The Marshal and the Murderer

by Magdalen Nabb

  Once they could get near enough they dismantled more of the loose brickwork so as to get inside.

  'Whatever it is,' Niccolini said as they peered through the gloom at a steaming mound in the middle of the kiln floor, 'it's not the scrap of missing clothing I'd expected.'

  'No . . .'

  It wasn't clothing. The mound had been mostly burned away but what little was left was easy enough to identify, despite the muddy red water that discoloured it, as a stack of banknotes.

  The Marshal walked slowly up and down the corridor with a coffee-cup in his hand. It was after five o'clock in the afternoon and someone had switched on the lights a moment ago without his having noticed it. Each time he passed by the door of Niccolini's office he heard the Captain's voice, grave and persistent, interrupted on occasion by Niccolini's more agitated tones but only rarely by a response from Moretti. Behind the next door a more heated discussion was in progress between the finance police, who had just arrived, and Robiglio and his lawyer. The Marshal was aware of these voices as he passed each door but he wasn't listening to them. Anyone seeing him walking slowly back and forth, his great eyes fixed on the empty corridor before him, would have said he was thinking hard. In fact, his mind was a blank. In any case no one had time to bother watching him since the little Station had never in all its days seen so much action as in the last few hours. If things seemed quieter now it was mainly because Robiglio had calmed down a good deal, probably on the advice of his lawyer, in the time it had taken for the Captain to arrive from Florence with the two men from the finance police and be brought up to date. Before that, Niccolini had made the mistake of talking to Robiglio and Moretti together about the stack of banknotes. When Robiglio had realized that the money had been burned he had jumped on little Moretti and hit him viciously in the eye before they'd been able to stop him. After that they'd been kept waiting in separate rooms and Moretti, his cheek bandaged and the new cut on his eye bleeding slightly, had begun spilling the beans to Niccolini and the Marshal, though only to the extent of trying to incriminate Robiglio while protecting himself. He admitted that Robiglio had asked him to export the money which was the proceeds of illegal gambling, and that Robiglio had intended to collect it once it had crossed the border. He even explained that it was to have been packed under straw in the marked pot which in the end had never been loaded.

  'Why wasn't it?'

  'Because your men arrived and parked themselves right in front of my place.'

  'Otherwise you'd have done as he asked?'

  'NO!'

  'Come on, Moretti, you'd accepted the money and the pot was already marked.'

  'He was trying to force me, but I wouldn't have done it. I didn't do it, and you can't prove otherwise.'

  'You didn't do it because my men were there, you said so yourself. Nevertheless you had the money in your possession and that's, going to take some explaining away when the finance people get here.'

  'It wasn't my money. He left it there.'

  'Without your knowledge?'

  'Yes.'

  'But you knew where to lay your hands On it when you panicked and decided to burn it.'

  'It's not true.'

  'You put it in the kiln.'

  'I didn't. He must have put it there!'

  'So you told your brother to light the kiln with nothing in it? A bit extravagant, that. Stop wasting my time, Moretti. That was how you paid him off for the orchard, wasn't it? For your sister's dowry?'

  'No.'

  'How did you pay him, then? You were in debt at the time.'

  'I paid in instalments.'

  'You have the receipts?'

  'He didn't give me any receipts.'

  'Very trusting of you. You have the cheque stubs at least?'

  'I . . . no. I paid him in cash.'

  'How often? Once a month?'

  'No - yes, once a month.'

  'In that case we can check with your bank and they'll be able to show us the withdrawals that correspond with these payments.'

  'No! No ... I didn't ... I paid him directly from

  money coming into the business.'

  'You have clients who pay cash? Well, well. Still, it will be no trouble to check your invoices and see what the amount was that didn't find its way to the bank. How much?'

  'How much . . . ?'

  'That's right, how much were you paying him each month?'

  'I ... I don't remember. It varied.'

  'Varied?'

  'Depending on what I could afford ..."

  'What a generous and understanding man our friend Robiglio must be! Who'd have thought it? You're a fool, Moretti, do you know that? You never paid him anything because you couldn't afford it. You exported Robiglio's gambling proceeds regularly and for each run you did he knocked a certain sum off your debt for the orchard.'

  'It's not true.'

  At that point the Marshal had left them to it and gone into the duty room to see if one of the lads there could get him a cup of coffee. He felt exhausted and it looked like being a long time before he would be able to get away. He was also both depressed and disturbed. Depressed because, however much Moretti might have been at fault, the fact was that his chances now depended not on himself and his greater or lesser guilt but upon the skill of Robiglio's lawyer and the line he decided to take. If he could extricate Robiglio and plant the whole thing on Moretti, he would. But the business of the orchard, the quarrel in front of witnesses, and the black eye inflicted right here in Niccolini's office had pretty well put paid to that. Probably his only hope was to maintain that there was no case to answer, which meant that they had to pull Moretti out of the mire along with Robiglio. Neither solution was what the Marshal would call justice. Well, it wasn't his problem, he could only do his job to the best of his ability.

  What was disturbing him was the thought that he hadn't even done that. Even if it was true, as the Captain thought, that the Swiss girl had found out about the goings-on in the factory, there was a lot to be explained on that score. The body being dumped on the sherd ruck, for instance. It might have pointed to Moretti or it might have been meant to point to Moretti. But after seeing the money burning in an empty kiln it was impossible not to think that the sherd ruck might have been a temporary measure because the murder had coincided with a firing that could hardly have been delayed without arousing suspicion. Once the pots were unloaded . . . perhaps during the night - But no, it was too bizarre, too calculated! A body might be tossed down a well, or into a river, or almost anywhere in the heat and panic following a murder, but a thing like that, only a madman would do it.

  The Marshal ceased striding up and down, pausing for a moment to lean his forehead against the cold glass of the corridor's one window, which overlooked the square. It was quite dark by now and an icy wind was sending flurries of fine moisture against the window. They clung for a second before melting into drops. The beginnings of the first snow. Below in the lamplit square the bronze head of the partisan gleamed a dark orange. The Marshal's body tensed as he set his cup on the windowsill and peered down, frowning. There was something odd about the statue. A placard of some kind had been hung about its neck. It wasn't possible for the Marshal to see what was written there, but as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he realized that the square was full of people. He hadn't noticed them before but the reason for that was that they were standing quite still in big groups. Many of them were staring up at the windows of the barracks. He could hear nothing, which made their presence all the more sinister. There was no knowing how long they had been out there in the freezing November darkness, but there could be no doubt that the anonymous letter-writers were among them. There might well also be some of those who had once stood in that same square on a warm summer morning when the flies had been settling on the mangled corpse of Pietro Moro. The Marshal shivered. It had seemed unlikely that anyone but a madman could have tried to rape and then strangled an innocent girl and planned to burn the body in a kiln, but there was
no denying that there might well be a madman out there among that silent threatening crowd. Out there, not in here. Moretti was no madman, surely . . . and though he was wiry, he was so small. How could he have killed a big healthy girl without her at least managing to scratch his face for him? Robiglio was a much bigger man, a man who had brushed aside the hefty Niccolini like a fly that was bothering him. But that meant following the Captain's line . . . and the rape, or attempt at it? He'd said himself to that smooth young man Corsari, 'Somebody didn't take too kindly to being teased the way she teased . . .' But a normal man didn't rape and kill for that. Even so, there was Robiglio the fascist to bear in mind . . . the things he'd done during the war. Were those things normal? Where do you draw the line?

  He had begun walking up and down again and now he stopped and opened the door of Niccolini's office. He felt he needed to take another look at Moretti, as if to reassure himself. He slipped in quietly and sat himself down in a corner near the rubber plant. The Captain was plodding patiently and systematically through a series of questions based on the notes he had taken during the earlier briefing session. It didn't sound as though he was getting anywhere. The atmosphere was just as the Marshal had left it some time before, cold and tense. Niccolini was sitting beside the Captain and one of his boys was typing rapidly with two fingers at a small table in the far corner.

  'How did the girl find out? Did she see something? Overhear something?'

  'The girl has nothing to do with it. How could she have? Robiglio only asked me yesterday to take that money up'

  'And the other times?'

  'There were no other times.'

  The Captain showed signs of impatience.

  'What was your relationship with Monica Heer?'

  'There was no relationship. I let her come in to throw now and again, nothing else.'

  'Isn't it true that you frequently went round to Berti's studio when she was there, that you told your sister you found the girl attractive?'

  'No.'

  'Your sister told Marshal Guarnaccia here that that was the case.'

  'My sister isn't normal. Besides, I never see her. I used to, but I don't like the way her husband treats her and my visits always caused trouble.'

  'According to her, she often comes to see you, on Thursdays when her husband is out playing billiards.'

  'It's not true. I see her twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. It wouldn't be fair to my wife to have her around more often, or to my little girl.'

  'Her words were, I quote: "I go to see my brother, he lets me talk to him.'"

  'I've told you, my sister's not normal.'

  "A great many other things she told us turned out to be true.'

  'I can't help that. She never sets foot in my house except twice a year. You can ask my wife.'

  'So she never sets foot in your house. Does she come round to the factory to see you?'

  'On Thursday nights when her husband's out playing billiards? I finish work and go home at six, six-thirty at the latest. Any of my men can confirm that.'

  'Then what about something your men can't confirm. On the day the girl was murdered you came back to the factory after lunching with your clients.'

  'I went home!'

  'You went home, but you first went back to the factory either to collect your car or to deliver your clients to theirs. We don't yet know which, but we'll know tomorrow when we telephone the clients themselves.'

  'It doesn't mean I went in.'

  'Whose car did you go back to collect?'

  'Mine.'

  'The girl was in there alone, working. She too had just had lunch, according to the autopsy, her last lunch, a sandwich. Did you know she was in there?'

  'No!'

  'I think you did. I think you were round at Berti's on the Friday before and that's how she knew you were firing. She knew in advance because she got off the bus and walked straight to your place without waiting for Berti to turn up. She must have known.'

  'If she knew before Berti must have told her!'

  'Somebody must have told him, then. I understand you fire his pots.'

  'Yes.'

  'So who told him you were ready to fire?'

  'Anybody could have told him! And anybody could have got into my place and done for that girl. Anybody! The place is never locked!'

  There was a faint rustle in the vicinity of the rubber plant as the Marshal got to his feet, but no one noticed it. It was almost half an hour later, when the Substitute Prosecutor had been called and asked to make out a warrant and Moretti was holding out his wrists for the handcuffs to be put on them, that the Captain looked about him and then flung open the door to shout down the corridor.

  'Where the devil's Guarnaccia!'

  Nine

  'Report's ready, Captain.' The boy in the doorway was breathless, as though he'd been running rather than typing in a rush.

  'Thank you - no, no, take this to Marshal Niccolini for his signature.

  'He's downstairs, sir, trying to do something about the crowd outside.'

  'Then wait till he comes up.' Captain Maestrangelo turned back to the Substitute Prosecutor. 'What do you think?'

  'His lawyer's no fool. I'd say we could hold him under house arrest for the moment. I wouldn't try to go further until you have more evidence. Now, this other man - what's his name?'

  'Moretti.'

  'Hm. You're sure of your ground?'

  'The evidence is largely circumstantial but he's virtually confessed on both counts, a partial confession. Given time . . .'

  'Then hold him for forty-eight hours and make your decision on what charge you want to arrest him on. I've had seals put on the kiln and the technicians will collect the remains of the money tomorrow, though I imagine it won't be traceable' 'Excuse me, sir!' This time the boy really had been running.

  'What is it?'

  'Marshal Niccolini needs us downstairs. He's trying to clear the piazza but he's having difficulty.'

  'Then all of you go down except the radio operator and he can call in the patrol bikes.' He followed the boy out into the corridor, 'And tell Marshal Niccolini the Substitute wants a word with him before he leaves.'

  Then he saw Guarnaccia. He had just come in, bringing a blast of cold air with him, and was standing there holding his hat which had fine icy particles on it, as had the shoulders of his black greatcoat.

  'Where the devil have you been?' the Captain asked irritably but under his breath so as not to let the Substitute hear.

  'I had to speak to Moretti's wife ..." The Marshal made no move to unbutton his coat but went on standing there, his face wooden.

  'That could have waited. We have enough on our hands here. Niccolini could have done with your help down here.'

  'They're moving on now. Have you arrested Moretti?'

  'We're holding him for forty-eight hours. You'd better join us in Niccolini's office if you think you're not needed downstairs.'

  'Where is he now?'

  'Moretti? In the cells.'

  'I think I'd better speak to him . . .'

  The Captain was about to lose his temper but checked himself in time. He'd seen that expression, or rather lack of it, on Guarnaccia's face before.

  'Is something the matter?'

  'No ... no . . . Everything's all right now. I didn't do a very good job on this business, though. I'm not competent . . . should have thought on . . . If you don't mind, I'd better go out again when I've seen Moretti.' He was putting on his hat and the Captain realized that he wasn't asking for permission to go, he was going, as oblivious of his superior officer's presence as if he hadn't seen him. Indeed, he really seemed to be talking to himself as he turned and pushed open the door to the stairs.

  'It struck me right away the first time he said that about the place never being locked but then I forgot about it . . . made a bit of a fool of myself.'

  And he was gone.

  Niccolini was thundering up the stairs, taking them two at a time and shouting to the young c
arabiniere behind who was keeping up with difficulty: 'By God, I'd have put a few of them inside if I'd had the space - and I'd give a lot to know who informed the newspapers - ah! Guarnaccia! So there you are! What's going on? Where are you off to this time?'

  And he turned to stare after the Marshal who was stumping off past them down the stairs muttering something incomprehensible under his breath.

  There were only two cells in the dimly lit basement. Moretti was in the one on the left, seated on the end of the narrow bed facing the bars, his head in his hands. He looked up when he heard the Marshal's footsteps, his face a deathly colour and his heart beating visibly in the thin chest.

  'I've been to see your wife.'

  'How is she?'

  'Fairly calm, all things considered.'

  'Did she . . did she say anything?'

  'Not much. She didn't need to. It'll all come out in time. I didn't insist. She did admit when I asked her that she'd called in your next-door neighbour on your advice so that you'd all be seen having coffee together. I didn't ask her much apart from that.'

  Moretti stared into the Marshal's impassive face.

  'You know, don't you?'

  'I know. Who else does?'

  'For sure, only Sestini . . .'

  'You'd have done well to listen to his advice instead of fighting with him.'

  'He doesn't understand, nobody understands.'

  'I think you're wrong there; nevertheless, there's an innocent girl dead. Sestini was right to attack you, but after all, he didn't give you away so you're doing him an injustice in saying he doesn't understand.'

  'You try to help people, you do what you can . . .'

  'But some people are beyond help. Now the best thing you can do is to help us.'.

  'I can't. . .' Moretti's head dropped into his hands again and he began rocking himself to and fro like a distressed child.

  The Marshal regarded him for a moment, noting for the first time that the red hair was greying at the temples. Then he said quietly, 'No, no . . . you're right. For once, somebody has to help you.'

  He saw that Moretti seemed to be breathing with difficulty and wondered about his heart.