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“Do you have any idea who it is?” I asked.
“None. I’m hoping the forensic team can help us on that.”
“I bumped into one of them outside. She left to get her gear.”
“Great, I didn’t know they were already here.”
“What have we got?”
“Not a lot. According to Mrs. Barale, she was taking a nap when the shot was fired. Her nephew Bruno Santoni was supposed to be having a coffee with one of his friends, but she was asleep when he arrived. It was a woman who sounded the alert and who, according to the first people on the scene, said she saw Santoni in the kitchen, gun in hand, before escaping. She’s a student who lives in the guesthouse out back, but she’d come into the kitchen to ask Mrs. Barale if she could borrow some milk for her cereal. She heard the gunshot as she walked through the door.”
“Let me guess, she was eating little chocolate bears?”
“Yeah, she dropped the bowl when she found the body.”
“Fair enough,” I mumbled before asking, “Where is she now? If she saw our guy, I’d like to talk to her.”
“She’s being kept in one of the rooms upstairs. We wanted to interrogate the two women separately so they couldn’t influence each other’s story. I have an officer outside the room.”
“What about the old woman? What did she tell you?”
He sighed. “Nothing interesting. Of course her great-nephew is a saint. He comes here two or three times a week, does the shopping, sometimes takes her out to a restaurant on Sundays. He’s very polite, and it’s completely impossible that he shot the man in the kitchen.”
“So, just like normal,” I said.
The families of the worst criminals always had the nicest things to say about them. They were well-behaved, obviously serious, honest, and fine, clean-cut guys. My own mother wouldn’t speak about me so highly. I had no doubt that she thought highly of us, her five children, but if someone came to interrogate her, the first things she would tell the investigators would be questionable anecdotes from when we were teenagers or how difficult it was to raise four boys so close in age. Then she would go on about the fact that I didn’t call often enough, which made me ungrateful that she’d spoiled me too much.
“She admitted she sometimes has friends over, but says it’s because he likes to enjoy the garden,” said Adam.
“A group of nature lovers. Why don’t they join a gardening club while they’re at it?” I asked sarcastically. “Well, she’s not going to tell us. Shall we go talk to the girl together?”
“It’d be my pleasure.”
We climbed up the narrow staircase. There was a uniformed policeman standing on the landing who nodded at me.
“What’s she doing?” Adam asked.
“No idea. I closed the door, and she hasn’t tried to escape,” the police officer told us.
Adam knocked on the wooden door, but there was no response. We exchanged a look, and he knocked again.
Still nothing.
“Robin? It’s Lieutenant Leonard, can I come in?”
Silence.
Adam shrugged and then tried to turn the handle. It was locked.
He lost his patience and knocked a little more forcefully. “Robin? Open up, please.”
My colleague and brother-in-law started to panic a bit. Had she collapsed? Was she in shock? The policeman on duty went to fetch a screwdriver, and I got the knob off in no time.
We quickly ran into a problem. Our witness had disappeared.
Exactly how she did it was pretty clear from the open window. By looking out of it, it was easy to see that you didn’t need to be an accomplished acrobat to get out onto the roof of the little covered walkway in the garden below and then to slide down into the garden on one of the pillars.
“What did you say her name was?”
