Free The Marshal Makes His Report by Magdalen Nabb

feudal system. I’m the odd one out! There’s no excuse for my presence here except that I pay her rent. I don’t fit in at all.’
    ‘I think I understand. Even so, you’re a doctor so if she wanted . . .’
    ‘Good Lord, you must be joking. I’m not a grand enough doctor to attend the Ulderighi. Still, you’ve got the idea. If I were grand enough that would solve her problem. Anyway, she wouldn’t call someone like me in if her cleaner had a cold, so that’s that. You should see the fleet of specialists who descend on her son every six months. Only one is Italian. Two are from London and the rest from Switzerland.’
    ‘What’s wrong with him exactly?’
    ‘I couldn’t say. I’ve never seen him. Certainly, I’ve never heard anyone mention any specific illness, so it may well be that it’s just a question of nine hundred years of inbreeding.’
    ‘You mean he might be a bit mental?’
    She smiled at him, her face relaxed and pretty again once they had abandoned the personal for the medical. ‘That’s not a term a doctor would use.’
    ‘I beg your pardon. I just thought . . .’ He wasn’t really thinking but remembering an image. A gloomy courtyard and the sound of a flute high up in a darkened tower. You couldn’t call that normal. ‘I mean . . . he could be strange.’ That was just as bad. She was still smiling, perhaps even laughing at him.
    ‘It’s quite probable that his health is poor and that he could be, as you put it, a bit strange. As I say, I’ve never seen him. As far as I know, he doesn’t go out. Emilio’s seen him, though, because when he’s feeling well enough he does appear at the Sunday afternoon music lectures—and Catherine’s seen him a few times. He collects coins and medals or something of that sort and she took him some things she found among the flood-damaged stuff down there. She didn’t seem to think he was all that strange. He spent all his time at his desk by the window messing with his coin collection and watching the world go by in the courtyard below. I know she felt sorry for him, but she also said he was highly intelligent. Oh . . . ! You surely don’t think—’
    ‘No, no. I don’t think anything of the sort.’
    She looked disappointed. It was evident that a Crazed Son Shoots Father story would vindicate her feelings about these people. The Marshal had enough trouble on his plate without starting rumours of that sort within the Palazzo Ulderighi.
    ‘The official feeling is,’ he lied rather pompously, ‘that the victim died by accident while cleaning a rifle. Naturally, I have to make these inquiries so as to be sure there was no possibility of his having taken his own life.’
    ‘Well,’ said Dr Martelli, unabashed, ‘I suppose you know your own business best, but even so—’ she leaned back in the big white chair and pushed back a bunch of crisp brown curls—‘nobody will ever convince me that it was anything other than suicide. Quite ridiculous. Going down to clean a gun at two-thirty in the morning.’
    ‘We don’t know that he did.’
    ‘I’ve just told you that I heard him!’
    ‘You heard the lift.’
    ‘What? Ah . . . You’re right. Well, as I said, you know your own business best. What time did he actually die?’
    ‘I don’t have an autopsy report yet.’ He didn’t add that he’d never have it. He was feeling very uncomfortable with himself. This woman was far from stupid and he didn’t much care for reciting official lies to her while she observed him with lively and intelligent eyes. But it wasn’t just that. It was—
    ‘I can’t make you out,’ she said, interrupting his thoughts as she observed him. ‘This accident story—it’s exactly what a family like the Ulderighi would claim, as much to avoid a scandal as to collect the insurance, and of course if it’s the official line you have to give it out in just the way you did and in just the tone you did. That far I can follow you. And yet you really seemed to