A Woman Much Missed Read online

  A Woman Much Missed

  Valerio Varesi

  Translated from the Italian by

  Joseph Farrell

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by Valerio Varesi in English Translation

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Authors

  First published in the Italian language as L’affittacamere

  by Sperling & Kupfer in 2004

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  Copyright © 2004 by Edizioni Frassinelli

  English translation copyright © 2015 by Joseph Farrell

  Map © Emily Faccini

  The moral right of Valerio Varesi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Joseph Farrell asserts his moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 84866 687 0

  Print ISBN 978 0 85705 344 2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Valerio Varesi

  In English Translation

  River of Shadows

  The Dark Valley

  Gold, Frankincense and Dust

  I thank Simona Mammano,

  assistant police officer, for advice on procedural matters.

  And Ilde Buratti, for her support and invaluable suggestions.

  Author’s Note

  There are two different police forces in Italy: the CARABINIERI are a military unit belonging to the Ministry of Defence; the POLIZIA are a state police force belonging to the Ministry of the Interior.

  The maresciallo (carabinieri) and Commissario Soneri (polizia) can only be coordinated by the questura, otherwise they report to different ministries. As to the different hierarchies, the maresciallo is a rank below the commissario.

  1

  THE AFTERNOON WAS slipping idly by in an insidious silence. No word from the squad cars, nothing but yawns from the operations room and not a soul in the immigration office. As he walked along the deserted corridors, Commissario Soneri was already looking forward to the leisure of the festive period, during which he would be able to entertain thoughts he had kept at bay for weeks but which, now that he had dropped his guard, were surging cheerfully into his head. The pre-Christmas atmosphere made these moments to savour.

  He heard a telephone ringing in his colleagues’ office, and someone chattering away on the floor above in the premises occupied by the Drugs Squad, at this time of year even the pushers were taking time off. From his own office, he could look out onto the courtyard of the questura and see in the middle distance the wide gate which framed a section of Via Repubblica as though in a viewfinder, through which could be glimpsed big cars and ladies in fur coats caught up in the frantic round of seasonal acquisitions. Christmas to him meant memories of beechwood burning in the stove and the clink of spoons on plates of anolini in brodo, but he had no wish to abandon himself to melancholic recollections. To distract himself, he focused on the motionless fir trees lined up darkly in the mist and an elderly lady approaching under the shadow thrown by them. She was leaning on a walking stick, a little stooped, and was dressed in a dark green overcoat which reached to her ankles, carrying a large, floppy bag over her arm. He had a feeling he ought to know who she was. When she reached the centre of the yard, she stopped and looked around, but it was not clear whether she was there to observe the cloister, which she seemed never to have visited before, or was unsure which way to go. Soneri stared at that solitary figure, at her awkward, circumspect behaviour and laboured progress, and knew instinctively that something was troubling her.

  A few moments later, his telephone rang. “There’s a woman here who would like a word with you, sir,” said the officer on the door.

  “Did she say what she wanted?”

  He heard the officer’s mumbled words. “She says she has some worries about a friend of hers, another woman.”

  “What kind of worries?” the commissario said impatiently.

  “She rang the doorbell, but no-one answered. The same when she telephoned.”

  “See that she talks to Juvara,” he said brusquely.

  It would be the usual story: some old soul dying alone in her own home. An elderly lady, a stroke, the sort of thing the newspapers headline, LONELY TRAGEDY. In addition to being annoyed, Soneri also felt mildly disappointed. The old lady had at first sight aroused his curiosity, but now that feeling had evaporated, leaving mere routine and banality. By the time he resumed his seat, the peaceful atmosphere of the afternoon seemed to him definitively disrupted. He decided he had better write up some reports which had lying on his desk for a couple of weeks, but he had scarcely begun when the old woman’s voice penetrated from Juvara’s office next door.

  “I rang several times, I tell you, including last night.”

  The inspector’s questions were muffled, but the woman’s words pierced the wall. “No, no, look – it’s out of the question. She never just goes away, and anyway she has a boarding house to look after. I don’t know if you know it, Pensione Tagliavini. Her name is Giuditta Tagliavini. Everybody knows her. They all call her Ghitta for short.”

  The name brought back to him the memories that had been buzzing around in his head a few moments previously, when he was on the point of falling into a state of depression. That was the name he had been groping for. Who did not know Ghitta? Half the student body had passed though her furnished rooms, and many had gone on to become professors, doctors, lawyers or engineers. Not to mention the girls from the nursing college or the secretarial courses.

  “Look, Ghitta always pops out a couple of times a day, but if she was going away she’d have let me know.”

  Soneri heard her voice alternate with Juvara’s as she told her tale, and he found himself assailed by memories from thirty years ago when, standing in front of the Pensione Tagliavini, he was for the first time bowled over by the smile of a girl with a nurse’s white uniform folded over her arm. That was the first chapter in a love story, full of the passion and candour of two twenty-year-olds. Much later, when they were married, he used to tell her that the credit for everything should go to the pensione, to the endless comings and goings which had aroused the attention of a young, over-zealous police officer.

  “Please believe me, sir, Ghitta goes out on Thursdays, never on Sundays.”

  Ada, Soneri’s wife, had died fifteen years earlier, leaving him to wonder what it would h
ave been like for them to grow old together and bring up that son for whom she had died in childbirth. The baby boy had not lingered long either. He was already dying when he was delivered, and never uttered a sound. Soneri had vivid memories of his wife, but he could not recall anything about the baby. Sometimes he had the impression of something fluttering unseen around him, pleading to be loved for his own features, for the colour of his eyes and hair. His pain had no face to weep over.

  “I’m not the only one who’s rung the bell. Others have tried too, but there’s no answer, only silence.”

  Silence, the same response he received time after time when in his dreams his unconscious urged him to seek out the face of his lost wife or child. He was accustomed to listening to it as the clearest, most eloquent, most pitiless, indeed the only voice possible.

  Juvara must have been busy typing up the report because the old woman was dictating her address. Soneri made out only “Fernanda” and then “Via Saffi”. The Pensione Tagliavini was in Via Saffi, even though it could not be seen from the street. There was only the name at the foot of the address board on one side of the front door. He remembered the ditty made up by some of the more boorish students, vengefully chanted under a window by a rejected suitor:

  You want to screw a pretty whore?

  Then make your way to Ghitta’s door.

  He jumped to his feet and went next door. Juvara and the old woman were both standing behind the desk and turned wordlessly as he appeared in the doorway. She had a pale, soft face that seemed somehow boiled, but he recognised her instantly. Fernanda Schianchi, the next-door neighbour who took in lodgers when Ghitta had no vacancies. The woman returned his look but she did not react save for an almost imperceptible wink, as though between former lovers. She picked up her bag, put it over her arm, took the walking stick she had propped against the desk and slowly walked out.

  The commissario did not speak at once. He went to the window and watched the woman walk across the courtyard towards the main gate at the far side, where the rushing crowd would swallow her up. He worked out in his head the route she would take. Via Saffi was not far off, but why had she taken the trouble to come along in person rather than telephone? Did she know perfectly well who he was, or was she keen to make sure by looking him in the face? She had, after all, asked for him by name.

  He picked up the telephone and called the front gate. “That old woman who has just gone out, did she ask for me by name?”

  “Yes, sir. She told me she wanted to speak to Commissario Soneri, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered you.”

  He saw her black, slow shadow under an arch. She paused briefly beside the porter’s lodge, then stepped out into the street. Only then did Soneri turn to Juvara with a questioning look.

  “She was worried about her neighbour. There was no reply and she doesn’t think she’s gone out. Her name is—”

  “Ghitta Tagliavini,” Soneri said.

  “You know her?”

  The commissario gave a wave of his hand to say that, yes, he knew her well.

  “Did she have anything else to report?”

  “She’s rung the bell and knocked on the door.”

  “Do you have any idea why she came over here in person?”

  Juvara shrugged, unsure how he should reply.

  “Doesn’t it seem odd to you? She could have telephoned, couldn’t she?”

  “I had the impression . . .” The inspector stopped, searching for the right word.

  The commissario was staring out the window again. He turned and gestured to Juvara with the hand holding his cigar, prompting him to go on.

  “Well, the first thing she said to me was, ‘You’re not the commissario’.”

  Soneri turned, walked past Juvara’s desk and out of the door without saying another word. The inspector watched him bound across the courtyard, passing under the archway and out through the gate.

  As he made his way along the crowded street, the commissario was struck by the strange link between the thoughts that had been in his mind that afternoon and the reality he was faced with now. The past, the happy years he had spent with his wife, the Pensione Tagliavini, and then, out of the blue, with no apparent connection, the sight of the old woman in the courtyard, almost as though she had stepped out of his head. She had come looking for him, she had come to speak to him, and he was certain she had recognised him in spite of the countless men who must have passed through her life in the years when the pensione was fully operational.

  He walked more quickly in an attempt to catch up with her, but the crowds prevented him from moving as fast as he would have liked. He went over in his mind the best way to Via Saffi, and wondered how far she could have gone by now with her shuffling, stooped gait. Remembering the way made him feel once more as though he was shipwrecked amid recollections that were as silent and isolated as flashes of summer lightning. As he turned from Via Repubblica towards Piazzale dei Servi, he looked along the pavements, but nowhere could he make out the figure of an old woman moving along slowly. He stared down the dark lanes which opened off both sides of the street, but he saw nothing. Arriving at the front door of the Pensione Tagliavini, he pressed the buzzer next to the name SCHIANCHI, but heard neither a voice nor the click of a switch being pressed. He rang again, and then gave up. He crossed to the other side of the street and took up a waiting position. A black mood settled on him like the mist which was thickening at the bottom of the street, pressing against the barriers of Via Saffi and wrapping itself round the steeples of the Battistero.

  Half an hour later there was still no sign of Fernanda. He took out his mobile and called Juvara. “Did Signora Schianchi leave an address?”

  “Thirty-five, Via Saffi,” Juvara said.

  The commissario cut off the call. Though he was irritated at the inspector, who, he said, did not ask enough questions and lacked the curiosity required in a man in his position, he knew that he, not Juvara, was to blame and was annoyed with himself. He had not focused properly, he had been careless. A commissario should know that every person has a story to tell. Perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred are of no interest, and the problem was that it was impossible to tell which was the genuine article unless you listened to them all.

  He rang the buzzer again, to no avail. He tried the other numbers on the board, until finally he heard a click and the door opened. He found himself in a hallway lined with bicycles. He felt stunned and confused, as though he were on a journey back through time. Nothing had changed in that hallway since the days when he and Ada had exchanged final moments of intimacy after their dates. More than anything else, he was aware of the slight smell of damp emanating from the dark walls and the earthy odours rising up from the cellars. He was brought abruptly back to himself by a woman in a tracksuit leaning over the upstairs bannister.

  “I’m looking for Fernanda Schianchi,” Soneri said.

  “She away.” came the reply, in laboured Italian.

  The commissario climbed the stairs to the landing. Three doors led off it. He recognised the one that opened onto the Pensione Tagliavini. “Where did she go?” he asked.

  “Not know,” the woman said, now annoyed. “Yesterday she say she go,” she added with a shrug. With her blue eyes and short blond hair, the woman must be Slav.

  Soneri did not move. He put a cigar between his lips and stood there deep in thought, observing the door of the boarding house. It bore a brass nameplate on which PENSIONE TAGLIAVINI was carved in flowing italics. He heard the woman go back into her apartment without saying a word, followed by the sound of the bolt being pulled across behind her. Fernanda seemed to have vanished into thin air, as had Ghitta. As he moved towards Ghitta’s door, he heard someone ring her bell downstairs. Just as he was going to investigate, the lights went off. He turned back to switch them on again, but tripped in the dark. As he found the switch, the buzzer went again. He rushed down, but lost time locating the button to open front the door. He got it open just in time to see a motorbi
ke accelerating away into the mist gathering over Via Saffi.

  He went back up to the landing. His weariness was dispelled by a sudden sense of urgency and by a suspicion which weighed so heavily on him as to become a certainty. He approached Ghitta’s residence and tried to force his way in by shaking both handles on the double doors. One side vibrated, causing the lock to rattle, a sign that the door had only been pulled shut, not double locked. He took out his telephone card and put it into the gap between the doors at the level of the lock, a trick he had learned from a burglar many years previously. At the fifth attempt the lock sprang open.

  He was greeted by the heat of a gas stove, inside which a blue flame was dancing. Not much had changed there either. He remembered clearly the long corridor where he now stood, with doors leading off on both sides, the wall-mounted telephone with the ledge underneath for writing messages, the directory and the piggy bank for payment. The hatstand was still there, as were the prints of old Parma and the dressing table with the mirror where you could check your appearance before going out. There reigned over all a kind of provisional peace, suggesting a momentary absence. Lamplight shone in through the windows and was reflected in the glass drops of the chandelier, sending out faint sparks of light. In the semi-darkness Soneri recognised aspects of the house he had visited dozens of times, waiting for the girl who would become his wife, but now he felt like a robber. He did not switch on the light, even though he was gripped by a tension which left him rigid. He moved along the corridor until his attention was attracted by the door to one of the bedrooms which had been left ajar.

  That was the room where Ghitta slept, the only one that had always been locked. He pushed the door open with the back of his hand, wrapped a handkerchief round his fingers and switched on the light, but as he did so he realised he already knew what had taken place and that he was sure of what he would see. The light shone on a double bed onto which a drawer had been overturned. He knew what that meant. He stood staring at the jumble of cheap jewellery and souvenirs, postcards, photographs, holy pictures, old belts, fountain pens and one small, lined notebook with a wine-coloured cover. He turned back into the corridor to continue his search. Ghitta was in the kitchen, between the table and the sink. In the dim light he recognised the outline of her tiny body stretched out on the floor. She could still have been, in that darkness, the person he remembered, but the moment he switched on the neon lighting, with its mortuary glow, she became nothing more than just another corpse, already stiff and cold on the equally chill marble flooring. No matter how closely he observed her with the professional eye of the police officer, she still seemed to him an inviolate body, without bruises or wounds. A couple of coffee cups had been left on the draining board, and on the table he noticed two medicine bottles and some pills. He gently raised the old woman by one shoulder, and her whole body, light and almost desiccated, moved as one piece. There was no trace of blood. He made an effort to organise in his mind what he had seen so far, but found himself facing a mass of contradictions: the door pulled shut with only one turn of the lock; no sign of forced entry; the corpse left in such a way as to indicate a solitary death; the drawer turned upside down; the probability of theft, but two cups with some coffee still in them suggesting a friendly encounter.