Page 11 of Murder in Portofino

‘That’s not a problem. I can get a message to the captain not to weigh anchor until he gets authorisation from us.’

I decided to plead ignorance. ‘Are you working with the police on this?’

He shook his head. ‘There isn’t a police station here in Portofino, but we have a good working relationship with the local Carabinieri.’ I saw him make a decision. ‘In fact, if you could spare me another few minutes of your time, I wonder if you’d be kind enough to come with me to the Carabinieri barracks to speak to the lieutenant.’

‘The lieutenant?’

‘Lieutenant Bertoletti. He’s the main investigating officer here.’ He held out his hand towards me. ‘Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Signor Armstrong. My name’s Solaro, by the way, Paolo Solaro.’

It took us an age to walk the three or four hundred metres to the Carabinieri HQ. The crowds of sauntering tourists were, if anything, even worse than I’d feared and I was thankful that Anna and I had decided to take the early boat for our visit this morning. The Carabinieri post occupied the ground floor of an apartment block in a narrow road and there was an older officer in uniform standing outside. I’m not too clued up on ranks in the Carabinieri but from the look of the stripes on his epaulettes, I had a vague feeling he was a maresciallo or marshal, roughly equivalent to a sergeant. He was smoking a cigarette, no doubt at the end of his Sunday lunch, and thinking of food made me realise with a start that I was hungry. Oscar would never have forgotten something as important as that but, for now, I had business to attend to. The maresciallo gave Paolo Solaro a nod as we walked up to him and the young man offered a few words of explanation.

‘Ciao, Romeo, this gentleman has some interesting information about the identity of our dead body.’

The maresciallo immediately dropped his cigarette on the floor and stubbed it out with his foot. ‘We’d better go and see the lieutenant.’

He led us inside, past a reception desk, to a door marked Privato. He punched in a code and we followed him into a corridor, at the end of which was a frosted-glass door. The maresciallo knocked and waited. Seconds later, a voice replied.

‘Avanti.’

Inside the office, I found a Carabinieri officer in shirtsleeves sitting behind a desk cluttered with paperwork. It was stuffy in here and the only ventilation appeared to be a freestanding fan on top of a filing cabinet. Officer Solaro handed him my card and gave him a brief outline of what I’d told him. The lieutenant stood up and held out his hand in greeting to me.

‘Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Please take a seat.’ I saw him study my card for a few seconds but he made no comment about my occupation. ‘Signor Armstrong, would you mind just running me through it in your own words, please?’ He was an intelligent-looking man, probably in his mid-forties, with short, dark hair. He was clean-shaven and he looked fit.

I sat down opposite him while the other two officers stood behind me and listened in as I went through my story again. As I had suspected, the police sergeant over in Rapallo hadn’t bothered to pass on my message yet. The lieutenant listened intently, throwing out a question every now and then until I reached the end of my account. He had been taking notes as I went along and now he looked up from his desk over my shoulder towards the maresciallo and issued orders.

‘Veronese, contact the Regal Princess. See if you can find out if there’s a man on board with an eyepatch. If there’s never been one or there still is one on there, then I think we can probably eliminate them from our inquiries. If there was such a person on board and he’s no longer there for whatever reason, tell them everybody has to stay on the yacht and it doesn’t move until I come out to question them.’

The maresciallo gave a brief, ‘Yes, sir,’ and went back out again, after which the lieutenant looked across at me.

‘As you said yourself, Signor Armstrong, this may be a completely different one-eyed man. Would you be able to wait for five minutes until Veronese has been able to speak to the vessel? Could I offer you a coffee? What about you, Paolo? A little espresso maybe?’ Clearly his relationship with the Coastguard officer was a lot less formal.

The lieutenant spoke into his phone as Paolo Solaro pulled up a chair, and barely three minutes later, another officer appeared carrying a tray with three espresso coffees on it. While we sipped these, the lieutenant asked me about my work and I gave him a quick summary of my life to date.

‘I worked in the murder squad at Scotland Yard in London for thirty years and a couple of years ago I retired and moved here to Tuscany. A good friend of mine in the Florence murder squad suggested I set up my own investigation agency and I’ve been doing that for the last year.’

‘Thirty years in the murder squad? Were you a senior officer?’

‘Not terribly senior, I was a detective chief inspector, a DCI.’

He was obviously familiar with the rank and he smiled. ‘That’s roughly equivalent to major in the Carabinieri or commissario in the Italian police, isn’t it? You must have seen some things in your time.’

‘Yes, but never a one-eyed man floating in the sea. Can I ask if you’re sure it was murder and not suicide or maybe just an unfortunate accident?’

‘Definitely murder.’ I saw him hesitate before making a decision. ‘This is restricted information, so please keep it to yourself, but the man suffered six stab wounds to the back, sides and neck. And as for suicide, you try stabbing yourself in the back.’ His tone was dry.

‘He was stabbed six times?’ Without knowing it, the cable-car conductor had been pretty close to the mark. ‘That certainly doesn’t sound like the work of a professional hitman.’

‘No, the pathologist said it looked like a frenzied attack with a fairly slim-bladed knife only about ten centimetres long.’

‘Tell me, do you have photos of the victim? I should be able to recognise him if he is the one I saw.’

‘I’m just waiting to get the photos back from the lab.’ He gave me a rueful shrug of the shoulders. ‘We’re only a very small contingent here and some of the technology takes a bit of time.’

Beside me, the Coastguard officer coughed apologetically. ‘It was my first experience of a murder victim, I’m afraid, and I didn’t think to take my own photos. I just left it to the force photographer.’

There was a peremptory knock on the door and the maresciallo returned. ‘Sounds like this might be our man, sir. I’ve spoken to the captain, a woman called Monica Devesi, and she confirms there was a man with an eyepatch on board the Regal Princess until just before eleven last night, name of Jerome Van der Groot, British national. She says that she’d heard that for some reason after dinner, he left the saloon in a huff. Ten minutes later, they heard the outboard motor on one of their little rubber dinghies being started up and a crewmember saw it heading for the shore. It never came back and neither did he, so when this was reported to the captain first thing this morning, she sent out a search party in another boat. They found the dinghy wedged against the rocks just along the coast from here, but they’ve seen no sign of him and nobody’s heard from him since last night. We found the body washed up only a hundred metres further on.’

‘When you say “wedged”, was the dinghy moored up?’

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