Sicilchim, the abandoned chemical factory, is a landscape of industrial ruin where evidence is hidden among debris and thrown objects. Salvo Montalbano’s searches there transform the factory from a neglected backdrop into an investigative site: first a stylish handbag appears incongruous among the wreckage, and later an apparently unidentifiable object proves to be a used neck brace.

Name and Physical Setting

The name Sicilchim is shorthand for Sicilia Chimica, or Sicilian Chemicals. In the novel, the site is an abandoned factory marked by broken metal cables, perforated smokestacks, and heaps of debris. A high wall separates the interior from the other side, making the space around it important to how objects can be thrown in or found beyond it.

The landscape is not empty or silent. As Montalbano moves among the wreckage, wind passes through the cables and the hollow smokestacks, producing a plaintive sound. After gunshots, their echo, a crash, and breaking glass have masked it, he recognizes that the sound has resumed. The ruin’s industrial structures thus shape both the atmosphere of the search and what can be heard within it.

The Handbag and the Search

Saro Montaperto directs Montalbano to the place where he found a necklace on the other side of the factory wall. Montalbano takes almost half an hour to reach the corresponding spot, climbing over piles of debris before searching among sun-yellowed magazines and paper, weeds, bottles, tyres, scrap iron, a bottomless wheelbarrow, and a rotten wooden beam.

Beside the beam he finds a brand-new-looking leather handbag, strikingly out of place amid the rubbish. Two large stones have been put inside it, apparently to give it enough weight to be thrown over the wall. Its metal initials have been torn away, but their impressions remain in the leather: an I and an S. Montalbano identifies them as Ingrid Sjostrom’s initials and recognizes the discovery as suspiciously convenient evidence.

The handbag also carries a sensory clue. When Montalbano later examines women’s clothes at the Capo Massaria house, he recognizes a scent like the one he had noticed, more faintly, when opening the bag at Sicilchim. The connection extends the factory’s importance beyond the discarded object itself: the site has preserved a trace that helps link separate places in the investigation.

The Neck Brace

Montalbano returns to Sicilchim after becoming furious over a problem involving his car and leaving the office without saying goodbye. He retrieves the key to the old factory from a tin can where he keeps assorted small possessions, then goes back to the spot near the handbag.

There, on the rotten beam, he recognizes an object he had previously taken for an unidentified pipe coupling: it is a neck brace, brand-new but clearly used. The discovery makes the ordinary act of looking again consequential; an object overlooked among industrial waste acquires a specific identity. Montalbano’s own neck begins to hurt as if by suggestion. He takes the brace away and returns to headquarters, carrying a newly recognized piece of physical evidence from the ruins.

Investigative Significance

At Sicilchim, the contrast between the stylish handbag and the rubbish around it, and between an obscure piece of scrap and the neck brace it proves to be, makes recognition itself part of the investigation. Objects do not explain themselves: their placement, condition, and relation to other traces give them meaning. The stones inside the bag suggest deliberate placement, while the brace’s location beside the beam turns a previously overlooked item into something Montalbano considers worth retrieving.

The factory therefore functions as more than a hiding place. Its wall, debris, and industrial structures shape how evidence is moved, concealed, and found; its ruin also slows Montalbano’s search, requiring him to cross piles of wreckage and inspect discarded things one by one. Sicilchim’s narrative significance lies in this uneasy conversion of waste into testimony: amid objects that appear useless, the investigation finds traces capable of changing direction.