Page 30 of Murder on an Italian Island
I made it back to the hotel in less than ten minutes and almost bumped into Virgilio by the front door. Together, we walked through to where Fontana was carrying out his interviews and waited until the door opened and Sergeant Gallo showed a young man out. At first, I didn’t recognise the man’s face but then realised that up till now I had only ever seen it pressed up close against his wife’s. Evidently, he was Mr Arnaldo, half of the amorous couple of newly-weds.
Virgilio didn’t waste time. ‘Is the inspector free? I have some new information that I feel sure he’ll be very interested to hear.’
Sergeant Gallo opened the door wide, and we went inside. Piero Fontana looked up and must have seen the excitement on Virgilio’s face. ‘Ciao, Virgilio, what’s new?’
‘You know I said I’ve got my people in Florence checking up on Ignazio’s original assault and rape cases? Well, I’ve just heard back, and two things have come up. The second woman to be abducted by Ignazio Graziani, Laura Bracco, has an Italian father, but her mother is originally Japanese, and, of all places, she comes from Nagoya. It strikes me as quite a coincidence that we have a man here at the hotel from that very same city. I think we might need to find out more about Tatsuo Tanaka. Who knows, he might be a relative of the mother or even a professional hitman?’
Inspector Fontana looked very interested and immediately ordered the sergeant to contact the Japanese police to see whether they had anything on Tanaka, but Virgilio’s news didn’t stop there.
‘There’s more. The couple of shopkeepers, Signor Giardino and his wife from Lucca, run a very specialised sort of shop. It’s an antique shop, but what’s special about it is that the website claims it boasts a large collection of “ancient artefacts, some dating back to pre-Roman times.”. Again, that’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?’
Fontana nodded ruefully. ‘I interviewed them an hour ago, but I didn’t ask what sort of shop they had. All they told me was that they were here on holiday.’ He returned his attention to the sergeant. ‘Could you call them back in, please, Gallo? Hopefully, they’re still around.’
I pointed out that I’d just seen them at the café in the village and the sergeant went out to send somebody for them. I looked back at Virgilio. ‘Suddenly, we might have a suspect for the first murder – a revenge killing all the way from Japan – and another for Aldo’s murder, this time connected to the antiques trade. Maybe we aren’t looking for a single killer after all.’
I saw the other two exchange glances and I felt a distinct ripple of optimism run through the room. Might one of these snippets of information be the breakthrough we had been seeking?
At that moment, I heard scratching at the door, accompanied by a familiar bark. I jumped to my feet as a young constable opened the door and Oscar came charging in. The officer looked at the inspector apologetically.
‘I’m sorry, sir, but this dog won’t go away. We keep shooing it off, but it keeps coming back. I don’t suppose?—’
I interrupted him to reassure him that Oscar was known to me and I looked around for Anna. Unable to see her, I checked with the constable. His answer was disconcerting.
‘No, sir, the dog was on its own. The officer out front said it came running up the drive and onto the terrace before coming in here. There was nobody with it.’
My brain was racing. If Oscar had come all the way here by himself, this meant he had run along the main road. This had been potentially dangerous to him but, more to the point, I found myself wondering desperately why Anna wasn’t with him. As I stroked his head to calm him down, I turned back to Virgilio and Piero.
‘I’m worried something’s happened to Anna. She went off to the field with the shed again. I need to get back there now.’
Virgilio was already on his feet. ‘I’ll come with you.’ He glanced back at the inspector. ‘Can you spare us a couple of officers? I don’t like the sound of this.’
Together with Sergeant Gallo and the young constable, we raced out of the hotel and back out of the gate, along the road to the field. We followed Oscar up the overgrown track, but when we approached the shed, I could see no sign of Anna, and I found my anxiety levels rising. It had been quite out of character for Oscar to run off on his own, and I felt sure he would only have done so if something serious had happened. What was immediately apparent was that Oscar had no doubt that the answer to the puzzle lay inside the shed. With his nose firmly positioned by the crack of the door, he stood up on his hind legs and started desperately scratching with his front paws.
Virgilio and I exchanged glances and he turned to the two police officers. ‘We need to get into this shed now. See if you can break the doors down or look for something we can use to lever them open.’
The two officers shoulder-charged the doors and I heard the timber give a creak of protest. Virgilio and I joined in and with a series of concerted efforts – and a few bruised shoulders – we managed to split the wood around the lock until the right-hand door swung out on its hinges. We ran inside and stopped in surprise. Apart from an aluminium ladder hanging on one wall, the shed was empty.
This wasn’t what I had been expecting. Virgilio and I were exchanging bewildered looks when my eyes were drawn to Oscar. He had run past us and was now scratching frantically at the floor of the shed in the far corner. I rushed after him, but it was only with the aid of the torch on my phone that I was able to detect the barely visible join where the timber floorboards had been skilfully cut. I looked up at the others.
‘It’s a trapdoor. Do any of you have a knife?’
Sergeant Gallo reached into his pocket and produced a Swiss army knife. With the aid of this, he managed to prise the trapdoor sufficiently so we could get our fingers underneath it and lift. We found ourselves looking into a dark pit. Oscar had his nose pointing unerringly downwards and I caught hold of his collar in case he might decide to jump into the abyss. The torch on my phone showed the rough-hewn walls, a couple of metres deep, and I caught my breath as I saw a familiar figure lying face down and motionless in the dirt, her left arm splayed out at an unnatural angle. I felt as if a cold knife had been driven into my chest, and I immediately realised what the ladder was for. With the aid of the sergeant, I lowered it into the hole until it touched the bottom. He reached for the top step, but I stopped him.
‘Let me go first. It’s my partner, Anna. I need to go to her. Would you hold onto Oscar for me?’
To an accompaniment of plaintive whining from Oscar, I climbed down the ladder until my foot touched the ground. I pulled out the torch again as I fell to my knees and reached forward towards Anna. Acting on instinct born of long experience while my brain swirled with the implications of what I was seeing, I laid my hand against the carotid artery in her neck. The wave of relief that surged through me as I felt a distinct pulse was almost overpowering, and I suddenly felt tears in my eyes. She was alive.
Wiping the back of my hand across my eyes, I cleared my throat and shouted up to the others. ‘She’s unconscious, but she’s alive. Call the emergency services now. We’ll need an ambulance and the fire brigade to haul her out of here.’
I turned back to Anna and did my best to cradle her head, desperately trying not to let my mind spin off into wild conjecture about how seriously injured she might be. For now, I told myself, all that counted was that she was still alive, but without Oscar’s help, she could well have died.
I felt a burning anger rising up inside me. The investigation had suddenly got very personal.
19
WEDNESDAY
I spent the rest of the morning at the hospital. It would have been good to have had Oscar alongside me, but he wouldn’t have been let in, so I had left him with Virgilio and Lina – giving them instructions to see that he got the biggest steak available. The more I thought about it, I had absolutely no doubt that without his intervention, Anna might well be dead. Upon arrival at the hospital, they had wheeled her away to investigate the extent of her injuries and I’d been told to stay in the waiting room. The paramedics in the ambulance had quickly worked out that she had dislocated her left arm and that she had taken a blow to the forehead, rendering her unconscious.
