He supposed it a house like any other, that of a peasant who had done well. How well? He couldn’t tell.
He could see a building of perhaps a half-dozen bedrooms, and a patio at the front with plant pots, but they were empty. There was a portico over the front door that looked like a recent addition, and an extension to the side facing him. The portico’s pillars were fresh and clean, but the side wall was still concrete blocks, short of the rendering needed to finish it. Cement was visible in the gaps round the windows on the ground floor and upstairs. Outside the kitchen door there was a row of boots and a heap of chopped wood, but his view was broken by the thickness of the vine stems on the trellis. He thought a path went up from the backyard, beyond the trellis and the washing line, but then there was a wall, solid bushes, perhaps laurel, and the shed.
Jago could see little behind him, and the views to either side of his position were restricted by rock outcrops and the trees that sprouted from sheer rock slopes. Music drifted up to him, and a murmur of voices. Marcantonio was playing football with the children at the front – it was landscaped and had been grassed but not watered so the ‘pitch’ was a dull ochre. There was no big car, just a Fiat van and Fiat saloon, the priest’s. The daughter and daughter-in-law were at the back – they might have been taking a break from washing the dishes after the Sunday meal. The daughter-in-law was a smart, stylish woman, but the daughter was drab. He saw the matriarch again, and a handyman who carried out a bucket of vegetable peelings for the chickens.
The shake in his hands was dying.
Watching the family after their Sunday meal calmed him. Little actions that reeked of the ordinary, the occasional shouts from the football game. He had noted that Marcantonio was never successfully tackled, never lost the ball, never missed a shot on the goal. The others had sight of it only when he decided they would. The boy never looked up. His gaze never raked the rock faces behind the house.
He thought the shaking would be back during the night. What he had seen in the cave would touch him. He had found it soon after she had left him. A few steps, a scramble, a roll across a bank of moss, then the old path, grass growing on it – he thought he was the first to use it for years – and the entrance to a cave. There was a patch in front of it where there was only dried mud and worn stone. He had hesitated and considered. He could hear sounds from below him, a radio, voices and a vehicle. Was there any virtue in exploring the cleft in the rock? It might have potential as a sort of refuge. He had switched on his small torch and crawled inside.
The beam had picked up one of those small orange boxes that used to hold Kodak film. He’d lifted it up and the date was stamped on it – 1987. He had gone further in. His feet had snagged on cloth, and the torch had shown him a child’s dress and small shoes with tarnished buckles, scuffed at the toe. There were blankets and two buckets, a plastic plate, several plastic cups and a candle-holder. In a recess he found a rotting mattress. He’d seen a chain – it had fine links but was strong enough to withstand the efforts of a kid to break it, and ended with an iron collar where a padlock was still fastened. The far end disappeared under the mattress. He was driven by a compulsion to know where the chain led. He pulled back the mattress and mice scampered out. He saw the staple buried in the stone – it would have been driven home with a sledgehammer. There were small socks, skimpy underwear and a pullover of fine-quality wool. He was in a den where a child, aged ten or twelve, had been chained.
He had gone back out into the light, which seemed heaven-sent after the depths of the cave. He imagined the child held there, wondered how long she had been there and how it had ended.
Jago watched the house, and the shaking ebbed. Impossible, but he tried to square a circle: a home where a sort of normality seemed unthreatening, and a cave where a child had been chained in darkness, with rats and mice, mosquitoes, cold – and fear.
He caught the movement. It was in the corner of his eye. He focused. A boy, seventeen or eighteen, slender, sallow-skinned, dark curly hair, walked along a track above and to the right of where Jago was, with three dogs. It was not a Sunday-afternoon stroll. The dogs were doing a job, scampering around him, over rocks and among trees. Often enough Jago lost them. Consolata had taken him into the water and made him wash off the smell of sweat. The dogs were thin. Their ribs and teeth showed. The boy controlled them with a thin whistle and shrill commands. He would have been a hundred feet above Jago and there were cliffs between them . . .