round his mouth.
‘Giovannaaaa! The Morozzis have scratched the caaaaar!’ he yelled.
‘Whaaaaat?’ she shouted back.
‘The caaaar! They scraaaaatched it! The Morozziiiiis diiiid!’
The wife then yelled at the top of her lungs.
‘Yes, I know, they waaaaashed it! They’re soooo sweeeeet!’ and she started waving her arm again. The husband was hopping from one foot to the other.
‘What did you saaayyy?’ he yelled.
‘They’re sooo sweeeeet!’
‘It’s scraaaaatched!’
Signora Giovanna gestured with her hand as if to say she couldn’t understand. Meanwhile Piras had gone into the garage and was already on his way back. He came up behind Salvetti.
‘Signor Salvetti, when, exactly, did you lend your car to the Morozzis?’
‘What? What’s my car got to do with any of this?’
Bordelli was right there beside him.
‘Please try to remember; it could be very important,’ he said in a serious tone.
‘Oh, really?’ Salvetti looked first at one, then the other, still in the grips of his tantrum. ‘They wanted to go for a drive through the hills. I think it was last Friday.’
Piras butted in.
‘Did you lend it to them Friday morning?’
‘Yes … I mean, no. I must have given it to them Thursday afternoon; that nincompoop Giulio came by to pick it up.’
‘Are you sure it was Thursday? Think it over carefully.’
‘Yes, yes, of course it was Thursday … because that morning we went early to the beach, whereas they normally don’t go out until ten, the bums. And so I let them take it the day before. A fine way to behave, bloody hell. They scrape your car and then don’t tell you! Neither of them, the pricks!’
‘It’s a pretty nasty scrape, Inspector,’ Piras commented. ‘Looks like they clipped a tree.’
By this point Salvetti was out of control, stamping his feet and cursing between clenched teeth.
‘Never mind washing it, they shouldn’t have scratched it. Bloody hell. The little boors!’
Bordelli tried to summon forth the least irritating tone possible.
‘Oh, so they washed it?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, they washed it! To thank me for the favour. Bloody hell!’
Signora Giovanna couldn’t understand what was going on. She’d been waving for the last fifteen minutes, and still nobody had left. Finally she got up and started coming towards the three men with her fashion-model walk, legs popping out of her beach cover with each step. Piras’s eyes were glued to her. She realised this and pretended not to notice, but did so in such an obvious way that Salvetti raised his eyes to the heavens and sighed. Bordelli was fed up with the whole situation.
‘We have to go, Signor Salvetti, thank you ever so much,’ he said, grabbing Piras by the arm and dragging him away. The Sardinian, however, managed to turn round one last time to look at Signora Giovanna’s legs and smile.
When they got into the broiling Volkswagen, Bordelli turned to Piras.
‘So?’
‘Beautiful woman.’
‘Aside from that.’
‘It’s an Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint, Inspector. It can do a hundred and ten no sweat.’
Bordelli wanted to see the sea again. They sought out the least crowded beach and went and sat down on an overturned
A sun-blackened lifeguard dozed on a deckchair under a vast umbrella, beside him a bottle of beer within arm’s reach, buried up to the neck in the sand, and, on the other side, a crumpled newspaper with a pack of cigarettes on top.
A pleasant breeze had risen, lightly ruffling their clothes. Bordelli chased the image of Elvira from his thoughts and studied Piras’s wooden face. The young man’s pitch-black eyes, with their veil of ancestral nostalgia, seemed able to look past the horizon.
‘What are you thinking about, Piras?’
‘I’m not thinking about anything.’
The inspector half-closed his eyes and looked at the sun setting slowly into the sea.
‘They say it’s impossible not to think about anything,’ he said. Piras did not reply. He picked up a handful of sand, letting it flow out of his closed fist. They both remained silent, each with his own thoughts, listening to the regular yet ever-changing sound of the surf. Bordelli again remembered Piras’s father … Sometimes they would sit on the ground, back to back, looking up at the black sky and its infinite points of light, not saying a word, while the others played cards or wrote letters that might never reach their destinations.
‘What do you say we leave, Piras?’
‘It’s your decision, Inspector.’
‘All right, then, let’s go. I need to have a little chat with Diotivede.’
‘You want me to drive?’
‘Sure, why not?’
Bordelli dozed the whole way back, hands between his legs, head swaying to and fro against the seat.
‘I’m going to close my eyes a little, but not sleep,’ he said.
‘Do whatever you like,’ said Piras.
‘I’m just a little tired.’
Bordelli closed his eyes and started to snore. Piras pulled into the courtyard at headquarters in Via Zara and turned off the engine. The inspector stirred, opened his eyes but then immediately closed them again to stop the burning. He pulled himself up with a grunt and shook his head, as if to throw off the cobwebs of sleep. Piras patiently waited for him to wake up fully.
‘You want me to take you home, Inspector?’
‘No, thanks. I can manage. First, however, I want to drop in on Diotivede for a minute. You want to come too?’
‘That’s fine with me.’
‘I’ll drive. It’ll help wake me up.’
‘As you wish.’
They both got out of the car to trade places. Bordelli staggered. A stabbing pain in the back made him groan. He yawned at the wheel all the way to the Forensic Medicine lab, running a red light and clipping a kerb, but Piras remained unflustered.
They entered Diotivede’s lab together, and Bordelli immediately sat down in the only available chair.
‘This is Piras, he’ll be joining us on Wednesday,’ he said.
Diotivede made a gesture of greeting to the lad and then looked Bordelli up and down, slipping white rubber gloves off of his small, slender hands.
‘Don’t you think you’d better go and get some sleep?’ he said.
‘I shall, a little later. Listen, Diotivede, don’t get offended if I ask you something I’ve already asked; it’s just to be thorough.’
‘Be my guest.’
‘Are you sure Signora Pedretti died round nine o’clock? Couldn’t it have been later? Or much earlier …?’ He ran a hand over his face, unable to say anything else.
The doctor shot a quick glance at Piras and took a step forward, stiff as a tree trunk.
‘No offence taken, but if I was unable to establish that sort of thing, I wouldn’t do the work I do.’
‘But
‘Science is not human. If you’d brought me a body that had been dead for a month or a year … then I might have trouble determining the hour and day of death. But in this case … there are very precise stages, and there’s
