keeps the letter to himself or whether he shows it to my wife, it must seem authentic. In both cases, and especially in the second one, it has the effect of halting the relationship. Foletti doesn’t know that the affair was about to finish anyway, and that Barsanti is already sated with the perfume for which Foletti pants increasingly jealously.
‘Barsanti was out of the picture, but he couldn’t hope to take his place on that account. He had to realise that, the affair interrupted, his arguments for blackmail are weakened. But passion has no sense, and we have to imagine Demetrio overwhelmed and blinded by passion – and also by a desire for revenge. He came from a town near Bergamo, and started working as a gardener in my wife’s house at the age of twenty-five. When I joined the Zaccagni-Lamberti house and transferred my offices there, I saw that he didn’t have much to do in the garden, so I began to use him sometimes as an assistant and sometimes as a clerk. He went to the bank, to the post, to various offices. I saw that he was intelligent: when he had nothing else to do, he’d read copies of trials, study the statute book and literally immerse himself in criminology treatises. He ended up being my right-hand man, and I have to say that he has always behaved properly and served me willingly, occasionally managing to suggest theories for the defence that I had to reject only because they were too subtle. Demetrio is a relentless logician, gifted with imagination and intuition. Too much for a clerk or a gardener. He married the maid of my sister-in-law, who’s dead. Teresa wasn’t bad-looking in her youth but she’s become an old woman in the last few years. We mustn’t forget that she’s ten years older than he is.
‘At the time of the crime, Demetrio was only a little over forty, a lot younger than me: he considered himself a good-lookingman, someone who’d begun to feel like something in between a clerk and my right-hand man. He could, in fact, aspire to my wife, all the more so after discovering that she’d already strayed from the straight and narrow.
‘That Saturday he sends the letter and hopes the response will come via the usual means before Thursday. Thursday morning, when he sees that no letter with my wife’s signature has arrived, he supposes Barsanti has not given any thought to the warning or the news he’s received. It’ll be necessary, therefore, to put pressure on Signora Giulia.
‘He must already have suggested to my wife that morning that she shouldn’t be going to Milan in the afternoon, and she would have been afraid. So she writes the letter that Sciancalepre found in viale Premuda a few days ago. It arrives in Milan a few days late, perhaps misdirected, and by that time Barsanti has already left for Rome. My wife would have gone out to post it at around ten that morning. Demetrio, sensing something’s up, enters the house an hour later to press home the threats. He shoves her down the hall and she screams – Demetrio loses his cool and shuts her up for ever…
‘The body is taken into the cellar via the internal staircase. The button I found under the wood on the cellar floor must have been torn from her dress when the killer dragged the body by the shoulders. The proximity of the cistern to the coach house is known only to Foletti; and he thinks he’ll put the lifeless body there. The route from cellar to cistern is hidden from sight. And the house is empty except for the typist, who’s in my office, which faces via Lamberti.
‘I’m in court for a trial and won’t be coming back before midday. Teresa is home and won’t know anything. Foletti hastime to return to the house, take the suitcases, jumble some of my wife’s clothes and linens into them and hide them in the cistern, not forgetting a purse or two. Inspired by Barsanti’s letter, which he’s intercepted, and in which the scrupulous rep discourages my wife from any such action, he fakes the
‘Barsanti was out of the picture, but he couldn’t hope to take his place on that account. He had to realise that, the affair interrupted, his arguments for blackmail are weakened. But passion has no sense, and we have to imagine Demetrio overwhelmed and blinded by passion – and also by a desire for revenge. He came from a town near Bergamo, and started working as a gardener in my wife’s house at the age of twenty-five. When I joined the Zaccagni-Lamberti house and transferred my offices there, I saw that he didn’t have much to do in the garden, so I began to use him sometimes as an assistant and sometimes as a clerk. He went to the bank, to the post, to various offices. I saw that he was intelligent: when he had nothing else to do, he’d read copies of trials, study the statute book and literally immerse himself in criminology treatises. He ended up being my right-hand man, and I have to say that he has always behaved properly and served me willingly, occasionally managing to suggest theories for the defence that I had to reject only because they were too subtle. Demetrio is a relentless logician, gifted with imagination and intuition. Too much for a clerk or a gardener. He married the maid of my sister-in-law, who’s dead. Teresa wasn’t bad-looking in her youth but she’s become an old woman in the last few years. We mustn’t forget that she’s ten years older than he is.
‘At the time of the crime, Demetrio was only a little over forty, a lot younger than me: he considered himself a good-lookingman, someone who’d begun to feel like something in between a clerk and my right-hand man. He could, in fact, aspire to my wife, all the more so after discovering that she’d already strayed from the straight and narrow.
‘That Saturday he sends the letter and hopes the response will come via the usual means before Thursday. Thursday morning, when he sees that no letter with my wife’s signature has arrived, he supposes Barsanti has not given any thought to the warning or the news he’s received. It’ll be necessary, therefore, to put pressure on Signora Giulia.
‘He must already have suggested to my wife that morning that she shouldn’t be going to Milan in the afternoon, and she would have been afraid. So she writes the letter that Sciancalepre found in viale Premuda a few days ago. It arrives in Milan a few days late, perhaps misdirected, and by that time Barsanti has already left for Rome. My wife would have gone out to post it at around ten that morning. Demetrio, sensing something’s up, enters the house an hour later to press home the threats. He shoves her down the hall and she screams – Demetrio loses his cool and shuts her up for ever…
‘The body is taken into the cellar via the internal staircase. The button I found under the wood on the cellar floor must have been torn from her dress when the killer dragged the body by the shoulders. The proximity of the cistern to the coach house is known only to Foletti; and he thinks he’ll put the lifeless body there. The route from cellar to cistern is hidden from sight. And the house is empty except for the typist, who’s in my office, which faces via Lamberti.
‘I’m in court for a trial and won’t be coming back before midday. Teresa is home and won’t know anything. Foletti hastime to return to the house, take the suitcases, jumble some of my wife’s clothes and linens into them and hide them in the cistern, not forgetting a purse or two. Inspired by Barsanti’s letter, which he’s intercepted, and in which the scrupulous rep discourages my wife from any such action, he fakes the
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