Free Marco Vichi - Inspector Bordelli 04 - Death in Florence by Marco Vichi Page A

patiently waiting for the surveillance teams to turn up something new, but as the hours and days passed, his hopes were beginning to crumble. Jack the Ripper, too, was never caught, like so many others. What if the band of monsters killed again?
    During the long wait, there was another suicide he had to deal with one morning. A pretty girl of humble origin had hanged herself with the sash of her dressing gown in a luxury apartment she owned in the centre of town. The body had been found by the cleaning woman, the morning following the death. The girl’s mother explained between sobs that Matilde would never have committed suicide and must have been murdered. She was bewildered, having been unaware of the existence of that apartment and wondering how her daughter could possibly have bought it, since she worked as a salesgirl at the UPIM department store. Bordelli likewise thought it seemed fishy and got down to work. It didn’t take long to figure things out. The girl had got sacked almost three months earlier and was the mistress of a sixty-year-old industrialist from Prato. Bordelli paid a call on him, and the businessman immediately owned up to his affair with the girl. He said he was deeply saddened by it all. He made no mystery of all the money he had spent on her. He’d given her the apartment as a gift and even paid the cleaning woman. Appealing to male complicity, he begged Bordelli not to let the matter get into the papers. The inspector smelled a rat. He asked him to come with him to the station and started pressuring him. After less than an hour of questioning the businessman confessed. They’d had a furious row and the slaps had started flying. The girl fell, hitting her head against the corner of a table and died almost instantly. In a fit of panic, he’d hung her from the sash of her dressing gown, to make it look like a suicide. He hadn’t wanted to kill her, it was the last thing he wanted, it was an accident.
    ‘She wasn’t dead,’ said Bordelli.
    ‘What?’
    ‘When you hanged her, the girl was still alive.’
    ‘That’s not true … it’s not possible,’ the businessman stammered, teetering in his chair.
    ‘Read the post-mortem.’ Bordelli passed him Diotivede’s report. The girl had died of suffocation. The blow to the head wasn’t serious. It had only knocked her out.
    The man sat there in shock for a few moments, open- mouthed and round-eyed … Then he burst into sobs. Bordelli turned him over to two guards and had him taken to the Murate prison. He wouldn’t stay there for long, with all the money he had. As it happened it was a case of manslaughter following a failed unintentional homicide. Whatever the case, the whole matter had been cleared up in no time. Whereas the murdered boy … Damn it all …

‘Let me get you something, Inspector,’ said Totò. Lasagna, sausages and beans, the usual flask of red and endless chatter about a thousand topics, from politics to women. Only once did the cook make a reference to the murdered child, and Bordelli was able to change the subject immediately.
    After dinner he drove slowly home, burping up essence of sausage. He parked the Beetle, and when he was slipping the key into the main door, he froze. The idea of sitting alone in front of the telly smoking and drinking made him feel depressed, and so he thought he would go into the centre of town and see a film. The last shows would be starting in half an hour. He headed off on foot with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, determined not to light it. To keep out of the annoying drizzle that kept falling without ceasing, he walked right up against the buildings. Their dark façades were dotted with the luminous rectangles of windows, which glowed with the changing bluish light of television sets. Every so often a shadow passed on the pavement, and two eyes shone in the darkness.
    The Cinema Eolo was showing
La Grande Vadrouille
, but Bordelli didn’t feel like seeing a comedy that night. He walked