The Marshal at the Villa Torrini (3 page)

The lad obeyed. He pushed the door with one finger and found the light switch. The two of them stood there staring in silence. They saw what had made the noise, a Chianti flask thudding to the floor. It was leaking its last red drops on to a white goatskin rug.

'Is he dead, d'you think . . . ?'

The Marshal strode forward and turned the bearded face up. It flopped back on the counterpane when he let it go.

'No,' he said, 'he's not. He's drunk. Very drunk.'

CHAPTER 2

'If you've taken your samples can we let the bath water out?' It was a doctor the Marshal had never met before and he was doing his best not to be in his way, conscious of his bulk in the small bathroom.

The red water gurgled slowly away, spluttering and choking as it went. The doctor carefully lifted one of the woman's feet, the heel of which was blocking the plughole. 'Otherwise we'll be here all night. Photo?'

The photographer's flash got busy as the body appeared out of the water. Then it stopped and they looked at each other.

'Well, that's a turn-up . . . ' The doctor picked up one wrist and then the other. Not a mark. 'Not so much as a scratch. Well, all that blood came from somewhere. Can we turn her? Got all your photos?'

'Fine by me.'

'Marshal?'

The Marshal had taken all the notes he needed before they arrived. He nodded.

The three of them turned her over.

'Ah. Well, not what you'd expect, of course, but explains the bleeding at any rate.'

A wine glass lay broken under the body and had made two very deep cuts in one buttock and a number of scratches on the lower back. One triangle of glass was still deeply embedded in the wound it had made.

'That's not our cause of death. I wonder . . .'

The Marshal, too, was wondering. Sometimes people fainted in the bath, though he'd never come across such a thing himself—anyway weren't they usually old people? It was one thing to faint, but when you felt yourself drowning wouldn't you come to? Start to struggle? Somebody feeble might not save themselves in time but this woman . . .

'How old do you think she is, Doctor?'

'Forty-five-ish, I should think. I'll take her temperature now I've got her turned over. Time of death likely to be a problem for you?'

'No. No . . . She was seen earlier and then the husband . . ;'

Considerable noise was coming from the bedroom where young Fara was battling to bring the drunken man to his senses without much success.

'Could have been drunk like him, I suppose . . .'

'Well, I can't give you an official opinion on that at this stage, but I doubt it.'

'Hmph.'

'Probably an accident.'

Fara's now desperate voice was eliciting nothing more than faint groans next door.

'I'll bring him round for you,' the doctor said, 'as soon as I've finished here.'

The Marshal took to wandering about the house again, though his wanderings were not as random now as before. He looked, not very wholeheartedly, for a suicide note. He found a desk whose top right-hand drawer contained the passports of Celia Rose Carter, born in Great Britain in 1947 and Julian Forbes, also British, born in 1959. He frowned and opened the woman's passport again.

'Eh, Marshal? What do you think?'

He realized that the technicians who were packing up their equipment at the kitchen end of the room had been talking to him and he hadn't heard a word. He looked at them blankly. 'I'm sorry. Wasn't listening.'

'It was nothing. Find anything interesting?'

The Marshal looked down at the passport again but all he said was, 'It's her birthday . . .'

'Don't worry about me, I'm fine.'Julian Forbes rolled back on to his stomach and added carefully, 'Just tell people I've fallen asleep on one of the beds.' Once again he was sleeping like a baby. Fara looked at the Marshal for help but the Marshal was no expert.

'We might have to let him sleep it off . . .'

The doctor came in, drying his hands on a linen towel.

'Let's get miladdo awake, then.' He approached the bed and turned Forbes on his back. With the rather hairy back of his still damp hand he rubbed Forbes's mouth and nose briskly. Forbes opened his eyes and at once the doctor swung him upright. The drunken flush on the cheeks drained away.

'Going to be sick . . .'

'Be my guest.' The doctor tipped some dried flowers out of a jar on the floor and Forbes vomited a good litre of red wine into it. Passing the jar to Fara, the doctor suggested, 'See if the technicians want a sample of that—and make some coffee while you're down there. He's all yours, Marshal.'

The doctor returned to the bathroom to clean the splashes of vomit from himself. The Marshal stood beside the bed, looking down. Young as Forbes was, he was losing the hair on his crown. The hands held to the temples, no doubt in the hope of containing a headache, were long-fingered and pale.

'Christ, I feel terrible! What's happened? Not a road accident—I never drive. Celia always drives . . .'

'You get drunk very often?'

'No, I don't.' His voice was peevish. 'It just affects me badly sometimes, that's all. Now what the hell's going on? Who are all these people?'

'If you can get as far as the bathroom—'

The word acted on him like a knife in the stomach. He double forward with a wail of panic and then curled sideways on the bed and began to sob in a high-pitched voice like a child.

The Marshal sighed inwardly. It was going to be a long night. A commotion outside announced the arrival of the magistrate. The Marshal's relief turned to dismay, however, when the magistrate's head appeared round the door, his eyes bright with irony, a small cigar in his mouth.

'They said it was you. Splendid! What have we got— apart from an appalling smell of vomit?' He held out his hand, giving a wicked smirk in the direction of the sobbing figure.

The Marshal shook hands.

'His wife . . . ' He nodded towards the bathroom and the magistrate popped across to look.

Forbes, without ceasing to cry, asked, 'Who's that, for God's sake?'

'Substitute Prosecutor Fusarri.' And if the Marshal, too, was thinking, 'For God's sake,' he didn't say it aloud.

Fusarri wandered back in, cigar poised delicately aloft. He never spilled a flake of ash on his fine grey suits. Forbes was still sobbing loudly, his face covered by his hands.

'What's his name?' mouthed Fusarri silently.

The Marshal offered his notebook.

'Well, well, Mr Forbes. What have you been doing to your wife?'

Now that was the trouble with Fusarri. He had no scruples, no tact! The Marshal who had been thinking precisely the same thing would never have dreamt of saying it. He was Milanese, of course, so you couldn't expect . . . Even so, he always left the Marshal uncomfortable. He never knew whether the chap was serious or not. Not, to look at his face, but then you couldn't be sure . . . One thing was sure, he knew how to sort this Forbes character to whom the Marshal had already taken a strong dislike. It was a pleasure to watch.

'Your wife is dead, sir, and in what look to us to be unusual circumstances. It may, of course, have been an accident, in which case we shall have no need to bother you further once we have the results of the post-mortem. In the meantime we require the answers to a few questions.'

Forbes still had his head in his hands, but he'd quietened down. Fusarri sat neatly down beside him and a curl of pungent cigar smoke found its way from the smiling mouth in the direction of Forbes's eyes. He lifted his head to cough.

'Good, good. I see we understand each other. So much more comfortable here than in somebody's office, don't you think?'

'Well, Marshal.' Fusarri stood up and strode out of the room, waving the little cigar at shoulder height. 'He's all yours!'

The Marshal stood there, staring down. He certainly wasn't going to sit on the bed for a start. Fusarri . . . The Marshal had no vocabulary to deal with Fusarri. It was the standard complaint that the magistrates trod all over the police and carabinieri, armchair detectives most of them, giving out orders like generals who never go near the battlefield. But Fusarri . . .

'Hmph.'

The Marshal fetched himself a wickerwork chair, hoped it was up to his weight, and sat down near Forbes.

'Tell me about it,' he said.

Forbes crossed one leg tightly over the other and folded his arms. His forehead and nose became beaded with sweat. He smelled of alcohol, of vomit and of fear. He didn't look at the Marshal and he didn't say a word.

'You'll have to, you know. Me or somebody else.'

Forbes darted a quick glance at the Marshal and then his eyes swivelled away. He was sweating so profusely now that some drops rolled down his temples and down under his open shirt collar which was striped green and white. Since there was nothing to listen to, the Marshal's big eyes looked, taking in every detail. A brown sweater that looked very old—it was certainly very worn. The striped shirt stuck out through the elbows and a bit of unravelled wool was hanging . . . Corduroy trousers, rather baggy, red wool socks. He was thin, but there were signs of an incipient pot belly. Too much drink, probably.

The Marshal was prepared to sit in silence for as long as was necessary. If you keep on asking questions people go on refusing to answer, but silence is very unnerving and a nervous person will try to fill it, no matter how reluctant he is to tell you anything. This man was nervous all right. So the Marshal, hands planted firmly on his knees, eyes fixed on his prey, waited.

Forbes was shaking now and having difficulty staying still, so that the Marshal knew what he wanted to do was get up and run and keep running. The reaction of a frightened animal. And yet he was surely an intelligent man. The Signora Torrini hadn't said much about him, come to think of it, she'd only talked about the woman. A writer . . . Well, she wouldn't be married to a road-sweeper, he didn't suppose. Besides, his hands . . . He'd never done a stroke of physical work in his life.

One of the slim-fingered hands now fished in a trouser pocket. Forbes pulled out a handkerchief and dried his brow thoroughly. It immediately became beaded with drops again. He went on mopping himself. It was something to fill the vacuum but it wasn't enough. He said, 'I can't remember anything. It happens when I drink.' He bent over and righted the Chianti flask that had rolled from the bed on to the rug. To hide his face, the Marshal thought.

'I understand. Perhaps you'd like to go to the bathroom and clean yourself up.'

He went rigid. 'Is she . . . have you . . .'

'She's still there,' the Marshal said. 'But I thought you didn't remember. The bathroom seemed to ring a bell last time I mentioned it.'

A pause. His mind was going like a steam engine, you could almost hear it. He was intelligent all right, but they were the ones who in the end always talked themselves into trouble. The stout denial of the most stupid criminal was much more effective, but a chap like this one couldn't keep it up. The temptation to run rings round a bunch of none-too-bright policemen was always too great, and sooner or later the brilliant story that explained everything would be concocted. Still Forbes was being cautious—or the hangover was saving him.

'I remembered when you said it. That . . .'

The Marshal didn't help him. He sat very still and hardly appeared to be interested even. His ear was cocked to Fusarri's fast rattling accent with its slurred Milanese S. He would have filled the entire house by this time with the pungent blue smoke of his tiny cigars which he chain-smoked. He'd be sure to get on well with Signora Torrini. A vehicle drew up outside. Doors slammed and someone gave an order.

The Marshal sighed and his heavy, black uniformed torso made an almost imperceptible movement forward. The other man flinched and drew back.

'That will be the ambulance. Do you want to see your wife before they take her away?'

Forbes dried his brow quickly and swallowed hard.

'What's happened to her?'

It was so calculated, so infantile, so blatantly false that the Marshal, thinking of a still young woman lying dead and alone for hours while he snored in a drunken stupor, could have hit him. Someone else in his place might have done just that and perhaps saved himself a lot of time and trouble since the man was clearly a moral and physical coward. But the Marshal didn't move.

'I don't know,' he said, and waited.

But Forbes only narrowed his eyes and then dropped his head once again into his hands.

'Oh God : . . My head!'

It was useless. The headache and nausea were more pressing than any need to save himself from accusation. Besides which, it could well turn out after the autopsy that there was nothing to accuse him of. After all, there was no getting away from the fact that he had been found asleep next door to his dead wife when he had a car and a current passport at his disposal. At any rate, it was useless to try and do much with him until he recovered. The Marshal got to his feet and again Forbes made that slight cringing movement which he covered by opening the bedside cabinet.

'Christ almighty, I need some aspirin . . .'

There were a few boxes of pills in the cupboard.

'If your wife was in the habit of taking sleeping pills or tranquillizers of any sort I'll need to take them with me.'

Forbes swept everything out of the cupboard on to the floor in a fury. 'Shit!'

'In the bathroom, are they?'

The man flung himself back against the crumpled pillows and started weeping loudly again.

'Did she?' insisted the Marshal.

'Did she what? Oh God! Oh God . . .'

Take sleeping pills?' But what was the use? The Marshal stooped and picked up the tablets, checking each label. Mineral salts, throat pastilles, a tube of liniment for sprains and bruises, capsules for relief from colds. Nothing. He put them back and closed the cabinet door. As he stood up he noticed a little screw of paper in a flowered ashtray by the bedside lamp. Picking it up, he gave a sideways glance at the sobbing figure on the bed. Forbes again had his hands over his face and was burrowing into the pillows as though he hoped they might envelop him completely. The Marshal unscrewed the twist of paper. There were two red capsules in it.

'Are these sleeping pills?'

Forbes didn't even look up.

'Oh God, my head . . .'

I'll need to take them away. You'll be given a receipt.'

Fusarri's voice called from the bathroom. By the sound of it, they were starting to remove the body.

'Are you sure you don't wish to see your wife before they take her away?'