The Disappearance of Signora Giulia (5 page)

‘Look! Over there!’ she said. ‘Do you see that shadow stretching along the path?’

‘It’s the shadow of a branch,’ Carlo replied.

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘A minute ago it wasn’t there, and the path was completely lit up by the moon. The shadow moved forward while a cloud went by, darkening the grounds.’

Carlo shook his head, smiling. But just at that moment the shadow moved, reappeared farther away, and then disappeared. A moment later he heard the distant crunch of dry leaves under the magnolia, as if someone were cautiously stepping over them. Emilia shivered again and Carlo led her into the room, quietly closing the shutters. She couldn’t get to sleep, and only much later did she allow herself to be persuaded that the shadow could have been thrown by a bit of cloud, and that a cat had surely made that sound in the leaves.

Two nights later, after turning out the bedroom lights, Emilia felt like going out on the balcony again. Carlo followed her and found her intently focused on that bit of pathway where they’d seen the shadow two nights earlier. The balcony was dark, since the overhanging eaves hid it from the moon’s beams. For at least half an hour it would remain in shadow, invisible from the park.

Though her husband tried to get her to go in, Emilia wanted to stay there till the bitter end, keeping watch below. Eventually Carlo brought her a shawl. As he placed it on her shoulders, he followed her gaze. She started, suddenly more alert.

A black shadow was moving along the path that began at the gate. It came forward, disappeared under an arch formed by branches, reappeared, and again disappeared. Meanwhile, the moon had moved and a band of light now
fell across the garden façade of the palazzo. Emilia withdrew, but Carlo remained with the shutters drawn, watching through a crack.

‘Anything more?’ Emilia asked.

‘Not a thing,’ he said.

After that, Fumagalli hurriedly wound up his business in Milan and a few weeks later established himself in M——, taking on projects he could carry out by working at home, and going to Milan only very rarely.

He was convinced now that someone was prowling around the grounds at night, and he suspected it was more than a petty thief. He’d walked through the trees, checked the lock on the gate – which seemed to have been shut for a century – inspected the railings and the surrounding walls. Not a sign. He hadn’t even seen anything interesting in the old coach house along the external wall; on the ground floor, where there were a few agricultural tools belonging to Demetrio, he saw the gate key hanging from a nail. Rusty and covered with old spiderwebs, it had certainly not been touched since it had aided Signora Giulia’s escape.

Having made an inspection, he went to tell Sciancalepre about it. The Commissario looked as if he’d been woken from a long sleep. He listened attentively and asked if he could go out on the balcony on the next moonlit night.

A few nights later, just before midnight, Sciancalepre and Fumagalli took up their posts on the balcony facing the park. Emilia had gone to sleep in another room. With a bottle of good cognac and two glasses set out on a coffee table, the two of them cast a glance every now and then towards the moonlit
paths. Sciancalepre, fearing the damp, wore his usual black cap pulled down over his eyes. Until midnight he sat smoking, hiding the burning tip of the cigarette in his hand. But he stopped when the hour struck, leant on the windowsill and didn’t take his eyes from the path on which Fumagalli claimed to have seen the shadow.

Suddenly he put his right hand on Fumagalli’s knee beside him. He’d seen the shadow. He followed it as it appeared and disappeared in the moonlight, until it was lost to sight completely in the bushes in the middle of the park. Not long afterwards he heard the sound of the magnolia’s dry leaves in front of the greenhouse. And a quarter of an hour later he saw the shadow again: it stopped in the middle of the path, farther away, and seemed to him to pause there, turned towards the balcony. For a moment he felt as if he were meeting its gaze – the gaze of a man standing down below between the pine and the roundish mass of beech. It headed towards the palazzo like a death ray, making for the balcony and its white curtains, skimmed earlier by the moon, behind which the young newlyweds would be sleeping.

Sciancalepre slowly took his binoculars from his pocket and crouched down by the railing to look through them. Fumagalli also crouched down, because the rising moon had begun to illuminate the façade of the palazzo.

Back inside, they went to sit next to a lamp in a room on the ground floor, taking the bottle of cognac along with them.

‘So did you see that it wasn’t an optical illusion?’

‘I did – and I’d say that in my view your nightly visitor is
someone we know well, a rather tall man with a dark overcoat and a black cap…’

‘My father-in-law,’ Carlo concluded, his voice low.

‘The same. And I ask myself what he’s doing here in the grounds at night.’

‘Maybe he comes out of nostalgia for this place he lived in for so many years,’ said Fumagalli. ‘Unless he’s drawn here for other reasons…’

‘He’s had enough time in three years to walk around the park,’ said Sciancalepre. ‘If he’s come back, it’s for a reason. Tomorrow morning we’ll take a closer look.’

Early next morning, Fumagalli and the Commissario went into the gardens. They started by visiting the greenhouse, where Demetrio was preparing to put the azaleas and lemon trees for the winter, and continued into the grounds. They found no sign of footprints on the worn dirt paths, nor did the areas around the gate or the old coach house reveal anything suspicious.

In the coach house, the key was still in its place, covered with spiderwebs. They took their time examining the gate, conscious that if it had been opened, it would have left a semicircular track on the ground. They walked along the walls at the property boundary and reached the gate, where a wooden door opened onto the street from between two flaking pillars. Neither one of them had previously noticed this door, but they were sure that no one could have used it, because the lock was fixed on the inside by a wooden stick that fitted through two joints in the wall. There were no possibilities left apart from the hypothesis that someone had climbed over the
gate or one of the park’s two boundary walls at the sides. In the latter case, the nighttime visitor would have had to come through one of the two adjacent villas.

While Sciancalepre studied the ground like an old Sioux, Fumagalli looked over the coach house, which was near collapse. It was evidently a place where two or three horses and a couple of carriages had been kept some fifty years ago. On the top floor were two rooms, now missing their shutters, where the coachman had perhaps once lived.

Fumagalli saw that with just a few modifications, the building could be used as a garage for his car. It wanted only a rolling shutter in place of the fence, which had itself perhaps replaced an old door. A circular courtyard, now grassed over, opened out in front of the coach house, and was divided down the centre by a path that began at the gate and went as far as the middle of the park. There, it became two smaller paths in the form of a semicircle that joined up at the grotto created in the hollow at the base of the double staircase.

He could see in a glance how little work was necessary to complete the project; he’d also resurface the path between gate and courtyard with pressed gravel. As for the courtyard, he felt there must be some paving stones under the grassy covering that had sprouted up from the soil. To find out, he took a pickaxe from the coach house and hacked at the ground here and there. All at once an arrangement of old, round paving stones came to light, damp from having been covered up for so long.

Sciancalepre, who’d been walking around all this time, was curious to see the engineer swinging the axe. He came closer. ‘What the hell are you digging up, Fumagalli?’

‘I was just looking to see if there might be some paving underneath this grassy area. And since there is, all I have to do is uncover the rest of the courtyard so I’ll have someplace to put the car that won’t get muddy when it rains. I want to turn this coach house into a garage. Good idea, no?’

‘Great,’ said the Commissario. His voice was sharp, his eyes half closed.

‘But really!’ Fumagalli went on. ‘I have to make two turns to get through the entrance on via Lamberti, and even then I have to leave the car under a portico. Much better to come through the park gate and use this coach house.’

Sciancalepre wasn’t following Fumagalli’s explanation. In one sweeping glance he took in the paving stones, just uncovered, and the powerful hands still holding the pickaxe. He looked up at Fumagalli’s face before letting his eyes drop back down to the ground.

Not long afterwards the gardener went to Fumagalli’s office early one morning. Closing the door, he told him that he’d recently noticed someone had been clearing the ground in front of the coach house, and against the external wall he’d found a pickaxe normally kept inside with the other tools.

Fumagalli let him go on and Demetrio, with the air of having made a discovery, said he’d suspected some sort of intrusion in the park. For two nights running he’d had a look round at varying times. The first night he’d noticed a man near the coach house. He hadn’t had the courage to confront him and had turned back in the direction of the greenhouse. But he saw the shadow come towards him and, frightened,
he’d hidden behind the trunk of a magnolia. Peering out from behind it, he noticed that the man went into the greenhouse and moved around inside with an electric lamp he turned on now and again. Demetrio had remained still, waiting, and after a good quarter of an hour he could see the shadow once more, now stretching out towards the coach house. He’d made for the courtyard and left the property by the entrance in the via Lamberti and retreated to his own home. The next night he saw the shadow near the gate, facing outwards as if waiting for someone, but before it moved he thought better of it and stayed away.

‘You did well to let me know,’ Fumagalli said. ‘I’ve noticed myself that someone’s walking around the park at night. But rest assured that sooner or later, one of these nights we’ll catch him.’

‘I don’t want to imply anything,’ the gardener added, about to go, ‘but I have a suspicion…’

‘You think you recognized the shadow?’

‘I think so.’

Unwilling to hear another word, Fumagalli tapped his index finger against his nose and shot Demetrio a meaningful look: keep your mouth shut.

He clapped him lightly on the shoulder and dismissed him.

When Sciancalepre was told about the gardener’s discovery, he immediately arranged to stake out the grounds on the next moonlit night. There was still a week until the right moment and the new moon; the autumnal sky held only the barest, milky hint of it.

Fumagalli didn’t want to put off his work on the garage, so the following day he hired two builders. They prepared the whitewash, began fixing a frame for the rolling shutter and resurfaced the internal walls on the ground floor of the coach house. Having unloaded three carts full of gravel, they set to work taking up the lawn in the courtyard.

The stakeout was set for the night before the full moon, which Sciancalepre thought good enough. It would continue every night until something decisive happened. As a precaution, the Commissario was invited to supper on the night in question so that he wouldn’t be seen coming to the house later on.

Silence reigned at table. Although she hadn’t been told everything, Signora Emilia seemed very troubled; Sciancalepre tried in vain to make her laugh with a few Neapolitan wisecracks. Teresa, serving that night, was also very anxious. But everyone was hoping for a final conclusion, even a comical one. If things went on as they were, there was some danger of its all turning into a ghost story – featuring some old, long-buried Lamberti, or else the ghostly apparition that had concealed Signora Giulia for the past three years…

So that she should feel able to sleep, Emilia had been told that tonight they would simply try to establish where the nocturnal visitor entered the park. The arrest would take place on another occasion.

By ten, dinner had been over for some time. Teresa had cleared up in the kitchen and gone back home. A little while later Emilia went to her room. She’d been advised to turn out the lights at eleven and not to turn them back on until her husband returned.

At eleven on the dot, Sciancalepre stationed himself on the inside of the gate towards via Lamberti, ears pricked. The moment he heard a faint tap, he silently opened the door to his officer, the young and seriously sturdy Salvatore Pulito, used for operations whenever brute force was called for. Pulito took his place in the hallway with a Coca-Cola, while Sciancalepre and Fumagalli went to the dining-room to drain a bottle of Barolo and smoke a last cigarette before the action.

It was eleven-thirty when they went outside and into the park, Indian file. The moon was already throwing clear shadows. The three of them made for the coach house, avoiding the central pathway and walking along the dividing wall towards the villa Sormani. Pulito stationed himself against one of the gate’s pillars in total darkness, in order to block the nightly visitor’s retreat; they reckoned he’d end up instead in the beefy arms of the young officer. Sciancalepre and Fumagalli crouched down amongst the low branches of an enormous poplar, ready to leap out at the shadow as soon as it appeared in the courtyard, where it would make as usual for the park’s central pathway, and from there to the greenhouse.

After a quarter of an hour they were still cramped under the tree. Fumagalli was itching to move when both of them heard a faint thud, as if someone had leapt over the wall of the villa Sormani, not far from the gate.

‘So that’s where he comes in,’ thought the Commissario. What an ass he was, not to have considered it before!

Time seemed to drag – until the shadow appeared at the edge of the lawned area in front of the coach house. Sciancalepre and Fumagalli both saw him, and instinctively
nudged each other in acknowledgement. The black shape appeared in the unlit area and stayed there, as if frightened by so much moonlight falling over the lawn. It wasn’t yet midnight; the visitor could consider himself ahead of his usual hour. After a few minutes he started to move, walking over the lawn, in and out of the shadows, straight towards the coach house. He stopped in front of the entrance for a moment, then disappeared inside.

The two men under the tree were impatient. Fumagalli whispered to the Commissario: ‘Let’s block him inside.’

‘No! We must wait until he leaves,’ Sciancalepre replied firmly.

The wait continued. Another half hour passed, the shadow neither moving nor making the least bit of noise.

‘What do you bet,’ Fumagalli whispered again to the Commissario, ‘that we’ve fouled up? It’ll be some poor devil, a homeless guy who comes to sleep on the straw in the coach house. And before he falls asleep, he takes a stroll around the park.’

Sciancalepre kept quiet. Without taking his eyes off the entrance to the coach house, he signed that they should go on waiting.

Finally he became impatient and told Fumagalli to cross the glade to the border opposite, right into the moonlight, and then return to their hiding place the same way. Maybe this would encourage the shadow to move.

Content to have something to do, the engineer followed orders. He went out into the clearing and stepped lightly across the lawn, heading for the gate. He stopped for a moment in the shadow, before turning round and beginning
the reverse journey, moving just slightly towards the entrance of the coach house so he could hear any sound or sign of life coming from it.

He’d gone about three or four metres beyond the coach house, and was walking back towards the tree where Sciancalepre was waiting, when he caught the sound of a hurried step behind him. Before he could turn round, he saw two flashes from under the poplar and heard two shots. Far away, from the direction of the palazzo, a shriek pierced the air.