The Marshal and the Madwoman by Magdalen Nabb Read Free Book Online Page A

he found her slippers under the bed, too. She'd probably been asleep when it happened then, and that housedress with no buttons was her nightdress which would account for her appearing at the window in it at siesta-time that day last week. Still, she must have had a summer dress. Hadn't his wife said so, and that she wore it every day? So where was it? There was only one place it could be, and yet the scaffolding . . . He went to the window and looked out. It was there all right, tied on to the scaffolding itself, washed and dried, hanging there in the lamplight. The scaffolding had prevented her from using the washing-line on a pulley below her window, and from seeing out properly too. Had she been the one to pull away the netting that should have covered all of it? Perhaps not, since the planks hadn't been laid at that level, only lower down. A funny way of doing a job to half finish it and leave it there all August.
    He leaned out and retrieved the dress. The lights were on in the flats of the house opposite and he could hear a television from an open window. He heard a voice calling up from the street below in the hot, lamplit night.
    'Martha!'
    'What is it?'
    'I'm going to Franco's if you want some cigarettes.'
    'Get me two packets, then, will you?'
    'How is she?'
    'No different. I can't leave her. If only it weren't for this heat. . .'
    The Marshal withdrew and closed the window. He looked at the flowered frock. All she had. And one egg and a slice of sausage in the fridge. If the evidence weren't against it, it would be easy enough to believe she'd committed suicide, though there were people in even worse condition, ill and in terrible pain, ill-nourished, lonely, and still they hung on to life at all costs. Besides which, there was no forgetting the day of his black eye, and Clementina as he had seen her outside the bar afterwards, noisy and bumptious, threatening all comers with her sweeping brush. Crazy she may have been, but she was full of life even if she did only have one frock that she washed and hung out every night. What the devil did she live on, anyway ... a pension most likely. He returned to the kitchen, stood in the middle of it, looking about him and then looked behind the bit of curtain again. At the back of one of the shelves, in such a gloomy corner that he hadn't seen it before, was a biscuit tin. He sat down at the table and opened it. He found a thousand-lire note and a few coins. There was no pension book and no rent book either, but at least there was her identity card.
    Anna Clementina Franci, born 14 May 1934 in Florence. Citizenship: Italian. Residence: Florence. Civil Status: widow Chiari . Profession: none.
    The Marshal was surprised that she was only in her fifties.
    There was nothing else in the tin. The absence of a pension book was disturbing since it might mean she had another hiding-place that he hadn't managed to find. The lack of a rent book was less odd, though he very much doubted that the house was hers. There was such a desperate housing shortage in the city that thousands of people had rented houses with no contract or rent book, often at exorbitant rates. Whoever had a house to rent could call the tune, and even those who offered contracts often expected a bribe each time they were renewed. Not that crazy Clementina was a likely customer for that sort of landlord . . . unless it was true that she had cash hidden away, in which case someone who knew about it. . .
    'Well, I'm not convinced,' said the Marshal aloud in the silence of the gloomy kitchen.
    No, the rent book wasn't worrying him but something else was. Something else was missing. There might be another tin somewhere, or a drawer. He got up to check. Every house had a drawer where things accumulated. In poor houses it was always in the kitchen, in richer households it might be in the entrance hall. It was where you went to look when you needed a bit of string for a parcel— though you never found the scissors that