‘Tell me why you said that! Tell me why! Why?’
The great front door closed, and silence returned. Bordelli was bathed in sweat, but at last he was free.
‘The devil,’ he said to himself. He would have given his right hand for a cigarette. It was possible that mother and daughter had heard only mating cats and sputtering cars, but still they had managed to give the villa an even stranger air.
He was about to go back into the garden when a white Fiat 500 pulled up. Stepping out of the car was a small, thin man of about sixty with a wrinkly mouth and a tiny skull that narrowed vaguely at the temples. He approached Bordelli with a hesitant step. Behind his enormous eyeglasses he wore a pained expression.
‘I’m looking for Inspector Bordelli,’ he said.
‘I am he.’
‘I am Dr Bacci, Signora Pedretti’s personal physician.’
They shook hands.
‘Poor woman. I still can’t believe it,’ said Dr Bacci, truly saddened. They walked through the garden and into the villa. Bordelli stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you some questions about your patient,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, but I would like to see her first.’
‘By all means. She’s upstairs. I’ll wait for you in that room over there,’ Bordelli said, pointing to one of the sitting rooms. The doctor trudged up the stairs, head bobbing to one side. He returned a few minutes later and rejoined Bordelli. Stopping in the middle of the room, he stood completely still and stared into space. Bordelli had made himself comfortable on a sofa that smelled strongly of old velvet.
‘Tell me, Dr Bacci, we know that the signora suffered from asthma … but to what degree?’
Bacci turned round, in a daze.
‘What was that?’
‘I was asking whether your patient’s asthma was serious, or if, perhaps-’
‘Ah, yes, of course. She suffered from tissual asthmatic allergy, a rather serious form of it, I should say.’
‘Could it prove fatal?’
The doctor began to wander slowly about the room, hands at his sides, eyes darting from painting to painting. There was great sadness in his voice.
‘The signora was allergic to many types of pollen. She sometimes had violent attacks, but never anything life-threatening.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
Bacci turned to face the inspector. He looked bewildered.
‘To tell you the truth, there was one plant that could be very dangerous,’ he said. Bordelli waited to hear which plant. The doctor began to move again and stopped in front of the portrait of a judge dressed in ermine, hunching his shoulders round his head.
‘Ilex paraguariensis,’ he continued, ‘commonly called mate, a typically tropical plant. Its pollen would have been deadly to Signora Pedretti.’
Bordelli coughed into his fist.
‘You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?’ he asked.
‘I don’t smoke.’
‘So much the better. Tell me, Doctor, how did Signora Pedretti ever find out?’
‘Find what out?’
‘That she was allergic to that tropical pollen.’
The doctor took his eyes off the painting and returned to Bordelli. He said that from a very young age the signora had always travelled a great deal. A few years earlier, during a stay in Colombia, she had experienced a very serious attack and had to be rushed to hospital.
‘They snatched her from the jaws of death. It was almost a miracle.’
The Colombian doctors discovered that the flowering mate had triggered the attack. The signora spent several days in hospital and recovered quite nicely in spite of everything. But the terrible experience had changed her, and after her return she hardly ever went out of the house any more.
‘I used to say to her: Signora, you mustn’t live like a recluse. Colombia is on the other side of the world. That plant doesn’t grow here.’
‘So, in short, that plant was the only thing that might trigger a fatal attack.’
Dr Bacci removed his spectacles, which were as thick as glass-bottoms, and pressed his eyeballs hard with his fingers. He resumed walking along the walls of the room.
The inspector stretched his legs, which had grown numb.
‘As far as I know, yes, it was the only thing.’
‘And what can you tell me about Asthmaben?’ Bordelli asked.
‘The signora always kept a bottle within reach. Luckily she responded well to it. Twenty drops, and in a matter of seconds, she could breathe again. That doesn’t happen with everyone, I can assure you.’
‘And what would happen if she didn’t take it?’ asked Bordelli.
‘It’s hard to say. Probably in normal cases she would have a few minutes of crisis, but I really don’t think she would die.’
‘With that tropical plant, on the other hand-’
‘With mate it’s almost certain that, without Asthmaben, she would die within minutes, especially after her previous crisis in Colombia.’
‘And with Asthmaben?’
‘Well, I have no proof, obviously. But I’m fairly convinced that with a double dose she would have been all right.’
The inspector sighed by way of conclusion.
‘So, if I’ve understood correctly, seeing that there was a bottle of Asthmaben on her bedside table, we can rule out that she was killed by an asthma attack. Is that right?’
‘I can’t swear to it, of course, since asthma is a treacherous disease and can cause death by heart failure. The only thing we know for certain is that we are in God’s hands.’