“Do you?” said Blume. “Well, then maybe he just liked eggs a lot.”
“There was a lot of milk in that refrigerator, too,” said the Colonel. “Both fresh and sour. Anglo-Saxons always have so much milk.”
“The fresh milk tells us Treacy was here recently,” said Blume. “Not that it’s likely to make much difference.”
“Why would he keep sour milk, Commissioner?”
“Milk is used as a fixative for pencil and chalk, which is what you say he mainly used. Sour is as good as fresh for that. Or maybe he made his own soda bread.”
“Soda bread? Good stuff that. You use sour milk? You must tell me about that another time,” said the Colonel. “Speaking of bread, did you notice the basket with the stale bread in it?”
Blume went over to a wicker basket sitting on the counter, pushed off the top, and produced two pieces of broken dirty bread which he rapped against the counter.
“Rub breadcrumbs over a chalk drawing, and you get an old look,” said the Colonel. “Treacy was a bit of a pig, but I don’t think he kept dirty bread to eat.”
“It’s hardly the only way to get a drawing to look old,” said Blume.
“You’re right again,” said the Colonel. “Just one of many techniques.”
“So maybe it was just stale bread,” said Blume.
“What else did you notice?” asked the Colonel.
“There was gelatin in the fridge, which maybe he used for glues or for preparing paper, something like that.”
“I see garlic, potatoes, vinegar. They can all be used, too, can’t they?”
The Colonel had dipped his spoon into the pot on the table. He twirled it niftily between his fingers as he pulled it out, opened his mouth, and dropped in a glob of honey.
“Honey is used for pastels,” said the Colonel, his voice slow and thick.
“Vinegar, wine, oatmeal,” said Blume. “There is an ice-cube tray full of ink over there, and it looks like he used the pastry-board as a drawing board. Under the sink in the greenhouse, I found denatured alcohol, white spirit, benzene, turps. You can smell the turps in here. Also, he was doing something with oils in that double boiler.”
“You haven’t missed a trick,” said the Colonel.
“Yes, I have,” said Blume. He walked over to the zinc fruit bowls and scooped up a handful of small acorns, shook them in the hollow of his hand, then let them drop. “Why did he collect dry acorns?” He went to the other bowl and picked up the woody fruits he had examined earlier. “And I don’t even know what these are.”
“Oak apples,” said the Colonel. “Or galls.”
“Galls?”
“Houses for insect larvae.”
“Sorry. I still don’t get it,” said Blume.
“I don’t know much about the nature side of it,” said the Colonel. “These things grow on oaks, maybe on other trees, too. They contain wasp larvae. What you do is pluck them, dry them out in the oven or the sun, then crush them with a pestle; you mix in acorns, too. But I don’t know what the proportion is. You mix it with water, maybe other things, and you get iron ink for drawing.”
“And that’s the end result in the ice-cube tray?” said Blume.
“You don’t use your nose enough, Commissioner. Bring your face down to that ink, breathe in, slowly, use your mouth as well as your nose. Open the back of your throat, too. Get the taste.”
Blume put his face over the tray and sniffed. “Nothing,” he said. “Maybe a bit like a sweaty cheese rind.”
“You need to learn to use all your five senses, Commissioner, and never despise smell which is our most basic, our most reptile sense. That is not gall ink. That’s cuttlefish ink. You can smell the salt. Damn, I can taste it in the back of my throat from here. Wonderful stuff. It looks black, draws brown. But gall-it burns through paper, but that’s good if all the paper you have available is half ruined. Gives you an excuse for all the wear.”
The Colonel pointed to the raised brick fireplace where a half-burned log lay in ash. “It’s too warm to be lighting fires for comfort,” he said. “So we can assume that had another purpose. Mix the soot with rainwater and you’ve got bistre which, in the end, is going to be the ink he used most.”
“Does it have to be rainwater?” asked Blume.
“Definitely. Especially here in Rome. Too much limescale in the tap water, too many salts in the bottled stuff. Besides, it’s free. You know who used bistre a lot?”
“Who?”
“Nicolas Poussin,” said the Colonel. “And you know when I first met Henry Treacy?”
“Tell me.”
“In 1973, when he was accused of trying to sell a fake Poussin landscape. An oil painting. He wasn’t so good with oils. Good, but not that good.”
Blume did some mental arithmetic.
“I turn sixty-three on November 13, Commissioner. That’s what you’re trying to work out. Two years ago I moved out of the Carabiniere Art Forgery and Heritage Division in Trastevere and was posted to Madonna del Riposo.”
The Colonel picked up a flat painting knife from the table, stabbed it into the top of the second box, and slit it open. He pulled out several flat and several bulky packages and a half loaf of Genzano bread, then set about unfolding and unwrapping each package. The flat ones contained salamis and cured hams, the bulky ones cheese.
The Colonel broke off a triangle of cheese and popped it into his mouth. He shoved the corkscrew into the black bottle before handing it to Blume. “If you’d be so kind, I’m a little breathless?”
Blume pulled out the cork, handed the bottle to the Colonel, who filled up Blume’s glass. Blume pushed his glass back to the Colonel, and said, “No thanks.”
“But it’s a Sassicaia. Not the famous 1985 vintage, more’s the pity, but even so.”
“I do not drink,” said Blume.
The Colonel held the glass by the stem and lifted it up so that the ruby highlights in the dark wine became apparent. “I see,” he said. “And this is because you are an alcoholic?”
“No. I just thought I should give it up, that’s all,” said Blume. “I prefer to keep in shape.”
The Colonel placed his nostrils over the rim and inhaled, sipped the wine, paused, pursed his lips, then drained half the glass. “You must be an alcoholic. There is no other reason for not drinking Tuscan wine. I’m disappointed, but I am sure we can still manage to work together. Informally.”
He unwrapped a bundle of waxed paper to reveal a pile of sliced ham. He peeled off the top slice with his thick fingers. “This culatello is particularly sweet. Try it.”
Blume hesitated, before finally helping himself to a thin slice of meat. It was good.
The Colonel cut a wedge of yellow cheese with a black rind, handed it to Blume, and said, “Gran Bastardo.”
“Who?”
“The cheese. That’s what it’s called. Comes from the Veneto,” said the Colonel. “By the way, if you insist on treating this as murder, just remember that Treacy’s business partner John Nightingale is the one with the most to gain and the most to lose. Most to gain because maybe he knows where Treacy has hidden his wealth and is now about to help himself, but most to lose because he may have just killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. You know, I can’t bear to see you sitting there drinking nothing. There’s some mineral water in the fridge, help yourself.”
“I don’t drink mineral water. Tap water is fine.”
The Colonel tore at a hunk of bread. “You’re not eating. Here.” He pushed over a plastic carton with soft white cheese. “Testa del Morto. Lovely on the bread. Slide a slice of ham over the top, fold, and.. ”
“No thanks.”
“Fine. More for me, then.” The Colonel chewed for a while, then started fingering around in his mouth. “Always get these strands of flesh… stuck between my teeth. I don’t suppose you have any toothpicks on you?”
Colonel Farinelli eventually decided the solution to the annoyance in his mouth was to down another glass of wine.
“As I said, I knew Treacy very well, once. I also knew his business partner John Nightingale, though less well. The two of them came to my attention in the 1970s.”