painting. A gentle soul, who’d been kind to
Sophie – I’d spotted him at the requiem mass earlier Rutillio
had broken down when giving evidence at the
inquest. He greeted me with a sombre, 'Buona sera, Signor
Lister
I was glad I didn’t have enough Italian to make conversation
as I followed him across a cobbled forecourt, lit by
a string of lanterns, and out onto the terrace. The formal
garden lay ahead, stretching away into a reservoir of private
darkness.
It was a warm, starless evening. Rutillio handed me a torch
and, thanking him, I took the way he indicated around a huge
chalice-shaped fountain and down some steps into the
parterre. I’d no interest in the house.
When we came before, I’d helped Laura pack up our
daughter’s room and I didn’t need to see it again. Sophie
was always telling us she would have preferred to live somewhere
less grand, so she could experience the 'real’ Florence.
Sometimes I wonder, if we’d let her find her own level, whether
she would still be alive today. We weren’t over-protective
parents, but her mother . . . no, we both felt that she’d be
safe here in this haven of privilege and tranquillity.
On that visit Laura told me about a dream she’d had of
wandering through the villa’s reception rooms (all herringbone
parquet floors and gilt chairs lined up along the walls) throwing
open one set of double doors after another, calling Sophie’s
name, searching for her. She insists now she had this dream
weeks before the murder. I’m not sure if her memory can be
relied on. She certainly never spoke to me about a premonition
. but then I didn’t always confide in her either.
She knew I was coming here tonight. I would have liked
Laura at my side, but wild horses couldn’t have dragged her
back to the place where our angel was taken from us. The
kill site, the police called it.
A procession of classical statues, time-worn allegorical figures
on marble pedestals, loomed up in the light of my torch then
fell back into darkness as I walked down the central avenue,
the gravel crunching under my shoes. It’s not known if Sophie
came this way that night. The labyrinth of paths, laurel hedges,
and medulla-shaped borders didn’t yield a single clue as to
which route she took, or how her killer entered and left the
grounds.
The last time I was here the police refused to let me
enter the grotto, the scene of the crime, because it was still
being examined by Forensics. I’d just come come from
identifying Sophie’s body at the mortuary and I remember
standing in front of the limonaia, the colonnaded shelter
where lemon trees are kept in winter, and staring into that
dank cordoned-off opening, the white-suited figures creeping
about inside like maggots, and being overwhelmed by
a sense of utter devastation, unable to comprehend why this had happened.
I hadn’t returned to lay Sophie’s ghost, or to try to come
to terms with her loss (I knew I wasn’t going to find peace
or 'closure’, a word so false it makes me angry every time I
hear it), but the image of the grotto had become embedded
in my consciousness. It was like a black hole, a decaying star
at the centre of my existence into which I sometimes felt
everything was disappearing.
I needed to bear witness in some way to the absolute wrong
that was perpetrated here on my own flesh and blood … I
saw this as something left undone.
Yes, I took it personally.
Outside the limonaia, I stopped and looked back, raking the
beam across the shadowy rooms of the garden. It had been
laid out long before the villa itself was built, to conform with
some now-forgotten symbology – its hidden meaning, Sophie
told me once, supposedly to do with 'a secret trail leading
from the darkness of ignorance to the light of wisdom’. I
wasn’t into Renaissance gardens or the occult, but the
murderer could have been.
Taking the path I remembered leading into the boscos, the
unkempt corner at the far end of the garden, I soon came
on the mound of
Sophie – I’d spotted him at the requiem mass earlier Rutillio
had broken down when giving evidence at the
inquest. He greeted me with a sombre, 'Buona sera, Signor
Lister
I was glad I didn’t have enough Italian to make conversation
as I followed him across a cobbled forecourt, lit by
a string of lanterns, and out onto the terrace. The formal
garden lay ahead, stretching away into a reservoir of private
darkness.
It was a warm, starless evening. Rutillio handed me a torch
and, thanking him, I took the way he indicated around a huge
chalice-shaped fountain and down some steps into the
parterre. I’d no interest in the house.
When we came before, I’d helped Laura pack up our
daughter’s room and I didn’t need to see it again. Sophie
was always telling us she would have preferred to live somewhere
less grand, so she could experience the 'real’ Florence.
Sometimes I wonder, if we’d let her find her own level, whether
she would still be alive today. We weren’t over-protective
parents, but her mother . . . no, we both felt that she’d be
safe here in this haven of privilege and tranquillity.
On that visit Laura told me about a dream she’d had of
wandering through the villa’s reception rooms (all herringbone
parquet floors and gilt chairs lined up along the walls) throwing
open one set of double doors after another, calling Sophie’s
name, searching for her. She insists now she had this dream
weeks before the murder. I’m not sure if her memory can be
relied on. She certainly never spoke to me about a premonition
. but then I didn’t always confide in her either.
She knew I was coming here tonight. I would have liked
Laura at my side, but wild horses couldn’t have dragged her
back to the place where our angel was taken from us. The
kill site, the police called it.
A procession of classical statues, time-worn allegorical figures
on marble pedestals, loomed up in the light of my torch then
fell back into darkness as I walked down the central avenue,
the gravel crunching under my shoes. It’s not known if Sophie
came this way that night. The labyrinth of paths, laurel hedges,
and medulla-shaped borders didn’t yield a single clue as to
which route she took, or how her killer entered and left the
grounds.
The last time I was here the police refused to let me
enter the grotto, the scene of the crime, because it was still
being examined by Forensics. I’d just come come from
identifying Sophie’s body at the mortuary and I remember
standing in front of the limonaia, the colonnaded shelter
where lemon trees are kept in winter, and staring into that
dank cordoned-off opening, the white-suited figures creeping
about inside like maggots, and being overwhelmed by
a sense of utter devastation, unable to comprehend why this had happened.
I hadn’t returned to lay Sophie’s ghost, or to try to come
to terms with her loss (I knew I wasn’t going to find peace
or 'closure’, a word so false it makes me angry every time I
hear it), but the image of the grotto had become embedded
in my consciousness. It was like a black hole, a decaying star
at the centre of my existence into which I sometimes felt
everything was disappearing.
I needed to bear witness in some way to the absolute wrong
that was perpetrated here on my own flesh and blood … I
saw this as something left undone.
Yes, I took it personally.
Outside the limonaia, I stopped and looked back, raking the
beam across the shadowy rooms of the garden. It had been
laid out long before the villa itself was built, to conform with
some now-forgotten symbology – its hidden meaning, Sophie
told me once, supposedly to do with 'a secret trail leading
from the darkness of ignorance to the light of wisdom’. I
wasn’t into Renaissance gardens or the occult, but the
murderer could have been.
Taking the path I remembered leading into the boscos, the
unkempt corner at the far end of the garden, I soon came
on the mound of
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