The Hermitage: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 9)

by LJ Ross

  “It’s all soda bread and chowder, where I’m from,” she reminded him, having decided to humour her soon-to-be husband for a couple of minutes. “Which reminds me, I had my auntie on the phone, earlier.”

  Phillips winced. MacKenzie’s ageing Irish aunt was a strong-headed woman from County Kerry who was known throughout that land as being one of its most opinionated and outspoken residents.

  “She had a list of complaints about our plans,” MacKenzie continued. “She doesn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to marry in the church where I was baptised, rather than having a civil ceremony in the beautiful castle I’ve admired since I was a girl. I didn’t bother telling her I haven’t seen the inside of a Catholic church since I was investigating one of its holy men for murder.”

  Phillips chuckled.

  “Aye, that wouldn’t have gone down too well,” he said, then reached across to touch her hand. “Would you like me to have a word with her? You shouldn’t have to deal with all that nonsense, love. It’s supposed to be a happy time, planning our special day.”

  MacKenzie squeezed his hand.

  “Thanks, Frank, but there isn’t really time just now. We have to shake a leg.”

  Assuming she was referring to the Warkworth case, Phillips reached for his notepad.

  “Well, I’ve just heard back from Faulkner, who says he’s having a devil of a time trying to find any useful DNA that doesn’t belong to the victim. Yates has been liaising with the Crown Prosecution Service and the Courts Service to pull together a list of all the people he prosecuted—and sent down—while he was practising.”

  He didn’t need to mention what a mammoth task that might be.

  “Tell her to cross-check against prison releases between eighteen months and six months ago,” MacKenzie suggested. “If our working theory is that Edward Clarkson was scared enough to leave his old life behind, maybe it was to do with him worrying that someone from his past would be coming for him.”

  Phillips nodded.

  “I can give her a hand—”

  “That all depends,” MacKenzie said, very casually.

  “—and I’m still waiting to hear back from the banks about his financial…eh? What’s that?”

  “It might be tricky to help when you’ll be in Italy with me,” she said.

  Phillips sat up a bit straighter in his chair.

  “What’s happened? Is our lad in trouble?”

  “Nothing Ryan can’t handle,” MacKenzie said. “But Morrison reckons he’ll handle it a lot better if we’re over there with him, to lend a hand. Besides, I told her you speak a dozen languages, that you’d blend in like Al Pacino and that, with any luck, we’d be home again by morning.”

  Phillips gave her a toothy grin.

  “Does this mean you’ll start calling me The Godfather?”

  MacKenzie tapped a hand against his cheek and clucked her tongue.

  “Ah, now. Let’s not start delving into the realms of pure fantasy.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  CHAPTER 25

  While Phillips brought his holiday civvies out of mothballs, Ryan stood beside a metal gurney at the Florence City Morgue and looked upon the ravaged body of Martina Calari. His face was carefully neutral and, to the casual observer, appeared entirely devoid of emotion.

  But his eyes gave him away.

  They had darkened in grief to a colour akin to the North Sea in winter and swirled with a stormy blend of anger and compassion.

  “Has she been identified?” he asked, softly.

  Ricci shook his head.

  “Her fiancé will be coming in shortly,” he answered. “It’s just a formality, really.”

  Ryan understood what he meant. The woman’s face, though wasted by an evening spent in the murky waters of the Arno, was still recognisable enough. She wore a ring on the third finger of her left hand that was a perfect match to the description given by her fiancé. Apparently, the cluster of sapphires and diamonds now caught between the bloated folds of the woman’s finger had been in his family for years.

  “The cause of death seems obvious,” he said, but looked across at the police pathologist for confirmation. The woman was somewhere in her late thirties, with serious brown eyes and a quiet air of authority.

  “Yes,” she replied, reaching out a gloved hand to point towards the deep circular tear in the woman’s neck. “She has been strangled, and with some force. Enough to tear the skin and crush her trachea, here.”

  “By what?” Ryan asked.

  The pathologist made a murmuring sound while she thought.

  “It’s too early to say for certain, but I would think a slim cord of some kind, perhaps of a similar circumference as the cord of a hairdryer, or any household electrical device.”

  “We already have a reasonable idea of post mortem interval but is there any way to narrow it down?” Ricci asked.

  The pathologist shook her head.

  “She has been submerged for at least six to twelve hours, that much I can tell you by the condition of her skin. Her core temperature has been affected by the surrounding water, which was approximately six degrees Celsius overnight.”

  They nodded, casting sympathetic eyes towards the body.

  “As for the time of death, I can’t give you anything specific, but I can tell you that, if she went missing sometime after six last night, it would be consistent with the level of decomposition.”

  “What about defensive wounds?” Ryan asked.

  “The water will probably have washed away any skin samples or fluids,” she replied. “But her nails were torn, here,” she pointed to the woman’s hands. “It’s possible this happened in the water, but it’s more likely to have happened during a struggle. Unfortunately, I suspect the nails were torn against her own skin, as she tried to loosen whatever was cutting off her air supply; there are scratches down her neck that appear self-inflicted.”

  Ryan nodded his thanks.

  “Is it the same?” Ricci turned to him and, for once, his face bore the evidence of stress. “Is this what you found before?”

  Ryan didn’t pretend to misunderstand.

  “Armstrong’s last victims—or, should I say, alleged victims—were stabbed and bludgeoned with the blunt end of a heavy copper pan, respectively. He has no known MO, other than being supremely careful with forensic matters. It makes our job harder, but it doesn’t rule him out of having done this,” he gestured mutely to the woman’s remains, then turned away to face Ricci fully. “If you’re asking me whether I believe Nathan Armstrong could be responsible for this, then my answer is ‘yes’. I believe he has it in him to kill without mercy, with force and, what’s more, he’d sleep like a baby afterwards.”

  Ricci swallowed and, for the first time, appeared out of his depth in the harsh light of the mortuary.

  “I’m no inexperienced boy,” he said. “I’ve seen what people are capable of, whether for love, for money or because they are mafia. But it has been a long time since Florence has seen anything like this. So long, that whoever was Il Mostro has become more of an urban legend; something the kids say to frighten one another at Hallowe’en, or the kind of gruesome story that authors use to inspire novels,” he added, with a small smile. “I was one of those kids. I grew up years after the murders happened and never saw anything remotely like it during all the time I’ve been at the Gruppo.”

  “You’re fortunate,” Ryan breathed.

  Ricci nodded soberly.

  “I heard…that is, I know what happened to your family. I was sorry to hear of it.”

  Ryan gave a short nod.

  “You were unlucky, my friend. But, living through that kind of experience can change a man. Make him see shadows around every corner.”

  Something flickered in Ryan’s eyes, something that might have been hurt, but was quickly extinguished.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Losing your sister to a serial killer and almost being murdered yourself is something you don’t tend to forge
t. I see his shadow around every corner. I see the lingering embers of what might be called ‘evil’ in Armstrong’s eyes, just as I once saw them in The Hacker. But it doesn’t make me a paranoid quack; no longer capable of distinguishing between reality and unreality, or between right and wrong. I see them both, very clearly, my friend, and it gives me a competitive advantage. You know why?” Ryan asked, conversationally. “Because, when the wolf comes knocking at my door, I’ll recognise him.”

  Without waiting for any response, Ryan turned and walked out of the mortuary and didn’t stop until he reached the street, where he emerged like a drowning man to suck in massive gulps of warm air. People passed by, stepping around him as they carried on with their ordinary lives.

  Never thinking, never imagining that they might be next.

  The street seemed to contract, closing in around him as Ryan stood there gasping for breath. He stumbled back against the stone wall of the mortuary building, fumbling with the top button of his linen shirt but finding it already open at the neck.

  He told himself to breathe.

  Breathe.

  In…out.

  In…and out.

  After a moment, the dizzying loss of control passed and the numb, pins-and-needles sensation in his fingertips began to fade. The street was whole once again, the same as it had been for centuries. Its walls had been tarnished and worn with time, battered and bruised, but they still stood tall.

  As would he.

  * * *

  When Ryan arrived back at the villa, the clock on the mantel had just struck five. Light streamed through the enormous arched windows, but its rooms were silent. His pace quickened as he moved from room to room and he fought back an overwhelming panic that gripped his heart and forced him to imagine every worst possible outcome.

  “Signore?”

  Ryan spun around at the sound of Magda’s calm voice and found her framed in the kitchen doorway.

  “Hello, Magda. I was looking for Anna?”

  Magda noted the pallor of his skin with concern but, wisely, chose to say nothing.

  “The signora is in your father’s study,” she answered. “Shall I bring some coffee through to you?”

  As though she had spoken the magic word, Ryan’s face transformed.

  “That would be great, thanks. Oh, and Magda, I don’t suppose you know where I can find a couple of decorative masks, at short notice?”

  She gave him a smile not unlike Da Vinci’s Madonna.

  “I have already laid them out on your bed,” she told him. “I had them delivered before lunchtime.”

  “You’re one in a million,” he declared, and surprised her with a quick peck on the cheek.

  She watched him move off in search of his wife and thought of her own boy, lost to her now.

  * * *

  Ryan’s father, David, was a methodical, traditional sort of man who had laid out his study very much like the one he had back home in Devon, save for the ornate touches that were to be expected of an old Florentine villa. He had resisted his wife’s none-too-subtle hints that he might want to brighten the place up a bit and give it a lick of paint, preferring instead to retain a rustic, more simplistic space where he could focus on the difficult matters his job had entailed. In more recent years, the space had become a reading room where any of his family might retreat for a few hours to lounge in the comfortable leather desk chair or on one of the velvet-covered day beds.

  It also happened to possess a long wall-space that was free of wall hangings or paintings, unlike most of the other rooms in the Villa Lucia, which had been the deciding factor for Anna.

  “What’s all this?” Ryan asked, as he stepped inside the musty room.

  His wife stood in the centre of the room, arms folded, surveying her handiwork. She turned distractedly when he entered and, for a fraction of a second, Ryan saw the expression he so often wore reflected on his wife’s face.

  “Hi there,” she said, and her face broke into a smile. “I missed you today.”

  He closed the space between them in three long strides.

  “I missed you, too,” he murmured, and kissed her deeply.

  Long minutes later, Ryan turned back to the wall and took a closer look at what she’d created. On one side, she’d tacked up images of Duncan Gray and Kate Robson, two people who had died at the hands of Nathan Armstrong at Kielder, in Northumberland, but for whom justice had been elusive. In the middle, she’d tacked up images of missing persons associated with Armstrong, alongside the dates they were reported. So far, she had Luc Bernard and Riccardo Spatuzzi, whose faces stared back at him in bold colour against the muted wall. A little further away, in her own space, there was a picture of Martina Calari, presumably taken from her social media account. A pretty young mother who smiled happily out at the camera, frozen in time forever. Ryan had a flash memory of how she’d looked only a couple of hours before, and bore down against a fresh wave of anger.

  He turned to another part of the wall, where there was a detailed timeline stretching back to the events at Kielder last year, when they had first encountered Nathan Armstrong at his house on the lake, known as ‘Scribe’s End’. Above it all was a large, annotated paper map of Florence, similar to those found in guidebooks or given out as pamphlets with areas of interest drawn in tiny 3D form. Dotted around the map were what appeared to be schematic drawings of various buildings, alongside printed images of them taken from the web.

  In other words, his wife had created a Murder Board.

  It must have taken hours, systematically finding and researching areas and people of interest and setting it all out in the way she knew he liked to work. There was nothing she could have given him that would have meant more to him in that moment.

  “Thank you,” he said huskily, and turned to bestow one of the special smiles he reserved only for her. “You’ve saved me hours of precious time.”

  Anna smiled.

  “I wanted to help,” she said, simply. “I don’t know if it’s right—”

  Ryan moved closer to study the wall, his eyes skimming over the handwritten details she’d added onto the map before moving to fall once again on the picture of Martina Calari. Wordlessly, he reached for her photograph and tugged it off the wall, only to move it a little further left, alongside the images of Duncan Gray and Kate Robson.

  “She was found earlier today,” he said, and stepped back again.

  “I’m sorry,” Anna murmured. “I know it’s what you suspected but it doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “No,” he agreed. “It’s one instance where it doesn’t feel good to know you were right all along.”

  Just then, Magda arrived with a tray of coffee. They thanked her, and she disappeared soundlessly, her eyes glancing once at the wall before falling away again.

  “She’s discreet,” Anna observed. “I wonder how she came to work for your family?”

  “She was a friend of my mother,” Ryan explained. “Has been for years. I think she needed the work and, as far as security goes, she passed the enhanced background checks.”

  His eye caught on a schematic drawing of the Uffizi Gallery and he pointed at it.

  “The police and security teams searched the whole museum before its doors opened to the public,” he explained. “Martina Calari went missing from there but, when the CCTV footage was requested this morning, we found it had all been wiped.”

  “Completely?”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Armstrong’s home in Kielder is kitted out like a technological fortress. I wouldn’t put it past him to know how to tamper with the cameras, even remotely.”

  “Do you know his schedule?” Anna asked.

  “I have a rough idea,” Ryan answered. “His public schedule is available online. He’s been hopping between radio and television gigs for the past couple of days, plus book signings around the city. I don’t know exact timings for all of them, but I can find out.”

  “It depends how long he had to himself, betw
een events,” Anna mused. “He’s a recognisable face around these parts, so he couldn’t just come and go as he pleases.”

  “That’s the conundrum,” Ryan admitted. “The street cameras outside the museum haven’t recorded any sighting of Martina Calari—or Armstrong, for that matter—in the period she went missing. I don’t understand how he managed to enter and leave, let alone take her with him, without being caught on camera.”

  “The Vasari Corridor,” Anna said. “I’ve been looking into possibilities all day and it’s the only one that fits.”

  Ryan frowned, trying to remember why the name rang a bell.

  “It’s an enclosed, elevated passageway,” she explained. “It was built by Cosimo de’ Medici in 1565 to allow his family and their guests to move freely between their residence at the Palazzo Pitti and the government palace at the Palazzo Vecchio without having to sully themselves on the street.”

  “Alright for some,” Ryan said. “But I don’t see how it helps us.”

  “The corridor runs south of the Palazzo Vecchio through the Uffizi Gallery,” she explained, moving over to trace her index finger over the map to show him its route. “It then bears west, running parallel to the River Arno until it reaches the Ponte Vecchio. It crosses the bridge and continues south, over the church of Santa Felicita, until it reaches the Palazzo Pitti and ends in the Boboli Gardens. It’s around a kilometre long, in total.”

  Ryan walked up to the map.

  “You said it runs parallel to the river, here,” he said. “Does it run through these buildings lining the river, or around them?”

  “Mostly, it runs through them, but with the notable exception of the Mannelli Tower—the story goes that the family refused to allow Cosimo to hack through their palazzo and it seems he respected their gumption in refusing him, even though he was the most powerful man in Florence, even Italy, at that time. He built the corridor around the tower instead, supported by enormous brackets, but for the most part the Medici built directly through whichever buildings stood in the way.”

  “Including the Palazzo Russo?” Ryan asked, referring to the building containing Nathan Armstrong’s apartment.