Boito shrugged.
‘As you know, all sorts of odd things can happen when people fall to their deaths. Signor Comai might have struck his head against the edge of one of the steps, or for that matter against the banister post at the bottom, a very ornate affair with plenty of sharp edges. The problem from my point of view was that there were no traces of blood, tissue, hair or anything else on any of these places. When I remarked on this, the widow claimed that she had wiped the surfaces clean because it was too distressing for her to have to look at her husband’s bloodstains. I then asked what she had used. A rag, she replied. What had she done with it? “I threw it in the fire. It made me feel unclean.”’
‘A fire? But this happened in August.’
‘Precisely. An oppressive, sultry day with temperatures in the thirties and thunder in the air. Nevertheless, a fire was indeed smouldering in the salone. I inspected the fire-irons, which were of wrought iron and very heavy. They were all filthy except for the poker, which seemed to have been wiped clean. When I asked about the fire, Signora Comai blushed and replied that she had suddenly felt a chill. Perhaps it was the change of life. She was approaching that period of her life. Sometimes she felt hot, sometimes she felt cold. These were very indelicate questions. There was no law against lighting a fire in your own house, was there?’
Zen liked Armando Boito, and under normal circumstances would have been more than happy to spend the whole day arguing the toss about this long-closed case, but as it was he had become a miser with minutes.
‘So you had a promising prima facie case totally dependent on circumstantial evidence,’ he suggested.
‘Just so. And what I would have liked to do, of course, was to take Signora Comai back to the Questura in Verona and submit her to a twenty-four-hour-a-day relay interrogation until she broke. But that was out of the question. The Comais did not quite belong to the cream of Verona society, of the rich and thick variety, but they weren’t nobodies either. There were plenty of influential friends and acquaintances only too ready to make a public scandal out of the fact that an over-zealous police officer was not only trying to prevent Gaetano’s widow from coming to terms with her tragic loss, but was virtually accusing her of having murdered him. I would never have been able to find an investigating magistrate to sign an arrest warrant. On the contrary, in the course of the one attempt I made it was made very clear to me that any further initiatives of the kind would result in me being transferred to a much less desirable posting than Verona.’
He opened his arms to embrace the bar, the village and the surrounding countryside.
‘This is my home, dottore! I had no wish to make a martyr of myself and get shipped off to some flea-ridden cesspit in Calabria or Sicily. To what good, anyway? The case would still have come to nothing. One has to be a realist about these things.’
Zen indicated his complete understanding.
‘But you still think she did it?’ he asked.
Boito looked at him almost with anger.
‘Do you need to ask?’
‘Then how?’
Boito sighed deeply.
‘My guess would be that she waited until her husband went upstairs for his afternoon nap, which he habitually did at about the time his death occurred. On some pretext she walked up alongside the chair lift in which he was seated. Near the top she somehow persuaded him to stand up, or perhaps just heaved him bodily out of the chair and down the long flight of stairs. She was much younger than him, remember, and very sturdily built. Then she ran downstairs and got the poker from the salone. He may already have been dead, but she wanted to make sure. She smashed in the back of the head, then lit the fire she had previously laid and wiped off the poker with a rag that she then burned. I had the cinders forensically examined and traces of cloth fibre were found, but of course that fitted in with her story.’
Zen nodded.
‘All right, let’s assume you’re right. She killed him. Why?’
Boito made a broad, resigned gesture.
‘That was the other problem I had in trying to pursue the investigation. If only there had been some clear motive, or indeed any motive at all, I might have been able to find a judge to take it on, despite the pressure from the family’s friends. But on the face of it Signora Comai had nothing obvious to gain from her husband’s death. She inherited, of course, but she was perfectly well provided for anyway. The Comais seemed to get along reasonably well together, like most middle- aged couples. By this point, both of them had passed the age when romantic passion could have played a part, and there were no indications that she was a psychotic. So if I’m right, and she did kill him, what could possibly have driven her to take such an incredible risk? Unfortunately I never found the answer to that question.’
Boito smiled complacently.
‘But maybe you’ll have better luck, dottore. What is the exact nature of your interest in this case, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘I’m investigating the death of Signora Comai.’
Boito’s reaction was one of shock. It occurred to Zen that he might well be one of those retired people who understandably feel that they have wasted enough of their lives on news about events that were either of no interest to them or beyond their control, and have decided to break the addiction and live clean for the years remaining to them.
‘Like her husband, she died in a fall,’ he said, rising to his feet and putting a banknote on the table to pay for their coffees. ‘The official line is that it was an accident.’
They walked out into the joyless morning.
‘What became of the villa?’ asked Zen as he searched for the elusive new car key. ‘I looked for it on the way here but I couldn’t find it.’
‘It’s gone. Signora Comai sold it after her husband’s death, citing painful memories and all the rest of it. It was torn down to make room for one of those new apartment blocks down on the main road. Not that it was any great loss, architecturally. The best aspect was always the grounds. Funnily enough, she kept a part of them.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, the villa itself was just a nineteenth-century fantasy on Gothic and Renaissance themes, but there was an extensive walled garden reaching back to a lane behind the property. It had been well designed, and had reached full maturity back in the fifties. And in one corner, at the very end, there was a playhouse that had been built by Claudia’s parents as a birthday present for her. I went down there to take a look when I was questioning her, but it was obviously of no interest to our investigation. Too small for a grown man to even stand up in. Anyway, she sold everything except for a strip at the very end, where the playhouse is, and then had a new wall built to screen it off from the new apartments. Everyone thought she was crazy. A sentimental whim, I suppose.’
Zen frowned.
‘So where is it?’
‘The villa was where the new block is, just opposite the AGIP filling station on the right as you drive back to Verona. But there’s nothing to see.’
Zen spent some moments in thought, then breathed in deeply.
‘Good air up here,’ he remarked.
Boito nodded.
‘In more ways than one, I would argue. San Giorgio has always been a paese rosso, one of the few in this priest-ridden zone. Because of the quarries, you see. This is where they mined that fine, flawless stone used for all the finishing work on the doors and windows in the area, and the quarrymen were soon organized by the PCI. So the intellectual air is also better, at least to my way of thinking.’
He smiled self-deprecatingly.
‘But of course I was born here. You must judge for yourself. The church is well worth a visit. Parts of it date from 712, but the village itself is much older, at least Neolithic and probably much earlier. I’d be only too happy to show you around, if you have time.’