiosity about the day-to-day running of a rich man’s life, though in some respects it left him more baffled than before, especially as to the lack of an adequate staff for a place of that size. A young foreigner, a gardener, very tall and fair, had met him at the gates, saying he’d had orders to take him to the housekeeper. He spoke into a walkie-talkie before they set out up the drive together on foot at the marshal’s suggestion.

  ‘Your driver can go into the lodge, if you like.’

  ‘No, no. He’s all right parked in the shade there.’ A walk meant time for a few improvised questions. ‘Do you work here full-time?’

  ‘In the garden, yes, sort of—that is, at
the moment I do but that’s because I’m on holiday. I’m a student of horticulture from England.’

  ‘From England? You speak Italian well.’

  ‘For a foreigner, you mean. Of course, I picked up a Florentine accent from the other gardeners, which is better than the horrible English accent you get when you study a language instead of just speaking it. Anyway, it’ll look good on my CV having worked here and this is my fourth time. I’d like to be here permanently when I get my degree.’ He slowed his walk and turned to the marshal, lowering his voice, though there wasn’t a soul in sight. ‘What I am, really, is a sort of poor relation.’

  ‘A relation?’

  ‘Distant. Very distant and very poor.’ He laughed. His deep blue eyes were merry but his voice remained cautiously lowered. ‘My mother’s a distant relation, second cousin twice removed or something, of somebody who married into Sir Christopher’s mother’s family. She wrote to Sir Christopher about me and got a polite reply, so here I am.’

  ‘And how do you get on with him?’

  ‘Oh, he’s very gracious. He comes every morning to talk to us, mostly to the head gardener, of course. He was born here and he inherited his cottage, under Sir Christopher’s father’s will—can you see it? Over there between the two vineyards.’

  The marshal was astonished. ‘Up on the rise? The gardener lives there?’

  ‘No!’ The boy lowered his voice to such a whisper that the marshal had to pause and bend closer to hear him. ‘The gardener’s cottage is much nearer, low down; you can only see the roof. That house up there is quite a big villa, used to be for guests, Sir Christopher’s precious royals and writers and artists and multimillionaires. The housekeeper could tell you a thing or two about that. She says his father’s hobby was picking up antiquities and his is dropping names. She disapproves. It seems a harmless enough pastime to me. Got him a knighthood, as well.’

  ‘I thought painting was his hobby.’

  ‘Oh, good Lord, no! He takes that seriously. That’s less harmless in my opinion. Entitlement complex, d’you know what I mean?’

  ‘I—no, no, I don’t follow you.’

  ‘People born with a silver spoon—or would you say a silk shirt?—think they’re entitled to be whatever they fancy, including being a famous painter, without a smidgeon of talent. As far as artistic things go it’s kind of pathetic, really, because it allows rich people to waste their entire lives on something they’re no good at and they must know, however hard they try and kid themselves, don’t you think? The trouble is that in some areas it works, like in landscape gardening, which is what I want to do. I haven’t a hope unless I’m lucky enough to stay on here but I see plenty of people who do make it, not because of talent but because they either inherit a good house and land or marry it. I wish I could swap ambitions with Sir Christopher—I mean, I could afford a box of paints and a canvas but what I need to work with is all this.’

  The marshal looked around him at ‘all this’ and saw his point.

  ‘It’s a shame, from my point of view, that the fancy visitors don’t still come. Potential clients, you know. But there’s nobody up in the guests’ villa now. What’s the main villa like? Have you been inside?’

  ‘For a minute. Do you mean you haven’t?’

  ‘Never set foot. He acknowledged my arrival through the head gardener but I doubt if he’d know who I was if he came along now and saw me.’

  Which brought the marshal to the point that so baffled him.

  ‘How is it that I’ve seen so few people here? This is only my second visit, I know, but I don’t seem to see any staff—apart from a secretary.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to see the staff in a place like this, Marshal.’

  ‘I suppose not … I hadn’t thought.’

  ‘Even so, you have a point. For instance, apart from the head gardener and myself, there are six gardeners who live out and who are mosdy on holiday now. This is a dead period in the garden. Even the weeds don’t grow in this dry, hot season. The head gardener himself will go on holiday for all of August. As for the house, well, since there are no guests now because of Sir Christopher’s health, poor old sod, there’s nobody left of the live-in staff except the housekeeper and the cook. The last buder wasn’t replaced when he went after the big robbery, and the house and kitchen maids come in from outside. The cook’s on her holidays at the moment and there’s an English cook filling in for a month. The housekeeper goes away in August and, given the mood she’s in, I shouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t come back. The head gardener says it’s because of your fingerprinting. You don’t really suspect her, do you?’

  ‘Of course not. I wasn’t here but I’m sure everyone working in the house was fingerprinted. That’s because they have to be excluded, and only unidentified fingerprints and those found where they shouldn’t be need checking.’

  ‘They think here it was poor Giorgio. That’s because he’s Albanian. The housekeeper keeps going on about letting foreigners in the house. In front of me, of course.’

  ‘If she’s that distressed about it perhaps I should have a word with her while I’m here.’

  ‘She’s distressed all right. Hers were the only prints in Sir Christopher’s father’s bedroom and she knows it. She looks after that room herself. It’s never used except when Sir Christopher gets sentimental and goes in there and communes with his dead father. She lets him in and she’s actually heard him. She has the keys, so you see…’

  ‘Keys can be copied.’

  ‘I know. And thieves wear gloves, which housekeepers don’t. His hairbrushes … I ask you … what an idea. Well, it’ll all be dropped now, I suppose. Of course, if the housekeeper does leave it’ll suit some people … I suppose you know all about the big robbery a few years ago?’

  ‘Yes. You seem to know a great deal about everything yourself.’

  He laughed quieuy. ‘Oh, yes. Gardeners work in pairs most of the time, you know, and we have to have something to talk about other than the greenfly problem. Well, here you are. I’ll be surprised if you get to see him. They say he was very ill yesterday and this morning. Upset, I suppose, poor chap. I think he’s a good man. All the workers here like him and I go by that more than anything. In any case, I’d really like to go on working here after … I hope you do see him. The head gardener says, and the housekeeper as well, that he’s really taken by you. My name’s Jim, by the way. We must have a talk one day …’

  The marshal didn’t get to see Sir Christopher, or even the disgruntled housekeeper. He had just started wondering if the young gardener had hopes of the marshal’s putting in a good word for him—which was ridiculous, though he liked the lad—when Porteous appeared in a doorway and the youngster melted away as if by magic, without another word.

  ‘I’m sorry but Sir Christopher is unwell, very unwell. I fear you’ve had a wasted journey.’

  ‘No, no.’ The marshal showed Porteous some sheets of paper from a plastic folder. ‘If you would give this to Sir Christopher to read and sign—it’s the official report of the robbery. The copy is for him to keep for the insurance.’

  ‘Yes, yes. His lawyer will see to all that. He’s with Sir Christopher now.’ He hesitated and evidently had second thoughts about turning the marshal away quite so brusquely. ‘Follow me.’

  Not to the kitchen offices this time, at any rate. After the high-domed hall with the mosaic floor and dry fountain they had turned left and walked through dim corridors for some time in silence before the marshal was left waiting outside the door while Porteous slipped into a room. His hand remained visible as he held the door slighdy ajar. The marshal, though trying his best, was unable to distinguish a word of what was said until Porteous had come out and walked off in a hurry, telling him to wait. Then the door began to open again and Sir Christopher’s voice was audible, high-pitched, weak, and anxious.

  ‘The small bequests particularly—’ Was that what he said? ‘Maul … becess … pe-ic-yery.’ He kept repeating it. Was h
e drunk? Was that why the marshal had been sent for and then not admitted?

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll have everything drafted for tomorrow.’

  ‘Pe-hicu-yery!—’ All those bottles in the garden that day. Perhaps the marshal, influenced by the sleepy beauty of the summer garden, had been romanticising and it wasn’t the approach of death that made Sir Christopher close his eyes and forget their presence but an excess of alcohol. The English were said to drink a lot.

  An almost inaudible murmur and the lawyer appeared, closing the door softly behind him. The marshal’s big eyes bulged at the sight of him. The man had extraordinary deep blue eyes and thick, soft lashes, remarkable enough in themselves, but what surprised the marshal was his youth. Surely the lawyer of a man as important as Sir Christopher should be someone mature, experienced. Of course, he might just be a junior partner from a large firm. A very prosperous-looking one, mind you. Or else it was the marshal showing his age again.

  ‘You have something for me?’ He took a gold pen from his inside pocket and, with a plump, manicured hand, put a tiny signature on one copy of the theft report and kept the other without comment. He guided the marshal back for most of the way he had come with the air of someone leading a bear on a chain.

  ‘Straight across the hall…’

  ‘Thank you. I can manage from here.’ He hadn’t hurried, taking the opportunity to peer up into the gloom of the frescoed dome and walk, almost on tiptoe, close to the fountain. He wondered if it was ever turned on and decided not. The marble bowl was dry and dusty.

  ‘No guests now because of Sir Christophers health, poor old sod.’

  The whole place, in the marshal’s opinion, looked dry and dusty and very sad. A noise from his right attracted his attention. Somebody was crying. A light was burning beyond partly open double doors. A boyish voice protested something the marshal couldn’t understand though he made out one or two words. Then the same voice dissolving into tears. The marshal stood still. He saw a hand, Porteous’s hand, he was sure of that, making a small repetitive movement. A face turned into the light. The upturned face of a young, tearful boy. Porteous was touching his shoulder, making not so much a patting movement as a tiny, circular massaging one.