The Marshal and the Murderer (19 page)

'I can't go through with it! I'm in enough trouble already and you can't make me go on. You can't touch me without incriminating yourself!'

'I'll do more than touch you, I'll wipe you out, you and your dirty little factory both!'

The four uniformed men ran up the steps on to the terrace and Niccolini was shouting something, but the two adversaries, whether they noticed or not, were too far gone in their anger to stop themselves, despite the obvious danger, of so public a quarrel.

'Try it!' shrieked little Moretti, his face as red as the stains on his ragged clothes and his thin chest heaving. 'Try it and you'll be sorry!'

'Don't delude yourself! A man in my position has nothing to fear from a nobody like you!'

They faced each other squarely as if ready for a fist fight. Between them, on their right, the big-bellied pot stood on the low wall. It had a splash of white glaze on its rim and the Marshal noticed it, thinking of Berti and his white-glazed plates.

'If he sees as much as one spot of glaze on any of
his stuff. . .'

He thought maybe that was why it hadn't been packed with the others, but there was no time to think any further because his view of the pot was blocked by Niccolini who had insinuated himself between the two quarrelling men.

'That'll be enough of that!'

His two lads were flanking Moretti, though without touching his body which was quivering like a live wire. All their eyes were fixed on the slight, red-stained figure and it was a brutal shock when it was Robiglio who burst the group apart, flinging his arms wide in fury.

'Out of my way, blast you! What the devil is this?'

Niccolini, despite his bulk, was thrown sideways while Robiglio's right arm caught the rim of the huge pot and sent it crashing down on to the stack in the truck below. Red sherds flew in all directions and one sharp piece bounced upwards gashing Moretti's cheek. Niccolini recovered his balance quickly and laid a heavy hand on Robiglio's shoulder, but it was brusquely shaken off.

'How dare you lay a hand on me! You'll be hearing from my lawyers!'

'Oh yes? You've got the right idea there, you'll be needing your lawyers before this day's out. In the car, both of you. We're going to talk this over in my office.'

'We're going to do nothing of the sort!'

'No? Well, please yourself. Either you come with me quietly or you come with me under arrest for unlawful assault, wilful damage to the property of Moretti here and outrage to a public official. Suit yourself, but make your mind up. Well?'

The Marshal, observing in silence a few paces away, decided he wouldn't like to be the one to cross Niccolini. His colleague's eyes were glittering dangerously and the veins of his temples were swollen with anger. Perhaps Robiglio came to the same conclusion, because after a few more protests, designed to preserve his dignity rather than to be taken seriously, the group began to move off Moretti was holding a stained handkerchief to his cheek which was bleeding heavily. The Marshal stood back to let them pass, but at the top of the steps Moretti hesitated and turned to look back at the factory.

'I can't ... I can't just go off like that. . . I'll have to tell my brother. Someone has to see to things here . . .'

'Go with him,' Niccolini ordered one of his lads, 'and don't let him out of your sight.'

The rest of them went on down.

As a matter of course, Robiglio and the boy escorting him approached Niccolini's car. But Niccolini jerked a thumb towards the van.

'Put him in the back and stay with him.'

'He won't like that,' murmured the Marshal as he got into the car.

'So he can lump it.' Niccolini had calmed down as suddenly as he had flared up. Now he winked. 'Had too comfortable a life, our friend. He can rough it for once. We'll take Moretti with us.'

Moretti came down the steps with the young carabiniere at his heels. Once they were in the car and moving off with the van turning in their wake, the Marshal sensed so strongly the silent tension of Moretti behind him that he couldn't help remembering Dr Frasinelli's account of the child's first outing from the villa, of how he had sat mute and trembling, staring straight ahead.

Was that what made the Marshal turn in his seat. It was true that he glanced at Moretti but he looked back at the factory too, at where the solitary pot had stood on the wall, at the ramshackle building beyond, and then at the tall chimney whose top came into view as the distance increased.

'Firing again . . .'he murmured, seeing a rising curl of smoke and he gazed again at Moretti whose eyes seemed in that moment to become glassy and sightless. Then they were thrown forward as Niccolini slammed his foot on the brake. The van almost rammed them from behind. A series of angry horns sounded in response to the blocked road but Niccolini jumped out and held up his hand.

'Guarnaccia! Come with me!' He paused a moment to yank open the rear door and thrust his face in at the young carabiniere who stared up at him in amazement.

'I told you not to let him out of your sight!'

'But I didn't. He just spoke to his brother like he said' 'And told him to light the kiln?'

'Yes . . .'

'Guarnaccia!'

They had to stop the traffic coming the other way too, so they could make a dash for the other side of the road. It would have taken longer to turn the car. They ran back, thudding heavily along in silence, the Marshal panting in Niccolini's wake, only catching him up on the steps of the terrace.

There was no one in the kiln room and no time to waste finding any one. Niccolini turned off all the gas taps he could see and began dismantling the bricked-up door with his gloved hands. The bricks hadn't been cemented up with clay and they were barely warm.

'Firing again! He hasn't a damn thing ready to fire except what he wants to hide. Get some water!'

There was no tap in the room and the Marshal hurried next door in the hope of finding a sink. There sat the silent man who worked alone turning at his wheel, feet buried in the dark red parings. He might never have moved since the Marshal had last passed through. He didn't move now but followed the Marshal with his eyes without pausing in his work.

'Hurry up!' Niccolini's big voice echoed in the high rooms.

The only bucket the Marshal could find had red slurry in the bottom of it, but he dashed water into it anyway and hauled it back to the kiln room. Niccolini grasped it and tossed the water through the hole he'd made, coughing at the smoke and steam that issued from it.

Once they could get near enough they dismantled more of the loose brickwork so as to get inside.

'Whatever it is,' Niccolini said as they peered through the gloom at a steaming mound in the middle of the kiln floor, 'it's not the scrap of missing clothing I'd expected.'

'No . . .'

It wasn't clothing. The mound had been mostly burned away but what little was left was easy enough to identify, despite the muddy red water that discoloured it, as a stack of banknotes.

The Marshal walked slowly up and down the corridor with a coffee-cup in his hand. It was after five o'clock in the afternoon and someone had switched on the lights a moment ago without his having noticed it. Each time he passed by the door of Niccolini's office he heard the Captain's voice, grave and persistent, interrupted on occasion by Niccolini's more agitated tones but only rarely by a response from Moretti. Behind the next door a more heated discussion was in progress between the finance police, who had just arrived, and Robiglio and his lawyer. The Marshal was aware of these voices as he passed each door but he wasn't listening to them. Anyone seeing him walking slowly back and forth, his great eyes fixed on the empty corridor before him, would have said he was thinking hard. In fact, his mind was a blank. In any case no one had time to bother watching him since the little Station had never in all its days seen so much action as in the last few hours. If things seemed quieter now it was mainly because Robiglio had calmed down a good deal, probably on the advice of his lawyer, in the time it had taken for the Captain to arrive from Florence with the two men from the finance police and be brought up to date. Before that, Niccolini had made the mistake of talking to Robiglio and Moretti together about the stack of banknotes. When Robiglio had realized that the money had been burned he had jumped on little Moretti and hit him viciously in the eye before they'd been able to stop him. After that they'd been kept waiting in separate rooms and Moretti, his cheek bandaged and the new cut on his eye bleeding slightly, had begun spilling the beans to Niccolini and the Marshal, though only to the extent of trying to incriminate Robiglio while protecting himself. He admitted that Robiglio had asked him to export the money which was the proceeds of illegal gambling, and that Robiglio had intended to collect it once it had crossed the border. He even explained that it was to have been packed under straw in the marked pot which in the end had never been loaded.

'Why wasn't it?'

'Because your men arrived and parked themselves right in front of my place.'

'Otherwise you'd have done as he asked?'

'NO!'

'Come on, Moretti, you'd accepted the money and the pot was already marked.'

'He was trying to force me, but I wouldn't have done it. I didn't do it, and you can't prove otherwise.'

'You didn't do it because my men were there, you said so yourself. Nevertheless you had the money in your possession and that's, going to take some explaining away when the finance people get here.'

'It wasn't my money. He left it there.'

'Without your knowledge?'

'Yes.'

'But you knew where to lay your hands On it when you panicked and decided to burn it.'

'It's not true.'

'You put it in the kiln.'

'I didn't. He must have put it there!'

'So you told your brother to light the kiln with nothing in it? A bit extravagant, that. Stop wasting my time, Moretti. That was how you paid him off for the orchard, wasn't it? For your sister's dowry?'

'No.'

'How did you pay him, then? You were in debt at the time.'

'I paid in instalments.'

'You have the receipts?'

'He didn't give me any receipts.'

'Very trusting of you. You have the cheque stubs at least?'

'I . . . no. I paid him in cash.'

'How often? Once a month?'

'No - yes, once a month.'

'In that case we can check with your bank and they'll be able to show us the withdrawals that correspond with these payments.'

'No! No ... I didn't ... I paid him directly from

money coming into the business.'

'You have clients who pay cash? Well, well. Still, it will be no trouble to check your invoices and see what the amount was that didn't find its way to the bank. How much?'

'How much . . . ?'

'That's right, how much were you paying him each month?'

'I ... I don't remember. It varied.'

'Varied?'

'Depending on what I could afford ..."

'What a generous and understanding man our friend Robiglio must be! Who'd have thought it? You're a fool, Moretti, do you know that? You never paid him anything because you couldn't afford it. You exported Robiglio's gambling proceeds regularly and for each run you did he knocked a certain sum off your debt for the orchard.'

'It's not true.'

At that point the Marshal had left them to it and gone into the duty room to see if one of the lads there could get him a cup of coffee. He felt exhausted and it looked like being a long time before he would be able to get away. He was also both depressed and disturbed. Depressed because, however much Moretti might have been at fault, the fact was that his chances now depended not on himself and his greater or lesser guilt but upon the skill of Robiglio's lawyer and the line he decided to take. If he could extricate Robiglio and plant the whole thing on Moretti, he would. But the business of the orchard, the quarrel in front of witnesses, and the black eye inflicted right here in Niccolini's office had pretty well put paid to that. Probably his only hope was to maintain that there was no case to answer, which meant that they had to pull Moretti out of the mire along with Robiglio. Neither solution was what the Marshal would call justice. Well, it wasn't his problem, he could only do his job to the best of his ability.

What was disturbing him was the thought that he hadn't even done that. Even if it was true, as the Captain thought, that the Swiss girl had found out about the goings-on in the factory, there was a lot to be explained on that score. The body being dumped on the sherd ruck, for instance. It might have pointed to Moretti or it might have been meant to point to Moretti. But after seeing the money burning in an empty kiln it was impossible not to think that the sherd ruck might have been a temporary measure because the murder had coincided with a firing that could hardly have been delayed without arousing suspicion. Once the pots were unloaded . . . perhaps during the night - But no, it was too bizarre, too calculated! A body might be tossed down a well, or into a river, or almost anywhere in the heat and panic following a murder, but a thing like that, only a madman would do it.

The Marshal ceased striding up and down, pausing for a moment to lean his forehead against the cold glass of the corridor's one window, which overlooked the square. It was quite dark by now and an icy wind was sending flurries of fine moisture against the window. They clung for a second before melting into drops. The beginnings of the first snow. Below in the lamplit square the bronze head of the partisan gleamed a dark orange. The Marshal's body tensed as he set his cup on the windowsill and peered down, frowning. There was something odd about the statue. A placard of some kind had been hung about its neck. It wasn't possible for the Marshal to see what was written there, but as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he realized that the square was full of people. He hadn't noticed them before but the reason for that was that they were standing quite still in big groups. Many of them were staring up at the windows of the barracks. He could hear nothing, which made their presence all the more sinister. There was no knowing how long they had been out there in the freezing November darkness, but there could be no doubt that the anonymous letter-writers were among them. There might well also be some of those who had once stood in that same square on a warm summer morning when the flies had been settling on the mangled corpse of Pietro Moro. The Marshal shivered. It had seemed unlikely that anyone but a madman could have tried to rape and then strangled an innocent girl and planned to burn the body in a kiln, but there was no denying that there might well be a madman out there among that silent threatening crowd. Out there, not in here. Moretti was no madman, surely . . . and though he was wiry, he was so small. How could he have killed a big healthy girl without her at least managing to scratch his face for him? Robiglio was a much bigger man, a man who had brushed aside the hefty Niccolini like a fly that was bothering him. But that meant following the Captain's line . . . and the rape, or attempt at it? He'd said himself to that smooth young man Corsari, 'Somebody didn't take too kindly to being teased the way she teased . . .' But a normal man didn't rape and kill for that. Even so, there was Robiglio the fascist to bear in mind . . . the things he'd done during the war. Were those things normal? Where do you draw the line?