The Brewer of Preston by Andrea Camilleri

Author:Andrea Camilleri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

“I’m going to call Catalanotti now and have him take you home,” said Puglisi. “And you, meanwhile, straighten yourself out.”

Agatina, after what had happened between them—biting and scratching and falling off the table and onto the floor as they kept on fucking—appeared a little calmer.

“All right,” she said.

Puglisi went out on the landing and called the man he had posted as guard. Catalanotti arrived in a flash, consumed by curiosity as to what might have happened since his superior, and later the woman, had gone upstairs. As soon as he saw the two corpses, he turned pale. The color of their faces and hands upset him; they looked fake, like puppets.

“Oh, shit!”

Then he looked in the kitchen and saw Agatina leaning on the table, with her head in her folded arms.

“I don’t know yet who the young man is,” Puglisi explained calmly. “He tried to save the widow but died of smoke inhalation.”

“Poor things! Poor things, both of them!” Catalanotti cried out in sympathy for the dead, while not failing, in the meantime, to examine the scene with his eyes, like the good cop that he was. There was something about it that didn’t convince him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Yes,” said Puglisi. “He was a brave lad, but unlucky. He laid a board down between the mound of salt out back and the house, climbed up, and broke the window to come inside—”

“Stop right there,” Catalanotti enjoined him in a soft voice.

“Why?” the constable asked, surprised.

“Because all the window panes are intact, and if they’re intact, he couldn’t have entered the room unless the woman opened the window from the inside.”

Puglisi felt like a child caught telling a lie. If not for what he had just done with Agatina, he would never have let himself be hoisted with his own petard like a novice.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said, embarrassed. “So how do you explain it?”

“No doubt about it,” said Catalanotti. “Here’s how I explain it.”

He took four paces, sidestepping the dead man, went up to the French door, opened both sides, and went out onto the balcony under a driving rain, a real deluge. He took a red-and-white-checked handkerchief out of his pocket, wrapped this around his right hand, punched his fist through the pane closest to the handle, making sure that all the shards landed inside, then went back into the room.

“You can continue now, sir,” he said sarcastically. “Now your argument makes perfect sense.”

Puglisi didn’t have time to resume speaking before Catalanotti, already thinking about something else and frowning darkly, went back outside onto the balcony and stared fixedly at a point in the mound of salt.

“What is it?” asked Puglisi, himself going outside into the heavy downpour.

“Over there,” said Catalanotti, pointing towards a spot halfway up the mound. “There. I first saw it out of the corner of my eye and didn’t pay any attention. Then it came back to me. Look.”

Puglisi looked towards the spot the other was indicating to him with his outstretched arm.

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