The Immaculate Deception by Iain Pears

Author:Iain Pears
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Police Procedural, Police - Italy - Rome, Italy, Mystery & Detective, Police, Married people, Art historians, Di Stefano, Rome, Argyll, Mystery fiction, Women Sleuths, Art thefts, Jonathan (Fictitious character), Traditional British, Rome (Italy), Fiction, Policewomen, General, Flavia (Fictitious character)
ISBN: 9780743272414
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-05-02T14:00:00+00:00

13

The drive to Siena was uneventful, even pleasant. It is very hard to be preoccupied and worried when you have the distractions of Italian traffic constantly threatening to force you off the road if your attention wanders too much. The address she had was for a small village about twenty kilometers to the northeast, but she stopped in the town anyway to have some lunch and also to look at the language school where Elena Fortini, Sabbatini’s former colleague, now worked. Her file said she was half American and half Italian and spoke English fluently. This skill now gained her a living, and a very quiet living it must be, Flavia thought to herself. Anybody who buried herself here must be looking for a quiet life.

This woman had been an artist of a sort back in the 1970s as well, although then she had produced the sort of art which rarely engaged Flavia’s official attention. She had been an ideological soul mate for Sabbatini and reading between the lines of the file Corrado had found for her, Flavia guessed that she had been the brains behind his politics. While she sensed that Sabbatini had been a radical because it was fashionable, this woman had been more serious, her opinions and actions more carefully thought through, even reasonable. Sabbatini had followed her lead and acted as he did to draw attention to himself.

As with many of the people who had been in revolutionary movements in the 1970s, Elena had realized, perhaps earlier than most, that the battle would never be won. Consequently, she had taken up an offer of a pardon in return for a brief prison sentence, a full confession, and information about her erstwhile colleagues. A notice attached to the file expressed irritation that the amount of information she gave was minimal, and completely unhelpful. Even when saving her own skin, she was unprepared to give up her friends.

Finding her had been remarkably easy; once a political criminal, always a political criminal, and Fortini was required to register her address every six months even though it hadn’t changed for years. The latest address was attached to another file Flavia had extracted from colleagues in antiterrorism.

Once she had eaten, rested, and prepared herself she drove the rest of the trip to where the woman lived. The house was a small and run-down pile, one of those difficult structures that is clearly old but could have been built anywhere between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Not big, but with bits added on here and there, so that the roofscape of terra-cotta tiles headed up and down in all directions and at all angles. Valuable now that so many English and Germans and Dutch wanted summer houses; bought for a song ten or twenty years ago and now worth a fortune.

All the stereotypes that built up in her mind so easily began to break down as Flavia walked to the door and saw the piles of chicken feed stacked neatly on

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