Death in Autumn (3 page)
209 was a small suite with sitting-room, bedroom and bathroom. In the sitting-room, which was furnished in yellow and white, the fingerprint technician was already packing his things to leave.
'Pretty much a waste of time,' he remarked, looking up as the Captain entered with the Marshal following behind. 'The room's been cleaned and there's hardly a clear print in the place. The manager had said, "Of course the room was cleaned, there was no reason to think anything was wrong." '
Well, nothing could be done about it now.
Two of the Captain's men were at work in the bedroom, one of them going through the pockets of the clothes in the wardrobe, the other sorting and packing the documents he had found in the smaller drawers of the dressing-table.
'I'll take the documents. Put them in an envelope.' The Captain was looking about him. After a while he muttered a curse under his breath. Not only had this room, too, been cleaned, but anything that had been out of place had been put away. They had nothing but the chambermaid's vague description to help them reconstruct what might have happened there, and she had little to say other than that the bed had been unmade and a few clothes strewn about, a normal enough state to find a bedroom in at that hour of the morning.
'What time was it exactly?' the Marshal had asked her.
'Nine o'clock. I always took her breakfast up at that time.'
'And you didn't think of telling anyone that she wasn't there?'
'Who should I have told? There was nothing to stop her going out early if she felt like it. I get paid just the same whether she eats the stuff or not—and don't imagine she ever gave me a tip because she didn't.'
'So then you tidied the room?'
'A bit.'
'What do you mean—a bit?'
'A bit. Enough so's the cleaner could come in.'
'And when did you finally think of telling somebody she was missing?'
'Next morning, I think. Or it might have been the morning after.'
'You told the manager?'
'No.'
'Who did you tell, then?'
'Gino.'
'Who's Gino?' The Marshal felt like giving her a good shaking.
'He waits on her table. He must have said something about her not turning up to meals.'
'Why should you tell this Gino and not the manager? Is he your boyfriend?'
'What's it got to do with you?'
And to cap it all, when the Marshal had asked her if she hadn't seen Hilde Vogel's picture in the paper she had simpered and said: 'I only read the horoscopes.'
'We're ready to go,' said one of the Captain's men. 'We'll seal the place up unless there's anything further you need to do here.'
'No . . . no, carry on.' The Captain picked up a crystal perfume spray from the dressing-table and put it down again next to a hairbrush from which the technician had already removed a few blonde hairs. There was little point in hanging on there. The magistrate had given orders for seals to be put on the door and windows. He could always come back and search the room again when he had more idea of what to look for. Perhaps the documents they were taking away would tell him something.
'Do you need me any more?' the Marshal asked as they went down in the lift.
'No. I'll drop you off at Pitti, you should get something to eat. But I may need you or even a couple of your boys from tomorrow. With so many of my men occupied on this drug case, all the checking up that's going to be necessary on this job will be a problem.'
When they stepped out of the lift in front of the reception desk, Mario Querci looked up from a stack of breakfast orders and said: 'If your car's in the garage you'd better carry on down in the lift. It's raining hard.'
'We don't need a key? We tried to come up that way but we couldn't open the lift doors.'
'Only residents have the key for coming up that way but you can open the doors from the inside.'
'Thank you. Good night.'
'Good night.'
It was raining so hard that it was difficult to distinguish more than a misty blur of yellow and white lights, even with the windscreen-wipers going their fastest.
'The river will soon fill up if this keeps on for a few days,' observed the Marshal as they drove along the embankment as far as the Ponte Vecchio and turned left towards the Palazzo Pitti where he got out.
When the car reached Borgo Ognissanti the carabiniere on duty in the guards' room pushed the button to start the inner gate sliding back and indicated to the Captain that the heavy young man with his hands deep in his raincoat pockets and a cigarette in his mouth was waiting for him. The Captain wound down his window and recognized Galli, from the
Nazione.
'I'll be calling a press conference tomorrow.'
'That's what I thought,' said Galli, grinning.
'All right, you can come up.' One good turn deserved another.
Only the main corridors were lit in that part of the building but in the opposite wing, beyond the lawns and the colonnade of the old cloister, there were lights burning in a ground-floor room where the younger men who
were
off
duty were playing pingpong before going up to their dormitories.
The Captain unlocked his office door, switched his desk lamp on and slid the large envelope he was carrying into a drawer.
'So you were right,' Galli began, dropping into a big leather chair. 'It wasn't a suicide.' He had evidently eaten and drunk fairly heavily and his face was pink and cheerful. He stubbed out his cigarette in the clean ashtray on the desk and fished in his mackintosh pocket for a fresh packet. 'I'm soaked through. I hope I'm not ruining your chair. What can you tell me?' Galli had never been known to produce notebook and pencil during an interview, but although he always appeared to be mildly drunk he made fewer mistakes than any of his colleagues.
'How much do you know already?'
'Plenty. I've had a chat to a friend of mine who works at the Medico-Legal Institute and I've been to the Riverside Hotel.'
'Sometimes I think you must follow me round all day.'
'Sometimes I do.'
'And when do you find time to write?'
'When you've gone to bed.' Galli grinned happily. 'I should be able to get this article into tomorrow's late edition.'
The Captain gave him the relevant points from the autopsy and details of the dead woman's identity.
'Suspicions?'
'I can't give you anything on that yet. It's too soon.'
'Well, this will be enough. The main thing is that we'll publish first, pull one over on the lot of them. Thanks a lot, Captain.' And, sticking another cigarette into his mouth, he went off cheerfully into the rainy night.
The Captain took the envelope full of personal documents from the drawer and tipped its contents onto the desk. Then, remembering his hunger and that he might well have to work far into the night, he got up and went to get himself a sandwich and a glass of wine from his quarters.
The lights had gone out down in the recreation hall. On his way back to his office he paused to look in on the men in the radio room since theirs was the only light burning on that floor.
'Everything all right?'
'All quiet, sir. There's nobody out on a Monday night in this weather—except us.'
Back in his office the Captain began to sort through the documents, picking up the grey passport first as he was curious to see a photograph of Hilde Vogel when she was alive. Probably it wasn't a good likeness, passport photographs rarely are, but it was evident from the fineness of the features that she had been very good-looking when young. Not pretty, the face was too severe for that, but certainly elegant and attractive. There was a hint, too, of the ironic smile mentioned by some of the hotel staff.
'So what were you up to,' murmured the Captain to himself, looking back into the cold bright eyes, 'to come to such a sticky end . . .?' But the face was secretive and told him nothing. He put the passport aside.
There were some share certificates which he was unable to read but which he could guess were in a German steel company. These he placed in a separate folder to be translated and checked as to their value.
A diary, leather bound and bearing the label of a well-known Florentine papermaker, told him little of interest. Hilde Vogel visited a hairdresser in the city centre once a week. She occasionally wrote herself a reminder to buy tights and other small items. The hairdresser's number was in the alphabetical list along with that of a doctor whose surgery was in Via Cavour and a lawyer whose offices were in Piazza della Repubblica. There was no German address to which she might have written those letters once a month. But the letters had been registered. The Captain searched through the pile of papers until he found what he was looking for: an envelope containing the brown printed carbon copies, receipts for the monthly letters. They were divided into years and the twelve receipts for each year paperclipped together. But the ones for the current year only went up to July, a date which did not coincide with one of her trips or with the brief visit of the man described by Querci, the night porter. The recipient's name was H. Vogel and the address was a bank in Mainz, West Germany. The sender was H. Vogel, Villa Le Roveri, Greve in Chianti. Whose address was that? Could she have been sending herself money to be deposited in a German account? There was no cheque-book among the papers, but then, the Captain realized, they hadn't found a handbag in the room, apart from those wrapped in polythene in the wardrobe. Probably the attacker had thrown that into the river, too, and it would be pretty well impossible to find it. The cheque-book was no doubt inside it along with her keys which had not been found either. He made a note to check all the banks in the city where she might have had an account and then replaced the letter receipts in their envelopes.
Next he examined a police permit which was up to date and which gave Hilde Vogel's place of residence as Grcve in Chianti, not the Riverside Hotel in Florence. The next thing he picked up offered an explanation. It was a plastic folder containing a thick stack of contracts for the rent of a country villa near Greve in Chianti. Hilde Vogel was the owner and the villa was, as all the identical contracts stated, her only property and place of residence in Italy. The place had been rented over the past ten years to dozens of tenants for periods of one month to two years for tourist purposes only. The conveyance documents contained in the same folder showed that Hilde Vogel had inherited the property from her father twelve years previously. But if she had been staying at the Riverside Hotel for fifteen years then she had never lived in it.
The Captain selected those contracts still current and then locked all the rest of the documents back in his drawer. Someone would have to
go
out and take a look at that villa tomorrow. Hilde Vogel might never have lived there but it would be worth taking a look at whoever was there now. The only trouble was that he had no idea how he could spare anyone to do the job.
'Well, at least it's stopped raining,' muttered the Marshal to himself as he took the left fork towards Greve in Chianti, under a soft blue autumn sky. It was all very well, but by the time the Captain had called him that morning he was already breaking his head over the daily orders because two of his men were on duty over at the assize courts. But all he had said on the telephone was: 'I'd better go myself, sir. The only two lads I could spare are too young and inexperienced.'
'I hope I'm not causing you difficulties?'
'No, no...' And he had buckled on his holster and fished out the sunglasses he was forced to wear because his eyes were allergic to sunshine.
He stopped at the Garabiniere Station at the bottom of the sloping piazza in the village of Greve to get exact directions for finding the villa, and perhaps some information about the tenants.
'A right funny bunch,' the Marshal of Greve told Guarnaccia over a quick coffee at the bar nearby. The shoppers passing in front of the open door looked busy and cheerful, perhaps because of the sunshine. There was a smell of fresh bread and wood smoke mingling with the aroma of the coffee. 'But we've never had any trouble with them. Do you want me to come with you?'
'No, no. I shan't do more than take a look at the place and find out if any of the tenants know the owner. You don't know her? A Signora Vogel, German.'
'I knew the previous owner, he was German, but he died long since. The villa's let through an agency—you can see their offices across there under the colonnade between the baker's and the newsagent's. Do you want me to have a talk to them?'
'If you're not too busy?'
'We don't get many crime waves in Greve. I've got to visit an old dear who reports her next-door neighbours for one reason or another every day, but I can call at the agency after that. Come and see me on your way back. It's a beautiful place, that villa, but you'll see it's been neglected.'
It was a beautiful place. The Marshal got out of his car, took a deep breath of warm air and looked about him. The villa had large gardens around it, and beyond that it was surrounded by a mature oak wood where brilliant autumn colours contrasted strongly with the misty hills that stretched to the horizon, but a lot of the ochre-washed stucco had crumbled from the villa's facade and one of the peeling shutters on the first floor was hanging askew. Although it wasn't more than five or six minutes' drive from the village there was an almost unnatural silence. So much so that the Marshal was startled by a large wet leaf that brushed his shoulder and fell to the ground with a soft pat. The damp earth was deep in rotting yellow, red and brown leaves which nobody must ever have tried to clear away. The Marshal trod through them round to the back of the building. There was a swimming pool there but it had no water in it. A lot of the tiles were missing and it, too, was strewn with fallen leaves.
The silence was suddenly broken by a trill of music, followed by a pause and then a tune played very softly. The music came from a ground-floor room where the shutters and the window were open. The Marshal walked towards it and stood looking in. It was the kitchen. It was large and had a wooden table in the middle surrounded by straw-bottomed chairs. On one of these a fair-haired young man sat playing the flute. When he saw the big, uniformed man in dark glasses he continued playing, staring at him all the while. The Marshal stood there staring back, his huge eyes taking in everything, from the young man's expensive-looking skiing sweater to the water coming to the boil on the cooker.
