Marco Vichi - Inspector Bordelli 04 - Death in Florence (5 page)

‘Where’s the little boy?’ Bordelli asked.

‘Over here, sir.’

Tapinassi gestured vaguely at Piras in greeting and led them towards the spot where the body had been found.

‘Have you got a spade?’ Bordelli asked.

‘There’s one already there,’ Tapinassi replied.

They advanced another hundred feet along the path, then turned into the woods and continued climbing with effort through the trees. Every so often a strong gust of wind blew. In the spots where the carpet of dead leaves was thinnest, the sludge stuck to their shoes. The silence was beautiful, and Bordelli couldn’t help but think of his walk with Botta.

‘Tapinassi, do you know this area well?’

‘No, sir. I’m not from around here, I was born at La Rufina.’

Moments later they saw the other policeman, Calosi, in the distance. Beside him was a man of about fifty with a double-barrelled shotgun slung over his shoulder and an Irish setter on a lead.

‘Go back down and wait for Diotivede,’ Bordelli ordered Tapinassi.

‘Yes, sir.’

The young policeman headed back down towards the car. When Piras and the inspector reached the spot, Calosi leapt to attention and gave a military salute. Bordelli didn’t even look at him. Together with Piras he went up to the freshly dug hole. A small naked foot, half eaten by an animal and already decomposing, was sticking out.

‘Wild boar,’ Bordelli muttered. The nauseating stench of the corpse almost completely covered the crisp scent of the underbrush.

‘It can only be him,’ said Piras, a hand over his nose.

‘We’ll know straight away … Calosi, have you already taken pictures?’

‘Yes, Inspector.’

‘Pass me the spade.’

Bordelli started digging, trying to be careful. The hunter watched the scene with his mouth half open. The boy’s leg appeared, then his thigh, bottom and back … And, in the end, his head. Completely naked. The smell was unbearable, and Calosi walked away, suppressing an urge to vomit. The boy lay face down. Bordelli turned him over with the help of the spade, and Piras frowned in disgust. The eye sockets were full of worms. The face was smeared with dirt, the features barely distinguishable. They heard a thud behind them and turned round. The hunter had fainted, and the dog started howling.

‘Take care of that, would you, Calosi?’ said Bordelli. He pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and started cleaning the boy’s face, careful not to touch it with his fingers. He felt as if he’d stumbled into an old painting about the plague. Every so often he had to turn his head away to breathe. He’d seen many corpses during the war. Children too, even newborns.

‘It’s him,’ said Piras, immobile as a rock.

‘Yeah, it’s him,’ the inspector muttered, tossing aside his muddied handkerchief. He’d seen only a few photos of the boy, but even so, it wasn’t hard to recognise him. Giacomo Pellissari had finally been found. There he was, naked, soiled with mud, dead. The thought of having to tell his parents turned Bordelli’s stomach. Meanwhile the hunter had come to, though he remained seated on the ground. The inspector approached him.

‘Do you come up this way very often?’ he asked him.

‘Yes, I live in La Pescina, down by Lucolena,’ said the hunter, looking away from the child’s corpse. He was hollow-cheeked, with skin the colour of leather and ravaged by wrinkles. He must have been a peasant and was probably not much older than forty.

‘Do you know the area well?’ Bordelli asked.

‘Like the back of my hand.’

‘Are there any other roads that lead up here, aside from the one at La Panca?’

‘There are several. From Figline, from Poggio alla Croce, and from Ponte agli Stolli by way of Celle, but all three are a lot rougher.’

‘So a car can’t make it up there?’

‘No, too many rocks and holes. You’ll drop your oil pan, you will …’

‘And on foot?’

‘On foot it’s another matter.’

‘Is Poggio alla Croce far from here?’

‘Not very. Farther on there’s the fork at the Cappella de’ Boschi. You just keep to the left and it takes about an hour.’

‘And where does the path on the right lead?’

‘To Pian d’Albero, where Potente’s
⁴
partisans were massacred. You can get to Poggio from there too … On foot, of course. They’re nasty trails.’

‘Thanks.’ Bordelli lit a cigarette, thinking of his outing with Botta. Without realising, they had passed not far from the boy’s corpse, but all they’d found were mushrooms.

‘Can I go now?’ the hunter asked.

‘Just be patient for a little while longer. You’re going to have to come down to the station to sign a statement,’ said the inspector.

The sun was beginning to filter into the woods, spreading a golden glow between the black tree trunks. Piras caught Bordelli’s attention with a whisper and pointed to two men approaching through the trees. It was Tapinassi and Diotivede.

The doctor gave a nod of greeting and went towards the lifeless child without stopping. As soon as Tapinassi saw the corpse, he stopped dead in his tracks, white as a sheet. He stood there for a moment, slack-jawed, then turned away.

Diotivede opened his black bag, took out a towel, and laid it down beside the body. He carefully put on his rubber gloves, knelt down on the towel and bent over to examine the child, touching the body at various points. Nothing on his face gave any sign of the stench he was inhaling from just inches away. Turning the corpse over on to its belly, he continued studying it closely. Piras and Bordelli were a few steps away, anxiously awaiting information.

Moments later the doctor stood back up, put the gloves and the towel in a plastic bag, and tucked this into his medical bag. Then his customary black notebook appeared in his hands. He scribbled a few things in it and shoved it into his pocket. Bordelli came up to him.

‘Strangled?’

‘Not only that …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘First he was raped,’ said the doctor. Bordelli exchanged a glance with Piras.

‘How long has he been dead?’

‘At a glance, I’d say three, four days.’

‘I hope you’re wrong. It’s unthinkable that he was left for so many days in the hands of a monster.’

‘God only knows what a wonderful time he must have had,’ the doctor said darkly. He could have performed a post-mortem even on himself without any particular emotion, but the sight of dead children always put him in a grim mood. ‘Can you tell me anything else?’ he asked.

‘You’ll have to wait for the post-mortem.’

‘Are you leaving straight away?’

‘No, I’ll be here a little longer … Give me a cigarette,’ the doctor said. The inspector had seen him smoke only on rare occasions, and it always seemed peculiar to him. He offered him a cigarette from the packet and then lit it for him. The doctor took a deep drag and then headed pensively up to the top of the hill, his bag swinging at his side. Bordelli went over to Calosi and Tapinassi, who both looked deader than the little boy.

‘Call the morgue and tell them to send the van, and take that poor bastard back with you,’ he said, gesturing towards the hunter.

‘What about the dog?’ asked Tapinassi.

‘Bring him, too, it’s the easiest thing.’

‘All right, sir,’ the two cops said in unison, having recovered their nerve a little.

‘When the van gets here, be sure to walk the stretcher-bearers to this spot, and then you can leave.’

‘All right, sir.’

Calosi and Tapinassi explained things to the hunter, and all three of them headed down the slope, followed by the dog.

Piras had asked them for the camera. After taking a few shots, he stood there staring at the little boy’s corpse with eyes that evoked Sardinian vendettas. The city was far away. The city where the boy had vanished into thin air. At last they were making some progress. The body had been found. But if something else didn’t turn up soon, they would be back where they started.

The inspector sought out Diotivede. He saw him some fifty yards away, motionless amid the trees, staring spellbound into space with his arms folded across his chest and his bag at his feet. He looked as if he were posing for a sculptor. Bordelli slowly caught up to him.

‘We’re going to need a little luck,’ he said.

‘Let’s hope it’s not like two years ago …’ the pathologist said, alluding to the four little girls who were murdered in the spring of ’64 before the killer was captured. They were months of hell …

A bird cawed from a treetop, and both of them looked up, trying to spot it.

‘Give me another cigarette,’ Diotivede muttered. Bordelli lit one for himself as well, throwing the match on the ground. A big mushroom rose up through the rotten leaves. Perhaps it was a porcino …

After facing the journalists with Inzipone at his side, the inspector shut himself in his office with Piras. It was almost four o’clock and they still hadn’t eaten anything.

Bordelli ran his hand slowly over his already stubbly face, thinking of the delightful morning he’d had. Around eleven he’d gone to talk to the boy’s parents, in Via di Barbacane. He’d wanted to go there alone. He saw Giacomo’s mother fall to the floor like an empty sack, and helped her husband put her back on her feet. He didn’t mention the rape, there was no need. He stayed with the Pellissaris for more than half an hour. Before leaving he had predictably vowed to catch the killer, to give the wretched couple something to hold on to. But as he was descending the stairs, he’d felt like a liar.

Commissioner Inzipone was blowing fire from his nostrils, having growled at Bordelli in private to get busy … As if up till then he’d only been scratching his balls, for chrissakes. Truth be told, he didn’t know which way to turn. Giacomo had been buried in a hurry in a shallow grave. Whoever had done the digging certainly wasn’t concerned with making the body disappear for ever, but only with getting it out of his hair. Maybe it was better the kid was dead. What sort of life would he have had after what he’d been through?

The inspector and Piras had searched the place where the body had been found for clues, any clue, within a radius of about fifty yards. But, aside from a few empty rifle cartridges, they’d found nothing. As if that wasn’t enough, it had been raining all week, and the layer of rotting leaves didn’t help.

Bordelli had sent a few patrols to La Panca a good while before, to question the inhabitants of the area and check to see whether the other trails really were impassable for cars. Perhaps the hunter had been exaggerating.

The inspector was hoping there might be a witness who’d seen something important, or that Diotivede might make a discovery that would prove to be a turning point. He was hoping, but he wasn’t terribly convinced.

‘Let me smoke, Piras.’

‘Can I open a window?’

‘Do whatever you like, but let me smoke.’

He lit a cigarette as the Sardinian threw open the windows as if it were the middle of July. The rain had started falling again.

‘We’re going to solve this, Inspector.’

‘Even at your age I wasn’t so optimistic.’

‘I can feel it …’

‘We need a psychic,’ said the inspector and, upon saying that, he thought again of Amelia.
Tomorrow morning
… the fortune-teller had said, before clamming up. To distract himself he told Piras the story of the tarot cards, and Piras loosened up and smiled.

‘When I was a young boy, there was a sort of witch who lived in Bonarcado. People said she had the power to kill people from afar, and whenever I saw her on the street in town my legs would start to shake.’

Gusts of damp wind blew in through the open window.

‘There’s something I really want to do, Piras.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Promise not to tell anyone?’

‘Promise.’

‘I would really like to have another little chat with that fortune-teller,’ said Bordelli.

‘Well, given our situation, anything’s worth a try …’

‘Thanks for the encouragement.’

The inspector picked up the receiver and dialled Rosa’s number, hoping to find her at home.

‘Hello?’ said Rosa after the tenth ring.

‘Ciao, Rosa, it’s me.’

‘Oh my God, I heard about the little boy on the radio … How horrible!’

‘Rosa, how can I get hold of Amelia?’ Bordelli asked curtly.

‘She’d foreseen it … Do you remember what she said?’

‘How can I reach her, Rosa?’

‘Oh, dear God, I can’t bear the thought of it … Poor little Giacomino …’

‘Rosa, please, tell me where I can reach Signora Amelia.’

‘Who on earth could have done such a thing?’

‘Rosa! Can’t you hear me?’

At last he got her to listen and repeated that he wanted to speak with Amelia as soon as possible.

‘I’ll try calling her,’ said Rosa, and she hung up. Bordelli and Piras sat there in silence, waiting, shooting each other a glance every so often. The ring of the telephone made them jump in their seats. It was Diotivede.

‘I can confirm everything. The decomposition process started not more than three days ago. He died of strangulation, and was raped first … by more than one person,’ the doctor said. Bordelli felt a stabbing pain in his stomach.

‘How many?’ he asked, trying to remain calm.

‘There were at least three … and don’t ask me if I’m sure.’

‘Why do you say
at least
? Usually you’re more precise,’ said Bordelli, exchanging glances with Piras. The police pathologist heaved a long sigh of forbearance before replying.

‘When analysing traces of sperm it’s possible to identify the blood type, and I found three blood types in the victim’s rectum. On the other hand, if ten different men of the same blood type had raped him, I would find only one blood type. And that is why I said
at least
…’

‘He was raped by at least three men,’ Bordelli said to Piras, momentarily covering the receiver. The Sardinian shook his head and grimaced in disgust.

‘Anything else?’ the inspector asked Diotivede.

‘An abrasion on the forehead, a bruised knee, a deep wound on the right thigh, caused after death, almost certainly by the shovel used to bury him. Under his fingernails I found carpet pile and a considerable amount of plaster dust, as if he’d dug a hole in a wall with his bare hands.’