Piero’s bar was on a lonely junction off the main road to Urbino, about five minutes by Ape from his house. He played cards there every evening after supper, winter and summer. I called in last night after supper. There was much sucking of air between remaining teeth, as everyone shook his head over his foolishness.

“To think that an old hand like Piero didn’t tie his ladder to the tree. Olive trees are lethal,” said the man behind the bar, a tall thin scholarly looking person who seemed out of place in a bar that huddled defeatedly alongside three other houses in the middle of nowhere, “the branches are bouncy, you see, put a foot wrong on the ladder and it swings round, and boof!” He made a graphic hand gesture and we all shook our heads again.

“To think that only a month ago he was so happy,” he pointed to a handwritten sign pinned up behind him with a list of dates and drawing of a television dancing on two short legs,  ”after he won the July championship at scala, carried home the grand prize.”

“I don’t think he ever turned it off,” said an elderly lady from the corner. She and I were the only women in the place. She was a tough traditional style Le Marche old lady, short and square and capable of anything. “I could hear from the other side of the valley when I worked in my orto.”

“He refused to get a hearing aid,” said the barman, “but he was getting very deaf.”

I arrived in the caserma before anyone else this morning. By bike, at last. It is liberating to have my own two wheels again and I’m going straight back out. I need to see someone before I can sign off the Piero Bianco case.

Piero’s nephew was fighting off middle age with unconvincing dark blonde hair and an overtight shirt. A ball of fur with a surprisingly deep bark waddled towards us as we opened the door.

“Valentina,” he flapped his hands at her ineffectually, “buon giorno, officer.”

He seemed quite calm about my news until he saw Giovanna studying an old fashioned treadle sewing machine in the window, an old fashioned round cornered television sitting squarely next to it.

“That machine was my mother’s. Now that Zio Piero has gone it’s all I have to remind me of her.” He dabbed his eyes with the corner of a pink silk hankerchief. “There’s his old television. He couldn’t hear it anymore, so he brought it in to me in the spring. Down! Valentina!” He scooped up the dog, who’d been sniffing Giovanna’s knees with interest, “She’s suffering a phantom pregnancy and the hormone drugs make her rather excitable.”

“You never cook so I don’t see why you’re bothering to write down the recipe,” he said, interrupting an interminable discussion about when olives should be harvested. Opinions on Piero’s habits had been swirling around the bar, one old chap in tatty shorts expressing surprise that someone so tight fisted would harvest his olives early just for flavour, while his friend, talking at the same time, explained to me that Piero had recently developed an allergy on his hands, necessitating that he hire a mechanical harvester.

I asked what that was as Otto tutted over my recipe, correcting several details.

“Some people swear by them,” said my informant, a portly chap in a well worn denim shirt missing a couple of buttons, “I don’t think much of them, but they are faster. It’s a sort of long pole, with a two-stroke engine, which shakes the olives off each branch.”

“A two-stroke engine,” said the man in shorts before Otto interjected, ”Don’t bother telling Andrea,” he said, passing me back my recipe, “she was motorcross champion for years in her youth.”

I’m still in my youth, surely? Thirty five isn’t that old.

I don’t remember seeing any gloves next to Piero’s body. And if he was using a mechanical harvester, why was a large plastic olive comb lying next to his body? That makes two questions to follow up today, a day that otherwise looms long and languid.

Spaghetti, olio, aglio e pepperoncino

“I had a letter that I needed him to sign for, so I came around here,” she said, leading the way to his body. “I don’t know who will harvest his olives without him here,” she said, as we waited for the carabinieri doctor to arrive. “His nephew isn’t the farming type.”

We tracked him down late last night so I’ll be seeing him this morning. It isn’t the sort of news that you can give over the phone. I didn’t manage to talk to Piero’s neighbour, he was out. Apparently, according to Rosalba, another elderly loner, never married, his only passion other than his land was singing in the choir, something he had to give up when he developed super sensitive hearing, which the doctor explained is one of the precursors to deafness. Luca and I also found out more about olives, having displayed our shocking ignorance of what amounts to a religion out here in the country. Apparently harvesting them this early produces more flavourful oil, although less than those who harvest as late as early December.

I went through the motions of investigation when I got back to the caserma, although it is clear that the tree did it. Giuseppe pointed out as much to Luca, as he ran to get the car on Monday.

“The tree isn’t going anywhere,” he said, his sarcasm rewarded by Luca’s brightly glowing blush. He managed to crash into the door jamb on his way through, in his haste to get away from Giuseppe. Since our recent spate of murders in Alba I can tell everyone is bored, wondering whether anything exciting will happen, and one elderly chap in trousers tied up with string lying under his olive tree next to the ladder he’d been standing on isn’t what they were hoping for.

I’d no sooner written those words when Maresciallo Giuseppe Rossi popped his head into my office. I thought I perceived a disappointed look somewhere between his beard and his glasses, deeply hidden behind his tan, to find me sitting calmly at my desk, where I’d slipped this notebook under a pile of arrest sheets.

The idea is to write each morning, marshall my day into shape. Today I will go through the traffic rotas, start a new project for the vu cumpru for next year and eat lunch at Il Faro. Some shopping, perhaps, at least for cat food, otherwise Mimi may eat me.

Another interruption - from my lieutenante this time, reporting a phone call from the post lady at a farm on the road out towards Urbino. She’s found a man in his seventies, Piero Bianco, lying dead under an olive tree. Giuseppe came in to supervise our conversation.

“No mystery there,” he said, “we get at least one a year. Fall out of their trees. Good way to go, harvesting olives.”

“Isn’t it too early?” Lieutenante Luca Venanzoni asked, and was rewarded by a contemptous snort.

“What do you know, Veneziano?” Giuseppe has a nickname for everyone. I don’t know what he calls me and I hope no-one tells me.