Zen nodded. He had read the investigators' reports on the couple. Giuseppina Bini was one of those elderly women who, having grown up when doctors were expensive and often ineffective, strove obsessively to keep the powers of sickness and death at bay by banishing their agents, dirt and dust, from every corner of the house. This had made it virtually certain that the dried spots of blood found on the dining room floor and on the steps leading to the cellar must have been deposited by the lightlywounded killer. In which case, thought Zen, he must have destroyed the discs and tapes after the murders, despite the horrendous risks involved in staying at the scene once ghe alarm had been raised and the police were on their way. It didn't make any sense, he told himself for the fiftieth time. If the object was to destroy both Burolo and his records, surely the killer would either have used a silenced weapon or eliminated Bini and his wife as well, thus giving himself ample time to erase Burolo's records before making good his escape. And if the discs and tapes had been erased after they were seized by the Carabinieri -the long arm of Palazzo Sisti would no doubt have been capable of this – then why did the killer make his way down to the cellar and ransack the shelves at all?
It made no sense, no sense at all, although Zen had a tantalizing feeling that the solution was in fact right under his nose, simple and obvious. But that was no concern of his in any case. His reason for visiting the villa had nothing to do with viewing the scene of the crime. Nevertheless, for the sake of appearances he asked Bini to show him the cellar before they went outside. The caretaker duly levered up a brass ring and lifted the hatch to reveal a set of worn stone steps leading down.
'It's not locked?' Zen asked.
Bini clicked a switch on the wall and a neon light flickered into life below.
'There are no locks here,' he said. 'If you keep your jewels in a safe, you don't need to lock the jewel case.'
The cellar was large, stretching the entire width of th~original farm. Zen sniffed the air.
'Nice and fresh down here.'
The caretaker indicated a narrow fissure at floor level.
'The air comes in there. They used to cure cheeses and hams here in the old days. Even in the summer it stays cool.'
Zen nodded. This constant temperature was no doubt why Oscar had used the place as a storage vault. But now the twin neon bars illuminated an empty expanse of whitewashed walls and bare stone floor. There was nothing to show that this had once been the nerve-centre of an operation which had apparently succeeded in fulfilling the alchemist's dream of turning dross into gold.
Once they got above ground again, the caretaker led Zen out on to the terrace.
'The swimming-pool,' he announced.
Wild follies and outrageous whims die with the outsized ego that created them, and their corpses make depressing viewing. Even drained and boarded over, a swimmingpool is still a swimming-pool, but Oscar's designer beach was an all-or-nothing affair. Once the plug had been pulled and the machinery turned off, it stood revealed for what it was: a tacky, pretentious monstrosity. The transplanted sand was dirty and threadbare, the rocks showed their cement joints, and the mystery of those azure depths stood revealed as a coat of blue paint applied to the vast concrete pit where the body of some small animal lay drowned in a shrinking puddle of water.
'We can get everything going again,' Bini assured his visitor. 'It's all set up.'
But he sounded unconvinced. Even if some crazy foreigner did buy the place, nothing would ever be the same again. Villa Burolo was not a house, it was a performance. Now the star was dead it would always be a flop.
'Well, it certainly seems to be a very pleasant and impressive property,' Zen remarked with a suitably Swiss lack of enthusiasm. 'I'll just have a look around the grounds, on my own.'
Bini turned back into the house, clearly relieved that his ordeal was over.
When he had gone, Zen strolled slowly along the terrace, rounding the comer of the original farmhouse.
Despite the encircling wire, there was no sense of being in a guarded enclosure, for the boundaries of the property had been cleverly situated so as to be invisible from the villa. The view was extensive, ranging from the sea, across the wide valley he had crossed in the Mercedes, to the mountain slopes where the village was just visible as an intrusive smudge.
When he reached the dining-room window, Zen looked round to ensure that he was unobserved, then crouched down to examine the slight discolouration of the flagstones marking the spot where Rita Burolo had bled to death. Another thing that made no sense, he thought.
None of the investigators had commented on the remarkable fact that the murderer had made no attempt to find out whether Signora Burolo was dead or not. As it happened, she had gone into an irreversible coma by the time she was found, but how was the killer to know that? A few minutes either way, a stronger constitution or a lesser loss of blood, and the Burolo case would have been solved before it began.
Nor was this the only instance in which the killer had displayed a most unprofessional carelessness. For although Oscar Burolo had concealed video equipment about the villa to tape the compromising material he stored in the vault, he camouflaged these clandestine operations behind a very public obsession with recording poolside frolics and informal dinner parties. Thus no attempt had been made to disguise the large video camera mounted on its tripod in the corner of the dining room. In the event, no glimpse of the murderer had been recorded on the tape, but how could he have been absolutely sure of that? And if there was even the slightest possibility that some damning clue had been captured by the camera, why had he made no attempt to remove or destroy the tape?
Once again, Zen felt his reason swamped by the sense of something grossly abnormal about the Burolo case. What did this almost supernatural indifference indicate, if not the killer's knowledge that he was invulnerable? There was no need for him to take precautions. The efforts of the police and judiciary were as vain as Oscar Burolo's expensive security measures. The murderer could not be caught any more than he could be stopped.
He walked back along the terrace to the west face of the villa. Beyond the sad ruins of the pool, the land sloped steeply upwards towards the lurid forest he had noticed earlier. The trees were conifers of some kind, packed together in a tight, orderly mass that looked like a reafforestation project. Beyond them lay the main mountain range, a mass of shattered granite briefly interrupted by a smooth grey wall, presumably a dam. Zen continued along the terrace to the wall which concealed the service block and helicopter pad, a half-hearted imitation of the traditional pasture enclosures, higher and with the stones cemented together. On the other side was a neat kitchen garden with a system of channels to carry water to the growing vegetables from the hosepipe connected to an outside tap. Zen took a path leading uphill towards a group of low concrete huts about fifty metres away from the house and partially concealed by a row of cherry trees.
As he passed the line of trees, a low growl made the air vibrate with a melancholy resonance that brought Zen out in goose-flesh. There were three huts, a small one and two large structures which backed on to an enclosure of heavyduty mesh fencing. Both of these had metal doors mounted on runners. One of them was slightly open, and it was from here that the noise had come.
The inside of the hut was in complete darkness. A hot, smothering, acrid odour filled the air. Something rustled restlessly in the further reaches of the dark. As Zen's eyes gradually adjusted, he made out a figure bending over a heap of some sort on the ground. The resonant vibration thrilled the air again, like a giant breathing stertorously in a drunken slumber. The bending figure suddenly whirled round, as though caught in some guilty act.
'Who are you?'
Zen advanced a step or two into the hut.
'Stay there!'
The man walked towards him with swift, light stridei.
He was short and stocky, with wiry black hair and the fac~: of a pugnacious gnome.
'What are you doing?'
'Looking over the house.'
'This is not the house.'
Zen switched on his fatuous Swiss smile. 'Looking over the property, I should have said.'
The man was staring at him with an air of deep suspicion.
'Who are you?' he repeated.
Zen held out his hand, which was ignored.
'Reto Gurtner.'
'You're Italian?'
