"She's dead." The man in the light blue short-sleeved shirt was nodding so emphatically that his white bandolier bobbed up and down and his dark blue peaked cap slipped far down his forehead. "She's definitely dead."
"Well, we hardly needed the carabinieri to figure that out." Sister Isabella stood with her arms folded between the young man in the peaked cap and the dead Raffaella, eyeing him.
"I don't understand why you are here," Isabella said.
In fact, there was quite a lot she didn't understand in that moment. She still did not want to believe that Sister Raffaella was gone. Just yesterday they had said Lauds together at morning prayer before going their separate ways: Raffaella to her duty in the piazza, where she was in charge of the convent's stall at the market in Santa Caterina, and Isabella had taken advantage of the early dawn to go for a long jog through the vineyards.
That she was no longer alive now seemed so … unreal to her.
They hadn't been the best of friends, but they had liked and respected one another. Raffaella's death was a sore loss for the convent. She had been one of them, and loyalty to God and to their community was paramount.
"I can see in your eyes that you are sceptical, Sister. But believe me, my presence is indispensable. When someone dies in this way," his gaze turned to the belltower, "we have to rule out the involvement of third parties. So it's perfectly normal for the paramedic to call the police."
"And where is the paramedic?"
The policeman lowered his chin and then looked up at her again.
"Well, this is hardly a matter of life and death." He attempted a smile and failed miserably. "There was a bad accident on Via Statale 12. A lorry and a coach … it may take time for an ambulance to get here."
Isabella was only half-listening to him. She was still in shock.
Immediately after her terrible discovery, she had rushed to the common room to call the emergency services.
First she had got the fire brigade because she had dialled the wrong number in her panic. When they asked her where the fire was, she was so bewildered that she hung up. Only then had she remembered the number of the ambulance service. But she had wondered exactly what they would be able to do, because Matteo Silvestri was right about one thing: Sister Raffaella was dead. Even a dozen paramedics couldn't change that.
With Filomena's help, she had at least been able to keep all the sisters from rushing to the tower, sparing them the sight of their deceased colleague. But Sister Immaculata was still sitting on her bench, sleeping. Hearing loss could sometimes be a blessing after all.
While she had been on the phone, the Abbess had been gracious enough to put a blanket over the dead woman's body. Isabella stared at the shape it made and could not believe that Sister Raffaella was really lying under that cloth. She had been one of the few people with whom she shared her life and her faith. Just eighteen sisters lived in and ran the venerable old Convento di Nostra Cara Regina Maria. She adjusted the number downwards by one and said a silent prayer for Sister Raffaella.
As she did so, she felt the gaze of the Carabiniere Matteo Silvestri resting on her.
He must have noticed her sorrow, and he took off his cap. "You know, I also knew Sister Raffaella. From the market." He nodded pensively. "Every now and then she would pour me a homemade grappa. It's really fantastic." He brought his closed hand to his mouth, mimed a kiss, and opened it like a flower.
"Poetry."
"You can buy it. In our shop."
Matteo Silvestri shook his head abruptly, as if realising that he too was bewildered by what they were talking about. The former seriousness crept back into his features.
"Do you think it was an accident? Maybe while ringing the bells, she leaned too far over the balustrade – possibly after having had a drink – and then …" He left the rest unsaid, but gently lifted and lowered his chin, as if he were indicating the path of Maria Raffaella's fall.
Isabella thought about it. She had been asking herself the same question until the carabiniere arrived, going over it again and again. Sister Raffaella had always been a bit too fond of a drink, and at any hour of the day – regardless of what the Bible did or didn't have to say on the matter. Isabella didn't know how bad Raffaella's little drinking problem might have been. But she had never seemed to have drunk to the point of losing control.
"It's hard to imagine," she said at last. "Especially since the bell rope hangs inside the tower." She paused for a moment: something was coming back to her. "Besides, the bells hadn't been rung at all. That's why I came over to check on the tower in the first place."
The policeman produced a dark leather notebook, flipped it open and pulled a biro from his breast pocket. "So you found Sister Raffaella."
"Yes, right here." She pointed uselessly at the body. She watched as he took notes, then glanced at his mobile phone and wrote down a number in his book.
She raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"
"I'm noting down the temperature, for the police report."
"And what good does that do?"
He shrugged. "It's just what we do. When you found the deceased, did you notice anything else that wasn't as it should have been?"
Isabella squinted against the sun as she looked him in the eye: "You mean apart from the dead body on the ground?"
"Sì."
She was about to tell him no, when all of a sudden an image resurfaced that she had put out of her mind amid all the commotion earlier. There had indeed been something.
"Sister? Are you all right?"
Only now did she realise that she was still staring at the man, her eyes wide. She nodded slowly, but then a moment later she shook her head violently. Nothing was as it should have been! And why had she not realised before? She needed some reassurance that it wasn't just her imagination playing tricks on her.
"What are you doing?" asked Matteo as she crouched down and gently pulled the blanket away. She forced herself not to avert her eyes as she uncovered Raffaella's body as reverently as she could.
"The arm," she said finally. "Look at the hand."
It was awful to have to endure the sight of Raffaella once again.
Matteo bent down beside her, then understood. "Her index finger is extended. It looks like she's pointing at something."
Isabella nodded. She had noticed it right away. The strange angle at which Raffaella was lying. It couldn't just have been a result of the way she fell. She must have stretched out her finger in her last moments of life after her fall.
She could see Silvestri shift to see the direction in which the finger was pointing. She looked up, only her eyes moving. It was obvious. Sister Raffaella was pointing at the belltower. The question was: why?
To tell us that she had fallen from the tower? But that was obvious. No! Isabella dismissed the thought. There had to be another reason.
As she watched the carabiniere carefully study the position of the hand, something caught her eye. She bent over Sister Raffaella, being careful not to touch her. There was something in the sandy dust that covered the cobblestones where Sister Immaculata had not yet swept. It was immediately beneath Raffaella's outstretched arm.
"Signore …" She cleared her throat: it was suddenly quite dry. "Signor Silvestri. Look, under her hand. There in the dust."
The carabiniere looked first at her, and then at the spot she had pointed out.
"Mio dio," he breathed.
Isabella closed her eyes for a second. So he recognised it, too.
Gently, he lifted Raffaella's wrist and shifted it up a few inches.
Now it was obvious.
"She was drawing something." The policeman's voice sounded hoarse.
"A circle," Isabella replied, but then went one better. "No, a number."
"A nine."
"Or a six. Depending on how you look at it."
"You're right. Definitely a six from the point of view of the deceased.
But what does that mean?"
As she searched for an answer, Isabella studied the dead woman's face.
Raffaella was a slender woman with soft features and mahogany-brown curls that had popped out from under her fallen veil.
Matteo was busily taking notes in his little book, and she could see him trying to trace the six very precisely. Her brow furrowed sceptically. A photograph might have been a better way to preserve the evidence.
When he seemed satisfied with his work, he looked at her meaningfully. "What could the six stand for?"
She still couldn't give him an answer, but the question was rattling around her mind. Isabella didn't have a strong grasp of numbers. But she knew that six was the smallest composite number with different prime factors, and also the fourth highest composite number and the fourth triangular number. She also knew that a cube consists of six equal faces and that God created the earth in six days. She thought of the hexagram, a star of six rays made up of two superimposed equilateral triangles. The Star of David, the symbol of Judaism.
Her breath caught as another association with the number six haunted her brain: 666. According to the Revelation of John, the number of the Antichrist.
Isabella crossed herself hastily and went through the facts. Sister Raffaella had fallen from the belltower. That much was clear. But how, and why? Or maybe she hadn't fallen, and had instead chosen to end her life in this awful way? No! That was unthinkable for Isabella: Raffaella was a bride of Christ, and for Catholics suicide was a mortal sin. Maybe it had been an accident? But what had she been doing up there? Just enjoying the view? The air was sweet and clear, with no clouds obscuring the scenery: so that was certainly a possibility. On the other hand, it wasn't all that easy to fall off the tower. The protective stone ledge stood chest-high, so you would need to have already been perched on top of it, and Isabella couldn't see any reason why Raffaella might have got up there.
No: the answer to this riddle lay before her, written in the dust.
The "6" she had traced had to mean something. Something seriously important. It seemed to represent Raffaella's final thought. In Isabella's opinion, it ruled out both suicide and accident.
But there was one other possibility …
"I really can't see what Sister Raffaella was trying to tell us by writing that," Matteo's voice put a stop to her hurtling train of thought.
"I can't tell, either," she replied. "But there is one thing that we can say with some certainty."
"And what's that?"
She shot him a sharp look.
"It was murder."