The Salati Case Read Online Free PDF

brought me into the centre of a picturesque village. There was a church on one side of a small square with long steps leading down towards the fountain in the middle. There was a bar on the other side of the square, and a shop. A bit further away I could see a building with an Italian flag flying next to the European one.
    There was no one around. The shop and the bar and what must have been the village hall were all closed. I got out of the car and looked down all the roads that led away from the square. They didn’t offer much. There was one old woman in black who was shouting for some animal or child to come indoors. In the other direction there was a man pushing a bicycle away.
    I went down one of the side streets with a row of small cottages, ancient peasant houses that were shut up against the cold. The street was asphalted but there were cracks across it. I nodded a
buongiorno
at a man who was peeling potatoes over a hedge into a field of pigs.
    ‘Know where the Salati house is?’
    ‘Sure.’ He pointed at a house where there was a cluster of shiny cars. I could see someone carrying in a tray of food. ‘The end of this road,’ he barked, pointing, ‘the last house before the orchard. It’s the one on the right where all the mourners are.’
    I walked down, trying to bounce my ankle into life.
    On the left was a woman in gardening gear. ‘That the Salati house?’ I said to her.
    The woman nodded.
    ‘You live here?’
    She nodded again.
    ‘I’m a private detective, Signora.’ I let the news sink in. ‘I’ve been employed by the executors of Signora Salati’s will to verify the legal status of Riccardo Salati. Have you lived here long?’
    ‘This is where I’ve been since I was born,’ she said proudly. She pointed across the road to the house opposite. ‘That’s Silvia’s house, the red one. She moved in the day she got married.’
    ‘Could we take a look?’
    ‘Not much to see. And now’s not exactly a good time.’
    I could see the orchard’s twisted branches to the side of the Salati house. Beyond the fruit trees were vines, their thin, bare arms wrapped around long lines of wire.
    ‘Are they going to sell it?’ I asked.
    ‘I expect so. Umberto has no interest in returning here.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because he’s part of the provincial jet-set. Sissa isn’t Portofino.’
    ‘I prefer Sissa,’ I said.
    ‘It’s a good village,’ the woman said, staring at me. ‘We’re close knit here, and some people think that’s bad. But we look after ourselves, we care for each other.’
    ‘Including Riccardo?’ I asked.
    She looked at me and nodded slowly. She started talking about how her friend had continued her dignified battle for justice for her boy.
    ‘I’m trying to work out what might have happened to him,’ I said. ‘I get the impression that he was unreliable …’ I trailed off, hoping she would pick up the story, but she was pulling up a weed that had sprouted in the window frame of her house.
    ‘He would leave on a whim,’ she said eventually, ‘or show up on another. You never knew where he was going to be from one minute to the next. He was often away all summer working in the hotels in Rimini. Then, out of the blue, I would be woken up by him shouting to his mother in the middle of the night, asking her to open up. No warning. There was no warning to anything he did, except when he went missing. That was the one thing which, looking back, might have been expected.’
    ‘How come?’
    ‘Just the way he lived. Like I say, he would be here one minute, gone the next. He was a wanderer without roots, and sometimes those kind of people just’, she had the weed in her hands and was looking at it, ‘don’t come home.’
    ‘Did he have many friends here?’
    ‘I wouldn’t say that. But he wasn’t disliked. And he certainly didn’t have any enemies.’ She looked over to the house opposite. ‘But ever since he moved out east we all lost touch with him.’
    ‘And who