Giorgio’s fatal car crash into the sea is reported as the culmination of a prolonged collapse after his father’s death. The account links his death to sedative use and grief, then closes with the discovery of his body on the rocks below the San Filippo bend and Salvo Montalbano’s conviction that he had interpreted a crucial clue correctly.

Disappearance and Discovery

Giorgio had not returned by the following morning, prompting his cousin to alert the police and the Italian Carabinieri. The searches were described as extremely superficial; the speaker suggested they may have been preoccupied with investigating Pietro Rizzo’s murder. The explanation places Giorgio’s disappearance amid another urgent investigation, while making clear that the search for him had not been thorough.

On Sunday afternoon, a fisherman in his boat spotted a car on the rocks below the San Filippo bend, just before the Capo Massaria headland. He rowed toward it, saw a body in the driver’s seat, and hurried away to report what he had found. The discovery answered the immediate question of what had happened to Giorgio, but the account also supplied a personal explanation for the crash.

Cause and Background

The explanation given was that, from the moment his father died, Giorgio had lived in a state of almost constant derangement and taken too many tranquilizers and sedatives. Rather than follow the bend, he continued straight at high speed, broke through the small guard wall, and crashed onto the rocks. The account thus presents the loss of control as both a specific driving error and the outcome of a condition that had persisted since his bereavement.

His cousin insisted that Giorgio had never got over his father’s death. He described Giorgio’s feeling for his father as passion and love, pronouncing those words firmly and precisely, as though to prevent their meaning from being blurred. That emphasis makes the attachment central to the report: Giorgio’s grief was not presented as a passing sadness, but as a lasting force shaping the state in which he drove to his death.

Aftermath and Significance

After the account, Montalbano left the airport car park and drove for about sixty miles before stopping beside an artificial lake. He took a neck brace from his car’s trunk, threw it into the water, and waited for it to sink. Only then did he smile: he had wanted to act like a god, but believed that, despite being a fourth-rate one, he had guessed correctly. The gesture follows the confirmation of Giorgio’s death and gives the crash an investigative aftermath: Montalbano treats the news as confirmation of his inference, then disposes of the object associated with it. Giorgio’s death is therefore disclosed not only as a fatal accident but also as the point at which Montalbano’s private conclusion becomes, for him, settled.