The Marshal's Own Case Read Online Free

was thinking you might . . .’
    ‘If she thinks he’s inside I can find that out, but if she wants to report him missing she must do it down there.’
    ‘I told her that.’
    ‘You did?’
    ‘The thing is that when he went home last Christmas he was in plaster. It seems he was in a car accident and broke three ribs. Since then she hasn’t seen him. He wrote once or twice and sent a bit of money but she was expecting him home for the summer holidays and he didn’t turn up. Well, what if he’s ill? He might be in need of help.’
    ‘She didn’t give him much when he lived at home by all accounts. It’s more likely she needs his money and he’s stopped sending it.’
    ‘She is his mother, Salva.’
    ‘All right, all right. I’ll check the prison and the hospitals. But if he’s decided he wants nothing more to do with his family, he’s over eighteen and there’s nothing I can do about it—why hasn’t he been called up, anyway?’
    ‘I don’t know, but it may well be he was rejected. He was always frail and his chest wasn’t too good. You will do what you can?’
    ‘I’ve said I will.’
    ‘After all, if he works in a bar . . .’
    ‘I can’t be going round every bar in Florence.’
    ‘Of course you can’t, no. It’s just that I can’t help thinking . . .’
    ‘Thinking what?’
    ‘If it were one of our boys. Just vanishing like that in another city, how we’d feel . . .’
    ‘All right,’ he said more kindly, ‘I’ll see what I can find out.’
    ‘Perhaps I should have waited until tomorrow to ask you. You’ve had a long day and one lost child’s enough to be going on with. I must say it made me wish we had a little girl—though I should say she was a bit of a handful. Her mother didn’t seem to be able to cope with her at all. “Fat right up to the sky”!’
    ‘What?’
    ‘That was how she described you.’
    ‘Hmph.’
    ‘Such pretty hair.’
    ‘She wasn’t the first today either. Lost children, I mean. I had a woman in looking for her forty-five-year-old son. Unpleasant sort, too. If her son’s anything like her . . . Still . . .’ He got up and turned up the sound again, ready for the late news. ‘Takes all sorts to make a world . . .’
    It was about to be brought home to him just how true that was.

Two
    H e was standing with his back to a low stone wall gazing down at the scene before him. The grassy slope, littered with illegally dumped rubbish, ended where an olive grove began and, far below that, the jumbled red roofs of the city spread along the Arno valley with the dome and bell-tower of the cathedral rising in the centre. A blood-red autumn sunset was reflected in glimpses of the river. Had he taken his dark glasses off the sky would have appeared pinker and less ominous, but the Marshal never did take his glasses off until the sun went down because sunlight made his eyes water copiously. So he stood there, a large black figure in a sea of green, watching. He was hungry, but what Bruno had found he had found just before lunch and they would be lucky if they discovered the rest of it before supper.
    Bruno himself, unlike the Marshal, was never still for a moment. He darted from the orange-and-green clad group of municipal refuse workers to the line of dog-handlers working their way down the slope, then back again, talking and gesticulating. Lorenzini, who had been on patrol with him, had disappeared. Perhaps he was up on the road behind the wall where the ambulance was waiting and the Public Prosecutor was talking quietly to the doctor. The Marshal could hear their voices on the calm evening air. If any spectators were still hanging around they were as silent as the Marshal. Once or twice he glanced down at the contents of two polythene bags lying on a rubber sheet beside him and then his gaze would drift again to the city below. He reckoned he must be almost directly behind his office in the Pitti. A part of the palace was visible through the trees of the Boboli