Page 13 of Murder on an Italian Island (Armstrong and Oscar Cozy Mysteries #12)

SUNDAY NIGHT/MONDAY MORNING

When I got back to the room just before ten and picked up my laptop, I found that Rita had been true to her word and had sent me a load of information.

I settled down and eagerly studied the details.

Beside me, Anna was once more engrossed in her historical tome, but she took time out from her studies to shoot me an enquiring look.

‘I suppose this means that you’re going to have to revert to being a detective again.

’ Before I could attempt an apology, she reached over and tapped me gently on the back of the hand.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to moan at you.

You have no choice, I get that. This is your best friend we’re talking about, after all.

Personally, judging from the state that Graziani was in last night, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if his death were accidental, but I quite understand that you need to do everything you can to help Virgilio. ’

I breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thanks, Anna. It’s like you say: I have no choice. I owe it to Virgilio to help any way I can to clear him of suspicion. Still, I promise it isn’t going to occupy me twenty-four hours a day and I’m still up for our windsurfing lesson tomorrow.’

‘You’re sure about the windsurfing?’

‘Yes, genuinely. I think I might be beginning to get the hang of it, even if I’m sure I can hear the water in my ears – or maybe my brain – swilling around as I move my head.’

She returned to her medieval studies and I started looking through the wealth of information Rita had sent me.

I spent almost an hour sifting through the documents and soon realised that there was one important omission: there was no mention of the man and the woman who had dined with the victim the previous night.

This confirmed that they weren’t guests at the hotel, but the fact that I had seen them again this evening made me think that they were almost certainly living locally.

Whether this meant that they were residents of the island or just here on holiday remained to be seen, but as they had known the victim, they were significant.

I resolved to speak to Rita in the morning in the hope that she might be able to shed some light on their identity.

As far as the others were concerned, I gradually sifted them into two camps: ‘likely’ and ‘unlikely’.

Into the unlikely camp, I put Tatsuo Tanaka, the four Brits, Heidi Engadin and Martin Wolf from Zurich, along with the couple of young lovers.

They both shared the surname, Arnaldo, and Monica had added a note indicating that this was their honeymoon.

I tended to discount the foreign guests because I felt convinced that this murder had a local, or at least a Tuscan, dimension.

My feeling was that the young honeymooners probably had other things on their minds rather than committing murder, but I knew that they would have to be checked all the same.

Leaving them aside for now, this left me with the two hard nuts and the couple from the beach on the first day, so I concentrated on the two tough guys first.

Rita had sent me copies of their documents, and I saw that the ginger-haired one was called Filippo Guerra, age thirty-seven, resident in Rome, while the one with the shaved head was Carlo Donati, also from Rome – but a different address – and he was a year older.

The other couple were Fernando Giardino and his wife, Erica.

He was the man we had seen running up the path from the beach the previous afternoon and he was almost exactly the same age as me, just about to turn fifty-eight, while his wife was two years older.

They both lived in Lucca, two or three hours away from here.

Before taking Oscar for his late-night walk, I sent the details of all four to Marco in Florence so he could run them through the police computer system.

* * *

At seven next morning, when I went out with Oscar, there were already two police cars and a minivan in the car park, and tape blocking off the path to the beach.

A team of police officers were combing through the trees on the clifftop and an orange rigid inflatable boat was down by the beach with people in wetsuits clearly getting ready to search the seabed for the murder weapon.

I wished the constable on duty at the top of the path good luck, but I had a feeling it was a forlorn hope.

And without a murder weapon, I had little doubt that the inspector would decide to leave it at that and put Graziani’s death down to either misadventure or suicide.

After breakfast with the others, Virgilio and I sat down in his room to go through what we had so far.

Marco had managed to access the original Graziani file and had produced an excellent summary of the main findings.

We studied it carefully, making a note of the names of the four victims and cross-checking them against the names of the guests here at the hotel.

None of them matched, making it less likely – but not impossible – that somebody here had been related to them and had deliberately come here out for revenge.

There was also the problem of how such a person could have discovered that the victim was going to be here.

All of Graziani’s four victims had lived in or near Pisa, which was over a hundred kilometres from the island, and I had a hunch that the murderer – if indeed there were one – would be found here on Elba.

After all, I imagined it would have been common knowledge that when Graziani had been released from jail he would, in all probability, have returned to his home turf.

I studied the photos of the four victims and it was immediately clear that Graziani had gone out of his way to pick attractive young women.

All four had been in their early twenties and they all had dark hair.

According to the file, Graziani had stalked each of them for days or weeks before carrying out his assaults.

Three had been students at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa – one of Italy’s top universities – and the other had been a librarian working at the university.

I could only begin to imagine the horrors they had endured at his hands.

At just after nine, we got another e-mail from Marco that made interesting reading.

Mr and Mrs Giardino from Lucca had received a clean bill of health – they would appear to be harmless shopkeepers – but the two tough guys had both popped up on the police system, though not with criminal records.

It turned out that they were Carabinieri officers belonging to the TPC.

I was unfamiliar with the acronym and Virgilio explained.

‘TPC stands for the Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale – the Carabinieri art squad. I’ve worked with them a few times, most recently three years back when they uncovered a flourishing gang of forgers working out of Florence, producing convincing-looking fake old masters.

’ He looked up and shot me a wink. ‘The TPC are pretty good… for Carabinieri .’

I couldn’t help smiling at his grudging admiration.

Italy has a dizzying array of different police forces, ranging from the Polizia , the state police of which Virgilio was an officer, to the Carabinieri, who started life as a branch of the army and now operate to a great extent in parallel with the Polizia .

Along with them are separate branches specialising in financial matters, illegal immigration and road traffic – to name just a few.

Since settling here in Italy, I had occasionally worked with both the police and the Carabinieri and had often questioned how they managed to collaborate without overlapping or competing.

I wondered whether these two guys were here on holiday or on duty.

And if they were here for work, what might have brought them to the island?

Either way, the knowledge that these two were on the side of law and order came as a bit of a disappointment.

I had definitely been considering them as potential murderers – mainly based on their hard physical appearance – but it now seemed that I had been wrong and had misjudged them.

Yes, they could still be killers, but it was less likely.

I had to smile when I imagined Inspector Bellini’s frustration at finding himself faced with three serving Italian police officers and one former British copper among the suspects.

As I knew from experience, police officers are some of the most difficult people to interview, mainly because they’re so used to asking the very same questions.

Virgilio and I talked through the other suspects, including the owner and staff of the hotel.

On Saturday evening, there had been seven people working here: Rita in Reception, the chef, an assistant chef, a waiter, a waitress, the night porter and Signor Silvano, the owner.

The kitchen and serving staff had all left at ten along with Rita, and Signor Silvano had retired to his private apartment on the top floor shortly afterwards.

This left the night porter as the only staff member actually here at the time of Graziani’s death.

No doubt the inspector’s people would already have interviewed the staff, but as we were not part of the investigation, we had not been given access to the results.

It was possible that one of the foreigners might turn out to have a suspicious past, but I wasn’t holding my breath. I was still convinced that the murderer was to be found far closer to home here on the island.

Rousing Oscar from the floor at my feet, Virgilio and I went downstairs to Reception, where we found Rita. She gave Virgilio a concerned look when she saw him.

‘ Ciao , Virgilio, how did it go with the police last night?’