The Monster of Florence (35 page)

“Under the circumstances I was a bit surprised to see you here. Just goes to show it doesn’t pay to listen to gossip.”

Everybody knew. It was common gossip. Ferrini, of course, knew all along and then assumed that he did too. How could he not have cottoned on? Why was he so slow? Ferrini had gone on and on about the decent cases being given to youngsters with his same rank and no experience. To him it had been obvious that this was a police show and that they were only there because it would have looked bad if the carabinieri, known supporters of Romola, had been absent.

And when he thought of poor Teresa trying to convince him against the evidence that he was considered a good investigator! If only she were home … But then, how could he tell her the truth?

“If they’re running an idiot investigation, they’re only getting idiot men!”

The remark was burnt into his memory. They say, of course, that eavesdroppers … He hadn’t overheard on purpose.

“Marshal? Good morning!”

He looked up, dazed, surprised to find he was back in front of the Palazzo Pitti. Dr. Biondini was looking at him quizzically. “You were miles away! I can see you’re concentrating on catching your Monster. I just wanted to thank you for the photograph. One of your men brought it. I shall have a good look at it this evening. I’m sorry not to have seen you at the opening of my exhibition.”

“Yes …” The Marshal frowned. “Later, I can’t … Good morning.”

He turned away and went under the arch and up the stairs, feeling for his keys. Fortunately, Lorenzini was in the duty room discussing some problem with the two lads in there and the Marshal was able to go into his own office, shut the door behind him and sit quietly at his desk with his own thoughts. So lost in his ruminations was he that he’d been staring at the sheet of paper which Lorenzini had left there for him for a long time before he thought to actually read it.

Beneath it in brackets Lorenzini had added Bacci’s comment:
is this us?

Behind his dark glasses, the Marshal had only the vaguest sense of buildings and people going by, sometimes swiftly, more often very slowly.

“One long traffic jam, this road …” commented the carabiniere driver beside him. “I’d hate to live out this way and have to get to work in the morning.”

This was the fourth or fifth remark of the sort he had made since they set off out of town on the road north. He got no answer this time either. The Marshal was aware of being spoken to but it took him so long to come to the surface that the moment for the appropriate banal answer had always passed. He wouldn’t want the lad to think he was angry or anything of that sort, but he couldn’t put together any kind of reassuring explanation for his profound silence. The truth would hardly do … I’m feeling out of sorts because the Colonel just pronounced that I was an idiot. The truth was that it was the Captain whose opinion he cared about. The Colonel was neither here nor there, since he’d only been in Florence since September and couldn’t be expected … to what? Notice that the dull silent NCO commanding a superfluous little station was really a wonderful detective? That was what was so awful: the Colonel had simply confirmed his own opinion of himself. There was no defence against it. He couldn’t even feel wronged. He
didn’t
feel wronged. And yet the Captain … Captain Maestrangelo was a good man, a serious man and an honest one. They knew each other well and the Marshal had always felt there was, if nothing else, a sort of respect. He knew he had
no brains and in cases where both brains and logic had been required he’d always been the first to acknowledge his need of the Captain’s help and had sought it. And still, he thought he’d contributed something and that something, whatever it was, had in turn been acknowledged by the Captain.

Again and again, he went over the scene in Maestrangelo’s office that first morning, in the light of what he knew now and had then failed to understand. It was always the same with him: images, movements, scenes, etched themselves on his brain, but he invariably failed to make them add up into sense.

He saw the Captain’s smooth brown hands turning the pen on his desk over and over, and the grey eyes always avoiding the Marshal’s questioning gaze.

“Why me?”

He’d been given no answer, he’d been told no lies. And he’d wondered, even then, he remembered, why Simonetti should have been willing to take on such a hopelessly difficult case.

“He didn’t strike me as a man who’d care for such a public failure.”

“No. He wouldn’t like that.”

And still he hadn’t cottoned on. The Captain could hardly have said outright that the intention was to create a ‘test-tube’ Monster and rig the proof as a simpler alternative to finding the real man. Perhaps that hadn’t been the intention right at the start when the case had been snatched out of Romola’s hands, but it must have been the case by the time this latest squad was set up. By then there had been a long enough gap for it to seem improbable that the real killer would strike again and destroy their case as he so often had Romola’s. The ground had also been prepared through the provocation of the incest trial. Only after that was it safe to bring on the innocents like himself, Bacci, that youngster Noferini with his computer and his enthusiasm and who in some way or other must have stumbled over the truth yesterday and had been reprimanded for it. As for Ferrini … The Marshal no longer knew what to think about Ferrini …

“Who made the choice of the three carabinieri?”

“It was made here. We made it.”

If he’d said the Colonel made it—but he didn’t. He said We. He’d even emphasized the “we,” and at the time the Marshal had found that reassuring because the Colonel didn’t know him but the Captain did. A fine piece of irony that turned out to be since it was that “we” that was now the chief source of his hurt.

“I think this is where we turn, isn’t it?”

If only Teresa were here. It was true that she’d been wrong, too, but then who would ever have imagined …

“The Captain thinks a lot of you.”

It wasn’t like Teresa to be wrong about something like that. She noticed things that he missed, but even she couldn’t explain away what he’d overheard this morning.

What did she think of Ferrini? She’d once said he’d spent too much of his life catching villains and that it had affected his personality, that instead of making conversation he had a tendency to interrogate. Sometimes, she said, he had a positively threatening air and she could imagine how it might feel to have him clap handcuffs on you and advise you to make a clean breast of it—“I don’t know if I’m making myself clear!” But she had been laughing aloud as she imitated him and then she’d said, “Why don’t we have them round for a meal? They always cheer me up.”

“Marshal?”

That was true. There was something about Ferrini, even at his most infuriating, that was in some way cheery.

His wife, who was plump and pretty and always laughing, would roar with mirth as he raged on. “He was born that way, you know. Take no notice. Isn’t he a scream?” And then he’d start laughing too. They adored each other.

If only Ferrini were here now. What he wouldn’t say—he’d rain curses on the lot of them. Guarnaccia! What else can you do in this job? Cynical? We’re just going through the motions, looking for a likely suspect who can be put behind bars and, unlike the previous ones, stay there.

Why hadn’t the Marshal believed him in the first place, really believed him, instead of taking his remarks as the usual cynicism.

“If they’re running an idiot enquiry …”

How could they class Ferrini that way when he’d solved so many cases? He’d even been given an officer’s rank from being an NCO because he’d solved so many. The Marshal had never known the Captain to be unfair but there was no getting away from it this time and he felt resentful on Ferrini’s behalf. For himself he only felt ashamed. Ashamed of his presumptuousness in thinking he could take on a problem that had defeated a man of Romola’s calibre.

“We’re wasting our time. Who needs it?”

“Marshal?”

“What’s the matter? Did you say something?”

“Just that we’re here. This is the address you gave me. We’ve been here for—”

“You should have said …” The Marshal got stiffly out of the car, hoping to leave his own problems behind him until he got back. It was wrong to be feeling sorry for himself in the face of the people he had to deal with now.

The Marshal had rung the bell and braced himself for the meeting with a bereaved mother, but it was the dead girl’s father who opened the door of the first-floor flat.

“You’d better come in. The wife …”

There was no sign of her, and the father, thin and beaten looking, led him into a small sitting room.

“Will you take a chair? I’m sorry, she … It’s Saturday night, you see … But I did tell her so she’ll be back if you don’t mind waiting. I did tell her.”

The Marshal sat down, looking about him without speaking. He didn’t understand at all what the problem was or why the reference to Saturday night when it was a little after three-thirty in the afternoon, but he made no comment.

“Do you smoke?”

“No. No, thank you.”

“I smoke too much since …” As if to demonstrate this he was taken by a long and painful fit of coughing, after which he lit up. “I haven’t seen you before.”

“No, I’ve not been on the case long.”

“They’ve come and gone … So many of them. I remember them all, every one. They all promised … They meant it, too—oh, it won’t bring her back …” He smoked in silence, gazing at the enlarged photograph of his daughter on the sideboard. The Marshal was convinced that he had been a robust, well-built man at one time but that grief had caused him to collapse inward on himself. What bit of flesh was left on him hung loose on his big bones. What did you say to a man in these circumstances? He certainly wasn’t going to make the promises all the previous investigators had evidently made. It wasn’t the sort of thing he did, anyway, and after all these years it would sound pretty hollow, even ludicrous. He, too, looked over at the photograph. It was the girl with the long dark curls whose preautopsy picture had so upset Bacci. He hoped to God they hadn’t let the mother see the body. The father, he knew, had been the one to find her.

“Our lovely Sara. She was a beautiful child. We used to wonder how we came to have her because there’s no good looks to speak of in this family. The wife was well enough before she put weight on but nothing out of the ordinary, and I’d win no beauty competitions. But Sara! Those big eyes and the shiny black curls … her mother would never cut her hair when she was little. I used to worry about her in the summer, all that weight, you know, in the heat … The things you worry about. Like, I was against her having a moped. I worried myself sick for years, I hadn’t a minute’s peace. But what can you do when they’ve all got one and besides, she needed it to get to school. Worried myself sick … I worked as a hospital porter so you can imagine. I’d seen that many youngsters brought in—I suppose in your job it’s the same …”

“Yes,” admitted the Marshal, his stomach tightening at the thought that the moped problem was going to have to be dealt with in the near future.

“Have you children?”

“Two boys. I feel the same way about mopeds, I must say.”

“Yes. That’s it, you see. You worry about so many things, try to protect
them. You imagine you’ve thought of everything. I was relieved when she took up with Silvio and they bought their little car …

“My mother, God rest her soul, used to look at Sara and say where did we get her? Where did we get this little angel? She’d go on like that, saying she was an angel who’d been lent to us. Her last words to us when she went were, ‘Look after that child, she’s marked to die young.’ The wife was blazing mad. She hates superstitious stuff and doesn’t believe in it, but it gave her a fright and she got so she was worse than me about being overprotective. That night, they weren’t more than half an hour later than they’d said. I don’t want to give you the impression I played the heavy father, I never did that. I just liked them to say when they’d be back and ring up if they were going to be late. I think that’s only sensible. You’d do the same, am I right?”

“Of course … It saves worry.”

“Less than half an hour … only, she was a good girl to us and she knew … She always phoned, or Silvio would. Less than half an hour late, and then they were only down the road having a pizza, but the wife …

“She said, ‘Something’s happened. I know something’s happened. We’re going to look for them.’ I said, ‘Come on now, give over, they said about half past eleven. They’ll arrive any minute and if they’ve changed their plans they’ll phone.’ She said, ‘Something’s happened to her.’ She went into the bathroom and she was sick. That’s when I got the car keys. I thought to myself there could be no harm in running down to the pizzeria …

“They say women have a sixth sense about their children, don’t they? I said to her, ‘Stay here. They’ll come home. Stay here.’ She stayed but she didn’t believe me. Outside the pizzeria I saw some friends of theirs who were just leaving. The place was closing and a waiter was stacking chairs on the tables. That’s when I felt sick, like my wife. I didn’t know what to do. It was their friends who said, ‘We’ll find them. Don’t worry, we know where to look.’ I knew what that meant, and it was only a few months after … after what happened at Scandicci. You know …”

“Yes.”

“They weren’t parked at the first lane we went down. The kids told me not to worry, they’d probably already set off for home but that there was another place we could try. We got back in the car and—I don’t know how to explain this, but I was thinking that I’d give them hell for when we got home for giving us all this worry and yet, at the same time, I knew I had to find them tonight because otherwise maybe strangers would find them tomorrow. I even decided I’d better call the wife’s sister and wait till she got here before I broke the bad news. I had this terrible feeling that I’ve never forgiven myself for, of wanting it to be over. It’s not natural, that. There must be something wrong with me.”