Some Bitter Taste Read online

  ‘She’s a bit weird but I like her.’

  ‘In what way was she weird? Your mother has told you that she’s dead?’

  ‘She did but I forgot for a minute—I mean I liked her … do I have to do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Talk about her like she doesn’t exist anymore. It doesn’t feel like she doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve never known anybody who died before.’

  ‘It’s all right. You don’t have to if you don’t want. As long as you remember her she does still exist in a way.’

  ‘My mum said robbers attacked her. She’s really upset.’

  ‘And what about you? Does it upset you?’

  ‘No. It just feels … weird.’

  ‘Weird like Signora Hirsch? Tell me why you think she was weird.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know … like she was really old—like my gran. She never talks about now, always about things that happened years ago and people I’ve never heard of. I don’t mind, only she’s not that old, is she—I mean was she? She doesn’t look it, doesn’t wear old lady’s clothes and stuff.’

  He’d had the same thought himself, hadn’t he? So perhaps it wasn’t just a question of her mother’s furnishings. ‘Lisa, can I sit on the end of your bed a minute?’ There was no room for more than her desk and chair and he didn’t want to loom over her.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I’ve got something important to ask you. There’s a built-in cupboard in the entrance hall in Signora Hirsch’s flat and I need to know if you ever saw inside it.’

  The girl hesitated, twining a strand of long fair hair round her finger. ‘Does a secret still count when somebody’s dead?’

  ‘It depends.’

  ‘So how do I know whether I can tell you?’

  ‘Don’t worry. You can tell me because if it’s the sort of secret that should be kept forever I’ll tell you and neither of us will ever tell anyone else. Telling me doesn’t count because of my job.’ She seemed like a twelve-year-old now, a little girl venturing into adulthood and then retreating.

  ‘There was a safe. She didn’t say so but I saw. She got some things out and showed them to me.’

  ‘What sort of things? Did they look valuable? Were they jewels, things like that?’

  Lisa shrugged. ‘Old things. Candlesticks and some old books and clothes, stuff like that. Maybe they were her grandma’s. She never knew her grandma and grandpa but she talked about them all the time like old people do.’

  ‘And what about her brother? Did she talk about him?’

  ‘No. Only her grandparents and sometimes her mum and dad. There was a picture of her mum and dad in the safe and another picture of flowers. That was her secret, she said, having those pictures. Don’t you think that’s weird?’

  ‘It depends. Were the pictures paintings? Perhaps they were valuable.’

  ‘These were just old black-and-white photographs. So is it a real secret, or not?’

  The marshal considered. He was never dishonest with children if he could help it.

  ‘I’m not quite sure. I promise you that when I find out I’ll tell you. In the meantime you keep the secret.’

  ‘Even from my mum and dad?’

  ‘Even from them. You have done up to now, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘You needn’t tell a lie. If they ask about it you can tell them I said to ask me. You’ve been a big help, Lisa, and I’m very grateful to you.’

  He could see she was pleased and felt he could rely on her. On his way downstairs he heard the noise of journalists and press.

  ‘Is it true that her throat was slashed?’

  ‘Must have been in there for days judging by the stink.’

  ‘In this heat…’

  ‘Just one from outside the door showing the hall?’

  ‘Was the house ransacked?’

  ‘Just one of that cupboard—was there a safe?—’

  ‘Gentlemen, please.’ This prosecutor was quiet-spoken, very calm and very much in control. ‘We’re trying to remove a body here. If you’ll let me complete my business in peace I’ll give you a statement. Downstairs. Ah, Marshal. Have those carabinieri clear the staircase and the exit, will you? And don’t let the TV cameras up. They can film the body being loaded and that’s it.’

  The story of the safe would get into the papers and no journalist would be so lacking in imagination as to invent contents for it as dull as old clothes and a few photographs.

  Within twenty minutes or so the prosecutor emerged into the street and gave them a provisional date and time of death as established by the marshal, who had visited the building next door. Its second-floor occupants had been infuriated by the battering on the wall during the removal of the safe: ‘Apart from anything else, we were giving a dinner party that night—and since when do builders work till that hour? What was worse was that we thought they were going to knock right through. It happens with these old houses. Half past eight, anyway, give or take a few minutes. Is it true they slit her throat? I always said there was something funny … of course, she was a foreigner, wasn’t she? She had no accent but her name …’

  The pathologistjoined the prosecutor and, unwisely in the marshal’s opinion, gave the press a statement which, while not giving a cause of death as such, admitted to the throat wound and considerable loss of blood, which had them all scribbling ‘Murdered woman’s throat slashed!’

  Then the questions: Did the safe contain stolen jewellery she had never dared wear? Was it true she paid regular visits to a mysterious stranger who never returned her visits? Could it be the man was in prison, which would explain why she wouldn’t have wanted to tell anybody? They received no answers. They would quote their own questions and any more exotic ones they could think of to pad their articles for the next day’s paper, ending with the usual ‘Investigators are releasing no further information at present’

  ‘Oh, well,’ thought the marshal, in a philosophical mood as he climbed the slope towards his station in the left wing of the Pitti Palace, ‘only doing their job, I suppose.’ As he walked under the stone arch with its great lantern, which was now lit, he hoped his wife was also in a philosophical mood. He was late again, very late, and he hadn’t phoned.

  //

  ‘The war on football hooligans: forty-five Fiorentina fans to be excluded from the stadium for the rest of the year—

  ‘The mayor on line: Work is to begin in the Clemente VII room in the Palazzo Vecchio, where the mayor will be in contact with citizens on their personal computers once a month from next October—

  ‘A woman bled to death in her own home after thieves slit her throat. The death is thought to have taken place four days ago—

  ‘Good evening. Those are the main headlines of our third edition of the Regional News. Now from the stadium here’s—’

  ‘Salva! Hurry up, your case is coming on!’

  The marshal appeared after a moment, muffled in a white bathrobe, and stood near the sofa rubbing at his head with a big towel. Supper had already been spoiling when he got in so he’d had to wait for his shower.

  ‘Aren’t you going to sit down and watch it?’

  ‘There’ll be nothing much to see.’

  ‘Look! You see, now we’ve got a PC we’ll be able to contact the mayor.’

  ‘We haven’t got a PC, the boys have, and unless the mayor wants to play computer games with them I don’t think he’ll be hearing from them.’

  ‘Is that her they’re putting in the ambulance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve read about these thieves who gas old people and rob them, but slitting her throat … Why do they keep saving ‘they’ anyway? How do they know it wasn’t just one person?’

  ‘A safe that size would be too heavy for one man to—’

  ‘There you are! Isn’t that you next to the ambulance? No, it’s not.’

  ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  The first forty-eight hours following a murder a
re crucial. After that, witnesses are already jumbling times and dates, alibis have been set up, and borders crossed. Stories which might conflict are adjusted, phone calls are made, stained clothing destroyed. And anyone who in those first two days of limelight might want to take centre stage giving vital information shouldn’t be given time for second thoughts about getting involved. So, surely to God, the captain wouldn’t expect him to go trailing up to the Villa L’ Uliveto to waste time over a few trinkets?

  ‘I’ve got the prosecutor on the other line now. Hold on,’ Captain Maestrangelo said.

  The marshal held. Of course, he didn’t have a suspect, not even a shadow of one, but he wanted to go through her papers this morning and find both her brother and her lawyer without delay. He realised that he had as yet told no one about the bag-snatching episode, which would suggest that a stranger might have had her keys, rather than that she had opened the door to her killer.

  ‘Marshal?’

  ‘Yes. There’s something I should have mentioned—when the victim came to me, she reported having had her bag—’

  ‘It’s your case. Tell the prosecutor. He’ll be at the Hirsch flat in fifteen minutes and wants you to check on the two shops below before you join him—but I’d like you to postpone your visit to Sir Christopher rather than give it up. I’ll make your excuses myself and get the fingerprinting done this morning. I’d send somebody else but he’d take it very badly, you know, and I wouldn’t like there to be any repercussions … Guarnaccia?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’ll do as you say, of course.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘No … I think. If we move fast on this Hirsch case, we can get to the bottom of it. She led such a confined life that—’ He was amazed at himself. He was no detective. What was he thinking of to claim he could solve a case he knew nothing about yet? The captain would wonder what had come over him. It was embarrassment which made him so far forget himself as to say whatever came into his head so long as it changed the subject. ‘You haven’t told me … this business of Sir Christopher. Are we just obliged to put up a good show for an important foreign resident? I’m sorry, I was just wondering, because in that case I only need to make a courtesy visit, as brief as possible. You see what I mean. To tell you the truth, since they haven’t a hope of recovering the stuff and have warned us off accusing any of the staff, I don’t see why they called us at all. These people must think we’ve nothing better to do.’

  ‘They do think that, if they think about it at all, which I doubt. I’ll be frank with you, Guarnaccia. Of course it began as a matter of courtesy and I’ve told you why I came along. Pay him the courtesy of the visit he’s asked for, however brief, if not out of respect for the uniform we wear then out of respect for his sickness and his age. You have always had more patience with age and loneliness than anyone I know.’

  ‘And this good man, too…’

  ‘Yes. He’s not old, though.’

  ‘No, I suppose by today’s standards … and they say he’s ill but he could go on for years with the best care.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? He told you more about his illness? Despite being embarrassed about it?’

  ‘No. He didn’t tell me much but he wasn’t embarrassed about it at all. No, no … he’s dying and he knows it.’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘No.’ No, no, no! The marshal wanted to be let off. The Hirsch murder, with its background of Sdrucciolo de’ Pitti, with the Rossis and the local shopkeepers as witnesses, he could deal with. He might not solve it—not a scrap of evidence had come to light yet—but he knew where he was, he knew what to do. Why couldn’t the captain send some smart young officer to the villa, one of those military academy types from a good family who would drink tea with the Englishman and not fall over his own boots in the flower garden.

  And this good man, too. Willlseeyou again?’ That sad, almost pleading look before Sir Christopher turned away.

  What did people want, what did they expect of him?

  ‘You’ll really come and see me as you promised?’ Signora Hirsch’s frightened eyes. He wanted to concentrate on her now but it was a bit late, wasn’t it? He had forgotten her for days.

  ‘And this good man, too …’ Sir Christopher would die. That’s a road we all have to travel alone. What help could he possibly be?

  ‘Guarnaccia?’

  ‘I’ll go as soon as the prosecutor can spare me.’

  He got up, put on jacket and holster, lifted his hat from its hook, checked with Lorenzini, and started down the narrow stairs, already feeling for his sunglasses. The sky was almost colourless, the glare enough to have his eyes streaming in seconds. He went down the side of the palace forecourt in the shade offered by a high wall. It didn’t help. The heat was all-suffusing, the air was stagnant. Sometimes, when it was like this, car tyres made the wet sound of a rainy day but it didn’t rain, except sometimes for a minute or two, a few fat drops that rose as steam on the instant to increase the Turkish bath effect. The marshal walked slowly. He didn’t want his shirt sticking to him. He didn’t want to get so distressed by the suffocating heat that he would start forgetting things and lose his patience. If you lose your patience in July you’re not likely to get it back again until after your evening shower. And to think that people paid good money to suffer not only all this but the stress of an unknown city and a language they couldn’t speak.

  “You’re holding the map upside down!’

  ‘I’ve told you I’ll go in no more shops!’

  ‘Mum, I’m thirsty!’

  ‘A very important collection of paintings and I don’t want to hear another word out of either of you until—’

  ‘Did you have to let it melt all down your front?’

  Without understanding a word, the marshal recognized these complaints as they drifted around him in a dozen languages. He stood waiting to cross the road, muttering as he did every year, T don’t know what they come here for, they’d do better to stop at home.’

  There was a traffic pileup and the marshal gave up waiting and wandered across the narrow road between the cars and the inevitable chorus of horns.

  Sdrucciolo de’ Pitti was a haven of peace in comparison. It was cluttered with parked mopeds and bikes and it was occasionally necessary to flatten yourself against the wall to let a white Mercedes taxi by, but otherwise you could walk in the middle of the paved alley and you were away from the worst of the noise. Rinaldi, the antique dealer, was at his door, looking down the street as though expecting someone. He turned and spotted the marshal coming down, though.

  ‘Ah. I heard about the Hirsch woman. Come in if you think I can help you. You’ll excuse me if I keep an eye on the street? I’m waiting for a delivery. Very good men, the best there are, but with things of great value, you understand …’

  ‘Of course. Why don’t you see to that. I’ll go in and wait, then we’ll talk.’ Once inside, the marshal almost regretted having suggested this. He liked looking round places unobserved, not to mention observing people from behind. But ‘things of great value’ was an understatement in this case, as would be ‘bull in a china shop’. So he removed his sunglasses and kept very still. Only his huge all-seeing eyes scanned the long, dark room with its deep red polished floor, gilded frames, and weathered statuary. Rinaldi’s broad back excluded most of the spent light from the alley. A fancy lamp with a silk shade made a golden pool on a tiny inlaid desk where Rinaldi must habitually sit. There was no clutter, only an elegant desk set and a silver box of visiting cards. The rasping engine of a three-wheel truck at the door announced the expected delivery. Rinaldi came inside. He looked as anxious as a mother cat, and his hands clenched and unclenched as two huge men struggled with a crate that was almost as tall as a human being and clearly a great deal heavier. The men’s faces were red with strain and they gasped for breath.

  ‘Down! Put her down! I can’t make it…’ They stood the crate on its end in the centre of the small room and bent doubl
e, heaving, clutching their chests. One of them, whose greasy blond hair was tied back in a ponytail, was sweating so much that big drops rolled down his nose and splattered onto the polished floor. The dark head of the other was shaven but it gleamed with wetness even so. ‘I thought we’d never get her on that truck. Next time it’s got to be three men … Jesus…’

  ‘There isn’t a third man I can trust like you.’ Rinaldi seemed barely able to breathe himself. ‘You must get her through to the back for the restorers.’

  They did it, too, though the marshal feared they might have heart attacks in the attempt. The crate was broken open and he caught a glimpse of sculpted draperies. These disappeared under sheeting and the men reappeared, shutting the rear door behind them.

  They left without being paid, an almost invisible signal passing between them and Rinaldi. The marshal was used to this sort of thing. He was investigating a murder and they were trying to hide a cash payment without receipt from him. Half the trouble in any investigation was caused by people hiding things from you that were self-evident and that you didn’t care about anyway. The two most common were tax dodges and adultery.

  The marshal decided to distract Rinaldi at once.

  ‘If you don’t mind my asking, do you always call the crates of stuff you get delivered “she"?’

  ‘What…? Oh, I see.’ Distracted and relieved. ‘Inside that crate was a statue of the goddess Athena. Very much a ‘she’. And very much damaged by pollution, I’m sorry to say. I imagine you’re looking for information about what happened upstairs but I’m afraid I barely knew the woman.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’ve heard she was very reserved, didn’t chat much with her neighbours.’

  ‘Not at all, as far as I’m concerned.’

  “You never visited her?’

  ‘Never. “Good morning, good evening” in the street or on the stairs, nothing more.’

  ‘Really? Probably just gossip, I suppose, but somebody mentioned a bit of a disagreement…’

  ‘As you say, people gossip.’

  ‘No disagreement then?’