He tossed restlessly about on the seating, which seemed to have been designed, like certain fast food outlets, with a view to limiting to the absolute minimum the time that anyone would want to use it.
‘I’ve had enough of all your tricks and teasing, understand? He fell down the stairs! That’s what happened and you have no proof to the contrary. He was a cripple by then, for God’s sake! He fell down the stairs. That was the conclusion arrived at by the investigating magistrate at the time and it’s never once been queried, not once in all these years!’
And then those terrible vulgar blasphemies and obscenities that no lady such as Claudia evidently aspired to be should ever have let pass her lips in public. ‘ Dio boia, Dio can, vaffanculo! ’ Zen muttered the phrase aloud now. It was addressed to himself, as she had addressed it at the time, but filled with a very different kind of disgust.
When the car rental people finally arrived, Zen hired a small Fiat with a waiver allowing him to drop it off at any one of the firm’s agencies in Italy. Back at the Questura, the usual morning queue of immigrants and asylum seekers in search of residence and work permits had already started to form. In the mood he was in, Zen didn’t waste any time on the sensibilities of the clerical staff in Personnel. Within five minutes he had the last recorded address and telephone number of Inspector Armando Boito, who had retired in 1991 and might easily be dead by now.
Zen had parked the Fiat illegally right outside the building, thereby obstructing one lane of what now revealed itself to be a major traffic artery. The first thing he saw when he got in was a white parking ticket fluttering under the windscreen wipers. He got out again, tore it in two and dropped it in the road, thereby adding littering to his local crime record. You had to hand it to the Veronesi, he thought as he pulled away, what they lacked in charm they made up for in efficiency, particularly when schei — dosh — was involved.
It took him almost an hour to get out of the city, partly because he was a timid and inexperienced driver and partly because he had no idea where he was going, but mostly because he was trapped in a counter-Adige of nose-to-tail commuters who knew precisely where they were going and had no patience for this bumbling amateur who was fouling up the system. He only escaped in the end because he happened to see a direction sign with the word ‘Valpolicella’ and immediately veered right across two lanes of traffic in a manner that elicited a number of colourful comments which he was fortunately unable to understand since they were in a form of dialect specific not to the Veneto in general but to the city of Verona in particular.
After that, it was pretty straightforward. He stopped at a petrol station and asked directions, then rang Boito’s number from the payphone. The call was answered immediately, and by the man himself. This time Zen wasted no time on a cover story. He told Boito exactly who he was and what he wanted, and got an immediate and positive response.
San Giorgio di Valpolicella was reached by a turning off the main road which wound up into the hills looming mistily above the plain below before twisting to a halt in the entrails of a village that was clearly very much older than anything Zen had seen on the drive there. Boito had said that he would meet him at a bar in the centre of the village, next to the church.
‘You can’t miss it. It’s the only one.’
He was right. Zen parked in the piazza and walked over to their rendezvous, a typical rural watering hole lacking either charm or pretension.
A man in his sixties, with a shock of white hair cropped short and the thickset, four-square, slightly Germanic look of the local population, rose to his feet and greeted him. Zen made token apologies for disturbing Boito so early, which were graciously brushed aside. They both ordered coffees and then the retired inspector told his story.
He remembered the Comai case well, he said, because it was one of those where he was reasonably sure that a crime had been committed, but had not been able to prove it.
‘They stick with you, those ones! She got away with it, you think, and I wasn’t intelligent or powerful or lucky enough to make her pay. So you end up feeling guilty yourself, almost as if you were the criminal. The whole business leaves a nasty taste in your mouth. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’
‘I certainly do.’
‘Gaetano Comai, the victim, was in his seventies at the time. His wife Claudia was about twenty years younger. Their son Naldo was in school and it was the housekeeper’s day off. Gaetano had retired from the army by then, after a long and distinguished career. He suffered from circulatory problems and could only walk with the aid of a metal frame. At their house in Verona there was a lift, but at the villa here in the Valpolicella they installed a chair lift so that he could get up and down the stairs. Are you familiar with those contraptions? It’s basically a platform fitted with a chair and powered by an electric motor, which runs up and down the staircase in a steel track mounted beneath the banisters.’
‘I’ve heard of them.’
‘The first we knew was when Signora Comai called the police station in Negrar with an incoherent message about an emergency, please come at once. No specifics. That was a bit odd in itself, don’t you think? Your husband is lying critically injured after allegedly falling downstairs, but instead of calling an ambulance you call the police.’
‘Did you ask her about that?’
‘She claimed to have been in shock. Anyway, the patrolmen arrive and immediately radio for an ambulance, but when it gets there Signor Comai is certified dead. Meanwhile the policemen have taken a statement from his wife about how the accident occurred.’
‘Her husband had been upstairs, having an afternoon nap,’ Zen recited. ‘She was downstairs reading in the main salone. She heard the tapping of his walking frame as he came along the gallery, then the whine of the chair lift in operation, a sharp cry and a series of heavy thuds. She ran to investigate and found his crumpled body at the foot of the stairs and the lift still only a few steps from the top.’
Armando Boito stared at Zen suspiciously.
‘How did you know that?’
‘I’ve read the file on the case, ispettore. Believe me, I’ve done my homework. What I want from you is the items that did not appear in the official report.’
Boito nodded.
‘We’re getting there. Forgive me, I have to take everything in order, otherwise I become confused. Signora Comai then demonstrated to the patrolman, as she did later to me, that the lift would only move as long as the control button on the arm was depressed. It must therefore have stopped when her husband, for whatever reason, lost his balance and fell forward to his death. The patrolman, who should instantly have been promoted for this thought, walked up the stairs and tried it out for himself. As the grieving widow had said, the lift moved as soon as he pushed the button. Only it moved up.’
He and Zen exchanged a long look.
‘Those chair lifts are very simple devices,’ Boito went on. ‘They either go all the way up or all the way down, reversing direction at the end of their track. So Signor Comai must have been ascending and not descending the stairs when he fell, in which case his wife’s version of events was obviously false.’
‘What did she say to that?’ asked Zen.
‘She hummed and hawed for a while, then used the shock argument and suddenly remembered that she had used the lift herself to go upstairs to fetch medicines from the bathroom. She felt too weak to walk, she told me. And too frightened of the staircase. According to her, she had felt it to be a “malign force”.’
Zen glanced at his watch.
‘But you thought otherwise?’
‘I certainly did. There was no sign of any medicines in the vicinity of the corpse, and the pathologist found no indication that any had been administered. What he did find, in addition to the expected fractures and contusions, was a deep bleeding fracture to the back of the skull.’