Kaosium,
Thank's for your work.
This passage is interesting. I haven't had a chance to enlarge and try to translate Rose's posted documents of the Matteini Report, but the highlighted section (above) suggests to me that Raffaele is blaming Amanda, and the ultimate blame is due to Amanda's difficulty to "speak and understand Italian."
Nice catch, Fine! I think you're right, additionally this fragment should probably be rendered:
"even for
her difficulty to speak and understand Italian"
Thus Raffaele isn't pretending his own Italian caused problems, but Amanda's. That makes more sense, I understand Raffaele comes from an area known for their accent, but I think it makes more sense in context to assume that should have been 'her' not 'him.'
If this is the proper explanation for Raffaele telling the cops that Amanda left him that night---"a different version than the dates previously"--- then he must have been bewildered, indeed, to find that Amanda had begun her own interrogation ---a couple hours later---the night of November 5th saying she'd stayed with him all night. When the cops confronted him with that information he must have realized ---WTF!!!---that he'd misunderstood what Amanda wanted him to say. But, apparently, the cops didn't believe him.
Ohhh, I don't think that was the way of it.
If Raffaele is saying at 10:40 that Amanda had left that night, I'm pretty sure little miss cartwheels was cooling her heels in a nice backroom with Perugia's finest by 10:45. They brought Raffaele in for a reason, and it looks like the first thing they did was tell him they had 'proof' Amanda was elsewhere. They sure couldn't have wasted much time if they already have his statement at 10:40.
When did they get there, 10:15-10:30? This bespeaks a
plan, and it explains why all the extra cops are on duty at that hour and why Giobbi was 'mathematically certain' Amanda was to come in, even if she never knew it. The 'smoked' Raffaele probably never told her, knowing she would tag along anyway.
Thus the completely clueless Amanda is in there trying to tell them she never left that night, and the cops with their 'hard evidence' that they think has now been confirmed by Raffaele are
completely convinced she left that night, that she met Patrick Lumumba, and that she's lying about it to protect him. At this point they probably don't have her involved with--as in actively committing--the murder, being as that's actually pretty bloody unlikely. It took the mind of Mignini, who isn't there yet, to come up with that idiocy.
The longer she continues to tell the truth, the more they become convinced she's lying. The crescendo builds and builds; Amanda, exhausted, uncomprehending and frightened becomes so completely stressed she becomes vulnerable to the police's insistence her memories are wrong, she must have repressed them. Having no idea what to believe anymore, her mind searches for answers, and the one they've been subtly suggesting all along comes to mind: Patrick Lumumba. Maybe dopemine production exploding in her thalamus, perhaps the stress blocks her seretonin and/or norepinephrine, she gets cuffed about and it
comes to her, and what she's imagining seems like an
epiphany the police must be right, and she breaks and complies.
It doesn't last, of course, it starts to fade--but by that time it's too late. The police think they've captured their murderers, all the pieces seem to fit into place.
(By the way, I believe that no one ever thought that Patrick and Amanda smoked hash when they met the afternoon of November 5th. They'd met outside the library of the University for Foreigners. A very public place, and neither Patrick nor Amanda said they smoked hash there.)
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I imagine this was just a suggestion agreed to by the broken Amanda, it was supposedly the night of the murder, and she did smoke hash that night, and they've convinced her she must have been with Patrick, so it would follow that he'd end up passing the hash pipe with her.
