He also didn’t believe it because, no matter how sorry he felt for her years of helpless suffering and for her present pitiful condition, he knew beyond a doubt as he watched her that her silence was a lie.
*
Noferini was asleep. The Marshal sat near the switchboard he didn’t understand and never touched, looking out of the small uncurtained window at the white shape of the Suspect’s house. At a certain hour, when the white house was in darkness and the squabbling voices ceased, Noferini would turn the volume on full so that the slightest word or movement would be magnified. Then they would take turns to get a little sleep. Noferini had just stretched himself out on the hard bed, covered himself with an army blanket and within seconds had rolled on to his side and begun snoring very faintly. The Marshal envied him. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had a decent sleep. Having failed to make up his lost hours in the mornings, he was now finding himself wakeful at nights as well, whether he had to be here or not. Despite this, he had no intention of waking Noferini up after a couple of hours as he’d asked. Undisturbed, he would sleep on throughout the night. The search warrant for the Suspect’s house was now signed and the search would start tomorrow morning. The warrant hadn’t been easy to get since the judge had looked askance both at the original anonymous letter of accusation and another, more recently arrived, suggesting that if the house and garden were searched with a metal detector something of interest would be found. Anonymous letters are out of order in court and can’t be used, but Simonetti fought for the right to check this one out and in the end the judge, reluctant to protect someone whom the newspapers had now defined as a monster in his own right, whether he was the Monster or not, had signed the warrant. The search would begin early next morning. Neither the Marshal nor Noferini was expected to appear before lunch, but the Marshal was quite certain that whatever he might decide himself, Noferini would be over there first thing bobbing about like a squirrel whether he’d had any sleep or not.
With a snort and a rustle of eiderdown the Suspect shifted in his sleep. The Marshal turned to the dark shape against the just visible paler darkness of the whitewashed wall but the boy slept soundly. Once you’d forgiven him his overdone enthusiasm, which owed more to youth and inexperience than to calculation or ambition, you couldn’t help liking the lad.
It had been Ferrini who’d first christened him “the squirrel,” though whether that was because of the feathery light eyebrows that met over a turned-up nose or because of the intentness with which he collected information to store in his beloved computer wasn’t clear. The boy slept as hard as he worked …
The Marshal turned back to the window. It wasn’t, thank God, as cold as it had been. The air was more humid and no stars were visible. It would probably rain tomorrow.
He settled in his chair and his thoughts turned to the problem of the frightened daughter. There was something in the back of his mind … something quite apart from her concealing silences and it wasn’t about her father, either, though he was sure, even so, that it was to do with sex. The Marshal was the first to admit that he was no great brain and that logical thought was pretty much beyond him. He either knew things or he didn’t. But there was something going on here that he’d never come across before and that he found difficult to define, even to himself—goodness knows, he didn’t ask much of himself in the way of clear explanations. It was somehow the case that every path you took led you back to the same place. All arguments were circular. If you started thinking that the Suspect wouldn’t have done so and so because he would have been crazy to risk it, you then remembered that if he slaughtered sixteen people he didn’t know from Adam then, of course, he was crazy, so then what? And if it made no sense that the daughter should have gone to the police about her father so long after it was all over, well, she didn’t have any sense, did she? Round and round and on to the next baffling episode. That was a problem, too. A backlog of twenty years of case notes which, though he’d never admitted it to anybody, he’d never quite finished reading because of the present workload, plus at least some of his usual duties—Lorenzini had to have some free time—had made it impossible. He didn’t blame anybody for that. He blamed his own slowness, since everybody else had presumably managed. But this became yet another circular argument because even though he knew he was slow, and even though he felt like someone trying to understand a film that’s being run past him on fast forward, he was also convinced that there wasn’t enough information there. This was a conviction based on nothing at all. It had been there all the time but hadn’t come to the surface until he’d watched Simonetti questioning the daughter. He’d had the transcript of the trial there and he was selecting parts of it which would help in showing the Suspect as the probable Monster. It wasn’t unreasonable to wonder whether all the rest of the information they’d been given had been edited in the same fashion. If it had, was that out of order or just sensible? The Marshal wasn’t sure, but he was sure that he could hardly be the one to bring the question up since he was the only member of the squad who had failed to get through the information he had been given. It was one of the things he wouldn’t mind having a word with Ferrini about, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to find the opportunity to talk now that they’d been split up and were working different shifts. He had managed, when they’d just taken the daughter away, to ask him quietly:
“Do you think that was necessary? I mean, in front of so many men?”
“She’s going to have to do it in front of a full courtroom.”
“But she could be heard in camera, surely?”
“She could but she won’t be. At least, not unless we find that Beretta twenty-two under his pillow. She’s the best, and might be the only, weapon the prosecution’s got.”
“He can’t be tried for the same crime again.”
“No. But he will be, mark my words. And for that murder of forty years ago, too. Use your head, Guarnaccia. Otherwise the trial’d last two minutes. ‘You are the Monster of Florence.’ ‘No I’m not.’ Jury retires.”
“Then it won’t go to trial.”
“Won’t it?”
What a business. He stared across at the faint shape of the Suspect’s house. They might find something but he hadn’t much hope. The Suspect did know his phone was tapped, they knew that by now. That was the latest from the barman who was highly amused by the story because apparently the only reason it bothered him was not that the police might catch him giving himself away but that it might somehow double his phone bill. He still didn’t seem to know the house was bugged, though. Probably thought that sort of thing only happened in spy films. What was he supposed to be thinking about? The daughter. He’d been trying to remember something she’d said and it was the barman … where did he come into it? The barman’s eyebrows met in the middle. That wasn’t right, it was Noferini who shouldn’t have been behind that bar, anyway. He was supposed to be getting some sleep. Round and round in circles. The alarm! His hand shot out to switch it off so it wouldn’t wake Teresa, but instead of a clock on the bedside table, he hit something bristling with knobs and switches and someone else turned off the alarm.
“Blast!” He came to himself, realizing that he had accidentally hit the control board and switched off half a dozen things, including the volume.
Noferini was off the bed and beside him in half a second, crouching in front of the board to bring back the sound.
“Shift yourself. Get off your backside!”
“There he is. What’s he doing up at five? Was that his alarm going off?”
“I suppose it must have been.” Five? He’d fallen asleep, then. He must have been asleep for a good three hours. “Made me jump. I hope I haven’t done any damage.”
“No. What d’you think he’s doing? Listen …”
Whatever it was, he was doing it a long way from a microphone. He was swearing at his wife as usual and they could just about hear her fainter lament along with the noise of something being dragged. Possibl
y a piece of furniture. Every now and then they picked up the odd word or phrase.
“In here …”
“… bitch …”
“Mouth shut. Get hold …”
They looked at each other in the dark.
“The skips!” whispered Noferini, as though the voice coming from the switchboard could pick up his words. “They’re round the back of his house!”
They started down the stairs. These country houses had only one door. If he was pulling that gun and ammunition from its hiding place to dump it into the municipal skip so that it would be removed the next day, they needed to catch him at it. They opened the door.
“Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it in the dark; he knows we’re here, doesn’t he?”
“He doesn’t know about the bugs.”
It was true that without the listening devices they’d have had a hard time knowing what he was doing. The night was dark as only night in the country can be. That was what he’d been waiting for. Not so much as a star. They’d had to grope their way in a wide arc round to the back of his house where the skips were, and more than once they bumped into invisible trees. The positive side of this was that he wouldn’t see them either. They settled near a cypress tree at a distance and waited.
“What’s taking him so long?” whispered Noferini after a while.
The Marshal didn’t know and didn’t answer. Speculation was pointless and they might be heard. After all, he could have the gun cemented into the wall for all they knew, or under a sealed-down flagstone in the floor. All they could do was wait.
Noferini’s ears were sharper than his and the Marshal sensed his having picked up something before he heard it himself.
A shape moved near the skip and the lid creaked open. A thud. Then it creaked shut. He hadn’t let it slam. They moved forward but before they could reach the skip they heard it open again and saw the vague outline of someone reaching in. They ran the last few steps but the arm must have been withdrawn because the skip slammed shut. Noferini grabbed at a sleeve, but the invisible figure wriggled out of his grasp with a little cry of fear and shot away.
“Torch!”
The Marshal had already wrenched it from his pocket and now its beam made a cone of light in the blackness. It picked up the figure of a tall thin man disappearing behind the house they had come out of. When they got there he’d gone. They stood still a moment and listened for footsteps to tell them which direction he’d taken. They heard nothing. It was as if they’d imagined him. He might have been a ghost, except for the fact that Noferini was still holding a jacket by the sleeve.
Eight
“How long exactly between his putting it in there and the other man removing it?” Simonetti was furious with them, but what was to be done about it?
It was Noferini, always quicker than the Marshal, and driven by nervousness now, who answered:
“Only seconds, sir. We hadn’t taken more than three steps before we heard the lid open again.”
“Then they’d arranged it. How did they arrange it? He’s been under observation, his phone’s tapped. How did they communicate? Has he sent any letters? That would account for the delay.”
The Marshal coughed.
“Well? Are you disagreeing with me?”
“No, no …” Who would dare? “I don’t know if he’s sent any letters. We’re only here at night. Besides, his wife could have posted something. She’s sure to have been to the post office to pay her household bills and so on …”
“So?”
“I just thought that perhaps the delay was because of the weather.”
“The weather?”
“That’s right. That and the new moon. It was totally dark last night. If it hadn’t been, we’d have seen him.”
“The new moon. Yes, I see …” He looked at the Marshal with a different expression, then gave him a pat on the arm. “Good …”
The Marshal was annoyed for the rest of the day, not with Simonetti so much as with himself. He had fed Simonetti a line that would result in a full-page article in tomorrow’s Nazione. He had also, just for a moment, felt rewarded by that pat on the arm. Like the schoolboy with a star on his composition or the good dog who has fetched the newspaper.
He had been right about one thing: the weather had changed. It was raining hard. The search had begun indoors, in a sort of storeroom off the kitchen. The kitchen itself was encumbered with cables taking lights for the film cameras to the dark storeroom. The Marshal, coming out of the sitting room behind Simonetti, stepped over the cables and went outside to where three men were pulling the wheeled rubbish skip into the yard. Once it was there, they stood a while looking at it. There wasn’t a lot they could do with it at this point. They couldn’t open it because of the rain. It would have to be removed to Florence to the police laboratories. Of course they had all, including Simonetti, glimpsed inside, but without much hope. It seemed inevitable that whatever the Suspect had wanted to get rid of had been put there only so it could be removed by his friend or accomplice. The Marshal was put out by this because he wouldn’t have thought him far thinking enough for such a plan. He had seen him as the usual deny-everything type with a well-developed sense of danger on an animal level, but not a cool planner. Not that. It wasn’t often he misjudged his man. And yet, there it was. He’d seen the other man for himself, in as much as you could say you’d seen anything in that solid darkness. They would check through the rubbish anyway in the faint hope that if the gun had lain there, however briefly, there might be a trace of grease on one of the plastic rubbish bags.
He stood there, motionless, the rain beating down on him, observing in silence the men messing around the skip. They were arguing now about the best way to transport it. They had thick, rainproof jackets on and amphibian boots. He ought to go home. Even if he had no hope of sleeping he could at least put more suitable clothing on. He hadn’t had so much as a coffee either but he was too tired to come to any decision, even about breakfast, so he stayed where he was. Behind him in the kitchen someone had begun hammering. Were they demolishing the place or what? The Suspect, who had the right to be present during the search, had not gone to work. He was raising his voice now in tearful protest at whatever they were damaging.
Just a little way down the lane was another cottage. There were a number of journalists in there. The Marshal had spotted them when they appeared briefly on the roof to take photographs, but it was both wet and dangerous on the loose red tiles and there was very little to see so they had spent most of the morning inside out of sight. No doubt they’d paid a small fortune to the householder for this privilege.
It was stupid to stand there getting wet.
“What are you standing there getting wet for?” Ferrini appeared beside him. He’d arrived this morning and so was suitably dressed.
“I was thinking …” lied the Marshal, whose mind was a blank.
“Come inside and think.”
The Marshal followed him docilely.
“This is a business,” Ferrini muttered. “I mean about last night.”
“Yes.” Seeing Ferrini was pulling off his wet rainproof, the Marshal unbuttoned his soaked greatcoat. “It bothers me, to tell you the truth.”
“Did he give you hell?”
“Not exactly … it’s bothering me because I wouldn’t have thought it of him.”
“Simonetti?”
“No, no … I mean—” He inclined his head towards the door of the storeroom where the Suspect was weeping and his wife was trying to push past him to get in there. Somebody had smashed some bottles of tomato preserve and she was more infuriated by that than by any accusations levelled against her husband.
“Damn and blast it, all that work and trouble—and who’s going to pay for it all? Who’s going to pay?”
“They’re trying to ruin me! What have I ever done that they want to crucify me?”
“I think we’ll withdraw.” Ferrini indicated the next room and they left the kitchen, clo
sing the door on the noise.
“We’ll stay off the film set for a bit, I think. I wanted a quiet word with you. What did you mean, anyway, about our friend in there?”
“I’m just surprised, that’s all. I mean, it was a well-thought-out plan and it worked …”
“Ah. Yes, well. You know, Simonetti likes to make out that our Suspect’s as clever as Houdini. The cold-blooded killer winging through the night and homing in on his victims, sleeping in his coffin all day. Our very own local Dracula. So, he won’t be put out by last night’s tricks, will he?”
“No. No, he’s not. He’s pleased, I think, as far as that goes. Though, if we’ve lost the gun as a result …”
“If he thought he’d lost the gun as a result you’d be out of a job by now.”
“It would be the natural thing to think, though, wouldn’t it?”
“Humph. Anyway, I’m inclined to agree with you. I wouldn’t have thought him capable of it, either. Not his style. Still, from Simonetti’s point of view, a story like that and a spot of gun grease on one of the bags of rubbish in that skip is a lot better than finding nothing at all. And believe me, if somebody wants to hide something as small as a gun in the countryside there’s no way anybody could ever find it.”
“That’s true.”
“I don’t know why you don’t go and get some sleep.”
“I can’t manage to sleep at all during the day. There were one or two things I wanted to ask you.” But he was so tired that he couldn’t remember for the life of him what they were.
The search continued, slow and laborious, moving from the storeroom to the kitchen. Every inch of the building had to be filmed and any object removed required a written report with a detailed description. They were looking, without much hope, for the gun, but they were also looking for any object belonging to any of the victims. Something from the handbags he’d gone through and emptied. There had never been any clear idea of any particular object missing from the victims, which was one reason why everything had to be filmed. After a certain period of time they would return to the house and take note of anything that had been removed by the Suspect.
The Monster of Florence Page 15
