Death in Autumn (2 page)

'Ask a lawyer,' suggested the Marshal drily.

'We can't waste a lawyer's time over a thing like this; besides which, that would cost more money than getting a vet to put it down!'

'Well then, stop wasting my time and leave it be. Don't tell me in a place like this you can't afford to feed it. It's no bigger than a rabbit.'

'And if she doesn't come back?'

'Why shouldn't she come back?' The Marshal had lost hope of shaking the man off. They were on the doorstep and he kept tugging at the sleeve of the Marshal's black uniform, glancing back every few seconds to make sure he wasn't wanted inside. The taxi moved off followed by an angry chorus of hooting and the porter went inside. At this point the receptionist lowered his voice to a confidential gossipy whisper.

'Well, for one thing, I know for a fact she didn't even take a suitcase. We keep them in store in the attic for her since she's here permanently.'

'If she didn't take a suitcase,' said the Marshal, 'then she won't be gone long, will she? And now—'

'Hm. It's not my place to say . . .' He glanced over his shoulder again. 'It's not my place to say, but. . . I've never liked her . . . perfectly respectable on the surface and I've nothing against her, nothing concrete, but there's
something.
You understand what I mean? I imagine that in your job—'

'No,' said the Marshal, 'I don't understand you.' The man certainly made a better impression when he confined himself to 'thank you and good morning'.

'It's been eight days.'

'What has?'

'She's been gone eight days and a woman of that sort doesn't go away for eight days without a suitcase. Maybe she couldn't pay her bill. This month's was due. If we keep this dog and she's vanished we'll be stuck with it. Now do you understand?'

The Marshal didn't answer. He made a calculation and then walked back into the hotel with the receptionist fluttering behind him.

'Well, I'm glad to see you realize that something's got to be done. It's all very well for the manager to say—'

'Give me back the register. How old is this woman?'

'Forty-eight. Well kept, I'll admit, but—'

'Height?'

'About my height. . . What's this got to do with the dog?'

'Blonde?'

'Bleached. You know her? There, I
knew
there was something. I can always tell.'

'Where's her registration?'

'Wait, I'll find it for you . . . I just knew, it's a feeling I get . . . here.'

The Marshal looked at the information, slowly took out his notebook and copied it down carefully. He buttoned the notebook back into his pocket. 'You'll be hearing from us.'

'I do
hope
it's nothing serious,' lied the receptionist, then remembering just in time: 'What about the dog?'

'You'll probably be able to have it put down, if that's what you want.' At the doorway he couldn't resist turning to add sententiously: 'But you just might have to identify a corpse first.'

'A corpse? You mean she's . . .
Me .
. .? Oh my God!' That wiped the excited expression off his face. 'I'm afraid I'd faint . . .'

'I'm damn sure you would,' growled the Marshal to himself, going on his way.

CHAPTER 3

'I'm sorry to have kept you waiting.' Captain Maestrangelo returned to his office that afternoon to find the Marshal sitting there patiently, his big hands resting squarely on his knees. They talked for a few moments about the latest on the new drug gang. The Marshal knew the parents of one of the youngsters who had died and so had a personal as well as an official interest in the case. After a while the Captain said: 'I gather you got my message, but there was really no need to come over, I just wanted to bring you up to date on that body in the Arno affair. It's not a suicide. I spoke to the magistrate this morning . . .'

The Marshal listened carefully to a summary of the contents of the autopsy report. It wasn't until the Captain said: 'Identifying her is still going to be a real headache,' that he offered: 'There's a possibility that I've found out who she is . . .'

They didn't go immediately to the hotel since they would have to see both the day and the night staff. Maestrangelo telephoned the manager and asked for all the personnel to be present that evening at the time of the evening changeover. The response was polite but decidedly reserved.

'Am I allowed to ask why?'

'It would be better if we discussed that when I arrive.'

'He knows why,' commented the Marshal when the Cap- tain had hung up. 'That receptionist will have told everybody in the place.'

It was already dark by the time their car crossed the bridge under which the body had been recovered, and a drizzly rain was falling into the river. There was so much traffic clogging the narrow streets at that hour that it was fortunate the hotel had an underground garage beside the entrance.

As it turned out, the Marshal had been right. The receptionist had told everyone in the place. There was an atmosphere of mild excitement when the carabinieri were shown into the manager's crowded office, but nobody seemed unduly worried or tense apart from the receptionist himself, whose name was Guido Monteverdi and who kept edging up to the Marshal at every opportunity to give some new reason why he was the least appropriate person to identify the body. The Marshal was relieved that it was the Captain who took his statement while he himself took that of the night porter, a quietly spoken, pleasant man in his late thirties who did his best to be helpful without resorting to gossip. He and the Marshal sat facing each other across a cluttered desk in the small office where the hotel's accounts were kept, and from where the usual noises of the hotel were only just audible. The porter gave his name as Mario Querci and answered the routine questions about his birth and place of residence. Then he began to speak of the missing guest.

'No, I wouldn't say she was a happy woman. She often seemed to me disappointed with life, a little bitter, but she never seemed moved to do anything about it. I suppose a lot of people are like that.'

The Marshal, watching him as he spoke, wondered if the night porter himself wasn't like that, too. You didn't often find a fairly presentable, youngish man in a job of that sort. More often than not they were retired men, or none too healthy ones who found the work easy to cope with. Perhaps in this class of hotel such people weren't acceptable. He made no comment but let the other go on talking.

'I always felt that she'd had some real disappointment at one time and that it had embittered her.'

'Did she say so?'

'No . . . nothing specific. But it might be the case, even so. There could have been something that happened a long time ago in her own country. She'd been living here about fifteen years and I've only been here for eight, so . . .'

'Where were you before?'

'In a hotel further north. I suppose, more than anything, it was the fact that she had trouble sleeping that gave the impression that she was unhappy.'

'She had trouble sleeping so she came down here and passed the time away chatting to you, is that it?'

'Yes . . .' He seemed embarrassed.

'Well, 1 suppose in your job you're bound to listen a good deal to people's problems whether you want to or not.' He was typical, the Marshal thought, of the sort of porters, waiters and barmen whom everyone calls by their first names and who are always willing to do small favours in an unaffected way, always with a friendly, conspiratorial smile. 'What about visitors?'

'She never had visitors, though she wasn't alone in the world, I know that.'

'How?'

'There were letters, not often but fairly regularly. I take the post in before I leave in the morning.'

'Letters from her own country?'

'No, I can't think there was ever one from Germany, at least, not that I remember, though there could have been, I suppose, without my noticing or on my night off. They came from all over the world. She wrote letters, too.'

'In answer to the ones she received?'

'I don't know . . . No, I think they always went to Germany. You'd have to ask the receptionist; she'd leave them with him during the day if she didn't go out and post them herself.'

'Did she go out much?'

'I don't think so. Again, you should check with the day staff. She did go away occasionally for a few days.'

'Had she been away recently?'

'No, not for over a year, if I remember rightly.' He hesitated a moment and then said: 'I told you she never had visitors and she didn't as a rule, but . . .'

'Well?'

'Well, you could hardly call him a visitor—1 mean, he didn't go up to her room as you might be thinking—but there was a man who came in and asked for her, a very respectable-looking man, tallish, well-dressed. She came down and met him here and they went out together.'

'At night, presumably, if you saw him?'

'Yes. I suppose about elevenish.'

'When was this?'

'It must be nearly a month ago.'

'You're sure?'

'I can't be sure to the day, He didn't come back with her and since he wasn't registered here I've no way of checking' 'You're sure it wasn't the night she disappeared?'

'Oh, quite sure. It was well before that . . . Would you mind if I asked you something?'

When the Marshal nodded his consent the porter went on: 'I just wanted to . . . well, to know what happened. You said she was found in the river but you didn't say—was it suicide?'

'No.'

'I see.' He seemed almost relieved.

The Marshal waited but the porter asked nothing further so he went on: 'Did she confide in you, things of a personal nature?'

'She talked a lot about her health. Despite her insomnia she hardly ever took anything, sleeping pills, that sort of thing. She was very concerned about her diet, too. I don't mean the way women usually are, worrying about keeping slim. She was very slim anyway.'

'Yes,' murmured the Marshal. When he had arrived on the river bank that morning with the Captain the first thing he had noticed had been one thin bluish leg issuing from the sodden fur.

'She went in for those health food things. She talked a lot about wheat germ and vitamin C. She even gave me some vitamin C tablets once, saying that if you spend a lot of time in a confined space and don't get enough fresh air—I'm sorry, that's of no interest to you, I suppose, but she talked that way a lot.'

'To be honest,' the Marshal said, 'I was thinking of things of a more personal nature than that. This man who came, for instance, she didn't tell you anything about him or about any other men?'

'No . . . She never talked about men except in general terms. But . . .'

'But what?'

'Well, there must have been a man in her life but I was never clear about whether he was in the past or the present.' 'It doesn't sound as if he was still around if she never received him here.'

'Well, there were the trips she took, of course, but she always talked about it in the past tense in a way that's difficult to explain. She didn't talk about
him,
as I said, but about another woman.'

'Someone she was jealous of?'

'That's putting it mildly. You'd have to have known her to understand. She always had this calm, ironic sort of attitude, about herself, about everything. She could be very scathing, hard in a way, but in an amusing way. I'm not very good at expressing things but if I say that her main concern seemed to be her health—well, obviously, she took it seriously because she was very rigid about her diet and these health pills—but when she talked about it, it didn't come out as serious. She always talked about herself and about everything else in a sort of detached, ironic way. I'm making her sound a bit unpleasant but she wasn't really, though people who didn't know her so well might have thought so.'

The Marshal had already talked to a chambermaid and a waiter who both thought so, but he only said: 'You were telling me about her being jealous.'

'That's just it. When she talked about this other woman, that was the only time she showed any real emotion. She still tried to keep the same ironic tone but even so it was obvious that underneath there was real fury. There were times when she said some really bitchy things. She would almost let herself go completely, though never for long.'

'What sort of things did she say?'

'It was always more or less the same story. It seems the other woman was older and she harped on that. She'd say something like: "That witch is eight years older than me and she drinks like a fish. The one thing I'm sure of is that she'll die before I do. And I know for a fact that if it hadn't been for her so-called perfect English he wouldn't have given her a second glance . . ." Then she would get control of herself and change the subject.'

'What did she mean by "she'll die before I do"? Did it sound like some sort of threat?'

'No, not at all. She seemed certain of it, that's all. I always got the impression that she kept herself healthy because of this other woman.'

'You mean that's how she intended to outlive her?' The Marshal's big, slightly bulging eyes bulged even more.

'You'd have to have known her to understand,' repeated the porter quietly. 'She was a very determined woman in her own way.'

'Hmph.' The Marshal pondered on this for a moment and then added, 'But she didn't succeed, by the look of it.'

Over an hour later, back in the manager's more spacious office, he and the Captain sat alone comparing notes. With the exception of the night porter, Mario Querci, the dead woman had been little known and even less liked by the hotel staff.

There was no doubt that the missing guest was the woman they had fished out of the river; all of them had recognized the photograph of the dead woman. If nobody had come forward to identify her it was because the hotel manager took the
Corriere delta Sera
more often than the
Nazione
and the rest of the staff, if they bothered to read the newspaper at all, read his. None of them had seen the article, so Galli's efforts had been in vain. Two and a half hours of questioning had produced little enough useful evidence, but at least the woman now had an identity.

Hilde Vogel had been born in Germany and was forty-eight years old, slim, artificially blonde, unostentatiously well-dressed. She sent a registered letter to Germany once a month and took a trip abroad approximately once every two years, booking her flight through the receptionist who had repeated to the Captain that he knew there was something, he could always tell, but that it was really the manager's place to identify the body. She had last been seen at dinner eight days ago. Nobody had seen her leave the hotel, not even Querci, the night porter, despite his position in the entrance hall, and there was no other exit. The back of the hotel overhung the river.

Both the Captain and the Marshal were tired and hungry. When they emerged from the office into the reception area they were reminded of their hunger by a faint but delicious smell coming from the main dining-room where some guests were still eating, judging by discreet noises of cutlery.

Mario Querci was at his post, advising a middle-aged couple about a day trip to San Gimignano and Siena. 'If you like I'll telephone the bus station for you . . .'

He looked up and smiled as the two carabinieri appeared. 'All finished?'

'I'm afraid not,' the Captain said. He didn't like to add that they were about to join the men who were examining the dead woman's room, because of the presence of the guests who, anyway, were too busy trying to translate the price of the coach tickets into dollars to take any notice of the uniformed men.

'That receptionist, Monteverdi . . .' said the Captain as they went up the blue-carpeted stairs because the lift had just started up.

'Hmph.' The Marshal refrained from further comment.

They trod silently along more blue carpet looking for Room 209. Silk-shaded lamps were lit on low, half-moon tables all along the corridor. 209 was halfway along facing the lift doors.

'It's going to cost us a lot of time and manpower to check the backgrounds of all the staff, but I suppose we can be thankful that she had no contact with any of the other guests.'

'So they say—' the Marshal sounded unconvinced—'and I suppose it's true since they were all agreed about it. But as for the rest ... It won't do. It won't do at all.'

'I must say I had the feeling that the manager had something to hide.'

'And he wasn't the only one.'