by Connor, Alex
‘Depends. In this case, the killer knew exactly what to do.’
Nodding, Gil glanced around at the newly modernised surroundings, with their even lighting, pristine tiled floor and sterile metal worktops. More Ikea kitchen than NHS morgue. Then he moved over to the far wall and studied the banks of drawers lined up. One drawer for each body. Neat. Hygienic. Uncomfortably familiar.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he said, talking more to himself than the pathologist. ‘How could one man overpower two men? Tie them up, torture them, and then kill them …’ He glanced back to Dunning. ‘Were there any drugs in the bodies?’
‘No.’
‘And no defence wounds? Nothing to suggest that they struggled?’
‘Like I said in my report,’ Dunning remarked officiously, ‘I found no defence marks.’
‘And that didn’t strike you as odd?’
‘Maybe they knew their killer.’
‘And let him tie them up?’
‘They were naked. Maybe it was sexual,’ Dunning offered tentatively.
‘And then they just sat there while someone fired nails into their balls?’ Gil asked, moving over to the far wall and reading the labels on the cadaver drawers. ‘May I look at the bodies?’
The pathologist nodded. ‘Detective Simmons said I was to give you any help you required.’
Gil pulled out the drawer named SEBASTIAN WEIR and drew back the sheet which covered the corpse. He could see the Y-shaped autopsy incision and the lacerating garrotte wound to the throat. He then studied Sebastian’s body, from the head downwards, staring at the vicious mutilation of the genitals.
‘How much blood would they have lost from the torture?’
‘Post or peri mortem?’
Gil turned. ‘Some injuries were inflicted after death?’
‘Yes, quite a few.’
‘Same amount of wounds on both brothers?’
‘Yes. Exactly.’
‘How many?’
‘Eight.’
Taking in a breath, Gil nodded. Seven years earlier, in Berlin, Terrill Huber had had nails driven into his scrotum. Eight of them. And Alma Huber had had nails fired into her breasts. Eight again. No one had known what it meant then. Gil didn’t know what it meant now.
He turned back to the pathologist.
‘How could a single man incapacitate two men? And even if the killer managed to persuade them to strip and be bound together, how did he torture them without them fighting back?’ Gil paused. ‘The Weir brothers were celibate. Never any rumours – and the art world gossips, believe me. People would have known if they had any sexual quirks.’
‘But people hide things like that.’
‘One man might, but two brothers?’ Gil shook his head. ‘No, I doubt it.’
He thought back to Berlin and knew that the same killer was active again. The murderer was spelling it out for him. Drawing the participants of the earlier case back into his sphere. Jacob Levens, brother of Alma Huber, conveniently finding the Weir twins. Gil Eckhart, the investigator on the Berlin case, called in to work on the Weir murders. Who else? Gil wondered, thinking back. Who else had been involved in Germany?
And then he remembered Harvey Crammer.
Eleven
New York
10.00 a.m.
Rubbing her cropped hair dry, Catrina walked back into the sitting room in the apartment over her gallery in the meat-packing area of Manhattan. She had inherited the residence and business from her late father, Frank Hoyt, a place he had used for laundering money from his casino in Las Vegas. And for housing a slutty string of mistresses.
Catrina’s childhood had been punctuated by overblown, simpering seventeenth-century French art, and a slew of overblown, simpering unsuitable women. When Catrina reached the age of twelve her mother ran away, exhausted by Frank’s infidelity and violence. Left in the care of an incompetent nanny, Catrina had skipped school. She grew tall and athletic, with a natural gift for sports. Which she ignored. Instead, by the time she was fifteen she had fallen in with a street gang, proving her worth in fights and taking on all comers.
She was pretty. And aggressive. No boy ever got close to Catrina unless she wanted him to. Restless in New York, she began to travel, ending up in Miami. But her explosive temper, unchannelled and uncurbed, resulted in a charge for assault at the age of eighteen. She had used a knife. The police then discovered that she had a gun in her possession.
When Frank heard about the charge, he left Vegas and confronted Catrina in Miami, dragging her back to New York and playing – too late – the heavy father figure. He said he wanted to become a bigger part of her life. That he was sorry for not being around much in her childhood. That the way she had turned out was probably his fault.
Catrina laughed in his face. Embarrassed and angry, he struck her. And she struck back, cutting him with the kitchen knife she had been holding. Frank never threatened his daughter again. Instead he hired a lawyer to arrange for the victim to be pacified, to drop the charge and settle out of court. Catrina didn’t thank him. She was too angry, too bitter about her past to let him off the hook.
Unable to communicate with his daughter, Frank Hoyt went back to Vegas. When he talked about Catrina to his cohorts, he always bragged about her. But in truth, she scared the shit out of him.
When he died Catrina was thirty. She had changed over the years. At nineteen she had left the street gang and taken up sports. Her body, lithe and muscular, became her personal weapon. She was strong enough to fell a man, sexual enough to seduce him. Rumours began to circulate that she was a lesbian. She was, for a short time. Rumours also circulated that she was a whore. Which was true. Then she inherited the gallery.
Once hers, she tipped out the French nudes and took a trip round Europe, buying the art she was drawn to. Her taste was laughable. She lost money. Worst, she lost face. An affair with an English dealer was no accident. Catrina had hand-picked him, choosing the man who could teach her the most. Six months later, she knew about Italian art and he knew about bondage. Catrina thought it was a fair swap. Her progress continued. If she could seduce knowledge out of someone, she would. If not, she would buy it from them. She didn’t believe in love or affection. She didn’t believe in any god or any devil. She was predatory, courageous and ruthless.
And now Catrina Hoyt was standing in front of her laptop, intrigued as she looked at an email that had just come through. Someone had written:
Dear Ms Hoyt,
This email is from Mr Luca Meriss.
Mr Meriss is in possession of some valuable information about ‘Portrait of Fillide Melandroni’, missing since 1945.
So some nutter – or some partner of the nutter who had broken into her basement – was now trying to contact her by email?
She read on:
Mr Meriss knows that you are interested in the Italian’s works. He also wishes to make clear that this is no stunt. Mr Meriss is a descendant of the artist Caravaggio. He has proof. He also has proof of the whereabouts of the portrait – and another famous work long missing.
Mr Meriss has just released a statement to the press and on his website.
Please reply.
www.meriss.icon.com
Cell phone: 0 ………………
Curious, Catrina clicked on the website link. A photograph appeared immediately. The face was fleshy, soft-skinned, handsome but overblown, the lips pomegranate red. A piazza boy outgrown his trade, she thought.
Luca Meriss claimed to be the descendant of Caravaggio and the notorious Roman prostitute, Fillide Melandroni. There was a photograph of her portrait too: slyly erotic, hair a black aura round her impious head. Catrina glanced at the drawing of the artist placed next to Fillide, the well-known features of Caravaggio scowling from the page.
Fucking idiot, she thought. Could this Meriss man really believe he was a descendant of the painter? In every biography she had read – and she had read them all – there had never been mention of Caravaggio having sired any offspring.
Indeed, the twentieth century had made him into a gay icon, until another authority suggested that his fight with Ranuccio Tomassoni was actually Caravaggio’s attempt to castrate the man with whom he was sharing Melandroni. Jealous rage had provoked the final, fatal attack, an event that had sent the fugitive Caravaggio fleeing Rome for Naples.
Catrina read on, amused. Well, if someone was going to claim an ancestor, why not pick the most notorious painter who had ever lived? She thought back to the break-in and the phone call which had followed.
I need you as a dealer. I need your seal of approval.
Maybe it wasn’t a hoax …
Catrina thought about her public admiration of Caravaggio, her writings on the Italian artist. The art world might try to dismiss her as a tyro, a freak, but there was no one more determined to prove them wrong. The knowledge she had built up about the artist was phenomenal. His violent nature was familiar to her, the street-smart contempt with which he had treated his contemporaries understandable. She could identify with him as gang-runner and yob. Wilful, hysterical and self-destructive. Doomed to die young. Lucky fuck, she thought.
As for his paintings, some forty or so survived but a number had been lost. And much as the art world might keep trying to claim pastiches or clodhopping copies as original works, a true Caravaggio spewed out its genius from the frame. Catrina knew, because she had travelled the world studying them. Standing for hours peering into the yielding flesh and the murky backgrounds. And her haphazard education hadn’t held her back. She had developed a passion, and become besotted.
Glancing back at the painting of Fillide Melandroni, Catrina thought about what she knew of the Roman’s portrait. Most of the art world believed that the likeness had been destroyed long ago. Throwing aside the towel she was holding, Catrina picked up her laptop and walked into her office. There she reached for a catalogue and found the entry she was looking for.
Portrait of Fillide Melandroni.
Creator: Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 1573–1610
Date: ca. 1597
Date destroyed or lost: 1945
Nationality: Italian
Medium: oil on canvas
Object dimensions: 66 × 53 cm
Former repository: Gemäldegalerie (Berlin, Germany)
Former inventory number: Inv. Nr. 356
World War, 1939–1945 – Destruction and pillage – Germany
World War, 1939–1945 – Art and the war
Catrina stared at the entry, then glanced back at the email. She had dismissed him – this Mr Meriss – but now she was wondering if she should have listened to what he had to say. His choice of name amused her. How obvious to pick Meriss – aka Merisi, the town where Caravaggio was born. It was all so clumsy, so gauche. But then again, a professional fraudster would have been more polished. Perhaps the naivety of this approach made Mr Meriss seem all the more genuine?
She looked back at the email again.
Mr Meriss has proof of the whereabouts of the painting and possibly another, larger, work …
She felt her skin flush and a frisson of excitement. He couldn’t mean the missing Nativity, could he? The most famous missing painting of all? The Nativity with St Lawrence and St Francis? Number 1 on the FBI’s Missing Works of Art, no less. The sacred cow of the art world that had had people chasing their tails for decades.
God knows how many times Catrina had heard rumours about a collector hiring someone to investigate its whereabouts. A month or a year later, the result was always the same. Nothing. But then an unexpected, and remarkable, solution to the mystery had presented itself. In 1996, at a trial in Italy, a Mafia cohort, Marino Mannola, said that he had stolen the picture in 1969. Along with the help of other men, he had used a knife to cut the painting out of its frame over the main altar of the Oratory of San Lorenzo, Palermo, then rolled it up. Unfortunately, in doing so the canvas had been ruined.
Apparently, when the anonymous man for whom he had stolen the work saw the masterpiece he had wept.
It made him cry, Marino Mannola explained. It was not … in a usable condition any more.
Some doubted Mannola’s story. But he was considered a reliable witness and had no reason to lie. Besides, it fitted nicely with the theory that The Nativity had been stolen by the Sicilian Mafia. The mystery was solved … for some. Others believed that the painting had met another end. Some adopted the rumour that amateurs had stolen the work and, finding it too notorious to sell on, had had to destroy it. Whichever theory a person favoured, the painting remained lost.
But there were a number of dealers, collectors, conspiracy theorists and optimists who believed that one of Caravaggio’s greatest masterpieces was still out there, hidden away. Maybe in Italy, maybe in the Far East, maybe in someone’s bank vault. But not destroyed.
Her mobile rang suddenly and Catrina picked it up. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Are you at your computer?’
She was surprised to hear a voice she hadn’t heard for months.
‘What the hell! I’ve nothing to say to you.’
It was the early hours of the morning in London, but Bernard Lowe hadn’t gone to bed. Instead he’d been busy and his northern vowels were now reverberating over the Atlantic.
‘This isn’t a social call – I can’t stand you any more than you can stand me. But you should hear me out, Catrina. Just look at your computer.’
She turned back to the screen. ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’
‘Go to www.meriss.icon.com and see what just gone up on line. See it?’ She couldn’t tell if he was coughing or laughing. ‘Now read it, and weep.’
Twelve
Berlin
5.00 p.m.
He had prepared himself for the event, straightening his hair and applying a little – very little – foundation to his skin. It evened out the tone that time had mottled, and gave his sallowness a youthful warmth. Any minute now, Luca told himself, the phone would start ringing. He had posted the information online and declared his blood tie to Caravaggio. It wasn’t his fault that Catrina Hoyt hadn’t responded. He had been scrupulous in going to her first, but it was her choice whether or not she contacted him. If not her, there would be many others.
He glanced at the list by his hand. The New York dealer Catrina Hoyt; the British contingent: Jacob Levens, dealer, and Bernard Lowe, importer and collector; the German dealer Oscar Schultz; and the Canadian collector Harvey Crammer. All devotees of the Italian Baroque. All devotees of Caravaggio’s work.
Luca felt a shudder of anticipation. The art world wouldn’t be able to resist him. Or his story. Or his knowledge of the missing portrait. And the hint that he knew more. About another, even more important work.
One thing at a time, Luca told himself. He had planned it for so long there was no need to rush. Let out the information slowly. Drip-feed the public. Let people cajole him, flatter him into confidences. Let himself be courted.
He had done his years of begging for scraps. He was at the head table now, the denizens of the art world below the salt. Fame was only seconds away. Money, recognition, status within a heartbeat.
And he was ready for it.
Whatever happened now.
He was ready.
He wasn’t.
The first reply came online. In response to Luca’s posting on his blog someone had sent a photograph. Excited, Luca fumbled with his keyboard, desperate to open the file and see what it contained. An old computer, it was slow to download. Then finally the photograph emerged – blurred, then focused, filling the screen.
At first he didn’t know what he was seeing. Then leaned back, repelled.
He was looking at a tabletop. On it were two bloodied scalps, lying side by side.
Thirteen
London
5.30 p.m.
At any other time Gil would have confided in his wife. But Bette was heavily pregnant, with only weeks to go. Not the time to frighten her. Because it would frighten her. He knew that muc
h. So instead he stood in the entrance of a block of flats on Wimpole Street and rang the bell for the third time. A moment later, a voice came over the intercom.
‘Who’s there?’
‘My name’s Gil Eckhart—’
‘I’m busy!’
‘Hear me out, Mr Crammer. I need to talk to you. We have a mutual friend. Jacob Levens.’
The door was buzzed open for Gil to enter and a man appeared at the head of the first flight of stairs. He was in his fifties, very tall and round-shouldered, his mouth wide, frog-like.
‘Come up, please.’
He waited until Gil drew level, then gestured to the open front door of his flat and followed his visitor in.
Harvey Crammer had obviously just returned from a trip: an unpacked suitcase lay on the coffee table in his sitting room, a crumpled overcoat was thrown over the back of an armchair.
‘Been travelling?’
‘I’m always travelling.’ Crammer’s wide mouth broadened into a smile, his fleshy nose casting a shadow over his top lip. Not so much the Ugly American as the Ugly Canadian. ‘And I’m sorry I have to hurry you, but I’m due to give a speech tonight and I’m running late.’
‘I just wanted to ask you a few questions.’
‘Questions? About what?’
‘A murder.’
Crammer put his head to one side, scrutinising his visitor. ‘I think I know you, Mr Eckhart. I think our paths have crossed before.’ He moved over to a side table. ‘Drink?’
‘Thanks.’
He passed a whisky to Gil, motioning for him to sit down before taking the window seat. The winter afternoon had long gone, lamps were switched on in Crammer’s apartment and shone out from the windows of the houses across the street. In the distance a burglar alarm sounded.
‘I do know you, don’t I? You see, I don’t suffer from that common failing of not remembering faces. Faces are only another language. And I have a facility for languages.’
‘We have met before.’
‘I thought so.’ Crammer sipped his drink. A stuffed deer’s head hung on the wall above him, and beside it, a couple of antique maps of Europe. ‘Where was it? I travel a lot – put me out of my misery.’ He was Canadian, but there was no trace of his native accent left. ‘You said we had a mutual friend in Jacob Levens?’