‘Aren’t you having something?’ he asked, his mouth full.
‘We’re fine,’ Fratelli responded immediately. ‘Watching you eat, Luca, is like… eating yourself.’
‘No argument there,’ Julia declared, then retrieved the blue folder from beneath Cassini’s arm.
Fratelli reached over and spread out the photocopied papers on the glass counter of the stall.
‘Are they going to charge the gardener?’ he asked Cassini.
‘Not yet. The bloke isn’t coughing to anything.’ The young officer twirled a finger around his ear. ‘Funny in the head, they said. Babbling mad stuff.’
‘What kind of mad stuff?’
‘Rubbish.’
Fratelli groaned. ‘You must learn to be precise. Did the gardener see anyone?’
Cassini laughed out loud, the criticism bouncing off him as if it counted for nothing.
‘He said he saw a monk hanging round the night old Vanni went missing. I ask you! A monk! How many of them do you get up in Bellosguardo?’
Julia Wellbeloved caught Fratelli’s eye.
‘A monk?’ she repeated.
Fratelli went back to the documents and ran through them, a quick finger ticking off each line.
‘As I thought,’ he announced when he’d finished.
They waited. Nothing.
‘As you thought, what?’ Julia wanted to know.
Fratelli glanced around. They were out of earshot of Nerbone’s customers. It was safe to talk. She thought he looked paler than usual this morning, strained and perhaps in pain. His tics — fiddling with his hair, scratching his cheek — were more marked.
‘The gardener. It’s ridiculous…’ He took a sip of his glass of fizzy water. ‘Walter must know this too. Why’s he playing these games?’
‘They’re talking to the lawyers about charging him,’ Cassini said. ‘They don’t think it’s ridiculous.’
‘Luca, Luca, Luca…’ Fratelli sighed, shaking his head. ‘Julia. You too. Listen to me. Think about this.’
They came closer.
‘Tornabuoni was supposed to meet Julia in the Pitti Palace, yesterday morning. He never came in to work. So we may presume he was taken before that. Some time during the previous night. Last night his head appears in the Loggia dei Lanzi. It takes a long time to identify the man, naturally. A severed head does not look like a living one, I suppose. Tornabuoni is a bachelor. He has a bohemian lifestyle. No one seems much surprised when he fails to turn up at work, if one can consider what he did to be work. Some might argue—’
‘Pino,’ Julia began.
‘Bear with me. He’s taken two nights ago. Murdered. Decapitated. Finally, we work our way round to his mansion in Bellosguardo in the early hours of this morning. And what do we find? The gardener. One of his several lovers. Weeping by the side of his body.’
Cassini polished off his sandwich. ‘So?’ the young officer wondered.
‘So why would the gardener still be there if he killed Tornabuoni?’ Julia said before Fratelli could speak. It was obvious when she thought about it. ‘After all that time?’ She stole a corner of Cassini’s bread. ‘Is that what a murderer would do? Cut off someone’s head, drive into the city to hang it somewhere public, then go back to sob by the body?’
She shrugged. ‘Doesn’t sound right to me.’
Pino Fratelli beamed at her.
‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Did I get something wrong?’
‘Not a thing.’ Fratelli turned to Cassini. ‘Listen to me, Luca. I was the detective the stazione turned to when a murder case came in. I’ve talked to, joked with and jailed more homicidal brutes than you’re likely to encounter in a lifetime.’
‘Show-off,’ Cassini threw back at him.
‘No. I’m telling you something from experience, and experience is the way we learn in this business, not through classes in cadet school. Sooner or later, almost every murderer is appalled by what he or she has done. They wish to rationalize it. Excuse it. To bury it, more than anything. They don’t want that reminder of their deeds around them, that bloody picture in their heads. Why do you think so many corpses end up in woods or rivers? Even the most hardened of killers is aware they’ve done something shameful, however much they seek to justify the act. They carry the guilt around with them, every waking moment. Why make it more real, more painful, by leaving the evidence so visible a day, a day and a half after they’ve killed?’
‘Quite,’ said Julia. ‘It doesn’t add up.’
‘As you knew instinctively.’ Fratelli raised his glass of water. ‘Salute.’
‘They did find this chap with Tornabuoni’s body, though,’ Cassini pointed out. ‘And he blurted out that they were…’ The young man blushed. ‘You know…’
‘Were what?’ Julia asked, determined to get him to say it.
‘You know… Doing it,’ he grumbled.
‘Thanks to the Napoleonic Code, homosexuality hasn’t been a crime in Italy since reunification more than one hundred and twenty years ago,’ Fratelli pointed out. ‘Except to the Catholic Church, and happily the Pope has finally found better things to occupy him than running our judicial system. The fact that Tornabuoni and his gardener are queer—’
‘Is relevant,’ Julia interrupted.
Fratelli stared at her, then raised a single grey eyebrow. ‘How?’ he demanded.
‘I don’t know. It has to be. You said yourself, the man who defaced those frescoes in the Brancacci feared women.’
Fratelli put a finger to his cheek and said, quietly, ‘Actually, I said he hated them. But I prefer your word.’
‘Well.’ She shrugged. ‘If you felt like that about women, perhaps you’d have the same loathing for someone who was gay. Both must have a reason, I imagine. Must stem from something…’
She couldn’t get Fratelli’s story about his wife out of her head.
‘Something horrible,’ Julia whispered, looking at him.
She wondered about that dreadful night two decades before when the chill and filthy waters of the Arno rose to swamp the city. In the river’s icy embrace, Pino Fratelli’s beloved wife died somehow. Fratelli said himself he felt the poison in his own head stemmed from burying the truth of that grim event deep inside himself. Was it possible the man they sought was shaped by a similar grief? Good and evil, right and wrong seemed difficult to discern sometimes. Life was not like those frescoes in the Brancacci, divided neatly and cleanly between light and dark. Most of us lived in the middle; in the grey, smudged area, swamped by a little of each. Fratelli more than most, and he knew it.
‘I remain unconvinced,’ he said, paying for Cassini’s food, not returning her gaze. ‘Something prompted this act. Something recent. There’s also a very practical matter before us. A visible reason why this cannot be as simple as Marrone would have us believe.’
‘Which is?’ Cassini asked.
‘The blood. Where is it?’
Fratelli placed on the counter a set of photocopied photographs. Even in black and white, rendered crude by the process, she found them so deeply disturbing she had to turn away. A stiff, headless corpse lay by a small greenhouse on a patch of lawn next to a neatly tended vegetable patch, arms outstretched, legs akimbo. He wore what appeared to be elegant pyjamas — silk, perhaps. Uniformed Carabinieri bustled round looking variously bored or disgusted. There was a trail of blood across the vegetables, spattered on the leaves of cabbage and leeks and cavolo nero.
The young officer came in close, interested suddenly. Luca Cassini so desperately wanted to learn.
‘And where’s the weapon?’ Fratelli asked.