A Long Finish - 6 (15 page)

‘So, two policemen in one day, eh?’ Maurizio remarked once they were seated. ‘What are things coming to?’

This was just an opening gambit in the match they were about to play, of no importance in itself. Someone had to move first. It was what happened afterwards that would determine the result.

‘That’s right,’ said Minot. ‘When I was driving home after a night in the woods, I saw someone walking up from the station towards the village. I naturally stopped and offered him a ride, only to find that it was our friend the spy. I don’t think he recognized me, but I knew him all right, with those stitches in his forehead.’

A silence fell.

‘Terrible business about Beppe,’ remarked Gianni Faigano.

‘Terrible,’ echoed Minot.

‘Why should he want to do something like that?’ Maurizio wondered aloud. ‘I spoke to him only a few days ago, and he seemed perfectly normal then.’

‘Maybe he didn’t do it himself,’ suggested Minot quietly.

Gianni looked at him.

‘How do you mean?’

Minot relit his roll-up, which had gone out.

‘Someone told me that you were driving into Alba that morning, and saw a truck parked close to where Beppe was killed.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ snapped Maurizio. ‘We were busy all day filling those demijohns.’

‘Well, someone saw a truck there,’ said Minot. ‘Told the Carabinieri about it, too. That’s how I found out, from Pascal.’

He finished his wine and poured another glass.

‘Take it easy,’ cautioned Maurizio.

Minot laughed harshly.

‘Don’t worry! If I get arrested, it won’t be for drunk driving.’

The silence reformed, a swirling opacity like one of the morning fogs for which the region was notorious.

‘What were you two doing the night Beppe was shot?’ asked Minot, not looking at them.

Gianni gave a humourless laugh.

‘Eh, you’ve been spending too much time with cops all right, Minot. You’re beginning to sound like one yourself!’

Minot smiled.

‘Fair enough. But let’s say a cop asked you the same question, what would you tell him?’

‘The truth, of course,’ Maurizio retorted irritably. ‘We spent the evening watching TV and then went to bed.’

‘Was Lisa here?’

‘What the hell is …’ Gianni began.

‘Was she?’ Minot insisted, speaking to Maurizio.

‘She was at her aunt’s house in Alba.’

‘So you don’t have any witnesses to confirm your story,’ Minot concluded. ‘In theory, you could have gone out that night, followed Beppe down to the woods and shot him.’

‘Are you out of your mind?’ yelled Gianni Faigano, pushing back his chair and standing up.

Minot held up his hands in a calming gesture.

‘Take it easy, Gianni. I know you didn’t kill Beppe. I didn’t either, but that didn’t stop Pascal from coming round and questioning me about it. Sooner or later it’ll be your turn. Just think how much easier everything would be if we all had a nice, solid alibi.’

‘Well, that’s too bad,’ snapped Maurizio, ‘because we don’t.’

‘I do,’ replied Minot with his nagging smile.

‘Good for you.’

‘I was out after truffles that night, miles from where Beppe was shot. And I wasn’t alone.’

‘Well, that’s a stroke of luck. Who did you go out with?’

‘With you two.’

The brothers stared at him.

‘We met here at midnight,’ Minot continued calmly, ‘and drove over to a patch I know of near Neviglie. You provided the dogs, I provided the location. We didn’t have much luck, as it turned out, but we stuck at it and didn’t get home until seven o’clock the next morning. An hour after Beppe was shot.’

Gianni Faigano shook his head.

‘Maurizio and I haven’t been out truffling for ages, Minot. We’re getting too lazy to spend all night tramping through the woods.’

Minot regarded him levelly.

‘That’s not quite true, Gianni. You make exceptions once in a while. This was one of them.’

Once again, the brothers consulted each other silently.

‘Why would we do that?’ asked Maurizio at length.

‘Why
wouldn’t
you? It’s in all our interests to have a solid story to tell the cops, right?’

Gianni shook his head slowly.

‘I don’t want to get involved in this.’

‘Ah, but supposing you’re already involved?’

‘What do you mean by that?’

Minot told them what he meant.

Twenty minutes later, he was back in his truck, the demijohns of wine covered by a tarpaulin. He took a roundabout route to the Scorrone winery, sticking to the back roads. There were risks either way. On the one hand, if any roadblocks had been set up by the police or the
Guardia di Finanza
, they were almost certain to be on the main highway, down in the valley. On the other, the indirect route would take about twice as long to drive, which meant twice as many chances of having a breakdown or an accident which would inevitably bring to the attention of the authorities the fact that he was transporting two thousand litres of unlabelled red wine, for which he had no sales documents, certificates of provenance, tax forms or shipping manifests.

It was a fine calculation, and in the end he decided to compromise by taking a short stretch of the
strada
statale
which would cut fifteen minutes off the total transit time. The chances of the uniforms being out at that hour were pretty low. They would have written their quota of tickets that afternoon, lurking in lay-bys to pick off drivers weaving their way home after a long lunch followed by several grappas too many. As for the tax police, both they and their trucker prey would almost certainly have taken Sunday off.

His predictions proved correct, and less than half an hour after leaving the Faigano house Minot pulled off the highway and up a short drive leading to the headquarters of the Azienda Agricola Bruno Scorrone. This looked more like a factory than a winery: all concrete loading bays and stacked plastic crates, pumps and pipes and nozzles and stainless steel tanks. In a region celebrated for its scrupulously traditional approach to wine-making, Bruno Scorrone’s main claim to fortune, if not to fame, was a generic Barbera d’Alba, widely available in screw-top, large-format bottles through various national supermarket chains.

Since in most years the Barbera grape is too cheap and plentiful to be worth faking, that particular product was more or less what it claimed to be, although purists might not have approved of the degree of manipulation which the wine had been subjected to, and would certainly have raised an eyebrow at the percentage of even cheaper and more plentiful grape varieties in the final mix. There had even been one occasion when the authorities had taken an interest in Bruno’s operation, following the discovery that one batch of wine bottled there had been beefed up with various ingredients of a non-vinous nature, notably antifreeze.

But Bruno had stoutly maintained that this particular lot had been bought in bulk from a third party, who had already been arrested and charged in connection with a similar offence, and that his facilities had served merely as a bottling plant. It had been a trying few months, but in the end he had been released with his legal record, if not his reputation, unspotted. One of the great strengths of Scorrone’s operation was that it acted as a depot through which many products of many different provenances passed. Bruno grew no grapes himself, but he vinified others’ fruit and blended the results with wine made still elsewhere, until sometimes he himself – or so he claimed – couldn’t be sure exactly what was in a given vat. This was true not only at the bottom end of the market, on which he depended for his bread-and-butter, but also on the occasions when he was tempted by an unrefusable offer into the high-margin sector. Which was where the Faigano brothers came into the picture.

Minot had been waiting for almost half an hour when Bruno Scorrone finally showed up in a four-wheel-drive Toyota. Gianni had been right, noted Minot; the brand-new vehicle was indeed green.

‘Been over to Lamberto’s for lunch,’ said Bruno, belching loudly. ‘I just wanted to make sure there were no hard feelings. God, you eat well there! I’d forgotten.’

And drink well, too, thought Minot, filing the thought away.

‘Why would there be any hard feelings?’ he asked.

Bruno Scorrone peered at him. Like everyone else, he was a little taller than Minot, but slacker and paunchier, with the florid, swollen face of a habitual drinker.

‘Well, you know, I found Beppe’s dog hanging round here after I got back from town. It seemed a bit odd, so I called the
maresciallo
to tell him about it. It’s always a good idea to keep in well with the authorities, particularly in my line of business.’

He jerked a thumb towards the laden truck. Minot nodded.

‘I understand.’

‘I didn’t say anything about Lamberto, of course,’ Scorrone went on, lighting a small cigar. ‘I didn’t even know what had happened at that point. But he might have heard that I’d talked to Pascal and thought that I’d said something about him. You can’t be too careful in a small community like this.’

Minot looked up at the vacant expanse of sky.

‘You certainly can’t,’ he said.

Bruno Scorrone puffed unsuccessfully at his cigar, then threw it away. He gestured at the truck again.

‘Well, shall we?’

Minot backed the truck up to one of the loading bays, Bruno Scorrone lowered the tail-gate, and together they set about shifting the heavy, fragile
damigiane
down to the concrete platform.

‘So what’s it to be this time?’ asked Minot as they took a breather.

Bruno huffed and puffed a little.

‘Barbaresco!’ he exclaimed. ‘I just clinched a deal with a buyer from Munich who’s in the market for five hundred cases.’

Minot whistled.

‘But that’s over four thousand litres! There’s only half that here.’

‘I’ll have to cut it, of course. The stuff that Gianni and Maurizio make could
be
Barbaresco. In fact, it’s a damn sight better than some I’ve had. Too good for foreigners, that’s for sure. And since they’ve never had the real thing, they won’t be any the wiser.’

Bruno was definitely slightly tipsy, thought Minot, or he wouldn’t be prattling away like this.

‘How do you know they’ve never had it?’

Bruno gave him a worldly wise smile.

‘Because in Germany, my friend, the real thing costs a minimum of a hundred thousand lire a bottle on release.’

Minot whistled again. Bruno nodded.

‘People prepared to pay that kind of money aren’t going to buy stuff at half the price with the name of some producer no one’s ever heard of. On the other hand, the people who
will
buy it wouldn’t dream of paying a day’s wages for a bottle of wine that won’t even be drinkable for ten years. What they want is something tasty to drink now, at the right price, and with a classy name to impress themselves or their friends. In short, there are two quite different markets, and each one gets what they’ve paid for. Meanwhile Gianni and Maurizio get a decent price for their excellent wine, I make an honest profit as blender and distributor, and you get your slice as our go-between and cut-out. It beats me why it’s even illegal!’

Once the last of the twenty
damigiane
had been heaved into place, Bruno turned to Minot, panting for breath.

‘Fancy a glass of something?’ he said.

‘Looks like you’ve had a few already.’

Bruno smiled.

‘Well, you know how it is. Lamberto prides himself on his collection of grappas, and after I sympathized about Beppe and the whole business about him and Nina Mandola coming out, he brought out a few bottles and then left them on the table.’

He led the way to an office at the end of the loading dock, where he received wine buyers and their agents during working hours. Here he kept a small but select stock of restoratives which he used to tweak moods and swing deals.

‘Try some of this!’ he told Minot, pouring a grappa illegally made by a neighbour in a disused pig barn.

‘So you’ve been talking to Pascal, eh?’ Minot remarked, setting his glass down after an appreciative sip. ‘So have I.’

Still savouring the grappa he’d knocked back in one, Bruno Scorrone didn’t seem to hear.

‘He told me you’d claimed to have seen my truck down by the stream where Beppe was killed.’

Bruno stared at him, all attention now.

‘What? I did nothing of the sort. Like I said, I called him to say that I’d found Anna running loose and had taken her home and all the rest of it. I didn’t even know Beppe was dead then! Pascal asked where I’d been that morning, and I told him that I’d driven into Alba. I saw people there who could corroborate that – apart from my Munich buyer, I mean – so it seemed the safest thing to do.’

He poured himself another glass of the oily spirit.

‘But why bring me into it?’ asked Minot, lifting his grappa but not drinking.

‘I didn’t! He asked if I’d seen anything unusual down where the road crosses the river. I said I thought I might have seen a truck parked in the bushes, but I wasn’t sure. He said, “What kind of truck?”, and I said I didn’t know but it looked a bit like yours. I didn’t say it
was
yours.’

Minot looked at him silently.

‘So you didn’t make a statement under oath or sign any papers?’

‘Of course not! It was just a casual chat over the phone.’

Bruno slurped out a third glass of grappa for himself.

‘What about you?’ he asked Minot. ‘You’re not drinking.’

‘I’ve got to keep a clear head.’

Scorrone puffed contentedly on his cigar.

‘Anyway, I’m glad you told me,’ he said. ‘That’s the sort of thing which can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings if it’s not cleared up. No hard feelings, eh?’

Minot shook his head.

‘No feelings at all.’

They walked out of the office and along the concrete loading bay to the truck. As they passed a stack of new bottles, Bruno suddenly laid his hand on Minot’s arm.

‘You weren’t really there, were you?’ he asked.

Minot looked at him in surprise.