Dead Man's Gift and Other Stories

by Simon Kernick

  The next water bus arrived five minutes later, crowded with a mix of Asian and American tourists from the outlying islands. I climbed on board and remained on deck as we headed back to the city, and it was a good thing I did, because I spotted Moretti in the distance standing on the quayside talking to a group of four uniformed police officers, one of whom was talking into a radio.

  So Moretti had decided I was more of a risk to him free than in the custody of the police. I was surprised, but that didn’t matter right now, because it was clear the police were looking for me and, even if I managed to ditch the gun over the side before we got there, they’d almost certainly arrest me anyway, in which case my true identity could be compromised.

  We were only fifty yards from shore now. I had to think fast.

  I moved to the far side of the water bus. There was a lot of boat traffic criss-crossing the lagoon, and I saw a man driving a small pleasure boat. He was cutting across our wake as he came round to overtake the water bus. He wasn’t going fast – maybe six or seven knots – but he was going to pass directly behind us in a few seconds. I hurried to the back of the boat, ignoring the protests of other passengers as I barged them out of the way, as well as their shouts of surprise as they saw me climb up onto the guard rail.

  The driver of the pleasure boat looked up and saw me as he came round onto our port side. He looked confused, then worried. I think he guessed what I was going to do. A good few yards of choppy water separated us, and if I missed I was in real trouble, but I also knew that if I hesitated I’d lose my chance.

  So I jumped. And then I was hurtling through the air, legs pumping, hoping like hell I’d got the timing right.

  I landed in the middle of the boat with a bang that sent it way over to one side and I immediately bounced forward, managing to grab the edge before I was flipped out the other side. The driver was less lucky. The poor sod obviously hadn’t been holding the wheel hard enough, because he fell straight into the water with a shocked yelp.

  As the boat righted itself, I scrambled over and grabbed the wheel, hitting the throttle and keeping my head down, as some of the more voyeuristic passengers on the water bus started to film the scene. The boat accelerated past the front of the water bus and, as I glanced over towards the jetty, I saw the cops turn my way and start shouting as they realized what was happening, a couple of them even drawing their guns.

  I didn’t think they’d shoot – and if they did, they were very unlikely to hit me – but I wasn’t going to tempt fate, so I crouched right down behind the wheel so that only the top of my head was exposed. I was going full-throttle now, but this was no speedboat and I don’t think I was managing more than a dozen knots. If the cops could get a boat out on the water, there was no way I was going to outrun them. I needed to get to safety fast.

  A marina appeared on my left with a canal cutting into the city, and I turned the wheel sharply, looking across to see the cops running along the quayside in my direction. They were shouting and gesticulating to the other boats out on the water – and there were plenty of them – to give chase to me.

  Almost immediately I heard the sound of engines getting closer and I snatched a glance behind. There were several faster boats gaining on me, but thankfully they contained civilians, not police. However, the drivers of at least two of them had phones to their ears and I had no doubt they were relaying my progress to the authorities.

  Gritting my teeth and feeling a potent mix of terror and exhilaration, I drove the boat into the canal, which almost immediately narrowed as buildings loomed up like canyons above me. Space was tight. There were boats moored on either side and only room to get one through at a time, and as I passed under a footbridge, the canal forked. I took the left fork because it looked quieter, and almost immediately it narrowed still further.

  The closest boat was only twenty yards behind me now and I could hear the driver shouting into the phone. It was time to take evasive action.

  I threw the throttle into neutral and, as the boat slowed, I jumped into the nearest moored boat and ran along the hull, then scrambled up a set of slimy stone steps onto a narrow footpath that ran parallel to the canal.

  Looking round, I saw the two men who’d been in the boat behind me pull up behind mine and start to get out, clearly prepared to continue the pursuit. These were big guys, and they looked fit. There was a good chance I wouldn’t outrun them, or they’d attract the attention of any passers-by who could also get involved.

  This is when a gun comes in handy. Turning back round, I pulled mine out and pointed it straight at them, trying not to give them a good look at my face.

  It had the desired effect. They both ducked back down in the boat and put their hands on their heads. There was no way they’d be following me now.

  Shoving the gun back in my jacket, I ran along the path, turning into the first alleyway I saw, pleased that it was empty. I kept going, the adrenalin driving me forward, taking turn after turn through maze-like back streets until finally, just like that, I hit a main shopping thoroughfare thronged with people.

  Slowing to a walk and getting my breathing back under control, I melted into the crowd and safety, thinking that once again my luck was holding. Maybe Darnell was right about his divine intervention and there really was someone up there watching over me.

  But if there was, I had a feeling he wasn’t planning a happy ending to this story, where I was concerned.

  5

  Sometimes you’ve got to know when to stop. And for me, now was that time.

  I often curse myself for foolish decisions I’ve made, but, as I stood in my hotel room two hours later, packing my clothes and wondering how I was going to get off this island without being picked up by the police, I knew I’d done the right thing by coming here. It hadn’t worked out as planned, but then some things don’t. No one apart from Moretti had got a good look at me, so I was pretty certain my identity hadn’t been compromised. But it would be too dangerous to go after him now. The element of surprise was gone. He was going to be very careful now and, for all I knew, he’d got himself a police guard.

  Well, that was what I was thinking anyway, but the thing about people – and especially criminals – is that they don’t always act rationally. And so it was that I turned round from my bed and caught a glimpse of Roberto Moretti through the window as he hurried up the alley to his house. It was dusk now and the alley was empty.

  As he unlocked the door, he looked round nervously as if expecting an ambush, and I retreated into the shadows so he couldn’t see me, watching as he disappeared inside. A minute later, a single light appeared on the top floor of the house, and I wondered what he was doing.

  I stood watching the alley for a few minutes, waiting to see if anyone else turned up at his house, but no one did. Then the light went out, and I knew instinctively that Moretti was leaving again.

  I should have let him go. It was always going to be safer that way. But my weakness has always been a desire to see justice done, as Bob Darnell seemed to have understood, and now suddenly I was being offered an opportunity to right a terrible wrong, and once again I had to make a split-second decision.

  So I made it.

  I was out the back of the hotel fast, knowing it was a race to beat Moretti to his front door. If I was wrong, then I’d just keep walking, double-back on myself and retreat to the hotel room to work out my next move. But my instincts were right. As I walked rapidly down the alley I saw his front door opening.

  If he caught a glimpse of me before I got there, then he’d retreat back inside, bolt the door and I was going to miss my chance.

  I accelerated. There was a crossroads at the end of the alley and people were walking past. They’d hear a commotion, maybe even a muffled shot, and someone could look my way at any moment, so I played it safe and kept the gun in my jacket.

  Moretti appeared in the doorway, saw me straight away and gasped in shock. He immediately tried to jump back inside, but he was holding a large ba
g and it got caught in the gap, slowing his progress.

  I was on him in one movement, giving him a hard, two-handed shove that sent him sprawling backwards, before following him through the door and slamming it behind me.

  Still clutching the bag, Moretti retreated into the shadows of a large open-plan sitting area with a view from the back window onto one of the canals.

  I pulled out the gun and pointed it at him. ‘It might be dark in here, but I can see you well enough,’ I said, ‘so don’t do anything stupid or you’ll get a bullet in the gut. Where’s the light switch?’

  ‘By the door behind you,’ he said, breathing heavily and sounding scared.

  Still keeping my gun trained on him, I switched on the main light and pulled the curtains so no one was able to see in.

  ‘Why did you come back?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you know the answer to that,’ I told him. ‘You killed Erin Darnell, and a lot of other girls too, didn’t you?’

  He shook his head vehemently. ‘No, no. You’re mistaken. I told you the truth earlier. It was my son.’

  It was, I suppose, still possible he was telling the truth, but this time I was a lot less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. ‘What’s in the bag?’ I asked him.

  ‘Clothes. I was going to go away for a few days. You scared me this afternoon.’ He looked at me imploringly. ‘I’m sorry I called the police. I was panicking. Please let me go. I won’t say anything to anyone this time.’

  Something about the way he was clutching the bag so tightly made me suspicious. There were more than just clothes in there, I was sure of that.

  He saw I was looking and loosened his grip on it, but it was too late. I was suspicious now and I told him to empty it.

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘It’s only clothes.’

  And that’s when I knew I was onto something. A man staring down the barrel of the gun will do pretty much anything to appear cooperative and delay getting shot. He won’t argue about emptying a bag of clothes.

  I cocked the pistol’s hammer. ‘I’m not going to ask again.’

  Still he hesitated. He was sweating now.

  I lowered the gun, so it was pointing at just above his left knee, and deliberately tensed my finger on the trigger.

  He unzipped the bag, carefully throwing out items of clothing one by one.

  ‘Turn it upside down and shake it.’

  I think he knew my patience had run out, because this time he did as he was told. More clothes, a pair of shoes and two large sponge-bags fell out. ‘That’s it,’ he said, showing me the inside. ‘It’s empty. Can I put my things back in now?’

  ‘No,’ I said, motioning behind him. ‘Sit down in that chair.’

  I saw him swallow then and, though he tried to stop himself, he inadvertently glanced at the pile on the floor, before reluctantly sitting down in the armchair. As I picked up the first of the sponge-bags, I saw his grip on the sides of the chair tighten perceptibly.

  I unzipped it and pulled out a toothbrush, followed by some eau de cologne and deodorant. At the bottom was a clear, airport-style liquids pouch and, as I pulled this out too, I felt my heart suddenly beating faster, and it was as if all the air had been sucked from the room.

  The pouch contained a number of items of cheap-looking female jewellery, but what caught my eye was a blue-and-yellow woven string wristband very similar to one I’d seen many times in the past couple of weeks. It had belonged to Erin Darnell and she’d been wearing it in the photo I had of her.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said quietly, turning my gaze on Moretti.

  6

  When Roberto Moretti saw that I knew what the items in the pouch represented, he did what most men who lead double lives do. He lied furiously and consistently in the face of this new evidence, claiming that he didn’t know what this bag was or how it had got in his sponge-bag, and when he saw that this wasn’t washing, he blamed his son again, saying the pouch and its contents belonged to him, even though we both knew Roberto had been dead two years.

  I suspect he would have carried on lying all night, but I shot him in the foot and that shut him up. Or rather it stopped him lying. Instead he howled in pain until I threatened to put a bullet in the other foot. Then he lay back in the chair moaning softly, his face pale.

  I’m not proud of my actions that night, but I considered them a necessary evil in the pursuit of the greater good. That is, finding out how many girls Moretti had killed and what had happened to their bodies.

  He wasn’t keen on talking. I guess he figured, quite rightly, that as soon as he admitted one murder, he was signing his own death warrant. But I found a bottle of grappa and poured us both a good slug, and when he saw that I was going nowhere until I got the answers I needed, and that more lies simply equated to more pain, he finally opened up.

  Roberto Moretti’s heart was a sewer.

  He’d first become attracted to young girls as a teenager but had learned to keep his impulses under control, at least until he reached his twenties, when while visiting the Philippines he’d first found out that he could pay for sex with children and get away with it. Rather than satisfy his urges, this experience simply increased them, and he killed his first girl when he was twenty-nine years old, abducting her in Bali, Indonesia, while travelling there alone. Since then there’d been five, including Erin. He’d buried the bodies where he could and, aside from Erin’s, none had ever been discovered. He didn’t want to give me their locations. I suspect he didn’t want it getting out what he’d done, even after his death. That way, his secret would be safe for ever.

  But I knew he knew where they were, so I made him tell me. It meant some further persuasion on my part, but I’m good at that.

  It seemed that sometimes Moretti planned the abductions, while at other times, as with Erin, the attacks had been spontaneous.

  Erin’s death had been, it seemed, decided on a whim. A young girl’s life ended almost before it had begun, her father’s life utterly destroyed. All for a few minutes of perverted pleasure.

  Moretti had struck after seeing Erin walking on a deserted beach in Roatan. He’d walked past, said hello and then, when her back was turned, he’d picked up a rock and struck her on the head with it, before dragging her into undergrowth to rape her, then finish her off. Once he was sated, he’d hidden her body nearby, before driving down to retrieve it later that night while his wife and son slept, courtesy of the drugs he’d put in their drinks, and buried it just behind the property they were renting.

  Indeed, according to Moretti, his wife had never suspected a thing during all the time he’d been married to her, and had died entirely ignorant of her husband’s double life.

  He might have been in great pain, but it became clear as he talked that he was proud rather than remorseful of his deeds. Like most narcissists, he thought he was extremely clever. His wife, he told me, had just been window-dressing, there to bolster his credentials as a family man and keep suspicion of any wrongdoing away from him. The only time he came close to any regret was when he described how his son had discovered his secret. Paolo had come to stay at the family home in Como, a few weeks after twelve-year-old Maria Ropelli had gone missing. He’d found an old bloodstain in Moretti’s work-shop where Maria’s body had been dismembered, and had asked his father about it. Although Moretti explained that he’d been quartering a deer that he’d hunted, he could see that his son was suspicious and would quickly have worked out that his father had been staying at the house alone when Maria disappeared. Moretti claimed that he’d had no choice but to deal with the threat Paolo represented, so he gave him a fatal overdose that very night.

  ‘I loved him, though,’ he said, with what seemed like a genuinely regretful sigh. ‘It was why I was there today. He was my only child.’

  I didn’t say anything and he took a deep breath, through gritted teeth. ‘So now you know everything. And you’ve punished me with a bullet. I implore you. Don’t kill me. I can pay a lot of money. Half a mi
llion euros? I can put that in an account for you right now.’

  ‘It’s not about money,’ I told him.

  ‘Don’t make yourself out to be something you’re not. You’re a contract killer.’

  ‘No one’s paying me to kill you. I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do.’

  ‘Why? We’re not that different, you and I. I can tell you’ve killed before. I can see it in your eyes.’

  ‘We’re very different,’ I said. Because we were. I could never have done what he’d done.

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? I’ve killed five. How many have you killed?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  He managed a smile then, thinking he’d found a weak spot, and there was a glint in his eye. ‘What’s wrong? You don’t want to answer?’

  ‘I’ve killed too many,’ I told him. ‘Some of them I regret. Most I don’t. And I definitely won’t regret killing you.’

  I finished the grappa and got to my feet.

  His expression changed then. He could see the same glint in my eyes now and it scared him, because he knew without a doubt what was going to happen.

  He shut his eyes as I approached. ‘Please,’ he whispered desperately. ‘Make it quick.’

  But I didn’t make it quick. All my anger at all the injustices in the world, including those I’d perpetrated myself, came tearing up from inside me as I shot him first in the groin and then in the throat, and waited as he died.

  It took a long time.

  Afterwards I changed hotels, waited a couple of days, then left Venice on a train, heading to Rome. Moretti’s body hadn’t yet been discovered, so there was no alert out for me and I passed through the station and, indeed, immigration controls at Rome Airport without a problem. Before I left Italy, I dropped an envelope containing a type-written letter to La Repubblica newspaper, which detailed the burial sites of the missing girls and named Moretti as their killer. It wouldn’t be hard to prove his guilt. After all, the remains of Maria Ropelli were buried in the garden of his house in Como.