A Cold Flame

by Aidan Conway

  “You know I was always there for you, then,” he said. “In the hospital.”

  “And now? I also need you now, Michael. It’s hard now too, you know. Normal life is hard. I need to see you more often. I need to know you care about me in normal life too. Not just when I become a part of the case.”

  There was a buzz from the hallway, where he had left his phone out of harm’s way. It would be Carrara. He was able to come in and out of a case. He was full-on when there was work to do but he could separate things. But Rossi knew he couldn’t. The phone stopped. He was obsessing about it. It made his head hurt.

  “We may not have much normal life ever again,” he began, “if we allow them to do what they want to do, to divide us. To sow hatred. If they drag us back to the old days, days you never saw, we can say goodbye to anything like normality. And it will be worse than then. It could be like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”

  “And it’s all down to you to stop it happening?”

  “I can’t let it happen,” he said.

  The phone began to buzz again.

  “Answer it then,” she said. “Answer it, Michael. Save the world, Inspector Rossi. Then come back for me if you want, if I’m still around.”

  She stalked off to the living room and turned on the television. Rossi watched her through the hatch knowing – or believing he knew – what thoughts were going through her head: that there was the usual mindless rubbish and films diluted to meaninglessness by the constant interruption of streams of advertising. So, this was the normality worth fighting for, was it? He wondered to himself. Wasn’t it fucked whatever way you looked at it? All of their lives. In this country. Buy this, buy that. Get the perfect body. Smile the perfect smile. But nobody knows their neighbour. So maybe he was right. Better to dedicate yourself to a noble cause and stick with it.

  She flicked over the channels. Rolling news. Rossi walked in and sat down next to her. He hadn’t answered the phone.

  “Come on,” he said. “Looks like there’s nothing on.”

  He reached out to take her hand and pulled her up off the couch. He reached his arms around her waist, then, in a sign of detente in a cold war that he had allowed to escalate, “Let’s go to bed.”

  The room was almost completely illuminated now. The nun who had made the discovery was sitting in a chair in the hallway of the residential wing. Someone had given her a cognac to counter the effects of shock. They, meanwhile, were inside, with the door locked behind them, where the body lay face down on the floor. A knife was protruding from beneath the right scapula. His throat had been cut and blood had spread freely over the terracotta tiles and into the edges of the nearby tasselled rugs. One side of the victim’s face was just visible but slightly brown now with drying blood. Patches of pallid and contorted skin showed through, testimony to the violence of his death. There had clearly been something of a struggle, books and ornaments tossed here and there.

  “We can’t!” hissed the younger of the two priests standing over the body. The voice of the older priest was low and expressed quiet authority.

  “We have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Didn’t you read it? Don’t you understand?” he said, holding up the letter in the other’s face. “‘In the event of my violent death …’ We have orders.The police will be on their way as soon as I call. There is no time. They will ask questions about why we delayed. We can do nothing for him but this. Ours is not to question orders!”

  The older priest went to the drawer. It was unlocked. He took from it a hunting knife in a worn leather scabbard, razor sharp, and turned to his accomplice, thrusting the handle of the knife towards him.

  “Do it!”

  “I can’t!”

  The older priest looked at him for a moment. In his youth he had eviscerated animals more times than he could care to remember with knives like this one, in the mountains. In Calabria, where hunting was second nature and, for many, often a means to survival. He knew those who had joined with the n’drangheta when they were still only boys, initiated by their own families into its obscure and secret rituals. Others had become bandits and kidnappers, out of necessity. They too had used their hunter’s skills to quickly and efficiently remove a section of finger, an ear, a nose even, which could then be sent to the victim’s family. It was proof of their captivity; it was the essential catalyst to effect the payment of a ransom.

  And here he was, the intellectual, the bright hope of his family who had gone up to Rome and risen through the ranks of ordinary priesthood. He knew the rites of Rome, had sworn allegiance to God and his Church, but he had slipped inexorably towards mammon. His duties, his priorities had been bound more and more to this world. His flock now amounted to accounts and portfolios, and the wolves circling it were any of his enemies – the state, journalists, and some paid assassin, most probably, intent on exposing them and inflicting mortal damage. He had been variously a custodian of secrets, a confidante, an adviser. Now he was a fixer, a butcher, cleaning up when necessary where others had fouled the nest, ensuring that the volatile truth might not emerge.

  “Give it to me!” he growled.

  He took the knife. He was back again in the mountains and, standing over the lifeless body, he yanked up his sleeves past the elbow and then knelt down to set to work, cutting and slicing into the grey, pliant flesh.

  “Bring a large plastic bag and towels from the bathroom. Quickly!”

  He continued the butchery, the soft kissing sounds of ripping skin and gristle the only accompaniment before he began to dispose of the body parts. He made a cursory attempt to mop up the blood and then concluded by thrusting everything into the carrier bag. He made for the en suite bathroom where he scrubbed his hands with near violence under the scalding water. He removed any traces of red he could see from the bathroom’s tiles and snow-white fittings with another towel and threw it too into the bag.

  “It’s done,” he said. Sweat was dripping from his brow. “We must bury all this evidence, first, in the grounds, deep as possible, then burn it when we can. Come with me. And not a word to a living soul,” he added. “If you don’t wish to meet with a similar end, then this goes with you to the grave. It was an order and orders must be obeyed.”

  The younger priest nodded in abject abeyance. His life had now been irrevocably changed. He had not been able to look at what the priest had done but he’d heard him and the knife doing their work.

  “We saw nothing,” said the older priest. “We say only that we surveyed the scene. The sister will be in a state of shock. She was confused and ran straight from the room. Give her more cognac and she’ll say what we tell her to say. You are sure no one else saw the body before you came?”

  The younger priest nodded.

  “Yes. I came straight down from my room.”

  “Go to speak with her now. Tell her he’s been mutilated. He has had the last rights of his Holy Mother the Church. She can thank Christ she didn’t see what they did to him.”

  Yana opened one eye to see light seeping through the shutters. It was morning but how early she didn’t know. She reached out a hand and found the bed was empty on Michael’s side but still warm. She turned over and glanced at the clock. It was nearly 6 a.m. There were splashing sounds coming from the bathroom. The flush. Then the door opened and Michael walked the few steps down the corridor and back into the bedroom. She could smell the aroma of coffee from him now. He had breakfasted early. He was fully clothed and ready to leave. He sat down on the bed next to her. The night together had been blissful, carefree, timeless and they had fallen asleep where they had collapsed. Now, in the half-light she could see that all that was a memory; a happy memory, one to sustain them again, at least for a while. His expression was grave.

  “Just got a call,” he said, as if minimizing its importance. “They think that maybe it’s all starting up again. The Islamist thing. They’ve murdered a priest.”

  Thirty-One

  “Maroni wants to see
us later,” said Carrara. “He’s not in Rome but everything is to go back to him as and when it emerges.”

  “But for now we try to keep a lid on it?” said Rossi.

  “A lid?” said Carrara. “Have you seen how many hacks are outside already?”

  “Well, we make it generic, for as long as we can. It’s homicide but we’re here because of you-know-what and we don’t want them to know. Not yet.”

  “We don’t know the motive yet.”

  “Well anything that could be Islamist, we’ve got to play it down until we plan our next move.”

  “There’s even talk of it being Satanic.”

  Just to make things a little more interesting, thought Rossi.

  “Come on,” he said, clearing a path through the various groups of officers who had crowded into the monastery’s ground floor.

  “A retired Belgian priest. Expert in canon law. Father Joaquim Brell.”

  The pathologist, Lula, was concluding initial crime scene analyses. She snapped off her latex gloves to shake Rossi’s hand.

  “We meet again, Inspector.”

  “And in eerily similar circumstances. What have you got?”

  “Suppose you’ll want time of death?”

  “It could help.”

  “Yesterday evening, or night, early hours maybe. But late, probably.”

  Rossi turned to Carrara.

  “We got the call in the morning, about six, right?”

  Carrara nodded confirmation.

  “A nun said she’d heard some sounds, and when she got up she noticed the door open and a light on. She went to check and made the gruesome discovery.”

  “And what time was that?” said Rossi. Carrara consulted his notes. “She says ‘about five’, but she’s in shock. The abbot who’s in charge here says she was rambling, hysterical. She might have averted a massacre, who knows. Remember the Italian sailors who had their throats cut in Algeria?”

  Rossi did remember. The Lucina massacre. 1994. Claimed by Islamist militants, while others saw the hand of the Algerian secret services behind an op to discredit the official Islamic opposition to the ruling dictatorship.

  “Did she get a good look at the corpse? She assumed he was dead, I take it?”

  “She saw the blood, the knife and ran straight out.”

  “But that leaves an hour,” said Rossi. “Did she call?”

  “No,” said Carrara, “A Father Rénard. Also Belgian.”

  “Do you reckon they had trouble finding our phone number?” quipped the pathologist. “Or did they think he might come round if he got a bit of fresh air, with a knife sticking out of his back?”

  Rossi was rubbing his chin.

  “Church murders. They like to keep these things under wraps. Remember the Swiss Guards? But this isn’t extraterritorial. They have to call us.”

  “So they hesitated?” said Carrara. “For a reason?”

  “Or something delayed them,” said Rossi. “If the sister’s story is as she said.”

  He turned to the pathologist.

  “Is there anything else, Dottoressa? The mutilation for example. They actually removed his face?”

  She nodded. “Afraid so. Disfigurement would be the word. Post-mortem, of course.”

  “Why ‘of course’?” said Rossi. “Have you ever seen what narcos and Mafiosi are capable of, to get a confession or for kicks?”

  “Not here though,” said Lula. She was the youngest pathologist Rossi had ever worked with but he had complete confidence in her despite her tendency to play the odd game of cat and mouse. “There would have been screaming.”

  “Right,” said Rossi. “And someone would have heard it. Assuming the nun’s good for her word.”

  A point to Lula then, thought Rossi. Fair enough.

  “You don’t think it’s Satanic? A sect or something?” said Carrara.

  Rossi shook his head but without any great conviction. The truth was he didn’t quite know what to make of it. He moved away from where the Forensics team were using an array of solvents in their attempts to glean more evidence from the scene. The smell was familiar and characteristic but he thought there was something else.

  “Do you smell that, Gigi?” he said, bending down to inspect a rug and the bottom of a drape. Still slightly damp, they appeared to have been doused with a volatile substance, possibly alcohol. Possibly an accelerant.

  Carrara looked at Rossi. They each knew what the other was thinking. More of the same? Rossi stood up again.

  “How did they get in? Assuming they had to break in. We’ll start with the most likely hypothesis.”

  “A side door forced,” said Carrara. “They’ll have scaled the wall into the gardens. There’s no security. No cameras at the rear. Only one on the intercom at the front.”

  “So they had an idea of the layout. Anything missing from the room?”

  “Some drawers were rifled but we have no inventory – there was some ecclesiastical paraphernalia – scapulae, icons, mass cards, and some money.”

  Rossi looked about the apartment. There were a few tasteful, well-framed paintings distributed judiciously across each of the walls. A couple of watercolours but mainly oils.

  Rossi moved over to the far side of the room.

  “Something hung here once,” he said indicating a theoretical rectangular space on the wall. “You can see there’s a gap, and here – these holes. These were for the supports, brackets of some description.”

  He looked down at the floor and wiped a finger along the tiles. Masonry dust. Somebody had been in a hurry.

  “But if it was there, it hadn’t been hanging for very long. There’s no sign of a shadow. It’s just a hunch but it might be worth asking if anyone can at least account for a painting being moved recently or even going missing.”

  “An art thief?” said Lula enjoying the chance to go beyond her normal brief with Rossi.

  “I’m afraid we’re getting a bit of a brick wall of silence here,” said Carrara. “Not to mention the language barriers. Either French, or Belgian, or Filipino, or very old and not too many teeth.”

  “And the guy who reported it?”

  “Rénard?” said Carrara. “The most coherent so far. He disputes the sister’s five o’clock theory. Says the clock in the room was slow. They had noticed the other day but it required a technician to look at the mechanism.”

  “And is it slow?” said Rossi.

  “It would appear to be running fifteen to twenty minutes slow, yes.”

  “Hardly significant, is it? And had they called the technician? I suspect not yet.”

  “No.”

  “These clocks can be notoriously unpredictable,” said the pathologist. “We have one in the country.”

  “We?” said Rossi.

  “My father and I. You should pay us a visit some time when we’re not working.”

  Rossi tried not to look overly interested in the proposal, moving on through the litany of checks and steps to take.

  “Any fibres?” he asked, hauling his attention away from the young pathologist even if she presented a more than pleasing alternative to the business in hand.

  “Lots. His and many others.”

  “Prints, Gigi?”

  The Forensic team were still scanning with their various ultraviolet, infrared lights, and metal detectors.

  “Again, plenty. But none on the weapon so far, I’m afraid.”

  “Seems there were a lot of visitors,” said Rossi.

  “Care workers and social assistants, cleaners and the like,” said Carrara. “So a few interviews to do there.”

  “Get on to them, ASAP,” said Rossi. “I want a statement from everyone and anyone who’s set foot in here in the last six months at least.”

  Carrara gave a nod and stopped a passing uniform. Rossi was still surveying the room. The crime scene spoke. That was the golden rule. It could immortalize the very moment of the crime, if treated with the utmost care.

  “How long had he
been living here, Gigi? He was retired, wasn’t he?”

  “According to Father Rénard, over a year.”

  Carrara had been busy again.

  “Compare the statements as and when you get them,” said Rossi. “Memory can be deceptive, can’t it?”

  “You mean when there’s a murder?” said the pathologist. “The shock.”

  “Yes, or when you want to forget about the past, or want the past to be forgotten,” said Rossi.

  He led Carrara away, leaving the pathologist to collect up her things.

  “Did you get a chance to have a look at the university images?” said Rossi. “Even if it has been kind of overtaken by this.”

  “Had a quick look but there’s nothing of particular interest, as far as I can see. Oh, and I’ve been getting some names of brigatiste, ex-brigatiste. I’ve put it all into easily accessible form for you. Browse it at your leisure,” he said and handed Rossi a key drive.

  Rossi slipped it into his pocket.

  “So, where next?”

  “You’re not so sure about this guy, are you?” said Carrara, knowing when Rossi felt a sliver of doubt, even in the most seemingly clear-cut cases. They were standing in a doorway and Rossi was looking back at the scene.

  “You tell me why there was up to an hour’s delay. Last rights? First aid? Look at him!”

  “The scandal?” said Carrara. “The bad PR? Or maybe they panicked.”

  Rossi stopped another officer who was trying to squeeze past unnoticed.

  “What’s the most discreet way out of here?” he asked.

  The uniform led Rossi and Carrara back where he had come from, through the narrow wood-panelled corridors and through a side door into the garden and the cloisters. A moss-embroidered marble fountain was at its centre, the water trickling down the green tendrils.