10

13 November 1999
Talimona
North Italy

 

 

Michael was surprised to find a number of police cars parked in front of Ignazio’s house. Carabinieri in their dark uniforms and men in plain clothes were busy around the house and a further group was milling about over in the small vineyard that hugged the side of the cliff to the right of the property.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked a policeman through the window of his car.

‘And you are, signore?’ the policeman answered the question with another and quite aggressively. Without waiting for a response from Michael, he followed with a curt, ‘Please get out of the car.’

‘My name is Michael Keats; I’m a journalist, from the London Evening Post.’ He closed the car door. ‘I’m writing about the Ronconi kidnapping for my paper and interviewed Ignazio Mazzini, the owner of this farm, a few days ago. I’ve come to ask him a few more questions. Where is he?’ he added more forcefully, looking around at all the activity. ‘What exactly is going on?’

‘I am afraid, signor Keats, that there’s been an accident. Please come with me. My boss will want to speak to you.’

The policeman led Michael up the steep incline towards the vineyard.

The explosion of growth that had made the branches of the vines heavy with dusty grapes had been months ago and the vines now resembled gnarled, brown sticks that had been stuck into the earth as if they were part of some kind of modernist artistic installation. It was a small but tidy vineyard of perhaps a few hundred vines and had been planted on a sloping south-facing plateau that clung to the side of the mountain. Still, it had furnished Ignazio and his antecedents with enough wine for their own consumption for many generations.

Michael was led over to the edge of the cliff where a man in a dark suit, a detective, no doubt, was in discussion with a colleague. In the distance, several hundred feet below where Michael stood, a hydrofoil tore a silver strip out of the surface of the lake, separating the water between Menaggio and Verdanno.

The policeman who had brought Michael up interrupted the conversation, nodding towards Michael as he spoke to him.

‘It’s a steep climb, eh, signore?’ said the second policeman, turning to face Michael, putting one hand on his hip and wiping the sweat off his forehead with the other.

‘Indeed it is,’ replied Michael.

‘I am Ispettore Coloni. My colleague tells me you are English, signore? A long way from home, eh? What brings you here?’

Michael repeated the explanation he had given a few minutes ago and asked once more what was going on.

‘Ah, you are a journalist, signore. Well, you will certainly have this story before anyone else, I think. I am very sorry to have to inform you that it will not be possible for you to ask signor Ignazio Mazzini any more questions. You see, signor Keats, his body was found down there on the Beldoro road earlier this morning.’ He gestured in the direction of the road some three hundred feet below. ‘It would appear that he fell, or possibly jumped – who knows? – from where we are standing, to his death. A truck driver found him in the middle of the road. His skull was fractured and his neck was broken. Regrettably, there was nothing that could be done for him. So, if you spoke to him recently, you may well have been one of the last people to see Ignazio Mazzini alive, signor Keats.’ Michael’s surname sounded odd in Coloni’s mouth, as if he were chewing something that was too large to swallow. He came up to stand beside Michael at the side of the cliff and looked down, shaking his head.

‘What would drive a man to do such a thing? Eh? If, indeed, he did jump, that is. Such a man would have to be pretty desperate, don’t you think?’

‘Desperate indeed. I’m not the greatest judge of human nature, Ispettore, but I would never have described Ignazio Mazzini as a desperate man, and certainly not as a man who would throw himself off the side of a mountain. Not from my discussion with him. He was an unhappy man, I will admit, but he was consumed with a desire to revenge himself on that shopkeeper who had been having an affair with his wife. That’s the kind of anger that gives a man a reason to live, not to die.’

‘Ah, you may well be right, signore, and don’t worry, we shall certainly be talking to Bonfadini, the shopkeeper. But, nevertheless, I think I agree with you – it somehow doesn’t feel right – a man who has lived the life that he has lived, throwing himself off a cliff, committing suicide. He would have seen that as an act of the purest self-indulgence. These people up here in the mountains, you know–’ he swept a hand around the circle of jagged-topped mountains that bordered the lake, ‘they live like animals. Survival is all. It always has been. Up here they don’t understand the kind of angst and stress that drives those poor bastards in Milano and Roma to take their own lives because a share price has dropped a couple of points. Sure, they have their problems, but …’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I, too, must admit that I find it hard to accept that he would have killed himself, but …’ he shrugged his shoulders and stared off into the distance, ‘that is for the judge to decide. Anyway, we are jumping to conclusions. It may all have been a terrible accident. Perhaps he was stepping back to admire his work in the vineyard and suddenly found his foot reaching out into space. Oh, I know, it seems unlikely, but in my line of work we do have to consider every possibility. In fact, nothing can be ruled out until we are certain the evidence is overwhelmingly against it happening. However, signor Keats, I apologise. I am wasting your time and mine with my idle speculation. We shall, of course, require a statement from you. Oh, and we will also need to know where you were yesterday and early this morning. Purely routine, you understand. Why not go down to Beldoro now and we can get it out of the way? Please, would you be kind enough to wait while I find an officer to accompany you to the police station?’ He bustled off towards a group of policemen who were examining the earth with great attention.

As he waited, Michael gingerly approached the edge of the cliff. He had never been very good with heights and the drop was sheer, without even an outcrop to break a fall. Down below, the asphalt strip of the road stretched like a shoelace in the direction of Beldoro one way and towards Milan the other.

Had Ignazio Mazzini really taken his own life? Had he taken a break from his pruning and stepped to the edge to admire the view, the view to which he had awakened every morning? Had he, breathing in the enormity of it all and realising the smallness of his own existence, limited by the land he worked and the peninsula on which he lived, stepped closer to the edge and leaning over, seen the nothingness below, the yawning empty space? Had he felt a desire for that space as he had never felt a desire for anything before? Had he looked back behind him and seen the crumbling walls of his own home, sensed the empty rooms within it, the shifting of a dirty dish in a sink, the scratching of a rat beneath the floorboards, the silence of a spider at the centre of its web?

Had he then taken a step into that space he desired more than anything, a step into that mirror of himself, a smile creasing the weathered lines around his eyes?

Michael closed his eyes, standing at the edge of the cliff, and said a silent prayer for a small life that had perhaps finally given up the unequal struggle. He then took one final look at the beautiful view that had been Ignazio Mazzini’s last and turned away.

 

‘It was his Lordship’s doing. Sometimes he has his uses, you know.’ Harry Jones’s guttural, smoke-damaged laugh gurgled down the telephone line from London.

Michael had returned to his hotel room after giving his account of his conversation with Ignazio to a policeman in the little police station in Beldoro. As he left he had been asked not to stray too far from the area just in case they needed some more information from him. ‘Purely routine’, of course, but he had no doubt that there were suspicions about him. It made him realise that it was now even more impossible for him to say anything about Claudio Scatti’s body rotting away in that chalet high above the valley.

On returning to the hotel, the receptionist/decorator gave him a fax from Bruno in Milan saying that, not knowing where Michael was staying, Harry had called his newspaper and asked for Michael to be told that he wanted to speak to him. And so Michael was seated by the window of his room, watching dark clouds threaten the mountain tops, laughing with Harry on the phone, happy to hear his Welsh accent. He was even more delighted to hear that the Post’s aristocratic owner had used his connections to arrange an interview with Luigi Ronconi. It would be the first interview with the old man since the kidnapping and it was to be with an English paper.

‘He bloody hates the Italian press, apparently, even though he’s owned most of it over the years. So, he is perfectly happy to well and truly piss them off by giving the story to a foreign paper,’ Harry gleefully added, before giving Michael details of who to contact to arrange the interview.

‘Before I go – I hope you don’t mind me asking – how is everything else, Michael? Have you found anything out? About Rosa, I mean.’

‘I’m no further forward, to be honest, Harry. I’m not really sure what to do next.’

‘How about coming back and getting on with your life, boyo? I’ve got a job here as Deputy News Editor that has your name on it, should you want it.’

‘Give me some more time. I’m not quite ready, but if I haven’t found out any more soon, I’m going to pack it in and get back to reality. I promise.’

‘Good lad. Now must dash. Mustn’t keep his Lordship waiting. You take care now, and let me know what happens with Ronconi. He’s supposed to be a difficult old bugger from what I hear.’

‘Bye, Harry. I’ll let you know.’

Michael put the phone down. He had not told Harry about Claudio Scatti, had not voiced his suspicions. It was hard to know why not. He still had not got it right in his head and wanted to be sure of it before sharing it with anyone. He was like that.

He ran a bath, wondering idly if he was, indeed, as he had said to Harry, ready to get back to reality. What was reality, anyway? Anything that was real had evaporated, had fallen between his fingers like sand as soon as he had discovered that Rosa had been dishonest with him. Even if he did return to reality, it would have to be a different version and perhaps that meant that he, too, would have to become a different version of himself.

 

It had turned unseasonably warm and even quite muggy as the morning had lengthened towards eleven, the time of Michael’s appointment at the Palazzo Ronconi, and he had been happy to walk the couple of miles from Beldoro to the gates of the palazzo. However, he thought longingly of his car’s air conditioning as he walked slowly up the steep driveway with sweat dampening his hair. The gate had swung open electronically for him after he had spoken his name into the grill on the gate-post and now the full glory of the palazzo began to appear in front of him from amidst the trees that screened it from curious eyes on the road that ran past it or from the town below.

Or, at least, its full lack of glory. He was almost disappointed by the simplicity of the building, a simplicity that belied the term ‘palazzo’. It was very large, however, a square, ochre-coloured building with a red tile roof. It was not, in fact, very old, Michael had read this morning. It had been built by an Italian-A merican millionaire philanthropist in the fifties to house a college in which young, affluent Americans could study Italian culture. Luigi Ronconi had acquired the building in the seventies when he had decided to return to the area of his youth after spending many years with Rome as his home as well as the centre of his business activities.

Luigi Ronconi was an enigmatic figure, if ever there was one. A man who, if he could be bothered, could count his fortune in hundreds of billions of lire, a fortune earned from his many industrial plants around Italy and the world; a man who had, many times since the war, been rumoured to be one of the power-brokers in Italian politics, moving politicians around like pieces on a chess board to create coalition governments; a man who, at one time, had controlled, through his network of companies, huge swathes of the Italian media and, consequently, influenced the opinions and thoughts of his fellow countrymen.

And yet, this was a man about whom not much was really known, as Michael had discovered from the fax that he had been sent by the Post this morning. Three pages to sum up one of the most influential European lives of the second half of the twentieth century.

He was born in the tiny Valtellina village of Dulcino in 1916; he became a car mechanic before the war; he distinguished himself in the partisan movement towards the war’s end; then little is known until 1950, when he appeared from nowhere to buy a small factory near Naples. The rest is history, really. Ronconi cashed in on the economic boom of the mid to late fifties, supplying engine parts to the major car companies from a network of factories across the country. He became an industrial puppet-master, a genius at making money and now he had one of the largest private fortunes in all of Italy and was, in fact, one of the richest men in Europe. Yet, he had never been interviewed on television and few photographs of him existed. Those that did were from the sixties when, for a few short years, he could be spied hobnobbing with the beautiful people of Europe. This was mainly because in the early nineteen-sixties, he fell in love with and married a Swedish model – Agnetha Dorland. The marriage, however, had not lasted longer than the time it had taken to have a child – Teresa, the victim thirty-five years later, of the Beldoro kidnapping.

Michael had read how peerless Ronconi’s record in the war had been. As ‘Il Falcone’, he had been a ruthless scourge of the German garrison in the Valtellina, charismatic and inspirational leader of what turned out to be a doomed group in countless operations, but his wife and young child had been taken by the Germans as a reprisal and he had left the valley and had spent the next few years fighting with other partisans before disappearing from view, presumably seeking the fortune that eventually was to be his.

While he had been earning his fortune, he was also investigating the fate of his son, Antonio, and, indeed, Antonio was miraculously found, living with a German family just a couple of years after the war. He returned to live with his father and grow up to learn the family business. It was Antonio Ronconi – half-brother to Teresa and twice as old as her – that Michael had to meet with first.

The door was opened as he approached and he was welcomed by a young woman, dressed for business in a blue, two-piece Chanel suit. She spoke to him in English.

‘Good morning, Mister Keats.’ Her accent had an American inflection to it, as if she had been left behind by the college that used to occupy this building. ‘How nice to meet you.’ She reached out her hand. ‘I am Anna Trabucchi? Signor Antonio’s personal assistant?’ She spoke in questions, betraying her American education. ‘Signor Antonio apologises. He is just completing an important telephone call and will be down directly? May I get you something, a coffee or perhaps some water …?’ As she said this, she was ushering him into an office that was located to the right of the main door. As he entered it he took stock of the luxurious decor of the entrance hall. Lush, floral wallpaper that looked almost too heavy to stay on the walls; large gilt-framed oil paintings depicting classical scenes; a long, sweeping, red carpeted staircase leading to the upper floor; a sparkling chandelier with tears of crystal dripping from it. The road that Luigi Ronconi had taken to this from a small village in the Valtellina represented something of a miracle.

‘Water would be great, thank you. It’s warm out there,’ replied Michael, taking in the room he had entered – booklined walls, a seriously hefty and inordinately tidy desk in front of the large French windows, which opened onto a beautiful vista down through the trees to the ever-present lake, gleaming in the midday sun.

She was not for small talk, this woman. ‘I’ll have someone bring it?’ she said, bustling out of the room in search of someone to bring his water.

A few minutes later she returned, accompanied by a woman carrying a tray on which were three decanters of different flavoured juice, a bottle each of sparkling and still water and a couple of glasses. The woman placed it on the table under the bustling direction of Anna Trabucchi, who then proceeded to pour a glass for Michael. He had just taken a long, refreshing draught of the ice-cold water, when the figure of a large man appeared in the doorway.

Antonio Ronconi was, as the magazines were always at pains to point out, a handsome man. He was tall, powerfully built and his hair was very dark and surprisingly long for a man of his age – around fifty-eight years old. His skin gave off a healthy, tanned glow. Sun-lamp or the beach, Michael would have been hard-pressed to say. He wore tiny, round sunglasses, tight-fitting black jeans and a leather jacket.

‘Anna, I never want to talk to that idiot again. He knows nothing. See to it that he never gets through to me.’ His words were in rapid Italian and he seemed to be angry in a very controlled way. Michael sensed a capacity for fury in this man, however, from just those few words. But when he turned to face him, his anger was immediately replaced by a disarming charm as he changed to speaking English. He held out his hand, speaking very fluently.

‘Mister Keats! How lovely to meet you. I know your newspaper well from my many visits to London. It’s a good paper.’

‘Thank you, signor Ronconi. It is kind of you to say that. And very kind of you and your father to see me,’ replied Michael, taking the proffered hand and feeling a strong, firm handshake. He was unnerved, however, by the hard stare that he received from Antonio Ronconi, as if the man were trying to read what was going on in his mind. But he quickly shook off the odd feeling of familiarity he experienced.

‘Of course, I get to London very rarely these days. My father hasn’t been well for several years and I spend most of my life behind this damn desk with the telephone glued to my ear. Or, increasingly, stuck in front of this computer. Aren’t computers the curse of modern life, Mister Keats, or do you mind if I call you Michael?’ He sipped from the glass of water that Anna Trabucchi had poured for him before leaving the room, closing the door quietly behind her.

‘No, not at all. Michael’s fine. I must say in my line of work, I find computers very useful.’

‘Ah, well, each to his own, I suppose,’ Antonio said, sitting down at his desk. ‘Now, tell me, regarding the kidnap of my sister, are you finding anything new? It seems to me that the media is tiring of it already. We have our public relations people working on ideas to keep them interested. I know, it’s ridiculous,’ he sat back in his chair and shook his head. ‘My sister has been kidnapped – she may even be dead, although I think she is most definitely alive – and we have PR people working on ideas to keep the story in the news! Yes, it is ridiculous! We market even our own grief these days, it seems, Michael.’ He spun round in his seat and stared out of the French doors at the lake, shining like a polished mirror in the distance. Then, he seemed to shake himself and drew his hands across his face as if wiping away all the words he had just uttered.

‘Anyway, you’re here to talk to my father. I don’t know what his lordship or your editor told you, but I fear that you are not going to be able to spend an awful lot of time with him. Luigi Ronconi has had a tough life, you know. People ask why they don’t know more about him, why he isn’t accessible to the press every minute of the day. What they should remember is where he came from – a small village in the Valtellina, about forty kilometres from here. The people of that village and all the villages around it, had been nowhere. Think of it. For centuries, man, they had been nowhere.’ He fell into the rock idiom like a man falling into a vat of wine – comfortable and secure. ‘In those days, you know, Michael,’ he went on, leaning forward in his chair, folding his large hands in front of him, ‘you didn’t travel far.’ He stood up, facing the doors leading out into the garden and sweeping his hands across the panorama they offered. ‘You were lucky if you could boast of travelling more than twenty kilometres from your home in your entire lifetime. Until the wars, that is. Wars change everything. They change people. But they not only change people; they also change their expectations. The last one certainly changed my father. In 1939, he was a mechanic working in a garage; a couple of years later, he was married with a young child – me; another couple of years later, his wife and son had disappeared, had been taken to Germany, to certain death, it seemed; he, by this time, was killing Germans as if he had been born to it, as if it was the most natural thing in the world; then he was wandering across Italy like a vagabond; and then … well, you can see it all around you; his success.’ Michael was surprised by the emphasis that was placed on the last word. Antonio hissed the word, rather than spoke it.

In the last two minutes, it seemed to Michael, the man in front of him had experienced a range of emotions. Antonio seemed to be under an inordinate amount of stress; he was a man in extremis, a man at the end of whatever tether he had made for himself.

‘But … anyway, you know most of this.’ He walked towards Michael, suddenly emanating bonhomie and warmth, throwing an arm around Michael’s shoulder, guiding him to the door and saying, ‘Come on, let’s go visit the old man. But let me warn you, he recently had a … how do you say it in English … un ictus?’

‘A stroke,’ Michael obliged, knowing the Italian for the illness of one of Rosa’s aunts.

‘That’s it! A stroke!’ Guiding Michael through the door, towards the stairs. ‘Such a strange way of putting it, but English is such an odd language, don’t you think? Anyway, you never know how he is going to be and his speech … well he was never the world’s greatest talker – the Valtellina is famous for producing men of few words – but, his words often lose themselves somewhere between his brain and his tongue. He gets very frustrated, but there’s nothing to be done. I shouldn’t tell you this – you being a member of the Fourth Estate and all – but I think you are a man of honour, even though you are a journalist! My father will almost certainly suffer another stroke soon. The doctors don’t know how soon or how serious, but it won’t be long, they think.’

They climbed the long, sweeping staircase, past oil paintings from which colour glowed as if they had been illuminated from behind. Heavy gilt frames surrounded each one and they, too, shone. At the top of the stairs, they turned right into a long corridor which was similarly lined with expensive-looking art. Antonio stopped in front of a door and whispered to Michael, ‘Let me just go in first to make sure he’s okay.’

A moment passed and then he returned, beckoning Michael into the room.

The 83-year-old Falcone was over by the window of a large, dark room. He sat in a wheelchair, in front of a huge bay window, the curtains of which were drawn closed apart from a three feet gap in the centre of the window. It was in front of this gap that he sat, a shaft of bright sunlight slicing into the room and creating a halo around his head. Motes of dust tumbled lazily in the light above his head and his oiled, still-black hair gleamed.

‘Papi. I have Mr Keats, the English journalist here to see you for a moment.’ Antonio took the chair by the handles and pushed it round so that Luigi’s face came into view.

The handsome, angular features of the twenty-seven year-old Luigi Ronconi could just about be made out, if, indeed, you had known him back then. But his cheeks had become sunken and his eyes had lost the deep colour that had made them seem iridescent and had attracted the opposite sex when he was young. They had become grey and flecked here and there with white. His body, though stooped in the wheelchair, was still large and powerful-looking for a man of his years.

Michael stepped forward and held out his hand.

‘Signor Ronconi. It is an honour to meet you. Thank you very much for seeing me.’

‘Ah you can thank his Lordship for that.’ The voice was harsh and deep, the accent was still recognisable as the one which coloured the words of Rosa’s family, the accent of the Valtellina. His speech was slightly slurred, mainly because his mouth was pulled down at one corner, probably, Michael surmised, by the stroke he had suffered. ‘We go back a long way.’

Antonio beckoned Michael to sit on a leather sofa in the centre of the room and pushed the wheelchair over to it.

‘I hope you don’t mind answering a few questions for me, signor Ronconi?’ He gestured to the small tape recorder he had taken from his pocket and was now placing on the coffee table that was in front of both of them.

‘That is why you are here, I believe, so, please, ask away.’

‘Not too long, though, Papi.’ Antonio interrupted.

‘Oh, you fuss too much, my boy. I am feeling fine today.’

‘So, signor Ronconi, I am interested in knowing who you think might have kidnapped Teresa. The newspapers have speculated that it might be the mafia, or business rivals or even Eastern European gangsters. Who do you think kidnapped her?’

‘I wish I knew, signore. Antonio thinks it is local gangsters. I don’t know.’ He sighed. Speaking was not easy for him and the words came out in staccato bursts at the end of each of which he seemed to gather himself for the next burst. ‘Of course … I have enemies. You don’t get all this,’ his eyes swivelled, taking in the whole room, as he drew in a deep breath, ‘without making enemies … What is the phrase … You can’t make an omelette … without breaking eggs?’ A slow smile crossed his face. ‘I’ Another deep breath, ‘have made rather a large omelette … don’t you think?’ His eyes twinkled, but then they clouded over again. ‘Ah, Teresa … She is a lovely child, you know. So open … and honest. And with a fighting spirit … just like her mother.’

‘Does she work here, for you, signore?’

‘No, she doesn’t.’ It was Antonio speaking. He was seated in a chair across from them. ‘She has her own work, her own studies.’

‘Ah, what is she studying?’

‘She is a … lepidopterist … you know … butterflies,’ said Luigi.

‘She is obsessed by them.’ It was Antonio now, interrupting his father. ‘Always has been, since she was tiny.’

‘She would chase them around the garden … when she was small. She was like a little butterfly … herself, back then,’ Luigi now, with a wistful look in his eyes as he cast his memory back over the years. ‘This place, you know … is a veritable haven … for butterflies and Teresa … Teresa has learned everything … everything there is to know about them.’

‘Before you leave I will show you her room and her study. You have a camera with you, I presume?’ Antonio rose from his seat. ‘I think that is enough, Papi. I don’t want you getting over-tired.’

‘Okay, okay. Signor Keats …’ Luigi reached out a shaky hand to Michael. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you … Please give my regards … to his Lordship.’

Antonio wheeled the chair back to its former position in front of the window and they left the room filled with the laboured sounds of the old man’s breathing. The interview was over too quickly for Michael.

‘You were lucky. Papi was very lucid today. There are days when he is less clear about who he is talking to and he wanders a great deal in what he says.’ Antonio was leading Michael to a room towards the rear of the ground floor of the palazzo. He opened it and stood to one side to let Michael go in.

‘This, as you can see, is Teresa’s office.’

The room was like any office – computer, desk and sofa against the far wall.

‘But she slept here as well. Next door is her bedroom – she wanted always to be close to her butterflies – and through here …’ He walked towards a door to the left of the room. ‘… through here are …’ He threw open the door with a flourish: ‘the butterflies!’

Michael walked into a small foyer with another door a few feet inside, allowing an area for viewing what lay beyond. What lay behind it was a large, conservatory-like construction which had been added, it seemed, to the back of the house. Inside were butterflies. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of butterflies, landing on plants and taking off again, bumping up against the glass through which Michael and Antonio were looking, coloured clouds of silently flapping wings.

‘It’s marvellous, isn’t it?’ asked Antonio, shaking his head.

‘My God, yes. There must be thousands of them.’ answered Michael, his eyes taking in the extent of this butterfly-infested room.

‘Actually, around five thousand. This is her laboratory, her study, her workshop. She breeds them and studies them.’

A woman walked through a door to the left of where they were standing, smiling at Antonio and then walking to the rear of the building.

‘She has a number of assistants. They have been wonderful in the last few weeks in keeping the whole place going.’ He looked at his watch. ‘But, I am afraid I must leave for Milan very shortly. If you wish to take some photographs here, please do …’

‘I will, but I wonder,’ interrupted Michael, ‘if I might actually take some shots of Teresa’s bedroom. Some real human interest may be just what you need, if as you say, you want the newspapers to take an interest in the story again.’

‘Well, it is a bit of a, how do you say it, a tabloid approach, in a way, but … oh what the Hell, why not. It’s through here.’

 

Michael had dropped the film into the Beldoro photographic shop as he passed through town on his way back to the hotel. He had then stopped at a bar and relaxed over a beer and a sandwich before making his way back to the hotel to start transcribing the tape and writing his story.

‘Signor Keats, there is a letter for you.’

The receptionist/decorator stood in his paint-spattered overalls, waving a small manila envelope at Michael as he climbed the first flight of stairs.

‘A letter?’ Who would be writing to him? No one knew where he was. He was even more puzzled to see that it had a local postmark on it. ‘Grazie.’ He took it and headed off to his room to open it.

‘Gentile Signor Keats,’ the letter began. The envelope was old. It was brown, of the kind used for business communications and only half of the glue on the flap had worked, so that it was half-open. The paper inside was a small, lined sheet, yellowing around the edges, as if it had taken years to be delivered. Ignazio Mazzini – for it was from him and Michael had given him his hotel details when he talked to him, in case he recalled anything else – was not the sort of man to have supplies of fresh stationery around the house and there was every chance that this sheet had been sitting in a drawer for decades before he had found a use for it.

The writing was painstaking. Each letter sat alone, as if it had been chiselled out of the paper. Each was bold and had been pressed deep, even going through the paper on a couple of occasions.

‘Please forgive me for taking the liberty of writing to you there is something I have remembered that I didn’t tell you I told it to the policeman who came to see me not long after you left. Rinaldi was his name.’ The punctuation, or almost total lack of it made it necessary to concentrate on what Ignazio was trying to say.

‘When I stood waiting for il porco, Bonfadini, and my whore of a wife, I overheard voices from the front of the bar a voice said, ‘Mi dispiace, la mia farfalla.’ I hope this can be of use to you the policeman was very interested. Distinti saluti.’

The signature that followed was laboured, like the handwriting of a ten-year-old. Still, Ignazio had had little occasion to pick up a pen in his lifetime, Michael surmised. ‘I am sorry, my butterfly’? Why did someone say that? Michael was puzzled.

‘Rinaldi?’ answered the voice at the other end of the telephone. ‘I’m sorry, there is no one of that name here. Are you sure you have the correct name, signore?’

‘Thank you, I must have made a mistake,’ replied Michael, replacing the receiver.

He had spent the last hour phoning every police station in the area and even a few outside the area, trying to locate the policeman who had visited Ignazio Mazzini a short time after he had. Every time he had received the same response. No one of that name worked out of that police station. The conclusion had to be that there was, in fact, no policeman of that name.

Michael stood up and went to the window, instinctively peering out from behind the curtain down into the street in front of the hotel, as if he expected to see this phony policeman staring back up at him. The street was, of course, empty. It was lunch time, the sacred hour in Italy.

Michael let the curtain fall from his hands and walked over to the tiny table on which his laptop sat. He felt uneasy. Had he been followed to Ignazio’s farm? It would not, of course, take a genius to work out that Ignazio might have some important information. But had they thought that he had found out something that no one else had and that was why he had been talking to the late farmer?

There were a number of possibilities. The main one that occupied Michael’s thoughts as he stared at the screen was that this Rinaldi had, in fact, killed Ignazio. Of course, he may have killed himself, but it seemed very unlikely. And surely there was no way that he could have fallen? He had worked that land all of his life. It would have been as familiar as a sitting-room carpet to his feet.

But, why would Rinaldi have killed him? What did Ignazio know that was so critical? Could it be something to do with his recollection of the words he had heard on the day of the kidnapping as he waited for the shopkeeper’s footsteps?

Michael reached over to the bed and picked up the yellow-edged letter that he had left there. He peered at it, running his finger across the badly punctuated words. ‘Mi dispiace, la mia farfalla.’ – ‘I’m sorry, my butterfly?’ An ironic reference to Teresa Ronconi’s studies, no doubt. Those words were the only thing about which the police had no knowledge, because Ignazio had not repeated these words to them. Could those four words be the reason that he had been killed?

Again, he stood up, feeling nervous, and made his way to the window. The street was now beginning to fill up again as the lunch hiatus came to an end. Mopeds were spluttering into life in the distance and cars were revving up. Voices filled the silence that had previously enveloped the town.

He, too, now possessed this information.

They may have thought that Ignazio had already shared it with him during his interview. No matter, though. He knew it now. And, more importantly, he presumed they knew that he knew it.

He pulled the curtains closed and returned to the seat at the table. He stared, unseeing, at his laptop which gazed bluely back at him, the cursor winking at him from just to the right of the last letter he had typed.

 

Still nervous, he waited until the sun had sunk behind the high peaks and light began to seep out of the town before leaving the hotel to collect his photographs.

He had also arranged for a courier to collect the photos from the hotel in an hour and take them down to Bruno in Milan, from where they could be transmitted electronically to London. There was no internet here at the hotel and anyway he wanted to ensure that the quality was good. He had already e-mailed several thousand words to Harry. He was back in business and happy to be so.

He walked briskly to and from the photography shop, keeping to the centre of the narrow streets, cheered by the fact that the mild weather had encouraged people out to look in the windows of the shops or just to stroll. He had ducked into a small grocery store and bought a bag of crisps and a six-pack of beer and was just opening one of the bottles back in his room when Rosa’s face jumped into his mind, unbidden. Her dark eyebrows were raised in a quizzical way and the downward pout of her lips seemed to give her a critical look, as if there were something of which she did not approve. It was precisely at that moment that he remembered the envelope of her contact sheets that he had stuffed into the side pocket of his bag the morning he had left for Italy.

He hauled down his bag from the top of the wardrobe and searched in the side pocket. It was empty. He stood up, scratching his head and took a step back from the bed on which the case lay, looking around on the floor, expecting it had fallen out as he lifted it down. But it was not there.

He was certain he had put it in there. He thought back to that morning, only a few days ago, taking himself through everything he did before leaving his house. He saw himself bending to the floor, picking up the envelope and putting the bag down to unzip the pocket and put it in. He saw himself closing the zip, picking the bag up, opening the front door and leaving. It had been there. There was absolutely no doubt.

Had he taken it out and forgotten he had done so? He searched the room, under the bed, behind the dressing table. Still, it was not to be found.

Had someone taken it? Had someone come into his room? It was inconceivable. He took a large swig of the bottle of beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sat down on the bed.

Why? What could anyone possibly want with Rosa’s photographs of ruined, abandoned churches and farms?

 

Shortly before seven o’clock, the time the courier was due to pick up the envelope containing the photographs of Palazzo Ronconi, Michael collected himself once more, realising that the photographs needed to be annotated in some way so that the office in London would know what it was looking at. He opened the package containing them and started to number them, cross-referencing those numbers with a number on a piece of paper and providing a few lines describing each.

Some of the shots were good and a number were very definitely usable. Not bad, he thought, considering he was not a photographer, although, naturally, he had learned some tricks of the trade from Rosa over the years.

He came to the four or five shots he had taken of Teresa Ronconi’s bedroom. It was a large room, which adjoined the butterfly sanctuary that took up the rear of the house. In contrast to the fairly grand manner in which the rest of the house was decorated, it was quite simple. The walls were painted in a quiet, pastel shade, instead of groaning under the weight of several decades of hefty wallpaper. What was most striking was the fact that every surface was covered with photographs in frames, large and small. What he presumed were her family were frozen in time, playing on ski slopes, cavorting for the camera on yachts. The lives of the rich and famous, indeed.

He had taken a photograph of one table, the surface of which was hidden by the sheer number of photo frames and he now peered at it in close-up to enable him to describe it properly. The photos in the foreground of the shot were of a younger version of her father and a blonde woman, most probably her mother seated at a restaurant table, smiling at the camera during that brief moment of happiness they had enjoyed together. Beside it were pictures of people he did not recognise, but at the edge of this group was a framed photograph of a younger and thinner Antonio Ronconi, a posed photograph that was a little like a publicity still of an actor. He sat, leaning forward on a stool, with his legs crossed and his chin resting on his hand. He was smiling and could easily have been the hero of an American soap opera. At the bottom of the photograph were some hand-written words. Michael could not make them out and wished he had a magnifying glass to find out what this brother had said to his sister.

It was then that he remembered Rosa’s glass, her linen tester. He had thrown it into his bag just before leaving their room in Renzo’s house and had not taken it out of the bag when he had been at home. So, it must still be there.

He fumbled around in the corner of his bag and there it was. Unfolding its stand, he placed it over the photograph. It took a moment for his eye to adjust to the glass’s magnification, forcing him to lift his head from the glass, blinking a few times, before returning to it.

The handwriting was flowery, with dramatic up and down strokes. A dream for a handwriting expert, he thought, trying to focus on the letters.

‘Con i migliori saluti, la mia farfalla – tuo fratello, Antonio.’

His eyes widened over the two words – mia farfalla. It was what Ignazio had heard one of the kidnappers say to Teresa as they manhandled her from the bar! Mia farfalla – Antonio’s name for his sister. It was too much of a coincidence that a stranger would use the same term of endearment, no matter how ironically.

Just at that moment, there was a knock at the door.

‘Damn!’ said Michael, realising it was probably the courier, here to collect the photos and bike them down to Milan. He looked at his watch and saw that he was fifteen minutes early. Bloody Italians and their relaxed approach to time. They’re either too early or too late. Never bang on time, he thought.

He stood up and walked to the door.

When he opened it, he briefly saw two men standing there. One of them quickly stepped towards him and grabbed him round the middle, pinning his arms to his side. He struggled as a cloth of some kind was pushed into his face by the other man. There was a pungent, chemical smell that caught at the back of his throat. Michael kicked out, catching one of the men hard on the shin, but the fight started to go out of him as whatever chemical was on the cloth started to take effect. His vision became blurred and then there was just an echoing silence.