Concetta blasted him with a murderous glare.
“It would be best if everyone just stayed in their place, that’s what would be best. You won’t learn, will you, that we’re the servants and what the dukes do is none of our business.”
“Why, what’s the matter, Donna Conce’, what have I done wrong? All I meant to say is that each of them keeps to himself, to try to answer the brigadier here-that they might have common rooms, but they weren’t used.”
Mariuccia broke in; she’d never stopped sniffling into her handkerchief the whole time.
“That’s right, no one ever goes there, but the duchess insists that the room be kept clean and tidy, she checks, and if she ever finds anything out of place, she calls me and gives me a lecture. That is, she used to. Now, she’ll never give me a lecture again. .” and she started in again, sobbing in despair. Her husband intervened:
“Now, what a fool you are, it almost sounds like you’re sorry the poor duchess can never scold you again.”
Once again, Concetta thought it her duty to explain to Peppino how matters stood.
“No, you’re the ones who don’t understand that now, with the death of the duchess, the way this house is organized might change, and maybe there’s no more need of us, and we find ourselves kicked out into the street.”
Sciarra shrugged his shoulders.
“Eh, when would that ever happen? If anything, now the young master and the duke will need us more than ever. After all, who’s supposed to keep all this household running, otherwise?”
Maione listened to the exchange of remarks, with apparent distraction but actually letting nothing get by him. He’d understood that in the palazzo there lived not one single family, but five different clans: the Sciarras, Concetta, and the duke, the duchess, and the young master, who had as little to do with each other as they could. He made a mental note to inform Ricciardi of the situation, just as the commissario stuck his head out the door again and told him to come in.
Now sunlight had filled the anteroom, and the temperature was rising noticeably. Ricciardi and Maione looked around at the wallpaper, the paintings, the furniture. Their expert eyes detected an abundance of silver objects, fine artwork, two Chinese vases, and an ancient bronze statuette: there had been no robbery, or if there’d been an attempt, it had been thwarted before it could be completed. Nor did they see any signs of a struggle; nothing was broken or even overturned. The only visible sign that anything had happened was a square cushion on the floor, at the corpse’s feet, with a hole in the side facing up. Ricciardi didn’t turn it over, because he didn’t want to move a thing until the photographer got there, but he was willing to bet that on the other side there would be unmistakable burn marks on the fabric, the very same signs that had been missing on the dead woman’s forehead. The murderer had fired through the cushion.
The duchess, if you didn’t look at her face, might have been sleeping, languidly stretched out on the sofa, just slightly relaxed, legs extended and hands in her lap. Ricciardi drew closer and noticed that she had no rings on her left hand, though there were marks of a ring on both her middle and her ring fingers. The middle finger actually seemed broken or at least sprained, though he saw no signs of bruising. He’d have to wait for the medical examiner and the photographer, before moving the corpse; but there was no mistaking the cause of death, the bullet hole in the forehead, right between the half-open eyes.
Maione, huffing and puffing and sweatier by the minute, had squatted down by the sofa and was trying to look under it.
“Where are you, now where are you, you damned little. . ah, there it is now. Commissa’, here’s the shell, it was right under the sofa, exactly where I expected it to be.”
“Nice work, Raffaele. Don’t touch it, though; let’s wait for the photographer. And while we’re waiting, why don’t you call the housekeeper, let’s hear what she has to say.”
The Sivo woman entered the room, silent and bulky. She shot a quick glance at the duchess’s dead body and quickly looked away, her face turning pale but with no change in her impassive expression. Ricciardi, standing with his hands in his pockets, watched her sweat for a long moment without speaking, seeking any other signs of discomfort, but he saw none.
“Now then, Signora. Tell me how you discovered the corpse of the duchess.”
“I rise early, around six. When I don’t have to go to the market or run other errands out of the house, like today, since it’s a Sunday, I stay in my room for a while. I tidy up my own things, in other words. Then I go to the first mass, the seven o’clock mass.”
“So this morning you left around seven, too?”
“No, this morning I wanted to look around a little. Last night, I don’t know if you’d know this, but it was the Festa of Santa Maria Regina. Those people get up to everything imaginable, there’s garbage scattered outside the front door, they light a bonfire in the middle of the piazza. I wanted to give Mariuccia instruction to start cleaning up a bit.”
Ricciardi tried to reconstruct a time line.
“And in order to go out, you go by way of the anteroom?”
“Yes, I have to. At night, when I go to bed, I shut the padlock on the gate outside here. The Signora, who comes home late, leaves the keys on the chain in that drawer,” and she pointed to a console table next to the door, “so in the morning I can open up and let Mariuccia in to start her cleaning.”
“And you close the padlock with a key of your own?”
The Sivo woman shook her head.
“No, no. I don’t have the keys to the lock. I snap it shut, and in the morning I take the keys from the drawer. I take a look at the room, and usually I find it’s tidy and clean. But this time I found. . I found the duchess.”
“And what did you do?”
The woman’s tone of voice remained subdued but her expression betrayed deep emotion.
“I thought that she’d fallen asleep on the sofa, fully dressed. It had happened before, more than once, the duchess. . sometimes she came home tired, very tired.”
Ricciardi decided to call a spade a spade.
“Do you mean drunk?”
The Sivo woman had no intention of uttering words she didn’t feel authorized to use.
“I couldn’t say, Commissa’. It’s none of my business, and when something’s none of my business, I look the other way.”
Ricciardi looked her straight in the eye.
“But this time you couldn’t look the other way. What did you do when you realized that the duchess wasn’t sleeping?”
“I stuck my head out over the courtyard and I called Sciarra. I told him to come upstairs and stay close to the duchess, and I went up to the top floor to call young master Ettore.”
Ricciardi tried to reconstruct events with as much precision as possible.
“And was the gate already open or did you open it?”
The Sivo woman seemed surprised. She furrowed her brow.
“It was open. Now that you mention it, the gate was open and the padlock was shut, the way I leave it in the daytime.”
“Go on. Was the young master at home?”
“Yes, he was already out on the terrace, watering the flowers. He wakes up early too.”
“What did you say to him?”
Concetta looked down.
“I told him that I thought the duchess was dead. That she had a hole in her forehead.”
Ricciardi kept pushing:
“What about him, did he come downstairs with you immediately?”
After a moment’s hesitation, the woman replied:
“No. He said that he’s no doctor. And he went to call the police. But he didn’t come downstairs.”
There was a long silence. Ricciardi processed the information.
“How long have you been in service with the duke and the duchess?”
“Twenty-five years, Commissario. Ever since I was twenty-one. First as a scullery maid, then as a cook and for ten years as housekeeper, since the duchess passed away.”