A Woman Much Missed Read online

  “They do that in five-star hotels too.”

  “I know, but that’s boring. What do you say if I come along and join you there?”

  “No, that’s not possible.” Soneri’s swift reply barely concealed his apprehension.

  “It’s really flattering for a woman to suggest an evening of intimacy with her man, only to be refused because he’s scared,” Angela said.

  “There are journalists downstairs. And anyway, Ada used to live here.”

  “You see, I was right. They let rooms by the hour,” she said, clearly upset. She hung up without another word.

  He did not call back, but breathed a sigh of relief and waited for Juvara to arrive. When he did finally turn up, he had followed the commissario’s instructions to the letter. Soneri found him standing with two other officers on a landing illuminated by a naked bulb which gave off a light the colour of camomile tea.

  “Saltapico has arranged the autopsy for tomorrow morning,” Juvara said.

  “He’s not hanging about.”

  “What do you make of it all?” the inspector said as he came in.

  “Nothing. I’m trying hard to understand what was going on in this house, what Ghitta was doing during the day. Somebody telephoned asking for her but slammed the phone down when they realised that something wasn’t right. I got the impression it was a pre-arranged call, always made at a fixed time, on a certain day. Otherwise, why would they have hung up?”

  “Nanetti says that whoever killed her was no amateur.”

  “Yes, he’d studied the perfect position to make sure there was no flow of blood. He left no trace and, even more importantly, got no stains on himself. This might indicate that it was someone who was well known in the house. It might even mean it was someone who’d been seen around here and couldn’t risk compromising himself. Or maybe he was just a scrupulous killer.”

  “We’ll find out tomorrow,” Juvara said. “The police doctor will clarify how she met her death. She could have been stunned first, or else poisoned and then . . .”

  “There’s no knowing. Reality is always surprising,” Soneri said, thinking to himself how much the old city had changed without his noticing. “Very good, then. Set up the scene the way I told you to.”

  From the window, he watched to make sure that everything went as planned. As the journalists crowded round Juvara, the commissario read the embarrassment on his face as he tried to push past them. The cars sped off, leaving the reporters to contemplate their empty notebooks. They would get the information they needed in a series of telephone calls to officials and police officers whom they had courted unobtrusively at various social events over the years.

  The street emptied quickly, leaving only a few cyclists, a couple of cars and the last customers in the shisha bar. After a while, the shutters at the bar were pulled down, and everything settled to the normal calm of a foggy winter’s night. Around eleven o’clock, Soneri rose to his feet and walked along the landing without switching on the lights. His eyes were now accustomed to that darkness broken only by shafts of light coming in through the windows. His thoughts returned to what Angela had been saying and to the way the pensione had been partially transformed into a shady hotel for couples with something to hide, when he was surprised by the telephone. He lifted the receiver, said nothing but listened intently.

  An elderly woman’s voice began to pronounce Ghitta’s name, but then stuttered to a halt. Soneri then heard a groan, followed by laboured breathing, almost a rattle of the sort associated with asthma, which in turn gave way to a sibilant exhalation of breath. The commissario remained silent. He felt powerless and apprehensive, as though watching a madman teetering on a high ledge. It did not last long. The breathing seemed to fade away, before a weak, almost indistinguishable voice muttered, “I can’t take it any more,” and the line went dead. He stood there clutching the handset while the mirror further along the landing reflected back an indistinct image of him trembling. In front of that same mirror, as he said his goodbyes on Sundays, Ada would remind him in a whisper not to make any noise that Ghitta could hear and never to telephone after ten o’clock in the evening, this being an inflexible rule of the Pensione Tagliavini. Once again he found himself measuring time past, and once again he felt concern at the growing frequency of assaults by memories. He returned to the living room and resumed his watch over the street. By midnight he had finished his cigar, but even though it was no longer than a match he left it in his mouth. In the street below, a man dressed in a somewhat dandyish fashion passed by No. 35. Soneri was certain it was not for the first time that evening, there was something familiar about his leather shoes, which shone as though highly polished. In that street of sober colours made darker by the mist, they were the only things which glistened. The man wore a loose belt over a dark overcoat, left open to reveal a white shirt, a purple bow tie, tight-fitting trousers and was sporting a hat that was a little like a bowler. That eccentric elegance confirmed to Soneri that there was something out of place.

  He got a better look at the man when he walked past for the third time. By that point, the way he passed and repassed the building could no longer be dismissed as mere random chance. The man stopped on the far side of the street and looked up several times at the living room window, causing the commissario to draw back behind the curtain for fear that the man might catch a glimpse of his shadow. He watched as he started pacing about once more, talking into his mobile. He seemed on a mission, executed with the scrupulousness of a vigilante paid to keep certain premises under observation, or to check that the Pensione Tagliavini was still enveloped in darkness. Half an hour later, Soneri heard a car draw up at the door. He opened the shutter fully and peeped out. A black Mercedes was idling in front of the main entrance, but none of the occupants got out. The car drove away again.

  There was a level of activity around the house which Soneri could not fathom, and this set him to searching for something which could explain the various presences in those rooms, give a name to the phantoms which manifested themselves in telephone calls, and explain the shadowy figures glimpsed in the mist or half-concealed behind the windows of vehicles. Forensics had carried out their work too meticulously and had carried off nearly everything. All that had been left behind was the small wine-coloured notebook lying on the bed alongside Ghitta’s scattered jewellery. He picked it up and retired to the living room once more, hoping to work out what it contained in the faint light coming from the street through the shutters, but no sooner had he sat down than he heard the click-clack of high heels on the street below. The sounds were firm, indicative of someone who was in command of the situation and who knew where she was going. A young woman with a large bag was making her way along Via Saffi, and the street echoed to the rhythmical beat of her tread. She crossed the street just before No. 35 and walked up to the front door.

  The commissario drew back from the door of the apartment until he heard the key being inserted in the lock at the foot of the stairs and saw the light going on. The woman climbed the stairs quickly. Soneri closed the door before she appeared on the landing. He was unsure where she was going until he heard the sound of the heels moving towards the entrance to the pensione. He heard someone fumbling with keys and at that point, before the woman had time to put her key in the lock, he pulled open the door.

  She gave a start and moved back half a step.

  “Come in. Police,” the commissario said calmly.

  The woman was taken aback, but Soneri took her by the arm just above her elbow and drew her in.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “That’s the very question I’d like to put to you. What sort of time is this to be visiting friends?”

  “I’m not here to visit anyone,” she replied, visibly relieved. “I live here. Didn’t you see that I have my own keys?”

  “Once upon a time it was strictly forbidden to come back to the Pensione Tagliavini after midnight.”

  “How do you know?”
r />   “Ah well,” Soneri said, with a mildly pained expression. “Which is your room?” he said, resuming a professional tone.

  The woman pointed to the door next to the room once occupied by Ada.

  “The cupboards are all empty.”

  “I don’t spend much time here. One night every so often when I’m working late. Where’s Ghitta?” she said, craning her neck in an attempt to look over Soneri’s shoulder.

  “Are you related?”

  “No, not really.”

  “What does that mean? A distant relative?”

  “It means we come from the same village and everyone there is related in some way.”

  “Which village?”

  “Rigoso.”

  It was one of the most southerly hamlets in the province, situated between Emilia and Liguria before the ridge overlooking that finger of Tuscany which resembles the handle of a frying pan. She had all the features of the mountain people from those parts: pale skin, clear eyes and squirrel-coloured hair with blond traces, like the chestnuts from the Apennines.

  The woman pushed open the door of her room, but the commissario stopped her. “I should warn you that you won’t find things the way you left them.”

  She switched on the light and one quick glance was sufficient for her to see the chaos typical of every house where the forensic squad had been at work. “At least they had the decency to leave the bed alone,” she said.

  “Inconveniences of this sort can be easily remedied,” Soneri said.

  The woman gave him a quizzical, searching look, as though some suspicion had been confirmed, but then she remembered she was dealing with a police officer. “Ghitta?” she said.

  The commissario nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “Murdered.”

  Her head dropped. She did not speak.

  “Were you expecting that?”

  Still uttering no word, she stretched out her arms and all of a sudden seemed afraid. Soneri saw her body shake with short, rapid quivers.

  “How could I ever have imagined . . .” were the only words she managed to speak before breaking off with a half incredulous, half puzzled expression.

  “. . . that they’d kill her?” the commissario finished the sentence for her.

  The woman nodded and then seemed to notice with some annoyance the lamplight glaring in her face. She seemed shaken to the core. The commissario once again took her by the arm and led her into the living room, switching off the light in the corridor as he passed. They ended up sitting facing each other, like lovers, in that pensione where so many lovers had come and gone. Their expressions could only just be made out in the faint light from the street. Soneri continued to look out from time to time.

  “Had she received threats?”

  “I’m not sure, but the atmosphere in here had changed a great deal in recent years.”

  “Because couples were coming instead of students?”

  “The clientele was certainly different, but that was because of Ghitta’s condition. At her age, she could no longer provide three square meals a day. And anyway, today’s students are all well off and prefer to rent flats. Couples come here for two or three hours and then go away. And they pay well. In spite of the fact that there was less effort involved, Ghitta was more and more stressed.”

  “Maybe because they brought along prostitutes and she was worried about her licence.”

  “I don’t think so. From what she told me, she was dealing with couples who were lovers, or sometimes with upper-class escorts.”

  “Do you sleep here often?”

  “No, only once a week. I work in a big store and when I do back-to-back shifts I don’t go home.”

  “But today’s Sunday.”

  “In the run-up to Christmas, we stay open on Sundays and they ask us to do overtime.”

  “You haven’t told me your name.”

  “Elvira Cadoppi.”

  “Do you commute from Rigoso?”

  “No, that would be too far. I live in Capoponte.”

  The tone of each response left something hanging in the air, and the commissario felt an undertow of ambiguity in the conversation. In the half light, he could not make out the woman’s eyes or her expression. Being able only to imagine them, he returned to that quizzical look thrown at him some moments earlier, in which he had caught a gleam of suspicion.

  “Did she ever tell you anything? About what made her anxious, I mean.”

  He had the impression that she reacted as though shocked or startled. “You see the time it is when I get here? We would only meet for half an hour at breakfast and then talk about home and the people who lived there, most of whom are unfortunately dead. The only ones left are all elderly. In any case, I’m the only one who has a key. You can trust people from the same background as yourself more than others.”

  Soneri insisted on asking questions about the past, about Ghitta’s life in a village which was perhaps nothing more than a lime pit of memories.

  Elvira surprised him by saying, “She used to go there every week, even though she didn’t have any good memories of the place.”

  “Was she visiting family?”

  “There was no-one left.”

  “What made her memories so unpleasant?”

  “It’s not easy to explain to someone who doesn’t know our ways.”

  The commissario waved the point away. “I was born in the country myself.”

  “Ghitta was called on to attend to twisted limbs, St Anthony’s fire, fractures, aches in the joints or even women who’d missed a period or couldn’t get pregnant.”

  “A faith healer,” Soneri said, recalling the customs in the villages. “A strolga, we used to say in dialect, someone half way between a witch and an astrologer.”

  “That’s right. Old people up there used to call her in quite often. They trusted her powers and most of the time they really did get better.”

  The commissario nodded. The essential thing was to believe in it, to accept it. He found himself floundering in total confusion, without a clue. He seemed to be adrift as he continued to chatter about a far-off town populated only by the elderly. He was about to ask about what had been going on in the pensione when Elvira got in first:

  “In spite of everything, they never liked her.” She spoke with a conviction which irritated the commissario, who wondered if her plan was to get away from the subject he most wanted to discuss.

  “So why did she keep going there?” he said, trying to make the question sound casual.

  “The fact is that the people in the village spoke badly about her as a person, but they also treated her with respect and even fear for what she could do. Healing illnesses is a skill handed down from one generation to the next with a secret formula which has to be whispered during the ‘visits’ so that other people don’t hear.”

  “I know, I know,” Soneri said, turning his face towards the street.

  “Women who possess this skill are considered highly dangerous,” Elvira said in a hushed tone which somehow spoke of vigils, snowy nights and candle-lit conversations on straw in damp stables while waiting for a calf to be born. “They believe these women possess the magic power to make men go mad and ruin whole families. And Ghitta . . .”

  “And Ghitta what?”

  She remained silent for a while. “A long time ago, Ghitta had an affair with a married man. Everybody in the village knew about it and at that point . . .”

  “At that point, she fled to the city.”

  The woman nodded. “But she was not really on her own,” she added.

  “The man followed her?”

  “No, I mean that she was pregnant.”

  “Where is her son now?”

  “I don’t know. We never spoke about him. I found out from people in the village that she put him in some institution for a while – because he wasn’t right in the head, I mean. But I’ve no idea where he might be now.”

  Yet another transformation. The brig
ht image of Ghitta was clouding into one of an unhappy woman who had left so much wreckage in her wake. He began to think that all this was due to the disillusion brought on by the passing of time, that the fault lay in his having failed to see things clearly at the outset. Experience had taught him that any attempt to scrape under the surface will lead to the discovery of something rotten.

  “And the other one? Her lover,” Soneri said.

  The woman looked up, but he could not decide if it was an attempt to look him in the eye or a gesture of impatience. “He left as well. His wife wouldn’t have him in the house any more, and nearly all the property was in her name.” She paused and then went on, “He and Ghitta went on seeing each other for a number of years, but then he disappeared.”

  “Do you think this might have anything to do with Ghitta’s murder?”

  He saw her shake her head in denial, but in the dim light it was easy to mistake the meaning of every gesture. The two of them were no more than voices and vague outlines to which bodies and faces could be arbitrarily assigned. At that hour everything appeared to have lost its geometric solidity, particularly the mist-covered city itself and the network of circular lanes at its heart, now deprived of all clear-cut dimensions. A sheet of falling water acted like a badly focused lens to distort distances and create deceptive perspectives. In such a cityscape, footsteps ring hollow and seem absorbed by a looming abyss to which every path leads, and men feel more and more alone.

  It was past three in the morning. The commissario got to his feet with the certainty that the night would not bring him anything more helpful. “Get to bed,” he said quietly to the woman, with the concern of a doctor.

  He was gripped by deep anxiety as he went down the stairs, and when he came out onto the street, a sense of sadness brought a lump to his throat. He looked along the road. The thick fog raised a soft wall all around him. It was, as ever, the most faithful representation of his state of mind.

  3

  EVEN IN HIS dreams Soneri found himself stumbling through a mist so thick that he had lost his way. His mother used to say that dreams evaporate if the sleeper is woken up and are remembered only if he awakes of his own accord. He was coming round from the deep sleep he had fallen into at four o’clock in the morning when his mobile, sounding more like a barrel organ, began ringing out with “La donna è mobile”.