The Disappearance of Signora Giulia by Piero Chiara Read Free Book Online Page B

shadow. He followed it as it appeared and disappeared in the moonlight, until it was lost to sight completely in the bushes in the middle of the park. Not long afterwards he heard the sound of the magnolia’s dry leaves in front of the greenhouse. And a quarter of an hour later he saw the shadow again: it stopped in the middle of the path, farther away, and seemed to him to pause there, turned towards the balcony. For a moment he felt as if he were meeting its gaze – the gaze of a man standing down below between the pine and the roundish mass of beech. It headed towards the palazzo like a death ray, making for the balcony and its white curtains, skimmed earlier by the moon, behind which the young newlyweds would be sleeping.
    Sciancalepre slowly took his binoculars from his pocket and crouched down by the railing to look through them. Fumagalli also crouched down, because the rising moon had begun to illuminate the façade of the palazzo.
     
    Back inside, they went to sit next to a lamp in a room on the ground floor, taking the bottle of cognac along with them.
    ‘So did you see that it wasn’t an optical illusion?’
    ‘I did – and I’d say that in my view your nightly visitor issomeone we know well, a rather tall man with a dark overcoat and a black cap…’
    ‘My father-in-law,’ Carlo concluded, his voice low.
    ‘The same. And I ask myself what he’s doing here in the grounds at night.’
    ‘Maybe he comes out of nostalgia for this place he lived in for so many years,’ said Fumagalli. ‘Unless he’s drawn here for other reasons…’
    ‘He’s had enough time in three years to walk around the park,’ said Sciancalepre. ‘If he’s come back, it’s for a reason. Tomorrow morning we’ll take a closer look.’
     
    Early next morning, Fumagalli and the Commissario went into the gardens. They started by visiting the greenhouse, where Demetrio was preparing to put the azaleas and lemon trees for the winter, and continued into the grounds. They found no sign of footprints on the worn dirt paths, nor did the areas around the gate or the old coach house reveal anything suspicious.
    In the coach house, the key was still in its place, covered with spiderwebs. They took their time examining the gate, conscious that if it had been opened, it would have left a semicircular track on the ground. They walked along the walls at the property boundary and reached the gate, where a wooden door opened onto the street from between two flaking pillars. Neither one of them had previously noticed this door, but they were sure that no one could have used it, because the lock was fixed on the inside by a wooden stick that fitted through two joints in the wall. There were no possibilities left apart from the hypothesis that someone had climbed over thegate or one of the park’s two boundary walls at the sides. In the latter case, the nighttime visitor would have had to come through one of the two adjacent villas.
    While Sciancalepre studied the ground like an old Sioux, Fumagalli looked over the coach house, which was near collapse. It was evidently a place where two or three horses and a couple of carriages had been kept some fifty years ago. On the top floor were two rooms, now missing their shutters, where the coachman had perhaps once lived.
    Fumagalli saw that with just a few modifications, the building could be used as a garage for his car. It wanted only a rolling shutter in place of the fence, which had itself perhaps replaced an old door. A circular courtyard, now grassed over, opened out in front of the coach house, and was divided down the centre by a path that began at the gate and went as far as the middle of the park. There, it became two smaller paths in the form of a semicircle that joined up at the grotto created in the hollow at the base of the double staircase.
    He could see in a glance how little work was necessary to complete the project; he’d also resurface the path between gate and courtyard with