WEDNESDAY EVENING
I got home at six and found that Tricia and Shaun had already returned from another gruelling day of sightseeing in the heat. All the way back in the van, I had been turning over in my head the different potential scenarios and possible suspects in this increasingly perplexing case. Now, as I pulled up on the gravel outside my home, I did my very best to banish all thoughts of murder from my head. I went in, changed into shorts and a T-shirt, and decided that the temperature had dropped enough for me to be able to give Oscar a decent walk. I still had a lingering feeling of guilt at having suspected Shaun – however briefly – of murder, so I asked him if he felt like walking down to Montevolpone with me for a beer.
He did.
As we walked, with Oscar happily retrieving sticks and pine cones all the way down the track between the cypress trees, we chatted. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t even ask Shaun about his experiences in the army but, as it happened, he brought the subject up himself.
‘Dan, would I be right in thinking that you’ve been involved with investigating the murder of a man called Tristan Angel?’
I did my best to avoid looking surprised as I answered. ‘Yes, but I didn’t realise it was public knowledge yet.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s not. I heard it on the Guards grapevine. You’d be amazed how quickly news travels, not necessarily through official channels. When I first started out as a very junior officer in the Grenadier Guards, Major Angel was in charge of our company. That’s how I knew him. I got a text message this afternoon from a friend who’s still in the regiment. He told me they say Angel was murdered right here in the duomo.’ Shaun didn’t reveal who ‘they’ were, but I had a feeling Jane Taylor-Mead’s boyfriend might well have been the source of the information.
The first thing that crossed my mind was the uncomfortable fact that, without Oscar’s discovery of the armoury and our realisation that the missing murder weapon had almost certainly been taken from the villa, to which Shaun had no access, I would have now found myself in the invidious position of having to suspect my future son-in-law of murder. The second thing to cross my mind, because I’m a detective – and this is what detectives do – was to consider the remote, but feasible, possibility that he might still have had some involvement in the murder with the assistance of somebody inside the villa. As a result, I decided to ignore my resolve not to talk shop, but to be careful what I said, at least for now. This seemed like too good an opportunity to miss to find out more about Angel and his fellow soldiers.
I picked up a particularly gnarly piece of vine root and lobbed it down the hill for Oscar before replying. ‘You probably know that Angel went on to become CEO of one of the most important arms supply companies in Britain, if not the world.I’ve been learning a lot about him over the past twenty-four hours, but if there’s anything you can tell me about him that might be helpful in tracking down his killer, I’m sure Virgilio and I would be only too pleased. What was he like?’
Shaun had no hesitation. ‘He was a good guy. He was fair, he was a hands-on sort of officer, and, above all, he wasn’t a Hooray Henry.’ He looked across at me and grinned. ‘As you can probably imagine, you get a lot of the upper crust in the Guards regiments.’
Here was another man who spoke well of Tristan Angel. There had clearly been two sides to the man. Although I had been building up a picture of him as a callous womaniser who had chosen an unscrupulous profession, there had been more to him than that. ‘Did he see action?’
‘He certainly did. Those were the Afghanistan years. He was awarded the Military Cross and, from what my NCOs told me, he deserved it. I did two tours to Afghanistan before UK troops were pulled out, and it was hard going, not knowing where the next IED, the next ambush, would come from. Angel was a hero all right. He just had one Achilles’ heel, and that was women.’
This sounded familiar, but I decided to sound ignorant. ‘But surely he was married, wasn’t he?’
‘They used to say in the regiment that Angel was married from the waist upwards. I think that was the biggest problem for him in Afghanistan. It wasn’t the Taliban; it was the lack of women. I’m sure if he had been able to keep it in his trousers, he’d have moved right up to the senior ranks, but there were all sorts of rumours of scandals, one involving a colonel’s daughter, and it all came to a head when a fellow officer, a woman called Barnard, Captain Liz Barnard, accused him of sexual assault. It was all hushed up, but it was pretty clear to us that he was given the choice of leaving the regiment quietly, oralmost certainly facing court martial. Like I say, that was his one big weakness.’
As I listened to Shaun, it was eminently clear that he had had considerable respect for Tristan Angel, and this made the possibility of his involvement in Angel’s murder even less likely, but I still resolved to tread carefully.
By this time, we had reached the outskirts of the little town of Montevolpone, and we made our way through the narrow streets to the bar in the piazza outside the old church. We sat down at a table in the shade of a sun-scorched umbrella that had once advertised Cinzano Bianco. Now the lettering was so faded, it was barely possible to make out more than a few faint letters on what had started life as a red and blue background. Tommaso, the affable proprietor, came out through the fly curtain when he spotted us, and I introduced him to Shaun and ordered two beers. When Tommaso returned with the beers and some nibbles, he was followed by his wife, Monica, bearing a bowl of water and a couple of wafer biscuits for Oscar. She, too, knows the way to my Labrador’s heart.
The two of them stopped to chat and, as ever, we discussed the prospects for next month’s grape harvest. In the Chianti region, thevendemmiais just about the most important event of the year, eclipsing most weddings and funerals. Fortunately, this summer hadn’t been as dry as last, and the signs were looking promising for a good harvest and excellent wine as a result.
After they had gone off, Shaun and I chatted some more, and I took the opportunity to ask him if he’d ever come across an officer named Donald Hicks. It was immediately apparent that the name wasn’t new to him, but I was interested to see a downturn to his lips before he replied.
‘Captain Hicks wasn’t in my company, thankfully. He was in B company, and that suited me fine.’
‘Why was that? Was he incompetent?’
‘Not at all. As far as I could tell, he was a good officer and he performed well on active service. The problem was that he was a cheat.’
‘What, at cards and that sort of thing?’
‘At everything. I once played golf with him and two other officers, and Hicks won virtually every hole. On the very first hole, it appeared amazing good luck when he sliced his drive off the tee and his ball ploughed into the woods, only for him to find it out on the fairway in a perfect lie. We assumed that it must have magically rebounded off a tree back onto the course, but as the game went on, that sort of thing kept on happening, and by the end, none of us had any doubts that he’d been cheating.’
‘Were you playing for money?’
‘He only ever played for money, but at least with me that day, it wasn’t for a great deal. I learnt my lesson, and I never played with him again, but I know people who lost hundreds, maybe even thousands, to him at golf, poker, even croquet.’
‘Well, well.’ I filed this information away. If Hicks had been an inveterate cheat, might he have been trying to cheat the company? Had Angel found out, and this had forced Hicks to take pre-emptive action to kill his boss, only to be murdered in revenge by one of the others loyal to Angel – like Eddie the Beagle, for example?
I decided to see if Shaun had come across any of the other TXA men and I started by asking if he knew of a Colonel Archer. The answer was no, and the same applied when I mentioned the others. As a result, I had to conclude that it looked likely that Diana Dini’s idea that the murders might have been sparked by events that had happened thirteen or more years ago was probably a non-starter – although the news that Hicks had gained a reputation as a cheat might still prove important.
As far as any possible culpability on the part of Shaun was concerned, although he had been at the scene of the crime around the time of the murder, he had clearly admired and liked the first victim, making it less likely – but not impossible – that he had been involved. Ironically, he had clearly disliked the second victim but, for that murder, there was no way he could have been involved because it had taken place at the villa. On balance, it was looking more and more likely that my future son-in-law was neither a murderer nor involved in murder, but I couldn’t entirely write him off as a suspect for now, and this made me feel awkward, to say the least.
We had just finished our beers and were trying to decide whether we should head back up the hill to home, or stay here and have another, when my phone started ringing. I had a feeling this might be Anna telling me to get home in a hurry because she needed my help, but I was wrong. It was Billy Nelson, calling from Rome.
‘Hi, Dan, great to see you today and thanks a lot for lunch. The next one’s on me. I’ve been doing a bit of digging to see if I could unearth anything more than the obvious on any of the TXA people, and I thought I’d found nothing. But then a chance conversation with one of the consular staff here threw up a little snippet that might be significant.’
