by Tim Parks
‘Going?’
‘Yes, that must be why I missed this call you say you made. It’s all a bit complicated though. Come into the kitchen while I make you a coffee and I’ll tell you about it.’ His voice sounded about as natural as something from Wagner. But foreignness was on his side here. Gregorio would put it down to his English way with Italian. Put on a bit of an accent perhaps?
They sat on stools watching the coffee pot, Gregorio munching biscuits, and Morris explained how he had had a girlfriend with him and …
‘Oh, a girlfriend, I thought you were coming with a boy?’
‘No, really? How come?’
‘You said amico on the phone.’
'Did I?’ Morris looked innocently at Gregorio and held his gaze untill he caught the faintest blush behind the boy’s tan. ‘No, no, a girl. Anyway.’
‘Not the one I saw you with in Piazza Bra that night? With the red tracksuit.’
‘Who? Oh no, this was my real girlfriend,’ He tried a little grin and thought he made it. ‘Anyway, we had a hell of a row last night - about getting married inevitably enough, she thought she was pregnant - and then when I refused, she took it into her head she was going to leave immediately, on the first bus from the village, so I had to walk her down there, carry her bags,’
‘But I phoned at six, you weren’t surely,’
The village is a good five kilometres and the first bus back to Olbia was 7:10,’ Morris had no idea when the first bus was, but then nor would Gregorio. The only time Gregorio noticed buses was when he was overtaking them in one of Papa’s cars. A warm feeling of justification began to throb back through Morris’s veins. He too would have a car soon. (Oh damn, he must get the cash out of Gregorio’s wardrobe!)
'Yes, I told her she should wait till nine or so and then call Roberto, but you know what girls are; I was a beast and she was going to get away as soon as she could. So of course “the beast” here ended up lugging her cases five kilometres down there and himself five kilometres back,’
He could see it all, was even beginning to feel hard done by. ‘Anyway, when I got back I thought I'd just clean up and go myself, seeing as it’s not too much fun being in a place all on your own.’
Actually, now he thought about it, there was nothing he would have liked more than a few days’ rest here on his own.
Gregorio appeared to swallow it all and then while he was swallowing his coffee too. Morris said he had to go to the toilet for a minute. He dashed into Gregorio’s bedroom and quietly eased the plastic bag out from behind the pullovers. Excellent. He padded into his own room and packed the thing into his suitcase. Had he forgotten anything? Was there anything at all anywhere that could give him away? He had washed the paperweight and put it back. Traces of blood in the sink? He thought not. There’d hardly been any blood. The floor was clean. All her things were gone. Everything.
‘You'll stay a few days though now I’m here?’ Gregorio’s voice behind him had him starting a moment.
‘A day or two maybe, but I’m kind of eager to be back. Find myself some work before the money runs out.’
How long would it be before the corpse began to smell, before Gregorio for some reason wandered behind the garden shed?
‘What are you doing today?’ Morris asked point-blank.
'I thought a lazy day on the beach with Roberto would hit the spot. Then I need a haircut.’
These people didn’t do anything but spend lazy days on the beach. And it was a scandal they’d passed him in English. His mother must have known the examiner or something. He followed Gregorio into the bathroom and watched him beginning to shave.
‘I was wondering if you could maybe do me a favour then. ‘ And he explained that when he had come over on the boat he had met a rich industrialist who was apparently a count or something and this man had hinted that Morris might be able to work for him in his office in Vicenza. He’d invited Morris to drop over and see him at his villa in La Caletta, and what he’d been intending to do was get the bus down there and from there to the ferry, but if he was going to come all the way back here to stay another couple of days, then …
‘Sure, take the car,' Gregorio said, slicing through white foam on his neck. Morris noticed a pack of old-fashioned Gillette blades on the glass shelf in the corner of the bathroom. People really were so vulnerable. It was ridiculous.
‘Well just go to Roberto’s first,I’ll get off there and you can go on.’
20
The only problem was that to go back and load Massimina into the car he would have to turn round and drive back in front of Roberto’s hotel going in the wrong direction for where he’d said he was going. There was no other road. Could it make them suspicious? It could. But Morris had learned by now that where there was no choice it was better not to worry about the danger of doing something. You just did it. He drove quietly past the white hotels careful not to accelerate or do anything unusual, then once out of sight cruised moderately back to the villa. He’d seen an old skipping rope somewhere in one of the cupboards that he could use for tying her up.
Morris backed the car almost to the shed and went to the house for the rope. But the door was locked and he didn’t have the key now. He’d given it to Gregorio. Damn. He’d have to buy a rope then. He could get a skipping rope when he passed through Palau. No problem in a seaside town.
A scuffling behind the shed as he approached froze him. Bird. It must be. It was. A sparrow was scrabbling around the sacks. He dragged the corpse away, imagining it would have stiffened now and be easier to move, bent up as it was. But no. The thing flopped and seemed determined to come out of the sacks. So much for rigor mortis. It was unmanageable. One didn’t want to be undignifled with the girl but there you were. He heaved the package any way he could as far as the back bumper and Addled with the keys. He must have the key to the boot, damn it. Try them all again. Yes, there. The boot was half full of clutter. Old shoes, jeans, a few tools, accessories for skiing. A knife. Morris shoved them to the back and wrenched up the corpse. But shapeless as it was in the sacks and with all her clothes and odds and ends swimming about and occasionally falling out it was difficult. He couldn’t tell what he was grabbing. Then the belt slipped away from neck and feet allowing the whole body to open up. The top sack with her head was just inside now but aie bottom slipped down, the sack slithering away to show her white backside.
Morris was suddenly boiling with anger, furious at this continued rebellion of the now inanimate girl. Anybody might drive by any minute. Somebody might be looking down from the hill behind. Damn and damn. He slapped her hard and the skin was cold as putty. ‘Get in for Christ’s sake!’ He heaved up the legs, jammed them in somehow and slammed down the boot. A pair of blue panties lay on the ground by his feet. No. He picked them up, found the key again (he mustn’t mustn’t mustn’t go and lock the keys in the boot or something stupid like that), shoved the panties inside a sack, which brought his hand in contact with her skin for just one unpleasant second, and had the boot down again. Morris stood up straight and made himself breathe deeply for two or three full minutes.
Ten o’clock. He turned off the coast road and drove southwest along Route 133. The rain of the evening before had left the country glistening and freshly scented. The car climbed steeply through hills of flowering gorse, occasional thickets, sheep, broken-down farms, modern holiday villas. Sardinia wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be, Morris thought.
It was a long time since he’d done any driving and he had to go easy, especially in such a powerful car. His experience was limited to his father’s old 1100. He turned on the radio and twiddled the dial a little, hoping for news or business’ reports, but it was all light music crap. There was nothing he hated more than light music. He settled down to enjoy what there was of a landscape, driving slowly and carefully. At Lake Coghinas he joined the main road and stopped a little later in Oschiri to get hold of every paper he could lay his hands on. With the car parked safely in sight across
the road he sat in a small dirty café and went through the lot of them. But nothing. There wouldn’t have been time for them to get anything in on her phone call of course. If they had managed to trace that he was done.
He was going to order a second coffee when it suddenly came to him that with the sun beating down on the car like it was, she would be smelling awfully in no time. And for some reason it was this idea of smell that bothered Morris most of all. As if once to experience the smell of a victim’s corpse would taint him for life. He jumped up, paid and left. Seeing a petrol station open just a hundred metres away he thought for a moment he might buy a can of petrol and arrange a little cremation. But it would probably attract more attention than it was worth. Like digging holes.
A further ten kilometres and he left the main road at Ozieri, taking the car snaking up into the rugged hills around Biti. This was the heartland of Sardinia now - bandit country: sheep, shepherds, roughnecks and miles and miles of wild empty country. No tourists either, by the looks of it; no expensive villas, no people wandering across the countryside on exploratory walks every day. Morris watched the occasional untarred tracks that snaked off the road to either side, looking for one that was overgrown, disused.
He found it a few kilometres before Nuoro. The ground was wet, which was unfortunate. He would leave tracks. But then there was no search going on, was there? He put the car into second and took it very slowly up the rutted track into the hills, until, passing through a thicket, he had trees brushing their branches against both sides of the car. He stopped and walked a little way. Bushes, undergrowth, no sign of a path. It was as good as he was going to find.
Back at the car he heaved her out again, textbook stiff now. But he had forgotten the rope. He was going to have to drag her tugging at the edges of the plastic sacks again, tearing out his fingernails. And he did, any old how, through bushes and nettles, the hell with respect. He was making far too much damage too, but what could you do? Nature would repair herself in a couple of days. A bit of luck was all he needed - a bit of luck. ‘With a little bit, with a little bit…’
No, he must try to breathe only through his mouth in case it smelled - and look away when the lower sack continually slipped down round her nether parts. But better that than her face. He felt like a long-distance runner, exhausted, but nearing the end of the course. If he could just hold on a bit longer. After a few hundred metres he found a particularly wild bush, crept under the branches and pushed the body around the trunk, grunting and sweating with the effort, shivering and boiling together.
It was ten minutes’ driving later that Morris realized that leaving all those clothes and things in the sack with her was pretty well the craziest thing he could have done. They would be bound to identify the body sooner or later, they were geniuses at that kind of thing these days. And then all those tags from Vicenza, Rimini, Rome and Porto Torres would trace out the itinerary of the kidnap down to the last detail and thus give the police just the lead they needed. He pulled into the side of the road and turned the car round. He felt rather proud of himself really to and he had the courage to go back there, and when he arrived proud again to see how quickly and efficiently he stripped the sacks off her and took all the clothes and shoes and odds and ends away. He didn’t seem to mind the body at all, nor its faint smel.l It did occur to him that he really ought to smash up her face with the car jack. But there were limits. And the St Christopher? Leave it. It was a gift he had given her and she could keep it. Nobody would connect it with Giacomo anyway. And it was a challenge, a snub to fate. Like Gregorio’s bronze left on the coffee table in his flat.
Coming out of the track for the second time onto the country road, Morris almost ran over an elderly man walking with a stick.
‘Scusi, mi scusi. Signore, buon giorno,’ Morris said from his open window at his breeziest and best. He looked the old peasant straight in the eyes. Tonight he would whoop it up with Gregorio and Roberto, get thoroughly drunk and then tomorrow or the next day back to Verona.
‘Buon di,’ the man with the stick replied from a leathery old face.
Morris returned via Genoa, which meant a thirteen hour trip. He travelled at night with a private cabin and kept himself to himself. Before turning in he stood at the boat’s rail and watched a warm Mediterranean moon shining full and bright over the boat’s lazy wake. Not a wave was in sight. The sea was a pond. He looked backwards towards the last winking lights of Sardinia and added up the cards, for and against.
There was the box of tampons Gregorio had come across by the garden shed, a strange place to lose such a thing. Then the corpse might be discovered immediately and identified immediately with the Sardinian papers publishing photographs good enough for Roberto or Gregorio to recognize. Give it a month though and they’d both be back on the mainland. There was the heap of fertilizer too, plus the two hundred extra kilometres he’d put on Gregorio’s Alfa Romeo that day. There was Stan who had seen the girl from a platform away in Rome and knew Morris was going to Sardinia. There was Signor Cartuccio who might have seen the identikit of the Rimini murders suspect, not to mention the possibility that the police could have traced his phone calls, might decide at any moment to check up on his supposed trip to Bari, who his friends were, where he had stayed. And against all these dangers Morris held but one card, which he must trust and pray would prove the ace of trumps - his unsuspectability, the leap of imagination that would be required on the part of a group of people who had shown themselves sadly lacking in that quality.
As soon as he was back in Verona he would get over and see Inspector Marangoni and have a frank talk about it all, especially about that last strange phone call, which according to yesterday’s Corriere had been too brief to trace. He would ask the policeman if there was anything he could do, if there was any hope left at all. He would weep maybe and beat a fist on the man’s desk. Yes, he could see himself doing it already.
Back in his first-class cabin with a bottle of spumante to celebrate, he drank quietly, going over his plans - the investments, photography, the book (he must buy a typewriter) - then rummaged in his suitcase for the dictaphone. Where had he put the new batteries? In the zip pocket. Good.
He installed the batteries, lay back and reflected. What was it he had said last? He wound back a little and switched on. … the choices I was made to take, that destiny knew I would and will take in a certain way because …’ His own voice stopped, to be followed immediately afterwards by a crackle and then a strange female voice.
'Che cosa mai dici in tutti questi nastri, Morri? Non capisco un cavolo. Sei cosi misterioso sai.’
The voice stopped. Morris, with his heart in his mouth, replayed it. It didn’t seem her voice. The words were long and drawn out by those dying batteries he had just replaced. A moan it seemed; a moan from beyond the grave. ‘Che cosa mai did … Morri. What do you say in these tapes, you’re so mysterious.’
A moment later Morris was at the rail again, hurling the dictaphone far out on a moonlit sea. He wouldn’t have been surprised really had a female arm reached out to take the thing. He was going crazy. Quite mad. And he stood at the rail for a long while, weeping quietly on his own.
21
It was late August, an ominous thundery day, and Morris, sweating in his new black suit, was following respectfully at the rear of the procession as they carried the coffin through the cemetery to the family vault. When a hand fell lightly on his shoulder.
‘May we have a word with you, Signor Duckworth?’
Inspector Marangoni stood plump and sombre-faced beside his wiry, moustached assistant.
If we can leave the family alone for the very last rites, and drive down to the Questura, there are one or two things we’d like to talk to you about.’
So they had found him out at last. For which of the crimes? He mustn’t confess untill he knew what they knew.
The three men walked back down the white shingle paths of the cemetery. The policemen had left their car outside the ga
te. (Could he say she’d fallen, banged her head?)
‘But I've been invited to the supper afterwards,’ Morris managed to get out now, to test the water.
‘Don’t worry, this won’t take a moment.’
The tone appeared to be cynical. Morris was obliged to climb into the car, the same kind of Alfa Romeo Gregorio had, he noticed. He felt surprisingly resigned. At least they weren’t beating him up.
'The thing is’ - it was the only remark anybody made during the short trip and Inspector Marangoni made it -’there are one or two things that don’t add up about this whole affair.’
They sat in a small blank empty room and Tolaini, the assistant, went out to get something. The tape recorder for the confession most probably.
In two months of burning sunshine Inspector Marangoni hadn’t managed to get a tan. His balding head was pale under the room’s fluorescent light as he leaned across the table.
‘Did the Massimina you knew used to pluck her eye. brows?’
‘No, I don’t think so.' He mustn’t fidget. He must sit perfectly still.
The assistant came in with a small metal box, set it down on the table and opened it.
'This,’ Marangoni said, lifting out a lock of hennaed hair. ‘Would you say it was hers?’
‘No,’ Morris said, ‘Mimi’s hair was just very dark, near black.’
‘Did she wear necklaces?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Anything you remember in particular?’
‘No.’ It wasn’t the way he would have gone about the questioning, Morris thought. And he began to feel curious.
'This?’ He lifted out the St Christopher.
Morris looked at it quite coolly. ‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Signor Duckworth, the young girl found in Sardinia, plucked her eyebrows, had this colour of hair, wore this charm. She...’
