An intriguing case

The Advocate: A Sardinian mystery,
By Marcello Fois, Vintage £ 3.95

The answer lies in the mode of storytelling where the writer plays around with time by framing the story as one which a son heard from his father. The incident at the heart of the narrative took place at least a hundred years ago and the outcome is already known. A young man who works as a hired hand on a farm is accused of theft. He goes underground to become a bandit and a price is declared on his head. Within a few days, the farmer is shot dead in his olive grove. Overnight, the thief- turned-bandit becomes a murderer. Only his widowed mother believes her son is innocent of the theft and the murder. She has nobody to take her mother?s conviction to save the lawyer Bustianu who is persuaded to take the case because of her entreaties.

Bustianu?s case appears particularly weak because Zenobi, the accused, refused to come out of hiding to meet him and give him Zenobi?s version of events. But Bustianu plodded on clutching at a straw here and plucking out a source from there.

It is this aspect of Bustianu?s work which is the most interesting part of the book. It shows that good detective work is not dependent on sudden bursts of inspiration and revelation but on solid research and field-work. This is where Bustianu?s methods vary from some one like Hercule Poirot who depended on his ?grey cells?. Here is Bustianu on himself: ?I will tell you a secret: I was led by my sense of smell. Almost entirely by that, while my pupils strove to find a gap through the slits of my eyelids, half shut to protect my eyes from the glare. And what my eyelids failed to do was done by the floppy brim of my hat, white in summer, dark in winter, and pulled down onto my nose. I was a kind of surface-going mole, sniffing out its territory. An old habit-bound donkey plodding along and asking no questions. and perhaps the real secret, the one that mattered, is simply that as I walked, leaning on the stick that I planted at least a step ahead of me, my brain stopped asking itself too many questions.?

It is Bustianu?s tenacity that wins the day but this quality is aided by an ability to be somewhat economical with the truth to make the real culprit confess. Bustianu brings to his job the qualities of a good detective and that of a sharp lawyer. There is also his over- whelming humanity which makes him believe a helpless widow and trust his sense of smell.

There is also poetry in the book. Here is a passage: ?And here am I seated on the hilltop. The immensity of it is beyond words: immensity battering at frailty! A sublimity that catches you in the heart and the pit of the stomach. Space, space and still more space, spread out before my gaze. In the sky-blue light of the valley, the sole divinity before whom it seems proper to bend the knee. If I were not a man I would weep at the sight of this. And sometimes I do so simply because I am a man.?