By now he fed his pets morning and evening, and they knew him well enough to venture up on to the sofa where he sat, even to the extent of perching on his legs and shoulders. He allowed them to scamper inquisitively about, squinting up at him and scenting the air, their whiskers keenly quivering, until he heard a car draw near and then pull up outside. With a brisk slap of his palms, he dismissed his familiars, stuffed the money which the truffles had brought him under the cushions of the sofa, and went to investigate.
The vehicle parked outside turned out to be a Carabinieri jeep. Out of it, squeezed into his uniform like a sausage in its casing, stepped Enrico Pascal.
‘ Marescia,’ said Minot.
Pascal winced.
‘My piles are killing me,’ he announced with an air of satisfaction, if not pride.
‘You spend too much time sitting at a desk!’ Minot returned. ‘Look at me. I’m out and about all day and half the night, and the old sphincter’s still as tight as a drum.’
Pascal shook his head.
‘The doctor says it runs in the family. Can I come in?’
Minot waved his hand carelessly. Enrico Pascal walked past him and stopped, surveying the floor in the room within.
‘Looks like you’ve got rats,’ he remarked, studying the droppings scattered about.
‘Eh, it’s hard to keep them out! Care for a glass of something?’
The maresciallo grimaced.
‘Maybe a splash, just to keep my edge.’
Minot nodded. The customs of the country dictated the consumption of a series of glasses of wine throughout the day, ‘just to keep an edge’. One was never drunk, it went without saying, but never entirely sober either.
With his curiously feminine gait, Minot stepped over to the ancient refrigerator in the corner and pulled out an unlabelled bottle of the white wine named Favorita, a grape native to the area since the dawn of time and still cultivated by a few producers for private consumption.
‘Even worse than mine,’ commented Enrico Pascal, surveying the cluttered interior of the fridge. ‘I always assumed the wife was doing it on purpose, to make me lose weight. “You could make a fortune selling this as a miracle diet,” I told her. “One look and your appetite disappears for hours.” What’s this, then?’
He pointed to a glass jar filled with some dark red liquid in which bits of meat were floating.
‘Hare,’ Minot replied, handing Pascal his wine. ‘Shot it just the other day. Do you like hare?’
Pascal did not reply. He tossed off his wine and returned to the centre of the room, where he stood looking around in a lordly way. Minot resumed his seat on the sofa. There was a silence which persisted for some time.
‘Saturday morning about six…’ Pascal began at length, and then broke off.
‘Yes?’
Enrico Pascal sighed deeply.
‘Where were you?’
Minot reflected a moment.
‘Out,’ he replied.
‘Out where?’
‘After truffles.’
With another wince, the maresciallo sank into a chair to Minot’s right, his back to the bleary light from the one window.
‘Yes, but where?’
Minot smiled cunningly.
‘Ah, you can’t expect me to answer that!’
‘I’m investigating the death of Beppe Gallizio. I expect full cooperation from every member of the public.’
The two men exchanged a glance.
‘It was over Neviglie way,’ Minot replied. ‘A likely looking spot I noticed a couple of weeks ago on the way back from making a delivery.’
Pascal considered this for a moment.
‘But Beppe had taken Anna out that night,’ he said. ‘And you don’t own a hound of your own, Minot.’
Instead of answering, Minot got up and went out to the kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of wine.
‘What’s all this about?’ he demanded, returning to the other room.
Enrico Pascal shifted painfully from one buttock to the other.
‘At first, you see, we assumed that Beppe had killed himself,’ he announced discursively. ‘We may still come to that conclusion in the end. But in the meantime there are a few things which are bothering us.’
Minot took a swig of wine, leaning against the mantelpiece above the cold grate.
‘What sort of things?’
‘Well, there’s the gun, for instance. It’s Beppe’s all right, it was lying there beside the body and the only fingerprints on it are his. But Anna had been there, too, and Beppe had his mattock and his torch and all his truffle-hunting equipment with him. Why bother with that, if he’d meant to kill himself? And why bring his shotgun if not?’
He sighed.
‘And then the technical people have been on to me with some problems they’ve been having.’
‘Like what?’
‘I won’t bore you with the details. For that matter, I don’t really understand them myself. But when you fire a shotgun, it discharges nitrate on to your sleeve and hand. Now there were traces of nitrate on Beppe’s body and clothing, but they were apparently too weak and old to have been done that day. There was also something about the “angle of scatter”, or some such thing. They say that for the pellets which hit Beppe to have spread out the way they did, the end of the barrel must have been at least half a metre away, which would have been too far for him to reach the trigger.’
Minot knocked back his wine.
‘But what has this to do with me?’