She was trying to force a smile, but it had melted on her face and she looked strained, like smiling was the last thing she could do. ‘You haven’t got any evidence for any of this.’ She wasn’t denying it any more, just challenging me to prove it.
‘On Wednesday,’ I went on, ‘when Umberto finds out his brother Riccardo was from your side of the fence, he works something out. His little brother wasn’t the sort to get all emotional about a long-lost father. Riccardo was the sort who would ask for a loan before asking for a hug. Umberto realised that Ricky would have been round to yours asking for cash pretty quickly. And he was right, wasn’t he? On Wednesday Umberto worked out what Riccardo must have been doing. He knew who would have wanted him out the way, and started leaning on you. There was only one thing to do. Send him the same place as his brother Riccardo.’
Her eyes were closed now, like she was concentrating. She was shaking her head vigorously in denial.
‘You rang his bell, got him to come down into the courtyard, and you hit him hard with something from Bocchialini’s shed. Or maybe he was down there anyway, standing outside in the courtyard having a cigarette. Once you’ve rearranged his skull, you decide to go upstairs to open the window to make it look like suicide, only then you have his keys in your pocket. I thought it was your son Sandro when I woke up this morning, but I realised it couldn’t be him. Not just because he’s a no- hoper junkie who only thinks about scoring Colombian sherbet. It couldn’t have been him because he wears expensive shoes which make a noise when he walks. The woman below Salati’s flat didn’t hear a thing. It must have been a short, slim person, probably a woman.’
I had wound her up so much she was wagging her finger at me. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’ Her face looked much older when not made up. There were vertical wrinkles on her upper lip.
Dall’Aglio had been watching the whole scene and now stepped forward to read her her rights. One of his men clicked the bracelets on her.
‘You’ll have to come to the Questura too,’ Dall’Aglio said to me. ‘We’ll need a statement.’
I drove there in a daze. It was well beyond midnight, but the streets of the city were busy with kids out on the town, revving their mopeds and showing off their new clothes.
Dall’Aglio took me down into the basement where they had the interview rooms. It was cold and damp and a bare light bulb hung from the ceiling on a frayed wire. He and another officer listened to everything I said like I was under suspicion myself. They took me through the whole week, asking me to repeat everything time and again.
Dall’Aglio didn’t seem in the mood to take advice from me, but when the statement was all printed up and signed, I told him to follow the money.
‘When Riccardo went missing,’ I told him, ‘he was carrying a large sum in cash.’
‘So?’
‘Whoever clocked Riccardo Salati had a tidy sum to invest. Look into Teresa Tonin and Giulio Bocchialini’s finances from back then. You’ll find something. Something will come up.’
He looked at me like there was no trust left. There was a knock at the door.
‘Sir?’ A young man came in. ‘Lieutenant Bollani wanted you to see this. That man we arrested this afternoon, Sandro Tonin… he had this inside his wallet.’
He passed Dall’Aglio a transparent plastic bag. Inside was a credit card. Dall’Aglio held the top of the bag and twisted it so that he could see the name of the card. ‘Massimo Tonin,’ he read.
‘I forgot to tell you,’ I said. ‘Sandro was using his father’s credit card. He phoned in the mourning notice on Sunday. Check his phone records and I’ll lay a bet with you that he called our dear Gazzetta.’
‘OK.’ Dall’Aglio flicked the boy out of the room with his fingers.
‘He was using his father’s card,’ I said, staring at Dall’Aglio. ‘He paid for the mourning notice. It wasn’t anything to do with Massimo Tonin. Only having already lost one son, Tonin didn’t want to lead the police to another, so he didn’t say anything about it.’
Dall’Aglio looked across at me and raised his eyebrows. ‘Doesn’t make Sandro a murderer.’
‘You were pretty keen to charge old Tonin when you thought he had done it.’
‘He was keeping secrets, that made me suspicious.’
‘Well, that mourning notice has been a distraction from the start.’
‘That’s why it was placed, I suppose,’ said Dall’Aglio. ‘Time for a little interrogation,’ he said, standing up. It was his way of dismissing me.
I walked out into the corridor. Even at this time of night there were dozens of officers walking briskly from one room to the next.
There was a coffee machine at one end of the corridor. I dropped a coin in the slot and listened to the strange whirring as a white, plastic thimble dropped into metallic fists and filled with the steaming black liquid they were passing off as coffee.
I could feel disappointment come over me like mud. I felt suddenly heavy. I liked conclusions and this was only the pretence of one. I seemed to have resolved a case that was incidental to Riccardo’s disappearance. Everything pointed to Teresa Tonin and yet there seemed nothing that could connect her to Riccardo’s vanishing act. I hadn’t even resolved what I had been commissioned to do in the first place: to certify whether Riccardo was dead or alive.
I had hoped that all the loose ends of the case could be resolved, everything wrapped up by a culprit’s proud confession. Instead, I was left to speculate about everything that we didn’t know. We still had no murder weapon for Umberto and no body for Riccardo. Kind of made a conviction difficult, if not impossible. All we had was a pile-up of probabilities. The evidence was about as hard as butter on a beach.
That meant that soon enough the press would start to listen to Teresa Tonin’s side of the story. The pendulum of public opinion would swing behind the poor mother. She would hire a lawyer, maybe even her husband, to insabbiare. It happened all the time around these parts. Contradictory evidence would turn up in unexpected places. Investigating magistrates were dropped from a case because of some stitch-up. Whispering campaigns cast enough doubts to make even a hot gun unreliable. The obvious got silted up with the decoy, until the decoy became the story and the obvious walked free. That’s what Italian justice is all about.
It was the middle of the night and I was just about to walk out the back door when I caught a glimpse of the gardener’s widow. She was sitting in a chair with a female officer next to her. She was still shaking and staring into space.
I walked up to them. The widow looked at me like she still believed I had pulled the trigger.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. The female officer straightened up. ‘Could I ask something?’
They both just looked at me.
‘How long had your husband worked for the Tonins?’
‘Thirty years.’
‘That right?’
She nodded.
‘Did you resent the time your husband spent at Tonin’s house?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Do you think he went beyond the call of duty?’
She held my stare. ‘He was always on duty. That’s what it’s like when you’re domestics. You live on the job. We’ve lived in their grounds all our married life. And now, when they find themselves in trouble, it’s Giulio who dies.’
I nodded slowly, trying to show her that I shared her indignation. ‘Where was your husband from?’ I asked.
‘His family were all from near Borgotaro.’
‘Up in the hills?’
‘Sure. His mother owned a small farm up there.’
‘What about his father?’