Page 29 of Murder at Christmas

Maybe Marina was right. After all, Selena, too, had told me that he had tried to grope her as well that same day. Maybe he had gone crazy but had remained sane enough to realise something was happening to his brain and had decided to end it all before he did something he would really regret. It didn’t sound very likely, but it was a possibility.

It was, of course, also possible that one of the molested wives or one of the two husbands – Paolo or Umberto – had decided to take the law into their own hands and had pushed Bartolomeo to his death.

I thanked Marina for the information and sat down in the sun with Oscar sprawled at my feet. I let my mind roam over the events of the past forty-eight hours and found myself reflecting on what had, at first, looked like an unfortunate accident. Now the potential candidates for Bartolomeo’s murder were stacking up, and I started ticking off the names in my head.

There was Orlando, whose relationship with his father had been fractious. Had he committed patricide in order to avenge himself and to remove his father’s resistance to the creation of the Alpine resort, which, according to Fiona, would have fulfilled his greatest ambitions? Had his sister helped, or had she even committed the deed herself?

Had Umberto killed his younger brother in a moment of extreme rage after hearing of Bartolomeo’s lecherous advances towards his wife? Might Gloria have carried out the deedherself? She had, after all, admitted to ‘going for a walk’ around the time of her brother-in-law’s death.

What if Marina – in spite of what she had said to me – had told Paolo about Bartolomeo’s groping, or he had somehow observed what had happened and decided to take revenge?

The other possibles were Gallo, the property developer, and the American mineral hunters. Could they have committed murder in order to open the door to their projects for the Alpine resort or the redeveloped mine? The big problem there was how they could have known that Bartolomeo would be on top of the big boulder at that specific time. It certainly wasn’t the best weather for hanging around in the open, spying on the villa on the off chance.

And then there was the question of the money that had gone missing from the company. Could the new boy, William, have had something to do with this, or might Bartolomeo’s deceased partner have been dipping his fingers in the till?

Alternatively, might Calogero Naselli, the Head of Accounts, have been the guilty party? Was he the one who had been stealing the money? After all, he was in the best position of all to do something like this without being caught. Might he have decided to kill in order to avoid his financial monkey business being exposed?

I glanced along the terrace and saw that Ingrid had emerged. She was chatting on the phone in rapid French that I was unable to follow. Although I had tended to believe what she had told me on the stairs, maybe she had known about the missing million because her husband had stolen it. Maybe she had decided to kill Bartolomeo in order to protect her husband’s good name. Was Ingrid the killer?

So many possible motives, so many people without a viable alibi, and any one of them capable of pushing an unsuspecting man off a slippery rock.

Any further deliberations were interrupted by the arrival of Valentina. When she saw me, she looked pleased. ‘Dan, I’m thinking of walking down to the mine to check out what the Americans were doing there, just in case they’ve found deposits of something more valuable than iron.’

I gave her a grin. ‘Having your own goldmine would be rather nice.’

She smiled back but shook her head. ‘Wrong kind of geology, I’m afraid, but gold isn’t the only precious mineral. I need to satisfy my curiosity, so I wondered if you would like to come with me – we have torches. It’s pretty impressive in there – gold or no gold.’

I gave her a smile in response. ‘That sounds like a great idea, thanks. I’ve never been inside a mine. Give me five minutes and I’ll meet you in the hall.’

19

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

As we set off, we met Paolo coming back up the track in the snowcat with the snowplough attachment, and he stopped to speak to us.

‘I’ve just finished clearing – well, not completely clearing but compressing – the track down to San Giorgio and I’ve spoken to the Carabinieri. They’re sending a forensic team now to examine Bartolomeo’s body and to take it away.’ He gave Valentina a sympathetic look. ‘They’ll take good care of him until his body can be released to the undertakers.’

She nodded her head in comprehension and dropped her eyes, apparently in the prey of powerful emotions. My suspicions that she might have been involved in her father’s death had never been terribly serious, and I was increasingly convinced that she had had nothing to do with it. The same couldn’t be said for her brother, however, and I knew that both of them would still have to remain on my list of possible suspects for now.

Paolo queried where we were going and, when I told him it was to the mine, he gave me a little smile. ‘When I was speaking to Luigi, he told me that they’ve located the two Americans and pulled them in for questioning. They’re being grilled aswe speak. It’ll be interesting to see what they have to say for themselves.’

‘What about the property developer?’

‘The Carabinieri in Turin are speaking to him this afternoon. He lives down there.’

Paolo had done a good job of clearing the worst of the snow from the main track, and it was only a couple of inches deep and pretty well compacted as he had said. I reckoned my van would just about have coped with it, but Ingrid’s Ferrari still wouldn’t have stood a chance. On foot, it took us barely a quarter of an hour to walk down to the turn-off for the mine. At first, Valentina and I walked in silence. I could imagine the thoughts going through her head at the news that her father’s body was going to be taken away, so I gave her a few minutes before trying to engage her in conversation. It took a bit of time, but I gradually managed to get her talking about her pet subject, and before long, she was sounding a bit more lively.

The mine was probably no more than a couple of hundred yards from the turn-off, but it took us almost as long to get there as it had taken to get all the way down from the villa. The snow was at least a foot deep, considerably deeper in places where it had drifted, and it was hard to keep our footing. We were right at the upper extremity of the treeline here, and the track led us through the last few rows of hardy pine trees, their branches bowed down beneath the weight of snow on them. It was a beautiful Christmassy scene, but that didn’t make it any easier to walk through. Oscar, on the other hand, was clearly in his element, plunging into the deep drifts until only the tip of his tail was visible – wagging furiously – having loads of fun.

As we approached the imposing grey cliffs of the valley wall, Valentina pointed out a dark shadow at their base. ‘That’s the mine entrance there. It’s actually inside a natural cave opening, and that’s why you’d hardly think there was a mine here at all,but a hundred years ago, this place would have been humming. Contemporary records indicate that almost a hundred men worked here at the mine’s peak.’

This was hard to believe today, but as we trudged up the slope towards the cave entrance, I began to see traces of its former glory. Almost completely covered by a thick coating of snow was a squat stone building from which a rusty cable emerged, heading off down the valley, strung between equally rusty pylons. Valentina told me that this had been used to transport the iron ore down to the floor of the main valley almost a thousand metres below us. Over to the left were lines of pyramid-shaped, snow-covered mounds of waste rubble that had been formed as the mine shafts had been excavated, and I started to make out man-made walls inside the gaping cave entrance.

We were about to go inside when my phone started ringing. It was none other than Inspector Paul Wilson from Scotland Yard.

‘Hi, Paul. Good of you to get back to me so close to Christmas. I was wondering whether you would be on duty or not.’

‘Hi, Dan. Of course I’m on duty; it seems like I never stop being on duty.’ I heard him groan. ‘Well, that’s not strictly true; I’m on duty all day today and tomorrow, but then I get four days off. Anyway, the good news is that the villains all appear to be on holiday at the moment, so I’ve already had time to look into that man you contacted me about.’ I heard a rustling sound and I could visualise him scanning his faithful notebook. ‘William Andrew Rogers, age thirty-one, born in Basingstoke, studied at Cambridge University before working for eight years for the member of parliament for the constituency of South Surrey until he left under something of a cloud in December of last year.’