The Drowning River by Christobel Kent

any of it, Iris threw off the duvet, and headed for the kitchen.
    Walking into the bright room, Iris realized she was wearing something of Hiroko’s, a long grey cotton nightdress. It felt warm; the flat was warm; the table was laid with small white cups, a board with slices of dense brown bread, a Japanese teapot. It was so perfectly welcoming and ordered that Iris wanted to cry suddenly. She sat down.
    ‘You sleep OK?’ said Hiroko, appearing behind her in the doorway with wet hair. She made a gesture inviting Iris to eat, twisted her hair up in a white towel and sat down. ‘The bed is hard,’ she said apologetically.
    ‘No,’ said Iris, ‘I slept amazingly.’ And she realized it was true, like a log. No dreams, just a heavy blissful dark sleep, like crawling into a soundproofed cave. Maybe it was because they were at the back of thebuilding, on the ground floor. She remembered Hiroko showing her a small courtyard garden through a long window when they arrived.
    They ate for a while in silence. The bread was quite hard, tasting of bitter grains Iris couldn’t identify, and the tea was yellow, with small flowers floating in it.
    ‘Is this tea Japanese?’ she asked. At home Iris drank her milky Indian tea by the bucketful, but she surprised herself by liking this; it was light and fragrant and somehow purifying.
    ‘Chinese,’ said Hiroko, smiling. ‘Sorry. I can’t find Japanese here.’
    Iris took another sip, and with the unfamiliar taste in the warm, quiet, bright room, she felt something shift in her head, a pressure easing, just enough.
    ‘What did the police say yesterday?’ said Hiroko. ‘What can they do? To find her?’
    Propping her elbows on the table, both hands warmed around the cup, Iris said, ‘They were going to check the hospitals, emergency admissions over this week.’ She spoke normally, but she didn’t feel normal. It was surreal. ‘But they didn’t call, did they? To say they’d found her?’
    Hiroko moved her head slightly. ‘No one called,’ she said.
    Iris nodded, feeling the tension build again.
    ‘Then they’ll try to trace the phone. If it’s still got power, you can do that, they said. You can find out where it was before it lost power, too.’ Had Ronnie even taken her charger? She’d been planning on being away a couple of days, hadn’t she? Or she wouldn’t have cooked up the trip to the countryside.
    She kept the implications at bay. Don’t think about that, she told herself, don’t think about whether Ronnie still has the phone but can’t answer it or recharge it. The thief – if there was a thief – took the phone; the phone won’t lead us to Ronnie. ‘And then they can check her bank account, to see if she took money out.’
    ‘Before the bag – before she lost the bag?’
    Of course, thought Iris, staring at Hiroko’s smooth, clever face, saw her thinking it through. The cards were all still in the bag, so they wouldn’t lead anyone to Ronnie either. ‘But it might give them a clue,’ she said. ‘To her movements.’
    Hiroko nodded.
    ‘And then there’s CCTV,’ Iris went on. ‘Cameras, in the streets.’
    Hiroko nodded again, a little sadly. ‘Not so many in Florence,’ she said. And then, delicately as though this was the question she thought might be the awful one, ‘And – where did they find the bag?’
    And only then did Iris think about it, think properly. At the time she had only been relieved when they’d said, because it had allowed her to stop thinking about rabbit holes and burials.
    ‘They found it in the Boboli,’ she said. ‘In the Boboli gardens.’
    And on the only visit she’d paid to the big park that covered a hillside behind the Pitti Palace – a Sunday walk with Ronnie when the sun had come out and Ronnie’s hangover had ebbed at the same time – Iris had seen that that soft grey-white dirt was everywhere. The dusty gravel paths left it on your shoes; it coated the hem of your coat, your skirt, your trousers.