Free A Darkness Descending by Christobel Kent

faced down Niccolò Rosselli’s mother.’
    ‘Well,’ said Luisa, ‘that takes some doing, too.’
    Sandro nodded. ‘You’re telling me. And in that lawyer’s office? We could have gone on for days, trying to find out anything. She’s a tough nut, that old woman.’
    ‘Are you getting paid for this?’ Luisa said abruptly, leaning forward across the restaurant table. ‘This Rosselli investigation, whatever it turns out to be?’
    Sandro grimaced. ‘Well, that’s the weirdest part of it,’ he said slowly. ‘You know what? We might even get paid.’
    That had been strange: the old woman abruptly deciding to trust them had been startling enough, and then the offer of money. He’d have said she’d be the last person to offer hard cash to a private detective.
    Not that he’d had the impression that Maria Rosselli had given in: she’d looked at Giuli, at Sandro, at the lawyer, and had made a calculation. Sandro imagined that it was hard for her to admit that she needed help, but she was too clever not to.
    ‘All right,’ was what Maria Rosselli had said, addressing Sandro directly as she treated the lawyer’s room as though it were her own, jaw still set hard as iron. ‘All right. She’s left him. That stupid girl has left him. Beh! Not even the excuse of being a girl … at her age, it’s ridiculous. I tell him, it makes no difference, we can manage without her. She hardly knew what she was doing with the child anyway.’
    Giuli and Sandro had been openly staring at her at this point. Sandro had found himself wondering how this woman had earned a living, brought up her only child on her own. He imagined there wasn’t much that Maria Rosselli wouldn’t be capable of, if she wanted it badly enough. Her certainty was frightening.
    ‘You mean his – his wife?’ Maria Rosselli had turned her deepset dark eyes on Giuli when she’d spoken, assessing her all over again. Giuli had raised her chin and bravely continued. ‘Niccolò’s – your son’s wife has left him?’
    ‘They were never married,’ the mother-in-law had said with blunt contempt. ‘She has no rights. I said that to him.’
    Sandro had turned his head to ease the stiffness he’d felt building up as he’d tried to take in what Maria Rosselli was saying. ‘The selfishness,’ she’d said coldly. ‘The neglect of duty, the weakness. It’s unforgivable. You can see what it’s done to him. He can’t sleep, he doesn’t eat. The child cries.’
    The child cries. In the dim, dusty room the words had hung in the air, changing things.
    Sandro felt a chill now as he felt Luisa’s eyes on him: gave himself a little shake. In the wide Piazza del Carmine something was going on, over beyond the church. Banners bobbing up and down in the soft darkness, and a groundswell of voices.
    ‘She left the child behind,’ said Luisa slowly, and Sandro saw something in her face he didn’t want to see. The conclusion he didn’t want to draw, about the only thing that would keep a mother from her child.
    Their waiter – a slightly stooped, elderly man with shiny patches on his ancient black trousers – was circulating between the tables on the crowded terrace; abruptly Luisa nodded to him, and he shuffled over in a parody of haste. Luisa brought that out in people.
    ‘Coffee,’ she said, in response to his ingratiating recital of desserts. ‘And the bill.’ The sound of the demonstrators in the square was getting louder; they were singing the ‘ Internazionale ’, to Sandro’s astonishment.
    ‘How old is the child?’ Luisa said when the waiter had gone.
    ‘Young,’ said Sandro, suddenly unwilling to think about Niccolò Rosselli’s situation, and unwilling also to evoke the nearly newborn for Luisa, who for years – more than a decade after her own child died – had not been able to look at babies. But clearly in this case the presence of a newborn was the key: the unanswered question. ‘A – a baby.’ Luisa turned her hard stare on