Tobias Jones - The Salati Case

‘What is it?’

‘I need to ask you a couple of questions,’ I said.

‘What are you after?’

‘Do you drive as well as garden?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did you drive Teresa Tonin into the city on Wednesday night?’

He didn’t answer.

I repeated the question. The man looked at me with contempt.

‘What do you want exactly?’

‘Did you?’

He shook his head, but he had lost his self-assurance.

‘Who did you drive?’

He didn’t say anything, so I reached for my phone and dialled Dall’Aglio’s number.

The man put a thin hand on my wrist and stared at me. ‘Who are you calling?’

‘The carabinieri.’ I let the phone ring on until he started talking.

‘Hold it,’ he said quickly. I stopped the call to the Questura, but he didn’t say anything else. I was about to redial when he started his little confession. ‘I’ve been doing the same thing for forty years. It’s simple, honest, humble work. I fix their boiler. I sweep the leaves. I change their tyres. I queue at the post-office.’ He was saying it with glazed eyes, like he had just gone into retirement and he was missing it already.

‘And did you drive the woman into the city on Wednesday night?’

He looked at me. Whatever he was thinking, one thing was clear: he knew why I was asking. His face appeared old suddenly, and his eyes opened wide like he had just seen his last minute of freedom flash in front of him.

‘Wait here a minute,’ he said, walking inside his house at a brisk pace. I followed him. The TV was on loud in a dark room.

I followed him into a small garage. I looked round at the chaos. Boxes stuffed with old tiles and taps and odd nuts. There were rags and ancient copies of gardening magazines. There wasn’t anything that stood out. Certainly not a pair of keys.

Before I knew what was happening I heard an explosion. I found myself doubled up, almost on the floor on instinct. It can’t have been more than a metre or two from me and my ears were ringing.

I reached for my gun as I crouched there, but the room was horribly still. I stood up. The gardener was on the floor. His face all intact, but there was nothing behind it. It looked like a mask floating in a lake.

You couldn’t see an entry point for a bullet but the exit was pretty clear. He was missing the back of his brain. There was a line of blood and cartilage up the wall.

The woman came rushing in with the barking hound. She screamed when she saw her husband and looked at me.

‘He took his life. I didn’t even know he had a gun.’

She was screaming and wailing. I wasn’t sure she had heard what I had said. I tried to get my phone out to finish that call to the Questura. That’s what I should have done two minutes ago and then perhaps this man would still be alive. Two minutes ago he had been a walking, talking human being and now he was cooling matter, nothing more. I could still hear the sound of blood and cartilage falling from the walls to the ground.

The woman must have let go of the dog because it jumped for me, its paws at head height. It knocked me backwards and fell on top of me, its teeth going for my neck. I got my thumbs into the soft bit of his throat and squeezed with everything I had. I managed to hold his gnawing teeth away from me until he started whimpering.

‘Pull it off,’ I shouted at the woman but she didn’t move. She had frozen. I shouted again, but by then the dog was almost gone and I rolled over on top of it and relaxed my grip. It lay there coughing and whining.

I took out my phone. ‘Get Dall’Aglio. It’s an emergency,’ I said.

Dall’Aglio came on the line.

‘The Tonins’ fixer has topped himself.’

‘What?’

‘The gardener on their estate. He just swallowed a speeding bullet.’

‘Where?’

‘In the grounds, round the back.’

‘I’ll be there right away.’

I looked at the woman. She was staring into space and shaking. I took her into the room with the TV on and sat her down. She didn’t seem able to focus on anything.

‘Why did he do it?’

She looked at me with eyes so sharp they could have sliced bread. She didn’t say anything, but it was pretty clear from her face that she thought I was part of the answer.

‘I was questioning him about Wednesday night,’ I said. ‘I was asking if he was at home.’ She was staring at the TV and I could see its bright lights reflected in her pallid flesh. ‘Was he?’

She shook her head.

‘Where did he go?’

She was still shaking her head. I wasn’t sure if she wasn’t saying or didn’t know.

‘Did he often up and leave?’

She shrugged.

‘How long was he gone for?’

She just managed to whisper her reply. ‘About an hour.’

I sat there with her whilst we waited for Dall’Aglio and his men. He arrived within a few minutes. One of his officers took the woman away. Others went into the garage and started photographing the corpse.

Dall’Aglio was staring at me like he blamed me for everything bad that had happened in his life.

‘Why can’t you just do things by the book?’ he asked.

‘That’s the best thing about my job, there is no book.’

‘Why is it that wherever you go, people start dying?’

‘This time it was suicide,’ I said. ‘Bocchialini and that Tonin woman were in it together. I had half an idea, listening to Bocchialini talk, that he was involved with the Tonin woman himself.’

‘Why?’

‘He was listing all the menial chores he used to do for the family like he was restoring the Sistine Chapel. He loved something in that household, and I don’t think it was his salary or his overalls.’

‘You think he and Teresa…?’

‘Not my taste, possibly not yours,’ I conceded, ‘but love works in mysterious ways. If they were an item and Sandro was their son, it might make the whole thing a lot more comprehensible.’

Dall’Aglio was frowning. It was just an idea of mine, but it was one of those that seemed to make sense retrospectively. It didn’t matter whether it was true or not for now.

We stood there like an embittered couple, unable to separate because we couldn’t get by without the other. We knew we had both been stupid and didn’t want to talk for fear of revealing the fact. He thought I was reckless. I thought he was passive.

For once I thought he might be right. Since Monday, there had been two fresh corpses and I knew it was my interfering which had, in some ways, produced them. That, Dall’Aglio would tell me, was why the police tactic was sometimes to watch instead of act. I had rushed in as usual, and now one of the suspects, Bocchialini, was as much use to us as a sieve in a flood. We stood there continuing the argument in silence, watching the men measuring up the body.

‘Come on,’ he said eventually, ‘let’s go and find the Tonin woman.’

We went into the main house. The door was open but everything was in darkness. She must have known we were coming because she was standing halfway down the stairs.

‘You heard about Bocchialini?’ I asked.

‘What?’ She looked up sharply.

‘He just swallowed a bullet. Put his grey matter all over your garden tools.’

She had her mouth wide open and was holding both hands over it. Her fingers eventually went on to her lower teeth as if trying to open her mouth still wider. I figured, given that reaction, he had been more than her gardener and chauffeur.

‘That’s one trigger you didn’t pull,’ I said, wanting to kick her whilst she was down. ‘My carabinieri colleagues are getting very impatient.’

I smiled at her. She was staring at us, but she was rubbing her hair into a mess.

We started walking up the stairs towards her. ‘It’s all over now,’ Dall’Aglio said. ‘It’s finished.’