by LJ Ross
“You asked me whether I think he’ll hurt someone in Florence? The answer is ‘yes’, because I don’t think he can deny himself the pleasure.”
“Even when he knows you’re tracking him?” Anna put in. “Because he must know you’d follow him here. He sent you those postcards, after all. What else were they, if not an invitation?”
“Yes, he knows,” Ryan said. “And no, it isn’t enough to stop him. In fact, I think my being here heightens the challenge for him not to get caught. I don’t know what else motivates him yet, not deep down, but I need to find out. When we know why, it’ll be easier to work out who he’ll target next, and when.”
Anna listened with a growing sense of unease. She’d known the type of man her husband had come to find, of course she had, but hearing Armstrong’s character and exploits spoken of so plainly made her blood run cold.
“What will you do? What can we do?” she corrected.
Ryan stuck his hands in his pockets.
“We do things by the book, as far as we can. Ricci’s due to speak to Armstrong in a couple of hours and we’ll find out where he says he was when Bernard and Spatuzzi went missing.”
“Both male,” Anna thought aloud. “Like Duncan Gray, all those years ago.”
Ryan thought of the young teenage boy whose mummified body had been discovered four months ago, and of his mother’s grief. Angela Grey had lived for thirty years thinking her son had run away from her, knowing in her heart that he was gone for good. She’d never suspected that he’d lain less than half a mile away from where she lived and worked, buried in a clay tomb by a man who believed his past deeds would never rise up to haunt him.
But he’d been wrong.
Ryan had done all he could to prove Armstrong had been the one to kill Duncan Gray, but on the cusp of charging the man with murder, he’d been overruled from above. He’d never forget the anger he’d felt as he watched the man walk out of Northumbria Police Headquarters, free to do as he pleased.
“Yes, the missing persons are all men, as far as we know.”
“Can we draw any conclusions from that?” Anna wondered.
Ryan considered the question.
“It was impossible to say conclusively whether Duncan Gray had suffered any sexual assault before he died but, if the police are able to find the bodies of Riccardo Spatuzzi or Luc Bernard before too long, we’ll be able to check for any obvious motives.”
“You think they’re definitely—”
“Dead? Yes.”
Anna swallowed.
“How do you know?”
“Put it down to instinct, again,” Ryan said. “But I’ve also read the police reports from Paris and Vienna. Both men were, by all accounts, content and happy in their lives, give or take the usual gripes about money or job satisfaction. There was nothing to suggest suicide as a possibility, or that either man was likely to pack up and leave one day without a word to anyone. The only logical reason why Bernard or Spatuzzi would go missing is that they were taken against their will…”
He trailed off, thinking of Armstrong’s general character, then gave a small shake of his head.
“I can’t say whether the gender makes any difference because I don’t have enough information. But I can tell you one thing: if either of those men had injured him, humiliated him or otherwise bested him, I think it would be enough to send Armstrong over the edge.”
Anna was silent for long seconds as she thought of another man, at another time, who had harboured similar delusions of grandeur. It would be all too easy to dismiss the thought as fanciful, to laugh off the idea that a person could be so megalomaniacal as to commit murder. But she had seen that type before and could even remember the warmth of his breath as Steve Walker had loomed over her with a knife in his hand, ready to kill or be killed.
“He needs to be stopped,” she said, flatly, and rolled out of bed in one fluid movement to reach for the dressing gown draped over a nearby chair. “Tell me what I can do to help.”
Ryan opened his mouth to tell her there was nothing, but stopped himself just in time. His wife was no trophy to be cosseted or protected; she needed neither. Anna Taylor-Ryan was a survivor who had lost every member of her family and had nearly been lost herself. There was nothing new he could tell her about the kind of dark, nefarious men and women he hunted each day, nor about the kind of destruction they left in their wake. She had been witness to both and would carry the memories with her, probably for the rest of her life.
This was not a woman who would be satisfied with some menial task, paying lip service to her considerable talents rather than using them as a force for good. He could not have loved her, otherwise, nor would he wish her to be anything less than who she was.
“I need to know who Riccardo Spatuzzi really is,” he said firmly. “Inspector Ricci knows the name but either can’t, or won’t, tell me the connection. I suspect it has to do with the mafia, but I have no idea to what extent. Without the full picture, we can’t eliminate the mafia as having a possible connection to his disappearance.”
Anna thought for a moment.
“The best person to speak to would be a journalist,” she decided. “Somebody in the local press, who knows the city inside out. I can try to find one.”
Ryan nodded his thanks.
“Make a few calls, speak to some people, but wait until I come back before heading into the city.”
“He won’t come after me,” she said, but Ryan shook his head.
“We don’t know that. Please, Anna.”
Before she had an opportunity to answer, they were interrupted by the familiar, tinny rendition of the Indiana Jones theme tune ringing out from Ryan’s smartphone.
CHAPTER 10
The Criminal Investigation Department was based out of Northumbria Police Headquarters, east of Newcastle upon Tyne in an area known as Wallsend. It was the old heartland of the city, a cemetery of shipyards and Roman forts, as well as being the hub of a proud community that weathered whichever storm rolled in and battered them from the sea. There was spirit here, MacKenzie thought, as she and Phillips turned into the staff car park. There was still plenty of industry, too, if the queue for their local Pie Van was anything to go by. What had started out as a humble operation outside the gates of the constabulary’s former office building had, by now, grown into several high-end kitchens-on-wheels serving everything from ham-and-pease-pudding stotties to vegan-friendly falafel.
When she mentioned as much to Phillips, he pulled an expressive face.
“Aye, that’s the price of capitalism,” he said. “I remember the days when I could pop down for a corned beef pasty and an Irn Bru and it’d take two minutes. Now, it’s all, diet this and organic that, and the pasties are the size of postage stamps.”
He patted his stomach.
“I s’pose it’s for the best,” he said, sounding unconvinced.
MacKenzie turned to face him.
“I think you’re looking just fine, Frank.”
It didn’t matter that Phillips considered himself an experienced Man of the World. One look from Denise MacKenzie was enough to turn him weak at the knees and, paired with the kind of suggestive smile she was deploying right now, he might as well wave a white flag and surrender.
“Aye. Well,” he said, eloquently. “I’ve, ah, well…I wanted to look smart for the wedding.”
“You’d always look smart, to me,” she said.
He made a valiant effort to pull himself together.
“I don’t know if this counts as workplace harassment but, if it does, I want you to know that I’m consenting.”
MacKenzie burst out laughing and planted a quick, smacking kiss on his upturned face.
“Take it easy, sergeant. We’ve got a full day’s work ahead of us before anybody’s getting harassed.”
With that, she gave him a wink and stepped out of the car while he sat there for a couple of seconds grinning like a fool.
“What a woman,” he sighed.
* * *
If the exterior of Police Headquarters was a triumph of boxy, uninspiring architecture, then its interior was a triumph of cheap, clinical décor. There was a sweepstake running on how long it would take for the first leak to start in the ceiling above the reception foyer and Phillips’ bet was that a damp spot would appear by the end of the week. He peered closely at the foamy ceiling tiles as they passed underneath, tutting when he found them all intact.
“Told you it would take longer,” MacKenzie said. “My bet was for six months, on the nose.”
Phillips waved that away, good-naturedly.
“I’m sticking to my guns,” he said. “I’ve spent nearly thirty years working in and out of government buildings and, I’m telling you, that ceiling will spring a leak by the end of the week.”
She stopped dead in the foyer and turned on him with narrowed eyes.
“Now, Frank. Don’t think you can go and hurry things along by leaving a tap running on the floor above,” she warned him, pointing a red-tipped fingernail above her head.
He had the grace to look abashed.
“As if the thought had ever crossed my mind,” he said, gravely.
“Mmm.”
They buzzed through a set of security doors leading to the office suite that housed CID and made their way up to the first floor, passing along what seemed like miles of carpet-tiled corridor until they reached the open-plan space where they spent at least half their lives. MacKenzie slung her shoulder bag onto the back of her chair and her eyes strayed to the empty space further along the row of desks, where they would usually find Ryan seated with his head bent industriously over a stack of files or his flinty blue gaze trained on the computer screen.
She glanced around the room at the motley crew of men and women belonging to Ryan’s stable of detectives. Despite the recent shift change, they looked tired. Outside, rain had started to fall, pattering against the window panes lining one wall of the room and it was having a soporific effect on them all. At moments like these, it was hard not to miss Ryan’s natural leadership; the energy he carried with him when he entered the room and the passion for his work that couldn’t help but inspire others to feel the same.
But there was no time to miss him while there was work to be done and, sensing that the energy in her workforce was low, MacKenzie called an impromptu meeting.
“Alright, listen up!” she called out. “Can everybody gather around, please?”
Chairs were scraped back, and the muted rumble of conversation died down as the men and women of Ryan’s division formed a semi-circle around her desk.
“Morning, everyone,” she said, injecting a bit of cheer into her voice. “As you know, the Chief has asked me to keep an eye on things while DCI Ryan is away for the next few days. We all know one another,” she added, with what she hoped was a friendly smile. “We’ve all worked together on countless cases over the past few years, so I hope you feel you can come to me if there’s a problem.”
She saw nods around the room, which was encouraging.
“Look, I want to make one thing clear,” she continued. “I’m just keeping his seat warm, I’m not looking to take it.”
She paused to let that sink in.
“With that in mind, I want us to focus on keeping things on an even keel over the next few days. I’d like each of you to let me have a summary of your caseload and how it’s progressing, so that we can divvy up the resources as efficiently as possible. I’ll start by saying that Phillips and I caught a new case yesterday morning, one we’re treating as a murder enquiry, so we may need to reassign resources depending on how things pan out.”
Although serious crime was their bread and butter, the truth was that murder remained a rare occurrence, for which they could all be grateful. Rarer still did they find a murder that did not conform to the usual tropes of gang or inter-family crime but appeared to be entirely without motive. As she looked around the faces of her colleagues, she saw their eyes sharpen.
“The victim is Edward Charon, a sixty-five-year-old resident of Warkworth and former ferryman to the castle hermitage. He was found bludgeoned to death inside the hermitage around ten-fifteen, yesterday morning.”
“How long had he been lying there?” somebody asked.
“We’re waiting to hear from the pathologist about post mortem interval,” MacKenzie replied. “The temperatures fell to well below zero last night, so it’s hard to estimate, but judging from experience I’d say he’d been dead at least twelve hours.”
“Why would anybody bump him off?” one of the DCs asked. “Was he dealing on the side?”
Nine times out of ten, drugs or some other illegal commodity lay behind an otherwise motiveless crime, so it wasn’t a foolish question.
“We haven’t ruled anything out,” MacKenzie said. “We’re having trouble finding a next-of-kin for the victim and the process has thrown up some questions surrounding Charon’s identity, which Mel has been looking into.”
She sought out trainee DC Melanie Yates, who poked her head around the side of one of her taller colleagues.
“Maybe you could give us a quick run-down of where you are with Charon’s background check?”
Yates was a quiet, no-nonsense woman in her twenties. Her work on the fringes of several investigations had been sufficiently impressive for Ryan to pluck her from the realms of obscurity and offer the opportunity to train on the detective’s pathway, as he had done with others before. Melanie was honest enough to admit that, having idolised Ryan from the very first time she’d seen him in the corridors of CID, it was a dream come true to find herself working within his team. She learned something new almost every day from her more experienced colleagues and she had almost overcome the foolish, schoolgirl crush she harboured for her very-married boss.
Almost.
As it was, she was worrying about his welfare in Italy and had limited herself to a maximum of three enquiries as to his wellbeing per day. Anything more would look far too familiar.
“Mel?”
“Right, yes. Umm,” she scrambled her thoughts together, never more aware of several sets of eyes having swivelled in her direction.
“A simple search of the victim’s home and local enquiries elicited no information on Edward Charon’s next-of-kin, so I ran a standard check on his background. He had no criminal record or cautions to his name, but it appears that Charon changed his name by deed poll in February of last year.”
“What was his name before?”
“Edward Clarkson,” Yates replied. “Aged sixty-five and a former resident of Gosforth.”
“What did he do for a living?” Phillips asked.
“He was a barrister,” she replied.
There were murmurs of surprise around the room.
“Eh?” Phillips said, capturing what they were all thinking. “Why the heck would a barrister change his name and move out of the city? Unless he fell in with the wrong element,” he added, answering his own question.
“I don’t know yet,” Yates replied. “We need to speak to his former colleagues in the chambers where he worked—ah, Riverside Chambers—down by the Crown Court on the Quayside.”
“What about family?” MacKenzie asked.
“Edward Clarkson was unmarried, although he cohabited with a woman by the name of Jill Grant from 1991 to 2004 at his home in Gosforth.”
Yates reeled off an address on one of the most expensive streets in the city.
“See if you can contact her,” MacKenzie said. “She’s the closest thing to family we’ve found, so let’s see what she can tell us.”
“Will do,” Yates murmured.
“Something’s off here,” Phillips burst out. “A man of his age and means doesn’t leave it all behind and bugger off to Warkworth for no reason, unless he’s had some sort of mid-life crisis.”
“Some people crave the quiet life,” MacKenzie said.
“That’s all well and good, but he didn’t need to change his name for that, did he
?” Phillips folded his arms and shook his head. “Naht. The bloke was running from something, that has to be it.”
MacKenzie was minded to agree.
“Frank, you look into that connection with Yates, while I’m paying a visit to the pathologist.”
She turned back to the rest of the team and proceeded to divvy up the remaining tasks, appointing a reader-receiver and several analysts to manage the influx of data that was already starting to come in.
“Boss?”
MacKenzie paused in the act of retrieving her coat.
“Ah, yeah?”
“What’s the name of the operation? For the board, I mean?”
Her mind was blank for a moment, then it cleared.
“Let’s call it ‘Operation Hotspur’,” she said, as a nod to the young Percy Earl of Northumberland whose exploits had even inspired Shakespeare, in his day. “Maybe it’ll bring us luck.”
CHAPTER 11
The streets of Florence sang with the chatter of Italian voices raised in the kind of friendly to-and-fro that Ryan remembered so well from his youth. Friends waved at each other across the street or stopped traffic just to say ‘hello’ and nobody seemed to mind. Having left Anna in the safe hands of his housekeeper, Magda, Ryan had uncovered his old scooter from the dusty confines of the garage. He’d been delighted to find that its engine revved into life with a smooth, purring roar and, moments later, he’d exited the high-security perimeter of the Villa Lucia to rattle through the streets, blending in with a stream of dark-haired men and women making their way into the city centre. As the wind rushed against his face, it was a journey of rediscovery, like a sepia-hued snapshot of an old memory he’d cherished from boyhood and had been afraid to uncover in case it would be spoiled. It struck him how difficult it was to come back to investigate the possibility of murder, especially when his heart urged him to forget about Nathan Armstrong and lose himself in the cultured scents and tastes of Tuscany instead.
He slowed down as morning traffic grew heavier towards the centre and didn’t stop to admire the River Arno as he crossed it, focusing instead on reaching his destination in one piece as he wove between the line of stationary cars, their horns blaring as a delivery van pulled to a stop in the middle of the road and began to unload its goods. Eventually, Ryan navigated his way through the side streets, circumventing the Duomo and working mostly from memory until he found himself outside GIDES headquarters at the Commissariato San Giovanni once more.