Vita Nuova (5 page)

‘I—no. No.’

‘After what you’d just seen, anybody would be confused and in a panic. If you take things calmly, it will all come back, bit by bit. We won’t write anything down until you’re quite sure.’

For a moment she remained silent. Their footsteps on the gravel seemed very loud in the silence. The marshal didn’t insist, didn’t prompt. She had said ‘he was out there.’ She wasn’t seeing Signora Donati watering her flowers, she was seeing a man. But he mustn’t suggest it. She seemed to him a bit too docile to be a good witness. Like so many people looking for a lifeline in their distress, she would probably be only too willing to say what she thought he wanted to hear.

‘It was a man.’

‘She actually said she saw a man? You didn’t suggest it? Well, of course not, with your experience and know-how. Excellent!’ The prosecutor, with his wide grin, really seemed pleased.

Fortunately, the shutters of his office in the Procura were closed against the sun and the desk lamp was on. The marshal always had an ample supply of folded white handkerchiefs, but he would not like his sun-sensitive eyes to start acting up here. Despite their newfound friendship, he didn’t fancy having to wipe away his tears in front of this man. ‘Experience and know-how. . . .’ Good Lord. Well, it made a change for the marshal to be receiving compliments, even if he hardly believed them. It would make life easier.

‘I’m just thinking that if she said “he” like that, then what she was seeing in her head wasn’t the neighbour watering her flowers. It was the man. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. . . .’

‘Perfectly. I couldn’t agree more.’

The marshal was almost encouraged to go on. But the other images crowding his head were more difficult to get into focus. The slender figure with long dark hair, the exposed fat legs dropping into a metal coffin . . . well, married man or not, would you bring any boyfriend home if your sister were that good-looking? First-born children are always jealous—not Giovanni, though . . . adored Totò. Even so, it could have happened before, maybe with the father of the child. Silvana was twenty-five and single. Of course, these days women had careers, didn’t marry so young as they used to. Not much of a career, ferrying a nephew around and working part-time in daddy’s office. She’d been ill, of course, but so many women were sacrificed by the family. His own sister, Nunziata, would have been a candidate for that, and it was thanks to Teresa if she’d had any freedom at all after their mother. . . .

The mother’s face . . . was she all there? Was it just the sleeping pills?

‘Hmph . . .’ was all he said, looking at the photographs spread on the desk.

‘Six bullets to the abdomen,’ the prosecutor followed his glance. ‘One to the back of the head. One missing.’

‘One missing?’

‘Eight shell cases—incidentally, bad news from ballistics. I don’t have their report yet, but they’ve already told me we’re talking Beretta 22 LR, shells are Winchester.’

‘Oh, dear. . . .’

‘Commonest gun in the country, used by every target shooter. Well, it’s not the end of the world but it’s certainly no help. People imagine ballistic evidence can provide cast-iron proof of a gun’s identity, but you and I know that’s far from the truth. Unless they come up with some extraordinary defect by way of a distinguishing trait, it’s more difficult than telling identical twins apart.’

‘Yes. . . .’ You and I . . . a newfound friend. Well, as long as it lasted. . . .

‘It’s the man himself we need to find, anyway. Keep talking to the sister, get her to be more precise.’

‘I’ll be talking to the young lady again tomorrow. To the father, too, as soon as he gets home. Not that he can help us much with the event itself, but he might at least have some suspicions about his daughter’s relationships and so on—the mother didn’t have anything to say about that to you when you saw her this morning?’

‘No. Not really, no. She said her daughter didn’t confide in her, so she couldn’t give us a name to work on. And I’m afraid I got nothing out of her about yesterday morning. Apparently, she takes sleeping pills and wears earplugs too.’

‘That’s what her daughter told me. She’s very distressed, of course, and not in good health either . . . odd that they weren’t at all close . . . they look alike.’

As plump as a pigeon with six holes puncturing her smooth belly, four of them hitting almost the same spot . . . the opening . . . washed before these photographs. . . .

‘Pretty . . . I expect the sister’s like her father, being dark-haired and so on.’

‘Yes. Yes, he is dark—not so slim, though. Put a lot of weight on with the years—haven’t we all? He’ll have to be more careful now, I would imagine. Tidy shot. Short range, of course, apart from the last shot; no burn marks, though. I’m pushing for the autopsy report for tomorrow morning but I’ve already had a word with Forli. Technically, cause of death was the bullet in the back of the head, instantaneous, very little bleeding. She would have died anyway from the other wounds.’

‘Yes. The missing bullet. . . .’

‘I’ve told them I want it found today. I’ve looked at the video of the area near the body and it looks from the enhancement as if the most likely thing is it went through the photograph that was smashed. It’s got to be lodged there somewhere. I’m holding a press conference at six. Have to give them something. It’s August and they’re desperate. You needn’t bother coming back. You have enough on your plate, and Maestrangelo will be here.’

Thank goodness for that. The captain was good at that sort of thing.

‘Right, Marshal. I’ll get a copy of the autopsy report to you as soon as I have it. Call me, of course if there are developments. . . .’

‘Yes . . . the sister was wanting to move the child back into his own room along with a maid. I explained—’

‘No, no, no. The crime scene stays sealed. I’ll speak to her. And, Marshal, I want to be kept informed of any and every development in this case. You’ve got my mobile number. Call me any time.’

‘Of course.’ Important people. But there were less-important people in this story, too.

‘Is there something else?’

The marshal remained seated, hands firmly planted on his knees, his hat clutched between big fingers.

‘Yes. Yes, the workmen. I promised to let them know whether they could carry on tomorrow. They’d be working on the disused outbuildings, mostly on the roofs. The area’s been searched.’

‘Yes, well, that shouldn’t be a problem.’

Some people could go to bed happy then. The marshal wasn’t among them. Well, he wasn’t going to eat alone in the kitchen. It was too depressing. After a battle with That Thing over the daily orders for tomorrow, he showered and changed and went to the NCO’s club to eat supper. He ate with a recently retired man who had taken a job with an industrialist.

‘All he really wants is for me to be there so that when he has to be away I act as his eyes. I really don’t have to do much, and it’s decent pay.’

‘You don’t get bored?’

‘Now and again, but there are plenty of people to chat to.’

With a good meal under his belt, he escaped from one of those depressing ‘Did you hear So-and-so died’ conversations and the prostate problems of long-retired colleagues and got home just in time to catch the tail end of what the late edition of the regional news was saying about his case. He turned off the television and wandered through the rooms as though he were looking for something. The rooms were empty and silent, and what he wanted he wasn’t going to find there. Far too late to call her now. He could have called her before he went out to the club and he had to confess to himself, now, that he hadn’t done it because she’d have asked him again about the flat he hadn’t done anything about. Well, tomorrow he would be seeing the captain. He’d talk to him about it then and call Teresa tomorrow evening. He went to bed and fell into a dreamless sleep, only to open his eyes suddenly at five in the morning, wide awake and with two questions in his head. The man was cold-blooded, watching her crawl away from him all that time, but why did the prosecutor think the man was such a tidy shot when there was a missing bullet, meaning he’d missed a dying target since he could hardly have missed her when she was facing him in the doorway? And why did that woman wear earplugs in a place as silent as a graveyard?

‘The bulldozer,’ he answered himself aloud, shutting his eyes again. That was it. She liked to sleep late. ‘And until they find the bullet . . . that’s Forensics’ problem.’ He turned over, pummelled Teresa’s pillow, pulling it to himself, and went back to sleep.

Three

T
he morning was stale and dank. If only it would really rain. Sometimes you felt a few tiny drops, but it never amounted to anything except an increase in the general humidity. The buildings in the city looked dirty, and with fewer cars you could smell more drains. The marshal’s driver was nosing his way out into Piazza Pitti, pushing through trailing groups of tourists instead of traffic. The marshal had retreated behind his dark glasses from the colourless glare. After a brief visit to the the Faculty of Science out on Viale Morgagni and an hour’s desk work, he already felt he wanted to take another shower.

They crossed the Ponte Santa Trinita. The river was low and sluggish. People were taking photographs of each other with the Ponte Vecchio in the background. All the colours were drab and the hills upriver were invisible.

‘Will you want me to wait for you, or should I come back later?’

‘Wait for me. You can drive me up to the villa afterwards.’

But when they reached Headquarters in Via Borgo Ognissanti, the marshal saw the captain sitting in his car as it was drawing out of the cloister. The driver stopped the car and the window went down on the passenger side.

‘I’m sorry, Guarnaccia. It’s an emergency. There’s been another episode at the gypsy camp and the press are all over it, attacking the mayor for giving them a permanent camp, and so on. He needs an update and some advice before he calls a press conference at the Palazzo Vecchio. Come with me and get me up to date on your business. Your driver can follow us.’

The marshal instructed his driver and got into the captain’s car.

‘How’s it going?’

The marshal thought a moment and then said, ‘Oh . . . I don’t know. It’s . . . difficult. Nothing you can get a handle on, nobody with anything to say. The wealthy middle classes . . . you just can’t tell what’s really going on. . . .’

‘And you’re afraid things are not as they seem?’

‘Well, they hardly ever are, are they? But, I mean, none of it makes much sense to me—for a start, why buy a place like that just to pull it apart and change it into something else? What’s the point?’

‘I agree with you. I saw the place, years ago, when it was abandoned. There were a lot of those medieval villas once—you can still see them in paintings, but most of them disappeared long ago—within a two-mile radius of the city, more or less. And they were the wealthy middle classes of their day, you know, the people who built them.’

‘Oh . . . I thought they’d be the big names, the nobility.’

‘Not at all. The important families operated from their country estates, much further out. No, these were merchants, bankers and so on. It was good insurance, growing a bit of food and wine, having somewhere to hide from enemies and plagues.’

‘I suppose it was. He’s wrecking the place, anyway, in my opinion—not that I’m setting myself up as a judge of architecture.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, but it happens all the time that these rambling places get divided up. As often as not, the banks buy them. Speculation.’

‘But he lives there.’

‘So perhaps he’ll sell up once all the work’s done. Probably make a fortune.’

‘Mmph.’

‘All right. You’re not to be moved. Did you get anything useful from the university?’

‘Nothing, except that she was an exceptionally good scholar. She was hoping to stay on as a researcher, which is of no interest to us except. . . .’

‘Except?’

‘The professor who was supervising her thesis—I managed to have a word with him, and that was a piece of luck because he stays at his house on the coast for most of August and he’d only come back to pick up some stuff for a paper he’s working on.’

‘And? What about him?’

‘Nothing. They just seem to have been close. I get the impression she was ambitious. After all, apart from the child, she seemed to have no life at all beyond her studies. I just thought . . . ambitious young ladies sometimes, you know . . . shortcuts. . . .’

‘I thought that only happened in the entertainment industry.’

‘No. . . .’ The captain didn’t get out much, any more than Daniela Paoletti had. ‘It happens in all fields. In fact, the professor himself told me that competition in the academic world is ferocious and that people with the right connections tend to win out over the really brilliant.’

‘And would he have been the right connection for her?’

The marshal shook his head. ‘They were only intending to take on one researcher next year, and there was the son of a politician in line for it—besides, the professor didn’t look like he’d be up to it. . . .’

‘Really? What do you mean? Too old?’

‘That, too. Never looked up from his books, I’d say. I can’t see him making a nuisance of himself with young female students. I can’t see him making a nuisance of himself with his wife—well, you shouldn’t judge. After all, the victim sounds to have been the same type—and she did have a child. But no, it was a dead end. He had an alibi anyway: He was in Naples for two days when it happened, working on something I didn’t understand with two other academics. You can tell what sort he was by the fact that it didn’t cross his mind that it was an alibi I was after, and he started telling me about this paper on whatever it was. I’d still be there now if somebody hadn’t interrupted us and saved me. Reminded me of Professor Forli. No, no . . . dead end. . . .

‘I talked to two women and a man in the registrar’s office, but they didn’t see that much of her. They were amazed when I told them how she died, but they didn’t have a scrap of information about any boyfriend. Not even hearsay, gossip, nothing. And as for the child’s father, they didn’t even know she had a child. I left my card. They obviously wanted to see the back of me this morning. They had an endless queue of foreign students to enrol.’

‘Someone must know, for heaven’s sake. Florence is supposed to be a hotbed of gossip. What’s the prosecutor saying?’

‘He’s saying Find the boyfriend. What else can he say? Good heavens, I see what you mean about the press. Television, as well.’

They were driving across the Piazza della Signoria to the municipal offices in the Palazzo Vecchio. Huge groups of sweating tourists were following flags or umbrellas held aloft.

‘What happened at the gypsy encampment? I missed most of the news last night.’

‘A man was stabbed in the leg yesterday by a group of gypsy children in a bag-snatching episode near the station and then, during last night, somebody managed to get into the camp and set fire to two house trailers with a can of petrol. A little girl died.’ They got out of the car and, on the instant, a telecamera was there.

‘Channel three news. Can you tell us anything . . . ?’

The captain ignored them. ‘I’m not likely to be in the office much, Guarnaccia, but you can get me on my mobile—and that press conference may well be put off until tomorrow because we’ll have to hold one about this business, as you can see.’

‘I imagine so. Funny . . . I’d been thinking that the murder of a well-to-do victim would get all the attention, but it’s a little gypsy girl.’

‘It’s not the little gypsy girl the mayor’s worrying about, it’s his political future. Keep me informed.’

‘I will.’ As the marshal got back into his own car, he remembered about the flat for sale. Too late. The driver started the engine. The cameraman was pushing through the tourists to hurry into the building behind the captain. A couple of youngsters in shorts and baseball caps stopped licking their ice cream and turned to stare after them. That cameraman was wasting his time. The journalists’ nickname for Captain Maestrangelo was ‘The Tomb.’

‘We should have found it before, of course.’ The technician exhibited the bullet in a small plastic bag.

It was hardly surprising. The bedside cabinet was antique, deeply carved, and damaged by ancient woodworm scars.

‘It had literally disappeared into the woodwork! If we hadn’t known it had to be here, we’d have been hard put. . . .’

‘The prosecutor will be pleased.’ Not that the marshal himself wasn’t, it was just that he wanted to be alone in the room and he hadn’t yet had the chance, apart from a very few moments yesterday. Too many people all over everything.

If the people in this family told him nothing, then perhaps the house itself would tell him things.

The windows were closed and shuttered and the lights on. It seemed gloomy for a few moments after the forensic people had taken their powerful lights away, but he waited and the effect soon passed.

Plastic sheeting had been put over the bed and the floor beside it so that the sister could be brought in here yesterday. The marshal removed these now and put them out in the corridor.

Then he stood still for a long time, looking.

The tumbled, snowy bed, red floor tiles, smooth with centuries of wax and wear, the few pieces of furniture, dark and heavy. It might be a convent cell . . . except for that one area of disorder, the messy trail leading to a chalk outline. Broken glass from the photo frame. The picture, with its frame and backing, had been laid flat on the bedside table to be photographed by the technicians. A little blond girl in white, a First Communion picture with a small round hole in it. The marshal looked at the child Daniela. She’d been very thin then, and her big solemn eyes were ringed with dark shadows. Nobody in this family seemed to be in the best of health, one way or another. There were two other photographs by the bedside lamp, one of Daniela holding her baby in his christening robe, the other a more recent one of little Piero pushing a wooden truck with red wheels. Yesterday’s search had turned up no other photographs. On the floor above, in Daniela’s big tidy study, the marshal had found a desk diary which contained nothing personal at all. There was the odd dental appointment, tutorials for her thesis, reminders about picking up dry-cleaning. If the man was married, then he had certainly been able to count on her discretion. It looked as if she would succeed in taking her secret to the grave. At the very top of the tower was an attic. It was empty.

‘She never really talked to us.’

An attic without secrets, a diary without secrets.

She had a secret, though.

The child’s bedroom was small and cheerful, the bedclothes turned back to air, a fur animal of some sort with a pointed nose propped on the pillow. A shelf of picture books. The bathroom was tidy, mostly white. Towels, some white, some dark blue, were folded on the brass rail, all except a used one lying on a linen basket.

A quiet, studious woman had got up, washed and dressed her little boy, given him his breakfast on the floor below, and taken him down to her sister. Had she then come up and taken a shower? Possibly. She’d still been wearing some sort of white robe when she died, and she hadn’t had time to make her bed. This was no place for a murder. It was all so quiet, so clean and simple, so . . . innocent.

Nothing is what it seems. Even the house phone. . . .

He looked again at the chalk outline of her body.

Perhaps she tried to raise herself to reach the telephone but sank down just as he fired at her head the first time.

And still, what help was it to know that? Somebody had come up here and she had opened the door to her killer. Had she known him? She must have. She had opened the door to him in her robe, a thin, white robe, silk, maybe. There was no house phone up here, and he hadn’t seen one on any floor yesterday. He walked to the window above the entrance and opened it up. Hard to recognize anyone from directly above at this height, but somebody familiar, a voice calling up a greeting. . . . He leaned out.

There was a man standing down there.

His hair was dark. He wasn’t in uniform. He was smoking. Suddenly, he looked left and right, tossed the cigarette, and ducked under the police tape to get in.

The marshal closed the window and started down. There was little point in trying to do it silently on the stone stairs. How the devil this man had got in was a mystery since the grounds were still full of carabinieri, but the marshal was more interested in who than how. When he reached the ground floor the man was there, looking around.

‘For God’s sake!’

‘Morning, Guarnaccia.’

‘What the devil are you doing here—and how did you get in?’

‘Oh, you know me,’ Nesti grinned.

‘Yes, I do, and it’s lucky for you the prosecutor’s not here or he’d put you away for this. Get out.’

‘Come on, Guarnaccia, give me something, anything, for tomorrow’s paper and I’ll go. Besides, I knew the proc wasn’t here and I got in down near that cottage where they were searching until ten minutes or so ago. Wall’s a bit broken down there—I’ve ruined my shoes.’

Nesti’s obsession with being first on crime scenes was only equalled by his passion for fine clothes and shoes.

‘Get out, Nesti.’

‘I’ve helped you out before now.’

That was true. Nesti had been a crime reporter on
The Nazione
for longer than the marshal had been in Florence, and he knew just about everything there was to know about the place.

‘Besides, I can’t get out the way I got in, because the wall’s two metres higher from the ground on the inside—and I can hardly go out the front gates. There’s one of your cars parked there.’

‘Nesti!’

‘You’ll be sorry if you don’t help me out, because I’ve got something on this rogue.’

‘On whoever killed her?’

‘Maybe—though, if I’m right, you haven’t a hope of catching him. No, I meant the owner of this place, Paoletti. You won’t have met him, he’s in hospital.’

‘And you have? Don’t tell me you’ve been to the hospital—’

‘No, no, no. A story from years back. He’s gone up in the world, judging by the size of this place.’

‘Nesti. . . .’ It was true that he was often useful, but he had this casual way of throwing out information so that you were never sure if he was serious—or, to be exact, you were always sure he couldn’t be serious, but he usually was. There was something about his laconic delivery and the fact that his eyes were always squeezed almost shut—probably against his own cigarette smoke—that made everything he said seem comic.