The Marshal at the Villa Torrini Page 9

  What about Forbes, though? She hadn't known of anything to his discredit but then, she didn't take that much interest in people. Couldn't blame her, after what she'd gone through, if she went in more for things than human beings. Less risky. If he did have a criminal record, the news would soon come through. System there was accusatorial . . . what was that part about the accusatorial role of the Public Prosecutor? Must be on a plane of dialectical equality with the accused and therefore . . . and therefore . . . therefore what?

  He listened. That was the fire brigade, if only that wretched wind would die down a bit, but it would be three days. It always went on for three days. He had heartburn. If only he could get up the energy to go into the kitchen and make himself some camomile tea. Had he been asleep at all? He couldn't remember.

  He did fall asleep for brief intervals, but the difference was slight. The wind still raged and the same thoughts fought with each other in his head and he was always aware of being in pain. Even so, there were things he could only be dreaming rather than thinking. At one point, Forbes had been showing him his forearms and explaining why they, and his hands, were free of scratches. The explanation had been convincing and the Marshal had even allowed himself to feel better disposed towards the man now that the mystery was cleared up. It was the wind, of course. He hadn't thought of that. How could anyone be expected to think with so much pain? He was doing his best. Therefore . . . the Prosecutor therefore . . . therefore . . .

  'Salva!'

  'What's to do?'

  'You're talking to yourself. Are you all right?'

  'I was asleep.'

  He didn't want to tell her what the trouble was and have to start explaining about the sandwiches.

  'You've been tossing about for hours.' She didn't ask any awkward questions but got up and went into the kitchen. He heard her put some water on to boil. He also heard her open the fridge and after a moment say, 'Oh, for goodness' sake . . .'

  She brought him two tablets to chew and then a cup of camomile, not too hot. At about five-thirty he fell asleep.

  'Professor Forli, you have described the injuries sustained by the deceased, Anna Maria Grazzini. Which of these injuries was the cause of death?'

  'The internal haemorrhage caused by the blow which punctured the pancreas.'

  'There is no question about that?'

  'None whatever.'

  'In your opinion, Professor, could Anna Maria Grazzini have recovered from these injuries had she received prompt medical attention?'

  'It is possible.'

  'Would you go so far as to say "probable"?'

  'I think I could say that, yes. A blood transfusion would have saved her there and then. I can't, of course, say at this stage whether there might have been complications arising later from the head injuries but they were not so severe as to make it very likely.'

  The Marshal had only just arrived and taken his seat. His face was burning, but as he looked around him he saw that almost everyone had the same problem. The freezing wind had whipped at their faces on the way here and now the courtroom was overheated.

  'So, had the accused, on ceasing to inflict blows on the now virtually unconscious victim, decided to call an ambulance rather than reaching the decision they did reach, in your opinion Anna Maria Grazzini would be alive today?'

  'With the reservation that other complications might have arisen, I'd say almost certainly.'

  'And had the accused later followed the advice of the man answering their emergency call to the police and sent for an ambulance—then, even then, could she have lived?'

  That would depend on how much time had gone by, how much blood she'd lost in the meantime.'

  'I can't tell you, Professor, how much blood she'd lost, but I can tell you that since they carried or dragged their bleeding, half-conscious victim down to a car and drove that car to a quiet lane behind the Belvedere Fort, that approximately fifteen to twenty minutes would have passed—assuming the times given us were correct.'

  'In that case, it's less likely . . .'

  'But still possible?'

  'Perhaps, yes.'

  'And yet, as we have heard, & further ten minutes—'

  'Objection!' The defence counsel was on his feet. 'There is no possible way that my client could have known that Grazzini was suffering from an internal haemorrhage. This line of questioning is tendentious in the extreme.'

  'Objection sustained. The Prosecutor will confine himself to the facts as they presented themselves at the time. Hindsight is out of place in a courtroom.'

  Quite right, too, thought the Marshal. Even so, the things he'd said, even if they were cancelled from the records, would have had their emotional effect. The defence was going for manslaughter and technically they might be right, but the Prosecutor was after a verdict of culpable homicide and would get it in all probability because of the way they'd dumped her. Dumped her, in the end, on himself.

  'It is my contention,' boomed the Prosecutor, unabashed, 'that the three accused knew only too well that the injuries they had inflicted on Grazzini were serious. They knew they were serious because, otherwise, why did they try and dispose of her? Why not, if, as they say, her chief problem was her drunkenness, did they not simply—put her to bed! Leave her to sleep it off! Saverino Mario and Giorgetti Chiara had achieved what they wanted to achieve, had they not? They could now remove the child to their own home for Christmas. So why, ladies and gentlemen, did they not do just that? Why instead did they conceive an elaborate plan to get rid of Grazzini, to get her, and not the child, out of the flat? We have heard Saverino Mario say, "We didn't want her to die. We didn't want her to die and that's why we called the police." And that is proof, from the mouth of one of the accused persons, proof offered, not extracted, that they knew, ladies and gentlemen, they knew that her injuries were indeed grave. Grave enough for them to want to get rid of her. Grave enough for them to think that should she die and be found dead in that flat—'

  'Objection!'

  'Sustained. Mr Prosecutor, I hardly think your suppositions are relevant to the pathologist's evidence. Perhaps you would like to reserve them for your summing up. Defence.'

  It was a relief for the Marshal to see that, though the Prosecutor was as aggressive as ever, he didn't use his repeating tactic on the pathologist. Perhaps it was a tactic unsuited to the authoritative witness and reserved only for the vulnerable and ignorant. Then he tried to decide where, between the extremes, he belonged.

  That was Chiara Giorgetti's lawyer speaking. He needed to get a suspended sentence for her, no matter what the verdict, because of the little girl. It had been decided in the end that the child should not testify. That was something. She had been questioned and her answers recorded but had she been brought into court she could not, at ten years old, have failed to understand that she was testifying against her own mother in a murder trial.

  The Marshal had visited the child twice in recent weeks. The grandmother had stopped sending her to school. There was trouble over that, but he could hardly blame her. The only answer would be to send her to a new school when all this was over.

  Goodness, it was hot. Giorgetti's lawyer was short, fat and vociferous and his face was as red as a peony against his crooked white stock.

  'Is it reasonable to suppose that Giorgetti Anna Maria— that Giorgetti Chiara, I beg your pardon—wanted merely to get rid of the injured woman? Why then did she—and it was she who decided—make that first phone call to the police? A phone call that could easily incriminate her, and which did incriminate her! She made that phone call on her own initiative and against the wishes of . . .'

  Why the devil couldn't he manage to remember their names? The case had been going on long enough. Was he just a bad speaker or was he, too, floundering in the new system?

  'Of . . . Saverino Mario. They were wrong. They were ignorant—ignorant of the consequences of their actions, and why? Because they had no way of knowing how serious the injuries to Grazzini were. Professor F
orli, could a lay person possibly have known that an internal haemorrhage was in progress?'

  'I would doubt it.'

  'There are no, shall we say, outward signs?'

  'Oh yes—'

  'But not such as a non-qualified person like Giorgetti Chiara, or even like myself, would be capable of interpreting?'

  'I should say not, except—' the pathologist glanced at the judge and then decided to carry on: 'Except that in this case one of them had inflicted the damage, and a blow so violent to the abdominal region can hardly fail to have consequences.'

  Very put out, but unable to find a comeback to this, the lawyer shuffled his notes unhappily and started trying to point out to the judge that the blow delivered was not in question since it had already been established that his client—whose name he managed to remember in time— had not been the one—

  'Yes, yes. That's understood. May we get on?'

  'No further questions.'

  The Marshal was about to get to his feet but, after some whispered conversation, it seemed that Chiara Giorgetti was coming forward to speak for herself. Well, she could hardly do worse than her lawyer. As she seated herself on the red plastic chair she kept her eyes fixed on the judge. Two carabinieri positioned themselves behind her. Her black hair had grown long and straggly during her time in prison, but she certainly hadn't lost weight. She looked as bulky as ever under her red and green glittery wool sweater. She'd been wearing that when he arrested her, the Marshal remembered, or something very like it, dressed up for Christmas Eve.

  'Giorgetti Chiara, what was your relationship with the deceased, Grazzini?'

  It was the Prosecutor questioning her but she never looked at him, only at the judge.

  'We weren't related . . . ' Her loud voice tailed off as she realized just how loud it was with the microphone which her raucous tones hardly required. She made as if to shift away from it but didn't dare.

  'I understand that there was no blood relationship. I want to know how you knew her, what part she played in your life, what sort of terms you were on.'

  'She was living with Antonio.'

  It was easy to see that she wasn't interested in the Prosecutor's questions. She answered them with the air of one brushing away a fly. Probably she had expected to be able to plead with the judge directly, to ask him to let her out of prison because of the child.

  'She was living with Pecchioli Antonio, your ex-husband, is that correct?'

  'Yes.'

  'Did you leave your husband because of his relationship with Grazzini?'

  'What? No. How could I? He didn't know her then. He met her after.'

  'After you had left your husband and moved in with Saverino Mario whom you later married?'

  'Yes.'

  'The custody of your child was given to your husband?'

  'Objection!' The lawyer's face was redder than ever as he jumped to his feet but he was overruled. The Marshal looked around the overheated room, watching faces, not listening. There was little he didn't know about Chiara whose mother, now looking after the little girl, had come to him years ago when she found out that her daughter was addicted to heroin. Not that she had found out, precisely, since she knew nothing of such things.

  'She told me, she screamed it in my face . . . I had nothing else to give her and she was shaking me, hitting me. Look at my eye. I'm ashamed to be seen in the shops and anyway, they won't give me any more credit. I've only my pension, you see, and though she goes missing for days at a time she's always there on pension day. She's always there . . .'

  Even after that, the poor woman had come into his office to report that her flat had been broken into and the television stolen. He'd had the job of gently dissuading her from reporting the theft and of getting Chiara into a community and off heroin. She'd stayed off it, too, largely because she'd got pregnant by Pecchioli almost immediately after coming but. Pecchioli, half her height and a quarter of her weight, so reminiscent of the Marshal's poor little friend Vittorio! But he'd kept them going. He had a job and he cared about the child. They'd been doing all right, keeping their heads above water, and after eight years of marriage they'd even got as far as leaving her mother's place for their own flat. It was dark and poky and the rent was disgracefully high, but even so . . . And then along came Saverino and Chiara abandoned the kitchen sink and scraping along for a good time in the clubs and a few new clothes. She soon found herself back in the kitchen; this time with an occasional black eye to enliven the proceedings. The truth about the custody of the child was that the question had never legally come up. She stayed with her father because her mother had abandoned her, and her mother never gave the matter a thought until things started going badly, and she realized that she had nothing and no one. Saverino stayed around, provided she toed the line, but he was bored with her. It then occurred to Chiara that she missed her little Fiammetta who would at least have been company. Even then, she wasn't fool enough to apply for custody. Saverino had a record—not much of one, but a record nevertheless. Chiara had a history of drug abuse which her lawyer was now trying to prevent her revealing.

  'Objection, Your Honour! Since the birth of this child ten years ago . . .'

  'Sustained.'

  'Will you tell the court how the quarrel resulting in the death of Grazzini Anna Maria broke out?'

  'It was Christmas Eve. Antonio had promised I could have Fiammetta for Christmas. Mario and me went to get her.'

  'What time was this?'

  'I don't know.'

  'You don't know!'

  There he went again. In this case, at least, there was some justification because she was lying, as the other two had, about what time the quarrel had broken out. The Prosecutor was right in assuming that they'd hardly have gone to pick the child up at midnight. Yet the woman had been dumped in the street in the early hours of the morning. The only reasonable conclusion was that they had waited hours before deciding they'd have to get rid of her. Hours when they knew how bad she was, otherwise they'd have gone about their business. But they didn't go, they stayed there, the three of them, with a woman bleeding to death on their hands, and the child . . . Hours of panic when, instead of sitting there paralysed, they could have saved her life and saved themselves from what was happening to them now. Why? Self-preservation, of course, was at the root of it, and had, in the end, been their undoing. If they hadn't tried to be clever . . .

  And Forbes? He, too, had sat there, after whatever happened had happened, thinking, and as he thought he drank, to give himself courage. That had been his undoing. He'd drunk himself into a stupor.

  'I'd done everything. I bought a crib and a tree with lights. Presents . . . ' Chiara's voice broke and she was crying more than speaking when she said, 'I wanted my little girl! It was Christmas and I wanted . . . ' She dashed the tears from her face and sniffed loudly, making the microphone splutter. 'I've no hanky . . .'

  The little girl, Fiammetta, was the only one who might have told them what time her mother arrived with Saverino. But she hadn't told.

  '/ can't remember. I think it was late.'

  And her eyes, in a face too old for her tiny body, had pleaded with the Marshal not to make her tell.

  'Do you want to live with your mum again?'

  'Yes.'

  'Aren't you happy living with your granny?'

  'Yes.'

  'And don't you want to stay with her?'

  'Yes, but I can't.'

  'You can if you say you want to.'

  'I can't. My mum said.'

  'Why? Did she tell you why?'

  'Because she's very old and she's going to die like Bobo.'

  'Who's Bobo?'

  'My granny's cat and he died because he was very old and he got run over, as welt, and they put you in a box when you die and you can't come out because you have to stay at the cemetery so I have to live with my mum.'

  Though her small face looked so old and drawn with misery, her mind was as underdeveloped as her body. When the Marshal
had asked her if she could tell him about what happened she had drawn him a picture which, though she identified the stick figures for him, he didn't understand.

  Later, a child psychiatrist had examined the drawing and the child, and recommended that she should not be subjected to the court hearing.

  'Have you put my dad in prison or is he on his holidays?'

  He hadn't been able to answer her but, in return for his having let her off, she let him off.

  'Was Grazzini already drunk when you arrived—at whatever time it was?'

  'She was already drunk and already making a scene.'

  'Did she often do that?'

  'Not all the time, but when she did she went crazy. Antonio tried to make her go to the doctor's but she wouldn't.'

  'Why to a doctor? Because she was an alcoholic?'

  'She wasn't an alcoholic, she was crackers. The drink always started her off but she was crackers and Antonio thought it was the accident. She got knocked off her moped by a fellow in a van and split her head open. It was after that that she started. She'd go to that piano bar in the piazza where they sing, and sooner or later she'd start quarrelling with somebody. If they threw her out she'd threaten to smash their windows and stuff like that. She'd scream abuse for hours and then start crying. They used to have to go for Antonio to come for her and he'd have such a time getting her home he'd be black and blue. She wasn't like that before the accident, but she wouldn't go to the doctor's anyway.'

  'On the evening in question was she abusive or had she reached the crying stage?'

  'She was screaming.'

  'So she was abusive?'

  'She was screaming and kicking out at Antonio. She didn't want him to let us take Fiammetta.'

  'Did she say why?'

  'She said the kid could stay in her own home for Christmas if it was good enough for the rest of the year.'

  'And that was considered reason enough to start beating her?'

  'Nobody started beating her! She was the one hitting out—and so that we couldn't take Fiammetta she'd hidden her clothes.'