With reluctance they both approached the tent. A rectangle of the white plastic sheeting that served as a door flapped idly in the air displaced by the cars; there was nothing as merciful as a breeze. Sandro could see something behind the flapping plastic, dark on the grass, and he had to concentrate to keep walking, one step after another. Not good, approaching a body from this end, with all the faces already ranged in your head, the expectant, anxious faces of those who’d loved him, however misguidedly.
He bent and entered. Involuntarily raised a sleeve to block his nose. The smell was horribly familiar, the putrid smell of proteins broken down, of humanity turned to carcass. He moved inside, to the left, allowing Pietro in after him, turning on a battery floodlight as he entered. They squatted beside him: beside the remains of the man.
This was what Pietro had meant about the heat and the time of death. He’d been shielded from the sun by what there was of the foliage, but where it had got to him there was — decomposition. The body discoloured, just beginning to come apart. Sandro looked away.
Identification might be difficult. It depended: some people — some wives — could tell their loved one from the shape of his hands, or his hair. He leaned in.
A devastating injury to the back of the head, was what he saw. Hair black and crusted with dried blood, and a depression in the skull.
He didn’t reach out a hand to touch the man, to turn him; that wasn’t allowed. He just knelt, an elbow in the dirt, his face hovering a centimetre or so above it and close to the dead man’s. He could smell it. More trauma over the temple.
Had he changed to come into the city? Out of the holiday T-shirt, the shorts. The trousers were bloodied too, below the knee, fine grey summer-weight wool. The leg at an odd angle, as though that had also been broken; out of nowhere Sandro had the image of a piece of scaffolding pole held in two hands being brought down to cut the man off at the knees. Where had that come from? Sandro realized with amazement that it had happened to him, years back.
Twenty-five years back, interrupting a robbery in a warehouse. A gorilla of a guy had come around a packing case swinging for him with a metre of steel pole and making animal sounds. Luckily for Sandro the guy’d been so high on amphetamines that he hadn’t been able to focus properly, and the glancing blow had only resulted in a three week bruise. Pietro had got him out of that one, neatly cuffing the man as he staggered in the aftermath of the swing while Sandro lay cursing on the floor.
One shoe was off, lying with the sole uppermost: Sandro leaned down close. ‘Is that blood too?’ he asked. The pale leather was stained. ‘Doesn’t look like blood.’
‘It’ll be analysed,’ said Pietro. He kneeled, pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, drew them on and applied a finger to the dusty black on the shoe’s sole; it left a powdery greyish residue on his fingertip. They both looked at it, staring as if their lives depended on it. For longer than was necessary: to avoid looking somewhere else.
Then Pietro sighed, and raising one knee he bent down and delicately turned the head, just a degree or two. Over the ear Sandro saw something, matted.
‘The oleanders would have concealed the body quite effectively,’ he said.
Sandro, sitting back on his haunches, nodded.
‘Is that why he’s here?’
‘We’re thinking perhaps — hit and run.’
Sandro stared at his old friend.
‘Are you serious?’
‘It happens,’ said Pietro wearily. ‘You know it does. The injuries are severe. Consistent with being struck by a car.’
Sandro scratched his head. Rocking back, he raised his upper body a little to peer through the tent flap and over the oleanders. The traffic was moving slowly, the sun glinting off a rooftop.
But he was supposed to be on holiday,’ Sandro said. ‘Shouldn’t have been here.’ And stubbornly, ‘I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it at all.’
‘Listen,’ said Pietro. ‘The man was under a lot of pressure, wasn’t he? Money troubles? They’d be the least of it.’
‘What are you saying?’ Sandro felt unreasonable anger rising in him.
‘I’m saying,’ said Pietro, ‘that we should consider the possibility that he — he walked into the traffic. Deliberately, maybe at night, maybe he waited for just the right kind of car, one of those big bastards with tinted windows that’s got hit and run all over it.’
Sandro kept staring. ‘As a way of killing yourself? With the river right over there? With paracetamol in every pharmacy?’
‘Maybe he wanted it to look like an accident,’ said Pietro, his turn to sound stubborn. ‘You never know,’ he went on. ‘Suicide — it’s like everything. People are scared of doing it one way and not another. A personal thing.’
‘And no one stopped.’
‘Like I said,’ said Pietro. ‘We know it happens. At night, no witnesses? They’ve done surveys, you know. Ninety-five per cent of Italians say they wouldn’t report the accidental killing of a house pet on the roads. It’s something like fifteen per cent if it’s an adult and there are no other witnesses, and you know you can inflate that because some of those who said they would go back and help are lying. Different if it’s a kid.’ He straightened. ‘If he got knocked over the crash barrier and into the trees. Well. Looking back, maybe you could persuade yourself nothing had happened.’
Sandro was still shaking his head. ‘If you say so,’ he said. ‘I still don’t buy it. Why here?’
Belligerent, even as he said the words, Sandro thought, I’m too old for this. Too old to be standing in the particularly livid glare of the inside of a forensics tent, a glare that had illuminated his nightmares for the best years of his life, along with that particular smell of fusty plastic and preservatives, and of decomposing humanity. Too old to be picking a fight with his best — his only — friend. And abruptly he pushed his way out through the flapping plastic.
Pietro came out behind him, a gloved hand on his shoulder. Outside, even the gaseous miasma that rose from the overheating traffic seemed like fresh air, compared with the stench inside the tent, and both men took deep gulps until they began to cough. A woman in the passenger seat of a red convertible brought to a temporary standstill, twenty-five perhaps, though made up to look older, turned and stared at them with distaste. The car’s driver, a tanned, well-preserved man approaching fifty, looked ahead resolutely through dark glasses.
Sandro turned, one way then another, still thinking it over, suicide or — something else; stilclass="underline" why here? To the east, the blue hills of the Casentino, Pontassieve and beyond, from where you could stop and look back at the city as he and Luisa used to do, picnicking, and see right through the crenellated tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. Hectares and hectares of forested hillside, untended olive groves, silent valleys where a body could rot to nothing unobserved.
‘It’s madness, isn’t it?’ Sandro spoke as if to himself. ‘Here?’ he said. ‘Why not — Christ. Why not somewhere less — less-’
‘Yes,’ said Pietro gently, ‘it’s a shithole. But we both know that people sometimes take themselves off to places — to terrible places, far away from home. To do this.’
Pietro stood in uneasy silence, waiting for Sandro to come to his senses. A siren whooped once and they both turned towards the sound; a blue light revolved on an unmarked van’s roof, stuck in the traffic coming towards them from the city. At the sound the cars began, reluctantly, to edge out of the way.
‘That’s pathology,’ said Sandro flatly.
‘Look,’ said Pietro quickly, in an undertone. ‘If he’d got himself — into a situation. With the wife, and the pregnant girlfriend. Running two homes?’ And Pietro shook his head wryly. ‘The wife might have been asking questions, the baby about to be born, the money-’ And he stopped. ‘You can see.’
‘Luisa wants us to move,’ said Sandro suddenly. ‘She’s found this apartment. D’you think I could get a loan, at my age?’