The Alba police chief got up and crossed over to the window. He opened the curtains, then wound up the external metal shutters. A bleak, pallid light reluctantly made its presence felt in the room. From the bed, Zen could see nothing but a section of rain-drenched plaster on the building opposite.
‘Not if this keeps up,’ Legna commented. ‘Until a few days ago, it looked like being one of the best years of the decade, possibly even the best since 1990. So the growers decided to delay picking and try to squeeze a little more flavour into the grapes. Now they’re out there clearing leaves and thinning clusters and praying that the rain lets up in time to save the harvest.’
He turned back to face Zen.
‘Well, I won’t tire you any more, dottore. You’ll need to be fully recovered if you’re to have any hope of getting Signor Manlio released in time to oversee the vintage. In my humble opinion, it’s a very tall order indeed.’
‘You think he’s guilty, then?’
A silent glance passed between the two men. Tullio Legna walked back to the bed.
‘The real problem is that there are no other suspects. Short of someone else coming forward and confessing, I can’t see any way of bringing it off.’
He paused, as though about to take his leave, then continued in a quieter tone.
‘And even if you did, it might not make any difference.’
Zen stared up at him through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘Meaning what?’
Legna eyed him acutely.
‘This is a small, tightly-knit community, dottore. Aldo Vincenzo may not have been the most popular member of it, to put it mildly, but to die like that! It’s the sort of atrocity which people remember from the war years, but which they never thought they’d witness again. Feelings are running very high.’
He placed the envelope he had been carrying on the bedside table.
‘All the information we have on the case is in there, together with a map of the district. But, as you no doubt know, Manlio and his father had a public row at the village festa on the evening in question. They were seen leaving the family house together later that night, and as far as we know Aldo never returned. If Manlio walks free without clear proof of his innocence, I’m afraid it may only be a matter of time before he… meets with an accident, shall we say?’
The two men confronted each other in silence for a moment.
‘And now I’ll go and order your lunch,’ Tullio Legna exclaimed in a loud, hearty voice. ‘Eat it all up, and try to get as much rest as you can. You’re going to need it.’
When the dog first appeared, snuffling and scratching at his door, Bruno Scorrone had a moment of weakness. Between thirty and forty million lire were staring him in the face, not to mention pawing at his knee, whining confusedly and surveying his hallway as though sighting invisible beings.
Somewhere safely far away — north of Asti, for instance, up in the Monferrato — Bruno could easily have disposed of a trained tabui like this for cash with no questions asked. But he had quite enough legal worries already, and knew exactly how much the hound meant to its owner. This made it all the more remarkable that she should be running around loose, her leash trailing behind her, at the mercy of less scrupulous and responsible citizens than Bruno, of whom there was no shortage in the locality. In the end he loaded the reluctant, hysterical Anna into his car and drove the two miles along back roads to Beppe Gallizio’s house. The rain had finally stopped, at least for now. The air was cool and slightly hazy, yielding a diffident, diffused light.
When he reached the house, on the outskirts of the village, there was no sign of Beppe. His car was there, but the front door was locked and Bruno Scorrone’s increasingly irritated thumping produced no response. Anna was behaving oddly, too. She circled the yard continually, sniffing and searching, running back to Bruno, planting her nose on his shoes and pawing the ground, then scuttling off to one side, where a path led down the hill. Bruno’s only interest in dogs was to scare off intruders and undercover tax agents, and in terms of their cash value as sniffers-out of truffles. He had no time to play whatever childish game the bitch was proposing. Fetching a length of rope from the barn, he tied one end to the leash dangling from her collar and the other to a spike protruding from the wall of the house, and then drove away.
Several hours passed. There is no way of knowing what this interval might mean to a dog, let alone one desperate to communicate urgent and terrible news. One of our days? One of our years? At all events, by the time Lamberto Latini showed up, Anna had worn her neck to a bloody mess in her frantic efforts to escape. Appalled at her condition, he freed the dog, which immediately displayed the same behaviour as she had with Bruno Scorrone, sprinting to and fro between Latini and the path winding down the hill between Beppe’s vegetable garden and a neighbour’s ploughed field.
Like the previous visitor, Lamberto rapped impatiently at the door, then tried the handle. He glanced at his watch. Just past ten. That was the time that they had agreed. By eleven at the latest he’d need to be at work back at his restaurant, which had been booked for lunch by a convention party from Asti who were being taken out for a ‘Traditional Langhe Country Meal’. But where the hell was Beppe? If he didn’t come through, Lamberto was in deep trouble. The cut-price dealings in truffles which took place in the back streets of Alba would be over by now, and if he had to pay the official price, including commission and tax, he’d hardly break even on the day.
Lamberto stood looking around in growing annoyance. Beppe had never let him down before. It was an excellent arrangement for both of them: truffles for cash, with no extra cut for middlemen or the fisco. Since Anna was there, he must have returned from his nocturnal hunting and gathering. Also there was the dented, mud- spattered old Fiat 500 which Beppe had cannily refused to trade in for something more comfortable and ostentatious, even though the sum Lamberto had paid him for a particularly fine specimen a couple of months ago would alone have paid for a new car. Whatever Beppe did with his money, it was nothing that might attract attention.
The dog was still mewling and worrying Lamberto’s shoes, making little forays towards the path leading down the hillside, then returning with a series of high-pitched whines. This increased the mystery of Beppe’s absence. Even if he’d been called away unexpectedly, or suddenly been taken ill, he would never have left his invaluable truffle hound tied up outside the house like one of her poor cousins, the half-starved watchdogs of the region.
Unlike Bruno Scorrone, Lamberto Latini liked dogs, to the extent — regarded locally as eccentric, if not perverse — of keeping a spaniel purely as a pet. So when he followed the increasingly distraught Anna round the side of the house, it was purely as a reflex action born of habit. But once they reached the back of the house and the bitch scampered off down the path, encouraged by this first glimmer of comprehension in the dim yet dominant species she had to deal with, Lamberto did not follow. He had no clear idea how to resolve the problem of Beppe’s dereliction, but taking his dog for walkies was certainly not it.
At a loss, and feeling vaguely ashamed of himself, he went over to the back door of the property and made a big show of knocking and calling out Beppe’s name. There was no reply, but the door opened a crack, as if under its own volition. Lamberto stared at it an instant. Then, ignoring Anna’s frantic entreaties, he stepped over the threshold, shutting the dog outside.
‘Beppe! Beppe? It’s Lamberto!’
He already knew that there would be no answer. The silence had that coherent quality, like settled soil, which houses only have when they are empty. Lamberto stepped cautiously into the large kitchen, with its board floor and bare walls where islands of brickwork showed through the crumbling plaster. The air was cold, the room empty. Moving into the hall, Lamberto continued his search, occasionally calling Beppe’s name aloud, less loudly now. Outside he could hear Anna’s persistent keening, as though she were answering him, but within the house the solid, complacent silence was unbroken. There was clearly no one there.
Lamberto returned to the kitchen and looked around, reluctant to admit failure. On the table stood a dirty dish with some sauce dried to a crust, an empty wine glass and a chunk of bread. The fire-place was cold, the ashes holding no ember. Lamberto picked up the bread and squeezed it. Yesterday’s. So Beppe had eaten, presumably before going out, but had not been back since. Except that his dog was there, and his car.
Then he noticed another item on the table. He picked it up and inspected it. At first sight it resembled a general-purpose knife such as might be used for slicing salami or cheese, except that the blade and handle were stained with a dark tawny substance resembling dried blood. Before he could begin to think what this might signify, his attention was diverted by the sound of a key being inserted into the front door.
