Valerio Varesi - Gold, Frankincense and Dust

Soneri’s mood darkened once more. “But what made him do it?”

The motive, one of the fundamental elements in a murder case, escaped him. Did Nina want to leave him? She had had so many other relationships. Or did he plan to leave her only to find he could not get rid of her? But she was not the type of woman to entertain regret, even if accompanied by threats of blackmail. No matter from which angle he examined the question, he could not make out what had led Soncini to kill her.

Musumeci’s call disturbed his reflections. “Commissario, I can confirm that the B.M.W. has the emblem of the equestrian club on its side.”

“Stay where you are. I’ll send Nanetti over to join you.”

“But we need a warrant.”

“You’ll get one.”

He called Marcotti immediately. “Dottoressa, there is a horse on Razzini’s car as well.”

“Carry on. I’ll sign the warrant at once.”

He then telephoned Nanetti, who said to him: “You sound in good form. That means that everything is coming to a head.”

“I might have found the person who murdered Nina.”

“Is that all? I thought it was something else entirely. That’s just routine for you.”

He would have liked to tell him to go to hell, but the moment was not right.

*

Two hours later, the first results came in. Traces of petrol were found in the boot of the car, perhaps spilled from the container of petrol used to set fire to the body. In addition, luminol had shown up traces of blood on the rugs, even though it was evident that the car had been valeted with immense care. Tests would establish whether the blood was Nina’s.

While having a sandwich in a bar in the city centre with Soneri and Nanetti, who had spent the morning working on Razzini’s car, Dottoressa Marcotti set out her own conclusions. “It’s clear to me that the proof is overwhelming, but I have to warn you that in the present situation that proof is only circumstantial. That’s sufficient for me to lock him up, but it will be a different kettle of fish when the case comes to court.”

The commissario was the first to share her doubts and feel dissatisfied. He thought he had had Soncini in his grasp, but instead he only had him by the hem of his coat. The affair still looked murky. It stank, but like something which spreads foul air all around without anyone being able to determine its source.

“If you want my advice,” she said, shaking her magnificent blonde hair, “don’t stop working on this case. We haven’t got to the bottom of it yet. Anyway, you know what the next step is.”

“Soncini,” Soneri said.

“Come to my office and I’ll sign a warrant for his arrest here and now.”

*

It seemed as though he had been waiting. Possibly Razzini had managed to make a call before the police arrived, but Soncini had the complexion of a man who had been ill. His face no longer showed that world-weary look which the commissario had found so unsettling. Two days’ growth on his chin, greasy hair straggling around a head which suddenly appeared small and pointed, wrinkles in the leather-coloured skin of his cheeks, all combined to give the impression of a man who had grown old overnight. The combative manner which the commissario had been confronted by in the first interviews was gone, and he now looked like a man resigned to letting himself go without even the slightest attempt to fight back.

“This is not a happy situation,” Soneri said, after a silence in which he pretended to be reading through some documents. In fact, he knew every word by heart, yet took his time so as to keep his adversary on tenterhooks. He expected Soncini to deny the charge or seek some way out but against all expectation he murmured: “Yes, I know.”

The lawyer who had accompanied him, a young man about Soncini’s daughter’s age, was also surprisingly reticent.

The commissario took that meekness as a sign of assent, and went straight to the heart of the matter. “Why did you kill her?”

“I didn’t mean to. It was an accident,” Soncini said, in a whisper.

“Bollocks!” Soneri threw back at him in an explosion of anger which surprised even himself. The figure of Nina pregnant appeared in front of him, with once again the memory of his wife superimposed.

“It was obviously premeditated,” he said, trying to control the words which were tumbling out of him in real fury. “You borrowed the car from your friend Razzini so that you could incriminate whoever had stolen yours. Maybe that was because you knew exactly who had stolen it.”

“It all happened by sheer chance,” Soncini protested. “Razzini was drunk. Nina had called to ask if we could meet as soon as possible. That was why I borrowed my friend’s car, and anyway he was in no state to drive. Do you really think I’d have planned to use a car the same as my own?”

“It was the best way to ward off suspicion.”

“It was an accident, I tell you. I left the place on Lake Como before ten o’clock. I don’t deny that. Nina was pestering me with calls, so I arranged to meet her in Parma in a bar not far from the toll booth on the autostrada, and after a short while I switched off my mobile. She sounded extremely agitated and kept on saying she had something very important to tell me.”

“Agitated in what sense? Terrified?”

“No, no. Highly emotional. Excited. She seemed happy and afraid at the same time. When we met, she threw herself into my arms, like a teenager, and told me … well, she told me she was expecting a baby. She’d just got the results from one of those kits you can buy in the pharmacy.”

“And you were none too pleased.”

Soncini looked at him with the ghostliest of smiles. “No, I didn’t take it well at all. You can understand that. I’m a married man.”

“That doesn’t seem to have stopped you playing about,” Soneri said bluntly.

“No, but there were no babies involved.”

“You mean there was always a clear agreement?”

“Nina had always told me there would be no problems. And then with the life she led … I couldn’t even be sure it was mine,” he said indignantly.

“So, you could take any liberty you wished, provided your affairs remained out of sight. It’s a sad old story, a little bit of philandering on the side. Even your wife went along with it, I imagine. From what I’ve picked up, there was nothing much between you.”

Soncini nodded slowly. “The fact is that Nina wanted to keep it,” he burst out as though this was the greatest monstrosity imaginable.

Once more Soneri had to make an effort to contain himself. The interview was touching more than one open sore, and he was tempted to punch Soncini’s face. “Do you think it’s easier for a woman to have an abortion than to keep the baby? For a woman like Iliescu, I mean, with the life she was leading?”

“She wanted us to get married. She wanted me to throw everything up,” Soncini sobbed. That too seemed an outrage in his eyes, that she would ask him to give up exclusive clubs, luxury holidays, moneyed friends.

“So you made up your mind to be done with it all, mother and child in one fell swoop,” Soneri cried, cutting the air with his hand like a guillotine falling.

“No, I keep telling you it was all an accident,” Soncini protested. Even the lawyer began to show signs of impatience.

Soneri made a sign to both of them to remain calm. “Explain to me how it happened.”

“We’d been talking a long time and it got quite heated. Nina would not budge. She said she was tired of living that way, that she was young and wanted a normal life. I told her she had cheated me and that it took two to produce a child. Then she started insulting me, saying that I’d taken advantage of her, that I had a good life while she was struggling to get by. We both lost our tempers and people in the bar started giving us funny looks. Next thing we got into the car and drove around a bit until we found an out-of-the-way place, not far from Lemignano. I gave her an ultimatum: either she had an abortion or else it was all over between us. She could say the child’s father was one of the other men she’d been seeing, or else she could say, for instance, she’d been raped by Candiani. What did it matter to her? She could take him to court and make herself a bit of money. Everybody knew she’d been seeing him. But she wouldn’t have it. She wanted me. She wanted to ruin me. Well, I started hitting her, not too hard, just enough to keep her under control and make her see sense. But she jumped out of the car and started running away, shouting in the mist that the whole city would find out because she was going to tell everybody. She seemed to have gone off her rocker. I ran after her. I thought I’d never catch her, but next thing I found myself on top of her. We had both run into a fence which you couldn’t see in the mist. She kneed me in the balls, and I lost it. I won’t deny that I went too far that evening. It was pure instinct and maybe I lost it. The fact is I landed a punch on her, the sort of punch you would give a man, and she seemed to fly backwards, as though she’d been carried away by the wind. I’d got her full on, under the chin. She fell with her neck against an iron railing. It had all happened so quickly that when I stopped to draw breath it seemed unbelievable, in the stagnant mist, the utter silence … I knew right away she was dead. I was scared out my wits. I had a couple of grains of powder with me and I took them. What did it matter any more? I was done for. There was no hope. However, the cocaine cleared my head and I started to think. I dragged the body into a field. Then I went to the workshop and got a container used for solvents and a sheet of canvas used for packing. I filled the container with petrol at a self-service garage, and went back to get Nina. After about a quarter of an hour I bundled her into the boot of the car. I returned to the workshop and went round to the yard at the back. It gives onto a ditch there where they often light fires to burn the crates used by a transport company. I had an hour before the arrival of the night guards on their midnight round. The petrol makes quick work of everything. It flares up quickly, burns a few minutes and then dies down. With all that mist around, there wasn’t much chance of anyone seeing me. I waited for the corpse to cool down before I could wrap it up in the canvas again. That didn’t take long with the temperature what it was. I laid the body on the back seat and drove onto the autostrada. I knew there was an encampment of Romanian gypsies at Cortile San Martino, and since Nina was an illegal, I thought of leaving the body there. An autostrada is the most anonymous place in the world. The whole world uses the autostrada! However, I couldn’t have foreseen that there would be a pile-up at exactly that point. But for that, the body wouldn’t have been discovered for ages.”