capable of taking hours before arriving at the crime scene. He decided to speed things up.
‘Pass me the mobile phone,’
he said to Galluzzo, who was sitting in front of him. Gallo, naturally, was at the wheel.
He punched in Judge Tommaseo’s number.
‘Montalbano here. Listen, Judge, that was no joke, that phone call Sorry to say, we found a dead body in the house. A woman.’
There were different reactions among those present in the car. Gallo swerved into the oncoming lane, brushed against a truck loaded with iron rods, cursed, then regained control.
Galluzzo gave a start, opened his eyes wide, twisted around and looked at his boss with his mouth agape. Fazio visibly stiffened and stared straight ahead, expressionless.
‘I’ll be right there,’ said Judge Tommaseo. Tell me exactly where the house is.’
Increasingly fed up, Montalbano passed the mobile phone to Gallo.
‘Explain to him where we’re going. Then call Pasquano and the crime lab.’
Fazio didn’t open his mouth until the car came to a stop behind the bottle-green Twingo.
‘Did you put gloves on before you went in?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Montalbano.
‘Anyway, now that we’re going in, touch everything as much as you want, just, to be safe. Leave as many fingerprints as you can.’
‘I’d already thought of that,’ said the inspector.
After the storm of the previous night, there was very little left of the scrap of paper tucked under the windscreen wiper. The water had washed away the telephone number.
Montalbano didn’t bother to remove it
‘You two have a look around down here’ the inspector said to Gallo and Galluzzo.
Then, followed by Fazio, he went upstairs. With the light on, the dead woman’s body upset him less than the night before, when he’d seen it only by the beam of the torch. It seemed less real, though certainly not fake. Livid, white and stiff, the corpse resembled those plaster casts of the victims of Pompeii. Face down as she was, it was impossible to see what she looked like, but her struggle against death must have been fierce. Clumps of blonde hair lay scattered over the torn sheet, and purplish bruises stood out across her shoulders and just below the nape of her neck. The killer must have had to use every bit of his strength to force her face so far down into the mattress that not a wisp of air could get through.
Gallo and Galluzzo came upstairs.
‘Everything seems in order downstairs’ said Gallo.
True, she looked like a plaster cast, but she was still a young woman, murdered, naked, and in a position that suddenly seemed unbearably obscene to him, her most intimate privacy violated, thrown open by the eight eyes of the policemen in the room.
As if to give her back some semblance of personhood and dignity, he asked Fazio, ‘Did they tell you her name?’
‘Yes. If that’s Mrs Licalzi, her name was Michela.’
He went into the bathroom, picked the pink bathrobe up off the floor, brought it into the bedroom, and covered the body with it.
He went downstairs. Had she lived, Michela Licalzi would still have had some work to do to sort out the house.
In the living room, propped up in a corner, were two rolled-up rugs; the sofa and armchairs were still factory-wrapped in clear plastic,’ a small table lay upside down, legs up, on top of a big, unopened box. The only thing in any kind of order was a small glass display cabinet with the usual sorts of things carefully arranged inside: two antique fans, a few ceramic statuettes, a closed violin case and two very beautiful shells, collector’s items.
The forensics team were the first to arrive. To replace the old chief of the crime lab, Jacomuzzi, Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi had hand-picked the young Dr Arqua, who’d moved down from Florence. More than chief of forensics, Jacomuzzi had been an incurable exhibitionist, always the first to strike a pose for the photographers, TV cameramen and journalists. To rib him, as he often did, Montalbano used to call him ‘Pippo Baudo’. Deep down, Jacomuzzi never believed much in forensics as a useful tool in investigations; he maintained that sooner or later intuition and reason would find the solution, with or without the support of microscopes and analyses. Heresies, to Bonetti-Alderighi, who quickly got rid of him. Vanni Arqua, for his part, was a dead ringer for Harold Lloyd. Hair always dishevelled, he dressed like an absent-minded professor from a thirties movie and worshipped science. Montalbano didn’t care much for him, and Arqua repaid him in kind with cordial antipathy.
Forensics thus showed up in full force, in two cars with sirens screaming as if they were in Texas. There were eight of them, all in civvies, and the first thing they did was unload boxes and crates from the boots, looking like a film crew ready to start shooting.
When Arqua walked into the living room, Montalbano didn’t even say hello; he merely pointed his thumb upward, signalling that what concerned them was upstairs.
They hadn’t all finished climbing the stairs before Montalbano heard Arquas voice call out:
‘Excuse me, Inspector, would you come up here a minute?’
He took his time. When he entered the bedroom, he felt the crime lab chief’s eyes boring into him.
‘When you discovered the body, was it like this?’
‘No,’ said Montalbano, cool as a cucumber. ‘She was naked.’
‘And where did you get that bathrobe?’ ‘From the bathroom.’
‘Put everything back as it was, for Christ’s sake! You’ve altered the whole picture! That’s very serious!’
Without a word, Montalbano walked over to the corpse, picked up the bathrobe, and draped it over his arm.
‘Wow, nice arse!’
The comment came from one of the crime lab photographers, a homely sort of paparazzo with his shirt-tails hanging out of his trousers.
‘Go right ahead, if you want,’ the inspector said to him calmly. ‘She’s already in position.’
Fazio, who knew what dangers lurked beneath Montalbano’s controlled calm, took a step towards him.
The inspector looked Arqua in the eye, ‘Understand now why I did it, arsehole?’
And he left the room. In the bathroom he splashed a little water on his face, threw the bathrobe down on the floor more or less where he’d found it, and went back, into the bedroom.
‘I’ll have to tell the commissioner about this’ Arqua said icily. Montalbano’s voice was ten degrees icier.
‘I’m sure you’ll understand each other perfectly.’
‘Chief, me and Gallo and Galluzzo are going outside to smoke a cigarette. We’re getting in these guys’
way.’
Montalbano, absorbed in thought, didn’t answer. From the living room he went back upstairs and examined the little guest room and the bathroom.
He’d already looked carefully around downstairs and hadn’t found what he was looking for. For the sake of thoroughness, he stuck his head into the bedroom, which was being turned upside down by its invaders from the crime lab, and double-checked what he thought he’d seen earlier.
Outside the house, he lit a cigarette himself. Fazio had just finished talking on the mobile phone.
‘I got the husband’s phone number and address in Bologna’ he explained.
Inspector’ Galluzzo broke in. ‘We were just talking, the three of us. There’s something strange—’
‘The armoire in the bedroom is still wrapped in plastic’ Gallo cut in. ‘And I also looked under the bed.’
‘And I looked in all the other bedrooms. But—’
Fazio was about to draw the conclusion, but stopped when his superior raised a hand.
The lady’s clothes are nowhere to be found,’ Montalbano concluded.
THREE
The ambulance arrived’
followed by Coroner Pasquano’s car.
‘Go and see if forensics have finished with the
