The Disappearance of Signora Giulia Read Online Free PDF Page B

in case he was needed. He recorded the deposition with great precision and then, with these few papers, he disappointedly turned back the way he had come earlier with so much hope.
    Now, he said to himself as the train crossed the Apennines, Signora Giulia seems almost like a ghost. If she didn’t go after Barsanti, she didn’t go after anyone else. And she definitely didn’t throw herself into the lake. She would have left a letter. And one doesn’t take two suitcases on a suicide mission… At this stage, he thought, I’m going to scratch out the word ‘fled’ and write ‘disappeared’ on her file.
     
    The following morning he went to see Esengrini.
    ‘Wrong track. No trace of Signora Giulia. Barsanti was there, but with someone else. Get this: the wife of an MP! You can take comfort in that.’
    The Commissario recounted for Esengrini every last detail of the expedition, and when he got to the bit about the letter, he asked him, ‘So you never heard his name, this Barsanti, before I spoke of him to you?’
    ‘Never.’
    ‘And yet,’ the Commissario continued, ‘you wrote him a letter. He told me himself. Unless he dreamt it!’
    ‘Impossible! It’s not true!’
     
    After this meeting, which ended a bit frostily, Sciancalepre realized that his investigation into Signora Giulia’s disappearance would have to go down another path – and that Esengrini would not be as cooperative as he had been thus far.
    He started by issuing a search warrant in a different tone from the first one. Then he called the gardener, Demetrio Foletti. He ascertained that Foletti knew nothing about the postal services his wife had provided for Signora Giulia and, in an effort to get to grips with the atmosphere in the Esengrini household, he got him to talk at length. But he just had repeated to him things he already knew.
    Foletti was a man of about forty, exceedingly loyal to his employers. He’d always been the gardener at the villa, starting when Signora Giulia’s parents were still alive. After their death, around ten years ago, he’d begun to make himself useful, during his free time, in the lawyer’s office. Fascinated as he was by legal matters, he became something of an office employee. He went on various errands, took phone calls when the typist was busy, welcomed clients, and now and then managed to give his legal views to some who, seeing him amongst all the codes and official forms, considered him to have a smattering of legal knowledge or at least the rudiments of its practice. He moved from garden to office, gradually neglecting the grounds with which neither the lawyer nor his wife could be bothered, and applied himself with better results to the more impressiveresponsibilities of clerk and trusted employee. It was therefore he who knew most about the lawyer’s family relationships, after his wife, Teresa, who’d acted as cook and housekeeper.
    There was someone else at the Esengrini’s house fairly often, a young girl called Anna who did the washing and other heavy work. But Sciancalepre learnt little from her. He got much more from Foletti, in whose opinion Signora Giulia was a saint and the lawyer a great man. All the same, it had seemed to him that their marriage had been cold and distant. The lawyer was gruff and didn’t know how to be affectionate, while Signora Giulia, who’d lost her mother at fifteen, was a romantic who craved affection and understanding. There’d never been any scenes between them, just long silences.
    The Commissario learnt from Foletti that the palazzo Zaccagni-Lamberti, as he called it, was an old property in Signora Giulia’s family, and that at his death ten years earlier her father had left the house and grounds to his young granddaughter, Emilia.
     
    The Esengrini Affair, covered at length by all the papers, had run into the ground. The Commissario was intrigued by the somewhat romanticized version of the story published by an illustrated magazine. The journalist