Page 60 of The Tuscan Child
The front door opened and a thin woman in black came out. She looked as if she had been crying constantly for some time. But she managed a weak sort of smile. “Paola. It is good of you to come.”
“I was concerned when I didn’t see you at the feast day.”
“How could I come and be joyful when one of the people eating and drinking there had killed my husband?” she demanded.
“You don’t know that, Francesca. It could well have been an outsider.”
“What sort of outsider? Which outsider would know about your well? They say he was jammed in there with his head down and left to drown. What kind of monster does that?”
“Maybe Gianni had made enemies,” Paola said. “He was not always wise in the company that he kept.”
“Gianni was always looking for a deal, that is true,” she agreed. “But he stayed away from criminals, from Mafia and gangs. There were rumours about him that just weren’t true. He liked to talk big, you know. Liked people to think that he lived with danger and intrigue. But it just wasn’t true. He was quite a timid man. But it does no good talking about it, does it? I don’t suppose they will ever get to the bottom of the murder. And where does it leave me? With no man to look after the sheep, to lift the heavy pots that make the cheese. I’ll have to sell up, if anyone will buy. Make do with my chickens and our few olive trees.” As she finished this tirade she seemed to notice me for the first time, standing back in the shadow of a cherry tree. “And who is this?” she asked.
“This is the young English lady who is staying with me,” Paola said. “She was kind enough to carry the basket for me up the hill.”
I felt those dark eyes analysing me critically. “The one who ...?” she began.
“That’s right,” Paola said. “The one who found your husband’s body with me.”
“It must have been a shock for her,” Francesca said.
“A shock for both of us,” Paola said. “I thought my heart would never start beating again. The poor man. What an end.”
“As you say, what an end. A most brutal and vicious man must have done this. And for what? Because Gianni wasn’t always wise in what he said?” She stopped, her hands toying with the apron she wore over her dress. “You’d better come in and have a glass of wine with me.”
“Of course,” Paola said. She motioned me to follow and we stepped into the darkness of the house. It was cramped and spartan inside but spotlessly clean. We sat at a wooden bench in the corner. Francesca took an earthenware jug from a shelf and poured us glasses of red wine. Then she put a plate of olives and some coarse bread out on the table. “Your health, Signorina,” she said, still examining me as if I was a creature from Mars.Perhaps I am the first foreigner she has met,I thought, but then I reminded myself that she had seen plenty of Germans during the war. That might have made her suspicious of all foreigners.
The two women talked. They spoke so rapidly and in their Tuscan dialect that much of what they said was lost on me. I found my attention wandering. I stared past them out of the window. There was a good view of San Salvatore from here. I picked out Sofia’s former house with the peeling yellow paint. Then I stared a little more intently. The windows at the back certainly opened onto the parapet. But from here it looked as if a stairway went down the outside of the wall just to the right of her house. So there was a way to bring up someone she wished to hide. I couldn’t wait to tell Renzo.
Finally, and to my relief, Paola got up. “I should be getting back to my daughter and the grandchild,” she said.
“Will you be attending the dancing in the piazza tonight?” Francesca asked, looking at me as well as Paola.
Paola chuckled. “I think my dancing days are over. But if the young lady wishes to go, I have no objection.”
“Oh, I don’t think it would be right for me to attend alone and to dance with strangers,” I said. “The police inspector already thinks I have a bad character because I had a glass of wine with the men of the town without a chaperone.”
“Why was an inspector from the police talking to you?” Francesca asked. “Why did he concern himself about your character?”
I realised instantly that I had opened up an embarrassing topic. I could hardly say that he was trying to pin her husband’s murder on me because he thought Gianni had tried to force himself on me and I had killed him in self-defence. I tried to come up with a reasonable thing to say. “He was being unpleasant to everyone,” I said. “He tried to make me confess to your husband’s murder because I was the one who found the body.”
“How ridiculous,” she said. “These police are idiots. Why should you have any reason to kill a man you had never met?”
“He was among those men at the table, I suppose,” I said. “I did exchange a few words with him. I said I was interested in seeing the countryside, and he offered to show me his sheep and how he makes cheese.”
“I see.” She was still frowning. “And why did you come to San Salvatore, Signorina?”
“My father was a British airman whose plane was shot down near here. I wondered if anybody knew anything about him.”
“In the war?”
“Yes. I don’t know any details. That’s why I came to find out.”
She waved a hand, dismissing this. “We were only children during the war. We learned to survive and hide away.”
“Yes. It seems nobody ever knew anything about a British pilot who survived a plane crash.”
“And was taken away by the Germans?”
