The Savage Garden (41 page)

    The Pensione Amorini wasn't yet open for business. The shuttered windows of the ground floor allowed him to skirt the building undetected. He slipped into the back garden through the door in the stone wall. The kitchen was at the rear of the building, its windows giving directly onto the garden.

    He could hear voices and the clatter of crockery. Peering cautiously around the window frame, he saw Signora Fanelli loading up a tray with plates and bowls. Her back was to Adam, which meant he had a clear view of Fausto's left hand resting lightly on her arse. Signora Fanelli turned her head and kissed Fausto briefly on the lips.

    He walked to the bar in the Piazza Cavour as if in a trance. His head throbbed, his ribs pulsed with pain, and he was jittery from lack of sleep. Unsurprisingly, the coffee didn't help.

    He picked over the evidence of his own eyes, desperate to find fault with it. He couldn't. Antonella had claimed not to know Fausto, yet she clearly did know him. Signora Fanelli and Fausto's relationship had appeared to be one of vague acquaintance, yet there was obviously much more to it than that.

    Slowly, strand by sticky strand, the web they had spun to ensnare him came into focus. He couldn't see all of it, but he could see enough of it. Fausto was the key. It was Fausto who had first fired his suspicions about Maurizio with an apparently throwaway comment two weeks before. Fausto had backtracked, yes, but just enough to remove suspicion from himself while keeping Adam's interest alive. La Capannina in Viareggio had come from Fausto, just as the key to the top-floor rooms had come from Antonella. Christ, she had played it well, refusing him once before offering it up. And why had she offered herself up to him at the thermal spring? Because she thought he was leaving the next day? Because his work wasn't done yet, and she needed him to stay? The answer was obvious, impossible to ignore.

    Maria too had played her part, fueling tensions with Maurizio, raising the temperature. There had been no need to tell Maurizio about Adam's visit to the top-floor rooms, but she had done so. According to Signora Docci, it had also been Maria's idea that Adam wear Emilio's dinner jacket to the party, the cause of yet more antagonism with Maurizio.

    The evidence stacked up by itself. Almost every memory he turned to supported the case against them. Even his seduction by Signora Fanelli could be made to fit, and he felt sick to the pit of his stomach when he thought about it. He had been guided and steered since his very first night in San Casciano.

    But why him? He had figured it out by the time he'd drained another cup of coffee.

    Maurizio needed to be exposed, dethroned, if Villa Docci was to pass down Antonella's branch of the family. She had evidently set her heart on the place, but all she had to work with were her suspicions about Maurizio's involvement in Emilio's death. She also knew that Maurizio was far too wary to fall into a trap laid directly by her. So she'd used a puppet. She had pulled the strings and Adam had danced. And everything had gone according to plan until the very last moment.

    This was the only consolation in the affair—Maria's betrayal. Antonella hadn't banked on Maurizio outbidding her as the hammer came down. She had underestimated him. Maria, older and wiser, hadn't.

    He carried this pleasing thought with him as he strode briskly along the track back to Antonella's farmhouse.

    She wasn't there. Nor was her car. Both were gone. It was no bad thing. He would only have screamed at her. Or worse.

    He made do with snatching up a rock from the roadside and hurling it through her kitchen window.

    The farewells were absurd, Signora Docci the only unrehearsed actor in the farce. Knowing the stakes were high, Adam played his part to innocent perfection. So did Maria. Her eyes even misted with tears as she kissed him goodbye on both cheeks. Maurizio sweetly offered to drive Adam to the station himself.

    They sat side by side in silence for most of the journey. Time was on their side, and Adam asked if they could swing by Piazza Repubblica to pick up his photos of the memorial garden. Maurizio accompanied him inside the shop. He also insisted on staying with him until the train departed. His last words were to the point.

    "You have a good brain. Use it. Somewhere else. Not here. Don't ever come back here again."

    As the train jerked out of the station, he reached for the photos of the garden. He skipped over the ones of Flora, not because they were any worse than the others—he was a hopeless photographer, they were all second-rate—but because he felt ashamed. He felt as if he had let her down.

    There was to be no justice for the man who slept alongside her beneath the stone floor of the Docci family chapel.

    ENGLAND WAS IN THE GRIP OF A HEAT WAVE, WHICH meant there had been four whole days of uninterrupted sunshine. Adam woke to the sound of the rain hammering against the window on the morning of day five, his first morning back.

    His mother's opening words to him when he headed downstairs were, "I told him he should have taken his umbrella to work."

    It was a familiar phrase; he'd heard her utter it many times before in that gently reproachful way of hers. This time, though, it grated, it remained lodged in his brain while the coffee percolated and his mother sang the praises of the new pop-up toaster they'd purchased while he'd been away. The cat had also been neutered in his absence, he discovered.

    He didn't blame her. He knew he was party to the petty little exchanges that constituted life at home. He had shared nothing of any significance with his parents over dinner the night before, aside from some impressions of Italy and an account of his work at Villa Docci. His father's reaction to the news of Adam's unmasking of the garden could be described, at best, as one of grudging respect. Just as predictably, his mother had waited until she was alone with him before offering some heartfelt words of congratulation. Publicly, she always took her lead from her husband—a state of affairs that had irritated Adam in the past, but which now seemed wholly unacceptable.

    "Sit down, Mum."

    "Darling?"

    He carried the cup of tea he'd just made for her to the kitchen table, leaving her little choice but to join him.

    "It's lovely to have you back, darling."

    "Mum, I know about Dad."

    "About Dad?" she asked, a slight note of anxiety jarring with the cheery innocence.

    "Harry told me."

    Her gaze faltered. "He shouldn't have done that. I asked him not to."

    "Mum—"

    "He promised he wouldn't."

    "Mum—"

    "I'm very angry with him."

    "Mum." He reached across the table and took her hand.

    She bowed her head and stared at her cup of tea. He couldn't see her face behind the curtain of hair, but he could see her shoulders start to convulse. The first faint sobs built quickly in volume.

    He slid from his chair and skirted the table. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and held her tight while she bawled.

    Later, after they had talked, it was she who suggested they treat themselves to lunch at the Grey Friar—an old coaching inn set in a fold of the North Downs beyond the urban sprawl. It was known for the quality of its cooking and its exorbitant prices, and they only ever went there on special occasions. This felt like one. His mother certainly seemed to think so. She sank two sherries before the meal and even smoked one of Adam's cigarettes. They both ordered the trout, which they ate at a table in the garden now that the rain had stopped and the clouds were clearing.

    He told her everything that had happened to him in Italy. The only details he spared her were those of a more intimate nature. She rarely interrupted, allowing him to unburden himself.

    When he was finished, she said, "Well, you young people certainly do lead colorful lives."

    It was exactly the sort of thing she
would
say—exactly the sort of thing he had prayed she wouldn't say.

    "Oh for goodness sake, Adam," she snapped, "I was joking."

    The considered questions she now began firing at him suggested she'd been listening extremely attentively. She searched for an alternative interpretation of events, something that would remove the hurt of Antonella's deceit. When she failed to find anything, she consoled him—in the way that only a mother can.

    Adam's father was late home from work, but he returned bearing "extremely good news." His acquaintance at the Baltic Exchange had reiterated his offer of unpaid (but invaluable) work experience. Adam was welcome to start whenever he wanted.

    "I don't think I want to do it, Dad."

    "You don't think you want to do it?" scowled his father.

    "That's wrong. I
know
I don't."

    The inevitable argument ensued. At a certain point his father lost his temper. "As long as you're living under my roof and at my expense, you'll do as you're told."

    The sheer volume caught them both off guard.

    "How dare you!?" erupted Adam's mother. "How dare you talk like that!? You have no rights here. Not anymore."

    His father was struck utterly dumb, and Adam found himself transported to a small side-chapel in a Florentine church. Something in the shapeless anguish of his mother's mouth recalled Masaccio's Eve at the moment of her expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

    Silence continued to reign. Adam's father glanced at him and realized immediately that his secret was out. He had not anticipated this and he hung his head.

    "Tell him," said his mother. "Tell him what really happened in Italy. Tell him what they did to you."

    For a man who set great store by logic and cold fact, it was natural that his father should show more interest in the mechanics of Maurizio's crime and its discovery than in the human cost to Adam. However, he did find it in himself to say, "If that girl ever darkens this doorstep . . . well, I don't know
what
I'll do."