“No,” he said.
Flavia sighed. “Are you sure? You didn’t see anyone coming out of San Giovanni? Going in? Did you hear anything?”
He shook his head, and walked off to the bar. Flavia cursed silently to herself. She might as well have stayed in bed. Then she yawned, and realized that the early rise, the coffee on an empty stomach and the faint air of rotting vegetables that came off the clothes of everyone in the place was making her feel slightly sick. No, she thought. Make that very sick.
“He did it.”
She tried briefly to keep her stomach under control and saw that the little man had come back, this time with another figure, as big as he was short, and as powerful as he seemed weak.
“What?”
“Giacomo did that end of the street. Yesterday.”
She concentrated hard, and managed a faint smile at Giacomo. He grinned, nervously and foolishly, back at her, showing his stained teeth. She caught a whiff of stale alcohol and cigarette on his breath, mingled with rot, and hoped desperately she could keep upright for long enough to question him.
“Did you see anything? At six? Or thereabouts?”
“Nothing in particular,” he said. He had a slow, stupid voice.
“No unusual noises?”
“No.” Every time she asked a question, Giacomo paused, and looked up at the ceiling, and thought hard. Hurry it up, she thought. I’m not asking you to perform calculus. He shook his head slowly, as though that gave added weight to his words.
“Did you see anyone in the monastery?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
She paused and thought. Waste of time.
“I saw a man come out of the church.”
She looked up at him urgently. “When?”
“I don’t know. Six-thirty? Something like that. No. I tell a lie. It must have been before, because we stopped for a break a bit after. We always stop at six-thirty.”
“Wonderful,” Flavia said heartily and insincerely. “Now, what did you see?”
“Like I say, a man came out of the church.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I only noticed because the door is always locked. I’ve never seen it open. So I thought, hello, the door’s open.”
“Yes,” she said patiently. “Now, this man, was he holding anything? A package?”
He shook his head, slowly, from side to side, then thought some more. “No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. He had a bag, though.”
“A bag?”
“That’s right.” He held out his hands to show the size. “I noticed because he dropped it.”
“Did it make a noise? Did he seem worried that he dropped it?”
He shook his head. “He just picked it up by the shoulder strap, and hurried away.”
“Hurried?”
“Oh, yes. That’s why I noticed. Another reason, you see, apart from the door being open, that is. He ran down the steps very fast, dropped the bag, then walked off very fast.”
“I see. Now,” she said urgently, partly because she wanted to know and partly because she knew her stomach was running out of time, “What did he look like?”
There followed an adequate description of a short, mild-looking man. Flavia took out the photographs that Giulia had taken that first afternoon when she’d been put on to the task of watching the monastery. Menzies leading someone out of the church, bidding him a fond farewell. So it seemed.
Giacomo peered at it carefully, and sucked his dentures in careful thought. “Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s the one.”
“You’re sure? The man on the right is the man you saw coming out of the church yesterday morning?”
He nodded. She thanked him and turned to go, her stomach heaving from the aroma in the bar, the bitterness of her coffee and the lack of anything to eat. She told him he’d have to come to the station to give a statement at some time. He seemed disappointed.
“I’m sorry, but it really is necessary,” she said as patiently as she could manage.
“That doesn’t bother me. I just wondered whether you wanted to hear about the woman.”
“What woman?”
“The one who went into the church after this man. I saw her.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Maybe I do want to hear about her.”
All in all, Flavia thought with some satisfaction and an odd sense of disappointment, pretty conclusive. The refuse collector had given a description of Mary Verney which was passable and would undoubtedly identify her properly when called on to do so.
But they didn’t yet have an explanation. The more she thought, the more she realized this awkward little fact. Someone had left the church with a bag which was just about big enough for a small icon. Mary Verney had left empty-handed. Their witness was sure of that. She had only been in the church for a minute or two; not long enough to hit Father Xavier, steal the icon and hide it somewhere. They’d have to search the church again, just to be sure. This Burckhardt was almost certainly the one who took the picture, and also the man who attacked Father Xavier.
Stood to reason. Icon and icon man. Bit of a coincidence otherwise.
But why steal it? Obviously because he wanted it. But a distinguished man like him? Stealing in person? Very unusual. Unheard of. Even the stupidest dealer would subcontract something like that. To a specialist. Like Mrs Verney. So what was he doing leaving before she got there? And surely someone like Mrs Verney wouldn’t do a job and take her employer along for the ride?
This stumped her, so she punished her stomach some more by smoking another cigarette and having another coffee and staring at the ceiling in the hope that something would occur to her.
It didn’t. And then, before she could take that precious half hour off for something to eat she’d been promising herself since five o’clock, Alberto rang. He had news, he said. They’d found someone floating in the Tiber. Did she want to come and have a look? She might be interested.
Why? she asked. Nothing novel about that.
“Ah, well, you see. His name was Burckhardt. He had identification on him saying he was an art dealer. From Paris. So I thought …”
“I’m on my way.” She picked up her jacket, calmed her stomach and walked out.
Whoever was responsible hadn’t tried very hard to conceal what they’d done; the body would have surfaced and floated ashore sooner or later anyway, even if one of the ancient, slow dredgers that pursue the thankless task of scooping up silt from the bottom of the river hadn’t sucked him up bodily and spat him out into the cavernous hold of the boat.
On the other hand, it was lucky that anyone had noticed. Had one of the crew not been new to the job, and been leaning over the railing watching because he was not yet experienced enough to have lost interest, the body might have been instantly buried under several tons of sand, taken out to sea and dumped four kilometres or so in the Mediterranean. Equally, had the new recruit not been the son of the captain, it is likely that his alarm would have been ignored anyway.
Either way, it was only by mere chance that the corpse of Peter Burckhardt was discovered so quickly, allowing the police to avoid a considerable waste of time in their less than urgent desire to talk to him. Time which they were instantly able to divert to the more urgent task of discovering who had taken him a couple of miles down river, shot him in the head, then tipped his body in.
And why, of course. He had nothing on him which helped in any way, except for an address book containing several hundred numbers which the unfortunate Giulia was told to ring up, one by one, in search of stray information. Certainly, there was nothing which instantly made the enquiry progress by leaps and bounds. The information lay in the existence of the corpse itself. But even that was relatively uncommunicative, offering no help over when it got there or who put it there. And, so the pathologist assured Flavia morosely, it probably wouldn’t. Not even a bullet, which had gone straight through and out the other side.