Free The Killing Room by Christobel Kent Page B

living out in Galluzzo then?’ Giuli said softly, very softly, as the old man’s filmy eyes swept the room. ‘A casa popolare , wasn’t it, last I heard?
    Hunched over her glass, Maria stared, saying nothing, and Giuli had the sense of the woman’s used-up body being a cage of bones, inside her chest a tired old muscle that didn’t know when to give up.
    ‘I think she was evicted last time they found drugs,’ she whispered at last. ‘She’s probably back with the mother. For as long as it lasts.’
    They both knew what that meant. ‘She takes them to school every morning,’ Maria said. ‘To show them she can be a mother. The big elementare in the Via della Chiesa.’
    Giuli nodded. Maria’s worn old hand crept across the table to rest on hers.
    ‘You be careful, Giulietta,’ she said. No one called her Giulietta any more.
    ‘What have I got to lose?’ she said.
    As she came out on to the street she heard a motorino ’s engine start up somewhere behind her, but she didn’t turn around.
    *
    They’d been gossiping up in menswear all afternoon, Giuseppina and Beppe. Luisa had only gone up to challenge them after thewoman had been in with her husband – the woman from the Palazzo who already did bad things to Luisa’s blood pressure. Dislike was like poison in the bloodstream: you could try to neutralise it, but sometimes people were just too hateable. Magda Scardino.
    He had sat oddly stiff in an armchair, reading something, while Luisa brought cocktail dresses, which Magda Scardino wanted tight, to the cubicle, and she talked through the curtain at him as though Luisa wasn’t there.
    ‘I expect you’re delighted, are you?’ she said, invisible. ‘You never liked him.’
    The man hardly raised his head from his sheaf of papers, but when his wife emerged from the changing room, barely contained by a red dress, he cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know about that, my sweet,’ he said. ‘I do what I’m told, you know that. I know you like to introduce an element of competition into these things. I certainly wouldn’t have wished a violent death on him.’
    Luisa turned the words over in her head, feeling a stir of unease. Who were they talking about?
    Professor Scardino spoke mildly, as if he was only talking about what to have for lunch. Perhaps she’d heard wrong. And as he spoke he was eyeing his wife’s body in the swathed silk, not with love, exactly. With a clinical sort of look, Luisa thought. And as she wondered what it must be like to be married to a scientist, his words sank in. Competition. Then she blinked. Violent death?
    Over their heads, Beppe and Giusy had been talking about it too.
    ‘How did you hear about it, by the way, darling?’ the Professor said, head back down over his papers, as his wife looked at herself approvingly this way and that in the mirror. ‘Your ear to the ground?’
    ‘Oh, one of the servants,’ she said airily. ‘They were gossiping. Someone’s aunt knew his landlady, or something. You know how these people are.’
    Magda Scardino’s eye flickered to Luisa in the mirror, then in a kind of challenge. Luisa stepped forward. ‘You might want it just nipped at the shoulder,’ she said, placing thumb and forefinger on the beautiful fabric from behind and pinching it into place.
    Their eyes met a moment in the mirror before Magda Scardino said, already turning away, ‘I want something in gold.’
    She chose three dresses, all to be taken in by that very evening – more, Luisa thought, for the pleasure of putting others to trouble than because they needed adjusting. The husband paid with one of those credit cards only available to the very wealthy, Giusy at the till looking nervously at Luisa over his shoulder.
    She and Beppe hadn’t got Luisa in on it, Giusy said staring when the door closed behind the Scardinos, because they assumed she knew already. Of course.
    ‘Bottai called on Mr Frollini this afternoon, too. It must be connected,’ said Giusy,