‘You can’t get much practice as a police pathologist, then?’
Barrabino turned to look at him a moment: ‘Plenty of practice as a normal pathologist, and there have been several tourist deaths here among our elderly visitors that the police have had to sign off on.’
The man was conceited, and Scamarcio was not warming to him. Maybe it was the swept-back shoulder-length hair and the car. Maybe it was just his tone.
As they descended the last of the wooden steps to the beach, he saw a dangerously thin Nordic man in running gear pacing up and down, 20 feet-or-so away from a crumpled form at the water’s edge. When he noticed the two of them approach, the man came jogging over, relief flooding his face.
‘Are you the police?’
Scamarcio introduced himself and his new friend.
‘I haven’t touched anything. I’ve stayed away, but I know it’s a body — no doubt about it. I called you from my mobile.’ He held up the phone as if proof were needed.
‘Thank you,’ said Scamarcio. ‘We appreciate that.’
‘I’m just here on holiday — my wife’s at the hotel. I go running every morning about this time.’ He seemed to have already planned out a checklist of questions in his head that he thought Scamarcio would require answers to. His English was clear and fluent, like so many Dutch people who had grown up with it as second language from an early age. The Italians should try a similar system, thought Scamarcio, but they were too proud.
‘I hadn’t been running long when I saw it. Our hotel is just back there.’ He gestured around the bay to the left, and Scamarcio could see the outline of red roofs among the palms.
‘It was about half an hour ago that I called you.’ The man quickly looked down at his mobile and seemed to scroll through something. ‘Actually, thirty-four minutes ago, to be precise.’
Scamarcio took a deep breath, and wished the man would do the same. ‘Thank you, you have been very helpful. Why don’t you just wait over there a moment by those trees while we take a look? My colleagues will be along in a moment, and will take a full statement from you.’
The man nodded and headed off towards a cluster of palms at the edge of the sand.
Scamarcio set off with Barrabino towards the crumpled heap, and as they drew near he was relieved to note that there was no smell and no flies. They stopped to attach their protective booties, and then walked the last few metres to the corpse.
It was the body of a man twisted into a foetal position. His face was round and pale, the eyes closed. His hair was dark and damp, pasted to the skull, and he was wearing brown trousers and a windcheater that was stained with blood. His left foot was bare, but a blue sock hung half on and half off his right foot. The sock was also stained with blood.
Barrabino knelt down by the body and undid the windcheater. After a brief examination of the eyes and mouth, he moved to the neck and arms, running his fingers along them gently, as if afraid to hurt him. After a while, he said: ‘He’s been stabbed. Repeatedly. It looks like there are just a very few blowfly eggs in the eyes and mouth so far, so I don’t think he’s been dead long — he was probably killed some time last night. There is rigor in the face and upper neck muscles, but not the larger ones yet, which tells me that he’s been dead at least two hours. But that’s all I can offer right now. When I get him on the table I will know more.’
‘Was he moved afterwards, you think? Killed elsewhere?’
Barrabino stretched his legs after kneeling by the body on the cold sand. ‘The lividity will tell me for sure, but for that I need him on the table. I don’t want to compromise the scene by moving him around too much here.’
The doctor took a small digital camera out of his bag and began to take pictures of the corpse from various angles, before moving to wides, mid-shots, and close-ups.
When he had finished, Scamarcio reached down into the man’s right-hand pocket, which was the only one available to him without moving the corpse. He fingers came upon a square, smooth surface, and he pulled out a brown plastic wallet and flipped it open. Inside was a driving licence in the name of Fabio Ella.
36
WHEN SCAMARCIO CALLED Cepparo, he told him that they hadn’t found anything else on Ella’s computer and that the lost emails were apparently irretrievable.
‘Well, you can’t prosecute a dead man.’ Scamarcio had heard the same words just a few days before.
‘If it is him. We have the wife coming down to do the ID. What are you going to do now, Cepparo?’
‘We’re going to carry on going through his web activity to see which sites he was visiting and whether we can draw in anyone else for this. We still have the wife as clean. But we do want to talk to her about his friends and associates, and I’d imagine that we’ll be crossing your case with that.’
‘So first she finds out her husband’s dead, and then she discovers he’s a paedophile. Maybe it’ll help her handle her loss in some way.’ They both fell silent to ponder that thought for a moment before Scamarcio said: ‘You go ahead, Cepparo. I have no problem with that.’
‘If we can’t get a lead into anyone else, we’ll tie it up — limited resources and all that.’
‘Sure, I understand.’
‘So then it’s up to you if you want to investigate further.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And, Scamarcio?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m really looking forward to that drink, cos your case seems kind of interesting.’
With Cepparo investigating Ella’s friends and associates, and the local squad still at the beach, Scamarcio’s thoughts turned to The Priest once more. Looking back on it now, it almost seemed as if the non-tip-off about the gypsies was a sort of precursor, a strange kind of gift that might pave the way for the later request for forgiveness. And that made him wonder if it wasn’t such a non-tip-off after all. He decided that, with the others out, he might as well head back up to the camp and observe the families — unannounced this time. Casual surveillance had gleaned results for him in the past, yet there never seemed to have been enough time or money to repeat it on recent cases. It was strange he hadn’t heard from Garramone, he reflected, following his message about Ella. Then there was the death of Spezzi hitting the news. Maybe that connection hadn’t triggered yet in the chief’s stressed-out mind?
The camp seemed shabbier in daylight. He smelt wood smoke on the breeze, and heard voices up ahead. Someone was shouting — maybe more than one person.
He decided to head west of the gate and follow the fence around to the left, in the hope of finding a point where he could look in unobserved. Eventually, he came across some bushes that allowed him to see into the clearing where he’d spoken with the small group the other day. He saw that the fire was still alight, and that several men and women were sitting around it, chatting. A short, busty young woman was standing to their right, yelling at a fat toddler who was trying to eat something he’d found on the ground.
The group around the fire talked on, oblivious to the woman with the child. After telling him off again, she scooped him from the ground and headed off in the direction of some shacks to the right, leaving Scamarcio with a glimpse of a teenage boy sitting morosely on the steps of a caravan straight ahead. Scamarcio shifted position in the bushes to get a better look. The boy kept glancing around him nervously while hugging his knees. Eventually, he pulled some smokes from his pocket and lit up, chugging the cigarette as if he were being paid to finish it as fast as possible. He was a strange-looking lad: dark hair gelled down in a side parting, eyes too close together, a small bony frame. He was wearing a tight T-shirt and denim jeans that were hugely wide at the bottom. Underneath, Scamarcio caught a glimpse of what looked like bright-yellow trainers. The boy looked around him a few more times, and then quickly got up from the steps and headed off to his right, checking that none of
the people around the fire had seen him go. He then left the camp through the gate that Scamarcio had used the other day.
The boy’s nervousness stirred the usual instincts in Scamarcio. He left his hiding place and headed back towards the gate. When he got there, he saw the embers of the boy’s spent cigarette burning slowly through the long grass, and ground his foot on the stub to extinguish it. When Scamarcio looked up the road to the right, the boy was nowhere to be seen, so he got back in the Cinquecento and headed down the hill, the way he had come, driving slowly, figuring that the boy could not have gone far. Indeed, as he rounded the bend the boy came into view, ambling along on the left. Scamarcio drove straight past him, and then parked up at a vantage point on the right that offered a good view of Porto Azzurro and the aqua beyond. He pulled a map from the glove box, opened it, and, pretending to be a lost tourist, began to study it carefully. A quick glimpse in his side mirror told him that the boy was approaching. He returned to the map and let him pass. He waited a minute or two, and then drove on once more, passing the boy again. By his reckoning, the boy was heading for a village Scamarcio had seen at the bottom of the hill. He pulled the car into a service station behind some houses and waited for him to walk by. This time he saw him turn left at the service station and enter what looked like a bar on the other side of the street. Scamarcio pulled the car over to the edge of the forecourt and parked, gesturing to the disgruntled attendant that he would be back in a short while. When he walked around the corner at the left of the service station, he saw that it wasn’t a bar that the boy had stepped into, but a kind of internet café, of which he’d already seen quite a few on the island.
Scamarcio made a quick assessment, deciding it was unlikely the boy had seen his face in the car, and entered the café behind him, resolving to order himself a brioche and cappuccino, as he hadn’t yet managed breakfast. The boy was already seated at a computer, one of several running along the right-hand wall. He seemed to be typing frantically, hunched over the screen like an old man. Scamarcio noticed that his right ear had three diamond studs in the lobe.
Scamarcio ordered from the waitress before picking up the day’s La Nazione and finding a table from which he could keep the boy in sight. He was still typing frantically, unaware of the world around him. Scamarcio registered that La Nazione had the Ganza story on the front page as well as pages 2 and 3. They were now saying that the coalition was in crisis. They were even reporting talk of the PM’s predilection for 17-year-old girls — a story that had been grinding the rumour mill in Rome for the past few months and had been triggered by the PM attending the 18th birthday party of a Romanian lap dancer he had recently befriended. If she played her cards right she could be looking at a cabinet post, along with all the ex-TV showgirls the PM preferred for the softer ministries, thought Scamarcio. How this country depressed him. He often wondered if he wouldn’t have been better settling in the States. Maybe if he’d tried living somewhere like New York, instead of lonely and vacuous LA, the urge to come home wouldn’t have been so strong. He returned his gaze to the boy. He had stopped typing, and was pushing back the chair and making for the bar. He handed over a coin and then headed for the door, seemingly in a hurry.
Scamarcio folded the newspaper and waved to the waitress to come over. When she reached his table, he pulled his badge from his pocket.
‘Listen, I don’t want to make a scene, but I’m from the Flying Squad, and I need to search that computer the boy’s just used. It’s important, and could save a child’s life.’
The woman’s eyes opened wide in amazement, and then she just nodded mutely. After a moment she seemed to gather herself together and said: ‘The password is SATURN. Can I bring you anything else, Detective? On the house, of course.’
‘Thank you. Another cappuccino would be good.’
She nodded and hurried away, and he headed for the computer the boy had been using. He sat down on the plastic seat, which was still warm — something he hated — and entered the password. He found the option for recent history, and saw that the boy had been on Yahoo Mail. He figured that he would have to call a techie in Rome to help him get into the boy’s account, and was just debating who to contact when, after just one click, he realised that the boy hadn’t even signed out of his mail box. That was not clever.
Scamarcio searched the ‘Sent’ list. The last email had been addressed to someone simply known as Mr Y. When Scamarcio studied the address in detail, it appeared as y12679 at gmail.com
The email the boy had written was short. Scamarcio scanned the English words: ‘I’m stuck what now? I can’t do this on my own.’ He saw from the boy’s address that he was called Dacian. He didn’t know if it was a first or a second name.
He went back to the Sent box. There was another email, sent a few minutes earlier: ‘I need instructions, this is all too much.’
He went to the inbox. Mr Y had written just one email to Dacian: ‘Just keep cool and lie low, I will get word to you soon.’
It was the only email in the inbox; all the rest must have been deleted. He went back to the outbox again, and saw another, much longer email the boy had sent before the first two to Mr Y. It was addressed to an Irina Makala at gmail, but it was in a language he couldn’t understand — Romany, he guessed. He pressed ‘Forward’ on the email and typed in Garramone’s address, and then went back to the Sent file and deleted the forwarded mail. He then made a note of the boy’s email address, and signed out of his account.
The waitress was back with his cappuccino, and he drank it down in one gulp before placing a five-euro bill under the saucer. The caffeine was racing in his blood now, and he knew he had no choice but to head straight back to the camp.
37
HE MADE A QUICK scan of the three narrow intersecting streets in the village to check that the boy wasn’t hanging around, and then got back into the car, handing another tip to the angry-looking guy on the forecourt. Before starting the engine he typed a message to Garramone from his BlackBerry, asking him to find a translator for the email he had sent him from the boy. He also asked him to get a techie to see whether they could access emails received and sent in the last few months that now appeared to have been deleted from the boy’s account. He gave him the boy’s email address.
He turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the petrol station onto the main road, the two coffees giving him a much-needed energy hit that he hoped would last him a few hours yet. There was no sign of the boy on the drive going up, which worried him. Could he be that fast a walker? Maybe someone had given him a lift.
He arrived back at the camp, noticing the silence this time. As he walked in through the gate, he saw that the fire was still going but that the people around it had gone. He approached the nearest caravan and knocked on the flimsy door. A young woman with an old face came out. She was scrawny, her skin paper-thin and lined, but her eyes still pretty. Her brown hair hung lank and greasy, with faded orange highlights at the tips. He held up his card again.
She shook her head at him, stepped out of the caravan, and shouted something, again in a language he didn’t understand. Quickly, a few more doors opened, and some of the men from the other day stepped out — including the spokesman, shirtless this time. He was wiping his hands down on his trousers, and didn’t look pleased to see Scamarcio.
‘Back again so soon? What is it now?’ he said, striding towards him.
‘You have a teenage boy here — I need to talk to him.’
‘Why?’
‘As part of the investigation, of course.’
‘But our children haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘I’m sure they haven’t, but I just need a quick word.’
The man paused a moment, seeming to weigh it up. Then he said: ‘We have several boys here. Which do you mean?’
‘If you bring them out, I’ll tell you.’
The man shouted something, and another man turned back the way he had come.
While he was gone, Scamarcio and the spokesman just stared at one another uncompromisingly, neither willing to give any ground by being the first to look away.
After what seemed like a long time, the man was back, two reluctant teenage boys in tow. But neither of them was the boy he had seen in the café.
The leader placed a hand on the back of each and nudged them forward.
‘No,’ said Scamarcio. ‘The boy I want has diamond studs in his ears, wide jeans, and bright-yellow trainers.’
‘Dacian.’
Scamarcio feigned ignorance.
The spokesman turned to the small huddle that had formed around him. They were speaking their language again, but Scamarcio thought he could make out the word ‘Dacian’ several times. One man who was shorter than all the rest kept shrugging, and eventually held open his arms in defeat.
‘His father doesn’t know where he is — he says he hasn’t seen him since the morning.’
‘Can he take me to their trailer?’
The leader said something to the man, and he shrugged again before turning and heading back to the line of caravans. The leader nodded to Scamarcio, and they followed. After a while he said: ‘My name is Pety.’
‘Where did you learn your Italian?’ asked Scamarcio.
‘Night school — it was provided by the government for free when I was living in Milan.’
Milan, reflected Scamarcio. Another connection to that place. ‘How long were you up there?’
‘Just a year, when I first arrived in Italy. But I didn’t like it; I couldn’t wait to leave.’
Scamarcio could picture the scene. He had seen the camps lining the way in to the city towards Cadorna Station — a grim, filthy shambles of shacks against a backdrop of concrete decay and graffiti.
‘Things better here?’
‘No comparison.’
The Few Page 17