Migliora il tuo inglese con letture graduate gratuite! ‘A Very Private Investigation’ è un testo semplificato con audio. Leggi ora il capitolo 6 e inizia ad imparare l’inglese!
Transcript
Chapter 6. Elementary, My Dear Marpelli!
Gianna is still standing at the traffic lights.
Despite the number of people on the street around her, she has never felt so lonely in her whole life. Her allergic tears have become tears of rage and hurt. She is confused and frustrated. She just wants to cry and go straight home.
Knowing now that Eugenio is cheating on her with a younger woman, her instinct is to pack her bags and leave, without even leaving a note. However, she knows it would be better to reflect before taking action. And better still, to find out what is really going on!
“What’s happening?” thinks Gianna, taking a deep breath and trying to calm herself down. “How long has this been going on? Is it really possible that I didn’t notice a thing?”
Questions fill her head. And the only way to answer the many questions that torment her is to keep searching for the truth.
“Well, what would Sherlock Holmes do?” Gianna asks herself, turning for inspiration to one of her all-time favourite fictional sleuths.
“Elementary, my dear Marpelli! He would continue to look for clues. He’d pursue the investigation until he had found out who that woman was, and every detail of the affair.”
Feeling a little more assured, and ready to take up her investigation once more, Gianna dries her eyes and turns back towards the appartment building.
At the grand building’s entrance, Gianna sees a large intercom with many buttons. She approaches and begins to scan the residents’ names. Among the many company names and surnames, none seems familiar.
“This is a waste of time,” she thinks, a little disappointed. “I simply don’t know who to look for…”
Suddenly someone is speaking to her.
“Can I help you?” The porter is a short, bald, white-whiskered man. He’s coming towards her from the lobby of the building. Gianna is caught off guard, her first thought to run away.
But instead, feigning confidence and playing her role as detective, she looks boldly at the porter.
Takes her phone from her bag, Gianna stabs the photo gallery app with her finger to open it at the last photo she took.
She holds the phone up, so the porter can see it. “Do you know this woman?” she asks, in a determined voice.
“No,” the porter replies, dryly.
“Have you ever seen her?”
“Yes,” he says, with the expression on his face of someone who has just been asked the most ridiculous question in the world.
Gianna too is perplexed. The porter’s short responses seem unconvincing somehow.
“And this woman… have you seen her lately?” she insists.
“Yes, of course.”
“And you honestly don’t know her name?”
“No.”
“And you don’t even know where she lives? Which apartment in this building is hers?”
The porter loses his patience.
“Listen Signora, this isn’t funny. If you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to work!”
He turns and walks back into the building, leaving Gianna stupefied by the man’s behaviour.
Before putting her phone back in her bag, she looks at the picture on its screen.
Unable to believe what she is seeing, she scrolls through all of the photos she had taken of the meeting between her husband and the younger woman. But the woman in each picture is the same as in the one she had shown the porter: herself!
Perhaps because she had been nervous, or because she had hurried, or because of the bright sunlight, but instead of using the main camera to take pictures of her husband and the other woman embracing passionately, she had used the secondary, rear-facing camera, and taken at least twenty selfies!
“How embarrassing…”
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