Free The Drowning River by Christobel Kent

and did not know about her husband, he became aware of Luisa’s hand on his, how cool it was in spite of the kitchen, and how she was not letting go as he would otherwise have expected.
    ‘Luisa?’ he asked.
    ‘Darling,’ she said, without turning her head to look at him, and he knew she was about to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. ‘I went to the doctor today.’

Chapter Six
    When Iris Woke The next morning, nothing was familiar about the room in which she found herself. Another kind of dark, strange place: but this was definitely not the Piazza d’Azeglio. Even in the dark she knew that; the bed was low and hard, the thin light was more diffuse, the smell was different, a spicy, unfamiliar scent. And it was warm.
    Then she remembered.
    Hiroko’s flat had not after all turned out to be in the streets and streets of dull apartment buildings out past the station, but buried in a narrow alley beyond the big Victorian covered market. It had been a longish walk from the school, and it was dark by the time they got there.
    Paolo – they seemed to be on first-name terms now, that hour with the police, talking about where the bag had been found, that terror she’d felt and he’d seen had shifted things somehow – had offered to escort her back to the flat in the Piazza d’Azeglio to get some things. ‘I don’t know, toothbrush, nightclothes?’ he had said, seeming nervous, and she’d found herself feeling sorry for him. This kind of thing couldn’t be good for the school, and she wondered what he would find to say to Ronnie’s mum. She felt stunned, herself, unable to think.
    They’d found a number for the Hertford house in Greve very quickly; it had taken the taller carabiniere, who Iris thought was the senior officer, a couple of minutes on his mobile. On autopilot Iris had found herself wondering if all foreigners maybe had to register with the police, but then of course even if you looked in the phone book, there’d only be one Hertford in Chianti, wouldn’t there?
    It had been a moment’s relief, to see the policeman’s face when the number came through, a breakthrough. The carabinieri were both very dark-skinned, with stubbled chins and black eyes and thick southern accents. The tall one wrote the number on a piece of paper Massi pushed towards him, squinting down his long nose.
‘Artfoord,’
he pronounced triumphantly,
‘Ecco’.
    They existed, then, at least, these friends of Ronnie’s mother Serena in their castle. Iris wondered if it was a real castle or if it too had been built out of glass and rotting wood by an experimental architect. Probably the real deal, knowing Serena and her Georgian farmhouse surrounded by yew trees with the gallops running for miles; again Iris’s stomach churned, at the thought of Serena this time, and what she would say.
    They looked at her, then at Massi, then all three of them looked at Iris.
    ‘Should I do it?’ she said, nervous to the point of hysteria. ‘You want me to phone them?’ At least she’d be doing something. Massi pushed the phone across the table to her, and the carabiniere handed her the number.
    At least it rang; the long Italian tone that never sounded anything like a telephone’s ring to her. It rang a long time; Iris was about to put the phone down, feeling tears of frustration pricking at her eyes, when it was snatched up and someone shouted,
‘Pronto?’
Her heart sank, it was Italian, and a thickly accented, bad-tempered Italian at that. Female.
    But Iris hadn’t given up.
‘Potrei parlare con i signori Hertford per piacere?’
she got out, with some effort.
    ‘Eh?’
There was a cavernous, echoing sound to the voice; Iris, holding tight to the receiver, imagined a baronial hall. If this was a housekeeper she wasn’t very welcoming.
    ‘I signori Hertford?’
    Massi gestured to her for the phone, but she persevered.
‘E la casa degli signori Hertford?’
    Perhaps hearing the desperation in her voice, the