A Voice in the Night (18 page)

The smell of blood was still strong in the study. He looked at the desk on which they’d found Mariangela sprawled out in an obscene pose. As if the killer had murdered her as they were
about to make love.

He went out of the study and looked back in from the hallway. Strangio had been telling the truth: from there you could see everything. There was no need for him to enter the room to realize
what had happened.

He went back in. On the large desk were some files with the name Ugotti on them, books, architectural designs, city maps, urban-planning manuals, large sheets of transparent paper, drawing
paper, pencils of many different colours, erasers, highlighters, T-squares . . . all drenched in blood.

The white bathrobe was not in the study.

He looked for it all over the house but didn’t find it. Perhaps the killer had taken it away with him, maybe putting it in an ordinary plastic bag.

But why did Strangio place so much importance on this bathrobe?

The inspector went out again, locked up, and put the seals back in place. Then he went down the little street that led behind the house, which was called Via Brancati.

Here was the garage, with seals on it. He removed them, raised the rolling door, and a little slip of paper fluttered in the air and onto the floor. Curious, he turned on the garage light in
order to see better, then bent down and picked it up. It was a small flier with the words
SLEEP EASY Security Institution.

Apparently the nightwatchman, when he passed at night, would slip a flier between the garage door and the wall to show that he’d done his job. When one raised the door, the slip of paper
fell to the ground. The inspector wanted to do a test. He lowered the garage door, stuck the paper in, then raised it again. The paper fell out. He picked it up again and started staring at it,
then realized that there were another three on the ground that must have been there for a few days already. He picked these up, folded them, and put them in his pocket with the other one. There was
something that didn’t add up, but he couldn’t work out what. He went into the garage.

Inside was Strangio’s BMW. A computer was visible on the back seat. At the opposite end of the garage was another rolling door exactly the same as the one through which he’d entered.
He raised this one too. Here, too, they’d put up seals. He was now in the garden.

It was a convenient setup. One arrived by car on Via Brancati, put it in the garage, and then entered the house through the garden, without having to backtrack on foot. Just as one could enter
through the gate with the car and then put it in the garage by opening the inside garage door.

He locked everything up again, went out onto the street, and put the seals back in place.

Happening to look up, he noticed, on a fourth-floor balcony of the apartment building next door, a woman looking out at him. She was definitely the same woman he’d seen sunning herself the
first time he’d come to the house. Was the woman out on her balcony day and night?

He went back to his car and drove home.

*

He looked all over the house for those transcriptions but didn’t find them. The only possible explanation was that someone had taken the pages away when they’d come
to pick up the documents he’d signed. He would ask Catarella about it in the morning.

As usual he laid the table on the veranda, then went to get the dish of mullet and onions that Adelina had prepared. A sheer delight. But he didn’t savour them fully as they deserved,
since he had something on his mind that prevented him.

He finished, cleared the table, replaced the dishes and cutlery with whisky and cigarettes, then went back inside to get the leaflets, spread them out on the table, sat down, and put them in
chronological order.

There were four of them, and they went from the fifth of the month to the eighth.

It seemed all in order. He was wasting his time. On the other hand . . .

He grabbed the bottle and was about to open it when, at that exact moment, a light gust of wind carried away the leaflets. With both his hands occupied, he was unable to prevent them from flying
away. Cursing the saints, he started chasing them down. Two came to rest on the floor of the veranda itself, the third ended up on the sand not far away, while the fourth disappeared. Muttering
ever new variations of curses, he ran into the house, grabbed a small pocket lamp, and went back out. It took him ten minutes to find the other leaflet. At last he had it in his hand.

Meanwhile, however, he’d realized why the whole thing hadn’t added up for him from the start, from the moment he’d entered the garage.

But he needed immediate confirmation; otherwise he wouldn’t sleep a wink that night.

He went to the phone, bringing the leaflets with him, and dialled a number.

‘Fazio. Sorry, I know it’s late, but—’

‘What is it, Chief?’

‘You were there when Tommaseo sequestered Strangio’s car and told him to put it in the garage, weren’t you? Tell me how it went.’

‘Strangio’s car had been left with us. So Gallo and I brought him back to Vigàta, and then Strangio drove it back to his place with us following behind him. But Strangio
didn’t turn onto Via Brancati; he went in through his front gate, down the driveway that leads to the garage, raised the garage door, and put the car inside. Tommaseo then had seals put on
both garage doors.’

‘One more thing. Do you remember Strangio saying that when he got home from the airport, he put the car in the garage and then went through the garden to get to the house?’

‘Yeah, I remember.’

‘And then he said that, after discovering the body, he took his car back out to come to us?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘Thanks. Good night.’

To pre-empt the danger of the wind, he lined up the leaflets on the dining-room table and then sat down in front of them.

So poor Mariangela was murdered the evening of the seventh. Strangio, who had already left – as proved by the leaflet marked the seventh, which had fallen on the floor of the garage
– came back the morning of the following day, the eighth, and, according to his declaration, opened the garage door. As a result, the slip for the eighth should have fallen to the ground.

Whereas in fact it had stayed in place.

Nor could it have fallen when Tommaseo ordered Strangio to put the car in the garage, because he came in through the other door.

The slip for the eighth should no longer have been there, if things had gone the way Strangio said they had.

And if it was still there, this meant that things had not gone the way the young man had said.

So what had actually happened?

What happened was that Strangio, home from the airport, had not gone through the garage, but had parked the BMW outside the gate.

As if he already knew that he would need the car again shortly afterwards to race to the police station. As if he already knew what he would find in the study.

He gathered the slips, stuck them in his pocket, went out on the veranda, and knocked back half a glass of whisky while waiting for Livia to call.

He didn’t want to think about anything. Staring at the sea was good enough for him.

*

He woke up at seven-thirty.
Why bother to get up?
he thought. It was Sunday; he could take things a bit easy. He closed his eyes again. Less than ten minutes later the
phone rang. He got out of bed to answer. It was Nicolò Zito, sounding upset. ‘Half an hour ago I got a phone call at home from a woman with the cleaning service who’d found the
front door to the Free Channel studios broken in. I called the commissioner’s office and then raced to the scene.’

‘What did they steal?’

‘Can’t you imagine for yourself? There was only one thing on my desk.’

‘The digital recorder?’

‘Exactly.’

Montalbano felt his heart sink.

‘What about the copy?’

‘No, luckily I’d brought it home with me. But I wanted to let you know.’

The inspector breathed a big sigh of relief.

‘Thanks.’

‘But there’s one thing I can’t understand. Don’t they realize it’s pointless and stupid on their part? They should also have stolen the tapes of last night’s
news broadcast. They were right there.’

‘Nicolò, it’s not like these people are always that smart.’

He hung up. There was no point in going back to bed. He went into the kitchen to make coffee.

Though he hadn’t wanted to say so to Zito, the burglars’ act made sense. It was clear that they were interested in everything that was on the recorder, not just the part that had
been broadcast.

At this point he started thinking about the fact that to cover up a burglary of limited scope – Fazio was right about this – they’d already killed two people and committed
another burglary that would certainly make some noise, because it had happened at a television studio. Zito was certain to describe it on the air as an intimidation tactic and ask for solidarity on
the part of his professional colleagues.

In short, whoever stole the recorder knew that it would unleash total pandemonium, but they did it just the same the moment they heard that Borsellino had kept a recorder hidden in his office.
They must have said to themselves:
Want to bet he also recorded the conversations he had with us before
reporting the burglary?

And they had acted accordingly, wasting no time and not giving a damn about what the papers and TV would say.

*

He showered, shaved, dressed, drank another half-mug of espresso, then the telephone rang again. And this was supposed to be a quiet Sunday morning?

By now it was eight-thirty, and this time it was Fazio who was calling.

‘Sorry, Chief, but last light I forgot to tell you that Mariangela’s girlfriend is coming into the station at ten o’clock, after she gets out of Mass. I’ll be there
too.’

‘OK.’

‘Did you watch Strangio’s press conference yesterday, which they broadcast again at midnight?’

‘No, I forgot. How’d it go?’

‘Strangio said the same things he told us, except that he said he’d slept at the hotel in Rome. And you know what? The most troubling question he had to deal with was put to him by
none other than Ragonese.’

‘And what was that?’

‘Actually, it wasn’t really a question. Ragonese pointed out to him, timetable in hand, that in leaving his meeting a little early, he had all the time he needed to catch a plane,
come here, kill his girlfriend, and go back to Rome.’

They’d all thought the same thing!

‘Strangio,’ Fazio continued, ‘said only that he didn’t kill his girlfriend. But Ragonese’s harangue had its effect. I’d been expecting him to defend the kid,
whereas he threw down an ace.’

‘Thanks, Fazio, I’ll see you in a bit.’

And this meant simply that there were two orders from on high: the supermarket burglar must turn out to be Borsellino, and Mariangela’s killer must turn out to be Giovanni Strangio.

But how on earth could his father, Michele, the powerful president of the province, let his son be accused in this fashion without reacting?

*

So how was he going to pass the time now? Lolling about the house? No, there was a better way. He went out, got in the car, and headed for Vigàta. But instead of
continuing on to the centre of town, when he got to the first houses he turned onto Via Pirandello and pulled up in front of the gate outside Strangio’s house. He got out of the car and
looked up. The lady on the fourth floor was on her balcony. He went on foot to Via Brancati and came to a stop in front of Strangio’s garage. He raised his hand and waved to the lady. She
waved back. He cupped his hands around his mouth and said:

‘I’d like to talk to you.’

‘Fourth floor, apartment sixteen,’ the woman said, using the same method.

As he approached the main door, he looked at the names on the intercom system. Apartment sixteen corresponded with the name Concetta Arnone. The door clicked; he pushed it open, went inside, and
took the lift. The woman was waiting for him outside her door.

‘Please come in, Inspector.’

‘How do you know who I am?’

‘I’ve seen you on TV. What, you think I’d let in a total stranger just because he waved to me from the street?’

She looked somewhere between sixty-five and seventy years old, was well groomed, didn’t wear glasses, had a well-preserved face, with few wrinkles and lively eyes, but
she must have had something wrong with her legs, as she couldn’t bend them. She sat the inspector down on the sofa in the small living room and then sat herself down beside him.

‘My legs are stiff; it’s very hard for me to walk,’ she began.

In the first fifteen minutes of their talk, Montalbano learned that she’d lost her husband five years earlier, had no children, had a married sister in Fiacca, had her shopping done by a
woman neighbour of the kind they don’t make any more, had trouble making ends meet with her pension, had nothing to do all day but stand out on the balcony leaning on the railing, since
sitting was too uncomfortable, and watched television late into the night . . .

The inspector interrupted the monologue.

‘Signora, I need you to tell me whether you were on your balcony on the morning of the eighth, and whether by any chance you saw—’

‘The eighth was a Thursday,’ said the woman. ‘Cannoli day.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I have a sweet tooth, Inspector, and on Thursdays I ask my neighbour to buy me a cannolo. One on Thursday, and the other today, which is Sunday.’

‘I wanted to ask you whether on the morning of Thursday the eighth, around ten-thirty, you saw Giovanni Strangio, the young man who lives in the house—’

‘Of course I know Strangio, and I knew his girlfriend too, poor thing. Yes, I saw him that morning.’

‘He told us that when he got back from Palermo, he put his car in the garage and then—’

‘No, sir, he did not put it in the garage.’

Montalbano pricked up his ears.

‘He didn’t?’

‘No, sir. He stopped outside the garage – I recognized the car – but he didn’t get out. He just stayed there a few minutes and then left. Come with me.’