A Woman Much Missed Read online

  He took out his mobile, dialled the number of the crime squad and asked them to contact Nanetti, head of Forensics. His colleague called back a few moments later. When the commissario gave him the address, Nanetti said, “Isn’t that the Pensione Tagliavini?”

  Everybody knew the place. Compared to those new hotels with banners flying, revolving doors and mock-Persian carpets, the ageing boarding house resembled an archaeological dig, and now Soneri was confronted with the task of excavating it, artefact by artefact. He left the kitchen and turned back towards the bedroom, but first he opened the doors of the other four rooms. Everything appeared neat and tidy, even if each room seemed somehow abandoned. In one there was a suitcase with trolley wheels, which, when he tried to lift it, he decided must be full. In Ghitta’s room, he noticed that the chest which the overturned drawer belonged to had been pulled away from the wall. It was an ordinary, everyday piece of furniture with a layer of walnut veneer over soft wood – fir or poplar. Soneri peered in and discovered that the old woman had hammered in a nail to which she had attached a piece of cord of the sort used to bind salami. As he pulled on it, a little cloth bag, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, emerged. He opened it and found inside Ghitta’s meagre treasure: a few gold rings, pairs of earrings, a chain with a medal of Jesus, a bracelet, a watch and in a little box, a ring made of white gold and inlaid with lapis lazuli stones. It did not take much to deduce that these were the only objects of any value in the apartment. Even if there were others, the intruder had not bothered to look for them, since he had ignored the ones now in Soneri’s hand.

  A few minutes later, Nanetti arrived. They did not even exchange greetings. Soneri ushered him into the kitchen, where he had left the light on. Nanetti followed the same rigmarole that Soneri had many times previously observed, leaving the commissario to wonder at the rigorous discipline of the old-style police academies where the two men had undergone training.

  “Looks like a natural death,” Nanetti said, after a cursory examination. Other officers busied themselves around them, one of them taking photographs.

  Chewing his cigar, which had gone out, Soneri stared hard at his colleague. “Looks like, but isn’t.”

  Nanetti stood quite still for a moment, pondering that statement, then without uttering a word, put on his latex gloves. The two men crouched down face to face over the body, and only then did they become aware of a tiny slit in the old woman’s dress between her breasts. They unbuttoned the top and pulled aside the vest, leaving her breasts exposed. Between the two drooping, shapeless breasts there was a cut no more than two centimetres in length, slightly open and violet at the edges. Only where the garment had come in contact with the torn flesh was there a faint trace of blood.

  “A magnificently executed laparoscopy,” Nanetti said.

  “What do you mean, laparoscopy!” the commissario said. “They slaughtered her the way you slaughter a pig.”

  2

  HIS COLLEAGUE’S CREAKING joints distracted Soneri as he bent over Ghitta’s face, noting her staring eyes and her white hair left dishevelled from her final attempt to fight off her assailant. Her mouth was slightly open in an expression of astonishment. She must have known her killer so well that she was taken aback by what was happening to her.

  “A real expert,” Nanetti said as he got back to his feet. “He laid her out in that position to stop the flow of blood.”

  The commissario nodded, but he felt annoyed with himself for not having thought of that right away. Only then did he notice that Ghitta’s hands were clenched in a fist a little below her waist, still gripping the pleats of her skirt. Her upper arms, pulled in alongside her chest, led him to surmise that she had hunched her shoulders in one last, futile gesture of self-defence. While the forensic squad scrutinised everything, Soneri moved fretfully from Ghitta’s room to the kitchen, followed by the officers’ hostile looks. He wandered into another room and stood there quite still, besieged by memories of Sunday afternoons spent there when he was Ada’s boyfriend, half-dressed, agreeing plans for the future or making love in silence.

  This apartment unnerved him because of the way it superimposed a past filled with hopes onto a present reeking of death. He struggled to believe that the same theatre could stage two such different plays, but the many years that had passed had altered what at one time appeared immutable, and now his job had brought him back to one of the places of his youth. It was never a good idea to return to a place where you had once been happy.

  The forensic squad went about their work steadily and meticulously. Eventually the commissario grew tired of watching them as they collected fingerprints, conducted a painstaking examination of each and every shelf and drawer and searched for biological traces. Aware of his own unfinished business, he wondered if he could leave. When the orderlies turned up to take away the body, he remembered Signora Schianchi. What had happened to her? Had she too been attacked before she got home? He realised that, somewhat oddly, he was more interested in Fernanda Schianchi’s absence than the death of Ghitta, perhaps because he believed that clearing up the first case would lead to the solution of the second. Or was it merely that she had come looking for him, and he had brushed her off onto Juvara? He felt the first dawning of a wave of guilt. She had come to the questura specifically to find him. She wanted to speak to him in person. Was this only because she remembered him from the days when he used to frequent the pensione?

  He went out onto the landing to make a call on his mobile, and as he was dialling the number he noticed that his hands were trembling. He gave Juvara the order to drop everything and instigate a search for Signora Schianchi.

  “She must have someone – some relative, a son or a daughter. She’ll have gone to see them.” He cut the inspector off curtly, annoyed at his objections.

  When he turned round, he found Nanetti standing next to him. He pointed to Fernanda’s door. “Is there no-one in?”

  “Another old lady lives there, but she’s faded into the mist.”

  Nanetti twisted his moustache and gave a grunt to indicate that the whole thing was a real mess. “Do you think we need to break in?”

  Soneri thought the question over silently. “I’m afraid we have no choice, but I think it’s best to hold off a bit. Maybe she’s simply gone to spend Christmas with some daughter. Juvara’s on to the case.”

  “Yes, it’s probably better to wait and inform the magistrate before we do anything. That way we’ll keep our noses clean.”

  “Who’s on duty?”

  “Saltapico.”

  “It would be,” the commissario said sarcastically.

  “Are the others any better?” Nanetti said.

  The thick walls of the house deadened the noise. All that could be heard was the forensic squad as they occasionally moved things around inside the apartment.

  “There’s something funny about the disappearance of this other woman,” Nanetti said, leaning back against the banister on the landing. He broke off when Soneri’s mobile rang. It was Juvara, whose tone was subdued. “Commissario, this woman doesn’t have anyone. She was widowed twenty years ago and there are no children. She has a nephew, but he lives in Milan.”

  “Did you call him?”

  “Yes, and his wife said they haven’t seen her in years. They speak on the telephone every so often. Just yesterday the signora telephoned to wish them a Merry Christmas.”

  The commissario hung up abruptly, profoundly annoyed with himself. He had blundered. He should have received the old woman in person.

  “Do you think the two women were on good terms?” Nanetti said. The commissario had no idea what he was getting at. He disliked the indirect approach employed by some of his colleagues, but he made an effort to control himself.

  “What do you mean? They saw each other all the time. Fernanda even rented out some of her rooms occasionally.”

  “So you would think she’d have a key to let herself in.”

  Once again, Soneri felt an i
diot. Why had that not occurred to him? In fact the thought had crossed his mind, but at that point he was still hopeful of finding Fernanda. Now he was less sure. Nanetti said nothing more and left Soneri to follow his own line of reasoning to its conclusion. It was highly probable that before coming to the questura Fernanda had seen what the commissario had subsequently discovered.

  “Maybe you’re right. If so, that’s why it’s becoming more and more important to get into Signora Schianchi’s apartment,” Soneri said.

  “I’d wait for the magistrate. After all, there’s no great rush. It looks to me like a straightforward case, like a game of chess.” Nanetti left him with that thought, trusting his men to get on with their job. The commissario went back into the apartment, wondering if Fernanda had stumbled upon Ghitta’s body stretched out on the kitchen floor. And if she had seen her, why had she not told Juvara?

  Before he could come to any conclusion, the telephone in the hall began to ring. Soneri rushed to get there ahead of the other officers. He picked up the receiver and said “Hello!” in a firm voice.

  From the other end of the line, all he could hear was a sigh followed a few moments later by a click as the line went dead. A short time went by and then the telephone began to ring once more. He turned back and repeated his greeting, this time in a tone of weary resignation. The only reply he received was the sound of the receiver being replaced so quickly as to make him think that the caller had had his finger poised to press the button. It could have been a wrong number the first time, but not the second. Whoever it was had expected to hear Ghitta’s voice and had hung up. Now they would be aware that something had happened at Pensione Tagliavini, but then perhaps they would have known that anyway if the phone had simply rung out. He calculated how much time he had before the press informed the city about the old woman’s death. Seven or eight hours, he thought – an interval in which, just possibly, someone would carry on behaving as normal. Perhaps they would even ring the doorbell and give him the chance to make their acquaintance.

  He lit his cigar at the stove. Forensics had left, so he was able to take some liberties. He opened a cupboard and was tempted to make himself a coffee. From the kitchen doorway the whole length of the dormitory-style corridor was in view, and from where he was standing, Ghitta would have been able to keep an eye on everything and everybody. Nothing ever escaped her watchful gaze – who was coming, who was going, or who went to the toilet most often. Soneri could even recall some of the other residents. Selvatici, a law student, had the room facing the one occupied by his future wife. During the day, even on Sunday afternoons, he could be heard padding back and forth in his room, addressing an imaginary jury. In contrast, during the night he bustled about continually, seemingly as agitated as an animal in a cage. Soneri also remembered a girl called Robertelli, a flautist who studied at the conservatoire. And then there was Nelli, a student of engineering. He paid a reduced rent because he was good at fixing things around the house. His clearest memories were of the nursing students in their white outfits, each more beautiful than the next. It was no surprise that he ended up marrying one of them. In that long corridor with the landlady’s room down at the far end, they seemed to parade in front of his eyes, along with the university students. In the late afternoon or evening, when Ghitta was not in the kitchen, she would take her place in the sitting room to the left of the entrance. It was tiny, not much bigger than a cupboard, and had just the one window, which looked onto Via Saffi, and from there Ghitta watched the world go by.

  Soneri decided to take a seat in the same position. He looked out at the journalists on the other side of the street, at the bar now owned by a Pakistani, and at the comings and goings of a sort of foreign legion living in the houses once occupied by people who had prospered and moved on. A squad car was parked outside No. 35. A number of curious passers-by stopped to stare at the vehicle and ask the journalists what was going on. He was dismayed when he imagined the rumours already circulating around a city that was too small to keep secrets. In all probability he was wasting time sitting there since everybody already knew, and no-one was likely to come calling on that misty night. He held his cigar hidden in the palm of his hand and kept on peering out into the semi-darkness, concealed by those pieces of dull furniture, in a timeless, imprecise dimension between today and yesteryear.

  He experienced a deep sense of solitude, which was hardly a new sensation for him. Investigations frequently induced this state of mind, but this time there was a new element. He felt as though he had been projected beyond his own comfort zone, like a piece of shrapnel hurtling through the air and growing cold at the place where it had happened to land. That pensione, his dead wife, the lost opportunities, the unachieved plans, the transformed district now inhabited by foreigners, the only people capable of finding comfort in those old houses – everything was reduced to that ethereal yet fiery substance that constitutes memory.

  The telephone once again jolted him out of his reverie. He got up unhurriedly and walked the length of the corridor. He picked up the receiver but gave only an indistinct grunt.

  “Ghitta,” came an unusually deep, male voice at the other end of the line.

  “Just a moment. Who shall I say?”

  Moments went by as the caller seemed to hesitate. “Who is this?” the man said in a decidedly unfriendly, peremptory tone of voice.

  “The signora is busy right now but—” Soneri said, and before the phone was slammed down, he heard a curse from the caller which seemed to be addressed to someone at the other end.

  The commissario hung up, but a thought was taking shape in his mind without finding precise form. He returned to the sitting room, took out his mobile and called Juvara.

  “I need . . . I’d like you make a bit of a scene, something to get rid of the journalists and all the people hanging about outside here.”

  “Alright, as long as you don’t want me to make any sort of speech. I never know how to answer their questions.”

  “There’ll be no need. Simply tell them that the inquiry is proceeding.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “Get a car and come to number thirty-five Via Saffi. Bring an escort. When you arrive, I’ll open the door and you come up with two officers. When you go back down, the journalists will throw hundreds of questions at you, so tell them that the apartment has been sealed off and that the inquiries will get underway again in the morning. They’ll be in such a rush to write up the story that they’ll lift the siege.”

  “And what if they leave someone behind to keep watch?”

  “That’s a risk we’ll just have to take,” the commissario said.

  He sat back in the armchair. He always enjoyed looking out on the city on winter nights when everything was sunk in a deep sleep and when everyone who went by had a good reason for so doing. He took pleasure in imagining or working out what that could be.

  *

  Angela seemed to have a knack of detecting from a distance the moments when the commissario was floundering in a morass of jumbled thoughts, and of coming to his rescue just when he was sinking ever more deeply. Perhaps it was because she was jealous of that world to which he denied entry to everyone, or perhaps because their relationship was made up of bursts of fiery passion.

  “What are you up to?” she said, before Soneri could even say hello.

  “I’m keeping a lookout.”

  “You always had a talent for voyeurism,” she said teasingly.

  Soneri moved his mobile to his other hand so as to be able to smoke more easily. “If it were any other way, I couldn’t do this job.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Pensione Tagliavini. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “That squalid little boarding house?”

  “What’s squalid about it? To me it brings back all kind of lovely memories.”

  “Sometimes you amaze me, commissario. How could you not know that the old lady hasn’t been letting rooms to students for
some time?”

  He had indeed lost all contact with that part of the city. There was a gap due to the fifteen years he had spent with the police in Milan. The bar run by Pakistanis, the district full of foreigners and even the Pensione Tagliavini itself had all altered the appearance of that quarter without his having taken it in.

  “It’s been some time since I last had any reason to be interested in this area, ever since I went to Milan. If you just drive past it, you’re not aware of the changes. So who did Ghitta let out her rooms to?”

  “Guess! Do you know what a knocking shop is? A whorehouse? In other words, people go there to screw,” Angela said in the face of his silence.