Conor Fitzgerald - Fatal Touch

A few more minutes passed and Inspector Mattiola and Sovrintendente Grattapaglia came out of the building to his right.

“How many people did you two manage to talk to?” asked Blume.

“Two,” said Grattapaglia.

“Five,” said Caterina.

“So which is it,” said Blume. “Five or two?”

“Seven,” said Grattapaglia.

“Ah,” said Blume. “You split up.”

“It was quicker that way,” said Caterina.

“Sure.” Blume lifted his bag onto his shoulder. “Treacy lived a few minutes from here. We’re going to check his house, see what we can find.”

Grattapaglia stepped forward, “I’ll take that bag for you.”

“No, it’s not heavy — also, you’re staying here. Continue coordinating the house-to-house interviews, watch this area, note who comes by.”

Grattapaglia stepped back without a word.

Blume nodded to Caterina. “Inspector, shall we go?”

Blume spoke as he walked down the lane, “We still have to treat a death from unknown causes as if it was a murder. Because it could be a murder. And to do this properly, we have to convince ourselves that it is a murder, which means ignoring all my experience which says it isn’t. Are you following?”

“I wish you had not humiliated Grattapaglia like that in front of me,” said Caterina. “You were the one who said I had to start getting on better with people.”

“Too bad. You blew your chance. I detailed you and him to go door-to-door together, and you didn’t.”

“So you’re punishing me too, by angering him all the more?”

“Sort of. You need to learn to handle this sort of petty stuff. I don’t know what it was like in Immigration Affairs, but it seems to me you must have been surrounded by selfless superior beings such as the rest of the force can only dream of.”

Caterina increased her pace to keep up as Blume hurried down Via Benedetta. She caught up with him as they reached Piazza della Malva. “Most of my old colleagues were petty bastards, too. Was he married?”

“Treacy? Not according to his ID card, but he could have been living with someone. We’ll see now. You know, I’ve been turning that name over in my mind. It’s familiar to me. He was an artist, according to his ID card.”

“A painter?” asked Caterina.

“I guess so. It’s bad enough putting down ‘artist’ as your profession, but it’s almost justifiable if you’re a painter.”

“Or a musician.”

“Yeah, a musician might do that, but it would not be justifiable. As long as he was not a writer or a photographer, I’ll forgive him his pretention.”

Blume waited till a small knot of American students outside the John Cabot University had passed, then turned on to Via Corsini. Caterina wandered over to the first house on the short terrace to check the number. “Which house?” she asked.

“Number 15. Down the far end, probably,” said Blume.

Only one side of the street had buildings on it. The other was flanked by railings that fenced in the overgrown courtyard of Villa Corsini. The last house was number 14.

In front of them was the entrance to the Botanical Gardens, to their left was the Podogora barracks of the Carabinieri.

“Where the hell is number 15?” asked Blume.

“We could ask the Carabinieri for directions,” said Caterina.

“That would look good, wouldn’t it?” said Blume. “Phone lovely Linda and get a confirmation of the house number.”

He stood at the front gate of the Botanical Gardens and found himself looking directly at a dark-suited park keeper with a full beard, who sat in his white booth gazing down the strangely rustic street with a proprietorial air, like some Sicilian gabellotto. Blume folded his arms, nodded, and was ignored. He decided to let it go and drifted over to the side of the street out of the man’s line of vision, and found himself before a green wooden door that seemed to be a side entrance into the gardens. A square marble slab was attached to the wall beside the door, the number 15 chiseled into it, off-white against white. Below it was an intercom with a clear plastic button and a single name: Henry Treacy.

By the time Caterina arrived to say they had confirmed the address, Blume had pressed the intercom button three times.

“Nobody there,” he said after a while. He put his bag on the ground and stood back, looking up to the top of the wall as if he had half a mind to scale it. “This looks like a side door into the Botanical Gardens,” he said. “Did Treacy live in a flower bed or something? We need to go around to the other side.”

The guard in the white box watched carefully as they came through the main entrance. Blume took a few steps to the right, but he could already see there was nothing there but wall.

“Hey!”

Blume stopped and put down his bag which was beginning to weigh. He waited for Caterina to flash a police ID card and send the guard reluctantly back to his post.

Together they stepped over a red-and-white plastic chain that looped around a square of manicured lawn bordered by outsized yellow daisies.

Caterina looked at the wall, then back at Blume, and shrugged. He went over to the wall, folded back a deep curtain of ivy, slapped the dusky ocher wall behind, then clapped the dust off his hands. “This is the perimeter wall,” he said. “The green door on the other side was more or less at this point here, which means there must be two walls and a narrow passageway between them. And they must lead to that garden lodge there.” He pointed to a small two-story house with a red tile roof to their left. “We could get in from this side, or go back and enter through that green door. I have some picklocks in the tactical bag.”

A few minutes later, Blume was working at the tumbler lock on the door. “Almost have it,” he said after five minutes. “I’m a bit out of practice.”

Eventually, he pulled out a crowbar from the same bag, stuck it into the wood frame next to the strike plate, and hurled his body against the door. The wood of the door jamb was so damp and spongy that the only noise it made as it gave way was a squeak and a sigh.

Directly in front of them was the wall they had been looking at from inside the Botanical Gardens. Blume pushed the door half closed against its splintered frame, and turned right into a passageway that was not quite wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Both sides were covered in ivy and wet moss. The passage was about ten yards long and led up to another door, this one a little sturdier. No longer keen to hone his lock-picking skills, Blume slammed the crowbar under the lock mechanism, jerked it around roughly till he felt it reach deeper in, then started wrenching it back and forth. After several attempts he motioned Caterina over.

“On the count of three,” he said, steadying his hands on the bar in preparation. When he reached three, they pushed against the door, but their timing was slightly off. They did it again, and the door burst open so easily that they almost fell over each other.

The sudden brightness in the room into which they now entered was disorientating. They stood there blinking for a few moments, Caterina trying to understand how the inside of a house could have so much light. As her eyes adjusted, she realized they were standing below a sloping glass roof. Ficus, bamboo, dracena plants, and small trees she could not identify grew from wide-bodied blue glazed urns sitting on a terracotta floor. “We’ve just broken into one of the botanical hothouses.”

“No,” said Blume. “This is part of the house. A sort of add-on greenhouse used as a workroom. Hot in here.”

He bent down, rummaged in his bag, and came up with a box of latex gloves, and wiggled his fingers like an important surgeon as he put them on.