Death in Springtime Read online

  'But that's the gamekeeper from the villa!'

  'Yes.'

  'Who could have done that to his eyes?'

  One eye was pushed right out of its socket.

  The boy, a young National Service lad from the village, stepped back, the colour suddenly leaving his face. He ran off behind the bushes, clutching at his stomach.

  The Captain climbed the side of the hollow, strode back to Rudolfo's house and sat down on one of the chairs, staring at the cold wood ash in the dark. The other two, who had been talking quietly when he came in, fell silent. The door was banging open and shut in the wind again. Bacci thought he should close it but the Captain had ordered that it be left open so he didn't move. Eventually the Brigadier found something to wedge it open. It was even colder in the room than outside, where at least the sun was quite strong when it came out.

  The Captain was so tense in his chair that his head and back were buzzing with pain. The drone of the circling helicopters nagged at his nerves. He was wasting fuel and time. You can't surprise a mountain. He had said it himself. But he couldn't bring himself to go back down. When the helicopters were at their most distant it was possible to hear the moaning of the wind around the wooded slopes lower down the mountain, and the handlers calling orders to their dogs in German. The tenser his body became, the more loosely did his mind seem to ramble. He had done everything according to the rules, moved slowly and carefully, weighed every possibility, but the ground had slipped from under him. The Substitute must have talked to the Prefect and the Minister by now, convincing them of Maestrangelo's reasons, his experience, his proven efficiency. What would he say now? It was ironic; the one time he had a Substitute who backed him up . . . And he hadn't the least idea how or why it had happened. That was surely ridiculous. Years of experience might count for nothing in a case of this kind if you were simply unlucky. But even then the possibilities didn't vary. Things went wrong but they were the things you knew might go wrong. If Maxwell hadn't paid . . .

  Guarnaccia had said, " I can't help you. I don't know the people." As if you could know all the people involved in every case you handled. It was true that if he had known more about them than just their criminal records he might have been able to work out why they had panicked and run, what might have happened, what they might have heard. ' "Ask the Brigadier..." The Brigadier at least knew the people, and so did his men . . .

  "That's the gamekeeper from the villa!"

  '' Who could have done that to his eyes?''

  A National Service recruit. A boy of eighteen or nineteen who probably couldn't cook spaghetti and who had run off to be sick at the sight of his first corpse.

  'Who could have done that to his eyes?'

  Practically a child. And his amazement was genuine. He didn't know.

  The Captain let out a long breath.

  'Brigadier?'

  There was nobody there. He found them standing outside, the Brigadier expounding quietly but insistently, Bacci's eyes wandering over the bleak skyscape.

  'Brigadier? Where could they hide that's not all that far away?'

  'Nowhere except the other shepherds' houses.'

  'Something empty.'

  'Anything up here that has a roof on it is inhabited— how many of them do you think there are?'

  'Two. And I want them alive. No shooting under any circumstances. Now tell me where they could hide. They're still up here, Brigadier, and I don't think they're that far away. They're hiding from everybody, not just from us. From the rest of the gang, from the other shepherds on the mountain, from everybody. They're frightened for their lives and they're hiding without intelligence, without plans, in any hole they can find, like animals. But they must have found some shelter because you can't survive up here without it, and only you know this mountain well enough to tell me where they've found it. Now tell me!'

  'I don't know . . . There's La Selletta, that's the next village—or it used to be, but it's a good walk from here, best part of two hours, and it's completely bombed out except for the church.'

  'The church still has a roof on it?'

  'Not the church hasn't, but the sacristy . . . and then there's a sort of crypt. A family held out there for four weeks at the end of the war with only a tub full of water and some—'

  The Captain had switched on his radio and was already talking to one of the helicopter pilots, telling him they should land down in the valley and then be ready to pick everyone up at La Selletta in approximately two hours. They would go on foot. You couldn't surprise a mountain but you could surprise two frightened fugitives.

  The dog-handlers gathered.

  'You don't want us to go on looking for the girl's body?'

  'I need you with me.'

  The walk was long and arduous. They had to fight against the wind which took their breath away. No one spoke except the Brigadier, who felt he should keep Bacci going by breathlessly recounting wartime stories to him since he looked so exhausted and depressed.

  'A tub full of water and a bag of wrinkled vegetables. It was supposed to be a miracle—at one time people used to come up here—but my father who lived up here until the bombing said they'd a ham hidden away—that they hadn't told anybody about . . . Keep straight on towards the ridge—I'll be with you in a minute.'

  And he would fall back to check on the boy who had been sick.

  After about an hour the high wind dropped, only returning in occasional gusts that sprayed them with raindrops. When they neared the ridge they saw that it rose on the opposite side of a valley. Below them lay the remains of the church, the roof of the nave missing. What had once been a paved square in front of it now looked like an overgrown lawn. The Captain was speaking into his radio.

  'This cloud's coming down.'

  It was rolling away from them down the side of the mountain.

  'We can see it.'

  'You'll still be able to pick us up?'

  'We'll do our best. How much longer will you be?'

  He looked at the Brigadier for an answer.

  'We're here.'

  'A few minutes,' the Captain said, and switched off.

  A small cluster of buildings clung on to the wall of the church, behind the exposed altar stones that had scraps of bright blue mosaic stuck here and there. A trickle of woodsmoke was winding its way crookedly upwards.

  The men were deployed in silence, the handlers and dogs grouped out of the way. Bacci was sent to the very edge of the near side of the valley where he crouched behind a huge flint boulder and tried to keep his feet steady on the eroded ground. To his left the mountainside dropped almost vertically until it reached another valley a hundred metres or so lower down. The rusty corrugated roof of some sort of shed jutted out half way down the drop. In the bottom were the roofless ruins of the houses. The inhabitants of La Selletta had built their church on the highest patch of flat ground.

  Bacci caught a glimpse of the green-clad men slipping silently round the other side of the church. It was quite difficult to distinguish them in the green-grey gloom of the late afternoon. Then he looked at the jumble of buildings at the rear of the church and saw a light that flickered and then vanished. There was a window in one of the jutting walls, a small barred window. Concentrating his gaze there, he managed to make out that the flickering light came from a fire, and that it disappeared when somebody passed in front of it. There were two people in the room, though he could only see their heads and the top half of their bodies. One figure stood motionless, wrapped in something dark. The other was moving agitatedly about the room, sometimes blocking the dull red light of the fire. Then they came together and the dark covering dropped from the still figure.

  After the first shock of seeing the girl's white flesh, Bacci tried to tear his eyes away, to contact the Captain, to stop the attack somehow. But he had no radio and he didn't dare move. Wisps of damp cloud were moving slowly around him, clinging to him and making everything look unreal in the thick silence. There was no longer anybody
in sight except for the figures moving in the square of flickering light, and they might have been a hundred kilometres away, they were so cut off from him. He saw them lie down, clinging to each other more like frightened children than like lovers. His nerves were stretched painfully with the strain of wanting to stop everything until it was over, but out of the corner of his eyes he caught a swift movement. The men in green were creeping out of the mist and becoming visible in a circle around the roofless church.

  'No . . .' whispered Bacci, his mouth close to the flint boulder. 'No . . .'

  The Captain must have known, or at least suspected, about the girl . . . But he couldn't know what was happening in there. Nobody else knew. Nobody else could see because there was only the one window. The circle was edging closer, diminishing. There was no sound at all. The two figures were moving desperately as if they knew how little time was left to them. One of the men in green raised his arm.

  'No . . .!' whispered Bacci, and he tried to make a signal. He lost his footing on the slope and grabbed the boulder, kicking out. A big piece of flint dislodged itself and hurtled down to hit the rusty metal roof below with a whang that echoed across the whole mountain before it bounced away into the cloud.

  Rudolfo, half-dressed and armed with a rifle, shot out through the open nave and leaped across some fallen beams.

  'Hold your fire!' The order came out of the mist. Rudolfo crashed through the circle of men and vanished in the grey cloud.

  'Loose the dogs!'

  They had him handcuffed within four minutes.

  Bacci was still behind the boulder, his eyes fixed on the crouching white figure in the firelit room. He saw the men go in and saw that she didn't move but let them cover her and pick her up.

  He didn't see her again because she was surrounded by other people after that, but over the noise of the radios and the helicopters that were circling, trying to find them, he heard her screaming and screaming at them to let Rudolfo go.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Captain was reading quietly in his office. It was Easter Sunday morning, and apart from the two men in the communications room who were chatting with the cars on patrol the building was almost empty.

  After a freak hailstorm two days ago the weather had finally settled down and the sun shone out of a tranquil blue sky. The Captain unbuttoned his jacket and finished reading the autopsy report. Caldini, the gamekeeper, had died from the stab wounds but the damage to his eyes had been done before that. He set the report aside and picked up Rudolfo's statement.

  ANSWERED TO QUESTIONS:

  I don't know PRATESI, Giuseppe. I know that he has a sausage factory near Pontino but I've never seen him.

  As far as I know he has nothing to do with this kidnapping.

  A.Q.: In January of this year, I don't know the exact date, CALDINI, Mario, gamekeeper at the villa, came to see me on the mountain to tell me that the villa was being sold. I know CALDINI because I graze the paddocks at the villa in summer and use the stables there, and because he hunts on the mountain on Sundays and comes into my house to eat. When I need money he buys a lamb from me. CALDINI told me that the new owner of the villa intended to evict us both and that he was going to build a swimming pool in the field that I use to grow food, and that there was nothing I could do because I have no contract. The next Sunday CALDINI brought a man called GARAU, Pasqualino, with him. He said GARAU knew the daughter of the man who was buying the villa and that they were Americans. He said GARAU knew how to organize a kidnapping but that the risk was too big because he was known to the police. CALDINI said we could save my summer grazing and his house by a mock kidnapping. GARAU told me that the girl could easily be hidden in my house because it's on the mountain and because I have no police record, and that we couldn't be prosecuted if we didn't ask for a ransom. We planned to frighten this man into not buying the villa.

  A.Q.: I don't know of any other person who wanted to buy the villa.

  AQ: As far as I know there was no ransom asked for.

  A.Q: I went down the mountain on the day it snowed. SCANO, Bastianino, drove me to Florence in a truck. I don't know who the truck belonged to. We went by the back road. The back road is the old road from Pontino that passes by the villa. Nobody saw us. SCANO left me in Piazza Pitti and went back to wait for me at the stable I use at the villa. I got into the courtyard and hid myself in the car. It wasn't locked. GARAU had watched the girl for almost a month. He told me what to do.

  A.Q.: SCANO, Bastianino, was dressed normally when I left him.

  A.Q.: I don't know who brought the food up the mountain. I picked it up from the same place twice a week. There was always another guard with me at the house, sometimes GARAU and sometimes SCANO, Bastianino. The gamekeeper came up twice to hunt.

  The Captain broke off and looked towards the window. Once he realized what a fool the gang had made of him Rudolfo had refused to speak. The second interrogation had been a waste of time, and the next day they had been forced to give up and take his statement.

  A.Q,.: I left my house and took the girl to La Selleta on Palm Sunday. I don't know what the date was. There was nobody else in the house when we left. Later the Carabinieri arrested me at La Selletta.

  That was all. He wouldn't even speak to the barrister they had given him. His hands had been trembling when they put the handcuffs back on him to take him away. Once he had cried, beating his head on his knees. Once, when they had tried to pressurize him into talking for his own good, he had screamed for his mother.

  He was nineteen years old, the same age as the boy who had been sick behind the bushes at the sight of a dead man with his eyes pushed out; the same age as Deborah Maxwell.

  The Captain had tried to talk to Maxwell, to explain to him about the Stockholm Syndrome, to help him understand that the link between captor and captive took time and patience to break, and that a statement full of lies and contradictions designed to protect the kidnappers was not unusual. After two hours he had given up, having at least dissuaded him from bringing a charge of rape which could only have been more damaging to his daughter than to Rudolfo.

  Mrs Maxwell had come back to see him.

  'I want to understand, to help her if I can.'

  'I'm sure you can. Be patient.'

  'But you can't mean that Debbie was in love with that bandit. I saw him. Why, he wasn't even clean. Debbie . . . What you said about her being frightened of the others and that he was kinder to her. I can understand that. And if he fed her all the time and she was dependent on him, I can understand her trying to defend him, but not . . . You don't know Debbie.'

  'I know about kidnappings.' He had told them about the cocaine but not about anything else. It was over now, anyway. 'Try not to make her feel guilty afterwards, when she becomes normal.'

  'How long . . .?'

  'Perhaps a month. I shall have to take another statement from her when she feels ready to talk to me.'

  'She looked so wild. Her hair all tangled, and her eyes . . . I'll never forget her eyes and the smell of her when I—that wasn't Debbie.'

  'Please don't worry. It's over.'

  He had telephoned her the next day.

  'How is she?'

  'I'm sure she's a little better—but sometimes she watches us. I can feel her watching us. I don't know if you understand what I mean.'

  'I understand.'

  'In her sleep she talks in Italian. We sat by her all night, John and I. And today she said to me, "I'm hungry," just like that, and it wasn't mealtime. Maybe she's getting better. She wouldn't eat before.'

  'Don't expect too much.' How many times over the years had he repeated these stock phrases? Not that it mattered much what he said, so long as he was calm.

  'I've thought over everything you said. I'm probably being foolish but I can't help thinking of all the songs, love songs, you know what I mean, that talk about chains and being captured. I don't know why it came into my head but it did. And feeding always forms part of courtship— I read an artic
le . . . You probably think I'm being very foolish . . .'

  'No, no . . .'

  'I'm trying to understand how Debbie could have—'

  'Just stay close to her.'

  He looked down again now at the mountain of papers that had to be read and signed. With an effort he might finish this morning. He picked up the stack of typed transcripts from the readable parts of the girl's exercise book. The typing was hurried and the translation was imperfect, but it would serve for now. Another transcript would be made when the lab had finished washing the pages. The first sheet contained part of a letter to Katrine Nilsen.

  1 . . . speak to each other the whole time it was happening, do you realize that? Nobody will tell me where they've taken you. Nobody speaks English and I don't understand their Italian. For three days I didn't speak at all. I was waiting for them to kill me, just lying still and waiting. There are so many things I want to write to you even if it's only in this exercise book. They haven't taken any of my things, not even my watch, but I can only write when there's enough light from the fire. I want to . . .

  OMISSIS. Ten lines obliterated/Cont . . .

  2 . . . have imagined that I could have lived through anything as frightening as this but I go on sleeping and waking and even eating. What difference could it have made to them to leave us together? All day I've been thinking about what it will be like when we're free. I want us to go on a trip together. I want us to laugh the way we laughed at that restaurant on Jacqueline's birthday because she couldn't remember the end of the joke she tried to tell us and got it wrong in three languages. Laughing like that without thinking or caring about anything. Now I can't even imagine how anyone can laugh that way. I never knew the world could be as sad and ugly as this. If I'd known I would never have been unhappy, even for an hour. Now there isn't any light and the people I see have no faces. I don't want to die here where nobody knows me. Nobody comes near me except with food and . . .