"You English," Nuzzo began, chomping now into the cone of his ice cream. "You like making a bet, si? The horses. The dogs. What colour dress the Queen Elisabetta will wear tomorrow."
Though not true personally, as a generalisation it was a valid one perhaps.
"So let's make a bet. You tell me where he is. Lee Bracewell."
I smiled: the million dollar question.
"Somewhere in England I should think," I answered.
It was unlikely that any of the handful of foreign suppliers and business acquaintances included in the contacts list which the Nottinghamshire investigators had drawn up would be prepared to risk prison time harbouring a suspected murderer. There was an old school friend who'd emigrated to Australia a couple of years earlier, but with only three or four hundred euros in Bracewell's pocket a flight to the antipodes was out of the question.
It was enough to get him home though perhaps. Buses, trains, a foot passenger ticket on a ferry. There were so many ports of entry, the south and east coasts. Sailings from France, Holland, even Scandinavia. Either that or a Eurostar through the Channel Tunnel. Tight, yes - he would have needed to manage his meagre finances carefully. But possible, distinctly so.
Beside me, Nuzzo was nodding. "Inghilterra, si. Why else did he come back for the passport?"
Unlike the Schengen area of mainland Europe, a traveller still required a valid photo ID to cross the UK border of course. Bracewell's passport was due to be renewed the following year - an older type therefore, before the Passport Agency had introduced electronic chips. Thanks in part to his wife's subterfuge, for the first forty-eight hours nobody was looking for him, his face not yet flagged up on border guards' computer screens.
*Home*, yes. Almost without question, he'd returned home.
"He'll be holed up somewhere," I commented. "Right there in his hometown of Nottingham maybe." It was difficult to imagine what sort of life awaited him - the constant looking over his shoulders, that dreadful, haunting image each time he closed his eyes.
I licked at my ice-cream; more of it was on my hands by this point than left in the cone. Glanced then across at the comandante. "The circles he mixes in, it shouldn't be too difficult to get hold of fake passport eventually. Move on, somewhere the other side of the world."
"The type of people who buy the guns,' Nuzzo murmured, the tip of his cone disappearing into mouth. He reached into pocket, pulled out a packet of paper tissues.
"Quite an arsenal," I reflected, gratefully accepting one.
Though changing little in regard to the fundamentals of the case, the discovery of the pile of firearms in Bracewell's lock up had helped explain his bloated bank balance at least. Not the mid-level drug pusher Diane and I had suspected, but instead the main hardware supplier to Nottingham's army of trigger-happy gangsters.
And there was something else too: perhaps it also explained his moment of tragic, white-hot violence that night. What if Sean had found out somehow, the alcohol emboldening him, loosening his tongue. A confrontation, a threat to inform. Or maybe Lee had discovered that Sean knew at some point earlier during that tragic weekend, this accounting for the distant frown in the photograph, the distractedness reported both by Sarah and the waitress in the Vecchia Napoli pizzeria. In the car on the way to the cigarette machine, things had come to a head perhaps, Lee too himself under the grip of the booze. There in his hand had been the bottle of Glenfiddich...
"Pronto. Sono Nuzzo."
The commander's mobile had rung, his head nodding as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. I took the opportunity to gulp down the rest of my ice-cream, wipe the worst of the stickiness from my hands.
"Capisco...va bene...grazie." Repocketing his phone, he glanced across at me. "News from Brindisi. A man who has just returned from the holiday has found his car isn't there on the street. A Fiat Panda, not far from where we found the Peugot."
"You think Bracewell might have stolen a car?"
"It's possible, no? It would explain why no-one saw him."
They'd had a frustrating time with the local bus scenario, he informed me. Dozens of services, scores of possible small town destinations. Bracewell would have changed his clothes of course, dumped the baseball cap, maybe even had chance to shave off his goatee beard. Those early morning commuter buses, the half-light of dawn, everyone still a little dozy. They often feature mid-side boarding doors: he might not have even had to pass the more wakeful gaze of the driver. Hidden behind a discarded newspaper, nobody would have looked at him twice. And memories fade: two weeks had by now passed.
All this was quite true. Yet even so, it seemed incredible that enquiries had failed to shake anything out. Given the local media bombardment, it was unlikely that there was an adult in the whole of Puglia who wasn't familiar with Bracewell's face. A man simply doesn't disappear into thin air.
"Some of the older models like a Fiat Panda," Nuzzo went on, "all you need to enter is a credit card."
Talk of car crime always put me in mind of the early to mid-nineties. Barely a weekend had gone by without some council estate being terrorised by kids screeching around in a stolen Escort or Astra. Bracewell was more or less of the right age - might well have been a joyrider himself, been on the periphery of some hoodlum little street gang at least, seen how things were done.
Nuzzo swatted out a hand. "But you know, maybe it isn't so important how he escaped. He escaped, full stop." There was a shrug. "Lee Bracewell isn't my concern any more. It's all in the hands of Interpol now."
His gaze swept out along the beach - the curious swooping gulls, the elongated shadows of departing sunbathers. Out over the distant horizon, the first peachy glow of sunset was beginning to emerge.
"No, it's the other Bracewell brother I must find." His words were sighed, world-weary.
During the course of my career I'd been part of three murder cases, the final as chief investigating officer - a grim and bloody affair involving a mother of two with a radiant, photogenic smile. To absorb oneself in something like this - to spend all one's waking hours imagining, hypothesising, poring over the details - it scratches at a man's soul. Invades his dreams.
Reaching into his inside pocket, Nuzzo pulled out a folded sheet of paper.
"We have identified a zone."
The sheet revealed itself as a photocopied map of the local area. To the left the monotone grey of the sea met the jagged border of the coastline. A raggedy concentration of dark grey shadings in the centre meanwhile denoted Punto San Giacomo. Scattered beyond this were the smaller clusters of Pozzetta and other local villages, the intersecting veins of roads. The most easterly of the clusters was cut by the right edge of the sheet: Francavilla Fontana. Two x's had been marked, the first indicating the point on the coast road where the hire car had been captured by the bank surveillance camera in Pozzetta, the passenger seat seemingly occupied; the second was halfway along the the Punto San Giacomo to Francavilla Fontana road where the Peugot had been passed by the paramedics, their testimony that vehicle had been passengerless later reiterated by the factory shift worker, Giacchino Russo. A sort of blob had been cross-hatcheted between the two points, an eastward lean lending it a vaguely triangular form.
"There no are blood stains on the backseat of the Peugot," Nuzzo explained. "We think Bracewell must have left the body somewhere in the dark, come back for the spade." Yes, it was the same scenario I'd been imagining too.
Nuzzo's head was shaking grimly, incredulously. "His brother is too heavy to drag far. So he just leaves him there near the side of the road. Goes back for the spade and his passport. Returns to he same place." A finger jabbed at the map. "We know he didn't return on the coast road and didn't leave again that way. We've calculated maximum distances, the minimum times. We've calculated how long he was in the house. How long it would take to bury a body."
I nodded solemnly.
"And there's one other thing," he continued. "The soil on the spade, the scientifiche say it isn't so sandy. It's soil from some kilometres inland." The map was refolded, returned it to pocket. "We have done all that we can. Made the zone as small as possible." There was a wince. "But still, it's more than forty square kilometres. Hardly the back garden of someone's house."
No, indeed. Forty square kilometres was comparable to the surface area of Guernsey, for example. Even with a crack dog team and a helicoptor equipped with ground-penetrating radar, it was still very much a case of the proverbial needle in the haystack.
"It's worth a try though, don't you think?"
"If you're sure he's there," I responded. "Somewhere in the search zone. Then yes."
He looked across at me, half frowned. "You don't think he is?"
The truth was that I wasn't entirely convinced, no. As a detective you learn to look out for things that don't quite seem to fit, clash somehow with the general backdrop.
"Why didn't he dump the spade?" I asked. "Somewhere away from the burial site. Just toss it into a ditch or amongst the roadside grapevines." The likelihood was, had he done so, it might never have come to light. The fact of its absence from signor Caputo's garden chest would just be circumstantial: we'd have had no way of knowing for sure how he'd disposed of the body. One might still strongly suspect burial perhaps, but as Nuzzo had just illustrated, without knowledge of the soil type the search zone would have been even more extensive.
My question had Nuzzo's hands swooshing, gesticulating. "The man had just killed his brother!" His voice was animated enough to have several nearby heads turn in our direction."'He wasn't thinking so good," he continued, modulating his volume a touch. "A situation like that, nobody would think so good."
Again, I wasn't entirely convinced. I thought Bracewell had been far more lucid than the comandante was giving him credit for. After all, the last known sighting of him remained the council building surveillance footage moments before parking the Peugot in Brindisi. Since then, he'd managed to disappear without trace. Not a bad trick, one which requires a certain clarity of thought.
"The broken whiskey bottle too," I went on. "Even if not in cold blood, even if it was a tragic accident, it's not often that the murder weapon - the presumed murder weapon - is left carelessly lying around like that."
Nuzzo remained silent for some moments, mulling things over. "You know the difference between you and I, ispettore?" he then asked. "You are retired. You can afford to have an imagination. A mind that questions." He thrust a finger to own breastbone. "But I... I am not so lucky. I have capitano Di Trani at provincial command who breaks my balls, says that we have not only the eyes of Italia on us, but those too Inghilterra. You comandante, he always says to me, your job no is not to think. Your job is to follow the signposts."
Then, suddenly, he was wincing himself to his feet, shuffling down the steps. Yet another of his vast legion of relatives was approaching - a chubby, curly-haired woman of around thirty-five with a brood of chubby, curly-haired children in tow.
Follow the signposts, I reflected as he kissed familial cheeks. I just couldn't help wondering if this particular one was pointing the wrong way.
*
Thirty minutes later I was suffering the commander's vocal accompaniment to Sinatra's 'Fly Me to the Moon'. An accompaniment which quickly morphed into a volley of groans and curses at the vineyard as he turned left onto the dirt-track, the car jolting as if caught in the midst of an earthquake, the rosary beads draped from the rear view mirror rattling against the glass.
"Gesu, Maria and all the saints! You haven't though of putting tarmac on this damn road?"
Exiting the vehicle at the top of the slope, he spent several moments with both hands on lower back, spine curved, face parallel to the sky. Eyes screwed shut, he waited for the pain to subside. Finally straightening himself, he hobbled towards a nearby vine.
"What you have you got here? Primitivo di Manduria?"
"Negramaro" I called in reply.
He nodded. "I see from the colour." Negramaro, black bitter. As the name suggests, it is the darkest of all the Apulian grapes. "You mind if I...?" A hand reached out towards a bunch.
"No, go ahead."
He pinched off a small handful, threw one into his mouth. "I am no expert," he concluded, his jaw rolling. "But my father-in-law, he had some vines. Not so many like you, but enough to make some money from the wine cooperative."
There came a moist thwack of a spit-out pip.
"Ask me, they are ready ispettore. Time to roll up the sleeves. It's harvest time."