The Monster of Florence

by Magdalen Nabb

  “What a brute. I’ve come across some characters in my time, but Silvano, my God … We followed him, you know. Followed him for months in eighty-five but he was as cunning as a fox. He knew, of course, that was the thing. His favourite trick was to slow to almost a stop approaching traffic lights on green, getting everybody in a rage behind him. Then the minute they turned red, he’d shoot across the junction and we’d lost him. Same with his phone. We had a tap on it for weeks before he found out and if you heard the conversations. Sex, never anything but sex, and always men—though for some reason he insisted on having women performing on the side for him. I don’t profess to understand that. Anyway, once he’d cottoned on that we were listening in he’d play every trick in the book on us, especially dialling some non-answering number to set our machine going and then leaving his phone off the hook till our bobbin ran out. We tore his house apart, too, after two of the murders, but we never found anything except that rag and that was whipped away from Romola pretty smartly. I tell you, in all my career I’ve never known a villain who had Silvano’s luck.”

  “From what you say, it wasn’t entirely luck.”

  “No, he was a clever bastard, too, but he had luck all right. Getting away with the murder of his first wife, for a start, not only once but twice. I’ve brought you what I could on that.” He pulled a batch of papers from his raincoat pocket. They were rolled up and secured with a rubber band.

  “The full report’s in the archives but …”

  “No, I don’t want to involve anyone. I’ll be glad to see anything you’ve got.”

  “I didn’t bring the search reports since we found nothing useful—though I can tell you there was a moment—it was the gun we were after, of course, but the morning after a murder you can imagine that we might have found the bits he took away, you know what I mean. We were searching his workshop opposite the house and one of your men noticed an old fridge in the corner, not plugged in, just being used as a store cupboard. He opened it and, Jesus, a damn great cloud of iridescent flies flew out at him. We thought this is it. It wasn’t, though. They were feeding on meat all right, but it was animal meat. Then we found a plastic bag full of their larvae. He was breeding them for fishing. I don’t know whether we were more disappointed or relieved. We should have known better than to have any hopes of finding anything. He was always one step ahead of us.”

  “Except with the rag. Funny …”

  “I know. Still, water under the bridge. We’ll never find out the truth about that. I ought to be off—unless there’s anything else I can tell you.”

  “There is. This Suspect. Oh, I suppose it’s irrelevant now but I’d just like to understand. Why him?” Hadn’t they both been in the same boat, the Suspect and the Marshal?

  “I’m not the one you want! Why me?”

  Di Maira shrugged. “I’m not privy to all their little secrets. Esposito was in on it, but he’ll say nothing. I only know they needed somebody with a previous conviction for murder, or GBH at least and he had to be a Peeping Tom. Once they’d discounted the real culprit, who’d left the country, anyway, there wouldn’t have been much of a choice. I’m only guessing here but you can be sure they’d pick somebody poor and helpless who couldn’t afford a fleet of fancy lawyers. The real piece of luck, though, was the daughter. Everybody in the village knew he was having it off with her and that she wasn’t right in the head. All they had to do was convince her to sign a report and they were ready to announce him as the Monster. Joe Public won’t make the connection, if you ask me. Incest’s too tricky a subject.”

  “It can’t have been easy, though.”

  “I don’t see why. It was probably the first thing that came to light when they started checking him.”

  “No, no … I mean getting her to sign. Convincing her to go into court. She seemed so terrified, so ashamed.”

  “She was. Terrified and ashamed. It was a dirty trick—even Esposito, who wrote the report they made her sign, thought it was a bit much. They hauled the girl into Police Headquarters, asked her if it was true what they’d heard about her father touching her and so on and then said sign here. If she’d refused they could have accused her of calumny. So whether she wanted to or not …”

  “That’s what I thought.” The Marshal thought this over, remembered the videos and added, “She didn’t object to her father’s buying her a flat.”

  “No. Even so, it’s about the only intelligent move Simonetti’s made, because nobody, not even his lawyer, will dare touch the subject, and you mark my words, he’ll be done for the Monster’s crimes because of it. Everybody and his dog will know Simonetti’s case against him doesn’t hold water, but nobody will defend him because of this incest business. That’s what settled their choice and he’ll be tried for that again because it’s all they’ve really got. Oh, by the way, if you do want those search reports I mentioned you can have them, you know. I’m not keeping anything back. I just thought—”

  “No, no … If you found nothing, there’s no need. But maybe … I was wondering if these three …” How to put it? “If these three had anything to contribute, or even if you thought they might be in any way involved …”

  Di Maira frowned at the three names on the paper the Marshal pushed across the desk.

  “Ha, yes, well, they’ve all given us a hand in one way or another, but I imagine anything they’ve told us will be in Romola’s acquittal.”

  “You haven’t read it yourself?”

  “No, of course not. I was part of it, if you like. Who reads those things? Last year’s weather forecast, a bureaucratic formality.”

  “I know … normally. Well, all three are mentioned here and there but I’m not too clear … This Salvatore Angius, for instance?”

  “One of Silvano’s boyfriends passed him on later to Flavio but stayed in contact with him. He was generally regarded as an adopted son of Silvano’s, and they were related—he came here from Sardinia when he was orphaned as a kid. Worked a bit as a shepherd boy and I reckon was pretty well starving as well as homeless when Silvano picked him up—he was his alibi in sixty-eight, that must have been in the report.”

  “Yes, it was. There was also a mention of his living near the Rossini house and I did wonder whether he might actually have been at the scene of the crime.”

  “If he was, we’ll never prove it now. He has a record, though, so if you want to know more you can check him out. He was presumably disillusioned with Silvano in the end because he withdrew his alibi when we went over it all in the eighties.”

  “He collaborated against Silvano?”

  “Up to a point. Then he stuck. If I remember rightly we did him for reticence somewhere along the way. Searched his house, too, just in case he’d got hold of the famous pistol, but we didn’t find it. If you’re thinking of any of these as a suspect I might as well tell you we’ve checked them all.”

  “I’m sure you would have. No, I just like to know all about the people involved … For instance, are they reliable as far as their evidence goes—I mean, what sort of life do they lead—drugs, prostitutes?”

  “Drugs, all three of them, of course—not addicts, though, the type that takes anything that’s available to get high, you know the sort of thing. Prostitutes—same thing, they all pick up what’s available—Angius, though, I’m not sure about. Couldn’t make out whether he really was homosexual or just dragged into it by Silvano. If he really was, well—you know the way it goes with that sort. They manage to be more or less kept until a certain age and then they wake up one morning and zak! It’s over, and they’re having to pay for it. Nicolino, now, he really was Silvano’s son, as far as can be made out. You knew that?”

  “Yes. But did they keep in touch?”

  “Couldn’t say. I can’t imagine the kid would want much to do with his mother’s murderer, would you? Mind you, with that band you never know. I had the feeling he was frightened of Silvano, myself, as well he might be. A castrator of sons, if there ever was one.�
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  “That’s something …” The Marshal paused, turning this idea over.

  “What?”

  “It’s just that … it’s something they tend to say about mothers.”

  “You’re right. It is. But apart from the fact that the poor sod didn’t have a mother for long enough, Silvano wanted all the sex that was going for himself, men and women. He didn’t want any competition. Nicolino never mentions him any more and I’m convinced it’s fear. He saw Silvano that night, or sensed him, standing in the reeds.”

  “Yes, I remember that.”

  “You do? Well, he doesn’t, not any more, or so he says. We took him back there, you know, in the eighties. I suppose he’d have been about twenty. It was a warm day and we were standing right there where it happened, waiting to hear what he’d have to say, dying to give him a prod but not daring to.

  “He stood there a long time, then he shook his head.

  “ ‘I don’t know … it’s all gone …’

  “He was staring straight ahead in the direction of the Pistoia road. We’d no way of knowing whether he really didn’t remember or whether he’d decided not to talk. He’s pretty backward, you know, and they’re the hardest type to judge. Just then, a bit of a breeze got up and the reeds moved. They were dry and they made a rustling noise.

  “ ‘I touched her hand.’

  “It was as if he’d been switched on. I thought right away it was the reeds and I was right. He said as much afterwards.

  “ ‘I touched her hand and it fell down in between the two seats. The back window was open and I climbed out and started running. I was screaming and screaming and then there was a voice in the reeds … Somebody … Then we were going away and they kept telling me: Remember to say your dad’s ill in bed. Remember … I don’t know where they left me. I only remember running across the main road because I was so glad to see the big light.’

  “That’s as much as he was able to tell us, but I think he was doing his best to help, and God knows he’d had enough of it when he was a kid. Nobody wanted him, you know, in the family, any more than they wanted Sergio when he was released from prison. I reckon what they really didn’t want was any more trouble with Silvano. They knew the kid was his, and they didn’t want the truth about the real relationship between Sergio and Silvano coming out. So Nicolino grew up a mess, unwanted, and Sergio died in the ex-prisoners’ home.”

  “He what?”

  “Oh yes, he’s dead. You’ll hear nothing about it until our case is further along. Nobody wants the Vargius story resurrecting just now. What do you expect? Who’s this third one, then? Ah, Amelio. He was more of a help, but then he knew more. And he told us about the orgies going on in that flat when he was a kid—the ex-wife confirms it all, too. She’d wake up in the night and find two men in bed with her, Silvano plus his latest boyfriend. Then it got to Silvano plus boyfriend plus boyfriend’s wife, and if she protested he’d beat the living daylights out of her. The kid tried to defend her a time or two but all that meant was that he got the same treatment.”

  “Why didn’t she leave him?” The Marshal was always a bit dubious about this sort of story from women who’d tolerated the same treatment for years.

  “She tried. Went back to Sardinia to her parents in seventy-four, but there was nothing but poverty and unemployment and they packed her back off to her husband. You made your bed, you lie on it, style of thing. She did leave him for good in the end in nineteen eighty, though she moved back into the flat when he was arrested for his first wife’s murder. Our theory is that it was being abandoned by her that set him off in seventy-four and then again in the eighties. Not to mention the son leaving him, too, in seventy-five. He went to live with Flavio and that didn’t go down well at all. The brothers fought like cat and dog about that, and I suppose that’s why the kid got away altogether then and went up north to his own mother’s sister for a few years. A shame, really, since his stepmother had tried to be a mother to him, but life with Silvano must have been an inferno.” Di Maira pushed the sheet of paper back across the desk. “By God, I wish I could have done him for it. We didn’t even manage to send him down for doing in his first wife. Not that there wasn’t evidence, witnesses too, even after twenty-seven years. The trouble was there’d been no autopsy. No photographs, either. It had been set up to look like suicide and nobody, nobody lifted a finger to show that it wasn’t.”

  “You mean people knew?”

  “Everybody knew. We’re sure, for a start, that the village Marshal knew. He was long dead when we started investigating the matter but the station records show that he had Silvano in and measured his thumbprint against the bruise on his wife’s neck. He knew, all right, but he didn’t stick to it and we don’t know why.”

  “Could he have been afraid?”

  Di Maira shrugged. “I suppose he might have been. The Vargius family was big and they were a vicious crew. Then, that village, it’s the arsehole end of the world. A Marshal in a place like that would be very much on his own. A man could meet with a nasty accident in a place like that long before any help could arrive. Anyway, we’ll never know now. There was one of his carabinieri, too, he’s still alive, or so he was when we went there in the eighties. He was the only one who actually worked on the case, if you can call it a case when nothing much was done, with the Marshal. Blasted man actually found the body and couldn’t tell us a thing. Turned tail and ran for the Marshal—not that he wasn’t right to do that, but he didn’t look at anything so that with the Marshal dead—there’s an HSA report, of course, as there has to be in any case of sudden death, but the local doctor took one look at the gas canister standing by the bed with the tube leading to the young woman’s mouth and signed a death certificate without a murmur, which meant the Marshal could only report suicide.”

  “Yet people were sure it wasn’t?”

  “That gas canister was empty. Not one of the people who entered the room—and the neighbours were in there within minutes—the young carabiniere, the Marshal, the young woman’s family, had any problem with gas or even remembered a smell of gas or thought to open a window. What’s more, the baby was standing up in its cot screaming the place down. It would have been dead long before the mother if the canister had been full. And if that weren’t enough, the mother had knocked at the house next door twice that evening to ask them to warm the baby’s milk because she’d run out of gas, once at about six thirty and again at ten. She was found dead at eleven thirty.”

  “By this young carabiniere, you say.”

  “By Silvano, he says. The neighbours heard him hammering at his own door and screaming. Then he hammered at their door and when they opened up he said his wife had a man in the house and wouldn’t let him in. He made a great show of breaking the door down in their presence.”

  “Had he an alibi for the time immediately before?”

  “The usual Silvano-style alibi. He’d been seen in the bar and the billiard hall, and every other place in the village he frequented regularly, in the company of his brother-in-law, Giuseppe. The truth is that nobody actually saw the pair of them after about ten thirty so they had all the time in the world to do the job, but with the brother-in-law backing him up and saying they stayed out together until two minutes before Silvano started hammering at his own door … Well, you know enough about Silvano, if you’ve read the Romola report, to realize that the wife and kid were for show and the real relationship was between Silvano and the brother, Giuseppe. That never got out in the village so his alibi, fishy though it was, was never broken.”

  “But … the dead woman’s family?”

  “Yes. The family. She was only nineteen, you know. Margherita, her name was. I’m sure her mother knew exactly what had happened but she never said a word. I suppose, from her point of view, she’d lost her daughter and nothing could bring her back. If the truth had come out, she’d have lost her son, too. Plus, like everyone else, she was scared of Silvano. Then, the shame if the homosexual story came out.
They’d have had to move away and they had land there. No, no, nothing would have induced her to talk then and nothing would induce her to talk even in the eighties when the famous pistol—which, incidentally, belonged to her brother and disappeared when Silvano left the village—had killed so many people. We tapped her phone since she wouldn’t open her mouth much to us. She was on the phone every day to her surviving daughter who lived up near Como—the one the kid Amelio went to when he ran away from Silvano. You’ve got the transcripts there. I made them myself by hand and kept my copy after I’d typed them up. I hope you can read my writing …”

  The Marshal unrolled the sheets of paper. The writing in ballpoint had faded a little to a brownish blue.

  “I think so.” But he didn’t try for a moment. “Why? If he needed the wife and child for show, why kill her? Was there another man?”

  “There was, but that wasn’t the reason—interestingly enough, the other man’s name was Amelio. I wonder if Silvano let that pass because this Amelio was her intended before she was forced into marrying Silvano. You’ll find that little story amongst the stuff I’ve given you. Even so, although she did start seeing him again before her death he wasn’t the reason. What precipitated things was that she was leaving him, not for the other man, though. She must have been sick to death of the life she was leading, half-starved and regularly beaten by that monster of a so-called husband. She’d made her decision and applied for a job as a resident maid-of-all-work in an orphanage where they would let her take her kid. She’d bought a long-distance bus ticket. She was leaving him the next day.

  “Of course, now there’s nobody who can tell us about it but there’s every reason to think he’d been forcing her to join in his sexual acrobatics with her brother and when she wanted out he bumped her off. We get the same set-up in sixty-eight when Belinda Muscas wanted out of the Belinda-Sergio-Silvano triangle and got the same punishment. He probably even bragged about it when he was setting up the sixty-eight job. It was Sergio, after all, who told us: ‘He murdered his wife in Sardinia and the kid was saved that time, too.’ Who else would have told him except Silvano himself? Then in seventy-four his new wife tries to leave him and he turns murderous again. In eighty she really does leave him and all hell’s let loose. See what I mean, now?”