Watched an excellent Montalbano episode on BBC i player on full screen TV. Will write up as novel on which episode is based has not been translated into English. The episode is called the Gull’s Dance and begins with Salvo watching a Gull falling to the sands, struggling and then turn over dead. When a local fishing boat owner calls to report a concern he asks about the Gull and appears satisfied when the fleet owner has says those he has seen die fall directly into the sea. The man has come to report a concern that one of his boats appears to be involved in smuggling of some king, perhaps drugs with which he has not wish to be associated.
Fabio’s father calls concerned that his son has not returned home having promised to take him for a hospital. Salvo tries to ensure the parents everything is OK but the summons Mimi and they go off in search. Father subsequently says he has received a call from someone on the run who has seen/ knows something and arranges a secret meeting with Salvo, who works out who the man is but disregards the situation because of the info about Fazio. They have already established that the duty police officer at the docks thought he heard shots but when a motorcycle went past he assumed it had backfired. When they find a gun case the anxiety is heightened, and reaches fever pitch when the informant says he knows that Fazio was being taken to some empty wells at a site some two hours away.
When they arrive with local forces including Mimi from Vigata they discover two bodies in the wells. One has been there for several days and tortured before the final shoots while the other broke his neck from a fall only hours beforehand.
What we learn much later is that a former school friend of Fazio had contacted him with a concern and then backed off, but makes a call to him the evening before his disappearance, although in fact it is someone pretending to be the friend advising him to be at the docks at am when he will observe what is going on. This is a trap as one of the men dead in a well is his friend and informant. Fazio who has a glancing bullet at his neck is also hit on the head prior to being thrown down the well, but manages to turn the tables and one of the other men falls while the other runs off after an exchange of fire. Fazio dazed goes off and hides in a nearby cave hoping to recover. The next he remembers is a car driving at speed into the cave so he shoots fortunately missing Salvo and another officer. Fazio recovers at a hospital in the area for his security and is able to begin to recount what happens.
Meanwhile they are able to trace the other dead man previously married he appears to have not one but two places of stay. In one there is a powerful telescope which his ex wife says he used for spying on neighbours and which is trained on the docks The caretaker cleaner says that he appears to have a friend stay overnight from the mess she sometimes finds but there is no evidence of who. It later emerges that he had a transexual lover with whom he stays at another accommodation and who was involved with a smuggling enterprise of some kind. This later is established as moving Russian Mafia supplied chemical weapons to a Middle East Country and in fact the fleet owner is implicated and not the innocent he proclaimed. The informant had been tortured to find out what he had told Fazio who had been set up to find out what he knew and then killed when it was appreciated he had little Knowledge. Fortunately Fazio had been able to turn the tables.
Salvo appears attracted to a young nurse at the hospital on the first day he visits Fazio and invites her out for a meal , He encounters her again trying to find where Fazio has been moved in the hospital on the orders of the chief to protect the man. She accepts the invite and Salvo gives the key of his car plus number plate for her to wait for him until after the Fazio visit. He is not surprised when she changes her mind about sex after inviting herself to his home and he points out the three occasions she said or did things which aroused his suspicion. It was never clear if she was a nurse at the hospital or not which would have been an remarkable coincidence and story flaw if this was the case.
Her boyfriends had been the criminal who Fazio had pushed into the well and she was being forced by the other man to get information from Salvo, later to get him drunk so compromising pictures could be taken to blackmail his silence and inaction. The man heading this enterprise is a member of one of the Sicilian crime families.
The caretaker cleaner has been found murdered and interestingly the expensive and powerful telescope had been removed but Earlier with the woman shot by men on a motorbike as she opened the door. The surmise is that she used to telescope and found the info to blackmail the gang although how she had done this remains unexplained. She paid the price for her foolishness. They move of Fazio to a secure hospital bed in Vigata goes well with Mimi in charge
Mimi is also helpful in ensuring that a letter to Salvo from the dead former school friends of Fazio is put back in the flat which Salvo has broken into and then found via an official search warrant. However the concern remains how to tie in the Mafia family into the killings and Salvo has a creative idea which is to get a friend of the nurse to make a complaint against him that he has failed to investigate a report that someone one is being held at the home of the Mafia man against their will. On the insistence of the Chief Salvo goes force handed with a search warrant having also notified his media TV friend to be present albeit secretly to await developments.
At the home the wife says her husband is away but Salvo winds her up exposing that her husband was also having an affair with the transvestite and in her rage she reveals the location of the secret room where her husband and the other murderer are hiding. They are arrested with the media present and Fazio’s life is no longer threatened or the nurse. For once the relationship remains platonic. What the falling Gull has to do with the rest of the story remain unclear to me. I enjoyed the work very much and look forward to read more of the books and the remaining two episodes of the series.
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