A Known Evil

by Aidan Conway

  “Yes, Dr Spinelli, I do.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “the thought might have occurred, in my mind, in my wildest moments, in my worst moments, but I would never, ever have done it. Haven’t you ever thought about revenge, Inspector?”

  Oh, yes, thought Rossi. How he had thought about revenge, planned it even, down to the last detail. The hit, the getaway. The cleanest, most perfect of crimes only a cop could commit.

  “Yes,” said Rossi, snapping back from the reverie, “probably, but as far as I know, I have never as yet put it in writing.”

  “And neither have I.”

  A good firm answer. Rossi liked that. It meant he was on the right lines. It might mean less work, too, and he wanted Maroni off his back about this guy. He was clean. Screwed-up but clean. And besides, there was no material link. No weapon. No witness. No DNA.

  But Rossi sensed Carrara was uneasy. He would be concerned that his squeezing of Spinelli was going too far emotively. Carrara was Mr Logic. It was what he did and he did it well, and Rossi knew he was itching to put his oar in. He gestured to his colleague, ceding the floor to him.

  “I was just wondering,” began Carrara, “do you think I could take a quick look at the computer, Dr Spinelli?” he asked, glancing askance at Rossi and, like seasoned team players, getting his immediate tacit assent. “I think we might be better off just checking a few things here and now.”

  “Feel free,” he said and machine-gunned his password into the keyboard.

  “That’s not written anywhere, is it?”

  “No. Memorized and difficult to crack. Numbers, letters and symbols and case-sensitive.”

  Rossi was more than glad of Carrara’s serious nerd tendencies when it came to computers; it meant he could save precious time and dispense with tedium. He was clicking around now on Spinelli’s e-mail, opening strange windows he’d never seen before and seemed to have already located something of interest.

  “I note,” he said, sounding very much the doctor rather than the policeman, “that you’ve been checking your sent items a lot.”

  “I honestly don’t remember,” Spinelli replied.

  “On the night before the murder you checked some recent e-mails you sent to Maria. Why would you do that?”

  “And why would I do that?” asked Spinelli his tone a blend of puzzlement and returning mild contempt. “I was drunk and emotional. I couldn’t give a damn what I’d written about the night before. I might have been hitting all the wrong keys. There’s any number of explanations.”

  “Well,” said Carrara gauging from Spinelli’s reaction that there was no damning sign of guilt, “I don’t know for sure, and we may need a linguistics report on this, but could it be that someone, someone else, really was in your account and was trying to, shall we say, discover your style, see how you write, and then,” he looked up at a frowning Spinelli, “write as if he, or she, were you?”

  Rossi, intrigued now, was eager to combine forces.

  “Doctor Spinelli, are you sure you came home alone that night?”

  “I told you. I was very drunk. I remember next to nothing after 9 or 10 o’clock. I blacked out and woke up with a headache from hell.”

  “Do you think anyone could have seen you, as you were coming home or leaving the bar?”

  “The barman, maybe. There was a girl, actually; I remember that.”

  “And did you drink with anyone? Did anyone buy you drinks?”

  “Maybe, yes, usually, but I couldn’t say who. Some people know who I am and we often get talking but, really, it’s all a blur. There was the concert, people coming and going.”

  Rossi turned to Carrara.

  “Luigi, why don’t you take this man for a quiet drink in his usual bar and see if you can find a witness who saw him leave and with whom. Then get him down to the lab, if that’s all right with you,” he said, turning his attention back to Spinelli who now had his arms crossed tightly across his crumpled, white-shirted chest, “and run a blood test and a urine test.”

  “A blood test?” spurted Spinelli.

  “For what?” said Carrara.

  “Anything,” said Rossi, “but sedatives mainly, fast-acting ones, although I do get the sneaking feeling we could be talking Rohypnol here.”

  “The date-rape drug?” said Spinelli, shifting in his chair.

  “Got it in one,” said Rossi. “And if it was, we should still be able to pick up any traces. Judging by your symptoms, the blackout, the after-effects, I’d say you got a spiked drink. Maybe someone taking a shot at you, or a poor-taste wind-up. I don’t know. Whether or not they then came back here with you or slipped in while you were distracted is more difficult to prove.”

  Rossi turned to Carrara.

  “And see what prints you can get off the PC, the door. We can always run them through the databases and see what comes up.”

  Spinelli seemed more relaxed; like he’d been through the mill, yes, but to some extent relieved. The look of an innocent man who has found someone to believe him?

  “Time to cut down on the sauce, perhaps?” Rossi ventured, more than a little pleased with himself, and then remembering what Spinelli was going through, added, “I’m very sorry about Maria. We’re going to do everything in our power.”

  “Thank you, Inspector,” said Spinelli.

  As Rossi headed for the door, leaving Spinelli in Carrara’s capable hands, a thought occurred to him. He turned towards the now ex-suspect, as far as he was concerned.

  “Do you think there could have been other reasons why they, or whoever it was, wanted to kill Maria? Did she have anything in her possession, did anything go missing that you might be aware of?”

  “She had a laptop, of course, disks, memory sticks with a lot of our data on. You know, the court cases, the legal actions against us. The work we were doing on constitutional reform. The prison reform. You didn’t find anything, presumably.”

  “Nothing. Her bag was ransacked and subtracted from the scene.”

  “Well, our new lawyer is going to have some work to do. But not to worry. Starting from scratch is what we’re good at. Or perhaps I should say climbing the mountain. Yes, mountaineers. That’s what we are. Well-prepared, with clear objectives, and a tough lot.”

  Not Kremlin mountaineers, I hope, Rossi thought but decided to save it for himself. You can’t expect everyone to be into Mandelstam, he conceded, but the comparisons being drawn between Stalinist control freakery and the power structures within the movement were maybe not so far off the mark.

  “Like Sisyphus?” he said, compromising.

  “Maybe,” said Spinelli, “or maybe that’s how you see things, but I like to think we’re actually getting somewhere, Inspector, that it’s not all quite so futile. And I think we’ve got a lot of people in high places more than a little scared. You see, solving Italy’s problems is not difficult, despite what they say. What’s difficult is getting the privileged to give up their cosy little arrangements. They cost us billions, the Church too, with all its privileges. But when the people begin to understand, we’ll put our plan into practice. We’ll remove the Church from every part of civic society. No more secret banking. The Lateran Treaties guaranteeing the cosy coexistence of the Vatican within the Italian state and all their fascist inheritance will be torn up.”

  “But the treaties are part of the constitution,” cut in Carrara.

  “Exactly,” he said, his eyes burning red now, from grief, anger, and exhaustion, “and when there’s enough support we’ll change the constitution and Italy will be a real Republic. Not this hobbled pseudo-democracy taking orders from the cardinals, multinationals, and old-money fascists. Then we’ll be free. And Maria will be a hero. She won’t have died in vain.”

  “Well,” said Rossi, enjoying the speech and the little game that had sprung up between them, “just remember, that when you do get near the top of this mountain you’re climbing it’s merciless, it’s lonely, progress is painfully slow, and you’ll need to
carry all your own oxygen.”

  “The oxygen of the truth, Inspector, or just the plain old stuff that keeps you breathing?”

  “Oh,” said Rossi, “I’d say you’d do well to have them both, and in abundance.”

  Eighteen

  “I tried not to,” said Bianco to Rossi, who had just slipped back into the office to be greeted by a grim, conspiratorial silence. “He was, shall we say, insistent. Very insistent.”

  Maroni had been going berserk. In Rossi’s absence, the whole team had incurred his wrath and, homing in on the weakest link, Maroni had managed to squeeze at least some information out of Bianco.

  “He’s got a lot of people on his back,” Rossi countered, having grasped where it was all leading and beginning to soliloquize.

  “Oh, and he said he wants to see you ‘physically in person,’” Bianco added, “about Spinelli but before the press conference.”

  “And they’ll be pushing for an arrest,” a newly bored Rossi continued, slumping into a vacant chair, “just to keep things quiet and to keep the hacks happy. Give the dogs a bone. Then he’ll go to trial and he’ll probably be convicted, on circumstantial evidence. Then there’ll be an appeal and after about four years they’ll all realize what idiots the judge and, of course, the police had been the first time round and he’ll be out again, and the news, the talk shows, and the afternoon trash TV will be talking of nothing else. Sound familiar?” Bianco just hung his head.

  “No? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s called what often passes for Italian justice!”

  “He threatened me with a transfer. Well, not exactly threatened, but you knew what he was getting at.”

  Rossi nodded. He knew both Maroni’s methods and that it was always only a matter of time before he would have things moving in the direction he wanted. But while Rossi had time on his side and was still ahead, he could at least try to make hay.

  “C’mon then. What did you give him?”

  “I told him about the e-mails but,” he said, slipping back into his usual chatty tone, “but the funny thing is that he asked me if there were any.”

  “He asked you if there were any e-mails?”

  “Yes, he said there’d been an anonymous tip-off and he needed to know if it could be trusted. Said it could be life or death.”

  Rossi dismissed Bianco, who seemed at least relieved to have got the whole thing off his chest. Then he sat down, took up a pencil and began to run through the possibilities. He took a deep breath.

  Scenario one: Maria Marini’s killer had given the tip-off about the e-mails to throw them off the scent. So either he had known about the e-mail correspondence or he knocked them out himself, if the Rohypnol theory held up. Which meant he’d wanted to get Maria out of the way, leave the MPD with a serious PR headache, and have Spinelli and his party fighting for their political survival.

  But if somebody just happens to tip-off the police, didn’t that actually presuppose that Spinelli was likely innocent and being framed? How could anyone have innocently come by the information. A casual comment from Maria’s ex? A worried friend? But it would still be way too shaky in a court of law.

  Scenario two: Volpini, Marini’s ex. After all, he was the aggrieved party in primis, the cuckold. The e-mails had given him the perfect opportunity to lay the blame at his love rival’s door. But from what Carrara had told him he didn’t seem jealous enough, at least emotively. And if it emerged that Spinelli really had been drugged? Could Volpini have organized that little caper too? Again, unlikely, as Spinelli would have recognized him. And he was in Milan, unless he had hired help to get the drugs into Spinelli, gain access to his apartment and then write an incriminating final e-mail. But that was real professional stuff, way too far off the scale.

  Third scenario, thought Rossi, his pencil blunting fast. What if it was all a ruse by Spinelli, first to set himself up in order to later get himself off the hook? It would work like this, Rossi said to his junior detective alter ego: make sure the e-mails get found via an anonymous tip-off and it looks like it’s game over. There’s a strong sentimental motive, circumstantial evidence to support it, no cast-iron alibi, and no witnesses to his going to sleep early rather than to the usual bar. Sooner or later the investigators would check his e-mails, but Spinelli goes belt and braces and points the finger at himself with his own poison pen. Then the Rohypnol theory kicks in and throws enough doubt into the equation to theoretically save him.

  What if we cops hadn’t come up with it? Well, that would be Spinelli’s ace in his sleeve, his alibi. He could have given himself a dose of the stuff, holding off but planning at the last minute to say “hey, look guys, I felt terrible the other night, what if I was drugged and while I was zonked out on the floor someone got into my computer and set me up?” And maybe he’d even left the bar with some MPD groupie, saluting all and sundry to make sure it looked like he hadn’t left alone, thus furnishing a nice suspect for the cops to run around after. It was a real gambler’s option but it would leave sufficient doubt for him to get away with it and leave the case wide open.

  Rossi’s head was spinning. It was feeling more and more like science fiction. But he also knew that before the facts could become the facts they could be anywhere and could be anything. Reality wasn’t like a film, a book; the plot was unwritten or unwritable. People were being murdered and the chances were that it was by someone they knew. It was a question of probability. The difficulty lay in unravelling the human messes of love, hate, politics, revenge, and ambition, not necessarily in that order, and the technical and logistical framework within which they operated – put simply, space and time. That, and establishing how far someone was prepared and able to go in order to remove another human being from the face of the earth. So what was at stake?

  His gut instinct was telling him Spinelli was clean, but experience now suggested that he was up against a formidable array of possibilities and a formidable confederacy of deviants, as well, probably, as some dunces, in his own camp. There was a slew of circumstantial evidence, there was political expediency and the constant, pressing need to get a quick conviction. The tip-off story stunk, too, and combined with the urgency trickling down the chain of command via Maroni, despite himself, he feared history might be repeating itself, that this might be another political case dressed up as common crime. Even if you did never step in the same river twice it was still a river, you still got your feet wet.

  So much for the straightforward murder enquiry. So much for keeping Rossi on a case that had nothing to do with the powers-that-be. In substantive terms, Maroni knew no more than he did himself. But Maroni also had to jump when “they” said jump and jump bloody high.

  No. The more he mulled it over, and the more he processed what had happened in the space of what, three or four days, or two weeks counting the Colombo killing, the more he began to think that something, some mechanism might have snapped into action. Apart from having a killer on the loose, he was going to be coming up against darker forces than he had expected to be facing. His mobile phone rang again. That would be him.

  Nineteen

  The atmosphere in the conference room where the journalists were gathered was verging on the festive. Working for state-funded newspapers and TV, if you were on a good contract, was a junket and the lifestyle was easy to get used to. Everyone knew everyone, some better than others, of course. And some – how many? – had got to where they now were by dint not only of their wordsmithery but also in varying degrees thanks to the intimacy of their acquaintances, although the gender balance was, stile Italiano, rather more skewed in the predictable direction. Others may have not slept their way to success and though bed-hopping was about par for this course, there were other variations that could be registered on your scorecard too.

  The Grand Hotel, being central and within walking distance of Termini station and the underground, had been chosen both to accommodate the revellers and to cater for the expected stampede of local, national, and even foreign correspon
dents. It provided the necessary space for national TV crews and their entourages as well as for the usual mike-toting local hacks from the galaxy of more or less obscure cable stations.

  There was a palpable sense of expectation. All murder enquiries brought out the feeding frenzy instinct and this one was no different. It guaranteed weeks of copy for the crime correspondents, what with the endless speculation, the tawdry spectacle of interviews with victims’ families and neighbours and the footage of the crime scene. Then, like some second stage in a feared and now all too real malady, there would be the morbid pilgrimages to murder locations that sometimes ensued when a killing was perpetrated within the community, or, even better, within a family. The apparent randomness and viciousness of these recent crimes had aroused a particularly grim interest and the hacks were fishing now for more juicy details.

  Iannelli had arrived early and secured himself a place in the front row. He’d always taken the hard way, fully aware that his choices would condemn him to pursue the slow build, the long haul, yet he didn’t have to avoid anyone and his name rarely featured in the gossip over drinks. All the usual faces were there and he’d been careful enough to press the flesh and backslap his way around the room, devoting a few moments of special attention to Luca Iovine of The Facet, already pencilled in as his future employer.

  But he’d been here since five, and he wasn’t the only one beginning to think that if they put back the scheduled start-time again, the jovial atmosphere might turn rather more sour as first aperitifs and then dinner appointments got interfered with and grumbling stomachs and editors’ demands began to have undesired effects on tired brains. There was little worse than a projected early finish transforming itself into a protracted all-nighter. One downside to the job then.

  There were signs of movement, however, coming from the temporary wings set up to give the conference room its heightened air of police-like institutional drabness. TV crews had just switched on their lights before a row of suited men, some in plain clothes and others in uniform, filed out and took their positions on the podium. They moved at a pontifical pace and with what seemed to be an equally apparent disdain for what constituted urgency in the non-police world. Despite their indifference to the long wait to which the waiting media men and women had been subjected, it was clear that they would not be hanging around either. And if the press wasn’t ready, it was their problem. Iannelli scanned the faces, but there was no sign of Rossi.