The Killing Room by Christobel Kent

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

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Giuli stood in a doorway on the Piazza Tasso, watching. The cigarette in her hand, the second of the day, was half smoked: she’d lit it from one the hairdresser’s girl had held up to her wordlessly as she emerged from the office.

Giuli knew that she should call Elena Giovese and tell her that her boyfriend was dead, after all. No one else would, would they? She just couldn’t quite think of how you would say it, and desperately she rebelled. Not fair. Thirty years ago she’d sat there listening to the school janitor telling her her mother had been found, dead of an overdose in a doorway. Why should she be the one to do it? She’d ask Sandro. Later.

The wide glazed doors of the Women’s Centre had swung open to admit or release the clients – as they’d been taught to call them – half a dozen times since she’d stood there, and still Giuli hadn’t seen what she wanted. She didn’t know what – or more to the point, who – she was waiting for yet, but she had an instinct. Whoever it was that had bullied Rosina into lying about Giuli would reveal herself.

The slightest touch, maybe not even that, maybe only a breath at her shoulder, and she jumped, turning.

‘Sweetheart.’ He was disappointed in her, the downturned eyes under the straight fringe. ‘I know what you’re doing.’ It was Enzo.

She dropped the cigarette, guiltily. ‘What are you doing here?’ She heard herself, like a schoolkid caught out.

‘I wanted to make sure you were all right,’ he said, gesturing at the motorino at the kerb. He must have shot over on it to find her.

He’d called, as he always did, to chat over his lunch break and Giuli had told him about Sandro, and his visit to the morgue. She’d heard the intake of breath that said this wasn’t their world, that Enzo, who’d come from the quiet grey hills at the foot of Monte Amiata, wanted nothing to do with it. But he’d come to find her.

The trees in the square, scrubby and battered from the children climbing them, were in full flower but not yet in leaf, and the sun shone pale through their branches on to the neglected earth. There was an afternoon lull in the viale’s traffic and the old stone wall that surrounded one side of the Piazza Tasso was golden in the afternoon light. Reluctantly Giuli looked back at the Centre’s doors.

‘You’re torturing yourself,’ Enzo said quietly, nodding towards the building. ‘What if someone sees you?’

Something rose inside Giuli she couldn’t subdue and when she turned to him, blazing, he took a step back. ‘I don’t care if they see me,’ she said. ‘Someone sent an email this morning. A picture, that was meant to rub my nose in it. Do I just hide?’ The address on the email pulsed somewhere just out of reach in her head: it was why she was here. She’d see a face, she’d make a connection.

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