Page 12 of Murder at the Ponte Vecchio

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

I spent that afternoon at the computer, working my way through the list of Virgilio’s possibles, but without uncovering anything particularly compromising. I started at the bottom with Inspector Roberto Faldo. He was forty-one years old and had been born in Parma, roughly a couple of hours up the autostrada to the north of Florence. He had attended Parma University before joining the police there. He was married with two teenage children and had been a police officer for almost eighteen years, moving to the Florence force eighteen months previously. Photos of him showed him to be a smart, fit-looking man and he appeared to be a motivated and ambitious officer who promised to go far.

The two more senior officers were both in their sixties. Vincenzo Grande, now sixty-one, had joined the police at the age of twenty-five and had spent most of his career in his native Sicily before getting his current position here in Florence asCommissario Capo, the next step up from Virgilio, and roughly equivalent to superintendent in the UK police. He was married with two sons and three grandchildren. When I saw his photo, I remembered meeting him on a couple of occasions. He had been cordialand welcoming and he certainly hadn’t struck me as being devious, although I had struggled to understand his strong Sicilian accent.

His superior, thevice questore, occupied the position of second-in-command of the force and had come from Rome four years earlier. His surname was Verdi and I had never met him, but his parents might well have had an interest in music as they’d christened him Giuseppe, like the composer. He was sixty-three years old and married, but without children and, to the best of my knowledge, he had never written any operas. Both of these men were clearly career officers who had worked their way up through the ranks.

Once I’d established their identities, I set about doing a bit of digging into the past of all three men. Inspector Roberto Faldo was the easiest. Although he didn’t have a social media presence, both of his teenagers did, and I was able to track the family back over the past five or six years of sports competitions, school plays and holidays as far away as the USA and Africa as well as closer to home on the Tuscan coast and the island of Elba. His hobby appeared to be sport in general in all its iterations. There were photos of Roberto on skis high in the mountains, in a battered 4 x 4 climbing a near vertical slope, standing on a podium in cycling gear, and crossing the finishing line of a triathlon. There were shots of him with his wife at various parties and other events, and she always had a broad smile on her face. Nothing sinister there. It looked like a solid, happy family.

Superintendent Vincenzo Grande, Virgilio’s immediate superior, was less visible on the Internet but I managed to dig up some scraps of information. It was immediately clear that his hobby was hunting and I found references to him in connection with a hunting club by a lake to the west of Florence as well as another club dedicated to hunting for wildboar – a major pest in the Tuscan countryside. There were various photos of him with trophies and more bloodthirsty shots of him posing alongside the bodies of a variety of unfortunate dead animals. I knew from experience how popular hunting was here in Tuscany – in season, it often sounded like World War Three outside my house on a Sunday morning. No doubt Grande had quickly made friends with like-minded people after arriving here from Sicily. But as far as my investigation was concerned, unless you happened to be a wild animal, there was little about him of a negative nature to be found online.

Vice Questore Verdi was tall, meticulously groomed and always impeccably turned out. Online, he appeared at numerous formal events, even shaking hands with the president of the republic on one occasion, inspecting new recruits at a police college and appearing on several TV talk shows answering questions about law and order. His wife appeared only once – a grey-haired woman looking uncomfortable in an unflattering evening dress – but there appeared to be no shortage of younger, prettier women only too happy to be photographed alongside Giuseppe Verdi – composer or not.

From there, I moved on to less conventional searches, trying to discover if any of the three had skeletons in their cupboards of an illegal, financial or extramarital nature. Again, I drew a blank. I ran their names across the national and local news agencies without anything sinister being thrown up. There was an interesting article from a major Sicilian newspaper a few years back detailing Vincenzo Grande’s successful steering of anAntimafiacampaign – only a matter of months before he had obtained his present position here in Florence. The synchronicity of the timing struck me as interesting – had he applied for the Florence position so as to put five hundred miles between himself and theSicilian Mafia heartland? Had he, maybe, annoyed one of the local dons and had chosen retreat as the better part of valour?

I could find no dirt on thevice questoreapart from what looked like a particularly intimate shot of him standing beside a young female officer in uniform, his arm around her waist and his hand resting cosily against her hip. She looked happy enough, and I could find nothing anywhere about him objectifying or abusing women, but I filed that away as a possible chink in his armour. However, what possible connection there might be between a womanising older man and a dead asylum seeker was beyond me.

I finally gave up, unable to find anything that might indicate guilt for any of the three. Of course, if the investigation had been carried out by the police, they would have been able to gain access to the bank accounts of the three men, which might have made interesting reading. Without that information, I had pretty much got as far as I could go. A quick flick through the other officers Virgilio had mentioned also produced nothing, so mid-afternoon, I picked up the phone and called Virgilio to break the news to him that I’d drawn a blank. He listened to me rattle off what little I’d managed to learn about them and his tone was gloomy when he answered.

‘Thanks a lot, Dan, that’s pretty much the same result that I’ve had. You’re definitely right about one thing: Verdi, thevice questore, does have a reputation for having wandering hands, particularly with attractive, young, female officers. There have been a few grumbles but nobody’s come forward to lodge an official complaint and I don’t blame them. High-ranking officers like him have powerful friends.’

The Metropolitan Police has had its fair share of sexual predators – and quite probably still does – and one of the things in my career that I’m most proud of is managing to get justice fora young constable who had been stalked and sexually assaulted by a superintendent in – of all things – the vice squad. The super had been thrown out of the force but, sadly, the constable had subsequently also left, disillusioned, looking for a different career. I took an immediate dislike to thevice questore. Abuse of power is bad, but when it becomes sexual abuse, that’s even worse. Whover the perpetrator was, I was determined to help Virgilio, so I came up with a suggestion.

‘There’s no way I can get access to your system so as to investigate serving police officers from within. That’ll have to be up to you. If you want my advice, if I were you, I’d take Marco into my confidence. He’s a good man and you can trust him, I’m sure. Anyway, that’s your call, but what I could do if you like is to take a look at Verdi, Grande and Faldooutsidework. Let me have their addresses and I’ll do a little bit of discreet surveillance. You never know, we might catch one of them dipping his hands in the till.’

Virgilio gave me the addresses and thanked me but warned me to be as careful as possible. I promised that I would be the soul of discretion. He and I knew that it was unlikely that I’d be able to uncover anything to link any of the three men with missing police records, but it was worth a try.

I went out to where Anna was sitting under the pergola with Oscar sprawled at her feet. She was reading a hefty old tome even bigger than last night’s steak. I glanced at the title and was unsurprised to see that it dealt with the life of her beloved Medici family, who had ruled Tuscany from the fifteen hundreds to the middle of the eighteenth century. She glanced up as she heard me, and Oscar also looked up, no doubt hoping for a walk or a biscuit – or both.

‘Finished your investigation, Sherlock?’ She gave me a smile. ‘Normal people take time off to relax on a Sunday afternoon.’

Although over lunch, I’d told her that Virgilio was okay andthat we’d had a good talk, I hadn’t given her so much as a hint as to the true nature of his concerns, and she hadn’t asked. I smiled back and indicated the book on the table in front of her.

‘Look who’s talking. You never stop working.’

She reached up and caught my hand. ‘We’re obviously made for each other.’

I leant down and gave her a kiss before pointing up the hill. ‘Feel like coming for a walk?’

She had only just started to shake her head when there was a movement at her feet and Oscar leapt up ‘Walk’ is another trigger word for him, but he had to wait while I changed into shorts and trainers before we set off. In the winter, Florence is as cold as London or colder, and in the summer, temperatures regularly soar into the mid- or high thirties. Today was perfect. It was warm, probably in the low twenties, but the air was still fresh and the ground had dried out after Friday night’s rain. It was an ideal afternoon for walking and chasing sticks – that’s Oscar who does the chasing. I just throw them for him.

We walked up past rows of vines that were just beginning to show distinct signs of awakening from their winter sleep, and through olive groves where the nets used by the farmers when harvesting the olives in late autumn were still lying about. I buy oil and wine locally and both are excellent. The oil here in particular is so very different from most extra virgin olive oil on sale in UK supermarkets. This stuff is a deep-green colour and cloudy, not dissimilar in appearance to what comes out of an engine after twenty or thirty thousand miles. The taste is strong and fruity and it catches your throat when it’s been freshly pressed. One of my favourite snacks is simply a thick-cut slice of the wonderful unsalted Tuscan bread, rubbed with a clove of garlic, then liberally drizzled with freshly pressed oil and sprinkled with a pinch of salt. With a glass of Chianti, it’s unbeatable.

My gastronomic musings were interrupted by my phone. It was Marco and he had news.

‘Ciao, Dan, I haven’t been able to contact Berg’s lawyer yet, but listen to this: the housekeeper says the lawyer came for dinner on Wednesday, three daysbeforethe family get-together. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

I certainly was. ‘Assuming that the lawyer didn’t just come to give advice, this could mean that Berg actually changed his will in advance of seeing his children. Did he change it to benefit his kids as they anticipated? Alternatively, now that his long-term girlfriend has died, did he disinherit the family and arrange to give the whole lot to the Italian equivalent of Battersea dogs’ home?’

I heard him chuckle. ‘I’m sure the Ente Nazionale Protezione Animali would be only too happy to receive a hefty legacy, but could he really disinherit his kids? It depends whether his affairs are going to be treated under Italian law or Dutch law. I would imagine, seeing as he’s been resident here, that it will be Italian law and, as such, there’s a fixed percentage that has to go to each of his kids, irrespective of whether he liked them or not. Besides, whatever the legalities of his will and the fact that he hasn’t contacted his children for thirty years, cutting them out of their inheritance would strike me as downright malicious.’

‘Everything I’ve heard about him so far tells me that he was a strange and selfish man, so that might have been his plan. Maybe he blamed them for not making the effort to try to contact him, and this would have been his idea of revenge. Of course, until we get sight of the will, there’s no way of knowing.’

‘Exactly, and most probably the will’s locked inside the safe at his villa – and things aren’t looking too good on that front. The tech guys have just called me back to report that it’s a Zugtresor safe, made in Switzerland, and virtually uncrackable. They’vemessaged the company to ask how to proceed, but it’ll take time. Forensics are still combing the shop on the Ponte Vecchio and they report no sign of Berg’s laptop or his phone. They’ve managed to open the safe there – like I told you, they described it as ancient and unsophisticated – but it only contained a few trays of fairly cheap rings and a collection of run-of-the-mill bracelets and necklaces. No sign of the entry combination to the safe at the villa. I’ll contact his bank and his lawyer first thing tomorrow in the hope that they hold a copy of the will, or even the safe combination, but I doubt it. Clearly, the old man didn’t trust a soul. We’ve released the victim’s name to the media with a plea for anybody with any information to come forward but, again, I’m not holding my breath.’

‘Have the media been informed that it’s being treated as murder, not suicide?’

‘Yes, and I’ve already had local TV trying to interview me. I wish thecommissariocould deal with them. I’m useless in front of a camera. Have you had a chance to talk to him yet?’

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