The Viper by Christobel Kent

Author:Christobel Kent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Chapter Sixteen

BARTOLINI AND MARTINELLI there at the bar. Just a couple of locals, having a morning drink. The memory of that kept returning to Luisa, the particular atmosphere in the place, the vibration between those two. Childhood friends, he’d said, hadn’t he? Despite the old princess’s snobbery. She needed to talk to Sandro – but that would mean telling him she’d lied.

Sandro thought the answer to the murders lay in the house, in those who had been there, that was why he was haring round the country tracking them down. Luisa thought it was still there in the village, in the autumn air, in the forest.

She would confess. She just couldn’t do it if he wasn’t there, dammit. She got her things together, closed the shutters: she had an idea.

She might be in the centre of Florence but Sant’Anna was there, in the corner of her eye, just out of sight. The curving road through trees turning rusty, leading up, up to nowhere and the three points: the Salieri house on the ridge; Martinelli’s smallholding scattered under mangy trees; La Vipera. She knew, Luisa knew, she would go back there. She saw herself plodding up the potholed road in the dusk.

No dinner to prepare, no man to wait for: she was free.

If she had dwelt on the idea of living in solitude, it was not her but Sandro she imagined. How he would survive without her, if he would marry again: it was one of the patterns of thought the cancer had set scurrying, round and round. You could only discipline yourself: no more than once a week may that prospect be considered. She had never – and this was possibly the single advantage of a cancer diagnosis and one that she had not considered up to this point – thought about how she would survive without him. Luisa descended the stairs with the thought, suddenly uncertain of her balance: she had to put out a hand to the wall either side a second.

And then she was down and out into the noisy street, fragrant with the smell of bread from the corner bakery and some pale late blossom overhanging the rails of the little public garden between her and Santa Croce.

Sandro was a little overweight. He complained now and again of aches and pains. He had been to the doctor perhaps three times in his life. Sandro would be fine. Was it just mortality? You went from twenty to thirty in a fever of hard work, trying to get somewhere. Thirty to forty hoping, waiting for children that didn’t come. Then before you know it fifty’s there; sixty arrives even quicker but you’re still moving, still up and out every morning. Something else sits there on the horizon, though. Waiting.

She’d read and re-read the message he’d sent her. I’m sorry, darling. We’ve got to head up to Trentino to talk to some people. Might have to stay over.

And sometimes it comes before you see it. Johanna Nielsson didn’t see it coming.

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