The Salati Case

Saturday

I woke up a few hours later feeling brittle, like I could snap for lack of sleep. I looked at the clock and it was only just four in the morning. I tried to get up quietly, but every movement seemed loud and clumsy. As I walked towards the kitchen, the tendons in my left ankle clicked as I went.

The entire city was asleep. In that cold silence every thought seemed powerful and unopposed and fantasies took possession of my mind.

I sat in the armchair. I could hear traffic in the distance, hear someone’s boiler firing up.

It was surprisingly noisy once you were used to the quiet. And each sound could have been any number of things.

I was thinking about what the old Veronesi couple had heard. The cat’s bell, they said.

I couldn’t tell if it was a dream or something real that I was remembering. Time seemed to pull apart for an instant, allowing that instant to pass in slow motion, to become something more than what it was.

I stood up and went over to the phone table where I drop my keys each night. I picked them up as silently as possible, but there was still the rattle of kissing metal. They hadn’t heard the cat, I realised, but someone lifting the keys from Umberto Salati’s pocket.

I slipped the keys into my jacket and counted out the eight specimen keys from Sandro Tonin’s bag. I zipped them into my inside pocket and pulled the door shut.

The fog was thick but the green neon of a chemist’s cross was bright. As the lines came on one by one the air seemed to turn into algae.

It was still early. I had been outside Sandro Tonin’s flat since before five and there had been no movement. I was yawning every few minutes and wondering whether I should go back to bed.

At a few minutes past eight Sandro came out dressed for work. He was headed for the office by the look of his pressed trousers. I could hear the sound of his heels clicking as he walked.

Once he was out of sight I walked up to Sandro’s block and quickly tried one key after another. The gate gave way. I did the same for the door on the inner courtyard and got into the building.

Inside I slipped the keys back into my pocket and started walking up the stairs. A young boy was heading out in running gear and I stopped him.

‘You know which floor Sandro Tonin is on?’

‘Third,’ the boy said enthusiastically.

He ran off and I went up another two floors.

There were two doors on that floor. I tried the one to the right because there was an umbrella bucket outside the door with an expensive walnut wood handle poking out. That would be Sandro, I thought.

I rang the bell expecting nothing but I heard the sound of someone inside and eventually the door opened.

It was a girl. Her face was on and she had a cup of coffee in her hand.

‘Sandro in?’ I smiled.

‘Just left,’ she said sleepily.

‘Who are you?’ I put my good foot inside the door.

‘Marzia Colombi. Who are you?’

‘Renzo,’ I said. I use the name so often it comes out natural by now. ‘I’m a mate of Sandro’s. Mind if I come in?’

I walked in without waiting for a reply and shut the door behind me. She looked at me with a mixture of scorn and terror.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I said. I pulled out my ID.

She looked back at my face and tried to smile. ‘Looks like you need a partner.’

‘I don’t do partners. What about you?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Sandro.’

‘What about him?’

‘Where were you Wednesday night?’

She frowned. ‘Here.’

‘This where you live?’

She nodded.

‘With Sandro?’

‘Sure.’

‘And Wednesday you were here all evening?’

‘Sure.’

‘And Sandro?’

She frowned. ‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s time to remember.’

‘I…’ She was about to play ignorant again, but stopped herself. ‘What’s all this about?’

‘Did Sandro go out on Wednesday?’

She shrugged. ‘He said he wanted to get some gear in.’

‘What gear?’

‘You know,’ she said scornfully.

‘Where from?’

‘Lo Squarcione.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘The guy he normally gets it from.’

‘What’s it, exactly?’

‘Coke.’

‘And Lo Squarcione sells?’

‘Right.’

‘Did he come back with anything on Wednesday?’

She nodded.

‘And you know this character, Lo Squarcione?’

‘Sure.’

‘Where?’

‘He hangs out around the station. Always has.’

‘Dealing?’

‘Doing any business he can.’

I wasn’t sure what to believe. She looked too eager, like she was after something.

‘What does he look like?’

‘Who?’

‘Sandro’s dealer.’

She blinked. ‘Large scar from ear to nostril. That’s how he got his name I guess. He looks like the kind of kid who puts too much candy up his nose. You know, looks tense most of the time.’

I went through the flat room by room. Started emptying drawers, looking in cupboards, rifling through clothes. The girl was watching me as if she was thinking about calling for help, so I ripped the phone from its socket and threw her mobile off the balcony.

I went through the other rooms: the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom. There was nothing out of the ordinary. I went through the whole flat again, frustrated. It was a mess now, and the girl was whimpering. I didn’t even know what I was looking for, though I had a few hopes. If I could find his father’s credit card here I would be a lot happier that my theory was valid.

Nothing showed up. I pulled out my phone and called the Questura. I didn’t give my name, just told them to send men round to the address. I hung up before they could ask any more questions.

I grabbed her by her upper arm and held her against the wall. ‘This is a murder case, sister,’ I said. ‘That means people who kill and kill again. We’re going to the station. Let’s go and see who you see.’

She was shaking her head, staring at me with nervous eyes.

‘The carabinieri will be here in a few minutes,’ I said. ‘I’ve just called them. When they get here, they’ll arrest you and you’ll probably spend the next ten years inside.’

‘What for?’ she hissed. ‘What for? I haven’t done anything.’

‘No one ever does, do they?’

She was shaking now, not understanding my words properly, but understanding the sense somehow.

‘The only way out is with me. I’ve told you, I’m not going to hurt you if you help me, OK? You coming or staying?’

She started crying and I put a hand under her arm, took one last look around the flat and walked out, leaving the door ajar. She leaned heavily on me as we walked down the stairs.

I threw her in the passenger seat and sat down next to her. We saw the carabinieri arrive en masse and disappear up the staircase of the block.

I started up the engine. ‘You’re going to wait for a bus that never comes, you got it? You see Sandro’s dealer, you ask him for a cigarette. He’s the only one you talk to. You don’t approach anyone else, you with me? All you’re doing is asking for a cigarette.’

‘I’m not sure…’

‘He tries anything and I’ll put more holes in him than a scolapasta,’ I said, speeding up Via Trento towards the bridge. I hardly slowed at the roundabout. I screeched round to the right and on to the forecourt. ‘This may take hours,’ I said, ‘and it may not happen at all.’ I leaned across her and opened her door. ‘Just wait for that bus.’

She nodded and slammed the door shut. I parked up by the Toschi and walked back. From a few hundred metres away I could see the amassed lights of the station. Buses pulling in, heaving off. Cars dropping. Taxis hovering.

I crossed at the lights and sat on one of the stone walls under a tree. There were a couple of Moroccan men sitting there on a rug. From here I could see her. She was taking out a cigarette from her pockets and lighting it. ‘You’re supposed to ask for one,’ I said to myself, ‘not provide your own.’

She stood in the same place for a few minutes. She glanced around all the time, but it looked like she was searching for me, not her man’s man. I walked past her on the way to the ticket counter and told her to keep looking. I watched her from inside the station. Occasionally people would go up to her and ask something. She kissed a couple of people who recognised her. But she didn’t ever approach anyone.

I was just walking between one window and the next when I lost her. She must have seen me disappear for an instant and was suddenly gone. I went out there immediately but couldn’t spot her. There were trucks and buses parked everywhere. The Saturday morning crowds were already marching up Via Garibaldi. I ran away from the centre along the river but couldn’t see her.

There was no one who even looked like her. The pavements were busy with weekend shoppers coming in from all over the province now, and it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

I saw a girl down a side street. It wasn’t Sandro’s squeeze, but it looked like someone about as desperate as me. She was hovering like someone needing a score and biting her fingers like she hadn’t eaten for weeks.

‘You want to earn some?’ I said to her.

She looked at me and assumed the obvious. ‘I don’t do that sort of stuff.’

She was a sorry sight. Dirty fingers and skin like a toddler’s knees. Her forearms were reddened by a rash, and her joints all jutted out as if the flesh had been sucked out of her. Her eyes looked tough and dead. They moved too fast, but never seemed focussed.

‘What happened to you, sweetheart?’ I asked bluntly.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Looks like you’ve got something nasty on your skin.’ I pointed my chin towards her forearms.

‘Yeah, well…’

‘Injecting?’

She threw her hands upwards in admission and I got a closer view of the needles’ damage. I looked at her face again: if she had washed her hair since the turn of the century she could have been quite cute.

‘How long have you been using?’

‘A few years.’ She shrugged.

‘Every day?’

‘Never miss one,’ she said bitterly.

‘Who are you buying from?’ I asked.

She didn’t say anything.

‘With respect,’ I said, ‘I’ve had tougher assignments than shadowing a junkie.’ She shrugged and I pulled out a note from my back pocket. She looked at it like a starving man might look at a plate of food.

‘Lo Squarcione, right?’

She looked at me scared now. ‘Who are you?’ She still hadn’t taken the note. She must have thought I was an undercover.

‘I’m a private,’ I explained.

She took the note and I told her to go find Lo Squarcione. I didn’t like paying for her habit, but I didn’t suppose it made any difference. I followed her round the back of the station and within minutes she had gone up to a thirty-something man and started talking. They disappeared round a corner for a minute, just enough time to get the camera out. Someone like Lo Squarcione doesn’t like to be away from the shop for too long.

He came back without the girl. He looked the opposite of the kind of dealer I’m used to. He dressed like one of the boys: a tight leather jacket and trousers with too many pockets. He could have been an undergraduate with his raffish sideburns and air of the institutionalised rebel.

I pulled my camera up to my eye and got a shot just as the man was reaching into his pocket to find a lighter. The traffic suddenly cleared and I saw his hollow cheekbones and pressed the shutter. I kept my finger down, but the traffic cut off my view again.

I looked at the shots on the screen and zoomed in on the face. Up close it was mean. The scar made him look dangerous. His black hair was gelled up and his eyes were prematurely wrinkled.

Two Moroccans under a tree were looking at me with suspicion.

‘What?’

They didn’t say anything.

‘You selling grass?’ I asked them.

They looked at me as if they hadn’t understood. They were good at pretending not to understand. I held out a fifty, and nodded eagerly. Neither of them moved. They weren’t going to deal in daylight to a man with a telephoto. ‘Take it,’ I urged. ‘You haven’t seen me, OK?’

‘Va bene, va bene,’ one of them said, as if talking to himself.

I phoned Dall’Aglio. One of his operatives answered the phone. Eventually Dall’Aglio came on the line spitting blood.

‘Was that you?’

‘What?’

‘We got an anonymous tip-off an hour or two ago. Called to a house that was turned upside down.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m sorry I went in unauthorised, but I’ve got a case to wrap up from fourteen years ago. You find anything?’

‘Nothing but a mess. You broke into a private dwelling and left the door open for anyone to enter.’

‘I didn’t break in. Sandro Tonin’s partner invited me inside.’

‘Really. So where is she?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘The defence will have a field day with your operational procedure. Even if we do find something, we’ll be accused of planting it. That’s the problem with you privates. You’re not seen as orthodox, honourable people for some reason.’

‘Stop bleating. You need to find the girl. She was with me just now and was playing along, all cooperative. Gave me a story about Sandro’s alibi that Wednesday night, said he had gone to see some random pusher from the station. If she was stringing me along she will have alerted him by now. She’s called Marzia Colombi.’

Dall’Aglio was listening and I could hear his teeth grinding.

‘Have you brought in Sandro?’ I asked.

‘No, not yet.’

‘He’s not around?’

‘Left his office in a hurry minutes before we arrived.’

‘He’s been tipped off. Find Colombi, she’ll know where he is. Something else. I’ve got a photograph of someone called Lo Squarcione who’s come on my radar. I need a bit of background.’

‘Lo Squarcione?’

‘You know him?’

‘Yeah, I know him,’ Dall’Aglio said.

‘What line’s he in?’

‘Delivery.’

‘Of what?’

‘What do you think?’ The carabiniere sounded confused. ‘What’s Lo Squarcione got to do with this?’

‘I’ve no idea. Is he one of yours?’

Dall’Aglio didn’t say anything. Most of the petty dealers working in the open air had been picked up so many times by the carabinieri that eventually they started to get to know each other passing well.

‘We know who he is,’ Dall’Aglio said. ‘We’re watching him very closely and we don’t want a poacher in the woods, you understand?’

‘How long have you been watching him?’ Watching was police-speak for letting Lo Squarcione lie. Letting everyone lie. It was an old habit. ‘How long have you kept tabs on him?’

‘Goes back years.’

‘What about ’95. Was he on the radar then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So why don’t you clear him out? He’s dealing shit to every teenager this side of Reggio and you just let him carry on.’

Dall’Aglio was riled and started defending his force. ‘He’s one we have to leave in position.’

‘Why?’

‘We just do.’

‘And you say us privates aren’t honourable.’ I felt better once I had returned the insult. Dall’Aglio wasn’t going to say it out loud, but it was clear enough. Lo Squarcione must have been informing on his friends, helping police with their enquiries. If he looked tense it was because he was a squealer. It gave me a lever and I intended to use it.

I checked my gun under my armpit and watched Lo Squarcione for the next few minutes. People kept coming up to him and they would disappear off together into a block of flats and come out separately a minute later. He was making decent money, that was for sure: probably ten or twenty every five minutes.

I was about to go up to him when he walked off towards a moped. He had pulled on his helmet and sped off before I had time to take the number plate. It didn’t look like he knew he was being watched. I guessed he needed a safe-house for his earnings.

I saw him head south and ran back to my car. It had a parking ticket, which I ripped off. I pulled a U-turn in front of three buses of impatient shoppers. Whatever else happened in this city, people would always buy frocks on a Saturday. Not even a war would stop it.

I caught up with Lo Squarcione as he was turning left just before the tangenziale. I backed off and watched the moped pull into the Blue Camel. It was a strip joint by night, one of those places where lonely men go to be reminded how lonely they are.

By day it looked like a grim building, the kind that can only look enticing under neon. The front doors were locked. I walked round the side and through an open fire door. It led into a black corridor. I couldn’t see anything, and felt along the wall for a handle. I found one that led into a larger, lighter room. There were voices from the floor above and I found the stairs and walked up quietly.

I saw him at the far end of the room flanked by a couple of heavies.

‘Squarcione!’ I shouted like an old buddy.

I sat down opposite him but the two men were immediately at my elbows.

‘What do you want?’ One of the bruisers said, pulling me up hard by my hair. He was a shaven-headed nut with a thick nose.

‘I want a word with Squarcione,’ I said.

He was watching the scene.

The other thug whispered in Lo Squarcione’s ear. Lo Squarcione pointed at a chair opposite.

I leaned over the table as the bruisers retreated.

‘Lo Squarcione?’

‘Who wants to know?’

‘Castagnetti.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Private investigator.’

‘I’m not hiring.’

‘I’m already hired. And you’ve come on to my radar.’

Lo Squarcione looked at me and his sneer froze. He seemed more dangerous up close. The scar made him look like a street fighter. ‘Any radar that’s got me on the screen is nearing the end of its useful life.’

I was cheered by his arrogance. It’s always a reflection of fear.

‘But, you see, you’re already on my radar. I want help getting questions answered.’

‘I’m not taking questions, the interview’s over.’

He held his hand beside his shoulder and bent his fingers forwards. The heavies behind him jumped towards me.

‘There’s a lot in it for you.’ I had to speak quickly. ‘I’m investigating something from fourteen years back. You’re not in the frame because you were still in nappies back then.’

Lo Squarcione stopped the bruisers by raising his fingers.

‘What’, he said through dark teeth, ‘is in it?’

‘Glory.’

‘Not interested.’

‘Money. There’s an inheritance involved.’

‘Whose?’

‘A man. Two men.’

Lo Squarcione looked at me with interest.

‘How much?’

‘I will have to talk to the men’s descendants. They’re in a position to approve a reward for information leading to a satisfactory resolution of the case.’

‘Hundred thousand.’

I showed him my palms as if to say I was powerless. ‘I’ll talk to them.’

‘And what do I have to do?’

‘Answer questions with whatever honesty you’ve got left. I want to know about a deal you did recently.’

He smiled, like he had gone back to being a boy.

‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.

‘You know how many deals I do in a night?’ He dropped the smile.

The arrogance was beginning to try my patience now and I suddenly felt tense. ‘All I know about you is that you shovel shit to children…’

‘Don’t be rude,’ he said coolly. ‘What’s the difference between me and that drinks dispenser over there. I’m just giving them what they want.’

‘What did you give Sandro Tonin?’

‘Who?’

‘Sandro Tonin. He came your way to score on Wednesday night.’

‘Means nothing to me. Anyway, they all use nicknames.’

‘Here.’ I pulled the photograph of Sandro out of my pocket and tossed it across to him. ‘This is what he looks like. There’s a man been murdered’, I gunned, ‘and I don’t know why your name keeps coming up.’

‘Who’s been murdered?’ He was trying to follow.

I ignored the question. ‘Did you see this man on Wednesday night?’

The man shook his head. He looked at me with that arrogant look again, shaking his head to say he didn’t answer questions.

‘If Lo Squarcione was in the witness stand,’ I stared at the ceiling, trying to aim my question to the heavies behind me, ‘would people believe him?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Lo Squarcione spat.

‘Just thinking aloud. Drug-dealers don’t normally make good witnesses. People seem to think they’re rotten, and I’m inclined to agree. But in his case…’

‘You saying I’m a grass?’

‘You said that. I wouldn’t ever say that.’

An elbow hit me above the ear and the pain shot through my shoulder.

The information was worth the blow. Lo Squarcione was a squealer all right. The guilty always leap to defend their honour because it’s the only way they can make it look like they’ve got any honour left. Lo Squarcione was a grass, and that meant he would normally sing from whatever songsheet he was given. That’s what grasses were like. They said anything if it made them some money or bought some protection.

I leaned across the table and whispered. He had to lean close to hear my words. ‘I know you’re a squealer. My friends in the Questura told me all about you. Unless you set me straight about this Sandro piece of shit, I’ll tell everyone in the city that you do the uniform’s dirty work for them, you with me?’

He had gone a pleasing shade of white

‘Wednesday night,’ I said slowly, ‘did you see Sandro Tonin?’

He looked at me with disdain. ‘What am I supposed to say?’ he asked. That was typical. The idea of the truth was so alien to him that he wanted me to tell him what I wanted to hear. That’s what grasses are like.

‘This is one of your regulars. You know him well enough. Just tell me if you saw him on Wednesday night.’

He looked at me and shrugged. ‘Sure, I saw him.’

‘Do you ever tell the truth?’

Lo Squarcione shrugged again, like he didn’t know what he had done. It looked to me like he was the kind of cuckold who gave away alibis like he gave out his poisons: he probably sold them to the highest bidder.

‘You saw this boy on Wednesday night? What time?’

‘How do I know?’

‘You’re sure you’re telling this right? You saw Sandro Tonin on Wednesday night did you?’ I asked uncertain.

‘I saw him,’ he said, trying to sound convincing.

I got up to leave. ‘I’ll let you know about that reward,’ I said.

I walked out frustrated. It felt instinctively that my guesses from last night were all wrong. It might have been true that Sandro had been with his woman all evening, and had only gone out to score some substance to pickle his brain. You didn’t need to be a genius to know that a guilty man needing to set up a watertight alibi wouldn’t exactly ask Lo Squarcione for one.

In the car I took snaps of all the number plates in the Blue Camel car park just for luck. I drove off thinking about Lo Squarcione. I assumed he was simply pond life, a peddler of unpleasantries. It was possible that he was with the nice gentlemen of the south, but that seemed unlikely. Informers from that part of the world tend to be used for building foundations. Lo Squarcione’s accent was from round here. This was a local racket run by amateurs. Not that that made him any less dangerous. He would certainly have decent backup. But it meant Lo Squarcione almost certainly couldn’t count on what euphemistically used to be called political assistance.

It was yet another dead end. Sandro had seemed a likely bet and now I had lost another twenty-four hours. It didn’t seem much set against fourteen years, but it was only days since Umberto Salati had been killed. Every hour counted. As soon as normality returned and the momentum was lost, nothing would stand out any more. I needed to understand what had happened Wednesday night but nothing was connecting.

The lack of sleep was getting to me. My concentration was evaporating now the adrenalin of the chase had gone. I yawned and felt my jaw ache. I tried to think about the case, but my mind had the staying power of a leaf in autumn.

I parked on Viale Mentana and walked to my flat. There was nothing to do but sit and think.

I looked at the bee balm I had put into tiny containers last night. They were properly set now. I checked for lumps but it looked smooth and white. I unscrewed a cap and ran my finger across the top of the oily mixture. It smelt as you would expect: vanilla, coconut, the usual. I rubbed it off my finger and screwed the top back on.

I sat on the sofa and thought about old Massimo Tonin. I couldn’t believe it was him. He didn’t seem the type. There was no motive. I didn’t even think he had paid for that mourning notice, though I was sure he knew who had.

His son Sandro had seemed plausible, but before I had even got to him, it felt wrong. Dall’Aglio would bring him in anyway, and they might find something in his flat, but Sandro had been more concerned about buying his fix than silencing the past. His mother had phoned him, that I knew. But it might just have been, as Dall’Aglio said, a mother phoning her son.

I thought about that. They were talking when I got there on Wednesday. They had been talking on the phone as soon as Umberto Salati had left. I made a note to ask Infostrada how long that little chat had lasted. The only bit I had heard was the end of their chat, when old Tonin and I went in. ‘I’ll call you back,’ she had said.

I’ll call you back, I said to myself. The woman had said it to her son. But there had been only one call. That’s what Dall’Aglio had told me.

It probably wasn’t anything. We all say stuff we never do. But she hadn’t called him back, and mothers normally do. They do everything for their children, especially if there’s only one. They do everything, I repeated, trying to think of all the absurd things my friends allowed their mothers to do. Their ironing, their cooking, their cleaning.

Someone had told me that the Tonin woman made Sandro’s bed and put food in his fridge. It was that receptionist who had said it. Said that the mother came into town to do all his chores.

That was when the penny dropped. How did the woman get around? I kept imagining her stuck in the Tonin villa all day because that’s where I had always seen her. But she spent half her time in the city by the sound of it. Old Tonin had made out his wife was immobile, but it sounded like she got around just fine.

It was late afternoon by now. It was dull outside, the grey turning black. I called the Studio Tonin, but there was no reply.

I called Crespi’s phone. ‘I need Giovanna Monti’s number.’

‘My assistant? Why?’

‘I just do. Where is she?’

‘She left at lunchtime, always does on a Saturday.’

‘What’s her mobile?’

He gave me her number.

‘Any news on those properties?’ I asked impatiently.

‘I’m engaged in other matters this afternoon. I’ll look into it on Monday. What time are you coming round?’

‘When I’m ready.’

I phoned Monti and asked for Serena’s number. She asked me why and I said it was to do with a murder. That put her straight and she gave me the number just to get shot of me.

I dialled the number.

‘Sì.’

‘Serena? Castagnetti.’

‘What now?’

‘I need to ask you just one or two more questions.’

‘Now?’

I listened to the background noise, hoping that I wouldn’t hear a man in the background. ‘You busy?’

‘I’m about to meet friends.’

‘It will only take two minutes,’ I said. ‘Where are you?’

‘Bruno’s.’

‘Stay there. I’ll be round in a minute.’

I gathered my stuff quickly. I opened up my bag and checked the contents. The camera was in there. A bit of cash, eight keys, the notebook, the cuffs. I put the pistol in place under my arm and looked around the flat. I picked up a tub of the balm and put it in a pocket.

She was there waiting for me when I walked up to the bar. Bruno’s is a noisy bar at this time on a Saturday. People were raising glasses, laughing hard, shouting at friends on the street. Serena looked even better than I remembered her. She had changed her clothes since leaving the office, and was dressed to go out for the evening. She was unbuttoned at the front, and it was hard not to admire her.

‘What is it now?’ she said.

‘You said something the other day.’

‘What?’

‘You said Sandro’s mother came in to make his bed, fill his fridge.’

‘Did I?’ she said.

‘I just wondered… are you sure about that?’

She laughed nervously. She looked less innocent then. She must have seen what I was thinking because she blushed.

‘You had a thing with Sandro?’

‘It wasn’t even a thing.’

That’s what I mean when I said this city was small. There’s never more than one degree of separation. ‘It’s irrelevant what it was,’ I said. ‘I just want you to be sure about what you’re telling me. You said Teresa Tonin would go to his flat to make his bed and so on.’

‘Sure.’

‘Certain?’

She nodded like she had been responsible for messing up the bed. It wasn’t an image I wanted to linger on.

‘How did she get into town if she doesn’t drive?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did she often come in?’

She shrugged.

‘OK, thanks.’

She looked at me. I thought she was about to give an explanation for something, but she just asked if that was it. I said it was and she walked off.

I called after her, remembering the bee balm. ‘Here, take this.’

She turned round and looked at me and then at the tub.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a kind of balm,’ I said. ‘Cures all ailments known to man. I make it from beeswax.’

She looked at me and didn’t know what to do. She took it out of my hand and unscrewed the lid. She smelt it and ran a finger around the surface and looked at it. She wiped it on to her lips. ‘He let me stay in his flat once or twice, that’s all,’ she said.

‘I don’t need to know,’ I said, unsure why she was trying to prove her innocence to me.

‘It’s just you seemed to think…’

‘I’m thinking about other things right now.’

I went back to Borgo delle Colonne and picked up the car. I drove back to La Bassa one last time. I parked in the main square in Sissa and looked around. You couldn’t see further than your nose the fog was so thick, but it meant that voices carried. I could hear the distant shrieks of teenagers. I could hear the old ladies incanting in the church. I walked around the square and saw a bar with little lights strung from one corner to another. Here and there they were hung too low and people had to duck to get in. There seemed to be a pensioners’ dance going on. The music was oompah liscio, but very gentle and quick, so that some of the smoothies looked snappy and sharp. The bar was three deep with men buying amari and beer.

I wandered around for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of Saturday night in a village in winter. I kept thinking about Teresa Tonin, wondering how she got about. I returned to the car and drove on to the Tonin estate. When I got there all the lights were off and the gate was closed.

I needed to get in unannounced, so I parked further up the road and went in on foot.

As soon as I had landed the other side of the railings a dog started barking. It didn’t sound like it was getting closer, but it was going nuts, gnashing and growling somewhere in the distance.

The Tonin place was all in darkness, but the lodge off to the right had lights on. As I walked towards it I guessed this was where the dog was. It was a small cottage with a tidy pile of logs stacked outside.

I rang the bell. The dog kept up his performance and I heard a gruff voice inside telling him to shut up.

The door opened and I saw an old woman I hadn’t seen before. She had the suspicion of a peasant, and held the dog in front of her to remind me who was in charge.

‘Is this where the gardener lives? I’m a friend of the Tonin family. You might have heard Massimo Tonin is in some trouble, and I need to see… I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten his name.’

‘Giulio. Giulio Bocchialini.’

‘You’re his wife?’

She nodded, pulling the dog back from my groin. She was a large woman with soft hair growing around her jawline.

‘Who is it?’ A voice shouted from inside.

‘Was your husband at home on Wednesday night?’ I asked quickly. She didn’t have time to reply when he appeared at her shoulder. It was the gardener I had seen a few days ago. I didn’t know if he had heard the question, but he looked at me with wide, blue eyes.

‘What is it?’

‘I need to ask you a couple of questions,’ I said.

‘What are you after?’

‘Do you drive as well as garden?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did you drive Teresa Tonin into the city on Wednesday night?’

He didn’t answer.

I repeated the question. The man looked at me with contempt.

‘What do you want exactly?’

‘Did you?’

He shook his head, but he had lost his self-assurance.

‘Who did you drive?’

He didn’t say anything, so I reached for my phone and dialled Dall’Aglio’s number.

The man put a thin hand on my wrist and stared at me. ‘Who are you calling?’

‘The carabinieri.’ I let the phone ring on until he started talking.

‘Hold it,’ he said quickly. I stopped the call to the Questura, but he didn’t say anything else. I was about to redial when he started his little confession. ‘I’ve been doing the same thing for forty years. It’s simple, honest, humble work. I fix their boiler. I sweep the leaves. I change their tyres. I queue at the post-office.’ He was saying it with glazed eyes, like he had just gone into retirement and he was missing it already.

‘And did you drive the woman into the city on Wednesday night?’

He looked at me. Whatever he was thinking, one thing was clear: he knew why I was asking. His face appeared old suddenly, and his eyes opened wide like he had just seen his last minute of freedom flash in front of him.

‘Wait here a minute,’ he said, walking inside his house at a brisk pace. I followed him. The TV was on loud in a dark room.

I followed him into a small garage. I looked round at the chaos. Boxes stuffed with old tiles and taps and odd nuts. There were rags and ancient copies of gardening magazines. There wasn’t anything that stood out. Certainly not a pair of keys.

Before I knew what was happening I heard an explosion. I found myself doubled up, almost on the floor on instinct. It can’t have been more than a metre or two from me and my ears were ringing.

I reached for my gun as I crouched there, but the room was horribly still. I stood up. The gardener was on the floor. His face all intact, but there was nothing behind it. It looked like a mask floating in a lake.

You couldn’t see an entry point for a bullet but the exit was pretty clear. He was missing the back of his brain. There was a line of blood and cartilage up the wall.

The woman came rushing in with the barking hound. She screamed when she saw her husband and looked at me.

‘He took his life. I didn’t even know he had a gun.’

She was screaming and wailing. I wasn’t sure she had heard what I had said. I tried to get my phone out to finish that call to the Questura. That’s what I should have done two minutes ago and then perhaps this man would still be alive. Two minutes ago he had been a walking, talking human being and now he was cooling matter, nothing more. I could still hear the sound of blood and cartilage falling from the walls to the ground.

The woman must have let go of the dog because it jumped for me, its paws at head height. It knocked me backwards and fell on top of me, its teeth going for my neck. I got my thumbs into the soft bit of his throat and squeezed with everything I had. I managed to hold his gnawing teeth away from me until he started whimpering.

‘Pull it off,’ I shouted at the woman but she didn’t move. She had frozen. I shouted again, but by then the dog was almost gone and I rolled over on top of it and relaxed my grip. It lay there coughing and whining.

I took out my phone. ‘Get Dall’Aglio. It’s an emergency,’ I said.

Dall’Aglio came on the line.

‘The Tonins’ fixer has topped himself.’

‘What?’

‘The gardener on their estate. He just swallowed a speeding bullet.’

‘Where?’

‘In the grounds, round the back.’

‘I’ll be there right away.’

I looked at the woman. She was staring into space and shaking. I took her into the room with the TV on and sat her down. She didn’t seem able to focus on anything.

‘Why did he do it?’

She looked at me with eyes so sharp they could have sliced bread. She didn’t say anything, but it was pretty clear from her face that she thought I was part of the answer.

‘I was questioning him about Wednesday night,’ I said. ‘I was asking if he was at home.’ She was staring at the TV and I could see its bright lights reflected in her pallid flesh. ‘Was he?’

She shook her head.

‘Where did he go?’

She was still shaking her head. I wasn’t sure if she wasn’t saying or didn’t know.

‘Did he often up and leave?’

She shrugged.

‘How long was he gone for?’

She just managed to whisper her reply. ‘About an hour.’

I sat there with her whilst we waited for Dall’Aglio and his men. He arrived within a few minutes. One of his officers took the woman away. Others went into the garage and started photographing the corpse.

Dall’Aglio was staring at me like he blamed me for everything bad that had happened in his life.

‘Why can’t you just do things by the book?’ he asked.

‘That’s the best thing about my job, there is no book.’

‘Why is it that wherever you go, people start dying?’

‘This time it was suicide,’ I said. ‘Bocchialini and that Tonin woman were in it together. I had half an idea, listening to Bocchialini talk, that he was involved with the Tonin woman himself.’

‘Why?’

‘He was listing all the menial chores he used to do for the family like he was restoring the Sistine Chapel. He loved something in that household, and I don’t think it was his salary or his overalls.’

‘You think he and Teresa…?’

‘Not my taste, possibly not yours,’ I conceded, ‘but love works in mysterious ways. If they were an item and Sandro was their son, it might make the whole thing a lot more comprehensible.’

Dall’Aglio was frowning. It was just an idea of mine, but it was one of those that seemed to make sense retrospectively. It didn’t matter whether it was true or not for now.

We stood there like an embittered couple, unable to separate because we couldn’t get by without the other. We knew we had both been stupid and didn’t want to talk for fear of revealing the fact. He thought I was reckless. I thought he was passive.

For once I thought he might be right. Since Monday, there had been two fresh corpses and I knew it was my interfering which had, in some ways, produced them. That, Dall’Aglio would tell me, was why the police tactic was sometimes to watch instead of act. I had rushed in as usual, and now one of the suspects, Bocchialini, was as much use to us as a sieve in a flood. We stood there continuing the argument in silence, watching the men measuring up the body.

‘Come on,’ he said eventually, ‘let’s go and find the Tonin woman.’

We went into the main house. The door was open but everything was in darkness. She must have known we were coming because she was standing halfway down the stairs.

‘You heard about Bocchialini?’ I asked.

‘What?’ She looked up sharply.

‘He just swallowed a bullet. Put his grey matter all over your garden tools.’

She had her mouth wide open and was holding both hands over it. Her fingers eventually went on to her lower teeth as if trying to open her mouth still wider. I figured, given that reaction, he had been more than her gardener and chauffeur.

‘That’s one trigger you didn’t pull,’ I said, wanting to kick her whilst she was down. ‘My carabinieri colleagues are getting very impatient.’

I smiled at her. She was staring at us, but she was rubbing her hair into a mess.

We started walking up the stairs towards her. ‘It’s all over now,’ Dall’Aglio said. ‘It’s finished.’

She didn’t say anything.

‘Let me tell you how it happened,’ I said, ‘and you tell me when I go wrong.’ She was looking beyond us at the armed officers who were standing at the bottom of the stairs a few metres below us. ‘Back in ’95 your husband told you about his fling with the Salati woman. Told you about Riccardo. That was a hard hit to take, but there was worse. Young Ricky was bleeding your husband dry and you didn’t like the look of it. Call it blackmail, or guilt money, or whatever, that boy was costing your family millions. The last straw was when your unfaithful husband gave his bastard son a brick of cash on San Giovanni.’

She didn’t say anything.

‘You told Bocchialini to go and pick Riccardo Salati up from the station. Someone carrying eighty-five million lire or whatever it was doesn’t want to hang around a station. His train was late and the cost of a ride to Rimini would have seemed like peanuts.’ I stopped and looked at her. She was shaking her head. ‘Bocchialini picked him up and you sat in the back of the car and strung his windpipe. You took him some place and buried him. An unmarked grave for the bastard. What was it? The river Po?’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

I looked at her. ‘You and Bocchialini had something going on. It wouldn’t surprise me if Sandro was his son.’

‘That’s your fantasy, is it?’

I watched her close and she looked like she was waking up from a fantasy of her own. You could see it in the smug way she smiled, the way she pulled her clothes around her as if becoming aware for the first time that she was a performer, acting out a role she had written herself.

‘So you dumped him somewhere and thought nothing more of it. Life went on. No one suspected you. No one even suspected your family. But then last Friday Silvia Salati dies and leaves a will. She hires me. She wants the whole case reopened. You hear about it on the grapevine, because your son heard about it in his office on Saturday. He told you that a private dick was on the case. So you panicked and placed a mourning notice in La Gazzetta. Only you pay with your husband’s card and not in cash. That’s not the kind of mistake a lawyer would ever make.’

She was trying to force a smile, but it had melted on her face and she looked strained, like smiling was the last thing she could do. ‘You haven’t got any evidence for any of this.’ She wasn’t denying it any more, just challenging me to prove it.

‘On Wednesday,’ I went on, ‘when Umberto finds out his brother Riccardo was from your side of the fence, he works something out. His little brother wasn’t the sort to get all emotional about a long-lost father. Riccardo was the sort who would ask for a loan before asking for a hug. Umberto realised that Ricky would have been round to yours asking for cash pretty quickly. And he was right, wasn’t he? On Wednesday Umberto worked out what Riccardo must have been doing. He knew who would have wanted him out the way, and started leaning on you. There was only one thing to do. Send him the same place as his brother Riccardo.’

Her eyes were closed now, like she was concentrating. She was shaking her head vigorously in denial.

‘You rang his bell, got him to come down into the courtyard, and you hit him hard with something from Bocchialini’s shed. Or maybe he was down there anyway, standing outside in the courtyard having a cigarette. Once you’ve rearranged his skull, you decide to go upstairs to open the window to make it look like suicide, only then you have his keys in your pocket. I thought it was your son Sandro when I woke up this morning, but I realised it couldn’t be him. Not just because he’s a no- hoper junkie who only thinks about scoring Colombian sherbet. It couldn’t have been him because he wears expensive shoes which make a noise when he walks. The woman below Salati’s flat didn’t hear a thing. It must have been a short, slim person, probably a woman.’

I had wound her up so much she was wagging her finger at me. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’ Her face looked much older when not made up. There were vertical wrinkles on her upper lip.

Dall’Aglio had been watching the whole scene and now stepped forward to read her her rights. One of his men clicked the bracelets on her.

‘You’ll have to come to the Questura too,’ Dall’Aglio said to me. ‘We’ll need a statement.’

I drove there in a daze. It was well beyond midnight, but the streets of the city were busy with kids out on the town, revving their mopeds and showing off their new clothes.

Dall’Aglio took me down into the basement where they had the interview rooms. It was cold and damp and a bare light bulb hung from the ceiling on a frayed wire. He and another officer listened to everything I said like I was under suspicion myself. They took me through the whole week, asking me to repeat everything time and again.

Dall’Aglio didn’t seem in the mood to take advice from me, but when the statement was all printed up and signed, I told him to follow the money.

‘When Riccardo went missing,’ I told him, ‘he was carrying a large sum in cash.’

‘So?’

‘Whoever clocked Riccardo Salati had a tidy sum to invest. Look into Teresa Tonin and Giulio Bocchialini’s finances from back then. You’ll find something. Something will come up.’

He looked at me like there was no trust left. There was a knock at the door.

‘Sir?’ A young man came in. ‘Lieutenant Bollani wanted you to see this. That man we arrested this afternoon, Sandro Tonin… he had this inside his wallet.’

He passed Dall’Aglio a transparent plastic bag. Inside was a credit card. Dall’Aglio held the top of the bag and twisted it so that he could see the name of the card. ‘Massimo Tonin,’ he read.

‘I forgot to tell you,’ I said. ‘Sandro was using his father’s credit card. He phoned in the mourning notice on Sunday. Check his phone records and I’ll lay a bet with you that he called our dear Gazzetta.’

‘OK.’ Dall’Aglio flicked the boy out of the room with his fingers.

‘He was using his father’s card,’ I said, staring at Dall’Aglio. ‘He paid for the mourning notice. It wasn’t anything to do with Massimo Tonin. Only having already lost one son, Tonin didn’t want to lead the police to another, so he didn’t say anything about it.’

Dall’Aglio looked across at me and raised his eyebrows. ‘Doesn’t make Sandro a murderer.’

‘You were pretty keen to charge old Tonin when you thought he had done it.’

‘He was keeping secrets, that made me suspicious.’

‘Well, that mourning notice has been a distraction from the start.’

‘That’s why it was placed, I suppose,’ said Dall’Aglio. ‘Time for a little interrogation,’ he said, standing up. It was his way of dismissing me.

I walked out into the corridor. Even at this time of night there were dozens of officers walking briskly from one room to the next.

There was a coffee machine at one end of the corridor. I dropped a coin in the slot and listened to the strange whirring as a white, plastic thimble dropped into metallic fists and filled with the steaming black liquid they were passing off as coffee.

I could feel disappointment come over me like mud. I felt suddenly heavy. I liked conclusions and this was only the pretence of one. I seemed to have resolved a case that was incidental to Riccardo’s disappearance. Everything pointed to Teresa Tonin and yet there seemed nothing that could connect her to Riccardo’s vanishing act. I hadn’t even resolved what I had been commissioned to do in the first place: to certify whether Riccardo was dead or alive.

I had hoped that all the loose ends of the case could be resolved, everything wrapped up by a culprit’s proud confession. Instead, I was left to speculate about everything that we didn’t know. We still had no murder weapon for Umberto and no body for Riccardo. Kind of made a conviction difficult, if not impossible. All we had was a pile-up of probabilities. The evidence was about as hard as butter on a beach.

That meant that soon enough the press would start to listen to Teresa Tonin’s side of the story. The pendulum of public opinion would swing behind the poor mother. She would hire a lawyer, maybe even her husband, to insabbiare. It happened all the time around these parts. Contradictory evidence would turn up in unexpected places. Investigating magistrates were dropped from a case because of some stitch-up. Whispering campaigns cast enough doubts to make even a hot gun unreliable. The obvious got silted up with the decoy, until the decoy became the story and the obvious walked free. That’s what Italian justice is all about.

It was the middle of the night and I was just about to walk out the back door when I caught a glimpse of the gardener’s widow. She was sitting in a chair with a female officer next to her. She was still shaking and staring into space.

I walked up to them. The widow looked at me like she still believed I had pulled the trigger.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. The female officer straightened up. ‘Could I ask something?’

They both just looked at me.

‘How long had your husband worked for the Tonins?’

‘Thirty years.’

‘That right?’

She nodded.

‘Did you resent the time your husband spent at Tonin’s house?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Do you think he went beyond the call of duty?’

She held my stare. ‘He was always on duty. That’s what it’s like when you’re domestics. You live on the job. We’ve lived in their grounds all our married life. And now, when they find themselves in trouble, it’s Giulio who dies.’

I nodded slowly, trying to show her that I shared her indignation. ‘Where was your husband from?’ I asked.

‘His family were all from near Borgotaro.’

‘Up in the hills?’

‘Sure. His mother owned a small farm up there.’

‘What about his father?’

‘Died in the war.’

‘Where’s the farm exactly?’

‘What’s it to you?’ She said it without malice.

‘Where is it?’ I repeated.

‘Just beyond the bridge on the left. He sold it when his mother died.’

‘When?’

‘A few years ago.’

‘What was it called?’

‘Il Mulino.’

I looked at her. She replied so absent-mindedly that she must have thought I was just passing the time of night. She hadn’t put anything together yet, had no idea quite who her husband had been.

Dall’Aglio was still at his desk at 4 a.m. That’s what I liked about him. He worked my hours. I knew what I needed but he wouldn’t like it.

‘Listen,’ I said to him as he finally put down the receiver, ‘there’s been a lot of blood spilt. Two lives lost, maybe three. I still need to resolve the Riccardo Salati case and I’m going to ask you something unusual. I need a dozen men.’

He laughed.

‘Your chance to be a hero,’ I said.

‘Why do I get the impression that’s a role you want for yourself?’

‘That’s bull. Nothing I want less, I assure you. I’m not the one with medals.’

He patted his chest and looked at me with a smile. He liked the idea of being a hero. There aren’t many people who don’t. He wanted to walk halfway down those front steps and tell the doubting media that he had an incredible story from fourteen years ago that all his predecessors had failed to crack.

‘When?’ He looked at me with resignation.

‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘It’s morning already.’

He agreed in the end. He took more convincing than a nun in a nightclub, but eventually he sighed and said OK. He said the order would go out as soon as the new shift came on at 8 a.m.

I walked home exhausted. I sat in the flat trying to think things through, but I was too tired. The flat was a mess and I couldn’t even cook something to eat because the pans were full of dried beeswax and oil. A week’s worth of washing-up was balanced in the sink like a cartoon, two columns rising to shoulder height.

I must have been thinking about my bees, because I suddenly realised that families in Italy are just like hives. It’s where the woman rules. She rules because she’s a mother, and she never retires. She fights for her children until the death, and – in Silvia Salati’s case – beyond it.