Errant Angels (22 page)

33

Inspector Michele Conti looked questioningly at Sergeant Pascoli, who stood in the doorway of his office with an ‘it's to be expected' look on his face.

‘Well, Sergeant?' asked Conti, who had been distracted from reading a discreetly folded copy of that morning's
La Nazione
newspaper.

‘Not really, sir… Seems he's quite ill, actually. At least, that was the message
Signora
Bramanti left.'

Questore
Bramanti's health had been a topic of debate for some time amongst the staff of the
Questura.

‘Is he in?' asked Conti, leaning back in his chair.

‘No. So I suppose that makes you senior officer until he gets back,' replied the unsmiling sergeant, who was well known for being an expert on finding things via the Internet, but not for possessing a detectable sense of humour, ‘or until Florence decides to send someone else up here,' he continued.

For a moment, Michele Conti sat and thought what this situation implied. Then, being a policeman who usually followed thought with action, he sat upright in his chair. ‘Right then,' he said in a very matter of fact manner, ‘let us get on with the business of the day. What do we have?'

Whilst Pascoli had filled the doorway, Conti had been reading yet another speculative article about the Lucca murders. Lack of any progress in the cases – including the latest one in Montecatini – had pushed the reportage to page five, but it was still there and the public were still
unhappy with the lack of results.

‘Anything new on the murders?' he asked, thinking that it was as good a place as any to start.

‘Well, yes and no,' replied the sergeant, who still stood in the doorway.

‘What do you mean, yes and no?' asked Conti.

‘No, nothing new of any significance has turned up since yesterday … and yes, something new has turned up this morning.' He took a couple of steps into the office and stood next to the inspector's desk.

‘So…?' prompted the inspector, who found Pascoli's occasional attempts at theatrical revelation, which were anything but convincing, rather annoying. ‘What's new?'

‘This…' replied the sergeant, putting a sheet of paper on the desk in front of Conti with a flourish. ‘It's hot off the fax machine.'

The inspector stood up, clutching the fax in his right hand. It had been sent from Florence, copied to Assistant State Prosecutor di Senno and it was, indeed, ‘hot'. He finished reading to the end and then turned to look at his subordinate. It was his first, totally unexpected day in charge of the forces of law and order in Lucca and this had to be the first thing to cross his desk.

‘The Foreign Ministry in Rome has been contacted by the German Government in Berlin and has requested the
Carabinieri
to “assist” us with the investigation into the murder in Montecatini, due to its international dimension,' he said, reading from the sheet. Sergeant Pascoli had adopted an ‘I know' expression, because he had already read it on the way to Conti's office. ‘That means they'll be all over us with their arrogance and innuendo at our perceived incompetence. Blast it!' He put the fax back down on the desk, thought for a few moments and then crossed to the door. ‘If anyone wants me, I will be in the lavatory. I could be gone quite a time.'

34

‘I have a call for you,' rasped the elderly voice of
Signora
Litelli. ‘It is
Signor
Doriano Peri from Florence.'

‘Thank you,
Signora
,' replied Riccardo Fossi as he settled into his comfortably upholstered leather armchair. He mused that the ever hyper-efficient
Signora
Litelli, given another ten seconds with the caller, would probably have deduced his eye colour, the colour of his hair and when he had last had sex. She had a knack of finding out all sorts of things. ‘Doriano,
come stai
?' he asked warmly, using the less formal form of address, usually reserved for family members or very close friends.

‘Good. And you?'

‘Fine … fine,' replied Fossi, turning slightly to look across the expanse of his office and out of the large window. He was in a good mood. There was Renata, the evening concert and the as-yet-unconquered Miss Yvonne Buckingham. He was in a very good mood.

‘Just a quick call,' continued Peri, ‘to let you know that the matter we discussed earlier in the week – well, I have no information whatsoever on that topic … nothing locally, anyway.'

He was careful not to give any details away. Even calls made from the Florence Flying Squad Headquarters ran the risk of the occasional eavesdropper and it was always advisable to err on the side of caution.

‘That's good news and a big relief,' replied Fossi, turning his attention back to his large desk and fiddling with a pen,
which lay on the desk blotter. ‘Thanks… I owe you one, my friend,' he continued.

‘Funnily enough, Riccardo, I had thought of that,' replied Peri, chuckling. Then his voice suddenly took on a sharper edge. ‘Just because I haven't found anything doesn't mean to say that the topic of discussion does not exist. It could be that we just don't know about it. You know the sort of thing – left hand doesn't know about the right hand.'

Fossi stopped fiddling with the pen. ‘How do you mean?' he asked.

‘I was thinking that perhaps you could help us, you know. If you proceed with the topic and then find out something we don't know, about the topic, you
would
let us know … wouldn't you?' There was a prolonged pause as Riccardo Fossi's pleasurable good mood suddenly developed a slightly sour tinge. ‘It's nothing more than we would expect from an upstanding pillar of the community such as you. It would be your duty,' continued Doriano.

‘Of course.' Fossi's voice caught in the back of his throat. He coughed and it returned to its normal placing. ‘Of course,' he repeated, the melodious sonority of his voice restored, but the doubts he had harboured about
Signor
Daniele di Leone and his olive oil were as alive as ever.

35

Julietta Camore sat at her piano doing a leisurely warm-up routine of vocal exercises and scales. It was still early in the day and she would mark her arias until the evening, when she would give full voice to them in the performance. She had wanted to sing the showpiece aria ‘
O don fatale
' from Verdi's
Don Carlo
, but had had her nose put out, somewhat unkindly, when she had mentioned it to Renata during a casual encounter in Lucca, only to be told that the Contessa had already approved Renata's choice of the same aria. Julietta had suspected that Renata had walked on past the next bend in the street and then phoned the Contessa to lay her claim to the piece before Julietta could. There had been little love lost between the two sopranos for some time now. As a result of Renata's perceived dishonesty, Julietta had been obliged to select something else. She had settled on Abigail's aria from the second act of
Nabucco
. The Contessa's fingers would make short work of the rousing introduction to the recitative, filling in the missing chorus and playing the accompaniment to the aria like a full orchestra. Besides, given the way she felt about
Signora
di Senno, the sentiments expressed by the daughter of King Nebuchadnezzar, the
Nabucco
of the title, seemed quite apt: ‘
O villains all! Upon all you will see my fury fall!
' Fair enough, Julietta had not just discovered a document proving that she was not actually her father's daughter, but the displeasure she felt towards Renata amounted to much the same thing in its building intensity.

Julietta spent some time polishing her interpretation of Abigail's great outburst. Then she reached up to the pile of scores on the piano to retrieve
Lucia di Lammermoor.
Last evening's rehearsal had gone quite well, but there was a section of the sextet which had been rather insecure, caused, it had seemed, by a sudden lack of concentration on the part of Gregorio Marinetti. The Contessa had covered it up from the keyboard, but Julietta wanted to run through it, just to be on the safe side. As she reached up and took the score she knocked her diary off the top of the pile. It cascaded over the piano's music stand and landed with a discord on the keyboard. It had landed open, face down, at the page on which she had written the name of Ruggiero Mondini. She had still not told the Contessa about this young man with the outstanding voice, this unbelievable find who had been personally recommended by her sister, Mirella. Julietta had never met this young Mondini, who was shortly to commence his studies at the university in Pisa. Unfortunately for him, his association with Mirella had tainted any hope of a pleasant relationship with Julietta. She slammed the diary closed and placed it on the piano stool beside her with a thump. She had already resolved to tell the Contessa about him and his marvellous voice only if this ‘singing angel', to quote her sister, actually telephoned her. Mirella had given Julietta's phone number to others in the past, much to the latter's annoyance, but in her own inflated opinion, it was Mirella's firmly held conviction that
all
of her friends were socially improving contacts. Despite this, nothing had ever come of Mirella's assurance that by doing so, her sister would benefit from any possible contact.

36

‘Can you put my mother on the line please, Elizabeth?' asked Luigi di Capezzani-Batelli. He had been busy with an intriguing case of suspected murder, which, of itself, was nothing new to him. That was, after all, what constituted a large part of his job; not the actual act of murder, naturally, but the often complex unravelling of the method used to send the unfortunate victim on their way.

‘I'll have to be after doing the stairs. Herself is on the
balconie
upstairs, resting herself for the
conceit
tonight. Can you be doing with a message? 'Twould be easier than anything else.'

Elizabeth was always very down to earth in her assessment of a situation, particularly if she could avoid undue physical exertion.

‘That's kind of you to offer,' replied Luigi, who had long ago learnt to hoist the maid with her own petard, ‘but I really do have to talk to her myself … if it's not too much trouble. I know how busy you are.'

‘Oh, 'tis never too much trouble for Elzeebit to do this and to do that,' replied the housekeeper with more than a generous dose of sarcasm in her voice. ‘Hold on to this thing,' she snapped before a deafening crash in the ear-piece confirmed that she had unceremoniously deposited the handset on the hall table on which the telephone stood.

With the hindsight of many years of experience, Luigi had anticipated her action and had conducted the last few lines of the conversation with his handset held well away
from his ear. He knew he would have to wait some considerable time, as the mumbling retainer went from floor to floor before summoning his mother to the telephone. As he sat waiting, he ran his eyes over the images of the scans the radiographer had taken of the victim, but they revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Then he turned his attention to the medical records, which accompanied the corpse. The elderly male had had a pacemaker fitted several years before, in order to stabilize the rhythm of his heart. Since then, he had been in good health until his sudden and unexpected demise. According to the
polizia
report, his son had found him dead in bed one morning and, in a state of extreme hysteria and distress, had reported it. The general assumption was that the victim's heart had finally given out, possibly due to the failure of the pacemaker. It was recorded that the victim's son had said that he couldn't remember when the battery in the pacemaker had been changed, if at all. The interesting thing revealed by Luigi's physical investigation was that the pacemaker was working perfectly and still continued to send impulses to the long-dead heart. His next step would be to investigate for signs of smothering. He was in the middle of making a note on the subject when Elizabeth, wheezy and a little out of breath, came back on the line.

‘I'll be giving you over to herself,' she said and her voice was abruptly replaced by that of the Contessa.

Although Luigi conceded that Elizabeth was getting on a bit and quite possibly was almost at the point of being past many things, he never ceased to be amazed at where she found her reserves of energy. It had taken her some little while to negotiate the stairs, but she had managed to deliver the message and return to the telephone in advance of his mother.

‘Hello, dear, what a nice surprise to hear your voice,' said the Contessa. In the background could be heard the
muffled sound of several growls and a heated exchange of words.

‘Hello,
cara.
This is just a quick call about the screen for tonight,' he said.

‘Oh, dear,' replied the Contessa. ‘They've all done very well in rehearsal making believe the screen was there, but we do need the real thing for our audience. I do hope that you are not going to tell me that we can't have it.'

‘Good heavens, no,' replied her son, chuckling; ‘quite the opposite, actually. I'm phoning to tell you that the screen is a brand new one from the central storeroom – unused.'

‘Oh, I say, that
is
good news. How kind you are to me,' she continued affectionately. ‘All of COGOL appreciates your help.'

She was not only pleased that COGOL would have the screen it needed for the Humperdinck and Mozart excerpts, but was equally as pleased that the item in question would be free from the possibility of the clinging antiseptic aroma of its origins. That had been of concern to her before.

‘I have arranged for it to be delivered to the
istituto
last thing this afternoon. Perhaps you could just make sure that somebody there knows to expect it?'

‘That is not a problem. I will phone
Signor
Orsini at the
istituto
myself. He is already expecting a chair and the little table from the drawing room. Gregorio is going to organize the collection and will take care of the delivery of both items for me. Are you busy with your work today?' she continued.

‘An interesting case at the moment, but I cannot say much about it at present –
polizia
business, you know.'

The Contessa made a sound of understanding acknowledgement.

‘Anyway,
cara
, I thought I would just confirm arrangements
about the screen. The other thing for you to mention to
Signor
Orsini is that the cases of wine and glasses from the villa will also be delivered during the afternoon. I must go now, so I'll see you at the concert this evening.
Toi Toi Toi.
' He wished his mother good luck for the concert and hung up.

The Contessa smiled broadly as she replaced the handset. She let her hand linger on it for a few moments, as if reluctant to break the connection with her son. She had found herself growing closer and closer to him, the older she became. As she stared idly down at the telephone she thought that, if things had been decreed otherwise, Enrico would be Luigi's elder brother by five years and Giacomo – well, Giacomo would have been nearly a hundred. She sighed. She might be an idealist by nature, but she was far too much of a realist to dwell on that which was unattainable. Her momentary reverie was abruptly interrupted.

‘Will herself be after havin' her tea down here in the sitting room … or up the stairs on the
balconie
?' wheezed Elizabeth from the doorway leading to the kitchen.