Death and the Olive Grove by Marco Vichi Page B

Piras,’ Bordelli said out of the blue. They returned to the car and, a few minutes later, pulled up at the big rusty gate. They went up to it and looked through the bars. In the daylight the garden looked even more neglected. The small stone fountain was dry and covered with moss, the weeds growing freely beyond the limits of the old flower beds.
    â€˜It looks like one of those haunted houses,’ said Piras. If Bordelli hadn’t seen the German woman come out with his own two eyes, he might have thought the same thing. He tugged the chain to the bell. They heard it ring inside the house, but nobody came out.
    â€˜Miss Olga!’ Bordelli shouted. Again he had the feeling that someone was spying on them through the slats of the shutters.
    â€˜Are they watching us?’
    â€˜You can read my mind, Piras.’
    The wind gusted and stirred up the dry leaves on the villa’s patios. The effect was rather like a Sunday at the cemetery. Piras and Bordelli carefully checked all the windows one by one, trying to determine whether someone really was watching them, but they didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. They only heard the rustle of the windswept leaves.
    They got back in the car and returned to the city by way of the old road, so steep it was almost perpendicular. Bordelli kept thinking of the man with the black mark on his neck. Where had he seen that sort of mark before? Perhaps he was mistaken …
    â€˜Piras, a man with a dark spot on the neck from here to here,’ said Bordelli, running his finger across his throat, ‘does that ring a bell for you?’
    â€˜I don’t think so,’ said the young man.
    â€˜So, what do you make of all this?’
    â€˜Well, we know for certain that Casimiro was in that field and had perhaps tried to climb up the buttress, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the villa had anything to do with the murder …’
    â€˜Quite so …’
    â€˜But I do wonder: where, exactly, was Casimiro murdered? At home or somewhere else? And if he was killed away from his home, why did they carry him all the way back there inside a suitcase? It would have been easier to dump him in the Arno or bury him out in the country somewhere.’
    â€˜Good question, Piras. Have you got an answer?’
    â€˜I’d really rather you didn’t smoke, Inspector,’ said Piras, seeing Bordelli reach into his jacket pocket. The inspector merely made a face that meant such things couldn’t be helped, and lit a cigarette. Piras opened the window at once.
    Diotivede heard him come in, but he kept his eye pressed up against the eyepiece of the microscope.
    â€˜What are you doing up at this ungodly hour?’
    It was barely half past seven.
    â€˜Well, I know you start work early,’ said Bordelli.
    â€˜But you don’t.’
    â€˜I haven’t been sleeping well lately.’
    â€˜I’ve already done your dwarf, but haven’t written the report yet,’ said Diotivede, turning a knob on the microscope.
    â€˜Tell me in person.’
    â€˜I know you knew him.’
    â€˜I first arrested him just after the war.’
    The pathologist ceased combing through the cilia of bacteria and sat up straight. Every time Bordelli looked at him he was amazed. Diotivede was over seventy, but his face still had something childish about it.
    â€˜He died two days ago, between one and two o’clock in the morning.’
    â€˜From a crushed skull?’
    â€˜Wrong.’
    â€˜How, then?’
    â€˜He was poisoned,’ said the doctor.
    Bordelli’s eyes widened.
    â€˜What about that blow to the head?’
    â€˜They did that later, almost certainly with a hammer.’
    â€˜What could it mean?’ asked Bordelli, shaking his head.
    â€˜I was wondering myself. Perhaps your little friend had some muscle spasms as he was dying; that can happen with poisoning. And the killer, perhaps fearing he wasn’t going