Page 23 of Murder on an Italian Island
‘Wasn’t he a very nice man? I never met him.’
She screwed up her face. ‘I know we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead but, no, he wasn’t a very nice man.’ I saw her glance across at Stefano for a moment. ‘At least not if you were a woman.’
‘So he was a bit of a Casanova, was he?’
‘Abit?’ She shuddered. ‘Ask any of the women who work here. The one thing we all learnt from day one was never to find yourself alone with him. He was like an octopus – hands all over the place.’
‘Oh dear.’ I was still trying to sound less like a detective and more like a shocked bystander. ‘And did he try it on with you?’
This time, Stefano answered. ‘He tried it on with every woman in the place. It was disgusting, but jobs like this are hard to find so, like Ingrid says, the girls just learned to avoid him where possible.’
‘And did they all avoid him, or did anybody go along with his advances? After all, I imagine he was quite a wealthy man.’
Again, the two of them exchanged glances before Ingrid replied. ‘You would probably do well to put that question to Teresa, his PA.’
I didn’t want to press them any further so I took a sip of beer and let Anna turn the conversation to the Etruscans. I listened with interest as she and Stefano discussed the Etruscan mining community who had quite possibly lived near here two thousand years ago and from time to time, I asked a question or two.
‘When you say, “near here”, where exactly do you mean? Are there ruins we could visit? I’m sure Anna would enjoy that, wouldn’t you?’
She nodded and Stefano pointed inland. ‘On the other side of the main road, just past Graziani’s villa, there are clear traces of early mining. Where there are mines, there are normally smelting furnaces, and it would be amazing if I could find the remains of one of these, what the locals callfabbrichili.There might even have been the site of a settlement there, but I haven’t seen any traces so far.’
‘And what about the mines; what are they like?’
‘The whole mountain behind us is riddled with them. Most are not much more than depressions in the ground these days. Most of the deeper ones have long since collapsed, but you can still make out some of the slag heaps. Nowadays, they’re overgrown, but if you look at the hillside carefully, you’ll soon see little mounds and dips everywhere.’
‘What about the miners themselves? You mentioned a settlement. Do you think that might be up there as well?’
He smiled. ‘That’s what I’d love to find out. I’m writing my thesis on the Etruscan communities here on the island and I would dearly like to be able to pinpoint a former settlement. Who knows? They might have lived only a matter of metres from where we are now.’ He sounded wistful and I was impressed at his dedication to his subject.
I sat back and listened with one ear while considering what he’d said. If there had been mines and a smelting furnace close to where Graziani’s new villa now stood, could it be that he had discovered the remains of the settlement, dug up valuable artefacts, and lived off the proceeds? I resolved to take Oscar for a walk up there this afternoon after finishing my next windsurfing lesson.
* * *
By the time my afternoon session finished – and I had been delighted to find that I had been able to cope with the stronger wind and the choppier conditions – I was feeling ever more positive about my progress – at least as far as windsurfing was concerned. When it came to the two murders, I was less optimistic. There were still too many unanswered questions and I wondered how Virgilio and his former colleague were getting on. Hopefully, Inspector Fontana’s investigation would unearth new information.
After a long, cool, glass of sparkling mineral water, I left Anna, who told me she was feeling tired and wanted to head back to the hotel. Oscar and I walked up through the campsite until we reached the main road. When I say main road, I don’t mean that it was a busy highway by any means, and Oscar and I were able to cross without seeing a single vehicle. The vegetation on the other side of the road was in stark contrast to the neatly mown grass and well-maintained flower beds of the campsite, and I found myself walking up a vestigial track through what had once been a vineyard. Now, after years of neglect, the vines had run wild and spread out across the ground, some encroaching onto the track. Apart from ruts made by a 4 x 4 or an agricultural vehicle of some kind heading up to an agricultural shed, the track looked as though it was very little used, and I could imagine that in a year or two, it might even disappear underneath the rampant vines.
It was very hot up here away from the sea breeze and Oscar appeared happy to trot alongside me rather than go bounding off into the undergrowth. I was pleased about this because I had read that there were several species of poisonous snakes here in the hills, and the last thing I wanted was for him to get bitten. I’m not a fan of snakes, poisonous or not, but fortunately, the only reptiles we came across were terrified lizards who shot off as our shadows landed on them. The laws of physics told me that my black dog would soon find the direct sunlight uncomfortable, so I just walked up to the top of a slight incline from where I had a better view onwards up the hillside. Here there was a wonderful gnarled old pine tree whose trunk was about the same thickness as my waist and was probably twice as old as I was – maybe more. We stopped in the welcome shade and I took a look around.
With my back to the sea, hiding Graziani’s villa and the campsite from view, there was virtually no sign of human activity apart from the large shed, which had probably once been used by the farmer. Seen relatively close up, it was more modern than I had thought, and I studied it critically. I had been thinking about getting a shed of my own, although I would need something only a fraction of the size of this serious agricultural building, and this sort of simple, practical design looked ideal. I took a couple of photos and resolved to show them to Nello, the local carpenter back in my village, in the hope that he could make me something similar. As I did so, I wondered idly why anybody had bothered to stick a solid-looking shed like this in the middle of an abandoned field – and the field was definitely abandoned.
The field was covered with a mixture of old vines, weeds, heather and thorny bushes that would have made any attempt at walking off the track almost impossible. The earth beneath my feet was a dusty orange colour and the stones littering the slope were a faded deep red – no doubt a sign of the ore beneath. Ahead of me, the hillside rose more sharply and carried on right up to the distant summit of what my phone told me was Monte Calamita, which translates as the magnetic mountain. It was the richness of the minerals beneath my feet that had made Elba one of the most important places in early Mediterranean civilisation, and I could almost feel the history radiating up through my feet as I trod in the footsteps of the long-lost miners.
Remembering what Stefano had said, I squinted hard and gradually started to make out occasional mounds marking old slag heaps and mines. Some were barely a few feet high, one or two almost as big as the shed. I let my eyes range about, but I was unable to spot any sign of a smelting furnace – although I didn’t really know what I was looking for. My eyes were drawn to a darker patch of earth where the vegetation was even thicker than elsewhere. On closer inspection, it was clear that this was a spring as I could see water oozing out through the ground and trickling off downhill towards the sea. The land itself was slightly flatter here and it occurred to me that the combination of level ground and fresh water might well have made this an ideal place for an Etruscan mining community. I could imagine a cluster of primitive homes up here but, alas, without stripping all the greenery away, it was impossible to identify any traces of human habitation so, after a fruitless search, I headed back downhill again, determined to mention the spring to Stefano in the hope that it might help his research.
As Oscar and I walked down through the campsite, I made a little detour and visited the reception building once more. I was interested to see how Teresa the PA had taken the death of her boss. If it was true that she had had a romantic involvement with him, I was expecting to find her in tears. Instead, I found her behind the counter doing something on the computer while, bizarrely, 1980s band Black Lace belted out ‘Agadoo’ from a speaker behind her. She looked up as I came in and gave me a beaming smile. For a moment, I even wondered if she might still be unaware of Aldo’s death, because I certainly hadn’t been expecting to see her looking so cheerful.
Or had I? After all, I only had it on hearsay that she might have had an involvement with victim number two. Maybe her feelings towards her boss had been similar to those of Ingrid at the windsurfing school. Could it be that she was now relieved that her sex-pest boss was no longer around?
I walked over to the counter and was pleased to see her reach out and turn down the volume of the music. As it was, I had a feeling I was going to be humming the annoyingly addictive – if incomprehensible – lyrics for the next few days.
‘Hello again. How was your windsurfing?’
‘Good, thanks.’ I hadn’t told her that I was doing a windsurfing course, so presumably. this meant that she had been checking up on me. If so, why? Dismissing this for now, I returned to the matter in hand. ‘I was sorry to hear the news of Signor Graziani’s death. It sounds like it was another unfortunate accident.’
The cheerful smile left her face. ‘Who knows?’
I had a feeling that she knew more than she was saying and I did my best to find out what that might be. ‘Now that he’s dead, I’m unable to ask him the questions I wanted, and I wondered if you would mind answering them for me – if you can, of course?’
