The Monster of Florence

by Magdalen Nabb

  “The last thing I want to do,” insisted Bacci, following, “is to make a bad impression.”

  “Don’t worry about it. He was just using you to make that speech to us all. It wasn’t anything personal.”

  “But even so …” Bacci glanced over his shoulder to where Simonetti was now deep in intimate conversation with both investigators, one of whom was listening, the other smoking and looking in another direction. Simonetti’s driver had got out of the car and was holding an umbrella over him but the other two seemed indifferent to the rain falling steadily on their heads.

  “Those two, for instance, Esposito and Di Maira … They solved that big drug case, do you remember? The one where they were exporting heroin in shoe boxes. And Esposito—he got that bullet wound in a shoot out in Piazza Santa Maria Novella. I heard him telling Noferini at one point when we were up at Galluzzo.”

  “Noferini? Is he the young policeman?”

  “The lieutenant, yes.”

  “Well, take my advice. Stick close to him. Talk to him. He’ll always know more about it than you do. Take your lead from him. It’s their show, this, don’t forget it.”

  “I won’t. The last thing I want to do is to blot my copybook at this stage.”

  “You’re due for promotion, you mean.”

  “It’s not only that—I shouldn’t be bothering you with my business …”

  “No, no … Leaving aside all else, I’ve known you a long time—since you were what? Eighteen or so, I suppose.”

  “Eighteen, yes. Anyway, you know my situation, my mother being widowed, and so on, and my sister still at university … It’s been a bit difficult.”

  “You’ve been a good son.”

  “I hope so, but … In short, I want to get married and once I’ve got this promotion, on a captain’s pay I think I can manage it all …”

  “Good. Good.” The Marshal put an approving hand on Bacci’s shoulder. “I hope she deserves you.”

  “Oh yes.” The young man’s face was pink. “She’s …”

  “Good, good.”

  “But you see, Marshal, I don’t want her to have to work—oh, she can as long as she wants to, I don’t mean it in that way, in an old-fashioned way. She enjoys her job, she teaches Italian in a school for foreign students. But we do want children and with the best will in the world I’ll be no help to her—you know what it’s like in this job.”

  “I know.” Nobody knew better after those long years of lonely separation. But how much worse it must have been for his wife with two small children and his sick mother on her hands. “You’re right there.”

  “Well, all I mean is that at least I should provide enough money for her not to be forced to work when she shouldn’t need to. And now, being chosen for this case might mean that I’ll get to be a captain a bit sooner than otherwise … You know what I mean.”

  The Marshal didn’t. “Has that been said?”

  “Well, hinted at. As long as I do a good job.”

  “I see. Lieutenant, we’re getting wet.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “I suggest you get into your car.” The Marshal himself looked about along the roadside for a flat stone to scrape the mud and wet grass from his boots and, failing to find one, scraped and rubbed them clean as best he could on a small grassy hillock.

  Ferrini was already in the car. The windscreen wipers were on fast and the heater was quickly steaming up the windows. They had to wait a moment until they cleared.

  “Christ, I’m soaked,” grumbled Ferrini. “Is that heater on full? A friend of yours, is he, that youngster?”

  “Bacci? I’ve known him since he was eighteen. He was with me at Pitti before he went to the Military Academy.”

  “You’d better keep an eye on him, then. He looks a bit ingenuous to me to be coming up against Simonetti. Put his foot right in it this morning.”

  “Yes. Well, I’ve warned him to take his cue from that police lieutenant, Noferini, I think he was called.”

  “You did right. That one knows which side his bread’s buttered on. A bit of a whizz kid with computers, too, I’ve heard. Did all the preliminary work on this job. Legend has it they started with about a hundred thousand names which, if you think about it, must cover every able-bodied male in Florence. Then they reduced it to those with previous convictions for violence and so forth.”

  “And now?”

  “And now we wait and see. Last I heard it was down to ten but it beats me what happens after that. You knock on ten doors asking, ‘Excuse me, sir, are you by any chance the Monster?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m not.’ Thank you very much and goodbye. This rain’s coming down even harder. Turn that heating down a bit, now, will you? Sweating on the inside and soaked on the outside. What a day!”

  The rain was indeed coming down even harder, rattling against the windscreen so that the wipers at their fastest could barely keep it clear, and spraying up under their wheels. Once they hit the road into the northern periphery of the city, they were obliged to sit in long queues with the rain beating steadily on the roof and angry horns hooting before and behind them. Ferrini talked on, as steady as the rain, explaining the quarrel, the rift between the Public Prosecutor’s office and the examining magistrate.

  “Of course, you could understand the PP’s impatience to a certain extent. It had been going on for years, the newspapers wrote about nothing else. There had been four different Monsters arrested and each time the real one struck again. If you ask me, nobody concerned knew what they were doing or even what they ought to be doing. They were all running round like scalded hens.”

  “I’m not surprised. I don’t know what I’d have done in their place. It’s all so bizarre.”

  “All right, it’s bizarre. But I know what I’d have done. I’d have run it like a routine murder enquiry, run all the usual checks and looked for an informer because there’d have been one. You can’t tell me that all those Peeping Toms trailing around the countryside on a Saturday night didn’t come across him. To hell with bizarre, it was the way they were running the enquiry that was bizarre! They were so busy with their psychological profiles and weird explanations that half the routine work went for a burton. Did you ever hear of a murder case where nobody checks the victim’s blood group? Anyway, the PP’s office was fed up to the back teeth and this new enquiry was started up whilst the Sardinian one was still running. A compromise, they called it. That was in eighty-four. ‘A different approach’ was what Simonetti called it when the new investigation was set up with the present Chief Proc in charge and Simonetti as his sidekick. Worked out very nicely for them both, all things considered. ‘A fresh, unprejudiced approach,’ they said. ‘No Sardinians need apply.’ Then, when the Instructing Judge protested Simonetti said to him, ‘If your theories are correct then our respective results must converge.’ Never crossed his mind, naturally, that if they didn’t he might have got it wrong.”

  That was exactly the way the Marshal’s thoughts had been running that first morning as he’d listened to Simonetti holding forth. Always so sure of being right, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence of being wrong.

  “It’s true, of course,” he pointed out now in an excess of fair-mindedness, “that’s what would happen if they were both right.”

  “In a perfect world,” Ferrini laughed, “they’d both be right and they’d both be able to prove they were right and they’d each be holding half the physical evidence and the Monster could be photographed between them confessing all. It’s not a scene I can easily imagine, I don’t know about you. And if any physical evidence does turn up I can tell you now that, whoever finds it, it’ll be ours. Past experience. In any case, by this time we’re on our own so no converging need be looked for. All we’re looking for is a likely suspect who can be put behind bars and, unlike the last four, stay there. Open that window just a crack, there’s steam coming off us—No, no! Forget I said that. We don’t want a shower.” The driver
pressed the button and the window slid back up. “No signs of it letting up … If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s people who lean on their horns in traffic jams—look at that stupid sod trying to get past us on the pavement … Imbecile! What was I saying? Oh, yes. Now, our pal the Monster—or Cicci, the Monster of Scandicci, as he’s popularly known, packed in years ago, in nineteen eighty-five, for reasons unknown. Could be dead, could have left the country, could be inside. Anyway, it’s been long enough for safety. I mean, if we get it wrong again we won’t get found out, shouldn’t do, anyway. The odds are against it and luck tends to follow people like Simonetti, don’t you find?”

  “I suppose so …” There was no getting away from the fact that all these ideas had passed, however briefly, through his mind as they’d tramped from murder scene to murder scene throughout the long wet day. Even so, when his own thoughts were put into words by Ferrini they seemed somehow heavier, cruder.

  “You’re a bit cynical …” was his only comment.

  “Come on, Guarnaccia, what else can you be in this job?”

  The Marshal stared out at the rain and exhaust fumes, the huddled shoppers trying to protect their legs from splashing cars, the polythene sheets over the greengrocer’s wares. Ferrini was right about that, at least: there was no sign of it letting up. He’d always had a sharp tongue in his head, the Marshal remembered that from when they’d worked on the transsexual murder together. Still, he had been cynical then but now he was bitter with it. Of course, it could have been that, working alone on a case they’d had a good handle on, they’d been too absorbed in the job for this sort of chitchat. They’d been left strictly alone to get on with it, too, which was a rare pleasure. So, maybe it wasn’t Ferrini who’d changed but the situation. Or it was since he’d been promoted to officer. Thank God, the Marshal thought, that he’d refused. Not that he’d imagined what the problems might be. He just didn’t want to go back to school and make a fool of himself. Nor did he want to start moving about the country again, uprooting his wife and children every few years. He was very happy where he was, Monster or no Monster. One way or another, this would eventually be over and he’d be back to stolen cameras and lost bicycles and worrying about having enough men to guard the openings of exhibitions in the galleries … Here they were, thank heavens …

  The huge stones darkened with rain and the black iron bars at the ground-floor windows gave the long façade a prison-like air, but for the Marshal the Pitti Palace was home and he had to suppress a sigh of relief as the car splashed to a stop in the wet gravel at the entrance.

  “I expect I’ll see you tomorrow.” He opened the car door.

  “What you want to do”—Ferrini prodded him sharply in the upper arm—“is to read the Instructing Judge’s report.”

  “I expect you’re right …”

  What he wanted to do, the Marshal thought, getting himself up the stairs as fast as he could and feeling in his pocket for keys, was have a long hot shower. And what’s more, nothing, he said to himself, is going to stop me.

  To make sure that nothing did he went straight to his quarters without checking in with young Brigadier Lorenzini.

  “Salva? Is that you? Good heavens, you’re wet through.”

  “I know.”

  “If you’re getting back into uniform, have a good hot shower first.”

  “I will.”

  “And then a hot drink. Do you want coffee or do you fancy hot chocolate?”

  “Anything. Coffee.”

  And within minutes the hot water was pouring over him, bringing comfort to every damp and aching bone and sluicing away monsters and murders and public prosecutors all. He lingered as long as he decently could with the water as hot as he could bear, gradually relaxing with the thought that the rest of the evening was his own, or at least could be spent in his own familiar world, in his own familiar uniform doing his own job.

  He lingered in the kitchen, too, standing there, coffee cup in hand, trying to make the tiny espresso last.

  “Oh, do sit down, Salva!”

  “I haven’t time.” And he stood there, at peace with the world, as Teresa squeezed past him.

  “I’m trying to get out to the shops if you’ll let me unload the dishwasher.”

  “Am I in your way …? You can’t go out in this!”

  “I’ll have to. I’ve nothing for the boys’ school snack tomorrow. I suppose I could wait half an hour or so and see if it stops …”

  She paused and looked out of the window at the steady drumming rain. He put down his cup and went over to stand behind her. “Wait till it stops,” he advised her. “There’s no great hurry, is there? Don’t get wet.”

  He enveloped her small form in a big hug.

  “I must get back to the office.”

  Not for the first time, as he entered the waiting room, he thanked God for Brigadier Lorenzini in whose hands he could safely leave his station. Two people sat waiting, pretending to read back issues of The Carabinieri. Both looked up at him hopefully as he entered and greeted them politely, then went back to leafing through their magazines as he popped his head round the corner of the duty room. Di Nuccio sat there typing furiously with two fingers and his colleague was talking quietly to the two men out on patrol through the radio switchboard. The Marshal opened the door of his own office where Lorenzini was at the desk, apparently concluding a piece of business. The heavy young man in front of him was getting to his feet and putting away the log book of a car. The Marshal nodded to him as he let him out.

  “Stolen car?”

  Lorenzini got up and gathered a stack of papers together. “A found car, if you can believe it. We’d found it before he’d even noticed it was stolen. Whoever stole it couldn’t find anywhere to park it so he left it in the middle of the road. What sort of a day did you have?”

  “Wet. We did seven crime scenes, four of them in heavy rain.”

  “Cheery. Why seven and not eight?”

  “Simonetti’s not interested in the sixty-eight murder. I suppose he’s right. It was a normal murder, not a serial killer job, and weapons do change hands,” he said.

  “A murder weapon?”

  “I know. It’s not true. Of course, though, it could have been stolen.”

  “Hm. Funnily enough … it’s the only one I’ve seen—scene of the crime, I mean. I used to live near Signa as a kid.”

  “You? But you can hardly have been born in sixty-eight.”

  “I was four. I don’t mean I was round there the day after the murder, budding investigator! No, it was just a kids’ game later when I was at school. We used to call it the haunted lane and see if we could frighten ourselves to death going down there alone on dark winter afternoons, pretending to search for the gun in the stream.”

  “Pity you didn’t find it.”

  “I bet we would have done if it had been there. Whoever owned the land must have got fed up with us in the end and he put a chain and padlock on the entrance to the lane. Oh, well, I’ve got two more people to see out there.”

  “I’ll deal with them.”

  “You don’t mind? I could get the paperwork on this car seen to.”

  “Show them in.” The Marshal eased himself into his familiar chair with a sigh of pleasure. “Are they together?”

  “ ’Fraid not. And one of them’s foreign. Are you sure …?”

  “Show him in, show him in.”

  The undersigned complainant, Raymond Poigne, born in Sheffield, Great Britain, 1947, who thought his camera might have been stolen—though it was true, as his wife Marilyn had said to him, that he could have left it in that last bar and who was sorry he couldn’t speak Italian but knew a bit of French if that could help—must have been as surprised as he was pleased to find himself greeted like a long-lost friend.

  ANOTHER MONSTER!

  5th time lucky?

  At a press conference held yesterday evening at Police Headquarters, Prosecutor Simonetti announced that he would shortly make a form
al accusation against the man he believes to be the Monster of Florence. The Prosecutor was not prepared to reveal the name at this stage, but the Anti-Monster Squad has been increased to double its former size and is working round the clock. The Prosecutor described a visit today to all the scenes of the Monster’s crimes, a visit undertaken in absolute secrecy and in plain clothes. Despite pressure from journalists he made no revelations about what he had discovered, or even what precisely he was looking for. “It was vital that we checked every scene,” he said, “though I can’t say anything further at this stage. The reason for secrecy must be obvious: we could hardly have got on with our business surrounded by journalists.”

  Asked if he was confident about the new accusation given past form the Prosecutor was emphatic: “I am absolutely confident that the Monster will not strike again. I know over the past few years public opinion has tended towards the idea that the Monster enquiry was suspended or even consigned to the archives, but this is not the case. It was precisely when everything appeared static that we were working our hardest on every possible hypothesis. No stone has been left unturned.”

  The Prosecutor pointed out that his office had been dealing all the while with its normal workload and that it was a measure of the commitment of his men that they had nevertheless achieved so much, considering the complexity of the case.

  So what is really new about this enquiry to bring it to the headlines?

  “First and most importantly, we’re using new methods, much more sophisticated methods. The serial killer is a totally new and unknown phenomenon in the criminality of this country. This means we’re starting from scratch. To understand the type of murderer we are dealing with, we have had the series of killings analysed by a team of psychiatrists and psychologists, ballistics experts and police pathologists. We knew with their help what we were looking for.”

  Did this mean that past errors would not be repeated?

  “Certainly. But that is in no sense a criticism of the work done on this case in the past, all of which was necessary and carried out with great scrupulousness.”