Free Dead Season by Christobel Kent

he would make damn sure she never turned up there asking for him.’
    ‘Funny bank to choose, if he was just making it up on the spur of the moment,’ mused Luisa, head cocked as she looked at him. ‘Don’t you think? I mean, it’s such a dodo. Old-fashioned, obscure – I keep expecting it simply to vanish.’
    ‘That occurred to me, too,’ said Sandro thoughtfully. ‘And Pietro, for that matter.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe he picked it at random, or maybe he has some other connection with the bank we don’t know about.’
    With the departure of the garbage truck, the street was abruptly, albeit temporarily, deserted. Sandro blocked out the thought of that rusting wrought-iron balcony, on which they might both be sitting now, looking out towards the Casentino. ‘Although,’ he said, ‘the station branch is probably as far away from the Loggiata Hotel as you can get.’
    Chin in her hands on the windowsill, Luisa just nodded. ‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘But I still think it’s strange.’ Then she straightened. ‘I’m starving,’ she announced cheerfully. ‘Let’s go and get some breakfast.’

C HAPTER S IX
    E VEN IN A UGUST, THE Piazza Stazione was never deserted. Nor was it much of a piazza, surmounted by the low, modernist bulk of the Fascist-era station that overlooked a patch of sparse and scrubby grass. The blackened concrete façade of an ugly 1970s hotel to one side, the shabby bus station, a busy roundabout. Not much of a piazza at all.
    Where the hell was it? Sandro stood at the taxi rank and pondered. In front of him a group of foreign teenagers lounged on the ground, leaning on their backpacks. One of the girls – pudgy, pale, pretty – had taken off her T-shirt and was sunbathing in a bikini top; Sandro stared, so dispirited by the sight that momentarily he forgot why he was there.
    All right. He passed a hand over his sweating forehead. He’d looked up the branches of the Banca di Toscana Provinciale: there were three in the city, three more in the suburbs. The nearest one to the station was in a road called the Vicolo Sant’Angelo, but although he had lived in the city more or less his whole life, Sandro didn’t know it. Nor, it turned out, did any of the taxi drivers, but then again, in August, what did you expect? Those left in the city were the no-hopers, half of them probably didn’t even have driving licences.
    One of the news vendors inside would have a map he could look at; he knew most of them. But for the moment he stood, under the shade of the station’s portico, watched another girl from among the backpackers feed a piece of fruit into a boy’s mouth, and thought about Giulietta.
    He and Luisa had gone for breakfast to one of the big, gleaming, businesslike bars in the Piazza Signoria, a few metres from the shop and therefore very much on Luisa’s turf. Never mind that it was expensive, never mind it catered largely to tourists: the bar made its own pastries, it was clean and sparkling – marble, polished glass and yellow cloths – and there was the view. Not even the heat and the querulous voices of tired tourists shuffling past could spoil that: the fine turreted tower of the Palazzo Vecchio silhouetted against the glaring sky, the pale arcades of the Uffizi leading off to the river. Luisa had settled them on a corner of the wide terrace; the waiter had bowed to her because here she was royalty.
    Briskly Luisa had given their order: caffe macchiato , pastries filled with custard, a budino of sweet cooked rice, two glasses of water. Then folded her hands in her lap.
    ‘You know where you’re going?’ she’d said.
    Sandro had glanced sidelong at her and shrugged. ‘Of course.’
    ‘You should get one of those new phones,’ Luisa had said pensively. ‘You just key in an address, or the name of a restaurant – or a bank, for that matter – and eccolo ! All up on that little screen, telephone numbers, map, everything. I’d like one. Beppe in menswear has