Michael Dibdin - Vendetta

The faint hum of a passing car stirred the heavy silence.

The main road was still out of sight, and there was no particular reason to suppose that the vehicle had been Spadola's yellow Fiat. But the incident served as a reminder of Zen's exposed position on the hillside, above the hollow where the Mercedes stood out as prominently as a trashed refrigerator in a ravine. Putting every other thought out of his head, Zen attacked the slope as though it were an enemy, kicking and punching, grunting and cursing, until at last he reached the summit and the ground levelled off, conceding defeat.

Before him the landscape stretched monotonously away towards undesirable horizons. Zen trudged on through a wilderness nf armour-plated plants that might have been dead for all the signs of life they showed. To take his mind off the brutal realities of his situation, Zen tried to work out how the information he had obtained might be brought to bear on the Burolo case. And the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he had stumbled on the key to the whole mystery.

The irony was that having been sent to Sardinia to rig the Burolo case by incriminating Furio Padedda, he now possessed evidence which strongly suggested that the Sardinian was in fact guilty. With the lions Oscar had bought to patrol the grounds of his villa after the kidnap attempt, had come a man calling himself Furio Pizzoni. His real name, Palazzo Sisti had discovered, was Padedda, and he was not from the Abruzzo mountains but from those around Nuoro. And Padedda's friends, according to Turiddu's drunken revelations the night before, in addition to the traditional sheep-rustling, were also engaged in its more lucrative modern variation, kidnapping. Turiddu's companions had shut him up at that point, but the implications were clear.

There had never been any question that the Melega family, with a dead brother to avenge, had an excellent motive for murdering Oscar Burolo, and the ruthless dedication to carry it out. What no one had been able to explain was how a gang of Sardinian shepherds had been able to gain entrance to the villa despite its sophisticated electronic defences, but given an ally within Burolo's gates this obstacle could have been easily overcome.

According to their testimony, Alfonso Bini and his wife pad been watching television in their quarters at the time pf the murder. If Padedda, instead of drinking in the ~llage, had concealed himself at the villa, there would pave been nothing to stop him entering the room from which the alarms were controlled and throwing the cutout switches. For that matter, he could have carried out ghe killings himself. The wound on his arm, which had lpoked suspiciously like a bullet mark to Zen, corresponded to the fact that the assassin had been lightly wounded by Vianello. Padedda would no doubt have used his own shotgun, familiar and reliable, to do the killings, removing one of Burolo's weapons to confuse the issue. Zen recalled the ventilation hole in the wall of the underground vault to which the trail of blood-stains led. Had that been searched for the missing weapon? And had ejected cartridges from the shotgun which Padedda kept hanging in the lions' house been compared with those found at the scene of the crime? Such checks should have been routine, but Zen knew only too well how often routine broke down under the pressure of preconceived ideas about guilt and innocence.

A car engine suddenly roared up out of nowhere and Zen threw himself to the ground. He lay holding his breath, his face pressed to the dirt, cowering for cover in the sparse scrub as a yellow car flashed by a few metres in front of him. It seemed impossible that he had escaped notice, but the car kept going. A few moments later it had disappeared.

He stood up cautiously, rubbing the cuts on his face and hands caused by his crash-landing in the prickly shrubbery. Now that he knew it was there, he could see the thin grey line of asphalt cutting through the landscape just ahead of him. There was no time to lose. Spadola had taken the direction leading down into the valley. He would soon see that the Mercedes was not there and couldn't have climbed the other side, and would cross this road off his list, turn back and try again. Zen's only consolation was that Spadola had not yet found the abandoned car, and therefore did not know that Zen was on foot.

He ran across the raised strip of asphalt and on through the scrub on the other side, hurrying forward until the contours of the hill hid him from the road. He could see the railway now, running along a ledge cut into the slope below. Rather than lose height by climbing down to it, he continued across the top on a coverging course which he hoped would bring him more or less directly to the station.

Meanwhile the bits and pieces of the puzzle continued to put themselves together in his mind without the slightest effort on his part.

As with Favelloni, it was impossible to know whether Padedda had actually carried out the killings or mer ly provided access to the villa. On balance, Zen thought the latter more likely. The Melegas, like Vasco Spadola, would have wanted the satisfaction of taking vengeance in person. This also explained the bizarre fact that no attempt had been made to destroy the video tape. It was possible that such unsophisticated men, unlike Renato Favelloni, might have ignored the camera as just another bit of the incomprehensible gadgetry the house was full of. Afterwards the Melegas would have had no difficulty in persuading a few of the villagers to come forward and claim that they had seen Padedda in the local bar that evening, while the age-old traditions of omerta would stop anyone else from contradicting their testimony. It all made sense, it all fitted together.

Zen hurried on, forcing himself to maintain a punishing pace. To his right, he could see the whole of the valley stretching across to the ridge on the other side where the Villa Burolo was visible as a white blur. Further up towards the mountains, the unnatural green of the forest fed by the leaking dam stained the landscape like a spillage of some pollutant. A distant rumble gave him pause for a ~pment, until he realized that it was not a car but two aircraft. After some time he made out the speeding black specks of the jet fighters swooping across the mountain slopes on their low-altitude manoeuvres. Then they disappeared up a valley and silence fell again. He pushed on, torn between satisfaction at having finally cracked ghe Burolo case and frustration at the thought that unless he managed to get to a telephone before Spadola caught up with him, the villagers' silence would remain unbroken for ever, and Renato Favelloni would be sent tp prison for a crime he had not committed. Of course, Favelloni no doubt royally deserved any number of prison terms for other crimes which would never be brought home to him, protected as he was by l'onorevole.

But, as Vasco Spadola had remarked, that was not the point.

The going was not easy. The red earth, baked hard by months of drought, supported nothing but low bushes bristling like porcupines, with wiry branches, abrasive leaves and sharp thorns that snagged his clothing continually. Fortunately, the plants didn't generally grow very close together, and it was always possible to find a way through. But the constant meandering increased the distance he had to cover, and made his progress much more tiring. And he was tired. His dissipations the night before had resulted in a shallow, drunken sleep that had only scratched the surface of his immense weariness.

At last he reached the crest of a small ridge which had formed his horizon for some time, and caught sight of the station for the first time, about half a kilometre away to his right, a squat building with a steeply-pitched roof.

The railway itself was invisible at that distance, so the buildings looked as if they had been set down at random in the middle of nowhere. Below, the track that he had originally planned to take in the car wound through the scrub. Zen ran down the hill to join it. The track showed no signs of recent use. Low bushes were growing on it, and rocks had sprouted in the wheel ruts. But now he was within sight of his goal, walking was almost a pleasure.