Death in Springtime

by Magdalen Nabb

  When they eventually let him go, he paused and spat deliberately, sideways into the grass. The dog, his head low against the rain, walked stiffly at his heels. They watched until the cloud hid him from view.

  'What about the rest of it?' asked the Substitute, lighting a cigarette, 'Up there. Mightn't the girl be hidden on the mountain?' He was craning his neck to look up but nothing was visible except the rolling grey mist that had almost reached the jeep.

  'I'm quite sure,' said the Captain slowly, 'that she is.'

  'You want a warrant?'

  'No. I don't want a warrant. I want to know who's got her and I want to know exactly where. Otherwise we could search up there for a year and we wouldn't find her.'

  'It's not worth trying a surprise raid?'

  'You can't surprise a mountain. There are no roads up there and not a square metre of flat ground where a helicopter could land. They'd see us coming hours before we got up there on foot, the girl would have been spirited away before we got anywhere near her and nobody would speak to us except in their incomprehensible dialect. For the most part they wouldn't speak at all even if threatened. They're not like Piladu who lives in the valley.'

  The Substitute, who had not considered Piladu very communicative up to then, fell to smoking in silence. The Brigadier switched on the motor and they began a bumpy, swaying descent. Thunder was grumbling somewhere in the distance. As the jeep turned the last curve at the foot of the slope the Brigadier braked and pointed.

  'See those rocks.' They were scattered everywhere, great lumps of the white flint of which the mountain was formed. As they looked, one of the rocks in the distance moved to one side and stopped, then moved again. 'Sheep,' said the Brigadier. 'And it could just as easily be the shepherd lying still with an old sheepskin thrown over him. An old trick but it still works. You wouldn't notice him unless you fell over him. You can't surprise a mountain.' He was pleased with this phrase of the Captain's and was evidently storing it up for his National Service boys. He loosed the brakes and the jeep rolled onwards.

  Their ten-kilometre drive out to Scano's place was a waste of time. There was no sign of the son, an undersized, sly creature who had spent more time in prison than out of it ever since he had been old enough to get himself down to the city and into trouble. He normally hung about the house all day and disappeared before his father brought the sheep back from pasture so as to avoid milking time. They knocked for a good ten minutes before giving up but it was obvious that the place was deserted. The rain beat against the peeling door and the uncurtained windows and dripped from the still bloody lambskin that swung spreadeagled from the washing line.

  'Let's get back to Florence.' The Captain swung himself into the jeep. He was wet, cold and irritable and he was already losing patience with this case. What sort of kidnapping was this, with no ransom demand and no parents? And to cap it all, it had to be on a case as weird as this that they sent him a Substitute Prosecutor who watched his performance with amused detachment. He felt like a circus. The whole thing was irregular.

  After dropping off the Substitute, the Captain went to his office before going to lunch. He wasn't expecting much to have come in during his absence but if nothing else there should be something from the foreign residents department at the Questura. The note was on his desk. The missing girl, Deborahjean Maxwell, was an American citizen. Occupation: student. Resident in Piazza Pitti, No. 3. The Captain sat down and reached for the telephone. His face had relaxed. If he ever found this girl he would thank her for choosing to live in that quarter of the city. After a surfeit of the extraordinary this was just what he needed: a dose of the solidly ordinary.

  'Yessir!'

  'Get me Marshal Guarnaccia at Pitti.'

  CHAPTER 6

  The Marshal was out. He had taken the van that morning from the gravelled patch outside his Station in the left wing of the Pitti Palace and driven across the city to the Appeal Court in Via Cavour. It was a case that bothered him because he felt that in the Assize Court the unfortunate man's chances had been wrecked by that fool of a cocky young barrister who had concocted an elaborate defence that gave a totally false impression of what had happened. By grossly exaggerating the victim's treatment of the accused in order to gain sympathy for the latter he had instead made it seem all the more likely that he had meant to kill. The only time little Cipolla had been allowed to speak was when they had asked him:

  'Did you intend to fire the gun when you picked it up?'

  'Yes . . . but . . .'

  'Just answer the question.'

  Without that damned barrister there could well have been a verdict of accidental death.

  The Marshal had arrived in time, as he had promised, to see Cipolla delivered to the court and taken upstairs, chained between two other prisoners whose appeals were to be heard that morning. During the fifteen months that he had been in prison his black hair had turned grey and his features had lost their definition. The Marshal always used to think he looked childlike, being so small, but now he was a little old man. Nevertheless, he had cast the Marshal a grateful look when he saw him standing there as promised, watching with his big, slightly bulging eyes.

  It was a long dull wait. After a while the Marshal climbed the stairs in the hope of getting an idea of what was going on. He could hear only a faint murmur of voices from behind the closed door. The guard outside was chainsmoking. The cracked brown linoleum under his feet was littered with cigarette ends. The Marshal nodded to him and started back down the ill-lit, dusty staircase. Half way down he heard a commotion below and quickened his heavy step in time to see, as he turned the last bend in the staircase, a slight figure slip out through the iron gate at the main entrance. When the Marshal opened the gate and looked out into the courtyard the figure had vanished. The black van was parked under a palm tree waiting to take the prisoners back to the Murate. There were a dozen or so cars parked near the entrance, including the Marshal's small van, but not a soul in sight. A woman came out behind him and looked from left to right.

  'You didn't catch him?'

  'No.'

  'That wretched man! And it's not the first time by any means.'

  'What happened?'

  'He steals things. It really is too much!'

  'But. . . aren't you from the Ex-prisoners' Assistance? What I mean is, don't you give the stuff away, anyway?'

  'We do, but there's never enough good clothing to go round so we have to keep a check on who's had what. That wretched man steals anything that's of good quality that he can get his hands on—not for himself since they're usually things that don't fit him—he sells them to the second-hand clothes stalls on San Lorenzo market.'

  'I see.' They walked back inside. 'What's his name?'

  I'd have to look up his real name; everybody calls him "Baffetti" because of his moustache which in my opinion makes him look just as shifty as he is. I'll look it up.'

  'But really, I'm not here for—'

  'A stop has to be put to it, once and for all. To crown everything, not only were we already packing up when he arrived but today's not men, it's women. He had the cheek to say he needed things for his wife who has to go into hospital.'

  The room just along the corridor from where the Marshal had been waiting was stuffy and fetid with the smell of old unwashed clothing and mothballs. A few pairs of battered shoes were lined up along an old wooden shelf. A second woman was folding worn sweaters and putting them away in a scratched wardrobe. There were cardboard boxes stuffed full of clothes standing everywhere on the dusty floor.

  'Here . . .' The first woman pulled out a small card from a file on the desk, 'Garau he's called, Pasqualino Garau.'

  'He's been inside?'

  'Yes, he has. He's perfectly entitled to come here but not to run off with anything he fancies and sell it. It's not fair to the others—and asking for clothes for his wife is about the last straw!'

  'His wife should come herself on women's day? But if she really is ill . . .'
<
br />   'He hasn't got a wife!'

  'I see.'

  'It's so unfair on other ex-prisoners who genuinely need help and who need to be decently dressed in order to try and get a job.'

  The Marshal, his big eyes rolling round the depressing room lit by one dusty light-bulb because the small, barred window hardly let in any light, wondered if they ever managed it. There was such an air of hopelessness about the place.

  The woman was slotting the card back into the file.

  'One of you really ought to sort him out. We can't cope—and he's not the only one.'

  'I'm afraid I'm not . . . I'm here for a case that's being heard in the Appeal Court . . .'

  'That poor little man, what's he called? The one who's supposed to have shot that Englishman? He doesn't look capable of harming a fly; I saw him being brought in. In any case there's a good Marshal who's . . . Oh . . .' The harassed woman looked up from her work. 'You must be . . .'

  But the Marshal, with a hurried 'Good Morning,' was gone.

  He heard the door open upstairs, then the sound of voices mingled with a scraping of chairs. Then a pause. The Marshal knew that the guard would be putting handcuffs and chains back on the prisoners and lighting cigarettes for them which they would smoke with both hands. Cipolla didn't smoke. There were heavy steps on the stairs. Cipolla was once again chained between the two larger men. His eyes immediately sought the Marshal's and he said, as he always said: 'Thank you, Marshal.'

  Thank you for being there, for at this stage the Marshal was powerless to help him. There had been no acquittal since they were taking him back to the prison. The barrister came down along with two others, their silk gowns rustling, their noses lifted a little against the dusty air. The Marshal planted himself where he filled the exit and asked without preliminaries: 'Cipolla?'

  'Sentence reduced to fifteen years. Intent to wound, no intent to kill.'

  'Thank you.' He let them go by. Fifteen years. He felt sure that Cipolla wouldn't survive them. He wouldn't come out of prison alive. If he'd had the money to choose a more experienced barrister, if the Marshal himself had been on the spot in the first place instead of that young fool student, Bacci, who fancied himself as some sort of Hollywood detective, probably have shot himself accidentally by this time . . . whole thing had been a mess from start to finish . . . fifteen years . . . would have been ten if it hadn't been a gun . . . poor creature . . .

  He backed his van up and drove out of the courtyard to join the heavy lunch-time traffic moving towards the Cathedral. There were clear blue gaps in the cloud here and there but light rain continued to spatter the windscreen. The usual long line of buses stopping and starting blocked the road all the way from Piazza San Marco to the Cathedral. Each time he tried to overtake, one of them would signal and pull out. Patience ... his lunch would be cold, though . . . fifteen years.

  His lunch was cold. He wasn't all that sorry to find an urgent message from Headquarters that meant leaving the glutinous pasta. He could snatch a coffee and sandwich in the bar over there at some point.

  The Captain wasn't in his office. The adjutant directed him to the hospital next door, giving him written instructions on how to find the ward. The Marshal slipped them into his top pocket. He knew the hospital well enough to find the side ward without difficulty. He couldn't see the patient when he first entered because of the people standing around her. One of them, doubtless the Substitute Prosecutor, was on his feet, playing with an unlit pipe. The Captain was seated with his back to the door. The third man was the one who held the Marshal's attention. It was that young fool of a student Bacci, who stood up stiffly at the sight of the Marshal who had witnessed his first embarrassingly unsuccessful attempt at being a policeman. The Marshal stared expressionlessly at the blushing face and then at the star on the young man's epaulette. With the briefest salute at what was now his superior officer he said gravely, 'Lieutenant . . .' and turned his attention to the Captain who greeted him briefly and then continued his interrogation with the younger officer interpreting.

  'You didn't see his face?'

  'No.'

  'Why not?'

  'It was covered.'

  'With what?'

  'I don't know. Something black . . . perhaps it was a skiing mask.'

  'You saw his eyes?'

  'No. I don't know. He made us turn away. We were both in front, so . . .'

  'Who drove?'

  'Debbie did. He held a gun at my neck.'

  'You didn't say before that he was armed.'

  'He couldn't have made us do what he wanted otherwise since he was on his own.'

  'He held a gun at your neck driving through the busy streets at rush hour?'

  'It was hidden behind a map which he held open right behind our heads.'

  The Marshal, whose thoughts were still with the prisoner on his way back to serve fifteen years in the Murate, and who was further distracted by half the talk being in English, was hardly able to follow a word of this interrogation. He had no idea what it was all about, anyway.

  The Captain was saying to the Sub-lieutenant, 'I want to know everything she can tell us about the Maxwell girl, family, friends, habits, etcetera—everything. You needn't translate, I can follow you.'

  Sub-lieutenant Bacci, very much aware of the Marshal's enormous eyes fixed upon him, began his questioning rather hesitantly. Nevertheless the girl answered him more readily than she had the Captain, her gaze fixed on his face.

  'She has a father and a stepmother.'

  'Does she get on with them?'

  'She talks a lot about her father. I think she's very attached to him.'

  'And the stepmother?'

  'I don't know. She's never said anything against her. I got the impression that they didn't know each other all that well, that the marriage was fairly recent.'

  'Do they live in this country?'

  'No, in the States.'

  'Do they have property here? A holiday villa, for instance?'

  'No. They've only been here once, just after Christmas.'

  'What about Christmas? They didn't spend it together?'

  'She went to them, for about a week, I think. I left before her to spend Christmas at home in Norway.'

  'How long did her parents stay here?'

  'About two weeks in all, but not always in Florence. They spent some time in the north.'

  'Did he have business there?'

  'No, none. Debbie was upset that they didn't spend all their time here with her.'

  'What did they do in Florence?'

  'Mostly sightseeing. And some shopping, he bought his wife quite a lot of jewellery.'

  'And his daughter?'

  'He bought her a fur coat, as a late Christmas present.'

  'Was she wearing it the day you were kidnapped?'

  'No. It's still in the flat.'

  'Wasn't it snowing that morning?'

  'Yes, but it wasn't a bit cold.'

  'Did her parents stay in the flat with her?'

  'No, there's only one bedroom. They stayed at the Excelsior.'

  'Did Maxwell give his daughter an allowance? Is that what she lived on?'

  'Yes. A telegraphic order arrived every month.'

  'Do you have any idea how much it was for?'

  'Yes. She sometimes signed it over to me if she needed it urgently and hadn't time to queue at the post office. It was always for two million lire.'

  'That's a lot of money for a student.'

  'They could afford it, I suppose.'

  The Captain interrupted: 'Do you also live on an allowance?'

  'Yes, but it's about half what Debbie gets and it's paid not by my father but by his firm of ship's engineers of which he's a director. I can study anywhere I like in Europe for two years.'

  'Do you wish us to inform your father about what's happened?'

  'Do you have to? If it's not necessary from your point of view I'd rather you didn't. I'm of age, after all, and it would give him a terrible fright. He's h
ad one minor heart attack already, I wouldn't like to cause him another.'

  'Then we'll leave it to you. Lieutenant . . . Something about their contacts and daily habits . . .'

  But the girl had understood.

  'We study Italian for four hours every weekday morning at the Cultural Centre for Foreigners. After that we would go back to my flat which I share with two other students in the Santa Croce area, or to Debbie's. She didn't much like to be on her own.'

  'But she didn't invite you to share her flat?'

  'I suppose she wasn't used to sharing since she's an only child. Most of us only share for financial reasons. She didn't have to.'

  'What did you do with the rest of the day?'

  'We always had homework to do. Later on we would walk round town and maybe go to the cinema. Occasionally Debbie would buy a dress.'

  'Is that how she spent her allowance? On clothes?'

  'Only very occasionally, when the mood took her.'

  'Did she spend much on restaurants, on living well in general, on entertaining?'

  'No, very little.'

  'In that case what did she do with all her money? It must have accumulated. And she didn't have a bank account?'

  'No. That's why she would sometimes sign the order over to me so that I could put it through my account— otherwise she had to queue up at the post office, as I said.'

  'You paid her in cash?'

  'Yes.'

  'So where did she keep the rest of the money?'

  'I don't know. I suppose it must be somewhere in the flat . . .'

  The Captain signed to him to change the subject.

  'Why did she come to Italy?'

  'She said she wanted the experience.'

  'Did she have any boyfriends?'

  The girl hesitated and then said: 'One or two . . .'

  'Nobody special?'