The Disappearance of Signora Giulia (8 page)

‘Esengrini, it was not only the letter that was missing, but also the body.’

‘You’re right; they were both missing. And they were the first things I looked for. The body couldn’t be far away. The murder took place in the house and the spot most suited for hiding the body was in the grounds. When I found out that the grounds had been searched with a dog (Demetrio told me), I shuddered. She wasn’t buried in the grounds, thank goodness. And if she had been, I can tell you that I would have changed the spot if I’d been able, since it would have spelt my death sentence: I didn’t yet have the proof to hand that you now have in the file!’

‘But what proof!’ exclaimed the judge.

‘What’s there now. All of it, apart from one thing: I don’t know where her jewellery is. About six months ago, I found a letter in the post from Panelli, the lawyer from Milan. A mysterious hand was helping me. I’m not a believer, still less am I superstitious, but that discovery, so unexpected, seemed like a sign from the heavens. I came to believe that that poor little thing wanted justice, and had had no peace, knowing I was suspected of her death.

‘You can’t imagine what these past three years have been like for me! My daughter’s hatred – first she gets engaged and then married to her mother’s ex-suitor – the looks from my colleagues and clients, the magistrate’s behaviour… Everyone was convinced that I was a cunning murderer.

‘When I opened the letter, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was the phantom document! The letterhead was mine, the signature could have been mine. I began to fear actually having been my wife’s killer, of having acted unconsciously, by doubling, like vampires. During that period I’d been skimming a book called
I Believe in Vampires
, which spoke of the dead who return to the world without a conscience and suck the blood of the living in an attempt to regain the lives they’ve lost. I thought I was one of them. I believed, too, in vampires, in Doctor Jekyll, in the doubling of Dorian Gray – that character in the famous novel by Oscar Wilde.

‘I’d killed my wife myself, without knowing it, and buried her in the grounds or in the cellar. I remembered that cellar, with its exit near the greenhouse under the embankment the palazzo Zaccagni-Lamberti is built on. For three years, I’d never thought once about it. I went all over it for several days. I shifted the paving, even knocked on the walls. Nothing. But by dint of searching under a pile of smashed demijohns and wooden tables, I found a cloth button from a dress my wife had been wearing in the last days I saw her – it’s missing from her wardrobe – perhaps the same one she put on the morning of her death. It’s for that reason I requested that the cadaver’s clothes be produced as evidence.’

‘Will we find a button missing?’ asked the judge.

‘That button was actually another thing against me,’ the
lawyer continued. ‘However, I had to save it because it would become part of the jigsaw I was constructing. I put it back where I’d found it; that was the best hiding place. We’ll go together to retrieve it when the moment’s right. But it’s a trifling thing, and it doesn’t shift the blame from me to anyone else. They’ll only move the jewellery definitely when they find it. That is,
if
they find it. The killer’s ingenious, and he’s playing a difficult game with me. The jewellery is a crucial tool in his hands. If it could be hidden in my office or my house, I’d be finished. That’s why I asked for my office to be guarded by a policeman after the search. I feared – and I still fear – that the killer, seeing that the investigation is not winding up, or suspecting it’s going to broaden out to include to him, will opt to sacrifice the jewellery, and go to hide it in my office, where a thorough search will uncover it.

‘But let’s move on. When I found the button I began to think that the body could have been hidden during the day and then brought outside, who knows where. It wouldn’t have been easy, but it would have been possible. I felt I was close, incredibly close to solving the case! I walked around the grounds continually during the day while my daughter was at university in Milan. I examined every dirt clod. Now and again I took a pickaxe and dug somewhere, covering it up later.

‘One day, dead tired after digging along the wall near the villa Sormani, I started back to the coach house with the axe. I was dragging the thing on the ground, I was so exhausted. All at once it slipped from my grasp. It had got stuck in a hook on the lawn in front of the coach house, as if a hand had seized it. When I went to fetch it, I noticed that in dragging it I’d unearthed a large iron ring.

‘I tried to tug it up; it was stuck. I pulled up several handfuls of grass, and a manhole cover appeared. I struggled to lift it. It was embedded in the ground, with the edges sunk into the earth. Hardly had I moved it when a gust of damp air hit me. I’d discovered my wife’s grave.

‘I carefully closed it up again, sinking the ring into the earth and covering it up with grass. Now I knew everything. But I was certain that the jewellery wouldn’t be found in the suitcases. It was booty worth at least thirty million lire, and the killer couldn’t have thrown that away.

‘Meanwhile, events moved swiftly forward. My daughter was about to reach the age of majority. She got married without a word to me. On the same day, Sciancalepre came to tell me that I had to leave the villa; my daughter was now the owner. I left. The only thing I cared about was still being able to enter the grounds, and I made sure of this. Since I’m the administrator for the Sormani property, I have the keys of the door opening onto via Lamberti. That’s how I began my life as the night shadow. A shadow with little hope, since the jewellery could hardly have been in the grounds. The killer had hidden it very well, and had I accused him – with what proof? – he could easily have pointed the finger back at me.’

At this point Esengrini suddenly became very tired. His head fell to his breast and he closed his eyes. ‘Leave me,’ he said to the judge. ‘Come back tomorrow. I’ve had heart trouble for a little while now…’

The magistrate left. The next day he was at M—— first thing in the morning. He found the prisoner in fine condition and he prepared to listen to the end of the story, which had kept him awake all night.

But Esengrini had another request to put forward. He asked the judge to carry out an experiment: to take Marchionato’s petition for provisional liberty and the letter said to be from Esengrini to Barsanti and put the two sheets on top of one another, place them against a window and compare the two signatures.

The judge, who had the file with him, carried out the experiment against the window of the little room. The two signatures fit together perfectly. Only the dots of the two ‘i’s didn’t fit. ‘This signature was traced using a transparency!’ he exclaimed, looking at the letter.

‘Of course. And it’s the key to the mystery. Now you see why I told you the killer had written the letter. That’s the signature of the killer! And it was signed that Saturday!’

‘But where are you leading me, Esengrini?’ cried the judge. ‘Talk! Out with the name! My patience is limited. I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do. I’m not going any further in the dark.’

‘I can’t yet tell you the name. First I must find the jewellery. And I want to find it without leaving prison. Help me out a bit longer. Not even the attorney general of the court of assizes can uphold the charge without the jewellery.’

‘Esengrini,’ said the investigating judge, ‘after this experiment with the two signatures, which I’m going to submit for an expert opinion even though there’s no need for it, you need only come out with his name and I’ll order your release.’

‘Not on your life! I’m going to stay inside until they find the jewellery. I’m going out when “he” comes in. If “he” knew I was out, he’d know his time was up and he might make some unpredictable move.’

The judge went off to await further requests from Esengrini.

In the meantime, Sciancalepre hadn’t been sitting on his thumbs. By this time the case had been referred to the investigating judge, but no one was stopping Sciancalepre collecting more information.

He remembered having overlooked something. Given that Teresa Foletti had received a letter from Barsanti after Signora Giulia’s disappearance, then Barsanti could have received some of her letters in viale Premuda after he’d left for Rome. In which case the doorkeeper, not knowing Barsanti’s new address, should have kept the correspondence. Sciancalepre therefore decided to return to viale Premuda, in spite of the three-year gap.

Meanwhile, he wanted to look again into the nocturnal visitor’s route of entry into the property. He went to the villa, climbed over the wall with the aid of the iron stirrup, and dropped into the Sormani property. Just there, the ground level was higher than it was in the Zaccagni-Lamberti property, something Fumagalli had already pointed out.

But how did the visitor get into the Sormani property?
Sciancalepre asked himself. The villa Sormani also had iron railings on the side facing the country and on the via Lamberti side it was closed off by the palazzo. For anyone not coming from inside the Sormani house, it had to amount to one and
the same: climbing over one set of railings or the other. So why the Sormani gate and not directly from the Zaccagni-Lamberti side? It was a little conundrum to add to all the others. And as if that were not enough, Sciancalepre encountered yet another: walking round the Sormani grounds, he found the handle of a new pickaxe under the dry leaves that slid underfoot; a veritable club, with squared edges on the part that entered the iron head. He picked it up, scaled the wall once more and went to the coach house where the workmen were still busy. He asked them if they were missing the handle of one of their pickaxes.

Several days before, they responded – in fact, the day that the cadaver had come to light – they’d discovered that a new axe, one they’d brought along with the other tools, was missing its wooden handle. They showed it to Sciancalepre and he matched it with the handle he’d found under the leaves, noting its perfect fit with the iron part. Was this handle, then, the club he had seen the shadow figure holding over Fumagalli’s head? He confiscated the axe and took down the builders’ names.

Serious doubts began to creep into Sciancalepre’s mind. The same wearisome delays in the investigation and certain inquiries about which he’d heard rumours gave him a hunch that Signora Giulia’s killing could have an entirely different explanation from the one he’d settled on.

Like Hamlet, he kept asking himself,
The axe or the club? A club with a handle of horn – or the wooden handle of an axe? And why did Esengrini go through the Sormani grounds
? He thought about Domenico Sormani, unmarried brother of the head of the family, a gambler and ladies’ man known for his love affairs. For half an hour, he tried to reconstruct a secret dalliance between
Sormani and poor Signora Giulia. But then he remembered that for the whole of the year concerned, Domenico Sormani had been in South America, where his brother had a business. He abandoned that line of thinking and decided to take up the thread on the viale Premuda once more.

The following day he was in Milan. He recognized the same doorkeeper, still there. He identified himself and tried to get her to recall his visit of three years ago.

‘It seems to me,’ she said coldly, ‘that three years ago someone did come to look for the tenant on the top floor, that young man who was always seeing women.’

‘That was me,’ Sciancalepre pressed on, ‘with some officers from the police station. But tell me, that tenant who went to Rome without leaving his address, did he receive any more post here?’

‘I have a stack of letters for tenants who’ve left and have never come back to claim correspondence. Sometimes it arrives a few years after they’ve gone,’ the doorkeeper said. ‘Let’s see…’

She went down to the lower ground floor, where she had a living-room, and returned with a packet of letters. She let Sciancalepre go through them and to his astonishment there appeared, among the last three, an envelope which read:

There, on a yellowed envelope covered with fingerprints, was Signora Giulia’s handwriting, somewhat faded with time.

Sciancalepre sat down and recorded the discovery, asking the doorkeeper to sign the report. He hurried to M—— and
rushed like lightning through his office in order to grab the packet containing the axe and its handle. He gave it to officer Pulito to carry, and the two of them headed to the chief’s office.

The letter burned in his pocket. He’d thought it prudent, at this stage in the inquiry, not to open it, and to place everything in the hands of the investigating judge.

‘Let’s open it together,’ said the judge, after hearing the results of the Commissario’s latest efforts.

The letter was dated the Thursday of Signora Giulia’s disappearance and said:

‘Poor woman!’ murmured Sciancalepre.

The judge, however, exclaimed, ‘Fantastic! Wonderful! Now I’m sure Esengrini is innocent.’ And turning to Sciancalepre: ‘Let’s go get the killer.’

‘But what killer?’ asked Sciancalepre.

‘Oh, that’s right. You’re not
au fait
with Esengrini’s declaration and petition. Here – take this file and read the whole thing while I go and hear a couple of witnesses. Then we’ll drive to M—— and on the way you’ll tell me the killer’s name. I think we’ll be in agreement.’

Sciancalepre wouldn’t even have read the will of an American uncle with such delight.

When he found the famous apocryphal letter from Esengrini to Barsanti and repeated the experiment with the overlay at the window, his face lit up. But confronted with the signed notes in the lawyer’s diary, his thoughts once again became muddled. He turned his mind back, and tried to imagine how and when Signora Giulia could have written the letter to Barsanti that Thursday. Evidently at around nine that morning, when she’d sent Teresa Foletti back home. But who had ‘known about it’? Surely whoever had traced the signature of Esengrini. And if they’d traced it from the document containing the request for Marchionato’s provisional liberty, the operation must have taken place in Esengrini’s office in his absence. But when? The previous Saturday. And that explained why Esengrini had put forward the request for the sequestration of his office. That Saturday morning, the request for Marchionato’s provisional liberty had lain on Esengrini’s table, typed up and already signed. The lawyer Berrini had already been in Esengrini’s office and
the surveyor Chiodetti would be there later, when Esengrini returned from court…

Who else was in the office during that half hour? Had Esengrini left it for just a few moments, giving someone enough time to trace his signature onto a prepared letter?

Sciancalepre closed up the file, lost in thoughts that now had a sure focus. A little later the judge came back with some other people. Sciancalepre said nothing. He continued to think, starting involuntarily every now and again.

As he sat beside the judge on the road to M——, he whispered a name in his ear so that officer Pulito, who was driving, wouldn’t hear it – or maybe just because he still feared being wrong.

The judge nodded. They didn’t say anything else to each other, and for the rest of the journey they continued their silent scheming, eventually attaching a specific name to the findings Esengrini had dangled before the magistrates for a month.

As they entered the district prison for M——, the judge halted for a moment. He looked up at Sciancalepre. ‘What if we’re wrong? If this devil of a guy pulls out another name? If it’s all been an infernal game?’

‘We can expect anything,’ Sciancalepre admitted, shaking his head. ‘Even that mysterious man entering the game – the one who was in Esengrini’s office on the day of the crime, according to the witness Rossinelli.’

‘It’s been nearly a month since we’ve seen each other,’ Esengrini said to Sciancalepre after greeting the judge.

‘We’ve moved Sciancalepre on to other things,’ the judge explained, ‘but he hasn’t been sleeping on the job, and this morning he brought me a new key to the mystery, we hope.’ So saying, he held out Signora Giulia’s last letter for the lawyer to read.

‘It is to my great fortune,’ said Esengrini after reading it and reflecting, ‘that Barsanti has always been a terrible guardian of his own correspondence. He loses one letter and for three years leaves another with the doorkeeper. But in addition to my mind, there’s a hand keeping things in order here. A mysterious hand, scooping everything up. Now that we’ve got this letter, finding the jewellery isn’t so important. But we shouldn’t neglect anything.’

‘Now,’ the judge observed, ‘I too have a request: I’d like to interrogate your typist and Demetrio Foletti in order to ascertain who was in your office on the Saturday morning when the letter with your forged signature went off to Barsanti.’

‘The suggestion is a good one,’ Esengrini admitted, ‘but perhaps it’s better to put it off; it could turn out to be useless. Let’s try instead to reconstruct the crime, supposing, for example, that Demetrio Foletti had committed it. Just to check a possible theory.

‘So: my wife, overcome by a serious Madame Bovary complex and emotionally needy, takes advantage of her weekly visits to our daughter at the convent school in order to escape the atmosphere of our town. On her way to Milan, she has the fatal encounter with Luciano Barsanti. After the first few meetings in various spots, Barsanti finds the right place in viale Premuda. They’ve already exchanged letters, as we know.

‘My wife has the great idea of receiving letters through
Teresa Foletti, with the simple ruse of envelopes addressed by her in order to encourage the belief that they’re coming from her daughter. Teresa believes in it, but her husband, who opens one of the initial letters – the second or the third – doesn’t. Maybe more than one, but definitely the one which says that the little longed for nest is ready, and giving its address in viale Premuda. Like the true rep he is, Barsanti signs some of the love letters with his name and surname. Which means that Demetrio Foletti knows about my wife’s liaison, knows the name of the lucky one and his exact address.

‘He doesn’t wait long before deciding on blackmail. It’s easy to imagine how his desire, no doubt of long-standing, takes shape when he sees that the woman he once considered unattainable is within his grasp. With the mind of a gardener, he thinks that women, like flowers, yield their fragrance as often to the one who tends them as to the one who places them in the drawing-room; and sometimes more intensely to the one who tends them. One need only reach out one’s hand to such a flower, using, if necessary, a little strength, and one has one’s own share of the perfume… We can imagine the approach and the rejection. Demetrio, the family’s right-hand man, goes in and out of the house at any hour; and my absences are continual and often last the entire day.

‘Poor Giulia pays dearly for her evasion. At a certain point Demetrio becomes jealous, just like a husband, or even more so. And he dreams up the stratagem of sending the letter, purportedly from the husband who knows everything. He’s used the system of tracing my signature a few other times, with my approval, and when signatures of little importance were necessary in my absence.

‘Whether Barsanti keeps the letter to himself or whether he shows it to my wife, it must seem authentic. In both cases, and especially in the second one, it has the effect of halting the relationship. Foletti doesn’t know that the affair was about to finish anyway, and that Barsanti is already sated with the perfume for which Foletti pants increasingly jealously.

‘Barsanti was out of the picture, but he couldn’t hope to take his place on that account. He had to realise that, the affair interrupted, his arguments for blackmail are weakened. But passion has no sense, and we have to imagine Demetrio overwhelmed and blinded by passion – and also by a desire for revenge. He came from a town near Bergamo, and started working as a gardener in my wife’s house at the age of twenty-five. When I joined the Zaccagni-Lamberti house and transferred my offices there, I saw that he didn’t have much to do in the garden, so I began to use him sometimes as an assistant and sometimes as a clerk. He went to the bank, to the post, to various offices. I saw that he was intelligent: when he had nothing else to do, he’d read copies of trials, study the statute book and literally immerse himself in criminology treatises. He ended up being my right-hand man, and I have to say that he has always behaved properly and served me willingly, occasionally managing to suggest theories for the defence that I had to reject only because they were too subtle. Demetrio is a relentless logician, gifted with imagination and intuition. Too much for a clerk or a gardener. He married the maid of my sister-in-law, who’s dead. Teresa wasn’t bad-looking in her youth but she’s become an old woman in the last few years. We mustn’t forget that she’s ten years older than he is.

‘At the time of the crime, Demetrio was only a little over forty, a lot younger than me: he considered himself a good-looking
man, someone who’d begun to feel like something in between a clerk and my right-hand man. He could, in fact, aspire to my wife, all the more so after discovering that she’d already strayed from the straight and narrow.