Death in Autumn

by Magdalen Nabb

  'At night, presumably, if you saw him?'

  'Yes. I suppose about elevenish.'

  'When was this?'

  'It must be nearly a month ago.'

  'You're sure?'

  'I can't be sure to the day, He didn't come back with her and since he wasn't registered here I've no way of checking' 'You're sure it wasn't the night she disappeared?'

  'Oh, quite sure. It was well before that . . . Would you mind if I asked you something?'

  When the Marshal nodded his consent the porter went on: 'I just wanted to . . . well, to know what happened. You said she was found in the river but you didn't say—was it suicide?'

  'No.'

  'I see.' He seemed almost relieved.

  The Marshal waited but the porter asked nothing further so he went on: 'Did she confide in you, things of a personal nature?'

  'She talked a lot about her health. Despite her insomnia she hardly ever took anything, sleeping pills, that sort of thing. She was very concerned about her diet, too. I don't mean the way women usually are, worrying about keeping slim. She was very slim anyway.'

  'Yes,' murmured the Marshal. When he had arrived on the river bank that morning with the Captain the first thing he had noticed had been one thin bluish leg issuing from the sodden fur.

  'She went in for those health food things. She talked a lot about wheat germ and vitamin C. She even gave me some vitamin C tablets once, saying that if you spend a lot of time in a confined space and don't get enough fresh air—I'm sorry, that's of no interest to you, I suppose, but she talked that way a lot.'

  'To be honest,' the Marshal said, 'I was thinking of things of a more personal nature than that. This man who came, for instance, she didn't tell you anything about him or about any other men?'

  'No . . . She never talked about men except in general terms. But . . .'

  'But what?'

  'Well, there must have been a man in her life but I was never clear about whether he was in the past or the present.' 'It doesn't sound as if he was still around if she never received him here.'

  'Well, there were the trips she took, of course, but she always talked about it in the past tense in a way that's difficult to explain. She didn't talk about him, as I said, but about another woman.'

  'Someone she was jealous of?'

  'That's putting it mildly. You'd have to have known her to understand. She always had this calm, ironic sort of attitude, about herself, about everything. She could be very scathing, hard in a way, but in an amusing way. I'm not very good at expressing things but if I say that her main concern seemed to be her health—well, obviously, she took it seriously because she was very rigid about her diet and these health pills—but when she talked about it, it didn't come out as serious. She always talked about herself and about everything else in a sort of detached, ironic way. I'm making her sound a bit unpleasant but she wasn't really, though people who didn't know her so well might have thought so.'

  The Marshal had already talked to a chambermaid and a waiter who both thought so, but he only said: 'You were telling me about her being jealous.'

  'That's just it. When she talked about this other woman, that was the only time she showed any real emotion. She still tried to keep the same ironic tone but even so it was obvious that underneath there was real fury. There were times when she said some really bitchy things. She would almost let herself go completely, though never for long.'

  'What sort of things did she say?'

  'It was always more or less the same story. It seems the other woman was older and she harped on that. She'd say something like: "That witch is eight years older than me and she drinks like a fish. The one thing I'm sure of is that she'll die before I do. And I know for a fact that if it hadn't been for her so-called perfect English he wouldn't have given her a second glance . . ." Then she would get control of herself and change the subject.'

  'What did she mean by "she'll die before I do"? Did it sound like some sort of threat?'

  'No, not at all. She seemed certain of it, that's all. I always got the impression that she kept herself healthy because of this other woman.'

  'You mean that's how she intended to outlive her?' The Marshal's big, slightly bulging eyes bulged even more.

  'You'd have to have known her to understand,' repeated the porter quietly. 'She was a very determined woman in her own way.'

  'Hmph.' The Marshal pondered on this for a moment and then added, 'But she didn't succeed, by the look of it.'

  Over an hour later, back in the manager's more spacious office, he and the Captain sat alone comparing notes. With the exception of the night porter, Mario Querci, the dead woman had been little known and even less liked by the hotel staff.

  There was no doubt that the missing guest was the woman they had fished out of the river; all of them had recognized the photograph of the dead woman. If nobody had come forward to identify her it was because the hotel manager took the Corriere delta Sera more often than the Nazione and the rest of the staff, if they bothered to read the newspaper at all, read his. None of them had seen the article, so Galli's efforts had been in vain. Two and a half hours of questioning had produced little enough useful evidence, but at least the woman now had an identity.

  Hilde Vogel had been born in Germany and was forty-eight years old, slim, artificially blonde, unostentatiously well-dressed. She sent a registered letter to Germany once a month and took a trip abroad approximately once every two years, booking her flight through the receptionist who had repeated to the Captain that he knew there was something, he could always tell, but that it was really the manager's place to identify the body. She had last been seen at dinner eight days ago. Nobody had seen her leave the hotel, not even Querci, the night porter, despite his position in the entrance hall, and there was no other exit. The back of the hotel overhung the river.

  Both the Captain and the Marshal were tired and hungry. When they emerged from the office into the reception area they were reminded of their hunger by a faint but delicious smell coming from the main dining-room where some guests were still eating, judging by discreet noises of cutlery.

  Mario Querci was at his post, advising a middle-aged couple about a day trip to San Gimignano and Siena. 'If you like I'll telephone the bus station for you . . .'

  He looked up and smiled as the two carabinieri appeared. 'All finished?'

  'I'm afraid not,' the Captain said. He didn't like to add that they were about to join the men who were examining the dead woman's room, because of the presence of the guests who, anyway, were too busy trying to translate the price of the coach tickets into dollars to take any notice of the uniformed men.

  'That receptionist, Monteverdi . . .' said the Captain as they went up the blue-carpeted stairs because the lift had just started up.

  'Hmph.' The Marshal refrained from further comment.

  They trod silently along more blue carpet looking for Room 209. Silk-shaded lamps were lit on low, half-moon tables all along the corridor. 209 was halfway along facing the lift doors.

  'It's going to cost us a lot of time and manpower to check the backgrounds of all the staff, but I suppose we can be thankful that she had no contact with any of the other guests.'

  'So they say—' the Marshal sounded unconvinced—'and I suppose it's true since they were all agreed about it. But as for the rest ... It won't do. It won't do at all.'

  'I must say I had the feeling that the manager had something to hide.'

  'And he wasn't the only one.'

  CHAPTER 4

  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." '
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  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. T
here 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.