Page 29 of Murder on an Italian Island (Armstrong and Oscar Cozy Mysteries #12)

WEDNESDAY MORNING

Seeing that our windsurfing lessons had been cancelled, Anna and I decided to walk up to the overgrown field so that she could see the remains of the Etruscan mines that Stefano had mentioned.

It was actually quite hard work walking inland into the face of the gusty wind, but I felt a whole lot safer than if I had been out on a surfboard.

Here on dry land, the breeze made a very pleasant and refreshing change from the unrelenting heat of the previous days.

We crossed the road and walked up the track as far as Aldo Graziani’s shed.

Close up, this was a relatively large building, and, as Stefano had said, it looked deserted.

While Anna and Oscar fought their way into the undergrowth looking for signs of the Etruscan mines or smelting furnaces, I examined the wooden shed more closely.

The first thing that struck me was that there were no recent tyre marks or footprints leading to it.

Clearly, it had not been used for some considerable length of time.

The other thing that struck me was that the front doors were secured by a high-security lock – one of those expensive ones that has a long, flat key, like the lock on the outside door of my office.

If the shed was empty, this seemed excessive, and if there was something inside, it was clear it was something of value.

My detective antennae started twitching and I walked around all four sides of the building, looking to see if there might be any other way in. But I looked in vain.

Unable to satisfy my curiosity, I waited in the shade for several minutes until Anna appeared, sweating profusely and looking disappointed. ‘Without a flamethrower, we don’t stand a chance of finding anything underneath all this greenery.’

To emphasise her point, Oscar appeared behind her with a long piece of vine that had somehow got tangled up in his collar and was now trailing behind him like a second tail. As I bent down and removed it, I pointed out the security lock.

‘I have a feeling there might be something valuable in here. I’ll report this to the inspector and hopefully, his people will be able to locate the key.’

She looked more animated. ‘What do you think’s in here? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we found a load of Etruscan artefacts?’

Secretly, this was what I was hoping as well, but I decided to temper my expectations and hers – at least for now – so I avoided speculating.

I pulled out my phone and called Piero Fontana.

He answered immediately and I told him where I was and voiced my suspicions.

He told me he was still interviewing the hotel guests but promised to send somebody to the campsite reception desk to ask Teresa for the keys.

I wished him luck, but I had a feeling the keys wouldn’t be there.

Something was telling me that they wouldn’t be found hanging on a hook.

If the contents of the shed were what I was hoping, the keys were most probably hidden away somewhere very secure – like in a safe.

Unless, of course, they had already been taken from Aldo Graziani’s pockets after his death.

Anna and I walked into the centre of Santa Sabina and stopped at the café where the walls of the little church sheltered the tables from the wind.

There were only two other people sitting outside and I recognised them as fellow guests at the hotel: the shopkeepers from Lucca.

The man looked up and gave me a nod of the head while his wife had hers buried in her phone.

As usual, they didn’t appear to be speaking to each other, but maybe after thirty or forty years of marriage, they had exhausted all topics of conversation.

I found myself wondering if they were enjoying themselves.

Even before the death of Ignazio, they had looked distinctly troubled, and my first impression of the man when I had seen him running up the path from the beach had been very different from what I would have expected of an average holidaymaker. What, I wondered, was bothering them?

We ordered coffees and chatted quietly as we drank.

In spite of Anna’s declaration that she didn’t mind my unfortunate habit of getting involved with investigations at the most inconvenient times, I tried to keep my mind off the two recent deaths, and we talked about all sorts including, inevitably, the people who had inhabited the island two and a half thousand years ago.

My resolve didn’t last long. In spite of my best intentions, an idea struck me as we were talking.

I had been wondering how Aldo Graziani had been able to force Ernesto Morso to sell him his vineyard for a song, what he could have used to blackmail him, and it occurred to me that Aldo might have discovered Morso doing something illegal.

Might the illegal activity have involved Etruscan antiquities?

What if Aldo had caught old Signor Morso digging up and disposing of valuable antiquities?

In return for not shopping him to the police, Aldo had been able to get the land for a bargain price and then, as a canny businessman, had carried on the very lucrative antiquities trade for his own purposes. Might that be it?

The more I thought about it, the more the old vineyard and the unexpectedly large shed struck me as being pivotal to the investigation, and I was interested to find that Anna had apparently been thinking along the same lines as she looked up from her drink with a pensive expression on her face.

‘I’m sure there’s something valuable inside that shed and I’m equally sure that it’s got something to do with the illicit antiquities trade.

When do you think the inspector will be able to get hold of the key? ’

‘Probably in the next hour or so, as soon as he finishes the interviews at the hotel.’

‘What if he can’t find the key?’

‘Very simple. His officers will force the doors open.’

Our conversation was interrupted by my phone. It was Virgilio. ‘Dan, Marco has just sent me some fascinating information. Where are you at the moment?’

‘I’m at the bar in the village.’

‘Can you spare the time to come back to the hotel? I’m on my way there now to speak to Piero Fontana.’

I glanced across at Anna. ‘It’s Virgilio. Sounds like he’s onto something. Do you feel like coming back to the hotel with me?’

After a brief pause, she gave me her answer. ‘If it’s all right with you, I think I’ll go back to that overgrown field and do a bit more searching in the undergrowth. Shall I take Oscar with me for another walk?’

Her use of the magic word ‘walk’ was enough to get him on his feet, tail wagging in anticipation, so we headed off in different directions.

I made it back to the hotel in less than ten minutes and almost bumped into Virgilio by the front door.

Together, we walked through to where Fontana was carrying out his interviews and waited until the door opened and Sergeant Gallo showed a young man out.

At first, I didn’t recognise the man’s face but then realised that up till now I had only ever seen it pressed up close against his wife’s.

Evidently, he was Mr Arnaldo, half of the amorous couple of newly-weds.

Virgilio didn’t waste time. ‘Is the inspector free? I have some new information that I feel sure he’ll be very interested to hear.’

Sergeant Gallo opened the door wide, and we went inside. Piero Fontana looked up and must have seen the excitement on Virgilio’s face. ‘ Ciao , Virgilio, what’s new?’

‘You know I said I’ve got my people in Florence checking up on Ignazio’s original assault and rape cases?

Well, I’ve just heard back, and two things have come up.

The second woman to be abducted by Ignazio Graziani, Laura Bracco, has an Italian father, but her mother is originally Japanese, and, of all places, she comes from Nagoya.

It strikes me as quite a coincidence that we have a man here at the hotel from that very same city.

I think we might need to find out more about Tatsuo Tanaka.

Who knows, he might be a relative of the mother or even a professional hitman? ’

Inspector Fontana looked very interested and immediately ordered the sergeant to contact the Japanese police to see whether they had anything on Tanaka, but Virgilio’s news didn’t stop there.

‘There’s more. The couple of shopkeepers, Signor Giardino and his wife from Lucca, run a very specialised sort of shop.

It’s an antique shop, but what’s special about it is that the website claims it boasts a large collection of “ancient artefacts, some dating back to pre-Roman times.”.

Again, that’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it? ’

Fontana nodded ruefully. ‘I interviewed them an hour ago, but I didn’t ask what sort of shop they had. All they told me was that they were here on holiday.’ He returned his attention to the sergeant. ‘Could you call them back in, please, Gallo? Hopefully, they’re still around.’

I pointed out that I’d just seen them at the café in the village and the sergeant went out to send somebody for them.

I looked back at Virgilio. ‘Suddenly, we might have a suspect for the first murder – a revenge killing all the way from Japan – and another for Aldo’s murder, this time connected to the antiques trade.

Maybe we aren’t looking for a single killer after all. ’

I saw the other two exchange glances and I felt a distinct ripple of optimism run through the room. Might one of these snippets of information be the breakthrough we had been seeking?

At that moment, I heard scratching at the door, accompanied by a familiar bark. I jumped to my feet as a young constable opened the door and Oscar came charging in. The officer looked at the inspector apologetically.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but this dog won’t go away. We keep shooing it off, but it keeps coming back. I don’t suppose?—’

I interrupted him to reassure him that Oscar was known to me and I looked around for Anna. Unable to see her, I checked with the constable. His answer was disconcerting.

‘No, sir, the dog was on its own. The officer out front said it came running up the drive and onto the terrace before coming in here. There was nobody with it.’

My brain was racing. If Oscar had come all the way here by himself, this meant he had run along the main road.

This had been potentially dangerous to him but, more to the point, I found myself wondering desperately why Anna wasn’t with him.

As I stroked his head to calm him down, I turned back to Virgilio and Piero.

‘I’m worried something’s happened to Anna. She went off to the field with the shed again. I need to get back there now.’

Virgilio was already on his feet. ‘I’ll come with you.’ He glanced back at the inspector. ‘Can you spare us a couple of officers? I don’t like the sound of this.’

Together with Sergeant Gallo and the young constable, we raced out of the hotel and back out of the gate, along the road to the field.

We followed Oscar up the overgrown track, but when we approached the shed, I could see no sign of Anna, and I found my anxiety levels rising.

It had been quite out of character for Oscar to run off on his own, and I felt sure he would only have done so if something serious had happened.

What was immediately apparent was that Oscar had no doubt that the answer to the puzzle lay inside the shed.

With his nose firmly positioned by the crack of the door, he stood up on his hind legs and started desperately scratching with his front paws.

Virgilio and I exchanged glances and he turned to the two police officers. ‘We need to get into this shed now. See if you can break the doors down or look for something we can use to lever them open.’

The two officers shoulder-charged the doors and I heard the timber give a creak of protest. Virgilio and I joined in and with a series of concerted efforts – and a few bruised shoulders – we managed to split the wood around the lock until the right-hand door swung out on its hinges.

We ran inside and stopped in surprise. Apart from an aluminium ladder hanging on one wall, the shed was empty.

This wasn’t what I had been expecting. Virgilio and I were exchanging bewildered looks when my eyes were drawn to Oscar.

He had run past us and was now scratching frantically at the floor of the shed in the far corner.

I rushed after him, but it was only with the aid of the torch on my phone that I was able to detect the barely visible join where the timber floorboards had been skilfully cut. I looked up at the others.

‘It’s a trapdoor. Do any of you have a knife?’

Sergeant Gallo reached into his pocket and produced a Swiss army knife.

With the aid of this, he managed to prise the trapdoor sufficiently so we could get our fingers underneath it and lift.

We found ourselves looking into a dark pit.

Oscar had his nose pointing unerringly downwards and I caught hold of his collar in case he might decide to jump into the abyss.

The torch on my phone showed the rough-hewn walls, a couple of metres deep, and I caught my breath as I saw a familiar figure lying face down and motionless in the dirt, her left arm splayed out at an unnatural angle.

I felt as if a cold knife had been driven into my chest, and I immediately realised what the ladder was for.

With the aid of the sergeant, I lowered it into the hole until it touched the bottom.

He reached for the top step, but I stopped him.

‘Let me go first. It’s my partner, Anna. I need to go to her. Would you hold onto Oscar for me?’

To an accompaniment of plaintive whining from Oscar, I climbed down the ladder until my foot touched the ground.

I pulled out the torch again as I fell to my knees and reached forward towards Anna.

Acting on instinct born of long experience while my brain swirled with the implications of what I was seeing, I laid my hand against the carotid artery in her neck.

The wave of relief that surged through me as I felt a distinct pulse was almost overpowering, and I suddenly felt tears in my eyes. She was alive.

Wiping the back of my hand across my eyes, I cleared my throat and shouted up to the others. ‘She’s unconscious, but she’s alive. Call the emergency services now. We’ll need an ambulance and the fire brigade to haul her out of here.’

I turned back to Anna and did my best to cradle her head, desperately trying not to let my mind spin off into wild conjecture about how seriously injured she might be. For now, I told myself, all that counted was that she was still alive, but without Oscar’s help, she could well have died.

I felt a burning anger rising up inside me. The investigation had suddenly got very personal.