Chapter 37: The grey coat

Bruno watched him walk to the end of the street and turn the corner and disappear.

Neither of us moved for a moment.

"Cassano sent him," I said.

"Yes," Bruno said.

"How does Cassano know about Rosa?"

"Cassano has known about everything before we have," Bruno said. "From the beginning." He looked at the photograph in his hand. "He knew about the shell company before the investigators. He knew Sara's hotel before we did. He has had someone inside this from the start."

"And now he wants us to go to Rosa," I said.

"He wants Richard stopped," Bruno said. "Rosa is the fastest way to do that and Cassano knows it."

"So we are doing his work for him again," I said.

Bruno looked at me. "We are doing it for Daniel," he said. "And for your father's housekeeper who has been living alone and afraid for eight years because Richard found her first." He put the photograph in his jacket. "Cassano's reasons are his own."

We got in the car.

He drove and I sat with the address on the napkin in my hand and the photograph on my knee and outside the city thinned out and became roads and then fields and the sky opened up wide and grey above us.

Forty minutes in Bruno put his hand over mine on the seat.

I turned my hand and held his.

"Tell me about her," I said. "Rosa."

He was quiet for a moment. "She made bread every Friday. The whole house smelled of it by noon. Daniel used to steal pieces from the kitchen and she would shout at him and cut him a proper slice anyway." He looked at the road. "She came to my father's funeral. Stood at the back. I saw her but by the time I got through the crowd she was gone."

"She felt guilty," I said.

"She was protecting a boy she had watched grow up," Bruno said. "Daniel was twenty-two. She had known him since he was nine." He paused. "She made a choice that cost her everything and Richard made sure she could not undo it."

I looked at the road ahead.

The town appeared two hours later exactly as Luca had described. Small and quiet, a main street with a baker and a hardware shop and a church at the end. Bruno parked on the street and we walked to the address on the napkin, a narrow house with a blue door and a window box with dead flowers in it that nobody had cleared from winter.

Bruno knocked.

Footsteps inside. Slow ones.

The door opened.

Rosa was in her seventies, smaller than I had imagined, with white hair pulled back and eyes that moved from Bruno's face to mine and back again with the sharp assessment of someone who had been waiting for this visit for a long time and had decided how to handle it.

She looked at Bruno for a long moment.

"You grew up," she said.

"Yes," he said.

She stepped back from the door.

We went in.

The house was small and warm and very clean. She sat us at a kitchen table and put a pot of coffee on without asking and sat across from us with her hands flat on the table and looked at Bruno the way people look at someone they owe a debt they have not paid.

"He was here last night," she said.

"We know," Bruno said.

"He told me the payments would stop," she said. "That he had no more use for my silence because the situation had changed." She looked at her hands. "He wanted something else."

"What did he want?" I said.

"A new statement," she said. "Rewritten. He had it typed already. He wanted me to sign it and have it notarized by this morning."

"What did the statement say?" Bruno said.

Rosa looked at him steadily.

"That I witnessed your father fall," she said. "That Daniel was not present. That I had given my original statement under duress from you." She stopped. "He wanted me to say that you pressured me into protecting Daniel. That you knew what happened and covered it."

Bruno said nothing.

I put my hand on his arm under the table.

"Did you sign it?" I said.

"No," Rosa said.

The kitchen was very quiet.

"He will come back," Bruno said.

"I know," Rosa said. "He will come back with someone who frightens me more than he does and he will not ask this time." She looked at Bruno directly. "I have been frightened for eight years. I am tired of it."

"Then tell us what happened that night," Bruno said. "All of it. On record."

Rosa looked at him for a long moment.

Then she stood and went to the dresser against the wall and opened the bottom drawer and took out a brown envelope, thick and sealed, and set it on the table between us.

"I wrote it down three years ago," she said. "When I understood Richard was never going to let me go." She sat back down. "Everything. The argument. What Daniel said. What your father said." She stopped. "And what I saw at the bottom of those stairs."

Bruno looked at the envelope.

His hand came to rest on it.

"Bruno," Rosa said. "I am sorry. I should have spoken sooner. I was afraid and I told myself Daniel needed protecting and I kept telling myself that until I could not anymore."

Bruno looked at her.

"You are speaking now," he said.

Outside a car slowed on the street.

Rosa looked at the window.

The car did not pass.

It stopped.

Bruno picked up the envelope from the table and put it inside his jacket.

Rosa was already on her feet.

The car outside did not move. No doors opened. No one came to the front of the house. Just a black car sitting on a quiet street with its engine running and two shapes visible through the windscreen.

"Back door," Bruno said.

He looked at me and I looked at him and in that look was everything that did not need to be said. That we were not going to sit at Rosa's kitchen table and wait for whoever was in that car to decide it was time. That we had come too far and gathered too much to hand it over on a Tuesday

"They are waiting for instruction," Bruno said. "Richard has not told them to move yet."

"He is on the phone with someone," I said. "He does not send people into a situation without telling them exactly what to do first."

"Which means we have two minutes," Bruno said. "Maybe three."

Rosa picked up the grey cat and held it against her chest and looked at Bruno with the steady eyes of a woman who had made her decision and was not going back on it.

"Back door," Bruno said. "Now."

I took Rosa's free arm and we moved through the kitchen fast. Bruno went first and held the back door and through the front window the car door opened at last and a man's shoe hit the pavement.