This state of affairs, it turned out, was a longstanding and stable one. Everyone in the village knew about it — Lamberto left his car parked right in front of the house when he came visiting — but it was a private matter and none of them had dreamt of mentioning it to the police. Nor had Lamberto Latini. The truth had only come out when Pinot Mandola himself had called Enrico Pascal, the local maresciallo dei Carabinieri, and told him that Latini could not possibly have committed the murder since he was sleeping with the caller’s wife at the hour in question.
If truth were told, Pascal was considerably more embarrassed than the complaisant husband himself at having to probe, as delicately as possible, the reasons for this unusual arrangement. Mandola himself was quite straightforward about it. As a result of a glandular illness, he had become impotent. Since he was unfortunately unable to provide for the sexual needs of his wife, his marital duty was clearly to find someone who could.
‘I immediately thought of Lamberto. He had long been a close friend to both of us, and I’d always had the idea that he admired Nina. And since his wife’s death, he had been running around all over the place having affairs and visiting whores and neglecting the restaurant. I felt it was time for him to settle down.’ With two such intimate witnesses, to say nothing of various villagers who came forward, now that the truth was in the public domain, to attest to having seen Latini’s Lancia in front of the Mandola house until after eight that morning, the Carabinieri had no choice but to release the restaurateur.
‘And so the mystery of Beppe Gallizio’s tragic death returns to haunt a community already traumatized by the horror which so recently afflicted the Vincenzo family,’ the article concluded. ‘Are the two connected in some way? “How can they be?” people are saying. But, in their hearts, they are thinking, “How can they not be?”’
Zen’s reading was interrupted by the barman, who alerted him to the arrival of the bus. Ten minutes later, it dropped him before a large pair of wrought-iron gates on an isolated stretch of road outside the village. A deeply rutted driveway of packed gravel curved down a gentle slope between matching sets of poplars as rigidly erect as uniformed guards. To either side, the land flowed away in gentle curves and hillocks, the contours defined as though on a map by serried rows of vines covered in burnt-ochre foliage.
As Zen strode along the drive, the house gradually came into view. It was set a little way down the hillside, so that the first thing visible was the roof. Roofs, rather: a quilt of russet tiles, each section covering a separate portion of the house, the rows all running slightly out of alignment with their neighbours. Stubby brick chimneys covered over with arched spires like miniature bell towers punctuated this mosaic.
It soon became evident that the house itself was as complex and various as its roofs, not so much a single entity as a conglomerate of buildings of various size, shape and antiquity, huddled together along three sides of a large courtyard with a covered well at its centre. Some of the walls were open, consisting only of rows of large arches; others had a few ranks of shuttered windows; still others were blank.
So far all had been silent, apart from the growl of a distant tractor, but when Zen approached the front door, a dog started to howl, alerted by some noise or scent. Judging by its appearance, this entrance had been disused for some time, so he followed the driveway around the outbuildings and into the courtyard. The dog’s yelps grew louder and more frantic. A blue farm-cart and a green Volvo estate stood side by side near the inner door, which was opened by a young man holding a shotgun in his right hand.
In his late twenties, he was impeccably dressed in a brown and russet check suit with an English look but an unmistakably Italian cut, a triangle of brown kerchief protruding from his breast pocket echoing the bronze-and-black banded silk tie. A dark mustard V-necked pullover and button-down collared shirt in the subtlest of light blues and a pair of highly polished Oxfords completed the ensemble. His straight black hair, slightly receding from the temples and worn relatively long at the back, was perfectly waved and formed. A pair of wide-rimmed spectacles gave character to a pleasant, open, boyish face.
‘Good morning,’ he said in a firm, cultivated tone.
Unpleasantly aware of the shotgun — which wasn’t exactly pointed at him, but wasn’t exactly not either — Aurelio Zen showed his police identification and introduced himself above the frantic barking of the still invisible dog. The young man nodded and set the gun down.
‘Shut up!’ he yelled loudly.
The dog abruptly fell silent.
‘I apologize for the intrusion,’ Zen remarked. ‘If I’d known there was anyone here, I would have phoned first.’
‘Well, someone’s been at work on your behalf,’ the man replied. ‘There have been two calls for you so far this morning.’
Zen looked at him in utter astonishment.
‘That’s impossible! No one knew I was coming here. I didn’t even know myself until a few hours ago.’
‘Neither did I, for that matter. I was released at seven o’clock this morning.’
‘Released?’
The man stared at him defiantly.
‘From prison. I am Manlio Vincenzo. What can I do for you, dottore? My recent experiences have not been such as to endear me to representatives of the law, but I am aware of my duties as a citizen, and still more of the precarious nature of my present position. I repeat, what can I do for you?’
Zen gave an almost embarrassed laugh.
‘I’m not sure, to be perfectly honest. I suppose I wanted to take a look at the scene of the crime. To see for myself, I mean, to get the feel of the…’ Manlio Vincenzo nodded.
‘I quite understand. What we in the wine business call the gout de terroir. Well, you’re in luck. Whatever else we may lack here in the Langhe, we have any amount of that. Let me get my boots on.’
He went back inside, taking the shotgun with him. Zen turned to face the sunlight streaming into the courtyard. Protected from the slight breeze, to say nothing of the noise of traffic on the road above, it felt incredibly warm and quiet, a haven of sanity in a harsh world. It cost Zen a distinct effort to remind himself that its late owner had walked out of here to an atrocious death, and that as yet no one knew why. When Manlio Vincenzo reappeared, clad in a pair of green rubber boots and a coat, he seemed to have been reading Zen’s thoughts.
‘My father would have gone this way the morning he died,’ he said, leading Zen around the far side of the house.
‘The night he died, you mean.’
Manlio shook his head.
‘No, dottore. He spent his last night in bed. My father snored very loudly. It was not the least of the many things which my poor mother had to put up with from him. I got up in the night to fetch a glass of water, and the whole upstairs of the house was vibrating from that unmistakable stertorous rasping. It was always particularly bad when he’d been drinking heavily.’
Zen frowned.
‘There was nothing about this in the reports I read.’
‘Of course not,’ Manlio snapped bitterly. ‘It’s only my unsupported evidence, and I was already under arrest. Why spoil a perfectly good case by dragging in the truth?’
‘What time was it when you heard him?’
‘About half-past three. I’ve been waking around then ever since I got back from abroad. Or rather I used to. In prison I slept like the dead, as they say.’
They had emerged into the open, with an extensive view of a series of hummock-like hills covered in vines, each surmounted by a clump of low, solid, brick buildings similar to the one behind them. In the washed-out blue sky, patches of cloud massed like foam on water.
‘Rosa, your housekeeper, told the Carabinieri that Aldo left the house after returning from the village festa, and that you followed him,’ Zen remarked.
‘Quite right. Rosa preferred to stay here and watch the shopping channel. It’s her one pleasure in life, although she never orders anything. Anyway, I left the festivities early, as you no doubt know, following a much-publicized quarrel with my father. When he got back, I tried to talk it through with him. He walked out and I followed. Rosa, who was clearly embarrassed by the whole scene, went off to bed. She was asleep when I returned.’
‘Why did your father go out at that time of night in the first place?’
‘There was a phone call shortly after he got home. It may have had something to do with that, but when I asked him where he was going, he just said he wanted to clear his head. He’d had quite a lot to drink at the festa. I told him that I’d come too, and he shouted that he’d had quite enough of me for one evening. But I tagged along anyway. I didn’t like the idea of him going to bed in that frame of mind. Besides, he’d got the whole thing wrong, and I wanted to talk the thing through.’
The lines of heavy-fruited vines stretched away before them across the curve of the hillside. Manlio Vincenzo turned off between two rows and started to walk downhill.
‘This is the way we came,’ he said. ‘My father a pace or two ahead, me following at his heels like a dog.’
‘How can you be sure it was this row of vines? It was pitch dark and you admit you were drunk…’
Vincenzo turned to him.
‘ Dottore, you could blindfold me and take me to any point on our property and I would know exactly where I was, to the nearest metre. Believe me, this was the way we came.’
They walked on in silence for some time.
‘What was the quarrel between you and your father about?’ asked Zen eventually.
‘There were two causes. The one which has fascinated the press and public, needless to say, is that he had opened and read a private letter addressed to me by a friend, had misunderstood the contents and then used them to abuse me in public. But that was relatively superficial. The real reason for his animus lay much deeper. I’m afraid it will seem quite incomprehensible, if not absurd, to an outsider.’
Zen shrugged.
‘Tell me anyway. That’s why I’m here.’