White Death (19 page)

I was walking home when I suddenly realised my phone was ringing. I pulled it out and heard an unfamiliar voice. It was some farmer who said he had got my number from the beekeepers’ association. He had a swarm of bees in the corner of one of his fields.

I didn’t really want the distraction but I knew, from experience, that it can help. Sometimes the bees take your mind off the case and force you to concentrate on something else.

The farm was a few miles outside the city. The swarm was hanging from the branch of a tree like a throbbing, humming lump of dark mud the shape of an elongated football. The air was thick with little black dots, flying noisily in search of somewhere more permanent. Up close you could see that the amorphous lump was made up of tens of thousands of insects. The noise was loud, a sort of hypnotic drone. The farmer stood a good way back, watching with curiosity as I laid a large sheet on the ground.

Taking a swarm is one of the easiest aspects of beekeeping. It’s mechanical more than anything else. I shook the branch hard and the majority of the blob fell into my yellow straw skep. I broke off a few of the smaller branches and tried to throw the bees off them into the skep as well. Some fell off, some stayed where they were.

When the skep was full of the black mass, I upended it over the sheet. I propped up one edge with a spare brick so that there was a thin opening. Within a few minutes I could see some of the bees with their abdomens in the air, fanning away to communicate that this skep was the new home and everyone should get inside. Slowly I watched as thousands of noisy dots crawled up under the thing.

‘I’ll leave it here a while, give them time to settle. I’ll pick it up later,’ I said to the farmer.

He took half a step closer now to look at the sheet and the skep. He leant forward like he was looking over a cliff and nodded. I looked at him. His face was rust-coloured with grey stubble across the chin. His thick hair was dull and matt, like it was washed with ash. He was the sort of man that spoke in monosyllables, and even then only when necessary.

He stepped back and looked at me. ‘Drink?’

I nodded, trying to imitate his reticence, and followed him to a barn the other end of the field. Inside the barn two rows of cows were munching on hay thrown out in a central aisle. A couple raised their heads to look at us and mooed a greeting. We walked through the middle to a far corner. The farmer moved bits of hose and wire from a dusty shelf and found an unlabelled bottle. He poured two shots into two small glasses that looked like they hadn’t been cleaned for a year or two. He passed me mine without saying anything and we clinked and threw them back. It was the kind of grappa that had no flavour, only a cruel afterburn. He was already pouring two more shots. We clinked again and threw them back.

The drink loosened his tongue a fraction. He asked the usual questions about beekeeping’s yields and costs, listening
to the replies as he stared into the distance, like he was calculating the tiny profit margins. I told him it was just a hobby and he looked me up and down like I was one of his livestock that hadn’t fattened up sufficiently.

As he put the bottle back on the shelf something that looked like a power drill caught my eye. The end of it was slightly swollen, like the nozzle that holds a drill bit, but otherwise it looked like a pistol: a similar trigger and butt.

‘What’s that?’

He followed my eyes and picked up the drill. ‘Captive bolt pistol,’ he said.

He passed it over and I took its unexpected weight. I watched the farmer walk over to one of his cows and put his fingers to its large, flat forehead. He suddenly pulled his hand up as if from a recoil.

‘Knocks them unconscious,’ he walked back towards me, ‘so their heart is still pumping as you bleed them.’

‘Merda,’ I said to myself.

‘It’s very humane,’ he said in self-defence.

I swore again under my breath. I quickly thanked him and told him I would be back for the swarm in the evening. I ran to the car, feeling my ankle struggling to hold up on the uneven terrain. I revved the engine and sped towards the motorway.

I hoped it wasn’t true, but it felt true. It had the shocking, unexpected feel of a truth that transformed everything. It should have been obvious. The man’s anger, his tirades against the profiteers, his admission that he kept the animals himself. I had been so focused on the heavyweights that I had missed the minnow in front of my eyes. The sort of lightweight who
had snapped, had suddenly decided that it was his turn to impersonate the powerful.

The telepass offices were about to close when I got there. The woman on the front desk stood up as I stormed through her space and into the manager’s office.

‘I got the wrong name,’ I said.

The iceberg manager looked at me with curiosity.

‘Run another check for me, will you?’

The receptionist had caught up with me now and was looking at her boss apologetically. She was dismissed with a brusque tilt of lacquered hair.

‘Allora?’ the woman said, trying to restore order.

‘Carlo Lombardi. Resident in Parma. Check for 12 March last year.’

She tapped away and I watched her. ‘We’ve got a lot of Lombardis. Got anything more specific?’

I came round behind her and looked at the screen. There was a whole page of them. I took the mouse out of her hand and clicked on one after the other until I found the one I was looking for. I brought it up on screen and moved away, letting her take over again.

‘12 March last year,’ I said.

She clicked and typed and eventually I heard the printer whirring and watched a solitary sheet of paper emerge.

‘Prego,’ she said with pointed politeness.

I walked over to the printer and picked up the piece of paper. I stared at it, knowing that I had found my smoking gun. Lombardi had been in Milan the night Luciano Tosti was murdered. I felt more sadness than ecstasy.

The drive to Carla’s lingerie shop was slow. There were
traffic lights on every block and roadworks on every other. Impatient drivers played chicken with oncoming trams whilst others who knew the city better than me peeled off onto narrow sidestreets.

When I got to the shop I saw Rosaria. She was serving a customer and had three open boxes on the counter. The customer was picking up garments one after the other and inspecting them carefully. Rosaria saw me and nodded. The customer left without buying anything.

‘You like prosciutto?’ I asked Rosaria.

‘I’m a vegetarian.’

‘Well, we’re going to go and buy some crudo anyway.’

‘I’m working.’

‘Call your friend. We’ve got to go. Now.’

She looked at me for an instant and then walked off through the back door. She came back with the old lady who was holding the young boy. We left without saying anything. We heard the boy screaming for his mother as we got in the car.

We drove back to Parma in silence. She must have known what was happening and her face looked determined, set against the world. An hour or so later I parked up outside the familiar prosciuttificio.

‘I want you to go in there and just order an etto of the stuff. Here.’ I passed her a fiver.

‘Who’s in there?’

‘You tell me.’

‘You think it’s the man who killed Luciano?’

I nodded.

‘What if he recognises me?’

‘He won’t.’

‘He might know what I’m doing. Might realise …’

I reassured her. Told her to go in when other customers were in there, told her I would go in ten seconds after her.

She stared out of the windscreen for a minute, breathing heavily as she prepared to meet the man who had killed her husband. We watched a couple go in and she opened the car door and went in after them.

She came back out within a few seconds. Her hand was over her face and she was bent double as she walked.

I got out and opened her door for her. She held on to me, clinging to my shoulders as if she was about to collapse completely. ‘He’s the one,’ she said, ‘the one who came round to our flat and was shouting at Luciano.’

It didn’t mean he had necessarily done anything more than that, but it didn’t look good. I lowered her into the car and told her I would be back in a minute. I saw the couple coming out of the shop and held the door open for them before going in myself.

‘Detective,’ he said cheerfully as I came in.

‘Buongiorno,’ I said, formally.

‘What can I get you?’

‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ I asked.

He looked at me sideways. ‘Sure.’ He crabbed to the side door behind the counter and called his wife. He hung his white coat on the back of the door and came round the front. He put his hand inside my elbow, the way some older men do round here, and walked me towards the front door.

‘Let’s go outside,’ he said. ‘I need a cigarette.’

‘Sure.’

He let a couple of customers come in, holding the door open for them. ‘Salve, salve,’ he said, bowing slightly with the deference of the eager retailer.

Outside, we stood with our backs to the warehouse. He lit the cigarette and then turned to me. ‘Any closer to finding your arsonist?’

I shrugged. ‘I found him.’

‘Really?’

I nodded. ‘I know who it is. I know why and how. But the authorities don’t want to know.’

‘It’s all about profits.’ He waved his cigarette in the direction of the cranes a few hundred metres away. ‘What’s a human life compared to a healthy bank balance? If they want to build, they won’t let anything stand in their way. Not you, not me. They’re ruthless bastards.’

‘So you fight fire with fire?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Someone had to take a stand. You took it. You stood up for yourself.’

He turned and squinted at me, trying to understand what I was talking about.

‘The thing I’ve noticed’, I said, watching the cranes turning slowly, ‘is that sometimes indignation makes us do things just as bad as what made us indignant in the first place.’

‘What are you talking about?’ He asked the question with a fraction of aggression.

‘I’m talking about Luciano Tosti.’

He was staring ahead. He didn’t say anything, but pulled hard on his cigarette. I watched the orange end speed towards his mouth as he sucked in. He exhaled slowly and turned
towards me. He didn’t say anything, just stared at me. I watched his face melt from defiance to confusion. He turned away again and took a last drag on his cigarette. He flicked the butt towards the car park.

‘That man took away everything I had ever worked for. A lifetime spent building up a business and he took it all away from me.’

‘He didn’t exactly take it. He bought it.’

‘He bought it with threats. Burning my car, threatening my family. He bought it cheap, got planning permission and sold it at a huge profit. He deserved everything he got.’

‘What did he get?’

‘He got what was coming to him.’

‘A blow to the brain? Slaughtered like one of your pigs?’

I looked at Lombardi, who was still staring ahead. If he felt any remorse, he was hiding it pretty well. His face was set against the world, his mouth rigid as he breathed noisily through his nostrils. Eventually he turned towards me.

‘How did you know?’ he asked softly.

‘A guess. I saw a captive bolt pistol earlier on today. Just by chance. The sort used to stun livestock. The mark it leaves looks like a hammer blow to the untrained eye. Hit the temple in the right place and you can kill a man. And then I realised that you seemed more angry about Tosti than anyone else. I didn’t want to believe it, so I went to the telepass offices and got your records. You were in Milan the night he was killed.’

He closed his eyes.

‘I saw that you had driven to Milan and back that night, which was coincidental. So I spoke to Tosti’s widow again. She had already told me her late husband had been harassed
in the weeks before his death. I asked her to come to your prosciuttificio just now and identify you.’

He grunted. ‘That’s who she was. I knew her from somewhere. I knew her face.’

‘And she knew yours. Said she was certain you were the person who had come to see her husband in the week before the murder.’

He was nodding slowly. ‘I had gone to confront him, to make sure he knew what he had done to me and my family. And he treated me like dirt. Insulted me as if I were some useless idiot who deserved what he got.’ He growled at the memory of it.

‘So you went back a few days later?’

‘I hadn’t intended to shoot him. I wanted to scare him. That’s why I didn’t even think about the trail I was leaving, about the telepass data or even making sure I wasn’t seen. I just wanted to take out the pistol and wave it in his face. I wanted to make him weep and beg. Make him say sorry, that was all. I never intended to kill him.’

‘But?’

‘He was the same as before. He stopped for the cancello to open and even when he saw the gun he laughed. Called me a sfigato and was about to speed off down the ramp. I clenched my fists in anger. It was instinctive. And of course the thing went off. He had been laughing at me and then he just stopped. He just’, there was a quiver in his voice as he repeated it, ‘stopped.’

His voice was trembling as he spoke. I turned to look at him but he was still staring resolutely ahead as if I weren’t there.

We stood there for a few minutes. I listened to the sound of a distant, mechanical hammer, a rhythmic reminder of the relentless building. The cranes were gyrating a few hundred metres away, their triangular metal arms turning towards and away from each other as if in a slow-motion courting ritual.

‘What happens now?’ he asked. His voice was almost childish. He sounded bewildered.

‘You turn yourself in. You tell the authorities what you told me.’

He sighed heavily as I spoke.

‘Take a lawyer with you.’

‘They’ll put me away for twenty years. My grandchildren will be grown-up by the time I’m out.’ He was talking to himself as if I wasn’t there. ‘My wife can’t run this place on her own. She won’t survive. She’ll …’ He screwed his face up. His shoulders bounced and he slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, his legs twisted beneath him.