Dead Season by Christobel Kent Page B

block it out from his other ear.
    ‘You’ve found a what?’
    ‘Go, go outside,’ she mouthed, making ushering movements.
    Gratefully Sandro took his hat and got to his feet, stopping to extract a handful of crumpled notes from his pocket and push them at her before hurrying for the door.
    Giuli sat and watched him go, and from behind the counter the worn-out woman in her blue overalls paused, her arms full of greasy trays, and her eyes fastened on Giuli.
    She’s wondering, thought Giuli. She thinks he’s probably my dad, but she’s not sure; for some reason the thought made her heart just a little heavy.
    She took a sip from her glass of water, ran it around inside her mouth. The coffee here wasn’t much good, she decided. It was bitter, but then, it was August. Nothing tasted the same in August.

C HAPTER E IGHT
    T HE SMALL CAR STUTTERED , jerked and nearly stalled as Sandro nudged into the traffic coming off the wide ring road and down from the hills that formed the city’s southern boundary. Half the road was up, down to one lane. At the big roundabout of the Piazza Ferrucci, south of the bridge of San Niccolo, the lights changed to red.
    Is it me? he wondered as he wrestled with the gears. Am I losing it? Surely he couldn’t have actually forgotten how to drive, even if it had been a while. The car – an ancient, unfashionable incarnation of Fiat’s smallest and most economical model – was dusty and unloved, its roof crusted with pigeon shit and last year’s leaves and all the city’s airborne filth. It did not inspire respect among his fellow drivers, which was why he was finding himself squeezed out at every junction and traffic light. He should have walked to lunch with Giuli, only the heat had defeated him, together with the thought of trying to have a fatherly chat when sweating into his suit. Calm , he thought. Pietro’s not going anywhere.
    He’d left the restaurant to stand under the huge portal to the city, the massive stone arch at the head of the artery that was the Via Romana, and tried to understand what Pietro was saying. Would the famous magic phone solve this problem he had of not being able to hear a damn thing on his mobile? Or perhaps he was just going deaf, along with everything else.
    ‘We’ve got a body,’ Pietro had seemed to be saying. ‘And I thought you might want a look at it.’
    ‘A body.’
    For a moment Sandro had stood very still as the world seemed to whirl on around him, the traffic, the dusty trees along the viale , a gang of tourists just brought up under the arch and their guide gesticulating upwards.
    In thirty years as a serving police officer in a big metropolis – most of those with Pietro beside him – Sandro had seen bodies before; he’d dealt with murders, but not so many that death meant nothing. That had been some time back, too: six months ago he’d investigated the death of a woman in a car accident, but by the time he’d seen her she’d been cleaned up, put back together and laid out on a refrigerated drawer under a sheet. It had been years – three, or was it four? – since he’d been first to a fatality and had to take the impact of it.
    ‘We’re at the scene,’ Pietro had said, and from his tone Sandro had known, even down a crackling mobile line with traffic noise in the background, that it was nasty. Pietro had spoken quietly – he’d never heard his old friend raise his voice – but there was just the trace of a shake, of hoarseness in the lower registers, that Sandro knew very well.
    ‘You OK, Peet?’ he had said, quietly in his turn. ‘Sounds like a bad one.’
    ‘Uh-huh,’ Pietro had said, and he had cleared his throat. ‘Not pretty. But he’s got ID on him, in the name of Claudio Brunello. A staff pass card, too, that says he’s the manager of a branch of the Banca di Toscana Provinciale.’
    ‘You remembered the name?’ he had said. ‘You haven’t lost your touch, Pietro.’
    ‘The story stuck,’ Pietro had