Even then, a troubling thought had nagged him. What if the thing consuming Fratelli from the inside was somehow linked to Chiara’s death? Could a man trap poison within his own head and quietly let it grow, year after year? Just as, if he were honest with himself, the city’s authorities had allowed the insidious corruption of Sandro Soderini and his acolytes to spread their venomous talons over Florence and all her institutions.
After a while he’d dismissed that idea as fanciful nonsense. Until that morning in his office, when Fratelli had been on the verge of revealing something, egged on by the attractive and intelligent Englishwoman.
Pino Fratelli had a secret, something pricked by events in the Brancacci Chapel; a drop of that inner poison that had started to wake, and perhaps whisper in the ear of the larger monster inside Fratelli’s head.
Time, never a friend of his, was surely running out.
Marrone was aware he should never have allowed those two to leave his office without insisting Fratelli say what was on his mind. But, thanks to his own embarrassment and cowardice, that hadn’t happened, though he was determined now it would. In the morning, when the gardener was in court and the Tornabuoni case closed as Sandro Soderini wanted.
When talking to his wily friend, however, it was always best to be well informed ahead of the event. This was why, late that afternoon, Walter Marrone had called down to the records department and demanded every file that remained concerning Chiara’s murder. The folders, battered manila ones, shouting their neglected age with every fold and tear, sat in front of him, their contents ranged in orderly piles around his desk. Years before, during one of the periodic clear-outs, he’d insisted nothing from the case be archived as long as he was captain of the station. Chiara’s death was still as real for him as it was for Fratelli, even if there seemed scant chance that it might be reopened with any great enthusiasm.
Marrone had read every page of the reports. Two decades provided him with an interesting sense of perspective. Looking back, it seemed astonishing that anyone could have considered Fratelli a possible suspect at all. If he’d killed Chiara so viciously, why would he have stayed with her body throughout that long, heartbreaking night? What demons could make a loving husband rape and murder his own wife?
The initial suspicions of the investigating team — which Marrone could observe only from afar, since he was known to the man in the interview room — were based entirely on Fratelli’s own condition, one that a more worldly Carabinieri detective, familiar with psychology in a way that was rare in 1966, would have labelled ‘catatonic’. Frozen by sorrow. Rigid and silent.
Uncooperative.
An idiot investigator had scribbled that on the page. Fratelli had nothing to offer them. No pointers, no evidence, no ideas. Only his own misery, and there was a surfeit of that in mud-soaked, tragic Florence at the time. So no one noticed or listened.
This was, Marrone felt, a shame. It was clear from a cursory glance at the evidence that such a crime was surely committed through opportunity, by a man, or more than one, seizing Chiara during that strange, dark night. Four days later, the autopsy reports had confirmed that Chiara had died long before Fratelli reached her, in the early hours when he was raging in the stazione, struggling to reach her, or bravely fighting his way alongside his colleagues, trying to help the stricken in the flooded streets of Ognissanti.
Only then was Pino Fratelli taken off the suspect list, though it would be a full two weeks before he was able once again to speak in a fashion that could be counted normal.
What had really happened? That was the question the Carabinieri sought to answer so often in their work. A simple task, made difficult by the singular, sly and complex nature of humanity. Scanning the peripheral notes, one seemingly minor fact was new to him, however. According to the records, the pathologist had noted the presence on Chiara’s face of a slight smear, one that ran from beneath her lower lips to her upper cheeks. It was light and almost indistinguishable, as if it had been rubbed, perhaps during her attack or possibly by Fratelli himself as he held her or touched her face.
The substance concerned turned out to be scarlet lipstick. The pathologist of the time was a thorough man who had later gone on to greater fame in Rome. Thanks to his persistence, four months after Chiara’s death a report had arrived from a lab in Milan identifying the brand. It was expensive and French — not that anyone took much notice, since by then the case was quietly fading from view.
Marrone could never recall Chiara wearing lipstick. Artifice was not in her nature. She was beautiful without make-up. Why bother? If she died in the early hours of the morning, the idea she was wearing it when she was murdered seemed even more improbable.
And now Pino Fratelli was suddenly obsessed with an act of vandalism in the Brancacci Chapel. One that involved a smear of scarlet paint and a naked woman. Sick the man might be. But when the tumour slumbered he was as sharp and quick as ever. A connection had been made, and it was one Marrone might have heard for himself had he not been so abrupt and dismissive.
Then came another idea. One that left him feeling cold and a touch uncertain. He phoned down to the records office and managed to catch the day man before he knocked off from his shift at seven, the time Marrone’s own duty was supposed to end.
The civilian seemed more than a little put out by a sudden demand for a routine office document from twenty years before. Marrone was not to be denied. He ordered it to be delivered to his desk immediately.
Ten minutes later, the records officer came in with the desk diary for the week starting Monday, 31 October 1966. The last few pages were blank. No one had had the time to write them up once the flood arrived. It was a miracle the book itself had survived the inundation.
Scanning through these twenty-year-old pages, written by officers he barely remembered, Marrone found the days before were as routine as most other weeks in the Ognissanti stazione. Domestic arguments, traffic incidents, minor theft, lost cats, howling dogs, drunks galore.
Right up till the moment, early on Friday morning, when the Arno broke its banks. All the regular events were there. One he was both surprised and appalled to see.
The first Thursday of every month.
The Brigata Spendereccia would have met around seven thirty, as they did today. And back then they asked for seclusion too. It was all there in the diary.
‘A civic event requiring privacy in the vicinity of the Pitti Palace will take place this evening. Security will be provided separately by the organizers. All officers are required to avoid the area and refer any calls in the vicinity to the relevant authority in the Palazzo Vecchio.’
What did they do at this odd event? Marrone had his ideas. Whispers, faint rumours. When he was promoted to captain, with Soderini’s backing, he was invited along once himself. His simple excuse — he genuinely had another appointment — was met with an icy stare. The offer was never repeated. Even today, only senior officers knew of it by name, and that was primarily a lure, a conspiratorial gag to ensure their silence when needed.
How many of the men around him had accepted Soderini’s summons? Walter Marrone didn’t know and didn’t want to. Like all Italian institutions, the Carabinieri comprised multiple layers of separate, sometimes competing, interests. He had no interest in freemasonry or other so-called friendly societies. Those dalliances he would leave to others.
‘Go home,’ he told Rossi, the grumpy civilian from the records office. ‘I’ll keep this. And the rest. Thanks.’
‘What’s going on here?’ the man retorted. ‘These things are twenty years old. There’s a murderer out there right now. And here you buggers are…’