Tobias Jones - The Salati Case

When he came in, she didn’t say anything but just looked at him.

‘Elisabetta,’ I said, ‘this is Massimo Tonin.’

She laughed nervously.

‘I’m so, so sorry I haven’t…’ he stammered.

‘What?’ she said.

Tonin was stumbling over lines he must have rehearsed in his head for years. ‘I’m sorry all this is my fault. Your father – I didn’t even know him as a son, not until the end of his life, and all I did was try to help him. But your grandmother, she insisted I never see you. She thought I was responsible, my family was responsible, for your father’s disappearance.’

She looked at me for confirmation of what he was saying.

‘Silvia’, Tonin said, looking at me, ‘knew that my family were involved in Ricky’s disappearance. She said so to me. She had nothing to prove it, and I didn’t believe her until you, Castagnetti, came along this week. She said that if I ever went near her family again, Elisabetta included, she would denounce us.’

‘How did she know?’

‘I don’t know how, but she was convinced Teresa or Sandro had done something terrible.’

Tonin looked at his granddaughter and seemed to change. ‘I am your grandfather,’ he said. It was the first time I had seen him smile since we had met. ‘I understand if you distrust me, and you would be right to be angry at all the pain I have, inadvertently, caused you.’ He was on a roll now, holding her hand. ‘But I’ve prayed for you for years, I’ve thought about this moment thousands of times…’

I walked away. I figured they had been apart so long, they could do without someone taking notes now they were finally together.

I went outside and looked for a bar. There was a place just opposite that was busy with the football crowd. They had all assembled to watch the highlights from the day’s games and were shouting insults at players they didn’t like.

My phone started ringing. It was Dall’Aglio.

‘We’ve found something.’

‘Go on.’

‘One of the dogs has turned up something.’

‘And?’

‘It’s just a few bones.’

‘Human?’

‘We’ll be doing tests.’

I took it all in. It had to be Riccardo. It couldn’t be anyone else. When you go looking for a body and you find one, the identification is just a formality and Dall’Aglio knew it.

Poor boy. Murdered because he spent too much of other people’s money. Hidden in the hills, forgotten by everyone except his elderly mother.

‘There’s something else,’ Dall’Aglio said. ‘We ran checks on Bocchialini and Teresa Tonin. It turns out they both spent big in the autumn of ’95. He bought a car in cash, and she put down the deposit for her son’s flat.’

‘Cash?’

‘Isn’t it always?’

‘Split it fifty-fifty,’ I said under my breath.

‘Something else,’ he said. ‘One of the fireflies…’

‘The what?’

‘One of the prostitutes who hang around the cittadella… she claims to have seen Bocchialini’s car that night, parked there for an hour with him inside it.’

‘She’s sure?’

‘She says she asked him for a cigarette, asked if he wanted company. She got a good look at his face.’

‘And she’s identified him?’

‘That’s what she says.’

‘Complimenti,’ I said. ‘And the keys?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Have you searched Bocchialini’s house?’

‘They’re still on it. They’ll turn up.’

‘You won’t get anywhere without them. There’s something else…’

‘Go on,’ Dall’Aglio said eagerly.

‘Have forensics gone over the tools in Bocchialini’s shed?’

‘Sure.’

‘Nothing of interest I take it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Didn’t think so. Let me tell you where you’ll find the murder weapon. Or where, I’m afraid, you won’t find it. A while back I was talking to the receptionist at Tonin’s law firm and she was telling me how Teresa Tonin used to fill young Sandro’s fridge with food. And then when we went round to the house to arrest Massimo Tonin, old Teresa was there cooking in the kitchen.’

‘So?’

‘It’s just that she’s a cook and like all good cooks she’ll have all the equipment. I asked old Massimo Tonin if she has a batticarne and he says she uses one. But I doubt you’ll find she’s got one any more. She will have got rid of it after she used it on Umberto Salati on Wednesday night.’

‘The tiny spikes…’ Dall’Aglio said under his breath.

‘It fits. But I fear it will only be more missing evidence…’

I was watching the street outside when I saw Anna di Pietro walking towards her flat with a man and a young boy. I told Dall’Aglio I had to go. I walked out of the bar and shouted over at her.

Anna looked at me with suspicion. I told her Tonin was upstairs with her daughter and she froze.

‘Tonin?’ She looked at me with incredulity.

‘He’s in there with Elisabetta now.’

‘What’s going on?’ the man asked.

‘You Giovanni?’

He nodded.

I introduced myself. The woman was already racing inside, the Standa plastic bags bouncing against her ankles as she ran.

‘Anna,’ I shouted.

She turned around and I walked over to her.

I told her about the farm they were searching and what they had found. She dropped her shopping.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said as I left them to it.

I like to think I’m a man of my word. Some wise bloke once said that it’s not the oath that makes you believe the man, but the man the oath.

So when I got back to the flat I called Mazzuli from La Gazzetta . He came on the line spitting blood, saying I had let him down, hadn’t honoured a deal we had made.

I told him I was ready to spill, just as long as my name never came up.

‘Is it related to what happened to that gardener last night?’

I told it to him from start to finish. It helped clear everything up in my mind before writing the report for Crespi. I spoke so much he didn’t say a word for ten minutes. It didn’t even sound like he was taking notes.

‘You’re sure about all this?’ was all he said at the end.

‘It’s only hints and suppositions. It’s just an informed opinion. The only difference between my job and yours is the “informed” bit.’

He laughed and muttered something about us having a drink sometime.

Telling him all about the case made me realise how incomplete it was. I went and sat in the armchair and thought it all through again. Bocchialini’s suicide had, in some ways, been the ultimate act of love. With him out of the way, there was little chance Teresa Tonin would stand trial for the murder of either Ricky or Umberto. He must have known he was the only link between the dead men and the woman he loved, and he decided to eradicate the link with a bullet to the brain. We hadn’t found the keys, and Dall’Aglio, I knew, was unlikely to find the weapon. Without them the only evidence connecting the woman to Ricky’s disappearance was the fact that she had spent a large amount of cash back in the 1990s. Even if we did some DNA tests on Sandro, and even if we found out he really was their child, it didn’t prove anything. The woman had been right when she had taunted me at her house that we had no evidence. That’s the way in Italy. You have suspicions, you might even get the satisfaction of knowing who did something, and how, but the satisfaction is short-lived because you rarely see them face justice. You know, that’s all, and knowledge is no good unless other people get it too.

One day something would turn up and bring me back to her. Someone would remember something, or somebody would chance across some old keys in the undergrowth somewhere. Someone would hear that rattle of metal as they walked through the woods one day and bend down to pick up the object, see the Salati surname, and remember about a murder from way back. A drought next summer might reveal a batticarne deep in the river bed. It might be tomorrow, it might be in ten years’ time. My life was like that: a blizzard of action followed by inactivity, as I waited for fate to take its course. But I would get her one day.