Free The Dark Valley: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 2) by Valerio Varesi

conviction.
    Soneri rose to go to bed, but Sante’s almost imploring look detained him a minute longer. “What can I do?” he said.
    Sante murmured, “Nothing.”

4
    Even before daybreak, the skies seemed to have shed their earlier heaviness. Soneri left the road between the houses, keeping Montelupo, still cloaked in a thick mist, directly ahead of him. He walked past the shuttered houses in Groppo and turned off to start his climb towards Croce, hoping to find some ceps in the more shaded areas which would be still damp with the dew falling from leafless trees. He came in sight of the chapel of the Madonna del Rosario, a place of pilgrimage in the month of May, and proceeded through the tangled vegetation which flourished in the clay of the lower valley and gave off the pungent scents of the wild. Before moving into the hornbeam woods, he stopped to get his breath. The last houses were now out of sight, and within the woods he felt himself both hunter and prey. When he looked up, he could make out wisps of mist clinging so closely to the peaks as to resemble smoke from a fire. Above the path, a sandstone balcony had crumbled under the pressure of the mountain streams and had slipped down into the valley, creating a deep scar in the woods.
    If he had had sufficient strength in his legs, he would have already been at the mountain huts and perhaps even at the bar on Lake Santo which was not far from the peak, but first he wanted to reconnoitre the hillside and the watery gullies where the weak winter sun could not penetrate. He gripped the trunks of trees as he clambered down, trying to recallmovements he had learned so many years earlier in outings with his father. The third time he fell, he saw them: a colony of “trumpets of death” seeming to intone a
miserere
in the shadow of an enormous oak.
    Sante’s words rang in his ears, but he refused to be put off. His principal concern was finding someone able to cook those mushrooms the right way. He left them where they were when he heard the sound of something crashing about in the undergrowth close at hand, knocking into the lower branches of the trees. He decided it must be a wild boar, sniffing the air and detecting his presence. Soneri stood stock still, listening, and then, straight in front of him, he saw a strip of land which gave the appearance of having been ploughed. He swept aside the leaves and uncovered a second family of “trumpets of death”, crushed into tiny pieces by blows from a club. Evidently there was someone who did believe they were omens of ill fortune. Shortly afterwards, he heard the brushwood breaking as the boar made off. Once he was sure the beast was well away, he returned to the path, from which it was now impossible to see down into the valley.
    A thick blanket of mist came down, turning the countryside grey. The huts could not be far off, but he was fearful of getting lost, and afraid too of those shots fired at some target, whatever that target was meant to be. At last he saw the outlines of the stone buildings, sheds for climbing equipment and summer dwellings in the mountaineering season when the passes echoed with the many languages used in that borderland between sea and plain. Inside one of them rubbish was scattered all around – empty cans, broken bottles, plastic bags and the remains of tinned food – but the ash in the fireplace and the crumpled bedclothes on the wooden bench were evidence of some recent presence.
    When he stepped back outside, the mist had lifted and this made him resolve to carry on. It was eleven o’clock, so he would have time to reach Lake Santo, see if the bar was open and make his way back, even if this meant another day without a single cep being picked. He quickened his pace along the mule path, coming out into the pure air of the clearing with the bar, high up the mountainside, beyond the point where the wood gave way to moss and stone. It was cold, and it occurred to Soneri that the first snows