Vita Nuova by Magdalen Nabb

tomorrow because we’ll have to hold one about this business, as you can see.’
    ‘I imagine so. Funny . . . I’d been thinking that the murder of a well-to-do victim would get all the attention, but it’s a little gypsy girl.’
    ‘It’s not the little gypsy girl the mayor’s worrying about, it’s his political future. Keep me informed.’
    ‘I will.’ As the marshal got back into his own car, he remembered about the flat for sale. Too late. The driver started the engine. The cameraman was pushing through the tourists to hurry into the building behind the captain. A couple of youngsters in shorts and baseball caps stopped licking their ice cream and turned to stare after them. That cameraman was wasting his time. The journalists’ nickname for Captain Maestrangelo was ‘The Tomb.’
    ‘We should have found it before, of course.’ The technician exhibited the bullet in a small plastic bag.
    It was hardly surprising. The bedside cabinet was antique, deeply carved, and damaged by ancient woodworm scars.
    ‘It had literally disappeared into the woodwork! If we hadn’t known it had to be here, we’d have been hard put. . . .’
    ‘The prosecutor will be pleased.’ Not that the marshal himself wasn’t, it was just that he wanted to be alone in the room and he hadn’t yet had the chance, apart from a very few moments yesterday. Too many people all over everything.
    If the people in this family told him nothing, then perhaps the house itself would tell him things.
    The windows were closed and shuttered and the lights on. It seemed gloomy for a few moments after the forensic people had taken their powerful lights away, but he waited and the effect soon passed.
    Plastic sheeting had been put over the bed and the floor beside it so that the sister could be brought in here yesterday. The marshal removed these now and put them out in the corridor.
    Then he stood still for a long time, looking.
    The tumbled, snowy bed, red floor tiles, smooth with centuries of wax and wear, the few pieces of furniture, dark and heavy. It might be a convent cell . . . except for that one area of disorder, the messy trail leading to a chalk outline. Broken glass from the photo frame. The picture, with its frame and backing, had been laid flat on the bedside table to be photographed by the technicians. A little blond girl in white, a First Communion picture with a small round hole in it. The marshal looked at the child Daniela. She’d been very thin then, and her big solemn eyes were ringed with dark shadows. Nobody in this family seemed to be in the best of health, one way or another. There were two other photographs by the bedside lamp, one of Daniela holding her baby in his christening robe, the other a more recent one of little Piero pushing a wooden truck with red wheels. Yesterday’s search had turned up no other photographs. On the floor above, in Daniela’s big tidy study, the marshal had found a desk diary which contained nothing personal at all. There was the odd dental appointment, tutorials for her thesis, reminders about picking up dry-cleaning. If the man was married, then he had certainly been able to count on her discretion. It looked as if she would succeed in taking her secret to the grave. At the very top of the tower was an attic. It was empty.
    ‘She never really talked to us.’
    An attic without secrets, a diary without secrets.
    She had a secret, though.
    The child’s bedroom was small and cheerful, the bedclothes turned back to air, a fur animal of some sort with a pointed nose propped on the pillow. A shelf of picture books. The bathroom was tidy, mostly white. Towels, some white, some dark blue, were folded on the brass rail, all except a used one lying on a linen basket.
    A quiet, studious woman had got up, washed and dressed her little boy, given him his breakfast on the floor below, and taken him down to her sister. Had she then come up and taken a shower? Possibly. She’d still been wearing some sort