Chapter Thirty-Four
I do not get on the train.
I stand on platform nine at Milano Centrale at six ten in the morning with a ticket in my hand and a coffee I have not drunk, and the doors do the thing they do, and the train to Turin goes out from under that roof at three minutes past its own departure time, and I watch it go.
Then I walk back down the ramp to the car park and I get into my own car.
I want to be accurate about why, because I have been lying to myself in an orderly and professional manner for four years and I have decided, on a platform, at six in the morning, that today I am going to stop.
A train goes one way. That is the entire objection.
You buy the ticket and you sit down and the country moves past the window and at the far end of it there is a woman in a cafe, and there is not one kilometer of that journey where you can change your mind.
There is no lay-by on a railway. And I need there to be a lay-by.
I need there to be one hundred and forty kilometers of road with somewhere to stop on every one of them, because I am not certain, at ten past six in the morning, that I am going to arrive.
So I drive.
The car is a grey estate with a hundred and ninety thousand kilometers on it and lime dust worked so far into the carpet that the man at the hand car wash in Lambrate once asked me, with real curiosity, what I did.
There is a child’s seat in the back and it is empty, and there is a raisin box on the floor of the footwell, and a plastic dinosaur that is missing a leg, and a copy of a survey drawing of the north pier of the Cassaro Palazzo with a bite taken out of the corner of it.
And there is an envelope.
It came to the practice on Thursday, registered, and Ines signed for it because I was on a scaffold, and it has Farrell and Company, London on the back of it in a small grey type that is trying very hard not to be a shout. It is thick. It has been in the footwell of my car since Friday.
I know what it is. I do not know the words in it, and I know what it is, because a woman sat on my pallets on Monday and said my son’s deed in the middle of a sentence about a different thing, the way you drop a spoon into a drawer, and I heard it, and I did not pick it up, and she watched me not pick it up.
I have not opened it. I am not going to open it today. I put my bag on top of it, and I put the car in gear, and I go out onto the Viale and I head for the A4 and I do not look at the footwell once, which takes a great deal of my attention.
Giulia has Sophia. I rang her at half past five and she said yes before I finished the sentence, and then she said, “Nora. Is the building all right,” and I said, “The building is fine,” and she said, “Ah,” and she did not ask anything else, because she is sixty eight years old and she taught eleven year olds for thirty four years and she can hear a lie in her sleep.
I rang Marco at six. Ilaria has the site. Rosa Vanetti is not to be spoken to before eleven, and if the Superintendency man comes he is to be given the method statement and a chair and nothing else. Marco said, “And if the client comes?”
I did not answer for long enough that he heard it.
“He signs the book,” I said.
“He always signs the book.”
“I know he always signs the book, Marco.”
There was a small silence and I could hear the compressor starting behind him, which means Marco Belotti has been getting to my site an hour early since a ceiling came down and has never once mentioned it.
“Signora,” he said. “The trays are covered. Go where you are going.”
So I go.
The A4 out of Milan at seven in the morning is a river of lorries and I put myself in the middle lane behind a Slovenian truck carrying pipe and I stay there, and the sun comes up on my right over the flat, and there is mist standing in the rice fields at Novara like something left over from a previous world, and I do not put the radio on.
And I do what I have been doing since one o’clock this morning, which is to prepare.
I am very good at this. This is the thing I do.
When I go into a room with a Superintendency officer who has already decided to refuse me, I do not go in with a feeling.
I go in with fourteen photographs, a moisture profile, a comparable in Vicenza, and the name of the man he trained under. I have never once lost that room.
So I have my questions for Celine Marchetti.
One. Where did you meet him. Not what happened, not how many times, not any of the theatre.
Where, physically, in a building, in a city, did you first stand in a room with my husband, and who else was in it.
Because a woman who is telling the truth answers that in two seconds and a woman who is lying builds a small stage first.
Two. What did he smell like.
I am not proud of that one. I wrote it down at two in the morning on the back of a gauge log and I looked at it and I left it there.
Three. Who paid you, and when, and by what route, and do you still have the paper.
Four. The green dress. Who chose it. Where did you put it on.
Five. When you came through those doors and four hundred people turned around, why were you holding your own elbow.
By Novara I have twenty one questions and they are numbered and I have them in the order I want them and I have anticipated the four places where she will try to move me, and I feel exactly the way I feel at nine in the morning outside a Superintendency office with a folder under my arm, which is calm, and slightly cold, and very slightly cruel.
And then somewhere past Vercelli I stop being able to keep it up.
It happens between two lorries on a wet road.
It does not announce itself. I am doing a hundred and ten in the middle lane and I hear my own voice in my head laying out the third question in the correct tone, patient, level, the tone you use on a man who has decided to refuse you, and I hear, underneath it, the thing that has actually been running in me since ten o’clock last night.
I am not going to Turin to find out.
I have not prepared twenty one questions.
I have prepared twenty one traps. Every single one of them is built to catch her out, and not one of them is built to catch her telling the truth, and I have been sitting at a kitchen table since midnight designing an interrogation for a woman I have never met, with a verdict already written, and I called it preparation.
Ines said it to me on the telephone six hours ago and I said yes and I did not hear it. You are an investigator with a verdict.
I pull off at the services at Villarboit because my hands have gone strange on the wheel.
It is a bad services. A petrol station, a bar with a slot machine, a man in a high visibility jacket eating a sandwich on a bollard.
I park at the far end by the fence and turn the engine off, and the car goes very quiet, and there is a lorry idling somewhere and the wind moving the plastic on a pallet of firewood by the door.
And I make myself say it.
I am not afraid that Adrian Kastellanos slept with a woman in a green dress.
I have never been afraid of that. Not for one hour.
Not on the night, and not in a flat in Turin with a wall heater that did not work, and not since.
Ines knows it. I told her in a bar six days ago and I told her the exact truth and she did not understand what she was being given.
She did not know where to put her hands.
I knew in the first six seconds. I have known for four years that the woman was carried into that room like a chair.
And I built the whole of my life on him anyway.
That is the part. That is the part I have been walking around for thirteen weeks the way you walk around a hole in a floor without ever once looking down it. I did not need him to have done it. I have never needed him to have done it. What I needed was for the reason to be a small one.
Because if he sat in that chair for a woman, then he is a small man, and a small man is survivable.
You can carry a small man. You can put him in a box under a bed and you can raise a child and you can restore a palazzo and you can be thirty three years old on a scaffold in Milan and be, on most days, in most weather, all right.
I have had four years of practice at carrying a small man and I have got extremely good at it, and I have built a business on the muscle it gave me.
But if he sat in that chair with a debt note on the table and four thousand two hundred people on one side of it, then he is not a small man.
Then he is exactly the man I married. He is the man who stood in a lecture theatre in Rotterdam and asked a question about a pier that nobody else in the room was clever enough to ask.
He is the man who came up a ladder in a suit jacket and put his back under a ceiling.
He is a serious man who did a serious thing for a serious reason, and he did it to me, and he looked at me while he did it.
And you cannot put that in a box.
I sit in a car park on the A4 at seven forty in the morning with my hands in my lap.
I am not afraid he is guilty.
I have never been afraid he is guilty. I have been comforted by it. It has been the roof over my head. For four years I have gone to sleep under the word guilty the way you go to sleep under a good roof in bad weather, and I have never once in my life been so warm.
I am afraid he is not.
The man in the high visibility jacket finishes his sandwich and folds the paper into a small square and puts it in his pocket, which I notice, and I will remember that man for the rest of my life for no reason at all.
I start the car.
I come into Turin at ten past nine and it is raining, and I find the archive on a street of arcades behind Porta Nuova, and there is a cafe on the corner with a marble counter and a woman sitting at the third table with her back to the wall, facing the door, the way somebody sits when they have been waiting a long time to be found.
I stop on the pavement in the rain.
And I say it out loud, to a shop window, on a street in a city I do not know, with my hand on a door I have not opened.
“Please have slept with him.”