Page 35 of Murder at the Ponte Vecchio

THURSDAY MORNING/AFTERNOON

I left thequesturaand headed out to the Teatro Dell’Arno for my session with Zebra. As usual, Oscar was delighted to see her and he sat on her lap all the way through almost an hour of rehearsal. Considering that he weighs over fifty pounds, this spoke volumes about her strength – not just her ability to raise her arms with the weight of jewellery attached to them. As a director, she was very patient and she had a way of explaining remarkably clearly what I had to do and where I had to go, as well as how I should look and act. By the end of the session, I was exhausted, but I got the impression that she was reassured, although I was still nervous. After all, the opening night was in little more than forty-eight hours’ time.

I drove back to my office and parked the van in the courtyard. Although it had been a glorious sunny morning so far, I could see rainclouds gathering and I found myself smiling. The tourists might not like the rain, but I knew that all the farmers around here would be only too pleased. Tuscany has been getting drier and drier over the course of the last decade and rain has become a rare and precious commodity.

Upstairs in the office, I found Lina looking and sounding more cheerful. I told her I’d been with Virgilio and that he’d also been sounding much more like his normal self. I didn’t tell her that our chances of laying our hands on a serial killer relied on the murderer being stupid – or desperate – enough to fall for my gravel-in-a-box trick or for Marco to fully recover his memory and tell us who had run him down – or at least who had phoned him just before the accident.

I went into my office and spent the remainder of the morning catching up on admin that I’d been neglecting until there was a call from Virgilio just after midday.

‘Ciao, Dan. I thought you’d like to know that the first part of your plan has been put into operation. I had Verdi, Grande and Faldo in my office for a briefing and I made sure they had a good look at the cigar box before I locked it in my desk drawer. None of them commented on it very much, which struck me as a bit strange – after all, it’s not as if I smoke cigars – but then I told them that it had come from Berg’s safe and its contents are valuable. I said I couldn’t take it out of the evidence bag and show them what was inside because Forensics still had work to do on it. Interestingly, Superintendent Grande asked me if there was gold in the box and I shook it so they could hear the gravel rattling about before announcing that it contained a quantity of precious stones. If he already knew that there were diamonds in there, maybe he was just doing a bit of disinformation, pretending that this was all new to him. Neither of the other two commented but I could tell that both of them were interested – for the right reasons or the wrong reasons, I’ve no way of knowing.’

‘And what about Luuc Berg? I trust he showed up.’

‘Yes, he’s just left now. He was uncommunicative and unhelpful and, to all intents and purposes, uninterested. I told him that his father had left a lot of valuable items in the safe andthat this box was only a small part of it. He just nodded and didn’t comment. Coincidentally, while I was talking to him, I got a call from the front desk to say that a parcel had arrived for me, so I jumped at the excuse, murmured a quick apology, and left him there with the box in the evidence bag on the desk in front of him for three or four minutes while I went down to pick up the birthday present for Lina that I’d ordered online. It’s a tennis racket, in case you’re wondering.’

‘And Luuc and the cigar box were still there?’

‘Yes, and, as far as I could tell, untouched.’

‘I’ll drop by later on to check the camera footage with the app on my phone. What did you think of Luuc? Do you think he might be our killer? Obviously, he can’t have anything to do with the missing files at thequestura, but maybe he really did kill his father.’

‘I’m not so sure. Yes, like his brother said, he’s an awkward so-and-so, but do I see him as a murderer? No, I don’t. Also, he produced a receipt for a hotel room in Modane, France, for Friday night. I haven’t checked with the hotel yet and it could be a forgery or he might have paid and then not slept in it, but I must admit that I’m tending to rule him out as a serious suspect. You never know, the hotel may have CCTV footage that proves he was there.’

Mention of CCTV stirred something that had been bubbling away at the back of my mind ever since I had seen those photos of the hooded figure who had murdered Jacobs. ‘You know the CCTV footage of the Grand Hotel? There were shots of the killer in the corridor and at Jacobs’s door as well as when he left the hotel, but there was no sign of him arriving. Might this mean that he was staying there?’

‘I got Faldo to check all the guests and he says none of them fitted the profile of the killer.’

‘I see. What about dinner guests? There’s a Michelin-starred restaurant there, after all. Could it have been one of the diners? Maybe the guy came in dressed normally and had dinner, then at ten o’clock, he slipped out to the toilets, changed into his black hoodie and did the deed. Presumably, there are CCTV cameras in the dining room. It might be worth checking to see if there was a lone diner there.’

‘I can’t remember seeing footage from the dining room, so I’ll check it out. Good idea.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘Seeing as I need to leave my office unguarded for a few hours in the hope that one of our suspects will come sniffing around, I’m going to the tennis club for a light lunch and then I’ve booked a lesson with Gilberto at two to try and sort out my backhand. If you’ve got nothing better to do, why not come and join me at three, and I’ll give you a game before we go back to check if any of our fish have taken the bait?’

‘As long as it doesn’t start raining, that sounds like a great idea. See you later.’

I then did a very silly thing.

As I put the phone down, my sleeve caught the cup of coffee Lina had brought me and tipped it into my lap. Fortunately, it was no longer boiling hot, but it made a real mess of my trousers. Although I had clothes at Anna’s house, there was no parking anywhere near her place and I had no intention of walking through the crowded streets looking as if I’d wet myself – or worse – so I piled Oscar into the van and drove back to my house in the hills to change. When I got there, I changed into shorts and trainers, had a sandwich, and gave Oscar his lunch before deciding to take him for a quick walk before the rain started. The sky had been getting steadily darker and I knew it wouldn’t belong. Somehow, I had a feeling Virgilio and I wouldn’t be playing tennis this afternoon.

I headed up the track, playing fetch with Oscar as I walked and reading my lines out loud from the script while trying to look where I was going. As we reached a particularly steep part of the hillside, I heard the noise of a powerful engine coming up the track behind me. I called Oscar to my side and stepped into the undergrowth to let the vehicle pass. A dust-covered Land Rover appeared around the corner below us with a couple of bearded 4 x 4 aficionados inside. The vehicle had been kitted out as if it were about to embark on the Paris to Dakar off-road race with a winch on the front, an exhaust extension that rose up from the engine to almost the height of the vehicle and some of the chunkiest tyres I’d ever seen. These guys definitely wanted to look the part, even if they were just driving up a gravel track.

They gave me a casual wave as they passed but didn’t slow down and they left Oscar and me sneezing in the dust cloud in their wake. As I stood there coughing and cursing, watching them disappear up the track and around a corner above us, I had my next brainwave of the day.

Something felt familiar and it took me a few moments to work out what it was before it came to me. I sat down on a stone wall, reached for my phone and went onto Facebook, where I located the pages belonging to Inspector Faldo’s kids. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. I could remember seeing a photo of Faldo driving up a steep slope in a Land Rover, not dissimilar to the vehicle that had just smothered us in dust – but it was the background to the photo that interested me. I studied it carefully and blew it up to see if my memory had served me well.

It had.

There, at the top of the photo, was something I recognised. Itwas unmistakably the dilapidated old tower down by the wildfowl lake. The photo must have been taken at the off-road driving centre in the old sand quarry on the far side of the lake. As I studied the photo, the idea that had sprung into my head crystallised. The fact that none of the vehicles belonging to our three police suspects or Luuc Berg had displayed any damage implied that if Marco’s would-be murderer had indeed been one of them, he must have used another vehicle.

Like a battered Land Rover, for example.

I did my best to recall the video footage I’d seen of the vehicles passing near to the scene of Marco’s accident and I had a feeling that there might have been a Land Rover among them. Virgilio would be able to check. The question was whether this had been one of the vehicles I’d seen outside the off-road centre and if the damage was still visible and, more importantly, whether there was still any DNA or other evidence to be seen. With rain on the way, somebody needed to get out there fast to investigate.

As I called Virgilio, I checked the time and saw that it was almost half past two and the phone rang and rang before going to voicemail. It suddenly occurred to me that he was having his tennis lesson at this very moment and he would be impossible to contact until three. When I heard the beep, I made a quick decision and left a message.

‘Hi, Virgilio, it’s just occurred to me that Faldo might have used one of the off-road vehicles from the 4 x 4 club near the wildfowl lake to try to murder Marco. Alternatively, maybe it was Superintendent Grande, whose shooting club is only about five hundred metres away from there. Either way, I need to check the vehicles there for damage before the rain comes and washes any evidence away. I’m going to go there now because I can’t think of anybody else at thequesturaI can trust to help me. When you getthis message, if I haven’t called you again, please could you come out to the 4 x 4 centre with some DNA swabs and some evidence bags? Thanks.’

---