Page 10 of Murder at the Ponte Vecchio (Armstrong and Oscar Cozy Mystery #11)
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 as Commissario 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 cordial and welcoming and he certainly hadn’t struck me as being devious, although I had struggled to understand his strong Sicilian accent.
His superior, the vice 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 wild boar – 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 an Antimafia campaign – 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 the Sicilian 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 the vice questore apart 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, the vice 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 for a 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 the vice 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 Faldo outside work.
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 and that 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?’