LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

ex, for starters. Or maybe just the whole political establishment,” he added with a mock-ironic flourish, standing up and beginning to pace the small office, making it look, at least to Rossi’s eyes, as if it were turning into a cell. He stopped at the window and turned around. Rossi could see he was shaping up for a confession of sorts. But which? There were those that revealed all, those that left out the awkward or shameful particulars, and those made up to take the rap for someone else.

      “Look, Inspector,” he began with greater, if rather more, mannered sincerity, “I wrote a few things, in the heat of the moment, which I shouldn’t have. You see, I’d already been drinking, rather a lot as it happens, and since the break-up, well it had just got worse and worse.” He made a hand gesture towards the street. “I’ve been spending most of my evenings in the piano bar round the corner from here. I get something to eat and try to switch off a bit, and then I come back, sleep on the sofa and then I dust myself down and start work again in the morning. The glamorous world of politics.” He stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and sat back down again. He paused to collect his thoughts, joining his hands and holding the fingertips just under his nose, as though gently drawing up through his nostrils some delicate perfume they exuded.

      “That day, the day Maria was killed,” he went on, “I woke up and my mind was almost a complete blank. I was still wearing my clothes and my head was pounding. At first, I thought I must have been hitting it harder than usual and perhaps, perhaps, when I had come back the night before I logged on and just started writing that stuff, but it wasn’t me. It was someone else; I was out of my mind; I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t want to kill anyone.”

      Rossi looked him in the eye.

      “Did you kill her? Perhaps while, as you say, you were out of your mind? Had you gone drinking again that afternoon?”

      “No.”

      “Did you follow her, stalk her?”

      “Stalk? No. Look, I went to her place once or twice when I was drunk, on other occasions, to talk, but that’s as far as it went. Just me leaning on the bell until the madness passed.”

      “Did you want to kill her?”

      “No, of course not!”

      “Did you ever fantasize about killing her, for revenge, for going back to Volpini, for screwing up your marriage?”

      “Do you really want me to answer that question?”

      “Yes, Dr Spinelli, I do.”

      “Sometimes,” he said, “the thought might have occurred, in my mind, in my wildest moments, in my worst moments, but I would never, ever have done it. Haven’t you ever thought about revenge, Inspector?”

      Oh, yes, thought Rossi. How he had thought about revenge, planned it even, down to the last detail. The hit, the getaway. The cleanest, most perfect of crimes only a cop could commit.

      “Yes,” said Rossi, snapping back from the reverie, “probably, but as far as I know, I have never as yet put it in writing.”

      “And neither have I.”

      A good firm answer. Rossi liked that. It meant he was on the right lines. It might mean less work, too, and he wanted Maroni off his back about this guy. He was clean. Screwed-up but clean. And besides, there was no material link. No weapon. No witness. No DNA.

      But Rossi sensed Carrara was uneasy. He would be concerned that his squeezing of Spinelli was going too far emotively. Carrara was Mr Logic. It was what he did and he did it well, and Rossi knew he was itching to put his oar in. He gestured to his colleague, ceding the floor to him.

      “I was just wondering,” began Carrara, “do you think I could take a quick look at the computer, Dr Spinelli?” he asked, glancing askance at Rossi and, like seasoned team players, getting his immediate tacit assent. “I think we might be better off just checking a few things here and now.”

      “Feel free,” he said and machine-gunned his password into the keyboard.

      “That’s not written anywhere, is it?”

      “No. Memorized and difficult to crack. Numbers, letters and symbols and case-sensitive.”

      Rossi was more than glad of Carrara’s serious nerd tendencies when it came to computers; it meant he could save precious time and dispense with tedium. He was clicking around now on Spinelli’s e-mail, opening strange windows he’d never seen before and seemed to have already located something of interest.

      “I note,” he said, sounding very much the doctor rather than the policeman, “that you’ve been checking your sent items a lot.”

      “I honestly don’t remember,” Spinelli replied.

      “On the night before the murder you checked some recent e-mails you sent to Maria. Why would you do that?”

      “And why would I do that?” asked Spinelli his tone a blend of puzzlement and returning mild contempt. “I was drunk and emotional. I couldn’t give a damn what I’d written about the night before. I might have been hitting all the wrong keys. There’s any number of explanations.”

      “Well,” said Carrara gauging from Spinelli’s reaction that there was no damning sign of guilt, “I don’t know for sure, and we may need a linguistics report on this, but could it be that someone, someone else, really was in your account and was trying to, shall we say, discover your style, see how you write, and then,” he looked up at a frowning Spinelli, “write as if he, or she, were you?”

      Rossi, intrigued now, was eager to combine forces.

      “Doctor Spinelli, are you sure you came home alone that night?”

      “I told you. I was very drunk. I remember next to nothing after 9 or 10 o’clock. I blacked out and woke up with a headache from hell.”

      “Do you think anyone could have seen you, as you were coming home or leaving the bar?”

      “The barman, maybe. There was a girl, actually; I remember that.”

      “And did you drink with anyone? Did anyone buy you drinks?”

      “Maybe, yes, usually, but I couldn’t say who. Some people know who I am and we often get talking but, really, it’s all a blur. There was the concert, people coming and going.”

      Rossi turned to Carrara.

      “Luigi, why don’t you take this man for a quiet drink in his usual bar and see if you can find a witness who saw him leave and with whom. Then get him down to the lab, if that’s all right with you,” he said, turning his attention back to Spinelli who now had his arms crossed tightly across his crumpled, white-shirted chest, “and run a blood test and a urine test.”

      “A blood test?” spurted Spinelli.

      “For what?” said Carrara.

      “Anything,” said Rossi, “but sedatives mainly, fast-acting ones, although I do get the sneaking feeling we could be talking Rohypnol here.”

      “The date-rape drug?” said Spinelli, shifting in his chair.

      “Got it in one,” said Rossi. “And if it was, we should still be able to pick up any traces. Judging by your symptoms, the blackout, the after-effects, I’d say you got a spiked drink. Maybe someone taking a shot at you, or a poor-taste wind-up. I don’t know. Whether or not they then came back here with you or slipped in while you were distracted is more difficult to prove.”

      Rossi turned to Carrara.

      “And see what prints you can get off the PC, the door. We can always run them through the databases and see what comes up.”

      Spinelli seemed more relaxed; like he’d been through the mill, yes, but to some extent relieved. The look of an innocent man who has found someone to believe him?

      “Time to cut down on the sauce, perhaps?” Rossi ventured,

Скачать книгу