Tuscan Termination Read online

  Ganz thought for a moment, then pulled his passport out of his pocket. He suddenly felt quite sure that for some reason they didn’t really think he’d done it. He said “I giff you this, and traffel to Florence now. Germany can vait. I tell the truth. I know you vould suspect me, but I am innocent. I haff nothing to fear – nein? I vill do my normal tour round in Italy, I vill need to go to Milan, Venice, Rome, and Naples. I shall be back here,” he stabbed a forefinger at the ground, “ I think about the end of the month, but I vill report to the police in every town. Also I giff the name of the Hotel vhere I stay. Is vhat you vant – nicht wahr?”

  “If you fail to do so, I will put out an alert and have you arrested as a murder suspect. Now, the statement and your signature, and then you are free to go, unless you change your mind.”

  “Change my mind?”

  “Yes, and tell me that you did it. A confession.”

  “No, I do not. I cannot confess to vhat I do not do – ja?”

  Some time later, Herman Ganz was accompanied to his house to collect the ill-packed suitcase and then escorted to the station in time for the train to Florence. As he closed the door on his house, and started down the track to the waiting police car, one of the two ‘carabinieri’ said to him “It’s pretty inconvenient not being able to drive a car up to the house. You should ask for permission to build a road.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” he replied. “Ci sto pensando.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The day after Ettore’s death, Hilary made a statement at the police station, and after that had been left in pace. She had watched a team of quiet men discretely examine every inch of the pool area, dusting for fingerprints, and putting small objects into plastic bags. All the garden tools had been removed from the shed. Slowly the searchers had moved over the whole garden area, and into the garage. They had been inside the house as well.

  The newspaper headlines, on the first day, had screamed “Tragic Death of a Young Man” and “Autopsy to be performed on Young Real Estate agent” and “Young Man Drowned in an Englishman’s Pool”. It wasn’t until the next day, that the headlines changed to “Foul Play suspected for Real Estate Agent’s Death”. Some more cautious ones said “Inquiry into Young Man’s Death-Not an Accident?” and “Accidental Death or Suicide?”

  Now, four days after the event, it seemed evident that Ettore Fagiolo had been murdered. Gossip was rife in the small town, as everyone tried to find a plausible explanation for his death.

  The body had been returned to the family and the funeral was to be that afternoon. Ettore was to be buried in the town cemetery, by the elderly priest who had married his parents, and baptised him. The service would be held in the church used by his ancestors, and his body laid to rest in the same graveyard as his grandparents and other relatives who had died before him. The whole town turned out to join his funeral procession, but Hilary stayed home. She had long ago decided not to attend funerals because, to go to one meant to go to all, or cause offence. This way it was just accepted as part of her foreignness. She could hear the bells tolling - able now to recognise the different calls, festive or funereal, and the joyful mid-day peal by which she used to time herself, the call for local council meetings, the toll for vigils, and the quarter hourly tolling away of time.

  Ettore was dead, and now it seemed likely that he had been murdered, speculation was pointless for she had no idea who could have killed him, or why, but others with more privileged information, or insight or inventive capacity, accepted no limits and the town heaved and bubbled with speculation. She had been honoured with many versions, mainly because she had found the body and was accepted by everyone as an important witness. “Witness to what?” she said. “I only had the misfortune to look out of the window, see a body and report it.” Nevertheless, this morning she had been told that a wronged woman had killed him; a German resident had done it in a drunken rage; a jealous husband had found him in the Proctors’ villa with his wife and had killed him, and countless variations involving, thieves, drug rings and even the Mafia.

  She sat on her terrace; the town was silent now, no doubt the procession was shuffling down to the cemetery about half a mile from the town centre. The day was humid, and she thought how marvellous it would be to bathe, but where? Maybe the river? It was three-thirty. She rushed around in the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, washed some fruit, and made a cheese roll.

  She grabbed a book and her bag. She had a towel in the car.

  What bliss to leave the cloying atmosphere of the town and drive, the car slicing the thick air into movement, creating the illusion of a breeze as she drove to the river. Then minutes later she walked across the scalding boulders and dropped her bag beside the torrent. The water was a clear blue-white colour and moved fast and transparent over boulders, smoothed by its passage over time. A yard from the bank it was about three metres deep and slower moving as it swirled into a natural pool overhung by a steep bank on the other side, which the local boys used as a diving platform, like miniature Tarzans. But today she was alone. The only person in the world: the water bubbling, frogs calling, rustling noises in the trees on the other bank. Nothing else.

  She swam in the icy water and felt refreshed: this affair had begun to dominate her life recently, she had been sleeping badly and having trouble relaxing and concentrating. Her work had fallen behind and the deadline for completion of the translation drew nearer without any appreciable reduction of the sheaf of paper still to be worked through. This is ridiculous, she thought, I must get down to some work. It’s not as though I even liked Ettore. I actively disliked him. He was an unscrupulous, and rather unpleasant young man, with his red Porsche, and dark glasses. As she recollected him, a memory of meeting him recently as she drove to the coast, flashed into her mind. His Porsche had been parked on the roadside and Ettore was lounging against it talking to Marco, the son of a local bar owner. The two dark heads were bent towards each other, as though earnestly exchanging important information. They had looked up at the same moment, straight at her, as her car drove slowly by them. Since Ettore’s death, Marco had been in obvious misery. She had seen him the day before, in his father’s bar, white faced, with dark circles under his green eyes, and his adolescent beauty somehow marred, so that he looked prematurely aged. Could he be involved somehow in this business, or was he just grieving for the loss of an idol more than a friend? A friend almost twice his age, and in many ways a bad influence on him. She knew that Marco had recently been caught smoking a joint, luckily before his eighteenth birthday. Had this been due to Ettore’s influence? It was fortunate that no other drugs had been found on him, but Marco’s father had reacted very badly. To him, smoking a joint was as unthinkable as shooting up.

  She felt suddenly extremely cold, and climbed out of the water, her teeth chattering, to wrap herself in a wonderfully warm towel. Then she found a comfortable hollow in the boulders, and began to eat her cheese roll, and read her book. Another hour or so, and the sun would dip behind the hill, and then she would go home and work.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Augusta Fagiolo settled her senile husband into bed for an afternoon rest. He would sleep for at least two hours and she had things to do. Her only child was dead and buried. In the room he used at home, there was nothing, only some of his clothes and shoes. She had taken the keys to his office and knew she must go there now and sort out the debris of his life.

  She wore black and tied the laces on her best shoes with gnarled hands. Arthritis after years of wear and tear was only to be expected. She was a simple woman, her parents had been peasants, and she had left school at the end of the second year at elementary school. She had begged to be allowed to continue, but her father had been adamant. He needed her to look after the sheep, walk with them all day as they roved from pasture to pasture. So she had obeyed, spending lonely days in the country, with only the dogs for company and the bells of the sheep clanging their whereabouts. But she was stubborn, and
although she had had little schooling she had continued to read, and to learn.

  As a woman there was not much for her but marriage and work in the house or on the land, but she could help her son who was a slow learner. She wanted something better for him. She had done her best by this son; forced him to continue his studies to become a ‘geometra’ and given him her savings to start up as an estate. agent Now she must do her best to protect his memory.

  The key turned easily in the lock, and for only the second time in her life, she went in. The day before the official opening he had shown her round, but there had been no reason to return. She glanced at the office where he received his clients. A huge desk, carpets on the floor, a soft sofa, a low table and on it some copies of architectural magazines. She walked through to the back office; here were the worktables, computers, and the drawing boards. He employed two young men barely out of school to do the designs, which he signed as his own. There was one other room, in which Ettore used to keep a change of clothes and shoes and there he kept all his bills, invoices and bank account statements. This was the room she needed to look in. She had brought a roll of black rubbish bags with her. She opened the wardrobe and began removing his clothes. There were quite a lot. She folded them and put them in a bag for charity, but she ran her hands into every pocket and emptied them out first. When she had finished she had two packets of condoms, (one half empty), a very small, very sharp pen-knife, an empty biro pen, two little packets of powder, some book matches from night clubs, a half empty packet of black, gold tipped cigarettes, and several keys with name tags on them, these last she took through to the work room and put into a drawer in a desk. After some thought she took the packets of powder and put them into her pocket. The rest went into another black bag. She opened a cupboard door and checked the contents on each shelf. There were folders containing bank statements, which went back several years. These she ignored after checking that their contents tallied with what written on the outside. There were bills, invoices and other paper work concerned with the financial or the bureaucratic side of his work. There were the customer files for work in progress. All these she methodically checked and replaced.

  It was hot in the office, so she turned on the overhead fan and opened a window. She found a locked cupboard door and after trial and error with the keys on the bunch, opened it. She knew immediately, that this was what she had come here for. There were videocassettes with disgusting illustrations on their covers. The titles gave no illusion as to their contents. Well, she thought, I find it revolting, but these days things are different. Her hand sketched the sign of the cross on her breast. She began throwing them into a rubbish bag. She had put on a pair of cotton gloves and had brought a cloth with her. She would wipe his fingerprints off each one, even though they were going to be destroyed, just in case. As she removed them from the shelves she glanced at them, then gave an involuntary cry; the one she was holding had two men on the cover locked in sexual congress. She muttered a prayer, threw it in the bag and stoically continued. There were others, some with young boys, so young as to be just out of childhood. She felt a terrible shame. Who was this son of hers?

  She did not know him; she did not want to know him.

  She threw the last one in, and picked up a box containing photos, of men, naked men alone or with other men, or with a woman, or more than one woman. They were graphically obscene. She felt ill. In a separate envelope was a dreadful photo of a creature that was neither man nor woman. It was wearing a red curly wig and laughing. The mouth was open wide, the head thrown back. Large golden hoops dangled from its ears, and it was wearing heavy make-up, but nothing else. She looked at it thoughtfully, averting her eyes from the lower half, concentrating on the face. It reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t think who. She put it on one side. Then she found a small folder of photos of children, little boys. They were brown skinned and thin, their eyes resigned.

  “Not the children, dear God,” she wept. All the photos she set aside in a separate bag. She would tear them into a thousand shreds, and then burn them and bury the ash. She hoped God would forgive him, and she would try to herself, but the images seemed burned into her retina, and she experienced such horror, that she felt there could be no forgiveness. A locked drawer contained a bag of loose pills, which she put in with the photos. There were a few non-professional photos, she took them out, and Marco smiled up at her, naked and erect, his face impudent and inviting.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As she had expected, Hilary had been called to the police station, the day after the discovery of the body, to sign a formal statement, but she was rather surprised to receive a request to return there for further questioning, the day after the funeral. When she arrived, the local Maresciallo greeted her quite kindly and escorted her to a room where a man, wearing a well cut, linen suit, was sitting behind a desk He rose to his feet and courteously asked her to be seated, introducing himself as Dottor Ruggero Di Girolamo, the magistrate in charge of the case.

  “Good morning, please be seated. You are Signora Hilary Odescalchi née Wright?”

  “Good-morning, and yes I am.”

  They spoke in Italian. He was very attractive, fairly tall, slim and very well dressed. He smiled, his dark blue eyes engaging hers. They shook hands and he indicated a chair, and then sat down himself. Di Girolamo had a case file in front of him to which he referred,

  “This is just a formality. I know you have already made a statement but I would like to go over one or two things with you.” He looked at her, gave another brief smile and continued.

  “You were born in Great Britain, in I957, on December 25th, were married in 1974 to Guido Odescalchi, born in Italy, in the Province of Lucca, in the town of Borgo del Castello, on 5th September I935, by whom you had two children; a female in I978, and a male in 1981. Guido Odescalchi subsequently died on January 8th 1987 as the result of injuries sustained in a car crash, is that correct?” He looked up at her again.

  “Yes, quite correct.” The sum of my life in two sentences, she thought.

  “So you have two children, Alexander aged 20, and Amanda aged 23. Where are they now, do they live here?”

  “No, no they don’t. Alex is at university, in Kent, though he’s on holiday in Greece now, and Amanda is a Social worker in London. They do come here for holidays, when they can, but not more than two or three times a year.”

  “Were they, either of them I mean, here on the 8th of July?”

  “No.” She felt it to be a strange question.

  “I see. Now, your address is No.1, Via del Sole, and you work as a translator, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could I see your passport please, or identity card. I presume you have both.”

  “Yes, I do, have both I mean. Do you want to see both?

  “Yes,” he looked at her again. “This is merely a formality as I said before.”

  She handed him her documents. Somehow she felt a little uneasy, not that she had any reason to, but being in a police station was always a little unnerving.

  He looked at her British passport and Italian Identity Card, and handed them back without comment.

  “Signora Wright,” he said following the Italian custom of using a woman’s maiden name, while calling her Signora, “I am sorry to have to ask you this, but I will have to ask you to allow us to take your finger-prints. We need the fingerprints of anyone who frequented the house, the Villa Rosa, so that we can eliminate all the known ones, and who knows, maybe find some unknown ones! It was overlooked when you came here to make your statement, and I am afraid I still have unidentified finger-prints.” He smiled reassuringly as though guessing at her discomfort.

  She tried to sound unconcerned as she replied, “Of course, I understand.”

  “Good. But before we do that I would like to ask you a few questions, just so that I can get a general idea of things. As you know, I am not in service in this area. Perhaps you could tell me something about your friends, the
Proctors?”

  “Well that’s just it,” she replied, “I can’t much, as I know so little of them myself, and I must tell you that they are neighbours, not friends.”

  “Not friends,” he paused “I must have misunderstood, I thought you were very friendly. I understood that you were given the run of the house and use of the pool during their absence.” His tone sounded a little harsh. He paused again, and then suddenly said “Were you there on the night of the 8th of July?”

  “What!” She took a deep breath thinking, I don’t believe this, and said, “No I was not. If you want me to sign a statement to that effect I will.”

  “Yes, I will ask you to do that,” he replied calmly. “Now, about these neighbours,” he paused significantly, “not friends, I would like you to tell me everything you know about them, their lives, their friends and their activities.”

  “Everything won’t take long, I assure you. About three years ago they came to Italy looking for a house to buy. They know Italy quite well, speak the language reasonably and decided they wanted to live here as residents. I think they looked in several areas before some one put them on to Ettore Fagiolo, the real estate agent. They fell in love with the house, Casa Balduini, which they later painted pink and then re-named Villa Rosa. It was falling to pieces when they bought it, and had been empty for 10 years which was when the previous owner, Signorina Rossi, died. Um, they bought it, renovated it, built the swimming pool and want to live in it most of the year. He is some kind of computer expert and sometimes goes abroad for brief periods, and she loves the house and garden and looks after them. They are my neighbours, nothing more and as a good neighbour, I said I would water the plants while they’re away, and they said, “Use the pool” and that’s about it. By the way I’m worried about the plants, if you haven’t finished with the house, could one of your men water them?”