The Rainaldi Quartet Read Online Free Page A

still closed to traffic, the surrounding area still taped off. One or two curious onlookers were clustered on the pavement, but there was nothing much to see. Guastafeste met me by the entrance to the courtyard and escorted me through into the workshop. Rainaldi’s body was gone, removed to the morgue for autopsy, Guastafeste explained, but there was a chalk outline on the workbench where it had lain. I tried not to look at it. Two men in white overalls were painstakingly collecting bits of debris from the floor and the top of the bench, and on virtually every surface was a dusting of white powder which I assumed had been used for taking fingerprint evidence. I’d never been present at a crime scene before. It was calm and quiet and unhurried, everyone going about their jobs in a methodical, clinical manner. It was difficult to believe that a few hours earlier a man had died here.
    â€˜Try not to touch anything,’ Guastafeste said. He was bleary-eyed, unshaven, his clothes crumpled. I knew he’d been up all night.
    â€˜What am I looking for?’ I asked.
    â€˜Anything that strikes you as odd, out of place. Anything missing.’
    â€˜You think something might have been stolen?’
    â€˜The workshop had been searched, I’m sure of that. Not wrecked, the way you see it in films, but searched nonetheless. The locked cupboard doors had all been forced open, there was stuff spilt on the floor that I don’t think Tomaso would have done.’
    I let my gaze wander around the room. I’d been here many times before, but always with Rainaldi. Without his loud, gregarious presence it seemed like a different place, one I was seeing for the first time.
    â€˜Would he have kept money here?’ Guastafeste asked.
    â€˜Not large sums,’ I replied. ‘A bit of petty cash, that’s all.’
    â€˜What about instruments? Do you know if he was working on any valuable violins?’
    â€˜Valuable?’ I shook my head. ‘Not Tomaso, he wasn’t that kind of luthier.’ It felt disloyal to say it, but the truth was that Rainaldi had not been a very distinguished violin-maker. He’d come into the business late and had not built up much of a reputation. He’d got by, done a lot of low-grade repair work to pay the bills, but his own violins had not been greatly sought after. I could not see that there would have been any valuable instruments in his workshop, either his own or anyone else’s.
    â€˜You think robbery might have been the motive?’ I said. I was studying the bench along the side of the room. There was a length of maple in a vice waiting to be sawn, some rough-cut violin backs and bellies, a rib assembly clamped together while the glue dried.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Guastafeste said. ‘It’s a puzzle. Why was Tomaso here? Did he call in for something on his way home and was surprised by his killer? The door of the workshop hadn’t been forced.’
    â€˜Someone with a key?’ I said.
    â€˜Or Tomaso let them in himself. It’s possible he was meeting someone here.’
    My eyes came to rest on the rack of tools above one of the benches – the saws and planes and gouges, the row of chisels with a gap where one was missing.
    â€˜Why would anyone kill him?’ I said, voicing my own inner confusion rather than because I expected a reply. ‘A man like Tomaso. Everyone liked him. Everyone.’
    The two men in white overalls were collecting up their plastic bags and screw-capped containers, recording their finds in a large black logbook. I saw Rainaldi’s pipe – the stained wooden briar pipe that he liked to smoke as he worked – in one of the bags. It was such a personal possession, so much a familiar part of the man that I couldn’t bear to look at it. I turned away and said to Guastafeste: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t see anything out of the ordinary.’
    He seemed to sense my