‘Aldo Vincenzo’s wife.’
‘But why is her photograph here?’
Before Minot could answer, the door opened and a teenage girl with an armful of schoolbooks walked in. She stared at both the men.
‘What are you doing here?’
Aurelio Zen inclined his head slightly.
‘We met at the market in Alba at the weekend. I’m a police officer.’
‘Where’s my father?’ demanded Lisa Faigano. ‘What’s happened?’
‘I’m afraid that your father and uncle have had to go into Alba to answer some routine questions.’
The girl dropped her books on the table.
‘And what about you, Minot?’ she demanded, seemingly more annoyed by his presence than that of the policeman.
‘I was hoping to see Gianni and Maurizio. No one told me they’d been arrested.’
‘They haven’t,’ put in Zen quickly. ‘We’re just taking statements from a number of people, including them. There’s nothing to worry about.’
Minot coughed.
‘Well, I’ll try again later.’
He sidled off to the door as if expecting to be stopped at any moment. But there was no challenge, and a moment later his truck roared away.
Left alone together, Lisa Faigano and Aurelio Zen surveyed each other warily.
‘Would you like a coffee?’ the girl said at last, as though grasping a little desperately at the rituals of hospitality.
‘Thank you.’
Zen had no interest in the coffee, but it would give him a pretext to stay longer without producing his search warrant. Lisa Faigano’s unexpected appearance had thrown him off-balance. Once Gianni and Maurizio were safely in custody, Zen had descended on the house and dismissed the patrolman on guard and his driver, telling them to return in an hour. He had wanted to be alone with the house, free to prowl and pry at will, to let the silence seep into his soul and reveal its secrets.
The arrival of Minot and then the girl had put an end to all that, and while he could have seen the former off the premises easily enough, he could hardly throw Lisa Faigano out of her own home. Nor did a bureaucratic approach seem likely to be fruitful. The brutally official questions he could so easily have posed sounded, as he rehearsed them in his mind, off-key and inappropriate. If he was to get anything out of her, Lisa had somehow to be managed. But how?
‘You’re the one they sent up from Rome about what happened to Vincenzo,’ the girl remarked as she filled the coffee machine.
‘That’s right, signorina.’
‘What’s that got to do with my father and uncle?’
Zen hesitated. It was hard to know who he had to deal with. The girl was at a stage where she could look thirteen one moment and thirty the next. Untuned features and awkward gestures suggested the former, but her brown eyes were shrewd and wary and did not give the impression of missing very much.
‘Nothing, so far as we know. But there appears to be a link to another crime which occurred recently, to which they may be material witnesses. Naturally we need to question them, if only to eliminate this possibility, and they have therefore been invited to headquarters to make their depositions. I’m glad to say that they were happy to comply.’
This was a lie. According to the officers who had carried out Zen’s orders, the Faigano brothers had been anything but happy at being hauled off at gunpoint in armoured vans emblazoned POLIZIA, the whole operation being conducted under the malicious scrutiny of their neighbours. They were particularly unhappy at losing a day’s work at a time when the weather finally seemed to be firming up for the vintage. But their happiness was not Zen’s concern.
‘When will they be back?’ Lisa asked, serving Zen his coffee.
He gave a helpless half-shrug.
‘That depends.’
‘So what am I supposed to do?’
‘About what?’
‘About dinner, of course! There’s hell to pay if it isn’t on the table on the stroke of seven, but if they’re not back by then…’
Zen coughed.
‘I think you can take it that they won’t be home to dinner, signorina.’
‘Not tonight at all, you mean?’
‘Are you worried about being alone?’
She laughed.
‘On the contrary! I can finally get through an entire game with no fear of being interrupted.’
Zen stared at her.
‘I play chess with this friend, you see,’ Lisa told him, sweeping a stray strand of hair off her face with one finger. ‘But either Dad or Gianni usually needs to use the phone at some point, and then everything’s ruined.’
Zen sipped his coffee and tried to look interested.
‘Perhaps you could go over to your friend’s house?’
Another laugh.
‘Hardly! He lives in Lima.’
Zen looked at her, smiling determinedly.
‘Lima,’ he repeated.
‘In Peru. Gianni got a computer last year to keep track of the accounts, and then when Aunt Chiara died she left me some money and I arranged for an Internet connection. But there’s still only one phone, so when they need to call someone, I have to go off-line.’
Zen nodded in a kindly, avuncular manner. The poor girl was clearly living in a fantasy world, imagining that she was playing chess on the telephone with Peruvians! Living all alone in this cold, comfortless house with a pair of grumpy, demanding geriatrics must have pushed her over the edge.
‘The last time I had an evening free was when Dad and Gianni went to the Festa della Vendemmia,’ the girl burbled on, her face alive with genuine enthusiasm for the first time. ‘It looked like we would finally get a chance to play a whole game without interruptions. I’d just tricked Tomas into a knight sacrifice which left him in a very weak position, when in walks Gianni and tells me to get off the line! Result, Tomas got twenty-four hours to analyse the situation and look up his reference books, and he came back and beat me.’