Dead Season (11 page)

He’d left the restaurant to stand under the huge portal to the city, the massive stone arch at the head of the artery that was the Via Romana, and tried to understand what Pietro was saying. Would the famous magic phone solve this problem he had of not being able to hear a damn thing on his mobile? Or perhaps he was just going deaf, along with everything else.

‘We’ve got a body,’ Pietro had seemed to be saying. ‘And I thought you might want a look at it.’

‘A body.’

For a moment Sandro had stood very still as the world seemed to whirl on around him, the traffic, the dusty trees along the
viale
, a gang of tourists just brought up under the arch and their guide gesticulating upwards.

In thirty years as a serving police officer in a big metropolis – most of those with Pietro beside him – Sandro had seen bodies before; he’d dealt with murders, but not so many that death meant nothing. That had been some time back, too: six months ago he’d investigated the death of a woman in a car accident, but by the time he’d seen her she’d been cleaned up, put back together and laid out on a refrigerated drawer under a sheet. It had been years – three, or was it four? – since he’d been first to a fatality and had to take the impact of it.

‘We’re at the scene,’ Pietro had said, and from his tone Sandro had known, even down a crackling mobile line with traffic noise in the background, that it was nasty. Pietro had spoken quietly – he’d never heard his old friend raise his voice – but there was just the trace of a shake, of hoarseness in the lower registers, that Sandro knew very well.

‘You OK, Peet?’ he had said, quietly in his turn. ‘Sounds like a bad one.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Pietro had said, and he had cleared his throat. ‘Not pretty. But he’s got ID on him, in the name of Claudio Brunello. A staff pass card, too, that says he’s the manager of a branch of the Banca di Toscana Provinciale.’

‘You remembered the name?’ he had said. ‘You haven’t lost your touch, Pietro.’

‘The story stuck,’ Pietro had said. ‘Sad one.’

And it had looked like a sad ending.

The lights turned green and this time Sandro scraped through on to the roundabout and into more stationary traffic. A people carrier came up alongside, bicycles on the roof-rack, and first a mother’s harassed face glanced in his direction, then her child’s, smeared and red, turned towards him from a babyseat in the back. Another child, bigger, was reading determinedly on the other side. Sandro shifted his eyes back to the road ahead and the big car moved on past. The rear window was crammed to the roof with stuff: supermarket carrier bags bulging with food, brightly coloured beach towels, the wheels of a folded buggy.

Claudio Brunello. With cold dread Sandro found himself back in that office where a framed photograph of a woman and three children sat on a shelf; where Roxana Delfino had told him her boss was away on holiday, with his family. A place in Monterosso: perhaps the people carrier that had just overtaken him was on its way to somewhere similar.

It pulled away from him, the father changing lanes impatiently; they’d been in the car an hour already and they weren’t out of Florence yet. Dangerous, though, to have the rear view blocked like that.

Sandro came up on to the wide bridge. Ahead lay the dusty trees of the African market’s sprawl, a splash of red oleanders, and the small tented structure that – unmistakable to Sandro – indicated the presence of a body. They’d cordoned off one lane to accommodate the pale-blue police vehicle parked at the roundabout, and the traffic was a nightmare.

Sandro parked under the forbidding, barbed wire topped wall of the military barracks, on the Viale Amendola, and walked back. Holiday traffic squeezed into the narrow confines of one lane, and rubberneckers. As he edged on foot between the cars, breathing the oily fumes, Sandro could see the faces. Turned in their seats and pressed to the glass, pointing at the forensic scientist in his long coat and latex gloves standing incongruously beside a busy roundabout like some postmodern civic sculpture, talking to a policeman. Just for a ghoulish moment or two they’d stare as they crept past, then they’d turn away, towards their holiday.

Sandro reached the crash barrier and climbed over, again feeling his age. Pietro, whom he’d observed discreetly monitoring his approach, tipped him a warning nod over the technician’s shoulder and Sandro stopped where he was.

As he waited, Sandro looked. It was hard to tell because of the white tent over it, but the body had probably been at least partly shaded by the trees. In these temperatures, he supposed that hardly made a difference; his gaze swung from the white plastic structure to the glittering heat haze above the big bridge. Below it, the river was low and greenish brown, clogged with weed; on the far bank he could see immobile figures sunbathing down where grass and reeds abutted the water.

At his feet the patchy grass between the oleanders was littered with debris from passing cars: cigarette packets, a fast-food carton, flyers from a restaurant. A child’s doll lay among the litter, the face smudged, the pink dress greying. No place, he supposed, to stop the car and go back to retrieve that doll, even if the child was howling.

The forensics guy was stripping off his latex gloves, and Pietro was shaking his hand. As the man walked back to his car, he gave Sandro an incurious glance; Sandro didn’t recognize him but then he was young, only thirty perhaps.

‘Where’s your partner?’ asked Sandro, trying not to sound surly. ‘You’ve got a partner on this, right?’

‘Matteucci,’ said Pietro with a weary smile. ‘Sent him off to clear his head, get a glass of water. I thought he was going to throw up: he’s not used to this. Came from a desk job in Modena.’ He loosened his collar. ‘And I can do without him breathing down my neck.’

Sandro nodded towards the tent, ‘When did you find him?’

Pietro nudged his cap back on his head, his forehead gleaming with sweat; over his shoulder on the barracks wall Sandro could see a tower with the red lights of a digital display, reading forty-one degrees. You could die out here, thought Sandro. He stepped further into the shade of the thin trees, the earth gritty and dusty underfoot. You could hear the river, a sluggish gurgle fifty metres to the south. The air was thick with mosquitoes.

‘About ten this morning,’ said Pietro wearily. ‘A kid in a high vehicle, some kind of people carrier, on their way to the country, he saw it. Seventeen years old. Got completely hysterical, according to the parents; they thought he was imagining it, or making it up, or it was just a drunk sleeping it off. Same thing everyone else obviously thought. But the kid just wouldn’t shut up, until they called the police.’

‘All right,’ said Sandro, thinking. ‘Anything yet?’ He nodded towards the forensics man, climbing into his car. ‘Preliminary findings?’ He knew there would be some. ‘Time and cause of death?’

Pietro grimaced. ‘Cause of death? Well, you’ll see.’

‘Ah.’ Sandro was in no hurry to go in the tent. ‘Time?’

‘He’d been there a while – I mean, considering. Three days at least.’

Sandro tilted his head back and looked up through the branches at the pale blue-white sky. ‘Considering?’ he said. ‘Ah. You mean, considering he’s out here in the open. Thousands of vehicles must have passed him, in three days.’

‘Maybe four,’ said Pietro.

Sandro stilled his head, searching the sky for cloud – real cloud. A good tower of raincloud building to the west over the Apuan Alps, cumulonimbus, the signal of the blessed summer rainstorm.

‘So, Saturday or Sunday,’ he said, still staring up. ‘No earlier than that?’

‘The heat makes it hard to tell,’ said Pietro, his voice so low Sandro had to strain to hear. ‘That – oh, you know. Accelerates decomposition. Especially in the dirt, and with the humidity.’

‘I know,’ said Sandro.

‘Pathology’s coming back to get him, anyway,’ said Pietro. ‘We’ll know more when they’ve autopsied him. Insect activity should do it. And there’ll be a toxicology report.’

‘It’s OK,’ said Sandro. ‘It’s just – well. My guy was seen Friday night. If it’s more than five days, then it isn’t him.’

But it’s still someone, he thought. It’s a husband or father.

‘Have you been in touch with the family?’ he said.

‘Trying to trace them,’ said Pietro. ‘Got a home address and phone number but there’s no one there.’

‘Assuming it’s his ID, not stolen, then I think they’re in Monterosso,’ said Sandro, jerking his head north. ‘It’s in the Cinque Terre. Holiday house. He’s supposed to be on holiday. He’s not supposed to be here.’

Pietro shook his head, barely perceptibly. ‘I think it’s his ID,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t look like a mugger: not wearing those shoes. Silk socks too, for that matter.’

The forensics guy’s car revved, his hand came out of the window in thanks to a car that was allowing him out, and he was gone. Watching the car disappear into the traffic, Pietro narrowed his eyes. ‘Do you want to see the body, then?’ he said. ‘They’ll be here for him soon.’

With reluctance they both approached the tent. A rectangle of the white plastic sheeting that served as a door flapped idly in the air displaced by the cars; there was nothing as merciful as a breeze. Sandro could see something behind the flapping plastic, dark on the grass, and he had to concentrate to keep walking, one step after another. Not good, approaching a body from this end, with all the faces already ranged in your head, the expectant, anxious faces of those who’d loved him, however misguidedly.

He bent and entered. Involuntarily raised a sleeve to block his nose. The smell was horribly familiar, the putrid smell of proteins broken down, of humanity turned to carcass. He moved inside, to the left, allowing Pietro in after him, turning on a battery floodlight as he entered. They squatted beside him: beside the remains of the man.

This was what Pietro had meant about the heat and the time of death. He’d been shielded from the sun by what there was of the foliage, but where it had got to him there was – decomposition. The body discoloured, just beginning to come apart. Sandro looked away.

Identification might be difficult. It depended: some people – some wives – could tell their loved one from the shape of his hands, or his hair. He leaned in.

A devastating injury to the back of the head, was what he saw. Hair black and crusted with dried blood, and a depression in the skull.

He didn’t reach out a hand to touch the man, to turn him; that wasn’t allowed. He just knelt, an elbow in the dirt, his face hovering a centimetre or so above it and close to the dead man’s. He could smell it. More trauma over the temple.

Had he changed to come into the city? Out of the holiday T-shirt, the shorts. The trousers were bloodied too, below the knee, fine grey summer-weight wool. The leg at an odd angle, as though that had also been broken; out of nowhere Sandro had the image of a piece of scaffolding pole held in two hands being brought down to cut the man off at the knees. Where had that come from? Sandro realized with amazement that it had happened to him, years back.

Twenty-five years back, interrupting a robbery in a warehouse. A gorilla of a guy had come around a packing case swinging for him with a metre of steel pole and making animal sounds. Luckily for Sandro the guy’d been so high on amphetamines that he hadn’t been able to focus properly, and the glancing blow had only resulted in a three week bruise. Pietro had got him out of that one, neatly cuffing the man as he staggered in the aftermath of the swing while Sandro lay cursing on the floor.

One shoe was off, lying with the sole uppermost: Sandro leaned down close. ‘Is that blood too?’ he asked. The pale leather was stained. ‘Doesn’t look like blood.’

‘It’ll be analysed,’ said Pietro. He kneeled, pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, drew them on and applied a finger to the dusty black on the shoe’s sole; it left a powdery greyish residue on his fingertip. They both looked at it, staring as if their lives depended on it. For longer than was necessary: to avoid looking somewhere else.

Then Pietro sighed, and raising one knee he bent down and delicately turned the head, just a degree or two. Over the ear Sandro saw something, matted.

‘The oleanders would have concealed the body quite effectively,’ he said.

Sandro, sitting back on his haunches, nodded.

‘Is that why he’s here?’

‘We’re thinking perhaps – hit and run.’

Sandro stared at his old friend.

‘Are you serious?’

‘It happens,’ said Pietro wearily. ‘You know it does. The injuries are severe. Consistent with being struck by a car.’

Sandro scratched his head. Rocking back, he raised his upper body a little to peer through the tent flap and over the oleanders. The traffic was moving slowly, the sun glinting off a rooftop.

But he was supposed to be on holiday,’ Sandro said. ‘Shouldn’t have been here.’ And stubbornly, ‘I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it at all.’

‘Listen,’ said Pietro. ‘The man was under a lot of pressure, wasn’t he? Money troubles? They’d be the least of it.’

‘What are you saying?’ Sandro felt unreasonable anger rising in him.

‘I’m saying,’ said Pietro, ‘that we should consider the possibility that he – he walked into the traffic. Deliberately, maybe at night, maybe he waited for just the right kind of car, one of those big bastards with tinted windows that’s got hit and run all over it.’

Sandro kept staring. ‘As a way of killing yourself? With the river right over there? With paracetamol in every pharmacy?’

‘Maybe he wanted it to look like an accident,’ said Pietro, his turn to sound stubborn. ‘You never know,’ he went on. ‘Suicide – it’s like everything. People are scared of doing it one way and not another. A personal thing.’

‘And no one stopped.’

‘Like I said,’ said Pietro. ‘We know it happens. At night, no witnesses? They’ve done surveys, you know. Ninety-five per cent of Italians say they wouldn’t report the accidental killing of a house pet on the roads. It’s something like fifteen per cent if it’s an adult and there are no other witnesses, and you know you can inflate that because some of those who said they would go back and help are lying. Different if it’s a kid.’ He straightened. ‘If he got knocked over the crash barrier and into the trees. Well. Looking back, maybe you could persuade yourself nothing had happened.’