by Iain Pears
And what did that leave? Filing, as Argyll had so maliciously suggested. In her own little room she could see several dozen miscellaneous files lying around on the floor. Her boss, General Bottando, had several dozen more in various states of disarray. And across the corridor, in the rabbit-warren of little rooms occupied by the other members of staff, probably about half the contents of what was laughingly known as their archives were being used to rest coffee-cups on, prop up desks and as improvised floor-coverings.
Organization and tidiness were not her strong points, normally, and she was quite prepared to admit that she was as bad as anyone else in the building – except for Bottando, but he was in charge so could do as he liked – at putting things away. But every now and then some faint echo of house-proud zeal would rumble in her deepest subconscious and she would develop, enthusiastically if only temporarily, a passion for method and order. Perhaps Jonathan was right, she said to herself reluctantly. Maybe I should do something about this place.
So she picked all the files off the floor and stacked them on her desk, and found underneath one of them a small pile of forms requiring Bottando’s immediate signature three weeks ago. No time like the present, she thought; so, both to get this little matter seen to and to inform her boss that all pursuit of the criminal element of society would cease until the files were put into order, she marched briskly and with an air of purposeful efficiency up the stairs to Bottando’s room.
‘Ah, Flavia,’ said Bottando as she marched in, omitting to knock as usual. That was all right; she never did manage to remember, and Bottando was used to it. Some people stand on their dignity. Many a senior Polizia man would produce a freezing look and remind himself – and his subordinates – that this was a general here who should have his door knocked on politely. But not Bottando. It wasn’t in his nature. Nor was it in Flavia’s, more to the point.
‘Morning, General,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Sign here, please.’
He did as he was told.
‘Don’t you want to know what it is you’ve signed? It could have been anything. You should be more careful.’
‘I trust you, my dear,’ he said, looking at her a little anxiously.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘You’ve got that look on your face.’
‘A little job,’ he said.
‘Oh, good.’
‘Yes. A murder. Peculiar thing, apparently. But we may have to stake out a minor interest in it. The Carabinieri phoned up twenty minutes ago, asking if we could send someone down.’
‘I’ll go,’ she said. She didn’t like murder at all, but beggars can’t be choosers these days. Anything to get out of the office.
‘You’ll have to. There’s no one else around. But I don’t think you’ll like it.’
She eyed him carefully. Here it comes, she thought. ‘Why not?’
‘Giulio Fabriano’s been promoted to homicide,’ Bottando said simply, an apologetic look on his face.
‘Oh, no,’ she wailed. ‘Not him again. Can’t you send someone else?’
Bottando sympathized. She and Fabriano had been very close at one stage. A bit too close for Flavia’s liking, and their friendship had degenerated into squabbles, fights and general dislike several years back. Shortly before Argyll had appeared on the scene, in fact. In ordinary circumstances, she wouldn’t have had much to do with him, but he was in the rival Carabinieri – doing surprisingly well, considering his relatively limited intelligence, but then there wasn’t a great deal of competition in the Carabinieri – and had developed the habit over the past few years of ringing her up every time he was on a case which had even the most tenuous connection with art. For example, a man has his car stolen. He once bought a picture, so Fabriano would ring to see if there was a file on him. Anything would do. He was tenacious, our Fabriano. The trouble was he also had a quite extraordinarily high opinion of himself and, as Flavia continued to keep her distance, and indeed had taken up with a ridiculous Englishman, his tone had turned decidedly hostile. Cutting remarks. Sneering comments to colleagues. Not that Flavia particularly cared or couldn’t deal with it. She just preferred not to, if possible.
‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ Bottando went on, with genuine regret, ‘But there really is no one else here. I’m sure I don’t know what they’re all doing, but still …’
In a toss-up between Fabriano and filing, Flavia was unsure which was the worse option. On the whole, she reckoned Fabriano was. The man just couldn’t stop himself from trying to demonstrate what a prize she’d let slip through her fingers when they’d broken up. But it seemed Bottando wasn’t going to give her any choice.
‘You really want me to go?’
‘I do. But I don’t imagine it will detain you overlong. Try and get back here as quickly as possible.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said gloomily.
It took about forty minutes before it dawned on her that Fabriano’s murder victim was the very same man that Argyll had been talking about the previous evening. To give her credit, thirty minutes of that delay was spent in a traffic jam trying to make her way out of the centre. Most of the remaining ten minutes was spent looking around aghast at the apartment. There was scarcely a book left on the shelves; all had been pulled off, many ripped apart then dumped in the centre of the little sitting-room. All the papers in the filing cabinets had similarly been removed and thrown on the floor; the furniture had been ripped, and the cushions cut up. Every picture had been pulled off the wall and slashed to pieces.
‘Hold everything,’ said Fabriano with fake amusement as she walked in. ‘Signora Sherlock’s here. Tell me quickly. Who did it?’
She gave him a frosty look and ignored the remark. ‘Jesus,’ she said, looking around at the chaos. ‘Someone did a good job here.’
‘Don’t you know who?’ he said.
‘Shut up, Giulio. Let’s keep this professional, shall we?’
‘I stand corrected,’ he said, standing in the corner of the room and leaning against the wall. ‘Professionally speaking, I don’t know. Must have taken several hours, wouldn’t you say? To make a mess like this, I mean. We can rule out simple vandalism, don’t you think?’
‘Curious,’ she said, looking around.
‘What? Do we have a blinding insight coming our way?’
‘All the furniture and stuff was just shredded. Very violently, and carelessly. The pictures were sliced precisely. Taken out of their frames, the frames broken and in a pile, and the canvas cut up. It looks as though with scissors.’
Fabriano delivered himself of an ambiguous gesture which was half sneer and half self-congratulation.
‘And you think that maybe we didn’t notice? Why do you reckon I called?’
Nice to know some people don’t change. ‘What happened to the occupant?’ Keep calm, she thought. Don’t reply in kind.
‘Go and look. He’s in the bedroom,’ he said with a faint and worrying smile.
She knew from the moment he spoke that it wasn’t going to be very nice. But it was much worse.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said.
The assorted specialists who gather round on these occasions hadn’t finished yet, but even after they’d tidied up a little the scene was horrific. It was like something out of Hieronymus Bosch’s more appalling nightmares. The bedroom itself was domestic, cosy even. Chintz bedcovers, silk curtains, floral-patterned wallpaper all combining to give an air of comfort and tranquillity. It made the contrast all the greater.
The man had been tied to the bed, and had been treated appallingly before he died. His body was covered in cuts and bruises and weals. His left hand was a bloody mess. His face was almost indistinguishable as anything that had anything to do with a human being. The pain he had suffered must have been excruciating. Whoever had done this had taken a good deal of time, a lot of trouble and, in Flavia’s instant opinion, needed to be locked up fast.
‘Ah,’ said one of the forensics from the corner of the room, reaching down with a pair of twee
zers and putting something in a plastic bag.
‘What?’ said Fabriano, leaning as nonchalantly as he could manage against the door. Flavia could see that even he was having a hard time maintaining the pose.
‘His ear,’ the man replied, holding up the bag containing the bloody, torn object.
At least Fabriano turned and bolted first, although Flavia was hard on his heels in her attempt to get out of the room as fast as possible. She went straight into the kitchen and poured a glass of water.
‘Did you have to do that?’ she asked angrily as Fabriano came in after her. ‘Did sending me in there make you feel any better or something?’
He shrugged. ‘What did you expect? “This is no sight for a little woman,” or something?’
She ignored him for a few seconds, trying to maintain calm in her stomach. ‘So?’ she said, looking up at him again, annoyed that she had seemed so fragile with him around. ‘What happened?’
‘Looks as though he had a visitor, doesn’t it? Who tied him up, ransacked the house, then did that to him. According to the doctor, he was shot to death eventually.’
‘Reason?’
‘Search me. That’s why we asked you people along. As you can see, whoever it was seemed to have a grudge against pictures.’
‘Organized-crime connection?’
‘Not as far as we can tell. He was the marketing director for a computer company. Canadian. Clean as a whistle.’
It was then that Flavia got this nasty feeling. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Arthur Muller,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ she said. Damnation, she thought. A complication she didn’t need. She could see it now: if she said Argyll had been there yesterday, Fabriano would go straight round and arrest him. Probably lock him up for a week, out of pure malice.
‘Have you heard of him?’ Fabriano asked.
‘Maybe,’ she said cautiously. ‘I’ll ask around, if you like. Jonathan might know.’
‘Who’s Jonathan?’
‘An art dealer. My, um, fiancé.’
Fabriano looked upset, which made the small untruth worthwhile. ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘Have a chat with the lucky man, will you? Maybe you should get him along here?’
‘Not necessary,’ she said shortly. ‘I’ll ring. Was anything stolen, by the way?’
‘Ah. This is the problem. As you see, it’s a bit of a mess. Working out what’s gone may take some time. The house-keeper says she can’t see anything that’s gone. None of the obvious things, anyway.’
‘So? Conclusions?’
‘None so far. In the Carabinieri we work by order and evidence. Not guesswork.’
After which friendly exchange, she went back into the living-room to phone Argyll. No answer. It was his turn to do the shopping for dinner. It didn’t matter; he’d be back in an hour or so. She rang a neighbour and left a message instead.
‘Yes?’ Fabriano said brusquely as another detective came in, a man in his mid-twenties who had already acquired the look of weary and sarcastic disdain which came from having worked for Fabriano for two hours. ‘What is it?’
‘Next-door neighbour, Guilio –’
‘Detective Fabriano.’
‘Next-door neighbour, Detective Fabriano,’ he restarted rolling his eyes in despair at the thought that this might turn out to be a long case, ‘she seems to be your friendly neighbourhood spy satellite.’
‘Was she in during the hours of the crime?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t come and tell you if she wasn’t, would I? ’Course she was. That’s why –’
‘Good, good,’ said Fabriano briskly. ‘Well done. Good work,’ he went on, thus removing from the policeman any pleasure he might have felt at his small discovery. ‘Wheel her in, then.’
There must be hundreds of thousands of women like Signora Andreotti in Italy; quite sweet old ladies, really, who were brought up in small towns or even in villages. Capable of labours on the Herculean scale – cooking for thousands, bringing up children by the dozen, dealing with husbands and fathers and, very often, having a job as well. Then their children grow up, their husbands die and they move in with one child, to do the cooking. A fair bargain, on the whole, and much better than being confined to an old folks’ home.
But in many cases, the children have gone a long way from home; many have made it big in the city, made money on a scale their parents could scarcely even imagine in their day; la dolce vita, eighties style.
The Andreotti household was one such; two parents, one child, two jobs and no one in the house from eight in the morning to eight at night. The elder Signora Andreotti, who once spent her spare time gossiping to neighbours back home, was bored silly. So much so that she felt her mind going with the tedium. And so she noticed everything. Every delivery van in the street, every child playing in the backyard. She heard every football in the corridor, knew the lives of each and every person in the apartment block. She wasn’t nosy, really, she had nothing better to do. It was the closest to human comradeship she came, some days.
So, the previous day, as she explained to Fabriano, she had seen a youngish man arriving with a brown paper packet, and seen him leaving again, still with the packet, some forty minutes later. A door-to-door salesman, she reckoned.
‘This was what time?’ Fabriano asked.
‘About ten. In the morning. Signor Muller went out about eleven, and didn’t come back until six. Then in the afternoon another man came, and rang the bell. I knew Signor Muller was at work, so I popped my head around the door to say he was out. Very surly look he had.’
‘And this was when?’
‘About half-past two. Then he went away. He may have came back again, if he was quiet. I didn’t hear anything, but I sometimes watch a nice game show on the television.’
She explained that in the evening – the crucial time, as far as Fabriano was concerned – she was too busy preparing dinner for the family to see anything. And she went to bed at ten.
‘Can you describe these men?’
She nodded sagely. ‘Of course,’ she said, and went on to give a perfect description of Argyll.
‘This was the one in the morning, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the afternoon visitor?’
‘About one metre eighty. Age about thirty-five. Dark brown hair, cut short. Gold signet ring on the middle finger of his left hand. Round metal-rimmed spectacles. Blue and white striped shirt, with cufflinks. Black slip-on shoes –’
‘Inside-leg measurement?’ said Fabriano in amazement. The woman was the sort of witness the police dream about, but rarely find.
‘I don’t know. I could make a guess if you like.’
‘That’s quite all right. Anything else?’
‘Let me see. Grey cotton trousers, with turn-ups, grey woollen jacket with a red stripe running through it. And a small scar above his left eyebrow.’
4
‘In that case I suggest you get him to trot down to the Carabinieri and make a statement. Do it now, in fact,’ Bottando said, drumming his fingers on the desk. A definite irritant. More than many, his department had to work closely with the trade; today’s witness was frequently tomorrow’s defendant. It was a fine business, not to get too close to people who were, at least, liable to come under suspicion. And in the world of Italian crime and politics, accusations of corruption were easily made. The connection of Argyll and Flavia, when allied to a murder and the wrath of Fabriano, had considerable potential for trouble. What was more, Flavia knew that very well. It was perfectly understandable that she should want to keep her private life away from Fabriano’s baleful gaze, but she should have known better.
‘I know. I should have come clean. But you know what he’s like. Jonathan would be locked up and emerge with bruises, just to teach me a lesson. Anyway, I’ve tried to get hold of him. He’s out. But I’ll see him and take a statement myself, not that there can be any connection of importance. I’ll send it to Fabriano tomorrow.’
‘Not obviously so, no. At least, not yet. Fabriano’s going to do all the legwork. Talk to the people at Muller’s office, find out his movements, and so on. Apparently he has a sister in Montreal who may come over. If anything turns up which might concern us, I have no doubt he’ll let us know.’
‘Still as obnoxious, is he?’
‘Even worse. Getting into homicide seems to have turned his head.’
‘I see. Good. In that case, until you talk to Mr Argyll, you may as well amuse yourself with daily routine. Now, how do you fancy doing something with that computer?’
Flavia’s face fell. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Not the computer.’
He’d expected that. This awful machine was supposed, by the designers, to be the last word in detection techniques. The idea behind it was to be the Delphic oracle of art police around the world. Each force in each country could enter details of paintings and things into it, and even photographs of missing pieces. Other forces could then access this information, look through it, recognize objects that were on sale at dealers, go round, arrest, prosecute and return the stolen goods to their real owners. The committee behind it had fondly expected that art theft would dwindle away to almost nothing overnight when the forces of law and order were provided with such an awesomely sophisticated weapon.
But.
The trouble with the thing was that it was a bit too Delphic. Call up a picture of a lake by Monet, and you were likely to get a photograph of a Renaissance silver chalice. Other times it would produce rows of gibberish or, worst of all, the dreaded phrase in eight languages, ‘Service temporarily suspended. Please try again.’