It was a small place. There weren’t many bars and only one or two were open. The first one I went into was full of early afternoon boozers. There were a few men playing cards on large, circular tables. Others were reading newspapers. The low ceiling was made up of foam squares resting on aluminium runners. A fruit machine chimed from a far corner where a wheezer was dropping his coins. The room smelt of men: aftershave and grappa, coffee and sweat.

‘You know a man called Franchini?’ I asked the barman.

‘Sat over there.’ The man pointed at a large newspaper. All I could see were fingers holding the edge of the pages.

‘Small world,’ I said.

‘Small village,’ he corrected.

I went round the side of the paper and looked at the man. He looked jowly and tired. He was one of those men who are so big they snore even when they’re awake. There’s something about retired cops I find melancholic. It’s as if once they leave the service their whole life is meaningless. Franchini was wearing a suit as if he couldn’t face wearing anything else, but it was all creased like it was the only one he had left.

I took my coffee over. ‘Colonello Franchini?’

He looked up, startled by being given his rank.

‘My name’s Castagnetti. I’m working on a case you left open way back.’ I looked at the man’s face that had dropped into a serious, defensive scowl. ‘You remember Riccardo Salati?’

He almost closed his eyes and stared at me as if he resented the disturbance. ‘Rings a bell.’ The words came out as a single sound.

‘Went missing in 1995.’

‘Right,’ he said unconvincingly.

‘The boy was catching a train back to Rimini, you remember?’

The man was nodding slowly now. ‘And he never arrived. I remember. I only remember because that woman kept hassling me for years afterwards to investigate this or that.’

‘Which woman?’

‘It was his mother, lived out in Sissa.’

‘She won’t be hassling you any more,’ I said, looking at him.

‘She copped it?’

‘Died last week.’

‘That why it’s being reopened?’

‘Distribution of the estate,’ I said, nodding.

Franchini glazed over like he was missing his old job. ‘And you’ve been hired to find the corpse?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Buy me a drink,’ he growled, ‘and we can talk about it.’

I lifted my chin at the barman and shouted for two grappas. The man popped the cork off a half-empty bottle and poured the water-like liquid into two shot glasses. He brought them over.

Franchini slugged it as soon as it was in front of him. I looked at him as his head went backwards. The underneath of his chin was stubbly, like he couldn’t be bothered to shave properly. There were grey clumps of wiry beard poking out between the blood vessels.

He put down his glass and stared at it. ‘She was obsessed by it poor woman. Anyone would be, but there was nothing I could do. He was a young lad. Early twenties. Had a woman and a kid in Romagna somewhere.’

‘All news to me. I haven’t seen the file.’

Franchini fixed me with a stare. ‘There isn’t one. He was reported missing, and that was that in those days. Nowadays they would spend all day printing off letters to relatives to keep them informed of the lack of progress. We let it drop. The way that woman went on at me, you would have thought I didn’t care. I cared too much, that was what my wife always used to say.’

I nodded and let the grappa touch my upper lip. It was a powerful poison.

‘I didn’t ignore any leads,’ Franchini looked at my glass, ‘it’s just that there weren’t any. There was no evidence that anything untoward had happened to him. Truth told, it wasn’t the first time in his life he had gone absent without leave.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I can’t remember all the details, but that boy had a wanderer’s sort of lifestyle. He played cards, lost money, borrowed money. His woman, I can’t remember her name, she said something like that herself. I don’t remember much more about it than that. This insistent mother and her unreliable son.’

I listened to the man slurring. He was the classic drunk, veering between the aggressive and defensive.

‘So there’s no file on the case?’

‘All you’ll find is the report listing him as missing.’

There was something about the way he said it that made me distrust him, think there was more to it than that. He had said it too nicely, and nice didn’t come natural to the Colonello.

‘And?’ I said, making it sound like I knew there was more.

Franchini caught me looking at him with suspicion. His face was blank, but he was blinking and he gave up the pretence.

‘When I retired,’ he said slowly, ‘I was looking forward to spending time travelling with my wife.’ He paused and stared at me defiantly. ‘When she died I didn’t have a lot to do and I went into the same line as you for a year or two. Did a little private work to help pay the bills.’

‘And you worked for Silvia Salati?’

‘It was five or six years ago. Nothing came of it. There were as many blanks then as there were before. You won’t find anything.’ He looked at me with a drunkard’s disdain, as if he were deliberately trying to give offence.

I lifted my drink again and stared at Franchini through the bottom of the shot glass. I placed the glass back on the table and signalled to the barman for another round. ‘Tell me about when he went missing. Why was he catching a train?’

‘To go home. Had a woman in… Ravenna or Rimini.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Emma. Or Anna. Something like that.’

‘And?’

‘What?’

‘What was the story on her?’

‘She was one of those alternative types. Living out of a caravan by the beach. That boy Riccardo had cleaned her out of money, so she had a motive. They had a pretty tempestuous relationship. Ricky put it about a bit, and she didn’t hang around either. Less than a year after Ricky went missing, she had married someone else.’

‘Does she still live out there?’

‘Sure, last I heard. Rimini it was.’

‘And their girl, what was her name?’

‘I don’t remember. Cute little kid. There was a stand-off as I remember between the Salati woman and Anna or Emma or whatever she was called. When I came back from Rimini that poor old Salati woman was more interested in how her granddaughter was than in the progress of the case. She hadn’t been allowed near her since her son died.’

He had said ‘died’, and saw me notice it.

‘You think he’s dead?’

He nodded quickly, like it was a certainty.

‘And what was the progress?’ I asked, wanting to keep the drunkard on track.

‘Nothing that I recall. His woman seemed like one of life’s gamblers who had already written off Riccardo as a bad debt. She was moving on, that’s what she said.’

I was trying to build up a picture of Riccardo’s family, but it was always hard when it was through someone else’s eyes, especially eyes pickled in grappa.

‘And the brother? Umberto?’

Franchini squinted, trying to remember.

‘He had lent the lad money too. From what people told me, Riccardo only had to open his mouth and people seemed to part with their money. He begged and borrowed to avoid calling it theft. That Umberto was pretty furious about the whole thing. He was tight as a clothes line.’

‘And you think he snapped?’

‘You talk to him. He says he was with his pregnant wife that night.’

‘He said the same to me this morning. Why did they split?’

‘I can’t remember. This was years ago.’

The barman brought over more drinks and Franchini threw his back. I looked out of the window.

‘And what did you make of the case?’

Franchini looked reluctant to reply. Didn’t like defeat, I assumed.

‘I didn’t get anywhere and I was too honest to pretend to the old Salati woman that I was on the brink of a breakthrough. I told her as much but she begged me to keep looking. I had the impression she knew more than she was letting on, or that she was holding back on me. It was like she wanted me to prove something she already feared. You get a sense for these things,’ he said condescendingly, looking at me through the white wire of his eyebrows, ‘after forty years’ detective work.’