When the alarm clock shrilled the next morning I resisted the temptation of reaching for the snooze button as I had in previous days. Threw the bedsheet back instead, shot bolt upright.
In a strange kind of way, the previous evening's conversation with Diane had acted as a tonic. Even though my advances had been definitively spurned - put on a dissatisfying purgatorial hold at least - it had been good to have someone to talk with, all the same. A confidante to offload to. I was feeling lighter, yes; more energised than I had done in quite a while. I'd had enough of wallowing in self pity, I decided. Of drinking far too much, feeling listless. What would my father have said? Life doesnt stop till it stops. Nothing you can do but get on with it lad. Something like that. Something blunt and northern and irrefutable.
After scrambling some eggs and tossing back a pot of coffee, I headed straight out for the vines. There's something about repetitive manual labour - grasp bunch, inspect, spray, duck under branches, grasp next bunch - something about being submersed in the green wonder of nature, which helps concentrate a man's mind.
Money was tight, there was no getting away from it, but maybe there were things I could do. Sell directly from the vineyard for one, the wine tapped directly into the buyer's own container. Enough traffic passed by below on the coast road. The advertising sign would have to be a rough-and-ready homemade affair, but that was much less of a problem than the offputting state of the access road up the hill. I wondered how much it would cost to run a wire from entrance up to bungalow, install some kind of rudimentary intercom system. Much more than a man as heavily in debt as I could afford, without doubt; like so many others things, it was modernisation which would just have to wait for now.
But yes: on-site sales. Even at less than cost price, a little immediate cashflow might just help keep my head above turbulent financial waters. If the worst came to the worst I could always sell the van - bought new less than two years earlier - swap it for an older model. I'd get by, I told myself. By hook or by crook, somehow I'd make it through.
Thus heartened, I found my thoughts drifting from here and now to the more distant and fanciful. What would it be like, I wondered, should Diane really come out to live with me at some future point? The pair of us brown and wrinkled from the sun, two wizened walnuts growing old together. Lazy summer days with towels stretched out on the rocks, the shadows of passing gulls skipping over our faces, the mist of the crashing spray rhythmically cooling our skin. Trips to the fish stall near the harbour to choose something for lunch: squid, baby octopus, mussels so fresh they spit at you. Ice-cream-licking strolls along the prom, evenings out in the bars and pizzerias. And during those frenzied little periods which punctuate a winemaker's year - springtime spraying, autumn harvest - she'd be right there beside. Bending her back, getting stuck in. The satisfying clack of cold ones tapped together at the end of a long day, the golden evening twilight playing through her hair. And at night, her warm, deeply breathing body would be beside me, the three dimensions of her bound tight in my arms...
But these were dangerous thoughts, I knew. As dastardly as a desert mirage. Best left unimagined, ignored.
*
As I munched at my lunchtime panino - today washed down by nothing stronger than water - I switched on the regional news. It was a sad-eyed, contrite-looking Nuzzo who gazed out at the assembled journalists, almost as if it were he rather than Lee Bracewell standing accused. The logos on the microphone covers clustered before him now included BBC, ITN and Channel Four. They captured the same phrase I remembered from the day he'd taken me for ice-cream: I followed the signposts. Gone then, replaced by images of a happy, bouncing basset hound. The hero of the hour.
Had it been my case, I wondered a few minutes later as I headed back out into the furnace of the early afternoon, would I have done anything differently? Whilst it was true I hadn't been entirely convinced by the supposed trail Bracewell had left - had been suspicious of the fact that signor Caputo's spade and the broken Glenfiddich bottle had both been left in the hire car - it was also true that I'd never once suspected that his brother's body would have been found so close to the holiday home. And it was true what Nuzzo had said that day, that as a retired police officer I could afford myself the kind of imagination that a serving one couldn't. He or she is obliged only to sift the available evidence, shape it into the most likely or obvious investigative route. Is obliged, in short, to follow the signposts.
Draw up a search zone. Call in the dog team, the specially equipped helicopter. Given the circumstances, I don't think there's a chief investigating officer anywhere in the world who could have acted any differently.
But maybe the pertinent question wasn't so much what I would have done but what I would do now. Just as Nuzzo at that very moment, I suspected: I'd be locked in my office with the contents of the case file spread across my desk. Poring over the details. Playing it all once again through my mind.
Though without access to any case file, as a recently retired DCI I'd retained what I hoped was a pretty decent memory for details. Putting aside for now considerations of whatever the circumstances might have been which had lead to that terrible, blood-misted moment in which Lee Bracewell had caved in a section of his brother's cranium, I concentrated instead on the seconds and minutes which had followed...
He must have sucked down the tears, left them for later. Let the survival instinct kick in. After catching his breath a little he'd snuck through the back gate, opened up signor Caputo's garden chest in search of spade; that a digging implement had been so readily to hand was his first stroke of luck. He didn't bury his brother's body deep, we now knew. Could only have laboured for a frantic five minutes or so; though hidden from the coast road by the dunes, he'd been frightened of being seen, wanted to get the job done as quickly as possible. As soon as the hole was deemed large enough, he'd rolled the corpse over the edge, its lifeless limbs flailing like a rag doll as it had slumped to the bottom. And then followed perhaps the most stomach-turning moment of all. Before filling the hole back in, he'd picked his way through the dunes to the car with Glenfiddich bottle in hand. Doors and windows closed to smother the noise, he'd smashed the bottle against dashboard. Returning then to the hole, he'd thrust the jagged neck section into his brother's stomach, this no doubt causing a sickening squelch as he'd twisted his wrists. Hands then cradled to catch the still-warm drips, he'd once more scampered to car, shaken a bloody spray across the passenger seat. Bottle pieces then tossed into rear, he'd scampered back to the hole, swept the moist, excavated sand inside, his brother slowly disappearing spadeful by spadeful. Disappearing, he must have hoped, forever.
Washing the blood from his hands into the sea, he'd shaken the sand from the spade, tossed this too into the back of the car, gathered some of the bloodied glass shards from the passenger seat into his palm. Now for the riskiest part perhaps: heading back inside to the holiday home. His second stroke of luck was that Sarah by this time had fallen into deep, drunken slumber there on the sofa. Tiptoeing past her, he'd snuck into the bedroom, the bloodied glass shards crushing under sole. Switching on the bedside light, he'd then gently woken his wife. His instructions had been crystal clear: keep schtum, play along with missing persons' scenario for as long as possible. When she got the chance, she was to transfer the crushed glass into the kitchen bin, make sure it would be found. In the meantime, he grabbed whatever money had been in her handbag, a couple of changes of clothes from the suitcase. The passport too of course; maybe this also had been an act of deliberate deceit intended to confuse and mislead. If he had indeed planned to seek harbour with his so recently regained father in Germany, arriving by public transport or stolen car, a travel document wouldn't have been necessary.
There'd been a sad, lingering goodbye no doubt, then off. Back past his slumbering, unsuspecting sister-in-law, out to the hire car. He obviously hadn't accessed the Francavilla Fontana road via Pozzetta or else the bank surveillance camera would have picked him up again. Probably he hadn't been aware of this shorter, more direct route; had gone the way he was familiar with, the reverse of the route he'd taken the previous Thursday from the airport, one which passed through the northernmost outskirts of Punto San Giacomo. That hour of the night, there had been little traffic on the road - just an ambulance and a few minutes later another vehicle, both headed in the opposite direction. At some point, he'd ducked off the main road onto an unlit country lane for a few moments - just enough time to change his clothes, dry shave his goatee beard in the rearview mirror perhaps. Stepping out of the car, he'd then dug the spade into the nearby soil - darker, less sandy than along the coast - tossed it back onto rear seat.
In those stunned moments following the killing of his beloved brother, it was all quite a lot for a man to think up. To carry out. Diane was right: there was something about it which didn't quite convince.
There was a particular phrase from the email Bracewell had later sent to Olivia which had stuck in my mind: not as it seems. At the time it had been read as an indication - perhaps again deliberately misleading - of accidental rather than pre-meditated killing. But now, thinking back to it, I wondered if it had meant much more.
It'd be there in the case file somewhere, I felt sure. There in some dark, cobwebbed corner of the memory. That one vital thing which we'd overlooked, had been buried beneath the weight of everything else.
*
It was as the heat was slowing draining from the day that I noticed it. A sight so terrible as to suck me straight back into a vortex of self pity and despair.
I was in the topmost section of the vineyard, beyond the outbuilding. Right in the midst of it, a zone less regularly checked than the main section further down the slope.
It was the bunch itself I noticed first - some of the grapes oversized, others stunted, little bigger than blueberries. A glance then at the leaves was enough for chilling confirmation: their veins were a vivid poison yellow.
This wasn't just a mild inconvenience like a spot of bunch rot. This was every wine producer's worst nightmare: fanleaf virus. This time the whole yield, my entire business, was on the line.
I called the provincial Ministry of Agriculture office, arranged for an inspection team to come and visit the following morning. Once done, there seemed little else a man could reasonably do other than uncork himself a bottle of wine, sink slowly into the velvet-cushioned surrounds of inebriation.
*
Even in the midst of my highest profile cases as a DCI, I'd never had any problems getting off to sleep. Of course, there was the natural tiredness that hectic fourteen or sixteen-hour shifts brought. More than that though, there was the reassurance that came from a stable job and what I'd fooled myself into believing was a stable marriage. No matter how many wrong investigative decisions I might make, I would still be paid at the end of the month. There would still be a sleep-warm Heather to snuggle up to when I got home late in the evening.
I was on my own now though - completely, soul-crushingly so. Falling fast without any kind of financial safety net to save me. My meagre pension waa barely enough to cover just the first of my two monthly loan repayments.
So no, all things considered, it was of little surprise that sleep just wouldn't come that night. It got to the point that I gave up trying, threw on a t-shirt, stepped outside into the cricket-shrilling Mediterranean night to finish the evening's second bottle of wine.
Not just an alcoholic but an insomniac now too...
Then, like the bite of a surreptitious mosquito, it came to me. There in the midst of all that impenetrable blackness, I suddenly remembered...