The Innocent (7 page)

And to cap it all, after two hours of drudgery among his dusty files, he now had to face that woman. What was her name again … ? He fished out the appropriate report and blew on it with a sigh. Annamaria Gori. All right. Things could be worse: twenty-nine degrees was hot for the beginning of June but the nights were still cool so you could sleep. It was miserable for the men without their shower but it would have been a lot worse in July or August. What’s more, if the place weren’t full of dust and chaos, he’d be annoyed because the builders hadn’t started work. Given that they had started, they’d soon be finished. Then, Esposito was at least off his hands for a while and he’d done what he could. Might be an idea to give him a ring next week.

Teresa had been very concerned:

—I do hope you don’t lose him. There’s something about him, I don’t know quite how to describe it. I mean, all your boys are very kind and well-mannered to me but Esposito … he always looks as though he really means it, d’you know what I mean? Of course, he’s a beautiful-looking boy but it’s not just that. When you talk to him his face kind of lights up …

I don’t want to keep him in the army because of his smile, for heaven’s sake!

‘Marshal? Somebody to see you.’

‘All right. Show her in.’ Keep remembering that things could be worse. At least the blasted woman had turned up at last—and, you never knew, he might get something useful out of her.

He didn’t. On the other hand he did find out what she was doing in that garden. He should have noticed at the time that she identified the pool by the plant growing there.

‘I wish you’d told me before. I’m trying to find out how a woman died. It’s a serious matter.’

‘But it’s nothing to do with me, though, is it?’

The two slashes of eyeshadow were bright blue today. It was difficult not to stare at them. Was she just slapdash or …

‘Tell me something, Signora. Do you ever wear glasses?’

‘No. I ought to but I don’t like myself in them.’

‘I see. And are you short-sighted or long-sighted?’

‘I can’t remember. One or the other. Roberto says when I renew my driving licence and they test my eyes I’d better get contact lenses, otherwise, if they stop me and I’m not wearing glasses, I’ll get in trouble.’

‘He’s quite right.’

‘Still, now I know you, I can come to you if I get in trouble, can’t I? I wouldn’t mind contact lenses but I couldn’t fancy putting them in and besides, you have to keep washing them and I’d be dropping them or losing them all the time. Wouldn’t you? Then he’d be annoyed.’

‘What does your husband do, Signora?’

‘He’s an optician. So you see, he’d be moaning at me every time I lost them.’

‘And you don’t fancy wearing glasses. So you thought what you saw in the water might be a dog.’

‘I touched it, can you imagine? It was something disgusting, I could see that, and it stank, so I told that gardener he should see to it. I mean, I could have caught something!’

‘Sign here, Signora, will you?’

‘What does it say? Roberto says I should never sign anything without reading it.’

‘It says you’ve received your handbag and checked its contents.’

She signed without reading it. As he showed her out, he suggested, ‘Next time, Signora, buy your plants from a nursery.’

‘Well, if I had, I bet you’d never have found that woman so you ought to thank me. They’re not flowering yet but Roberto’s already moaning on about the stone sink they’re in being too heavy for the balcony. He’s expecting it to hit the woman underneath on the head any minute, can you imagine? She’s a pain in the neck anyway, always moaning if Miranda puts the washing out. When did a few drops of water do anybody any harm? Still, if she keeps on being a nuisance, I can call you now, can’t I, after I’ve helped you?’

Once she’d gone, the marshal sat himself down at his desk with a determined frown on his face. What he determined was that Annamaria Gori was to become Lorenzini’s exclusive client. Along with Nardi. They were all Tuscans and should understand each other.

He picked up the missing persons list which one of Maestrangelo’s men had helpfully asterisked to indicate people reported missing in Tuscany. As he had expected, there was nobody the right age. Children got lost, or were abducted, unhappy teenagers ran away, often in pairs, to reappear after three days or so when the money ran out. Disappointeded older men, their personalities and their dreams eroded over the years, walked away in amazing numbers and never came back. Very few women in that age group. Young women in their mid-twenties left their husbands, changed their jobs. They didn’t need to escape, they could just go … except illegal immigrants. A very few young immigrant women escaped from the sex trade. Not nearly enough. If only she had a face … and hands, her hands could have told Forli so much. If only Forli would—

The phone rang. It was Forli.

‘I was just thinking about you!’

‘Thinking, “Why doesn’t he get those internal organs done?”’

‘Well …’

‘Sorry. You know how it is. That drugs shoot-out, a suicide and the post-operative … Anyway, I’ve done yours now and I’ll get the written report to the magistrate tomorrow, but there was something I thought you’d want to know quickly. She was pregnant—ten weeks. Could be the beginnings of a motive so I’m looking at the DNA of the foetus. I’ve started to track the woman’s dental work but you know how slow and difficult that is unless we’re very lucky. Another thing: I cleaned off the skull because it doesn’t look Caucasian to me. Mongoloid, I’d say. Now, it’s possible, these days, to determine race, which might help you. Unfortunately, I can’t do that here but I have a colleague in London who’d do it for me. Amazing chap. I’ll get a sample to him right away.’

‘But … the bureaucracy—’

‘No, no, no! No bureaucracy. A little bit of research between friends. You don’t know this man. They once turned up some fragments of a skull on a building site and he spent every spare minute he had on those fragments until he’d rebuilt the skull, modelled the face and given the woman the right sort of hairstyle for the period when, according to his calculations, she died. Put a photo in the papers and on TV. Solved a thirty-year-old murder case.

A case like this one he could see to over his breakfast with the crossword. He has a passion for crosswords. I’ll give him a ring tonight—no, tomorrow night. I’ve got nothing on tomorrow night and, believe me, when he starts talking about his cases, you’d better have nothing else on. He’d talk the hind leg off a donkey. Good man, though. Very good man. I rang him once on a case, I don’t know if you remember it …’

Some fifteen minutes later, the marshal hung up and rubbed at his ear. It felt hot. His spirits, however, were much refreshed and when Lorenzini came in with some evidence bags he found the marshal in good humour.

‘What have you got for me?’

‘Her clothes. Dried out and tested in the labs. Not good news, I’m afraid, as regards hard evidence, after so long in the water, but all bought in Florence. Good quality and well-known labels. Nothing from the marble fish—samething, the water. They’re sending it to Forli anyway, to check it against the shape of the wound. That’s it. Any luck with the missing persons list?’

‘Nothing. Is there anybody in the waiting room?’

‘An elderly couple. English. A stolen—or more probably lost—bag. Their passports were in it so the consulate sent them over here to report it.’

‘English …’

‘I’ll deal with it.’

‘Thanks. I want a bit of peace to look through this stuff.’

He caught a glimpse, as Lorenzini went out, of a passing wheelbarrow pushed by a wiry little man with a hat pushed to the back of his head and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The English couple stood on a piece of corrugated cardboard, looking perplexed. The door closed.

He had asked the builders four or five times not to smoke in the waiting room. Each time they said, ‘Don’t you worry, Marshal. We shan’t be wanting to use your waiting room. We only light up when we go out to the truck. All right?’ And forty times a day they left their trails of smoke. The youngest one sometimes remembered and stopped to grind his cigarette butt into the tiled floor. Things could be worse. He’d seen some boxes of tiles. They were on the last leg …

The marshal sat down and removed each piece of the drowned woman’s clothing from its bag and laid everything out on his desk.

Underwear: plain white cotton, bought in the department store in Piazza della Repubblica. Dark-blue linen sweater, label of a big, expensive fashion shop near the cathedral, elasticised blue jeans, the label cut out, plain white shirt, label cut out but a small white V embroidered on a pocket. Unmistakably Valentino. A very simple necklace of coral beads. A belt, pale, natural leather, narrowish, rather a nice buckle, and a maker’s name impressed on it. No cutting that out.

The marshal stared at the name, trying to decide whether to be pleased or not. There was nothing surprising about it. The woman had been found in this Quarter and there were only three possibilities when it came to handmade leatherwork of that quality. He was pleased to have a solid fact to go on but he’d have been even more pleased had it been one of the other two. Peruzzi, the crossest shoemaker in town. The only hope was to catch him in a good mood though, of course, he probably had no reason to remember this customer. Unless she was a regular. Unfortunately, the single shoe didn’t carry his name. It looked like a handstitched shoe but you would expect the maker’s name to be written on the inside and there was nothing. Besides, it was a funny sort of shoe. It was a very low bootee with a small heel and a pointed toe, laced up the front. The sort of thing he remembered his grandmother wearing, though hers were black and this one was pale natural leather like the belt. What was strange, though, was that one part of the shoe seemed to be different from the rest. The rest was all perfectly smooth and pale, but the left side was a little darker and had a different texture. Of course, it had been in the water but he couldn’t imagine that would account for it. Well, Peruzzi could help if he had a mind to and, if not, the marshal would certainly be spending the rest of his day away from the dust and noise. He collected up the clothes and called for a car.

‘I’m sorry about this. Be careful of …’ The piercing whine of three electric drills drowned the rest of the shop manager’s warning and the marshal followed her through a cloud of dust, stepping over a tangle of cables, to a tiny room at the rear. There was corrugated cardboard on the floor and filing cabinets and stacks of boxes were swathed in polythene. ‘It’s meant to be finished before the menswear fair starts but I’m beginning to doubt it. You can’t magine what it’s like trying to work in the middle of all this mess and the noise … Let me close this door so we can hear ourselves think.’ She looked around and started shifting polythene sheets. ‘I don’t think you’d better sit down, unless …’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll stand. I just want you to look at this sweater. You might have seen on the news or in the paper that we’re trying to identify a woman who was found drowned.’

‘I’m sorry. I never read the crime page.’

‘It doesn’t matter. If you’d just look at this—it is your label—genuine, I mean? There are so many fakes about.’

‘No, that’s ours. Besides, I recognise the sweater. It’s last year’s, though.’

‘And I suppose you sold hundreds of them.’

‘Hundreds, no. A linen knit as fine as this is very expensive. Over five hundred euros. Even so, I have five sales girls here and, with so many customers being tourists, we really don’t know them all.’

‘Of course not. Would your last year’s accounts show anything? If there weren’t all that many sold, if she paid, let’s say, with a credit card?’

‘I suppose it’s possible …’ She was a very nice woman, about the marshal’s own age, her grey-blonde hair simply dressed, her clothes quiet, and you could see she would have liked to help. ‘It’s just that, in all this mess and with the winter collection to organise for when the fair starts and the summer sales right after that, I don’t know how we’ll find the time. I really don’t.’ She opened her hands to indicate the chaos around her, frowning. She was wearing hardly any make-up and he could see brownish rings beneath her eyes.

‘What if I sent you one of my men and you—’

‘No! That’s the last thing I need! I’m sorry, but if you could just wait until the workmen have gone. It should only be a day or two.’

How could he not sympathise? He gave her his card and took one of hers. Picking his way out through dust and noise, he hoped, for her sake as much as his own, that it really would be a matter of days. She would help him if she could, he felt. Besides, he had learned one thing: over five hundred euros for an everyday sweater to wear with jeans meant that the drowned young lady had money. He got into his car and gave directions to the carabiniere driver, bracing himself for an interview with the angry shoemaker.

‘It’s closed to traffic,’ the driver reminded him. ‘Shall I go through anyway?’

‘Yes.’ He was trying to remember any occasion on which the shoemaker had been calm and cheerful. All he did remember was the time a pyromaniac had set fire to his car. Still, he needn’t have worried. The apprentice was alone in the workshop, standing at a workbench, his back to the door.

‘Good-morning.’

The young man was cutting out a piece of leather on a slab of marble, using a sort of scalpel, freehand. He finished his stroke and put the knife down carefully before turning with a smile.

‘Go to shop, please.’ He pointed. ‘Borgo San Jacopo.’ He wasn’t Peruzzi. What’s more, he was obviously Japanese and there was going to be a communication problem. On the other hand, he was certainly calm and cheerful.

‘Is Peruzzi in the shop?’

‘No Peruzzi. Today hospital.’

‘I see. I need to talk to him. Will he be here tomorrow?’

‘Yes. Today hospital.’

‘And you’re his apprentice? How long have you worked here? A year? A month? How long?’

‘Yes. Ten months.’

Was that long enough to make it worth asking him anything about the shoe? He’d know more about it than the marshal did, at the very least. He opened the bag and held the shoe out. ‘Can you tell me anything about this shoe? Anything at all?’