The Marshal Makes His Report Read online

  ‘I like a nice tune, myself,’ William said as he opened up the studio. But he said it in such an odd voice, despite a serious face, that the Marshal, who had been on the point of agreeing with him, hesitated and said nothing.

  ‘Tea!’ William announced, parking his umbrella and whipping off his jacket. ‘That’s the first thing. Why don’t you take off your jacket, too?’

  ‘Shouldn’t do that on duty.’ He would have liked to, though.

  ‘Well, sit down, at least.’ William put an electric kettle on to boil in a corner of the worktable. ‘My throat’s so dry from rehearsing and in a few hours it will be time for the matinée—you do drink tea, don’t you? I know Florentines do but you’re not from here. Sicily, you said, didn’t you? I guessed from your accent if I remember rightly.’

  ‘That’s very clever of you. I mean . . .’

  ‘You mean considering I’m a foreigner. But speech, accents, that’s my business as an actor. What’s your decision about the tea?’ He held the spoon poised over the teapot, waiting for an answer. The Marshal, more kindly than truthfully, said he would be glad of it.

  ‘Very wise. I see there’s only instant coffee, anyway, and you wouldn’t like that. We don’t have fancy teacups, only mugs. Very English. It’s good tea, though, not teabags. I fired a shot last night.’

  ‘You . . . you fired a—’ The Marshal’s already protruding eyes almost popped out of his head. He gaped around the studio as if in search of the offending weapon.

  William laughed at him. ‘Only in a manner of speaking. Don’t worry, it wasn’t a gun but a firework. A very small banger. But if you’d heard the racket it made! Well, I was in here, of course, but it made enough noise echoing round out there in the courtyard to waken everybody up and bring them to their windows shouting “What the hell”.’

  ‘And what sort of explanation did you give?’

  ‘Me? I was What the helling with the best of them. Now then, I woke: the porter, the porter’s wife, Grillo, but not the tata who’s genuinely as deaf as a post. I woke Hugh Fido but not La Martelli, Emilio Emiliani, and all the Ulderighi gang except Auntie.’

  ‘Aunty?’

  ‘Fiorenza Ulderighi, Bianca Ulderighi’s auntie.’

  ‘What time did all this happen?’

  ‘In the middle of the night—or the early hours of the morning, I should say. About two. We eat after the performance and so I get in very late. It seemed like a good idea to me at the time but I thought I should tell you at once for two reasons; firstly, somebody will tell you—at least, I imagine so—so you’d have been What the helling yourself, which would have been a waste of your time. Secondly, I’m afraid I’ve set more off than just a firework.’

  For once the boy looked deadly serious. The Marshal waited, observing him. It was a moment before he continued and then he was hesitant, which, from what little the Marshal had seen of him, seemed unlike him.

  ‘I said I woke all the Ulderighi except the aunt. Well, among them was Neri. Of course when I put my head out pretending to wonder what the noise was I had a good look about. Naturally, most people switched their lights on. Neri didn’t. I went out and looked up at the tower and no light came on. Even so, I know I woke him.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure all right. There was no light but I heard him. He was screaming. Really screaming. Up there in the dark. I frightened the life out of him.’

  The Marshal, stunned, sat immobile for a while without speaking.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ William said, handing him a mug of tea, ‘it seemed a good idea at the time—well, to tell you the truth we had a fair bit of wine with our supper—oh, don’t worry, I didn’t mention it to the rest of the cast.’

  When the Marshal still didn’t speak he went on, ‘Well, you know how it is? What seems a good idea after a glass or two, in the light of day—’

  ‘You didn’t—’ the Marshal interrupted, and stopped. He liked the boy but liking people never prevented him from seeing things as they were. Many a time he’d wished that wasn’t the case but there was nothing much he could do about it, so . . .

  ‘You didn’t buy your firework in the middle of the night after your few glasses of wine. You must have bought it when the shops were open.’

  William smiled, his face a little red.

  ‘Yes, of course. You’re right. I should have remembered how you notice things and not have tried to get that one past you. The truth is that it seemed like an amusing trick to pull on them all after you’d told me nobody had heard anything. So, yes, I did buy the banger after you’d gone yesterday, on my way to the theatre. Then, after seeing what I’d done—or rather hearing what I’d done to Neri—I confess I was rather ashamed. It was childish of me and out of place and I like to think that, even though I had bought the thing earlier, I wouldn’t have let it off if I hadn’t had a bit to drink. Anyway, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well,’ the Marshal said, relieved by the boy’s frankness, ‘I doubt if there’s any harm done.’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’ The boy took a gulp of tea and frowned. ‘This morning when I was leaving for rehearsals I saw two men arrive. They were doctors, I’m sure of it. Both of them were speaking English, though one was certainly Italian. So you see there may be quite a lot of harm done.’

  The Marshal observed him. Only now did he really notice that when the boy’s face wasn’t lit with mischievous laughter, it was a sad and thin face. One moment you saw the dapper, fast-talking comic, the next a schoolboy orphan adrift in the world. More than that, his remorse was genuine. If he had done harm, he cared. It was more in the hope of its being comforting than of its being true that he said, ‘You can’t consider yourself responsible in any real way. They say the Ulderighi boy is weak and nervous, not a normal person at all.’

  ‘He’d just lost his father. He may or may not have heard the shot. I of all people ought to have known better.’

  ‘They weren’t close, from what I’ve heard,’ the Marshal pointed out. He was dismayed to see the dark grey eyes glittering as though with tears and felt the sadness communicate to himself. ‘You can’t always judge people’s reactions by your own.’

  ‘No.’ This seemed to do the trick and the Marshal was relieved to see the glitter fade from his eyes. ‘No, of course. I was very close to my father. He was a teacher, you know, but his great passion was the theatre. He taught me so much, even when I was very small—what he would have given to leave his boring job and do what I’m doing now . . . The same is true of Catherine in a way. Our parents left us without a bean, as I think I told you, but we inherited their dreams. That’s not nothing, is it?’

  ‘No, no . . .’ agreed the Marshal, but he rather thought that a roof over their heads and a bit of money in the bank wouldn’t have done any harm. His own wife would have an army pension, of course . . . But what if something should happen to both of them, as it had to this boy’s parents? How would the boys be fixed exactly? He ought to look into it. These things want thinking about . . . for instance, surely it was better never to travel together without the children? Of course, once you start thinking on those lines you can’t live your life at all . . .

  ‘You must be thinking what a childish idiot I am,’ William Yorke broke in, ‘judging by your face.’

  ‘No, no . . . I wasn’t thinking anything, except . . .’

  With a sigh, he put down the mug of tea he had hardly tasted. He was here to pretend to do a job so he’d better get on with pretending to do it.

  ‘I wonder . . . the old nurse—’

  ‘Of course! I’ll take you to see her, shall I? She’s bound to let you in with me if she’s letting anybody in at all. There’s never any telling how compos mentis she’ll be, but let’s try.’

  He was glad to have something useful to do, to make up for having done something stupid, the Marshal could see that. But what about his own motives for involving the boy? Lorenzini could have been with him, should have been with him if any second perso
n were really necessary, which he doubted. But since that first evening he hadn’t said a word to Lorenzini about this business and he was wondering now if that was to avoid having the young NCO present when he was being used, made a fool of, or whether he was afraid . . .

  Afraid of what? As the two of them came out of the studio under the music-filled gloom of the colonnade he knew that he was afraid all right. It wasn’t something he could explain because there was no explanation for it. He was afraid of this house.

  Five

  ‘And there was blood, blood . . . all over the place. She never saw it. She never saw it, but her face . . .’ The old tata’s finger, shiny and crippled with rheumatism, stroked the pale check in the picture. ‘She was beautiful. There was never anyone like her as a girl. Look at her. They say she was responsible for what happened, but people will say anything. Besides, what else could she do?’ She flashed a look at the Marshal which seemed to him to be both lucid and vicious. In his experience you could never be sure with the very aged and the mentally infirm how much they hid behind their weakness, looking out at you. The woman was rambling, that much was certain, and young William was egging her on. It was obvious that he’d already heard this story, perhaps more than once. If only there were a window in the room. There was barely room for their three chairs because of the size of the double bed. The Marshal tried to close his nostrils against the faint, sickly smell of very old age. His hat was on his knees and his dark glasses in his hand. The only light came from the hundreds of icon lamps with their dim red glow.

  ‘They caught the men who did it, though, didn’t they?’ William shouted close to her ear.

  ‘Caught them. They caught them, all four of them. As for the girl, it was no more than she deserved, an adulteress and a nobody. But he was the villain of the piece and he got his come-uppance and no mistake.’

  ‘And he stank! Tell us, Tata, how he stank!’

  ‘Stank? When he walked through the streets he’d leave a stench behind him that didn’t clear for days. He never changed his clothes from one year’s end to the next. He was no better than a pig. He was never anything to look at, of course, even as a lad, not like Francesco. Now if she’d married Francesco as she should have done by rights— He was a victim if ever there was one, and oh, he was a good-looking lad. Bonny, he was. And they dressed him all in white with a garland of flowers, a garland of spring flowers . . . I can see him now. His head was crushed in at one side—’

  The old woman’s voice stopped quite suddenly and she looked at William with narrowed eyes.

  ‘Have you brought me something?’

  ‘Sweets, like you asked for,’ William said.

  ‘And are they soft? I’ve no teeth.’

  ‘They’re what you asked for. They’re soft. Here.’

  She snatched them from him but didn’t eat any. Instead she reached out from her armchair to a bedside cupboard with a small square of marble on top. On the marble was a cream lace cover with a bottle of medicine, a glass and a black rosary on it. Her crippled hand struggled with the drawer. The Marshal half rose from his chair to help her but she waved him away, irritated. ‘He’ll do it.’

  William tucked the sweets into the drawer.

  ‘Now what was I telling you? Well, Francesco died, of course, and they say as it wasn’t an accident though it was given out that his horse was to blame, and she married his brother. They made her have him, you know. She cried all the night before. Ugly! An ugly man and a soul as ugly as his face. Of course, once she’d had a child he left her alone, you have to give him that, but I never had any time for that branch of the family myself—you know he was cousin to that fellow . . . Wait a minute and I’ll tell you his name. The miser, you know who I’m talking about, now what was his name— and don’t you look at me like that, you young bugger, I’m not too old to know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Tell us about the murder,’ shouted William. ‘Tell us where the men came from.’

  ‘Campi.’ Her face darkened as though she’d named the Inferno rather than a Florentine suburb. ‘They were tanners, you see, great brutes. They got in by the small door, that’s how it was done. They got in the day before while he was away and not a soul saw them.’

  ‘But somebody sent for them, Tata! Come on, admit it! They were sent for!’ William was grinning as he provoked her.

  ‘A wife has her rights. A chit of a girl like that Ginetta and a servant at that, flaunting herself. Flaunting jewellery as he’d given her—well, it was the last time she’d go up that staircase alive. She hadn’t a stitch on when the four of them broke in. That came out in court. Not a stitch . . .’

  She lowered her voice and for some reason, perhaps enjoying a new audience, she addressed herself now to the Marshal.

  ‘It took two of them to hold him down . . .’

  The Marshal instinctively drew his face back a little from hers, not sure he wanted to hear what she was going to tell him, but the rheumatic fingers clutched the sleeve of his uniform jacket.

  ‘There wasn’t a mark on him but it took two of them to hold him while they did what they did to her. They took her body away with them and pitched it in the Arno, but it came up at the bridge . . . two bridges down from this one, what’s it called—’

  ‘Ponte alla Carraia!’ prompted William in her ear. ‘But the head, Tata! What about the head?’

  She still had hold of the Marshal’s sleeve. A fine string of saliva hung from the left side of her mouth.

  ‘They hung that on his bedpost, hung it there on one of the wooden spikes, the eyes staring out of it, staring at him and him staring back. And that’s how they found him in the morning. And there was blood, blood all over the place. It had soaked right through the bedclothes and through two mattresses and through the wooden base of the bed, and he was covered in it but he hadn’t moved an inch. Where they’d left him, there he was found, staring at that head with its bloody hanks of hair.’ Her grip tightened on the Marshal’s arm. ‘And he never spoke another word as long as he lived. Now then!’

  The Marshal, who felt as though he had been holding his breath for the last half-hour, let it out now with a sigh and shifted his bulk on the hard chair, but she was still holding on to him so that he was prevented from getting up.

  ‘There’s nothing goes on round here,’ she said, ‘that I don’t know about. Nothing.’

  If only that were true! The Marshal had tried more than once to ask her about the night Corsi died but each time she had raised a crippled hand and stopped him.

  ‘Wait a bit. I’m telling you something . . .’

  And she would be off on another of her rambling tales of vicious murder. There was a copy of the local paper tucked behind her in the armchair and the Marshal had no doubt that she collected her gruesome tales from that. More interesting, perhaps, than reading the obituaries to see how many of her friends she had survived. In fact, by this time she had probably outlived them all. Still, it was disconcerting, hearing all those gory details from such a frail and white-haired creature. And the way she told them, you’d think she’d been there at the time. That one about the body in the cellar was enough to give you nightmares, but that sounded more like she’d got it from a book than from a newspaper because that quote about ‘Here is an end of all my troubles’ and so on sounded a bit old-fashioned. They didn’t put stuff like that on tombstones these days. Well, wherever she got it from, it wasn’t here that the Marshal would find an end to all his troubles, that was certain. The only good thing was that the visit had been paid, his duty done. He had seen everyone he had to see and had collected no evidence for suicide except the story of a late night quarrel. And if every late night quarrel were to be supposed to lead to suicide . . . He must somehow detach the old woman’s hand from his arm. Inspired, he asked, ‘Will you let me look at your icons before we go? You have so many.’ Not that she heard a word he said. William had to repeat the request, bellowing in her ear, before they were allowed to stand up. One wall was entir
ely covered with red plastic icon lamps.

  ‘But . . .’ The Marshal thought better of it and shut his mouth.

  ‘Mm. I thought you’d be surprised. Shall we go?’

  Leaving wasn’t easy. The old tata clung to William and in the end he had to promise to return the next day.

  Out in the courtyard he admitted, ‘It’s a rotten trick, but you see she doesn’t really distinguish the days and if I call in for a minute on Saturday or Sunday it will be just the same. The surprising thing is that she doesn’t forget who I am altogether when she doesn’t see me more than about twice a year.’

  ‘The surprising thing,’ the Marshal contradicted him with considerable vehemence, ‘is that those pictures—’

  ‘Ah yes. I thought you’d like those. Did you understand who they all were?’

  ‘I recognized the Marchesa . . .’

  ‘Ah, the photograph. Well, all the photographs on that part of the wall were of her. At various ages. Her wedding picture too, did you see? Not saints, as you thought, but Ulderighi. The photographs go back as far as photographs can go back and then the rest are prints of oil paintings and so on. When she really gets going she’s convinced that she’s nursed every man Jack of them for the last nine hundred years. Once, on one of her more lucid days, she did tell me that her own mother was wet-nurse to an Ulderighi—I forget for the minute which—so that she grew up in this house herself and was working as a nursery maid by the age of eight. She’s ninety-one and has never known anything outside the walls of this place, but she certainly knows about everything inside. It’s a great pity that she’s so gaga, because she’s a mine of information if only you can get at it. She’s been a help to Catherine once or twice because, you see, she knew just how many boxes and trunks of papers and books there should have been in the cellar and what was in most of them better than La Ulderighi or anyone else. After the flood damage, I mean.’