The Savage Garden. Mark Mills

on which he remarked. ‘You never know when someone might need it,’ said Antonella simply.

      The lock gnashed at the key then conceded defeat. The interior was aglow, a ruddy sunlight slanting through the windows. Aside from a handful of old wooden pews the interior was almost completely devoid of furnishings. The thieves wouldn’t have been disappointed, though. The simple stone altar bore a painted triptych of the Adoration of the Magi. As they approached - silently, reverently – Adam tried to place it.

      The colliding perspectives, the elongated figures and the warmth of the tones suggested a painter from the Sienese school. The date was another matter. To his semi-trained eye, it could have been anything from the mid fourteenth to the mid fifteenth century, later even. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was distinctive, an unsettling blend of innocence and intensity – like the gaze of a child staring at you from the rear window of the car in front.

      ‘I must go there,’ said Adam.

      ‘Where?’

      ‘Siena.’

      ‘I’m impressed.’

      ‘Don’t be. I couldn’t tell you anything else about it.’

      ‘No one can.’

      ‘I’m sure someone could.’

      ‘I hope they don’t. Then there would be no more mystery.’

      They made a quick tour of the chapel, stopping at a small plaque set in the wall beneath one of the windows. There was a name and a date etched into the stone:

      EMILIO DOCCI

      27.7.1944

      ‘My uncle,’ said Antonella.

      ‘Your grandmother told me what happened. It’s a terrible story.’

      ‘He’s buried there.’ She pointed at the unmarked flagstones at her feet. ‘I never really knew him. We were living in Milan, and I was only ten or eleven when it happened.’

      Which would make her what…?

      ‘Twenty-four,’ she said, reading his mind. ‘And you?’

      ‘Twenty-two next month.’

      The words had a ring of desperation about them, as if he was trying to narrow the gap on her, and he quickly moved the conversation on.

      ‘Why did he keep his mother’s surname?’

      ‘To keep the Docci name alive. So did Maurizio. Not my mother – she’s a Ballerini.’

      ‘And you?’

      ‘I’m a Voli. Antonella Voli.’

      He returned her bow. ‘Adam Strickland.’

      ‘Strickland,’ she repeated. It wasn’t designed to roll off an Italian tongue.

      Adam glanced back at the plaque. ‘Is Emilio the reason the top floor of the villa isn’t used?’

      ‘Yes.’

      It had been her grandfather’s idea, apparently. The day after Emilio’s murder, the Allies had liberated San Casciano. Soldiers arrived. They searched the villa for intelligence left by the Germans before moving on. Her grandfather then had all the broken furniture from the terrace carried back upstairs. When this was done, he closed and locked the doors at the head of the staircase, sealing off the top floor. The rooms had remained that way ever since – undisturbed – on her grandfather’s insistence. When he died some years later, people assumed that Signora Docci would have them opened up, aired, repaired, re-used. But she had left them just as they were, just as they had always been.

      Adam lingered a moment when they left the chapel, casting a last look around the interior. Unless the information in the file was incorrect, then somewhere beneath the stone floor also lay the bones of Flora Bonfadio, dead some four hundred years.

      * * *

      They found Maria spreading the table on the terrace with a coarse white linen cloth. When Antonella stooped to kiss her on both cheeks, there was no mistaking the unguarded look of warmth in the older woman’s eyes. It visibly dimmed when she took in Adam hovering at a distance.

      ‘You must stay and meet my uncle and aunt. They’ll be here soon. Also my cousins.’

      ‘I should be going.’

      Maria’s expression suggested that this wasn’t such a bad idea. It also suggested that her grasp of the English language was far better than she liked to let on.

      ‘I insist,’ said Antonella.

      He stayed for only half an hour, but it was time enough to be won over by Maurizio’s easy-going charm and his wife’s mischievous wit. They made an attractive couple. He was dark and trim and distinguished looking, with a dusting of grey at the temples; Chiara Docci was a blonde and sharp-featured beauty whose husky laugh betrayed her passion for cigarettes, which she smoked relentlessly, to the evident disapproval of her two children, Rodolfo and Laura.

      ‘Mama, please,’ said Laura at one point.

      ‘I’m nervous, cara. How often does one meet a handsome young man who also has a brain?’

      Adam fielded her look and felt his cheeks flush.

      ‘Is it true?’ Maurizio asked. ‘Does he also have a brain?’

      ‘I’ve only just met him,’ Antonella replied, playfully noncommittal.

      Chiara blew a plume of smoke into the air. ‘That’s all it takes, my dear. The moment I met your uncle I knew I would have to search for mental stimulation elsewhere.’

      It was an odd sight for Adam, watching children openly laughing at a parent’s joke. And so wholeheartedly that he wondered for a moment if there wasn’t just a small grain of truth in Chiara’s quip. Somehow he doubted it, though. Maurizio was laughing along like a man who knows quite the reverse is true. His teeth were improbably white, Adam noted.

      ‘Your brain, my looks, wasn’t that the deal?’ retorted Maurizio, well aware that his wife left him standing in the looks department.

      ‘So what went wrong?’ said Antonella, nodding at her cousins, the offspring.

      More laughter. And more wine. Then a discussion about a forthcoming party at the villa, which Adam would be a fool to miss. Adam, though, wasn’t really listening. He was observing them, with their lively banter and their air of easy affluence, their coal-black hair and their honeyed complexions. A breed apart.

      He felt a sudden urge to be gone. Maria spared him having to make an excuse, materializing from the villa with the news that Signora Docci was ready to receive her family.

      Antonella accompanied Adam to the courtyard, where the bicycle stood propped against the well-head.

      ‘My grandfather’s,’ she said, her long fingers sliding over the leather saddle. ‘He used to put us in the basket when we were young and make us shout Ay Caramba!’

      She kissed him on both cheeks, her hand lightly touching his arm as she did so.

      Negotiating the turn at the bottom of the driveway, he could still feel the delicate pressure of her fingers at his elbow.

      9

       Have they gone yet?

       Didn’t you hear the car leave?

       Are you angry, Maria?

       Angry?

       You always answer a question with a question when you’re angry.

       Do I, Signora?

       Or sad.