A Private Venus

6

As soon as Duca realised from Davide Auseri’s story that the young man hadn’t killed anyone, the desire to punch him made him grit his teeth as if he had an unbearable itch. Damned psychopaths, asthenics, schizophrenics! Then the young man’s face, turned soft with anguish, like mayonnaise coming loose from a jar, aroused his pity.

‘Let’s go back to my sister’s.’ They had been sitting for almost an hour in the car, parked outside the Musocco cemetery and, what with the surroundings and the senseless story Davide had told him in a senseless monologue, he felt the need for a change of scenery. He didn’t have many places to go with this would-be madman: not his apartment in the Via dell’Annunciata, no, the great Engineer Auseri might turn up at any moment, nor could they go back to the villa in the Brianza, maybe to a hotel, but later: for now he preferred to take him to his sister’s. He telephoned her, from a bar, unexpected visitors are never welcome, while Davide drank freely at the counter. Let him drink.

‘I’m coming back with my friend, the one you met before. You’ll have to be patient, you’re going to have to help me, can you get my room ready for him?’

‘Has something happened?’

‘No, nothing, just a crisis of imbecility.’

On the way there, he stopped at a pharmacy, bought a little tube of the most basic sleeping pills, and once they got to Lorenza’s apartment he made Davide lie down on the bed and gave him a pill and, like a babysitter with a child, sat there watching him until he fell asleep, which happened almost immediately, because after his confession the neurotic giant was exhausted and fell into what was more a state of collapse than sleep.

Then he put Sara to bed, too-in his arms the little rascal fell asleep immediately-and when he and Lorenza were alone in the kitchen, which was shady although not cool, he told her that he almost felt like crying.

‘If it was just a matter of weaning him off alcohol, it’d be an easy job, but the man has a guilt complex about a murder, he’s been drowning his sorrows in whisky for a year without telling anybody. The idea that he killed a girl has been simmering inside him, and even Freud would take years to get it out of his head. As soon as he’s alone he’ll try to cut his wrists, the same method the girl used, and in the end he’ll succeed.’

‘You can tell his father, he can put him in a clinic, and you can look for an easier job.’

‘Yes, I could do that. He’s in a clinic, one month, two, six, whatever you like, and when he gets out he slits his wrists.’ He finished eating the thick slice of cooked ham which Lorenza had made him for lunch. ‘And then I’ll be the one who’s haunted by the thought that if I’d stayed with him I could have saved him. We’re too sensitive. In other words we’re ridiculously divided into two distinct categories, those with hearts of stone and the sensitive. One man can kill his own family, wife, mother, and children, then in prison calmly ask for a subscription to a puzzle magazine so that he can do the crosswords, while another man has to be admitted to the psychiatric ward because he left the window open and his little cat climbed up on the windowsill and fell from the fifth floor: he thinks he killed his cat, so he goes mad.’

At about seven in the evening Davide Auseri woke up, soaked in sweat: he had all the characteristics of an old maid affected by hypothyroidism, even the nervous sweats. Duca made him take a cold bath, staying with him in the bathroom because he didn’t feel confident leaving him alone, while Lorenza ironed Davide’s suit and shirt and forced him to eat half a roast chicken that she had gone to buy from the nearby butcher. Duca twice filled his glass with red wine, then asked him to come into his study. There had been no conversation: it was as if Davide had closed his front door and had stopped receiving visitors. Duca would make him receive him, by force if need be.

‘Sit down there,’ he said. This was the study his father had made for him to use as a surgery: the display case with the medical samples was still there from three years earlier, the couch covered with plastic that looked like leather, the screen in front and in a corner by the window which looked out on the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, the glass table with the penholder and the long drawer with the little cards in it, maybe more than a hundred-his filing cabinet. His father had imagined it would soon be full of the names of all the sick men, women, and children who turned to him to be cured. What an imagination! He lowered the Anglepoise and lit a cigarette.

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I haven’t even tried to tell you that you didn’t kill anyone, and that you’re not to blame for that girl’s death.’ He stood up and went in search of something to use as an ashtray, came back with a little glass bowl, and sat down again. ‘And I’m not going to try now. If you want to think of yourself as a murderer, go ahead. There are people who think they’re Hitler, and you’re suffering from the same disease. I’m telling you that right now, before I hand you back to your father, because I can help a young man who drinks a little, but I can’t do anything for someone who’s mentally ill.’

He hadn’t expected it but at that first knock, the door opened immediately. ‘If I’d taken her with me she wouldn’t have killed herself, it isn’t a mental illness, it wouldn’t have taken any effort, on the contrary, I’d have liked it, I could have taken her away with me, I wouldn’t even have had to say anything to my father, I could have phoned Signor Brambilla and asked him to tell my father that I was taking a short holiday, my father didn’t even care all that much whether or not I worked for Montecatini, it was only to give me something to do, I’d only have had to take her with me for a few days, until the crisis had passed.’ He was panting as he spoke, but it wasn’t because of the heat: the idea of being considered mentally ill, and by a doctor to boot, had shaken him.

‘Oh, no, Signor Auseri,’ Duca interrupted him, ‘it’s pointless for you to try and drag me into this discussion,’ his tone was cool and mocking, ‘in the treatises on psychiatry there are famous examples of absurd dialectic. I have no desire to have it demonstrated by you that you killed that girl. By the same reasoning, the gas company is responsible for all the people who gas themselves to death, and if you were the director of the company, you’d start drinking whisky and wanting to die. So forget it, the more you persist with this idea, the more you demonstrate how serious your case is.’ That must have touched a sore point, because he saw Davide raise his fist, as if about to pound on the table, but he didn’t, he simply held it like that, in mid-air.

‘But if I had taken her with me …’ He was almost crying.

‘Enough!’ Duca now pounded on the desk with his hand. ‘A normal person doesn’t bother with ifs. But you’re not normal. Here’s more proof: for a year, your father did everything he could to find out why you’d started drinking like that, why you were behaving so strangely, he nearly broke your jaw with a poker, so why didn’t you ever tell him the truth? What were you afraid of?’

The reply came, unexpected and limpid. ‘Because he wouldn’t have understood.’

He was right, Engineer Auseri wouldn’t have understood: depth psychology isn’t something emperors wish to engage with. Of course he didn’t tell him he was right. ‘Okay. In that case why did you tell me the truth? You’ve known me less than twenty-four hours, and I never even asked you.’ He already knew why but he wanted to see if Davide was capable of explaining it.

‘I hadn’t been back to the Via dei Giardini for almost a year,’ he said, looking down at the floor, ‘and this morning you took me there, you parked your car almost at the same spot where I had parked it a year ago, and you left me there while you went into Police Headquarters … And then you took me to the cemetery, you talked to me about your father, I saw all those graves …’

Exactly: without knowing it, that morning he had put young Auseri in a position to unblock his complex, and now, in order to unblock that other, more dangerous, complex-guilt-he had managed to scare him into thinking he might be mad, and poor Michelangelo-esque Davide was trying to demonstrate to him that he wasn’t: thinking you’re mad is more painful than thinking you’re guilty of murder. But it was too unpleasant a job: selling pharmaceuticals would have been less lucrative but also less disagreeable.

‘That handkerchief and that other object she left in the car,’ Davide resumed, ‘I didn’t want to see them, they made me feel bad, but I couldn’t resist, I’d take them out, I’d think about when she wiped her lips and instead of taking her with me I threw her out …’

He was a pitiful spectacle, so athletic and yet so morbidly sensitive, but at least he wasn’t closed up in himself as if inside a ball of concrete, the way he had been before.

‘All right, I’d like to see those things for myself. Where are they?’ Just to allow him to let off steam as much as possible, to get him to free himself, at least a little. Davide didn’t want to tell him at first, but he insisted.

They were in his beautiful soft suitcase, in an internal pocket with a zip.

‘I’d have liked to throw them away and never see them again, but even thinking about where I’d throw that made me feel bad.’

Of course, the morbid psychology of memories. On the glass surface of the little table, he now had the famous handkerchief which, in Davide’s mind, was the handkerchief of the girl he’d killed, and that little object, which looked like a tiny telephone receiver for a doll, two little wheels joined on one side by a strip of metal, no more than three centimetres in length. He barely looked at the handkerchief, but picked up this other object and held it in the palm of his hand. In a tone very different from his previous sharp, harsh one, he asked, ‘This object fell out of the girl’s handbag that day, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what it is?’

‘No. I thought it might be a sample of some kind of beauty product, but I don’t know.’

‘Have you tried to open it?’

‘I never even thought it could be opened.’

‘But you just said you thought it was a sample. A sample can be opened.’

‘I never thought too much about it. Just looking at it makes me feel bad.’

He understood. ‘I’ll tell you what it is: it’s a Minox cartridge.’ He saw that Davide didn’t know what a Minox cartridge was, so he explained it to him. ‘Inside here is a strip of film about fifty centimetres long and less than a centimetre wide, on which you can take more than fifty photographs with a miniature camera called a Minox.’ And having finished the explanation he forgot him, as if he no longer had him there in front of him, as if Davide didn’t exist and he was alone, in the air sickly with heat, in the soft, antiquated light of that lamp, a professional’s lamp, as the shop assistant had said to his father when he bought it for him. Only him and that cartridge.

A Minox wasn’t exactly a camera for amateurs. Little larger than a cigarette lighter, it had been used by spies during the war to photograph documents, as any reader of espionage novels knew. It could take photographs in fog and through smoke, which was why it had also been used a lot by war correspondents. But it required practice to take photographs with such a small camera, it wasn’t easy to frame the shots or keep the camera still. For an amateur, taking fifty photos with a single cartridge was too much, but for a professional it was ideal. And being so small, the film could easily be sent by post, and equally easily be hidden. He had once read a novel in which a spy had kept a Minox cartridge in his mouth when crossing a border and still managed to speak, though that could, of course, have been an exaggeration on the part of the writer-or maybe the character had a larger than average mouth.

He still felt nervous. He didn’t like pointless, infantile fantasies, but this cartridge came from a woman’s handbag and there weren’t many women so keen on photography that they’d use a Minox. Besides, the girl wasn’t exactly a normal, home-loving individual: every now and again she went out, let herself be picked up by a man and went with him, for financial reward. Superintendent Carrua would have defined such behaviour as prostitution, which might not have been very chivalrous, but was certainly accurate. In addition, this girl, for reasons she had not wanted to reveal, had intended to kill herself, and in fact had killed herself. He didn’t want to speculate, but he would have liked to know if this film had been exposed completely or partly-it must have been through a camera because there wasn’t a strip of film between the two spools, as there would have been if it hadn’t been used-if after a year it could still provide a sufficiently clear negative and, above all, what had been photographed. Of one thing he was sure: that these wouldn’t be holiday snaps, an old lady under a beach umbrella, a woman bathing on the rocks, a group of friends on a beach playing with a large ball.

And all these things he wanted to know immediately, he wouldn’t sleep or eat or think about anything else until he did.

He wrapped the cartridge in the handkerchief and put it in his pocket. ‘Excuse me a moment, I’ll be right back.’ The telephone was in the hall. The kitchen door was ajar and through it he could see Lorenza knitting a winter outfit for Sara and listening to the radio. He smiled at her and gestured to her to remain seated, he didn’t need anything. He looked at his watch: nine o’clock.

‘Superintendent Carrua, please.’

‘Who shall I say is calling?’

‘Duca Lamberti.’

A long wait, a few clicks, then Carrua’s voice, a little distorted. ‘Sorry, I’m yawning.’

‘I’m sorry, too, but I needed to talk to you urgently.’

‘You could have come here without phoning, I’m always ready to see you.’

‘I wanted to know if the photographic lab was open.’

‘The lab? Obviously it’s closed. They’re still doing a short week.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow morning.’ He couldn’t, he’d rather go and rouse some photographer from his bed.

‘If it’s urgent, I could have it opened and get hold of the technicians.’

‘It is urgent. I’ll explain when I get there.’

‘All right, I’ll be waiting.’

‘I’ll be bringing Auseri’s son with me.’

Ten minutes later, he and Davide were in the Via Fatebenefratelli, and by 11:4 °Carrua’s large desk was covered in photographs in 18×24 format: the enlargements from the Minox film. There were also two large bottles of Coca-Cola on the desk. Only Davide had not taken his jacket off: they had sat him down at the far end of the room, in front of the table where the typewriter was, and there he had stayed and there he was even now, while they looked at the photographs.

‘What are you thinking, Duca?’

‘I’m sorting the photographs.’

From a puritan point of view, they were obscene images. They were extremely clear, in spite of being enlarged, and technically excellent. Against a vague background of clouds, the kind you found in old photographic studios, stood the subject, a naked woman.

‘There isn’t much to sort: half are of the brunette and half of the blonde.’

That was true: there were about twenty-five photographs of the same dark-haired girl, and twenty-five or twenty-six of the blonde. It could have been claimed that these were artistic images, however daring, in fact the poses seemed to have a modicum of aspiration towards artistry, but that would have been splitting hairs. The poses of the two girls were openly alluring, it wasn’t just their nakedness, it was also the gestures of the arms, the position of the legs. In most of the photographs the girls were hiding their faces, but not in all of them. They couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old.

‘Where did you put the Radelli girl’s file?’ he asked Carrua.

‘Oh yes, it’s in the drawer.’ Carrua gave it to him.

It was a large yellow folder, quite creased, the dossier on the suicide of Alberta Radelli. It contained her photograph, the death certificate issued by the pathologist, a photostat of the letter the girl had written to her sister asking forgiveness for killing herself, an officer’s report, an overall report made by the appropriate office, three or four pages summarising the interviews conducted with a number of people: the suicide’s sister, the famous cyclist Antonio Marangoni, the caretaker of the building where the dead girl lived with her sister. There were stamps, signatures, words underlined in red, and large blue seals. Duca extracted the photograph of the girl, taken from her licence, and showed it to Carrua along with one of the photographs from the Minox.

‘It could be,’ Carrua said.

‘We can soon find out. Davide, come here a moment, please.’ Davide Auseri at last stirred himself and came towards Duca, who showed him the photographs from the Minox, those of the brunette and those of the blonde, but not the photo taken from the licence. ‘Is there anyone you know here?’

It was a nice office, large and quiet, a good place to work at night. Carrua had an apartment somewhere in the city, but even he might not have been entirely sure where it was, he only went there when he remembered the address and wanted to take a bath, but the rest of the time he preferred to sleep in the little room next to the office on the divan bed, with piles of newspapers and press releases on the floor, along with the telephone. His real home was in Sardinia, where he had been born, but he couldn’t get there more than once a year, for a few days. His other real home was this one here, his office, which was always full of things and people. Now there was this young man, looking at these photographs. Carrua was not a particularly sensitive man, but he felt sorry all the same to see Davide’s face as he looked at the photograph of the brunette.

‘That’s her,’ Davide said.

‘You mean this girl is the same one who was found in Metanopoli a year ago?’ Duca asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What about the other one, the blonde? Do you know her?’

‘No.’

Duca turned to Carrua. ‘Can you send for a bottle of whisky?’ he said, adding, ‘I’ll pay.’ He took Davide by the arm and walked him over to the window.

‘Stay there for a moment, the whisky will be here soon.’ He moved a chair close to him, as if he was an old man. ‘As soon as you don’t feel like standing, sit down.’

‘What brand?’ Carrua asked.

‘The most expensive,’ Duca said.

A half glass of whisky gave Davide’s eyes a less remote expression. ‘Don’t be afraid. That shivering inside will soon pass. Drink some more.’

He drank, too, quite a bit. He might end up weaning the young man off drink, but becoming an alcoholic himself. ‘And now let’s analyse these photos.’ He sat down next to Carrua. In prison you lose your own personality, he realised, you lose warmth, you become frozen, and that was why he had to drink. ‘These photographs were taken by a professional in a studio. Technically they’re perfect, aesthetically a little less so. The photographer hasn’t bothered much with the arrangement of the subject, all he’s interested in is the shutter, the speed, the light. My second observation is how strange it is to do studio photographs, and photographs of this kind, with a Minox. A Rollei or a Contax would have been better, or the usual plate cameras you get in studios. To obtain these photographs, they must have placed the Minox on a tripod, and it’s quite a problem, attaching it to a tripod, you need special nuts and bolts that aren’t easy to get hold of, because people don’t usually need to place a camera weighing fifty grams or a little more on a tripod that weighs fifteen kilos.’

‘When did you study photography?’ Carrua said.

‘I never studied it, I’m only a layman, but I had a friend who was a photographer.’ He looked at Davide, who had sat down and was looking out of the window, with his back to them. ‘My third observation is that the girls are not professional prostitutes used to this kind of work. Look at the poses: as far as looking sexy goes, they don’t know much, especially the blonde. The brunette’s a little better, she has a little more class, but she’s innocent. The blonde, on the other hand, is either very vulgar, or just clumsy.’

Carrua was looking through a dozen photographs as he spoke. ‘A very precise analysis.’

‘The last thing is what you have to think about: What was the purpose of taking more than fifty photographs of this kind? That’s your job. But there’s something even more problematic, or at least something I think is serious.’ He picked up the yellow file again and took out the few sheets of paper it contained. ‘When a girl lies down in a field and slits her wrists, she has to use something sharp to do it with. Then she can do one of two things: if she has a lot of self-control and is very tidy, she puts the sharp object back in her purse, if she’s already in a state of shock, she abandons it, she drops it near her, or else keeps it in her hand. But the officer’s report doesn’t mention any sharp object found near the body. Nor was any such object found in the girl’s purse. It’s unlikely that the girl would slit her wrists with the first sharp thing she finds in the field where she’s hidden herself, for example the lid of a tin can, a thorn, a fragment of glass, but even if we admit that, the pathologist’s report contradicts it: the cuts to the veins are straight and clean. You can’t make a cut like that with a tin can or a piece of glass.’

Carrua looked through the papers in the file. ‘Here it is: “… complete list of what was found in the place where the body of the above-mentioned Alberta Radelli was discovered …” It seems they searched, but didn’t find anything sharp. If it was a small blade it might have got lost in a field.’

They exchanged glances. They knew each other well and couldn’t fool each other. ‘You can’t slander the Metanopoli police like that,’ Duca said. ‘If there’d been something sharp there, even within a radius of thirty metres they would have found it and put it on the list. You don’t have a very high opinion of your fellow officers.’

‘Your father always said that, it offended him.’

They both smiled, wickedly. And then Carrua said, ‘I think you have something else to say.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the contents of the purse.’ He looked towards the window. Davide was there, his back turned. ‘Davide, no need to get up, just tell me how much money you gave the girl that day. Think carefully. Tell us what denominations it was in.’

Davide turned. Compassionately, the whisky had put to sleep the vipers that were poisoning him from inside. ‘Let’s see … They were ten-thousand-lire notes …’

‘How many?’

‘Let’s see … I think two, yes, two, when we were in the Corso Lodi, because she didn’t want to come, she was afraid … Then, by the river, she said she needed fifty thousand lire, and so I gave her another three notes of ten thousand … In my wallet I only keep notes of …’ He suddenly broke off, and slowly turned back to the window.

‘So,’ Duca said to Carrua, ‘when Davide left the girl she had fifty thousand lire in her purse, at least fifty thousand. Now I’ll read you from the list how much there was by the time the police arrived: one ten-thousand-lire note, one thousand-lire note, three hundred-lire coins, two twenty-lire coins, four five-lire coins. If we assume the girl already had the small change before she met Davide, in other words, one thousand three hundred and sixty lire, and that the ten-thousand lire note was one of the five that Davide gave her, there are forty thousand lire missing.’

It was obvious, but Carrua checked the dog-eared sheet of paper all the same. ‘Give me the pathologist’s statement.’ He read it carefully. ‘It says here she can’t have slit her wrists before eight o’clock, but probably after eight thirty.’

Duca looked again towards the window, almost sadly. ‘Davide, don’t get up: What time was it when you left the girl that day?’ He saw immediately that the young man hadn’t understood, he was dazed, but not with whisky. In Metanopoli, when you told the girl to get out of the car, what time was it, more or less?’

Davide didn’t say, ‘Let’s see.’ He said, ‘The sun had set.’

‘Could you still see?’

‘Yes. The sun had only just set.’

‘Given the season, it must have been seven or a little later,’ Duca said to Carrua. ‘The girl walked around for more than an hour before making up her mind, and in the meantime she could have spent forty thousand lire. Where and how I can’t imagine, because Metanopoli isn’t bursting with shops like the Via Montenapoleone.’

‘She may have given them to someone,’ Carrua said, ‘or someone may have taken them, that’s what you’re trying to say.’

They didn’t understand. Not even your closest and dearest friends always understand you. ‘I’m not trying to say anything. Apart from one thing: that I can’t deal with this young man. I don’t like problems any more, and this is one big problem. Don’t tell me you found me a good job and I don’t want to do it, you have to realise that I can’t afford to get mixed up in anything like this, it’d ruin me. After already being sentenced for homicide with extenuating circumstances, all I need is to be suspected of having links with the world of call girls and orgies and I’d really be messed up.’

‘You’re right,’ Carrua said gently.

‘I just wanted to show you that it isn’t bad will,’ Duca said. ‘This business is for you now.’

‘I’ll get right on it.’ Carrua picked up the phone. ‘Send me Mascaranti.’

‘I’m going to look for another job,’ Duca said. ‘Please get hold of Engineer Auseri, tell him whatever you want and give him back his son. Tell him he’s not to be left alone.’ He looked towards the window. ‘I’m so sorry, Davide.’

Davide got up slowly, laboriously, even the small amount of air coming in through the window seemed to make him sway, and came towards them. ‘Signor Lamberti,’ he said.

They waited for what was coming next, they had to wait almost a minute.

‘Don’t leave me.’

They waited some more, he seemed still to have a lot of things to say.

‘Don’t leave me.’

He took another short step forward. ‘Signor Lamberti.’ He was an intelligent young man, he paid attention, he didn’t need to be told things twice, he had grasped that Duca didn’t like being called Dr. Lamberti.

There was nothing else to do but wait for him to speak, and they waited. They both knew now what he would say. And in fact he did.

‘Don’t leave me.’

He was repeating, without realising it, the scene the girl had played with him that day in the car. ‘No, no, no, take me away with you, take me away.’ He had even tried to cut his wrists, like her, and he would try again, as soon as he was alone. It was a kind of unconscious identification, a way of expiating his guilt.

Duca stood up, took him by the arm to support him, even though Davide was not drunk, walked him back towards the window, and made him sit down. ‘You’ll be all right, Davide.’

‘Don’t leave me.’

‘Where’s Mascaranti?’ Carrua was screaming into the phone. ‘Can I have the honour, or am I asking too much?’

‘It’s all right, I’m not leaving you.’

‘If you leave me, it’s over, I know what I’ll do.’

Duca also knew what he would do, just as he had known when Signora Maldrigati told him she couldn’t bear to live like that any more.

‘I won’t leave you.’

‘Is he coming up?’ Carrua yelled. ‘Is my office on K2 or what? Why isn’t he here yet?’

‘It’s all right.’ He couldn’t leave him. He was a specialist in socially redeeming work: euthanasia, saving troubled young people. He went back to Carrua’s desk just as Mascaranti came in.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mascaranti said, ‘I just finished my shift and went to have a beer.’

Even though he was short and dark, even though he still had his Sicilian accent, he didn’t look like a policeman, more like a sportsman, a boxer, a racing cyclist, because of his athletic chest and huge hairy hands, and his trousers, even though they were not narrow, adhered to his legs almost like socks.

‘We’re not in the FBI here,’ Carrua shouted, ‘we’re in Milan police Headquarters: when you’ve finished your shift you stay here.’ He handed him the yellow file. ‘See if you remember this case, that’s your seal on the reports.’

In those hands, the sheets of paper were like butterflies in a dragon’s paws. Mascaranti studied them for a while, without saying anything.

‘He’s forgotten how to read,’ Carrua said nervously.

‘Yes, I remember it,’ Mascaranti said. ‘The girl who slit her wrists in Metanopoli. I checked the reports from the Metanopoli police, I even showed them to you. Is something wrong?’

‘Yes, something’s wrong, even though I saw them and you saw them and the secretary general of the United Nations probably saw them.’ Carrua did occasionally lower his voice, but it never lasted for long. ‘What’s wrong is that we don’t know what the girl used to slit her wrists. Plus, she should have had more than fifty thousand lire in her purse and there was just over ten thousand when she was found.’

Duca rose to Mascaranti’s defence. ‘Nobody could have known that, apart from Davide who gave her the money.’

‘And then there are these photos, which have just been developed after a year,’ Carrua said. ‘The brunette is the dead girl. Given the kind of photographs these are, there seems to be food for thought here.’

‘There’s also something else,’ Duca said, his eyes still on Davide, ‘anybody who wants to kill themselves by slitting their wrists does it at home, or in a hotel room, either in the bath, or in bed. It’s a little unusual to hide in a field to do something like that, especially when you have a home to go to.’

‘Didn’t you think about these things when you signed the report?’ Carrua screamed.

Mascaranti had long been immune to Carrua’s shouting and screaming. ‘Yes,’ he said calmly, ‘I thought about them, I even asked the pathologist if he thought it was worth doing a post-mortem. He told me he could do one if I wanted, but that his certificate was clear enough.’ He read some phrases: ‘ “… Loss of blood … No other wounds, contusions or marks on the body.” ’

‘Yes, I read that, too,’ Carrua said, ‘but I think we have to start again from the beginning. Take the file, and tomorrow morning go back to Metanopoli, question again everyone who was questioned before. And above all look into these pornographic pictures. I’ll give you all the details tomorrow morning.’

‘How did we get hold of these photos?’ Mascaranti asked.

‘I’ll tell you tomorrow morning!’ Carrua exploded. He didn’t want to talk about Davide now. ‘All right,’ he said to Duca. ‘Take our friend home. Tomorrow I’ll contact Auseri and he’ll come and collect his son, and you’ll be free.’ Duca said nothing, he was looking at the hard-faced Mascaranti, who had taken the yellow file and was clutching it to his chest.

‘I’m talking to you,’ Carrua said.

‘Sorry.’ Duca looked at him. ‘I may have changed my mind.’ It wasn’t a real change of mind, he was just making yet another of his mistakes.

Carrua put the two empty bottles of Coca-Cola down on the floor. ‘Go now,’ he said to Mascaranti, ‘and I’ll see you tomorrow morning at ten.’ He had already understood.

‘I’m staying with Davide,’ Duca said to Carrua, as soon as Mascaranti had gone out.

‘If you want to,’ Carrua said nervously: when his sensitivity was touched he became nervous.

‘I do want to. Plus, I’d like to ask a favour.’

‘Go on.’

‘I want to be with Mascaranti on the investigation.’

Carrua was looking at the bottle of whisky. ‘Give me a drop of that stuff.’ He barely moistened his lips, just stared into the glass. ‘Let me see if I’ve got this right, Duca, you want to investigate alongside Mascaranti.’ It wasn’t even a question.

‘Something like that. I won’t take an active part, but I’ll be with Mascaranti.’

‘First you wanted to drop everything, now you want to play cops and robbers.’

‘I changed my mind.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t reply, and Carrua didn’t insist, because he knew why. Davide was still there next to the window, straight, statuesque, devastated.

‘All right. Tomorrow I’ll send you Mascaranti.’ Carrua covered the two lots of photographs, putting one photograph face down on each pile. It felt strange, looking at naked photographs of a dead woman. ‘Where will you be?’

‘I think it’s best if we stay at the Hotel Cavour, that way we’ll be nearby.’

‘Yes, it’s practical.’ Carrua looked at his watch. ‘I don’t know how good you are as a policeman, so let me give you a test. Where would you start?’

He didn’t reply this time either. Nor did Carrua insist this time, because he knew perfectly well where he needed to start: with Davide Auseri. Homicide disguised as suicide was something lots of people tried, almost always in vain, but even if the girl really had killed herself, Davide Auseri had been the last person to see her alive, and his story was just his story, and it might not necessarily be the truth, or at least not the whole truth. But neither of them had the stomach to pump him at the moment, neither he nor Carrua. They were even afraid of what might come out if they pumped him, or maybe not afraid, they felt pity, they felt sorry for him, both of them, he and Carrua. One day, before too long, they would have to ask Davide where he had been that evening, from seven until ten, and if he could tell them the name of someone who had seen him during those hours, and if he couldn’t be clear about that, and if they suspected that the suicide of Alberta Radelli wasn’t a suicide but that she had been murdered, then they needed him, Davide, to explain, as best he could, what was behind the girl’s death, and what was behind those photographs, because whatever it was it wasn’t anything good.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Carrua said. ‘I remember somebody doing that in 1959. A man whose wife always took sleeping pills at night. One night he gave her one more than usual, then slit her wrists and came to us in the morning to say he’d found her dead.’

‘And how did you find him out?’

‘We beat it out of him. It was Mascaranti who questioned him. When you think up a trick like that, you never think you might be beaten. There’s no need of any Chinese torture, after the fifth or sixth slap from Mascaranti, a person has to decide before his brain explodes.’

‘I didn’t say she was murdered,’ Duca said, standing up. He hoped, with all his heart, with all the last spark of trust in his fellow men, with all his anger, that it wasn’t anything as nasty as that. He went to Davide. ‘Come on, let’s pitch our tents at the Cavour.’ He put his hand on his shoulder and gave it a little fraternal squeeze.