‘We’re at the scene,’ Pietro had said, and from his tone Sandro had known, even down a crackling mobile line with traffic noise in the background, that it was nasty. Pietro had spoken quietly — he’d never heard his old friend raise his voice — but there was just the trace of a shake, of hoarseness in the lower registers, that Sandro knew very well.
‘You OK, Peet?’ he had said, quietly in his turn. ‘Sounds like a bad one.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Pietro had said, and he had cleared his throat. ‘Not pretty. But he’s got ID on him, in the name of Claudio Brunello. A staff pass card, too, that says he’s the manager of a branch of the Banca di Toscana Provinciale.’
‘You remembered the name?’ he had said. ‘You haven’t lost your touch, Pietro.’
‘The story stuck,’ Pietro had said. ‘Sad one.’
And it had looked like a sad ending.
The lights turned green and this time Sandro scraped through on to the roundabout and into more stationary traffic. A people carrier came up alongside, bicycles on the roof-rack, and first a mother’s harassed face glanced in his direction, then her child’s, smeared and red, turned towards him from a babyseat in the back. Another child, bigger, was reading determinedly on the other side. Sandro shifted his eyes back to the road ahead and the big car moved on past. The rear window was crammed to the roof with stuff: supermarket carrier bags bulging with food, brightly coloured beach towels, the wheels of a folded buggy.
Claudio Brunello. With cold dread Sandro found himself back in that office where a framed photograph of a woman and three children sat on a shelf; where Roxana Delfino had told him her boss was away on holiday, with his family. A place in Monterosso: perhaps the people carrier that had just overtaken him was on its way to somewhere similar.
It pulled away from him, the father changing lanes impatiently; they’d been in the car an hour already and they weren’t out of Florence yet. Dangerous, though, to have the rear view blocked like that.
Sandro came up on to the wide bridge. Ahead lay the dusty trees of the African market’s sprawl, a splash of red oleanders, and the small tented structure that — unmistakable to Sandro — indicated the presence of a body. They’d cordoned off one lane to accommodate the pale-blue police vehicle parked at the roundabout, and the traffic was a nightmare.
Sandro parked under the forbidding, barbed wire topped wall of the military barracks, on the Viale Amendola, and walked back. Holiday traffic squeezed into the narrow confines of one lane, and rubberneckers. As he edged on foot between the cars, breathing the oily fumes, Sandro could see the faces. Turned in their seats and pressed to the glass, pointing at the forensic scientist in his long coat and latex gloves standing incongruously beside a busy roundabout like some postmodern civic sculpture, talking to a policeman. Just for a ghoulish moment or two they’d stare as they crept past, then they’d turn away, towards their holiday.
Sandro reached the crash barrier and climbed over, again feeling his age. Pietro, whom he’d observed discreetly monitoring his approach, tipped him a warning nod over the technician’s shoulder and Sandro stopped where he was.
As he waited, Sandro looked. It was hard to tell because of the white tent over it, but the body had probably been at least partly shaded by the trees. In these temperatures, he supposed that hardly made a difference; his gaze swung from the white plastic structure to the glittering heat haze above the big bridge. Below it, the river was low and greenish brown, clogged with weed; on the far bank he could see immobile figures sunbathing down where grass and reeds abutted the water.
At his feet the patchy grass between the oleanders was littered with debris from passing cars: cigarette packets, a fast-food carton, flyers from a restaurant. A child’s doll lay among the litter, the face smudged, the pink dress greying. No place, he supposed, to stop the car and go back to retrieve that doll, even if the child was howling.
The forensics guy was stripping off his latex gloves, and Pietro was shaking his hand. As the man walked back to his car, he gave Sandro an incurious glance; Sandro didn’t recognize him but then he was young, only thirty perhaps.
‘Where’s your partner?’ asked Sandro, trying not to sound surly. ‘You’ve got a partner on this, right?’
‘Matteucci,’ said Pietro with a weary smile. ‘Sent him off to clear his head, get a glass of water. I thought he was going to throw up: he’s not used to this. Came from a desk job in Modena.’ He loosened his collar. ‘And I can do without him breathing down my neck.’
Sandro nodded towards the tent, ‘When did you find him?’
Pietro nudged his cap back on his head, his forehead gleaming with sweat; over his shoulder on the barracks wall Sandro could see a tower with the red lights of a digital display, reading forty-one degrees. You could die out here, thought Sandro. He stepped further into the shade of the thin trees, the earth gritty and dusty underfoot. You could hear the river, a sluggish gurgle fifty metres to the south. The air was thick with mosquitoes.
‘About ten this morning,’ said Pietro wearily. ‘A kid in a high vehicle, some kind of people carrier, on their way to the country, he saw it. Seventeen years old. Got completely hysterical, according to the parents; they thought he was imagining it, or making it up, or it was just a drunk sleeping it off. Same thing everyone else obviously thought. But the kid just wouldn’t shut up, until they called the police.’
‘All right,’ said Sandro, thinking. ‘Anything yet?’ He nodded towards the forensics man, climbing into his car. ‘Preliminary findings?’ He knew there would be some. ‘Time and cause of death?’
Pietro grimaced. ‘Cause of death? Well, you’ll see.’
‘Ah.’ Sandro was in no hurry to go in the tent. ‘Time?’
‘He’d been there a while — I mean, considering. Three days at least.’
Sandro tilted his head back and looked up through the branches at the pale blue-white sky. ‘Considering?’ he said. ‘Ah. You mean, considering he’s out here in the open. Thousands of vehicles must have passed him, in three days.’
‘Maybe four,’ said Pietro.
Sandro stilled his head, searching the sky for cloud — real cloud. A good tower of raincloud building to the west over the Apuan Alps, cumulonimbus, the signal of the blessed summer rainstorm.
‘So, Saturday or Sunday,’ he said, still staring up. ‘No earlier than that?’
‘The heat makes it hard to tell,’ said Pietro, his voice so low Sandro had to strain to hear. ‘That — oh, you know. Accelerates decomposition. Especially in the dirt, and with the humidity.’
‘I know,’ said Sandro.
‘Pathology’s coming back to get him, anyway,’ said Pietro. ‘We’ll know more when they’ve autopsied him. Insect activity should do it. And there’ll be a toxicology report.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Sandro. ‘It’s just — well. My guy was seen Friday night. If it’s more than five days, then it isn’t him.’
But it’s still someone, he thought. It’s a husband or father.
‘Have you been in touch with the family?’ he said.
‘Trying to trace them,’ said Pietro. ‘Got a home address and phone number but there’s no one there.’
‘Assuming it’s his ID, not stolen, then I think they’re in Monterosso,’ said Sandro, jerking his head north. ‘It’s in the Cinque Terre. Holiday house. He’s supposed to be on holiday. He’s not supposed to be here.’
Pietro shook his head, barely perceptibly. ‘I think it’s his ID,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t look like a mugger: not wearing those shoes. Silk socks too, for that matter.’
The forensics guy’s car revved, his hand came out of the window in thanks to a car that was allowing him out, and he was gone. Watching the car disappear into the traffic, Pietro narrowed his eyes. ‘Do you want to see the body, then?’ he said. ‘They’ll be here for him soon.’