The Villa Triste (21 page)

1 December 1943

I have packed my wedding dress away. When I slipped it off the hanger, it lay in my arms, heavy as a body.

I’d waited until Mama went out, then gone up to the attic and found an old trunk and dragged it down. So – the slippery satin, the lace from Venice, the tiny stitches, the frowns and tutting of the Signora and her girls – all of it is gone now. Lodovico’s letters, too. And his photograph. I can’t bear to have him look at me.

I wrapped it all in the tissue paper that came with my trousseau. Finally, I took one last piece and spread it as evenly as I could across the top. I pinched the edges, made them neat and sharp. After that, I smoothed it and smoothed it, ironing it with my palm until there was not a wrinkle, not even the hint of a crease. Then I fetched the tiny white satin buttons from my dresser drawer, and scattered them across the top like seeds.

Chapter Ten

‘Tell me again what we know.’

As he spoke, Pallioti looked out of the plane’s tiny window. A patchwork of dull green spread out below. Far away, the greying expanse of the Adriatic merged into a bank of cloud. It was just after dawn on Monday morning. They had left Florence in the dark. In a few minutes, they would land in Brindisi. He and Enzo were the only passengers on the flight.

‘Roberto Roblino.’

Enzo didn’t need to open his briefcase, or look at the sheets of notes and printouts that had been faxed the night before.

‘Eighty-four years old. Has lived in the area something like fifty years. Something of a local character. He was found in his garden, on Sunday afternoon. Apparently by his housekeeper, who went by to see if he was all right when he didn’t answer the phone. Autopsy is scheduled for later this morning, but the ME figured he’d been dead about twenty-four hours. Single shot to the back of the head, and his mouth was filled with salt.’

Enzo glanced at Pallioti. ‘That’s not the only similarity,’ he said. ‘Roberto Roblino was also in the partisans. Also decorated at the sixtieth. He, on the other hand, did like to talk about it. A lot. Something of the Local Partisan Hero.’

Pallioti nodded. ‘What about your reporter?’ he asked.

Enzo frowned. For a moment the question seemed disconnected.

Then he said, ‘Oh, yes. The neo-Nazis.’ The spectre of the disastrous press conference Pallioti had struggled through on Saturday night reared its head like an unwelcome third passenger.

‘Did he have anything?’

‘A couple of years ago,’ Enzo said, ‘there were some silly goings-on. Apparently someone working for an IT company that did some work for one of the Ministries turned out to be a little Hitler worshipper. Got into some databases and tried to mess up benefit payments, mainly to Jewish camp survivors, but I guess to a few of the partisans as well. They caught it and shut it down before any damage was done. But it was a good story, the highlight of our little reporter friend’s career, I think. And you know how it is. If the spark lit a fire once, why not try it again?’

‘But it didn’t?’ Pallioti, who had been concentrating on the window, turned to him.

‘Didn’t what?’

‘Light a fire last time? I don’t remember it.’

Enzo shook his head. ‘No. It ended up getting pretty much buried. Apparently, before the story ran, the Ministry got hold of it. The company carried out an internal investigation and supposedly purged itself. There wasn’t too much more to say.’ He shrugged. ‘Honestly, I think it was half rumour to start with. A sort of journalistic urban myth. Even our little newshound admitted, when I pressed him, that there wasn’t too much concrete. Mind you,’ he added, ‘I suppose if there had been, neither the Ministry nor the company would exactly want to dwell on it. My bet is, the neo-Nazi line’s the same this time. More inspiration than substance.’

Pallioti sighed. This didn’t surprise him.

‘So, what else do we actually know about this?’ He nodded towards the window as if he was referring not just to the death of another old man, but to the whole of Puglia.

‘Well, the guy in charge of the case is one Cesare D’Aletto,’ Enzo said. ‘I talked to him last night. He contacted us as soon as he ran it through the database and saw what we had. He figured there probably weren’t two people running around doing this.’

Pallioti didn’t even want to think about the ramifications of that. Instead, he asked, ‘Is he cooperative?’

‘D’Aletto? On a scale of one to ten?’ Enzo said. ‘Eleven. He only got moved down to Brindisi three months ago. My guess is, it was sort of a shake-up when he came in. He says he’s got his plate full. Human trafficking. Drugs. Illegal immigrants. Illegal building. Illegal gangmasters. You name it. He’s not looking for glory, he wants to clear cases.’ Enzo shrugged. ‘Otherwise, he would have taken his sweet ass time calling us. Or have forgotten to get around to it altogether. I think you’ll find he’s more than happy to take any help he can get.’

‘And where did this paragon of virtue come from?’

‘Turin.’

Pallioti knew his counterparts in Turin. They were highly thought of.

‘And the bullet?’

Enzo nodded. ‘The ME is sure it lodged. So they’ll have it after the autopsy. D’Aletto thought you might want to have it compared by the same team that did ours.’

Pallioti raised his eyebrows.

‘I told you,’ Enzo said. ‘He’s cooperative.’

The plane banked. Rain splattered against the windows, smearing the outline of the coast, turning everything below them a dull, industrial grey. Wind buffeted the small jet as it began its descent. The engines shifted and purred. The landing gear made a grating sound and locked into place. Seconds later they landed with a whoosh, spray flying up from the soaking tarmac, blurring the dark car parked by the side of the runway and the figure standing beside it.

By the time they had taxied back, and the engines had been shut off and the door opened, Cesare D’Aletto was waiting for them at the bottom of the steps. The expression on his face – at once expectant and anxious – reminded Pallioti of the parents he encountered when he occasionally went to collect Tommaso from playschool. Young women in overcoats and fathers in suits who gathered at the gates, desperate to see their precious offspring and half afraid they would not come out of the door.

‘Thank you,’ he said, grasping first Pallioti’s hand, then Enzo’s. ‘Thank you so much for coming all the way here. And so quickly.’ He smiled as he ushered them towards the car.

Once they were safely ensconced in the back, Cesare D’Aletto turned and leaned over the front seat. ‘It’s been pouring,’ he said, ‘since Saturday night, when the weather broke. So it’s not ideal. But I thought you’d want to see the site as soon as possible.’

He was younger than Pallioti had expected and seemed almost apologetic, as if he could somehow control the weather, or the state of the crime scene, or both. His blond hair flopped into one blue eye. He flicked it away. ‘Unless,’ he added, ‘you’d prefer to stop? For something to eat, or coffee?’

‘No,’ Pallioti shook his head. ‘Let’s get on.’

‘Good.’ Cesare D’Aletto twisted back to the front and fastened his seat belt. ‘In that case, it’s about a forty-minute drive.’

Somewhere behind the bank of cloud that hung over the sea, the sun rose. Pallioti did not see it as they swung around the city, then joined a road so straight that it had to be Roman. The rain came down in sheets, blowing sideways, obscuring the countryside that, to Pallioti’s eye, looked low and green and scrubby. Once or twice, he saw small houses standing far back from the side of the road. When they turned off the motorway, the pace slowed considerably. It slowed again as they wove through a small town, not much more than clusters of whitewashed stone clinging to the side of a hill. A church reared out of the piazza. A few sodden market stalls were set out around a fountain, their red awnings sagging and dripping.

‘It’s not all like this.’ Cesare D’Aletto glanced back at them and smiled. ‘Brindisi’s actually quite nice,’ he said. ‘Some of it.’

Never having been there, Pallioti had no idea if that were true or if the young man was simply making the best of things. Coming here after Turin might technically have been a promotion, but it must also have been one hell of a culture shock. Not to mention a geography shock, if there was such a thing. The nearest snow-capped mountain peak was Etna. Even in the rain, he had felt the temperature a good deal warmer than the autumn dawn they had left behind in Florence. In the summer, this whole area was a frying pan. Akin to living in the desert. Pallioti knew the mezzogiorno had become fashionable with the English who had finally grown tired of Tuscany, and perhaps even with a few Italians, but he couldn’t imagine actually living here. What would you do? And where would you do it?

‘Was Roberto Roblino a native?’ he asked.

Cesare D’Aletto twisted backwards over the seat again and shook his head.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘According to the history we have on him, most of which is coming from his housekeeper at the moment, he came here about fifty years ago. From Spain.’

‘He’s Spanish?’

Pallioti had heard of plenty of Italians who had gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War, but he wasn’t aware the favour had been returned.

‘It says here’ – Enzo was looking at the file he’d pulled out of his briefcase – ‘that he’s an Italian citizen.’

‘Oh, yes,’ D’Aletto said. ‘He is. No question about that. We got his safe open yesterday, we’ve got his passport. But there’s no birth certificate, not in the safe anyway. The housekeeper and her husband met him in Madrid, in the 1950s. He had some kind of import–export company. Roof tiles, building material, that kind of thing. When he moved back here, he brought them, the company and the couple, with him. And he fought with the partisans. So he’s Italian all right. We just have no idea where he was born. It happened, apparently, during the war. A lot of records got destroyed.’

The driver braked abruptly for a pair of old ladies who stepped off the pavement and crept, tortoise-like, across the street, heads bowed in the rain.

‘No family?’

D’Aletto shook his head.

‘Housekeeper says not. There was a wife, or, more like, girlfriend, in Spain. She came back, stayed a few years and left. Other than that, nothing. Nothing in his will, either. It all goes to the housekeeper and her husband. Mainly the housekeeper.’

‘The one who found him?’

Cesare nodded as the car began to wind downhill.

‘Maria Grazia Franca. She and her family live here, in the village.’ He waved at the houses that were rapidly receding behind them. ‘She comes in five days a week. They naturalized as Italians aeons ago. Her husband takes care of the grounds. I’ve contacted the consulate in Madrid,’ he added. ‘But you know what that’s like.’

Pallioti didn’t, but he could guess. They had reached the bottom of the hill. The car accelerated, then slowed.

‘We’re here.’

Through the bleary glass Pallioti saw a television van and several other cars pulled up by the side of the road. Beyond them, a police car was pulled across the mouth of a track.

‘Damn,’ he muttered.

‘We’ve kept them out.’ D’Aletto glanced back. ‘So far.’

He held his ID up to the window as they came level with the patrol car. Cesare D’Aletto spoke briefly to the driver before they turned onto what looked like a potholed gravel lane, a lesser version of the beloved Tuscan ‘white roads’. There was no house in sight. The car veered and bumped.

‘Luckily,’ D’Aletto said, putting his ID away, ‘this is long. About a quarter of a mile. So we’ve been able to hold them down here. But’ – he shrugged – ‘once they knew who it was, and that he was one of the partisans. Well – after your press conference the other night.’

Pallioti nodded. They could hardly have known that this would happen again – that in fact it had happened already as he stood at his podium in Florence long-windedly trying to say nothing at all. If they had, perhaps they would have thought twice.

‘No one knows,’ he asked, grabbing the door as the car lurched over a pothole, ‘about the salt?’

Enzo looked up at the question. His team had essentially been told that they’d be hung, drawn and quartered if anyone so much as breathed the word. Cesare D’Aletto shook his head.

‘No one,’ he said. ‘Well,’ he added, ‘the housekeeper saw. She turned the body over, it was face down. And even in the rain—But I’ve explained to her, and she’s not a stupid woman. She won’t talk to the press. My team?’ he added. ‘Well, there are only four of us. I don’t have squads of people to put on this. And the forensic people, the ME. They won’t say anything. They know it’s more than their job’s worth.’

Pallioti hoped so. This was bad enough – the murder of ageing heroes in broad daylight in the supposed safety of their homes, without the news getting out that it involved some macabre sort of ritual. The press would have a field day with that. Not to mention that it would probably inspire half the nut jobs running around the country. Italy was no more immune to ‘serial killer mania’ than anywhere else.

The car gave another lurch, did something that felt like skidding, and turned a corner. He wondered if perhaps they should have stopped for the coffee after all.

‘This is it,’ Cesare D’Aletto said as they turned onto a wide packed-earth parking area. ‘Welcome to Masseria Santa Anna. Otherwise known as the
castello
.’

Looking through the window, Pallioti saw a large ochre-coloured cube with a crenellated crown running across the top. Two large windows stared out from either side of a broad front door that was approached by a semicircular set of white steps.

‘Signor Roblino owned pretty much what you can see,’ Cesare D’Aletto said, waving towards the low hills that fell away from the terraces and arrangements of shrubs. ‘A couple of hundred acres. Olive groves, mainly, and scrub. He built the house himself.’ He added as he got out and opened umbrellas, offering one first to Pallioti, then to Enzo, ‘According to the locals, he designed it, too.’

Despite the unfortunate circumstances, Pallioti found himself thinking that it was a good thing for Italy that Roberto Roblino had been significantly more successful as a partisan fighter than he had been as an architect. The house looked like a startled red face with its hair standing on end.

He looked around. They were standing on the crown of a small hill. Apart from the village, huddled on a larger hill about half a mile behind them, and the ribbon of the road, the land was dusky green and rolling for as far as they could see. Crowns of olives ran down the slopes, criss-crossed by the white lines of stone walls. The wind that had been evident on the coast had not reached inland. The rain fell straight down in soft, oozing drops. The driver stayed in the car while Pallioti and Enzo followed Cesare D’Aletto past the inevitable loops of crime scene tape, up several sets of steps through a terraced garden, and finally into the house.

‘The scene has been processed,’ he said, as soon as they got inside.