‘I thought the CCTV imagery would prove interesting. It was the scene with Graziani at our table last night that put Bellini onto me. That and the cameras picking me up walking back through the trees to the hotel after eleven, only ten minutes or so after Graziani had lurched out along the path into the trees.’
‘Did the CCTV show anybody else walking around at that time of night?’
‘Not that he told me. He was keeping his cards very close to his chest but, again, I don’t blame him for that.’
I braked hard as a scrawny, black and white cat shot across the road in front of me. ‘But the fact is that nobody knows for sure whether it was accident, suicide or murder. Unless they find a murder weapon, I could see the whole case being closed down by this time tomorrow, couldn’t you?’
There was a pause before Virgilio replied. ‘Whatever Inspector Bellini thinks, something tells me it was murder, Dan. One thing’s for sure: Graziani didn’t commit suicide. He’s not the type. If he were going to take his own life out of some sort of excess of guilt, surely he would have done it years ago in prison. I suppose an accident is possible – he was seriously drunk, after all – but there’s something telling me that we’re looking at a murder. I’ve been thinking back on last night and the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced there was somebody else out there on the clifftop when I had my confrontation with Graziani.’
‘Did you see anybody?’
‘Nothing definite, but for a second, I thought there might have been a movement in the shadows of the trees. At the time, I was so hyped up after smacking Graziani that I dismissed it as my imagination or some random animal and headed back to the hotel.’
We were out of town by this time and the road curled upwards over the hill towards the east coast. As we climbed, I reflected on what he had just said and realised that I tended to agree with him.
‘Whether you saw somebody or not, you could well be right about it being murder. Certainly, Graziani must have had a lot of enemies after what he did to those women. Twenty years is a long time to wait for revenge, but with him locked up in prison, now is just about the first opportunity anybody could have had to kill him. The biggest problem with that scenario, as I see it, is how did a potential murderer know that Graziani was going to be here at this hotel right now? That implies local knowledge or close surveillance, doesn’t it?’
‘Definitely. The killer must have known that he was going to be here last night, which is unlikely, so I can see why the inspector thinks it was a simple drunken accident. But if it turns out to have been murder, as you and I believe, the perpetrator almost certainly has to be somebody here at the hotel.’
‘The question is, who?’
9
SUNDAY NIGHT/MONDAY MORNING
When I got back to the room just before ten and picked up my laptop, I found that Rita had been true to her word and had sent me a load of information. I settled down and eagerly studied the details. Beside me, Anna was once more engrossed in her historical tome, but she took time out from her studies to shoot me an enquiring look.
‘I suppose this means that you’re going to have to revert to being a detective again.’ Before I could attempt an apology, she reached over and tapped me gently on the back of the hand. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to moan at you. You have no choice, I get that. This is your best friend we’re talking about, after all. Personally, judging from the state that Graziani was in last night, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if his death were accidental, but I quite understand that you need to do everything you can to help Virgilio.’
I breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thanks, Anna. It’s like you say: I have no choice. I owe it to Virgilio to help any way I can to clear him of suspicion. Still, I promise it isn’t going to occupy me twenty-four hours a day and I’m still up for our windsurfing lesson tomorrow.’
‘You’re sure about the windsurfing?’
‘Yes, genuinely. I think I might be beginning to get the hang of it, even if I’m sure I can hear the water in my ears – or maybe my brain – swilling around as I move my head.’
She returned to her medieval studies and I started looking through the wealth of information Rita had sent me. I spent almost an hour sifting through the documents and soon realised that there was one important omission: there was no mention of the man and the woman who had dined with the victim the previous night. This confirmed that they weren’t guests at the hotel, but the fact that I had seen them again this evening made me think that they were almost certainly living locally. Whether this meant that they were residents of the island or just here on holiday remained to be seen, but as they had known the victim, they were significant. I resolved to speak to Rita in the morning in the hope that she might be able to shed some light on their identity.
As far as the others were concerned, I gradually sifted them into two camps: ‘likely’ and ‘unlikely’. Into the unlikely camp, I put Tatsuo Tanaka, the four Brits, Heidi Engadin and Martin Wolf from Zurich, along with the couple of young lovers. They both shared the surname, Arnaldo, and Monica had added a note indicating that this was their honeymoon. I tended to discount the foreign guests because I felt convinced that this murder had a local, or at least a Tuscan, dimension. My feeling was that the young honeymooners probably had other things on their minds rather than committing murder, but I knew that they would have to be checked all the same. Leaving them aside for now, this left me with the two hard nuts and the couple from the beach on the first day, so I concentrated on the two tough guys first.
Rita had sent me copies of their documents, and I saw that the ginger-haired one was called Filippo Guerra, age thirty-seven, resident in Rome, while the one with the shaved head was Carlo Donati, also from Rome – but a different address – and he was a year older. The other couple were Fernando Giardino and his wife, Erica. He was the man we had seen running up the path from the beach the previous afternoon and he was almost exactly the same age as me, just about to turn fifty-eight, while his wife was two years older. They both lived in Lucca, two or three hours away from here.
Before taking Oscar for his late-night walk, I sent the details of all four to Marco in Florence so he could run them through the police computer system.
* * *
At seven next morning, when I went out with Oscar, there were already two police cars and a minivan in the car park, and tape blocking off the path to the beach. A team of police officers were combing through the trees on the clifftop and an orange rigid inflatable boat was down by the beach with people in wetsuits clearly getting ready to search the seabed for the murder weapon. I wished the constable on duty at the top of the path good luck, but I had a feeling it was a forlorn hope. And without a murder weapon, I had little doubt that the inspector would decide to leave it at that and put Graziani’s death down to either misadventure or suicide.
After breakfast with the others, Virgilio and I sat down in his room to go through what we had so far. Marco had managed to access the original Graziani file and had produced an excellent summary of the main findings. We studied it carefully, making a note of the names of the four victims and cross-checking them against the names of the guests here at the hotel. None of them matched, making it less likely – but not impossible – that somebody here had been related to them and had deliberately come here out for revenge. There was also the problem of how such a person could have discovered that the victim was going to be here. All of Graziani’s four victims had lived in or near Pisa, which was over a hundred kilometres from the island, and I had a hunch that the murderer – if indeed there were one – would be found here on Elba. After all, I imagined it would have been common knowledge that when Graziani had been released from jail he would, in all probability, have returned to his home turf.
I studied the photos of the four victims and it was immediately clear that Graziani had gone out of his way to pick attractive young women. All four had been in their early twenties and they all had dark hair. According to the file, Graziani had stalked each of them for days or weeks before carrying out his assaults. Three had been students at theScuola Normale Superiore di Pisa– one of Italy’s top universities – and the other had been a librarian working at the university. I could only begin to imagine the horrors they had endured at his hands.
At just after nine, we got another e-mail from Marco that made interesting reading. Mr and Mrs Giardino from Lucca had received a clean bill of health – they would appear to be harmless shopkeepers – but the two tough guys had both popped up on the police system, though not with criminal records. It turned out that they wereCarabinieriofficers belonging to the TPC. I was unfamiliar with the acronym and Virgilio explained.
‘TPC stands for theComando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale– theCarabinieriart squad. I’ve worked with them a few times, most recently three years back when they uncovered a flourishing gang of forgers working out of Florence, producing convincing-looking fake old masters.’ He looked up and shot me a wink. ‘The TPC are pretty good… forCarabinieri.’
I couldn’t help smiling at his grudging admiration. Italy has a dizzying array of different police forces, ranging from thePolizia, the state police of which Virgilio was an officer, to theCarabinieri,who started life as a branch of the army and now operate to a great extent in parallel with thePolizia. Along with them are separate branches specialising in financial matters, illegal immigration and road traffic – to name just a few. Since settling here in Italy, I had occasionally worked with both the police and theCarabinieriand had often questioned how they managed to collaborate without overlapping or competing. I wondered whether these two guys were here on holiday or on duty. And if they were here for work, what might have brought them to the island?
Either way, the knowledge that these two were on the side of law and order came as a bit of a disappointment. I had definitely been considering them as potential murderers – mainly based on their hard physical appearance – but it now seemed that I had been wrong and had misjudged them. Yes, they could still be killers, but it was less likely. I had to smile when I imagined Inspector Bellini’s frustration at finding himself faced with three serving Italian police officers and one former British copper among the suspects. As I knew from experience, police officers are some of the most difficult people to interview, mainly because they’re so used to asking the very same questions.
