The Drowning River Read Online Free

arrived.
    Six hours and four coffees later, the desk drawers now stocked with stationery,
La Pulce
folded and unfolded a dozen times so he could stare uncomfortably at the ad he’d placed last week (‘Ex-officer from the Polizia dello Stato offers thirty years’ investigative experience and discreet and conscientious service. No job too small.’), Sandro wished he’d asked her to come back for a spot of lunch. Found himself feeling envious of her two mornings a week of being needed.
    That night, Luisa chattered on about the day at the shop. A
marchesa
had been caught shoplifting. Seventy if she was a day, she rattled around in a vast, freezing nineteenth-century pile on the hill up towards Fiesole and had given an Uccello to the Uffizi, but the Americans who used to rent her
piano nobile
for cash in hand must have got cold feet, what with all the terrorism, because she was clearly broke. Broke, but refusing to admit it. She’d swanned through the shop being gracious to all of them then put a handbag under her ancestral fur coat. The alarms had gone off when she’d tried to leave.
    ‘Are you listening?’ said Luisa. ‘I thought you’d be interested.’
    ‘Sorry,’ said Sandro. He’d been wondering how long he should sit there in the Via del Leone, before calling it quits. ‘Shoplifting?’ He wondered if she was about to suggest he should look for some work as a store detective, or private security standing by the cashpoints or the jewellers’ shops on the Ponte Vecchio in a toytown uniform. He’d have to hide whenever a real uniform turned up.
    She looked at him. ‘You’re not going to give up, are you.’ It wasn’t a question.
    As it turned out, Sandro nearly missed his first client. He had advertised his hours of business on the plate he’d had made at the door as well as in the small ads, as eight-thirty until twelve, two until seven. On the doorstep at eight twenty-five on day four, Friday, his key in the lock, he thought, to hell with it. Who turns up at eight-thirty? Not in the crime stories, they didn’t, in the
gialle
of Rex Stout and Raymond Chandler, they turned up around whisky time, beautiful hard-boiled women with long legs. He should have known, after thirty years, that trouble gets people up early in the morning. People lie awake in the early hours, waiting for it to get light. And private detectives often found themselves drinking whisky by ten, even in the
gialle.
    But, getting slack already, Sandro had put the key back in his pocket and turned away from the door, from the thought of all those hours to kill. He took a step towards the square, where on the way home yesterday he’d noticed a nicer-looking bar than the grubby one on the corner of the Via Santa Monaca. It was a big, bright place with a marble counter frequented by the market stallholders; he could almost see it from where he stood, full of real life. You could stand there and watch the little kids playing on the slides, the mothers with their bags full of vegetables. He’d had enough of his view of half an inch of Santa Maria dell’Carmine and eighty square metres of orange plastic tubing. He’d had enough of silence and solitude; he was going to the bar.
    But something made him turn around. An apologetic cough, a small sigh, ten metres behind him, at his own front door. He turned without thinking, and there she was, a copy of yesterday’s
La Pulce
in her hand.

Chapter Three
    Iris March Burrowed Under the duvet and listened. She could hear the drone of morning traffic in the street the other side of the three-foot-thick walls, but the big, dark apartment was as quiet as a tomb, and as cold.
    Iris wanted a cup of tea. Her nose was cold; her feet were cold; the apartment was colder than anywhere she’d ever been in her life, and it was a long way across uncarpeted stone to the kitchen. It was colder than school in England, where the windows rattled and the radiators were never more than tepid, and you sat pressed