Medusa

XVII

Zen’s train was due to arrive at Verona shortly after two in the morning, but delays due to the fog prevalent throughout the region lengthened the journey time considerably. He dozed off immediately after the departure from Milan, but woke once they reached Brescia, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to sleep again. In many cases he had worked on, there had been a moment like this when events took on a rhythm of their own, imposing themselves like a dance partner who has suddenly decided to lead. But never had he felt this change with such urgency as now.

From the station he caught one of the two remaining cabs in the rank to the Questura on the east bank of the Adige, showed his identification to the desk sergeant and asked for the duty officer and a double espresso. The former turned out to be a gangly, dopey-looking youth who was probably in his mid-twenties but looked like a teenager to Zen. He had apparently been awakened from a deep sleep, but his manner turned rapidly from resentment to alarm as this nocturnal intruder displayed his credentials and explained the reason for his visit.

‘A local resident, one Claudia Giovanna Comai, died some thirty-six hours ago as a result of a fall from her hotel room in Lugano. The Swiss are treating it as an accident, but my superiors at Criminalpol have reason to suppose that this is not in fact the case. They have therefore dispatched me here to search the archives for various documents which might tend to prove or disprove this hypothesis. It is a matter of the greatest urgen¬ cy, as the time of my arrival, so inconvenient for both of us, should amply demonstrate.’

While the young officer was still groggy from this blow, Zen followed up by demanding the use of a secure internal land- line to call Rome and report progress. He was shown into an office on the ground floor and left there while his guide went off to look for the key to the archives. Zen called the operator at the Ministry of the Interior and directed her to put him through to the police authorities at the provincial capital in Cremona.

His reception there, coming from the source it did, was far more cordial than the one he had been accorded personally in Verona. Zen outlined the sketchy information he had acquired from Paola Passarini’s son regarding the property previously owned by the family and sold by them in the late sixties, and requested that full details be obtained from the local comune the moment they opened. He would ring back later in the day to learn the outcome.

As soon as the duty officer unlocked the door leading to the vast storage area in the basement, Zen felt at home. Archives were much the same all over the country, and he had visited most of them at one time or another in his career. To him they were sad but restful places, sheltered graveyards for forgotten intrigues, mysteries and atrocities about which no one cared any more. Above all, they were complete. Italian bureaucrats might have their faults, but like the medieval monks they resembled in so many ways they never threw anything away, although they had of course been known to destroy a document on orders from above, or to let certain well-connected persons remove it while their backs were supposedly turned.

This aspect of official record-keeping had been of some concern to Zen, given the apparent situation. His other worry was the computer screen perched on a desk near the door, but the young officer assured him that although the catalogue was gradually being digitized, this process was slightly behind schedule owing to technical problems and staff shortages and so far covered only those cases dating from 1994. The earlier material was accessed through a series of card index filing cabinets using a system perfectly familiar to Zen. He dismissed his companion with an unsubtle hint about his no doubt needing to get some more sleep, and then set to work. Shortly afterwards the desk sergeant appeared with a plastic mug containing a double shot of espresso. Deep in communion with the files, Zen almost made the mistake of tipping him.

The documents on record in the names of Claudia and Gaetano Comai were not extensive, and apart from the inevitable interlarding of pages regarding purely routine matters they solely concerned the matter of the latter’s death. Zen settled down to read them, noting various details from the contemporary reports and also the name of the officer who had conducted the investigation enquiries. When he had everything he needed, he replaced the files and went back upstairs.

The desk sergeant had never heard of any Armando Boito, and very much doubted that his superior would have either.

‘We’re too young,’ he explained in a cringingly apologetic tone of voice that Zen had never before heard used with those particular words. ‘The Personnel people keep all the records on former staff on file, of course, but they won’t be in until eight.’

Zen walked out under the portico of the Questura for a smoke. A rain as serious and solid as hail was falling. Beyond the other side of the street, the vast bulk of the Adige glided past like the collective unconscious of the sleeping city, a viscous colloid the colour of old blood, laden with muck and garbage, amorphous forms and sodden hulks, shattered hopes and broken dreams. The massed range of the Alps behind had unleashed a storm that would fill the wide channel of the river close to the level of the high embankments by evening. People would shake their heads and exchange fashionable worries about the climate changing, but in truth it had always been like this. There were no landscapes in Italy. Nature had always been the adversary.

Every instinct was telling Zen to push forward. Short on sleep, but high on adrenalin and caffeine, he felt restless and totally wakeful, but there was nothing he could usefully do until the day staff arrived for work, both here and in Cremona. It then occurred to him that he was going to need to rent a car, and that the places that opened earliest would be at the airport. He went back inside and got the number of the local taxi cooperative from the duty sergeant. At this point, having thrown his weight to such good effect, he could probably have talked his way into getting driven out there in a patrol car, but he already sensed that things were rapidly approaching a point where the fewer official dealings that were involved the better.

When the taxi dropped him off at the airport, the only sign of life in the glistening terminal was a check-in line for some crack-of-dawn cut-price flight to Ibiza. The car rental booths were right down the other end, near the arrivals gate, a walk of what felt like almost a kilometre, and none of them was open. Zen sat down on one of the array of steel benches nearby, fighting the urge to lie down and surrender to sleep by thinking about his interview with Claudia Comai. He realized now that she had understood everything he said alla rovescia, inside out. ‘I made my statement to the police at the time,’ she’d told him. ‘They questioned me on several occasions and I said everything I have to say then, while it was all fresh in my mind. The report must still be on file somewhere.’

He tossed restlessly about on the seating, which seemed to have been designed, like certain fast food outlets, with a view to limiting to the absolute minimum the time that anyone would want to use it.

‘I’ve had enough of all your tricks and teasing, understand? He fell down the stairs! That’s what happened and you have no proof to the contrary. He was a cripple by then, for God’s sake! He fell down the stairs. That was the conclusion arrived at by the investigating magistrate at the time and it’s never once been queried, not once in all these years!’

And then those terrible vulgar blasphemies and obscenities that no lady such as Claudia evidently aspired to be should ever have let pass her lips in public. ‘ Dio boia, Dio can, vaffanculo! ’ Zen muttered the phrase aloud now. It was addressed to himself, as she had addressed it at the time, but filled with a very different kind of disgust.

When the car rental people finally arrived, Zen hired a small Fiat with a waiver allowing him to drop it off at any one of the firm’s agencies in Italy. Back at the Questura, the usual morning queue of immigrants and asylum seekers in search of residence and work permits had already started to form. In the mood he was in, Zen didn’t waste any time on the sensibilities of the clerical staff in Personnel. Within five minutes he had the last recorded address and telephone number of Inspector Armando Boito, who had retired in 1991 and might easily be dead by now.

Zen had parked the Fiat illegally right outside the building, thereby obstructing one lane of what now revealed itself to be a major traffic artery. The first thing he saw when he got in was a white parking ticket fluttering under the windscreen wipers. He got out again, tore it in two and dropped it in the road, thereby adding littering to his local crime record. You had to hand it to the Veronesi, he thought as he pulled away, what they lacked in charm they made up for in efficiency, particularly when schei — dosh — was involved.

It took him almost an hour to get out of the city, partly because he was a timid and inexperienced driver and partly because he had no idea where he was going, but mostly because he was trapped in a counter-Adige of nose-to-tail commuters who knew precisely where they were going and had no patience for this bumbling amateur who was fouling up the system. He only escaped in the end because he happened to see a direction sign with the word ‘Valpolicella’ and immediately veered right across two lanes of traffic in a manner that elicited a number of colourful comments which he was fortunately unable to understand since they were in a form of dialect specific not to the Veneto in general but to the city of Verona in particular.

After that, it was pretty straightforward. He stopped at a petrol station and asked directions, then rang Boito’s number from the payphone. The call was answered immediately, and by the man himself. This time Zen wasted no time on a cover story. He told Boito exactly who he was and what he wanted, and got an immediate and positive response.

San Giorgio di Valpolicella was reached by a turning off the main road which wound up into the hills looming mistily above the plain below before twisting to a halt in the entrails of a village that was clearly very much older than anything Zen had seen on the drive there. Boito had said that he would meet him at a bar in the centre of the village, next to the church.

‘You can’t miss it. It’s the only one.’

He was right. Zen parked in the piazza and walked over to their rendezvous, a typical rural watering hole lacking either charm or pretension.

A man in his sixties, with a shock of white hair cropped short and the thickset, four-square, slightly Germanic look of the local population, rose to his feet and greeted him. Zen made token apologies for disturbing Boito so early, which were graciously brushed aside. They both ordered coffees and then the retired inspector told his story.

He remembered the Comai case well, he said, because it was one of those where he was reasonably sure that a crime had been committed, but had not been able to prove it.

‘They stick with you, those ones! She got away with it, you think, and I wasn’t intelligent or powerful or lucky enough to make her pay. So you end up feeling guilty yourself, almost as if you were the criminal. The whole business leaves a nasty taste in your mouth. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’

‘I certainly do.’

‘Gaetano Comai, the victim, was in his seventies at the time. His wife Claudia was about twenty years younger. Their son Naldo was in school and it was the housekeeper’s day off. Gaetano had retired from the army by then, after a long and distinguished career. He suffered from circulatory problems and could only walk with the aid of a metal frame. At their house in Verona there was a lift, but at the villa here in the Valpolicella they installed a chair lift so that he could get up and down the stairs. Are you familiar with those contraptions? It’s basically a platform fitted with a chair and powered by an electric motor, which runs up and down the staircase in a steel track mounted beneath the banisters.’

‘I’ve heard of them.’

‘The first we knew was when Signora Comai called the police station in Negrar with an incoherent message about an emergency, please come at once. No specifics. That was a bit odd in itself, don’t you think? Your husband is lying critically injured after allegedly falling downstairs, but instead of calling an ambulance you call the police.’

‘Did you ask her about that?’

‘She claimed to have been in shock. Anyway, the patrolmen arrive and immediately radio for an ambulance, but when it gets there Signor Comai is certified dead. Meanwhile the policemen have taken a statement from his wife about how the accident occurred.’

‘Her husband had been upstairs, having an afternoon nap,’ Zen recited. ‘She was downstairs reading in the main salone. She heard the tapping of his walking frame as he came along the gallery, then the whine of the chair lift in operation, a sharp cry and a series of heavy thuds. She ran to investigate and found his crumpled body at the foot of the stairs and the lift still only a few steps from the top.’

Armando Boito stared at Zen suspiciously.

‘How did you know that?’

‘I’ve read the file on the case, ispettore. Believe me, I’ve done my homework. What I want from you is the items that did not appear in the official report.’

Boito nodded.

‘We’re getting there. Forgive me, I have to take everything in order, otherwise I become confused. Signora Comai then demonstrated to the patrolman, as she did later to me, that the lift would only move as long as the control button on the arm was depressed. It must therefore have stopped when her husband, for whatever reason, lost his balance and fell forward to his death. The patrolman, who should instantly have been promoted for this thought, walked up the stairs and tried it out for himself. As the grieving widow had said, the lift moved as soon as he pushed the button. Only it moved up.’

He and Zen exchanged a long look.

‘Those chair lifts are very simple devices,’ Boito went on. ‘They either go all the way up or all the way down, reversing direction at the end of their track. So Signor Comai must have been ascending and not descending the stairs when he fell, in which case his wife’s version of events was obviously false.’

‘What did she say to that?’ asked Zen.

‘She hummed and hawed for a while, then used the shock argument and suddenly remembered that she had used the lift herself to go upstairs to fetch medicines from the bathroom. She felt too weak to walk, she told me. And too frightened of the staircase. According to her, she had felt it to be a “malign force”.’

Zen glanced at his watch.

‘But you thought otherwise?’

‘I certainly did. There was no sign of any medicines in the vicinity of the corpse, and the pathologist found no indication that any had been administered. What he did find, in addition to the expected fractures and contusions, was a deep bleeding fracture to the back of the skull.’

Boito shrugged.

‘As you know, all sorts of odd things can happen when people fall to their deaths. Signor Comai might have struck his head against the edge of one of the steps, or for that matter against the banister post at the bottom, a very ornate affair with plenty of sharp edges. The problem from my point of view was that there were no traces of blood, tissue, hair or anything else on any of these places. When I remarked on this, the widow claimed that she had wiped the surfaces clean because it was too distressing for her to have to look at her husband’s bloodstains. I then asked what she had used. A rag, she replied. What had she done with it? “I threw it in the fire. It made me feel unclean.”’

‘A fire? But this happened in August.’

‘Precisely. An oppressive, sultry day with temperatures in the thirties and thunder in the air. Nevertheless, a fire was indeed smouldering in the salone. I inspected the fire-irons, which were of wrought iron and very heavy. They were all filthy except for the poker, which seemed to have been wiped clean. When I asked about the fire, Signora Comai blushed and replied that she had suddenly felt a chill. Perhaps it was the change of life. She was approaching that period of her life. Sometimes she felt hot, sometimes she felt cold. These were very indelicate questions. There was no law against lighting a fire in your own house, was there?’

Zen liked Armando Boito, and under normal circumstances would have been more than happy to spend the whole day arguing the toss about this long-closed case, but as it was he had become a miser with minutes.

‘So you had a promising prima facie case totally dependent on circumstantial evidence,’ he suggested.

‘Just so. And what I would have liked to do, of course, was to take Signora Comai back to the Questura in Verona and submit her to a twenty-four-hour-a-day relay interrogation until she broke. But that was out of the question. The Comais did not quite belong to the cream of Verona society, of the rich and thick variety, but they weren’t nobodies either. There were plenty of influential friends and acquaintances only too ready to make a public scandal out of the fact that an over-zealous police officer was not only trying to prevent Gaetano’s widow from coming to terms with her tragic loss, but was virtually accusing her of having murdered him. I would never have been able to find an investigating magistrate to sign an arrest warrant. On the contrary, in the course of the one attempt I made it was made very clear to me that any further initiatives of the kind would result in me being transferred to a much less desirable posting than Verona.’

He opened his arms to embrace the bar, the village and the surrounding countryside.

‘This is my home, dottore! I had no wish to make a martyr of myself and get shipped off to some flea-ridden cesspit in Calabria or Sicily. To what good, anyway? The case would still have come to nothing. One has to be a realist about these things.’

Zen indicated his complete understanding.

‘But you still think she did it?’ he asked.

Boito looked at him almost with anger.

‘Do you need to ask?’

‘Then how?’

Boito sighed deeply.

‘My guess would be that she waited until her husband went upstairs for his afternoon nap, which he habitually did at about the time his death occurred. On some pretext she walked up alongside the chair lift in which he was seated. Near the top she somehow persuaded him to stand up, or perhaps just heaved him bodily out of the chair and down the long flight of stairs. She was much younger than him, remember, and very sturdily built. Then she ran downstairs and got the poker from the salone. He may already have been dead, but she wanted to make sure. She smashed in the back of the head, then lit the fire she had previously laid and wiped off the poker with a rag that she then burned. I had the cinders forensically examined and traces of cloth fibre were found, but of course that fitted in with her story.’

Zen nodded.

‘All right, let’s assume you’re right. She killed him. Why?’

Boito made a broad, resigned gesture.

‘That was the other problem I had in trying to pursue the investigation. If only there had been some clear motive, or indeed any motive at all, I might have been able to find a judge to take it on, despite the pressure from the family’s friends. But on the face of it Signora Comai had nothing obvious to gain from her husband’s death. She inherited, of course, but she was perfectly well provided for anyway. The Comais seemed to get along reasonably well together, like most middle- aged couples. By this point, both of them had passed the age when romantic passion could have played a part, and there were no indications that she was a psychotic. So if I’m right, and she did kill him, what could possibly have driven her to take such an incredible risk? Unfortunately I never found the answer to that question.’

Boito smiled complacently.

‘But maybe you’ll have better luck, dottore. What is the exact nature of your interest in this case, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘I’m investigating the death of Signora Comai.’

Boito’s reaction was one of shock. It occurred to Zen that he might well be one of those retired people who understandably feel that they have wasted enough of their lives on news about events that were either of no interest to them or beyond their control, and have decided to break the addiction and live clean for the years remaining to them.

‘Like her husband, she died in a fall,’ he said, rising to his feet and putting a banknote on the table to pay for their coffees. ‘The official line is that it was an accident.’

They walked out into the joyless morning.

‘What became of the villa?’ asked Zen as he searched for the elusive new car key. ‘I looked for it on the way here but I couldn’t find it.’

‘It’s gone. Signora Comai sold it after her husband’s death, citing painful memories and all the rest of it. It was torn down to make room for one of those new apartment blocks down on the main road. Not that it was any great loss, architecturally. The best aspect was always the grounds. Funnily enough, she kept a part of them.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, the villa itself was just a nineteenth-century fantasy on Gothic and Renaissance themes, but there was an extensive walled garden reaching back to a lane behind the property. It had been well designed, and had reached full maturity back in the fifties. And in one corner, at the very end, there was a playhouse that had been built by Claudia’s parents as a birthday present for her. I went down there to take a look when I was questioning her, but it was obviously of no interest to our investigation. Too small for a grown man to even stand up in. Anyway, she sold everything except for a strip at the very end, where the playhouse is, and then had a new wall built to screen it off from the new apartments. Everyone thought she was crazy. A sentimental whim, I suppose.’

Zen frowned.

‘So where is it?’

‘The villa was where the new block is, just opposite the AGIP filling station on the right as you drive back to Verona. But there’s nothing to see.’

Zen spent some moments in thought, then breathed in deeply.

‘Good air up here,’ he remarked.

Boito nodded.

‘In more ways than one, I would argue. San Giorgio has always been a paese rosso, one of the few in this priest-ridden zone. Because of the quarries, you see. This is where they mined that fine, flawless stone used for all the finishing work on the doors and windows in the area, and the quarrymen were soon organized by the PCI. So the intellectual air is also better, at least to my way of thinking.’

He smiled self-deprecatingly.

‘But of course I was born here. You must judge for yourself. The church is well worth a visit. Parts of it date from 712, but the village itself is much older, at least Neolithic and probably much earlier. I’d be only too happy to show you around, if you have time.’

But time was exactly what Aurelio Zen did not have.

In the small town of Sant’ Ambrogio at the foot of the hill, he parked the Fiat in the huge piazza just north of the medieval centre, and then proceeded on foot. In due course he found a grocery and a newsagent’s where you could send or receive faxes. From the former he obtained a ham and cheese roll, from the latter the number of their fax machine. Then he walked back to the phone box in the piazza and called his contact at the Questura in Cremona.

‘Yes, yes, we have the information you requested, dottore. The property you described does indeed exist, although it’s now completely abandoned. Shall I give you the details now? Fax them to your hotel? Absolutely, dottore. At once. There’s just one thing, if I may be so bold…’

‘Well?’ demanded Zen, chewing on the roll.

‘When I called the land registry office, the woman there had the file we needed ready to hand. She said that this was the second time in the past few days that there had been an enquiry about the former Passarini property.’

‘Who was the other caller?’

‘Someone at the Ministry of Defence, she said. So I naturally wondered if there was perhaps something going on there that we should know about. We could easily send a few men out there to search the place.’

Zen almost choked on his roll.

‘No, no, no! That won’t be necessary. There’s no interest in the property itself. It must be a ruin by now anyway. It’s just a question of the deeds.’

‘Ah, right. But what exactly is this concerning?’

‘An on-going criminal investigation based in Rome which for obvious reasons I can’t discuss. The Ministry of Defence also has an interest in the case. And to make things still more difficult, there is a civil lawsuit in progress, the evidence in which is germane to our own enquiries. One of the items regarded the ownership of this property back in the sixties. So it’s purely a matter of background information relating to an affair which is of no interest whatsoever to the Provincia di Cremona. Otherwise of course I’d have alerted you.’

To his relief, the inspector in Cremona sounded convinced.

‘ Perfetto, dottore. Forgive me for bringing it up, but I thought I’d better ask. We naturally like to keep track of anything important that might be happening on our territory.’

‘Of course.’

‘Excellent. Well then, I’ll fax the information to you right away.’

Zen left the phone booth and stood outside, smoking a cigarette and staring at the rectangular piazza lined with savagely pollarded trees. It was enormous for the size of the town, a parade ground big enough to drill a regiment. There must have been a sheep market here once upon a time, with flocks brought down from the hills above. That would explain it.

He went back into the booth and phoned Gemma. There was no answer, so he left a brief message on the answering machine, almost certainly too brief for the listeners to trace the number he was calling from. As he walked back to the newsagent’s, he remembered that Gemma had told him that she was planning to spend a couple of days visiting her son.

That gave him another idea. Having picked up the fax from the Questura in Cremona, he bought a sheet of paper — nothing came free in the Veneto — and faxed a message to his friend Giorgio De Angelis at Criminalpol, asking him to send a team of their technical people up to the apartment in Via del Fosso and remove any electronic surveillance equipment they found there. He didn’t bother mentioning the spare key held by a neighbour on the floor below. The Ministry’s specialists could open any door known to man while you were blowing your nose.

Back in the Fiat, he decided to take a quick look at the remains of Claudia and Gaetano Comai’s country property. It was only a few kilometres away, and the nearest link road to the autostrada lay in that direction anyway. Following Armando Boito’s instructions, he located the filling station easily enough, then turned left down a street along the side of the new apartment block. About three-quarters of the way down, what was obviously the original nineteenth-century wall of the estate replaced the modern cast-iron fence mounted on a concrete base installed by the developers. The old stone wall continued around the corner at the next cross-street, running along the rear of the property. At its mid-point, a green wooden door was inset in the wall. Stickers on the rear bumper of a battered white Toyota parked next to it exhorted people to say no to NATO genocide bombing in Serbia, save the whales, and think globally but act locally.

There was an odd, disturbing sound in the air, presumably a dog shut up here to guard the property, far from the snuffly intimacy and comforting odours of the pack. Single dogs had become the norm these days, Zen reflected as he opened the back door of the car and unlatched his suitcase. Single children too. He’d been an only child himself, of course, but things had been different back then. In the neighbourhood of Venice where Zen had grown up, there had been a community of children who played and learned together, swearing and daring and egging each other on, tussling for rank and status, inventing elaborate games for which no expensive products were necessary, exploring their territory and staging raids and mock battles with their rivals to either side. But all that had gone. Now both dogs and children had to try and make sense of life all on their own. No wonder they whined so much.

He approached the door in the wall, holding the small toolkit that he had removed from his suitcase. He had acquired this useful piece of equipment during his years as an inspector in Naples, when a petty thief had unwittingly blundered into the middle of a major operation Zen had been involved in. The burglar had gladly agreed to trade his freedom for a vow of silence and a set of his working instruments, plus a crash course in how to use them.

They had served Zen well on many occasions, but one glance at the lock told him that they would be of no use here. This was an old-fashioned barrel lock wrought by hand out of iron, contemporary with the original villa. It might have caused a slight problem even for the Ministry’s technicians. Zen’s bag of tricks, designed to cope with modern industrial products, would be powerless against it.

The wailing sounded out again, louder and more prolonged than before. Zen glanced at the white Toyota. It had the old- fashioned number plates starting with the two-letter code for the province where the vehicle was registered, in this case Pesaro. He grasped the handle of the garden door and pushed his shoulder against it. The door stuck for a moment on the stone ledge at the bottom, then swung open.

The remaining strip of garden consisted of dense shrubbery against the wall to either side and between the thrusting lower trunks of deciduous trees much too large for this space. A clearly-trodden path led off through this miniature glade, and Zen followed it past outcroppings of bushes and ground cover to a wall of giant cypresses where the path curved back, eventually revealing a diminutive brick house in the corner of the garden.

The wailing burst out with renewed vigour and volume, peaking in howls of grief with indecipherable words embedded in them. Zen stopped a few metres short of the little building. He knew now what he would find there, and had no wish to cause embarrassment by intruding. He could easily have slipped away unnoticed, but instead he continued to the low front door and opened it.

He looked cautiously around the tiny room before entering, knowing from experience how easily grief could find relief in violence, but there was no one there. To his left, between the windows, hung a mirror covered in black cloth. To his right, a miniaturized dresser with a central cupboard and many smaller cabinets and drawers to either side. At the far end, a table and chairs, a stove and fireplace, and another door. It was from there that the sounds were coming.

Zen stooped to clear the low beamed ceiling. The air was chill and smelt powerfully musty. He opened the door at the far end into an even smaller room. There was a chest of drawers on the same scale as the dresser in the main room. The top drawer was open. On a low wooden bed beneath the single window, Naldo Ferrero sat slumped forward and weeping uncontrollably. On his knees lay an open scrapbook of the kind in which Zen had once arranged the collection of railway tickets given to him by his father.

‘Excuse me,’ Zen said quietly.

Naldo Ferrero leapt to his feet, wiping his tears away and throwing the scrapbook down on the bed.

‘How dare you come here?’ he shouted furiously. ‘You killed my mother! What did you say to her, you bastard? You bullied her, didn’t you? You threatened her with God knows what and she threw herself off that balcony in terror and despair!’

‘Control yourself, Signor Ferrero. Your mother died in Lugano. How could I have interrogated her there? The Italian police have no jurisdiction in Switzerland. Besides, her death was the result of a tragic accident. At any rate, such is the view of the Swiss authorities, who are famously efficient and neutral.’

He was almost caught off guard when Naldo suddenly lashed out with his fist, but the space was too confined and the intended blow low and wide. Zen simply moved back a step, neither doing nor saying anything. As if appalled at his own temerity, Ferrero pushed past him and ran out of the house. Zen bent over the bed and picked up the scrapbook. It opened naturally about a quarter of the way through, for a reason that was immediately obvious. Ten photographs had been glued to the facing pages at this point.

All had been taken in a large garden. The first six showed a young man, the next two a woman of about thirty. The man might almost have been as young as sixteen or seventeen, with the lean, wiry body of an athlete, close-cut black hair and a guarded gaze laden with some emotion that Zen couldn’t quite read in the grainy, low-quality, black-and-white prints. In two of the shots he was wearing casual clothes with the oddly comical air of a style that is out of date but not yet classic. In three others he was in a bathing suit, in one case swimming on his back down a small pool. The remaining one presented him stretched out on the bed that Zen could see by turning his head, stark naked and apparently asleep.

The photographs of the woman had been rather more carefully composed, avoiding the amputational framing and dodgy focus evident in those of the man. The subject, however, was more problematic, despite the fact that Zen recognized her immediately. The younger Claudia had never been beautiful, so much was clear, but the look she gave the camera — as opaque in its way as the young man’s — revealed her to have been as troubling as she was troubled. Hers was one of those faces where a certain combination of daring, desperation and sexual greed transforms plain, pudgy features into something far more potent than standard ‘good looks’.

Her body, amply revealed by the yellow bikini she wore, provided a powerful bass to this disturbing siren song. The fact that she was slightly overweight and teetering on the brink of an early middle age added a final note. Glancing back at the shots of Leonardo, Zen realized that the look in his eyes was one of fear. This might have seemed perfectly natural under the circumstances, but the quantity and depth of the young man’s emotion was somehow disproportionate to the simple fact that he was screwing his commanding officer’s wife. Leonardo had been afraid of him, yes, but in some odd way he had been even more afraid of her.

By the time the last two photographs were taken, either Claudia or Leonardo must have worked out how to operate the timed shutter release function on the camera, since these showed both of them posed awkwardly in their swimsuits by the pool. These shots were the most powerfully suggestive of all. Zen vaguely remembered learning at school about certain atoms — or was it molecules? — that would ‘bond’ with others because they possessed a particle that the other lacked. The possibility for sniggery doppi sensi had been only too clear at the time, but he had never realized the wider implications until now. These photographs made it plain that Gaetano Comai’s wife and Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero had been doomed from the moment they met.

How they chose to deal with it was of course another matter, but that was in very little doubt from the moment that Zen turned back to the beginning of the scrapbook. This consisted of densely packed lines of handwriting in dark green ink, a journal of the affair evidently started shortly after it began. It would have taken at least an hour to read the whole thing, for it ran to almost seventy-five large pages, and Claudia proved to have had a prolix and evasive prose style, short on details but very long indeed on feelings, speculations, afterthoughts, commentary and rhetorical questions. Keenly aware that he could spare not hours but minutes, if that, Zen opted for a heuristic method, dipping and scanning, skipping and noting.

His initial researches told him little except for the fact, reading between the lines of loopy handwriting, that Leonardo’s part had initially been passive. It was Claudia who had initiated the affair when the young lieutenant appeared at the villa one summer afternoon to return some books to his commanding officer. As it happened, Gaetano Comai was away on army business, but other business soon resulted. Before long, Lieutenant Ferrero started turning up regularly at the villa, always on days when it was known that Gaetano and the staff would be absent.

He was about to put the book down again when he noticed that the thumbed softness at the edge of the used pages continued for a further distance before reverting to the hard cut edge of the original volume. Turning over two more blank sheets, he found the text resuming, but in what at first appeared a different hand. The pen was different too, a common blue ballpoint, and the writing tighter, harder and more slanted. There were three pages in all, and he read them very quickly.

Naldo Ferrero was standing immediately outside the front door, as if waiting for him to emerge.

‘I’m sorry I lashed out at you,’ he said in a contrite tone.

‘Have you filed that judicial application to recover your father’s body?’

‘Not yet. I’ve been busy. But I’m still working on it.’

Zen looked him in the eyes.

‘Signor Ferrero, when we met previously I promised to help you to the limits of my ability in return for your cooperation. I regret to say that I have been unsuccessful, but I will give you a word of advice which you would do well to take. Do not contact the judiciary about this. Do not make any further enquiries, either officially or unofficially. Go back to La Stalla, marry Marta if she’ll have you, and try and forget the whole thing. One man has already been murdered because of his connection with this affair. A second has gone to ground under a virtual sentence of death. If you pursue this matter, you may well become the third. There are very large interests at stake, and the people concerned are both powerful and ruthless. In any case, there’s nothing to be gained. I’m afraid it’s virtually certain that your father’s body no longer exists in any recognizable form. Put it all behind you and get on with your life.’

Back behind the wheel, Zen took out all his repressed emotion on the hapless rental car, forcing it mercilessly around the tight curves and along the infrequent straights, blasting other traffic with the horn and smashing the gears down to pass. At last he reached the autostrada, heading first west and then south to Cremona. When he reached the service station at Ghedi, he parked at the rear of the premises, well out of sight of the main buildings, between two huge red trailer trucks marked Transport Miedzynarodowy with an address in Poland. In the service area he bought a small electric torch, and then ordered coffee and a grappa and took them all to one of the stand-up tables. His hands were trembling so much that it was all he could do to get the cup and the glass to his mouth.

Some years earlier, on a return trip to his native Venice, Zen had inadvertently caused the death of a childhood friend by putting too much pressure on him at a vulnerable moment. Now it seemed to have happened again. There had been no way that he could have foreseen the consequences of his actions, but a sense of self-disgust remained. He only hoped that he might be granted an opportunity to make what amends he could.