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.’