by Aidan Conway
Rossi and Yana, however, moved away from that busy human hub behind them into the quieter alleys, first passing the modest baroque facade of The Church of Maria of Perpetual Succour on the corner of Via San Vito and then the Church of the Holy Saviour, and continued towards the northern end of Piazza Vittorio. They stood for a moment to admire the stolid if modestly proportioned Roman Arch of Gallieno and the precarious, ready to crush you, appearance of its interdependent stones. It had been like that since an earthquake in the fifteenth century but it was still there, like an upside-down smile with one crooked tooth. They then took their table in their favourite trattoria that dwelt in its shadow.
At the local mosque across the street, as usual, a small crowd had gathered and remained following Friday prayers. To think that this same site had only a few years previously been a private members’ club where strippers and adult performers catered to Rome’s more libertine clientele. Outside, opposite its wholly unassuming entrance and the assorted tidily arranged footwear, there were a number of sub-groups in little knots whose members were chatting and exchanging pleasantries. There were men in traditional robes, North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Bangladeshis, Indonesians. Others on the further edges of these groups had gathered there less for devotional reasons and more out of established habit. Some were sitting on the steps or on the stone bollards to chat and nibble on sunflower seeds and cashew nuts while sharing bottles of Peroni drunk from plastic cups.
The members of one of the groups began to amble their way back along Via San Vito towards the large opening of the Piazza of the Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore from where Rossi and Yana had just come. Of the group, all wore beards though one had only more recently begun to grow his. All were quiet and serious as they listened to the elder. All but one were dressed in casual, western clothes. The other in his white robes, the elder, had the air of a preacher or an Imam. Whether he was or not, they treated him with the respect due to a figure of comparable standing.
“Look,” he said, like some kind of tourist guide himself now, indicating the Basilica’s splendid triple-arched facade, the gold leaf and intricate mosaics of Christ Triumphing in Glory with the saints and the angels. “Look.”
Below, diminutive almost as mice on the church steps, a few hopeless drunks and homeless were sprawled on cardboard, ignored by gaudily dressed signore on a night out, perhaps to the nearby opera. Before this great Christian temple on the steps of Maderno’s seventeenth-century fountain, the carefree young of the city and travellers alike had gathered to pass the time, play guitars, and intermittently pummel drums, smoke, roll joints, and swig beer and wine from the bottles being passed around.
An earnest-looking priest, meanwhile, and some other higher-ranking cleric cut a diagonal line across the piazza, head-to-head, locked in conversation about who knew what business of the soul or the world. A gaggle of middle-aged American sightseers stopped to take pictures, some of the tipsier-looking females striking sexy poses, pouting, and revealing extra flesh for the lens. Lost-looking stragglers from a pub crawl had managed to negotiate the traffic zipping round the piazza and they weaved from side to side in identical black, bedraggled T-shirts coined and emblazoned for the occasion. A traveller’s dog howled and there was a scream, a shattering of glass, then a litany of foul language from a member of one of the tribes occupying the lower tiers of the fountain’s steps. The T-shirted transgressors raised their hands in slow surrender and staggered away in whatever direction they could.
“Look, Jibril,” the white-robed figure said again now taking the newest member of his company by the arm, “behold, my brother – these infidels, these fornicators and drunks, this destitution. All these are signs.” He began then to quote, from memory:
“‘When much wine is drunk, when giving charity becomes a burden for a man, when women are dressed, yet they appear naked. All these are signs, as when nation shall call upon nation to destroy Islam, and people shall copulate like donkeys in public. These too are signs. Signs of the end times – times, my brother, that very soon will be upon us.’”
Read on for an exclusive extract from the new DI Michael Rossi thriller:
A COLD FLAME
Publishing June 2018
One
The few flowers left in the vase had withered to dry brown stalks in the August sun. “You’re still sure this falls within our brief?” said Carrara as they stared at the cold, charred remains of the ground floor flat. All the bodies had now been removed but their presence lingered. “It’s a fire, isn’t it?” said Rossi. “Probably arson. Why not?”
They were standing in the welcome shade of the elevated section of the tangenziale flyover, on a side street off the busy, grimy Via Prenestina. It was hot, cripplingly hot.
“Even if there’s a file open on it already?” said Carrara. “A file that’s as good as closed.” Rossi shook his head and continued to gaze into the blackened ruins.
“It’s August. You can get away with murder in August. Who was on it?”
Carrara leafed through the case notes.
“No-one I know. A guy called Lallana. Racial homicides. Seconded to us in June and then transferred out again, on his own request, now buzzing all over the place with Europol. I got hold of him on the phone but he wasn’t keen on talking. Says it’s all in the reports and he’s got nothing more to add. He had it down as a hate crime – seems the victims were all foreigners – but not a single, solid lead. No witnesses, just the one guy who survived it.”
“A survivor?” said Rossi.
“Was. Dead now. Had 90% burns. Should have been long gone but hung on for nearly a week somehow.”
“And all while I was on holiday,” said Rossi.
“You can’t be everywhere, Mick,” said Carrara glancing up from the notes. “I mean a break was merited, after Marini.”
But Rossi was still struggling to comprehend the present horror. Shooting, strangling,
stabbing – that was one thing – but burning to death. They must have been locked inside when the fire started. Some might have woken but had been unable to get to a door or a window, the security grilles put there to keep them safe from intruders thus consigning them to their fates.
“But why wasn’t anyone able to get out?” said Rossi. “Because they locked their room doors every night?”
“Correct,” said Carrara. “Normal practice in bedsits, but no keys for the security grilles were found, not even after a fingertip search.”
“What about the front door?” said Rossi. “Couldn’t they have got out with their own keys? They all had one, right?”
Carrara took out a blown-up scene of crime photo.
“The lock. Tampered with, the barrel and mechanism all mangled up and debris left inside. It could have been someone trying to force it – an attempted break in, or sabotage. The occupants might have been able to open it from the inside to get out, if they had got as far as the door, but the bolts were still in place and nobody could get in. By the time the fire guys got there it was too late.”
“And their forensics?” said Rossi.
“Well,” said Carrara, “significant traces of ethanol – one story goes that there was a moonshine vodka operation – and they did find the remains of a timer switch next to the burnt-out fridge. Lallala maintained it could have been foul play or just some home-brew set up that got out of hand. He didn’t exactly go all out for the former theory. In the absence of a clear motive and witnesses the coroner delivered an open verdict. Have a look for yourself.”
Carrara handed Rossi the relevant report.
“Open?” said Rossi noting with contempt the irony. “Someone locked those poor bastards inside.”
“Like I said,” continued Carrara, “no keys for the window bars were found but no-one lived long enough to tell any tale.”
Amongst the scorched masonry and fallen timbers, one of the grilles lay across the small desert of debris, like the rib-cage of a once living and breathing being.
“An
y names?” said Rossi.
“Just the one,” said Carrara. “The tough nut. Ivan Yovoshenko. He was found in the communal bathroom and had dog tags from his conscription days. But for them he would have been a zero like the rest.
“And nothing on the others?”
“Nothing,” said Carrara.
“Well, they can forget checking dental records,” said Rossi. “These guys could probably just about afford toothpaste.”
Carrara fished out another sheet.
“There’s a list here of presumed missing in Rome and Lazio for the last six months, but no matches with this address. The word on the street is that they were five or six single men. probably illegals, but anymore than that…”
“Sounds familiar,” said Rossi. “But no friends, no work mates?”
Carrara gestured to the desiccated blooms and a brown, dog-eared farewell note or two.
“Paid their respects then made themselves scarce, I suppose,” said Carrara. “If it’s a hate killing. If it’s racial. You know, probably thought ‘who’s next?’”
“But a landlord?” said Rossi, sensing an opening. “Tell me we have an owner’s name.” But Carrara was already quashing his hopes with another printout from the case folder.
“Flat sold to a consortium two months ago as part of a portfolio of properties, a sort of going concern with cash-in-hand rents through an established ‘agent’ who hasn’t been seen since the fire.”
“That’s convenient,” quipped Rossi.
“Says here they always sent an office bod to pick up the cash in a bar and the go-between got his room cheap as well as his cut. No contracts. No paper trail. No nothing.”
“And no name for the agent?”
“Mohammed. Maybe.”
“That narrows it down. And the bar? Anyone remember him’?” “Nada.”
“A description?”
“North African. About 50.”
“Great,” said Rossi. “Well, it looks like the late Ivan’s our only man, doesn’t it? See what the hospital can give us.”
“And then a trip to the morgue?”
“You know, Gigi, I was almost beginning to miss going there.”
KEEP READING…
If you enjoyed this extract, you can pre-order your copy here
A COLD FLAME
Play with fire and you get burned…
Five men burnt alive.
In the dog days of a searing August in Rome, a flat goes up in flames, the doors sealed from the outside. Five illegal immigrants are trapped and burnt alive – their charred bodies barely distinguishable amidst the debris.
One man cut into pieces.
When Detective Inspectors Rossi and Carrara begin to investigate, a hitherto unknown terror organisation shakes the city to its foundations. Then a priest is found murdered and mutilated post-mortem – his injuries almost satanic in their ferocity.
One city on the edge of ruin.
Rome is hurtling towards disaster. A horrifying pattern of violence is beginning to emerge, with a ruthless killer overseeing its design. But can Rossi and Carrara stop him before all those in his path are reduced to ashes?
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my family for being book lovers all and especially Denis, Liam and Noel for reading an earlier version of A Known Evil. Thanks also to Chris Modafferi and my colleague Daniel Roy Connelly for helping to get the publishing ball rolling, and to Conor Fitzgerald for his generous insights into the genre. Finally, I would like to thank Ger Nichol, my agent, in Ireland, and Finn Cotton, my editor, in England, for their sterling work.
About the Author
Aidan Conway was born in Birmingham and has been living in Italy since 2001. He has been a bookseller, a proofreader, a language consultant, as well as a freelance teacher, translator, and editor for the United Nations FAO. He is currently an assistant university lecturer in Rome, where he lives with his family. A Known Evil is his first novel.
@ConwayRome
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