The Dark Angel

by Elly Griffiths

  ‘Where did that other man, Tim, come from? It was like he appeared out of nowhere. Like Bruno.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Judy. ‘He must have got wind that something was up. I don’t know how. As I say, he doesn’t work in Lynn any more.’

  ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘A nurse is with her now. She’s a bit shaken but she’s not hurt. You’ve spoken to your dad?’

  ‘Yes, he’s coming home as soon as he can.’

  ‘Good,’ says Judy. ‘It doesn’t feel right without him, does it?’

  ‘No,’ says Laura, ‘it doesn’t.’ She takes another sip of water and tries breathe properly. Glutamine, glutamic acid, glycine, histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine . . .

  ‘When you’re up to it,’ says Judy, ‘we need to ask you some questions, but I’ll be with you all the time. We’ll take it very gently.’

  ‘Who was that man?’ says Laura. ‘What did you call him? Micky something?’

  ‘Micky Webb,’ says Judy. ‘You dad put him in prison years ago and he held a grudge. He got out recently and . . .’ Her voice changes suddenly. ‘Oh Laura,’ she says. ‘It was my fault. I should have known. Webb went after someone else involved in the case. He poisoned her dog. I thought he might come after you. I came to warn your mum but I should have done more.’

  Laura thinks she understands only about one word of this. ‘You said you thought he’d poisoned Bruno.’

  ‘Yes. He broke into the house and took Bruno. It looks as if he fed him poisoned meat and shut him in a shed in the allotments at the end of your road. But Bruno being such a big, strong dog, he threw up the poison and broke out. Then he came home.’

  Bruno had been nearby when they had been calling him and rattling the fork on his plate. Had he heard them? He’d certainly picked up their distress somehow. And he’d come to save them.

  ‘He came flying in through the French windows,’ she says. ‘I thought he was a werewolf at first.’

  Judy smiles, although a moment ago she had looked as if she was crying. ‘He was like an avenging angel. Nelson will be so proud of him.’

  ‘He wasn’t even hurt,’ says Laura. ‘Not a scratch on him.’

  ‘He’s a miracle dog.’

  ‘What about Mum?’ says Laura. ‘Is she OK? You know she’s pregnant?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Judy. ‘I had a word with the nurse just now. They’re bringing a midwife to check her over but they think she’s fine. In shock though. As you must be too.’

  ‘She seemed to know the man,’ says Laura. ‘She kept saying his name.’ He said he loved her, she wants to say, they were the last words he ever spoke. But how can she ever say this to anyone? Perhaps she imagined it, like she imagined the bird flying out into the night.

  ‘Poor Mum,’ she says instead. ‘She was crying and crying in the ambulance.’ She realises now that Tim’s must have been one of the contacts in her mother’s Messages list. Tim and Dad.

  Judy gives her a little hug, more like a mate than a police officer. ‘It’ll be very hard for your mum. You’ll have to look after her for a bit.’

  ‘I know,’ says Laura. ‘I always do.’

  ‘I know,’ says Judy. ‘Nelson will be proud of you.’

  *

  Michelle lies on the bed. ‘Stay still,’ they told her. ‘Think of the baby.’ She dutifully folds her hands on her stomach, but she’s thinking of her other baby, her eldest baby. Laura. She had been quite prepared to die for Laura. She’s surprised how brave she had felt, how clear-cut her reasoning. She had felt ten feet tall when she had faced that low-life with a gun. She’d seen him raise the weapon and thought, well, this is it, perhaps it’s for the best, Harry and the girls will be fine without me. But then Tim had burst in and restored her life and her future. Except that he won’t be in it. Beautiful, brave, gallant Tim. He had died for her. How can she go on, knowing that? How can she not?

  She feels the tears falling into her hair. Maybe it’s all a nightmare and she’ll wake up to find herself sitting on the sofa with Laura watching the X Factor, Rebecca commenting sarcastically from the phone. Rebecca! She doesn’t even know what’s happened. She’s in Brighton, drinking wine with her flatmates, perhaps demolishing a takeaway, thinking of her parents with their dull, conventional life in King’s Lynn. Michelle doesn’t want to ring her and destroy this illusion. ‘Laura and I were held at gunpoint. A man died saving us.’ A man. They’ll never know what Tim was to her, and she can never say. Even Harry will never know. She must be kind to Harry. He’ll be riven with guilt when he hears the news. He’ll think it’s his fault. He put Micky Whatsit in prison and, when he came to get his revenge, Harry had been hundreds of miles away. With Ruth. But Michelle isn’t even angry about that any more. It seems that all her emotions died when the gun went off and she saw Tim fall to the floor.

  The nurse is back with another woman, someone vaguely familiar.

  ‘I’ve brought a midwife to have a look at you,’ she says. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’

  The safe side. Michelle has lived her life on the safe side and look where it’s got her.

  ‘The police are waiting to talk to you,’ says the nurse, patting her shoulder, ‘but this is more important.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Michelle, ‘the baby is the most important thing.’

  One day at a time, she thinks. One day at a time.

  Chapter 33

  Ruth calls Cathbad and tells him what has happened. She wants him to be prepared for Nelson’s return.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says Cathbad. ‘I’ll look after him.’

  ‘It’s so awful,’ says Ruth. ‘Poor Tim.’ She doesn’t tell him about Elsa and her late-night visit. One problem at a time.

  ‘Maybe this is what Tim was meant to do,’ says Cathbad. ‘We can’t know all the patterns of the great web. We can just hope that it will make sense one day.’

  ‘Please,’ says Ruth, ‘promise me that you won’t mention the great web to Nelson.’

  All the same, she thinks when she put her phone down, she’s glad that Nelson has Cathbad, if only for the journey home. She can’t imagine Nelson’s meeting with Michelle, knowing that another man died saving her. She knows that Nelson will always feel guilty for leaving his phone with Ruth, will almost feel that, in that moment, he had chosen Ruth and Kate over his lawful family. But this isn’t true, Ruth thinks. These last few days have been time stolen out of reality. By tomorrow, Nelson will have been swallowed by real life.

  She sleeps late and is surprised, when she makes her way into the kitchen, to find Marta sitting at the table with Shona and the children. Ruth can hardly look at that table without shuddering. At least Valenti took the gun with him.

  Kate comes to hug her. ‘We’re having Nutella pancakes.’

  Shona smiles. ‘I thought we deserved a treat. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. You?’

  ‘OK. Last night feels like a dream doesn’t it?’

  ‘Ruth,’ says Marta. ‘Can I have a word?’

  ‘I think I need to be at the police station at ten.’ Ruth looks at her watch.

  ‘I’ll drive you. There’s something I want to say first.’

  They go into the sitting room and sit on the sofa, facing the balcony windows. It’s another beautiful morning, with just a slight mist clinging to the valley, a faint whiff of autumn.

  ‘I want to apologise,’ says Marta.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘It was me who wrote the graffiti outside the house, who put the wolf’s head on your doorstep.’

  ‘You? Why?’

  ‘I wanted to stop the Roman dig. Too much time and money is spent on the Romans. What is so special about the Romans? Yes, they were good at engineering, but so are all fascists. Mussolini drained the Pontine Marshes, everyone will tell you that, and built new cities. The Romans were warriors and builders but there are many more interesting Italic peoples. You know I am writing a thesis on the Volsci?’

  ‘I think someone might
have told me that.’

  ‘There was a Vosci warrior called Camilla in Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil said she could outrun the wind and run over crops so lightly that she never even bent them. She could walk on the waves without getting wet.’

  Marta’s eyes are shining. It doesn’t take a psychologist to see that she thinks of herself as a modern-day Camilla.

  ‘That’s a great story,’ says Ruth.

  ‘The Volsci were highly sophisticated people,’ says Marta. ‘And they rebelled against their oppressors. Like my great-grandfather in the war.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ruth. Elsa had said that Giorgio was a traitor, a collaborator, but she is not about to mention this to his great-granddaughter.

  ‘I wanted to stop the Roman dig. All Professore Morelli cared about was getting the TV people interested. That’s why he got you involved. You’re a famous foreign archaeologist. I thought, if I could scare you off, the dig would be over. I got the wolf’s skull from Roberto, he works at the sanctuary. I thought that, if you went home, we could concentrate on the excavations in the graveyard. I was almost sure that my great-grandfather was there. My mother always said that he had been buried there, in the heart of the town.’

  The heart of the town in more ways than one, thinks Ruth.

  ‘The attempts on Angelo’s life?’ she says. ‘The messages on his phone, the brakes on his car, the mobile phone in the trench. Was that you?’

  ‘I left the messages,’ says Marta, ‘and I did the trick with the mobile phone.’ She smiles suddenly. ‘That was me. I’m good with technology. Remember I told you that Graziano was my tutor at university? I used to study computer science.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘To teach him a lesson. To make him look stupid. He’s so pleased with himself.’

  Ruth can hardly deny this. Angelo is rather self-satisfied, but she’s not sure that he deserved having his dig disturbed, to say nothing of sending him photographs of skeletons. She’s beginning to see the serious, devout Marta in a different light.

  ‘What about cutting the brakes on his car?’

  Marta looks shocked. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that. I didn’t want to kill him, just jolt him a bit. Maybe it was an animal? Roberto says animals sometimes sleep under cars and they can chew through the brakes.’

  This is what the mechanic had said, Ruth remembers. Even so, she thinks that Marta still has some explaining to do.

  ‘I saw your mother letting herself out of this apartment on the day of the funeral,’ she says. ‘Do you know what she was doing?’

  Marta sighs. ‘She was looking for the boar’s tooth. The one my bisnonno used to wear round his neck. It wasn’t with his skeleton and she thought it might be in this house. She has a . . . what is the word? Obsession.’

  ‘Wait there,’ says Ruth. She goes into the kitchen and takes the tooth from the shelf where Shona has put it for safekeeping. She puts the talisman into Marta’s hand, thinking that at least something from the past has been restored. A break in the great web has been mended.

  *

  Marta drives to the police station where Valenti is waiting for her. Linda Anthony is there, too.

  ‘I ask Linda to translate,’ says Valenti. ‘I think this might be complicated.’

  You can say that again, thinks Ruth.

  Through Linda, she tells Valenti about Elsa’s visit. She hopes to skate over the gun, but Valenti seems particularly interested in this detail.

  ‘The Commissario wants to know if you want to press charges for attempted murder,’ says Linda.

  ‘Oh no,’ says Ruth. ‘I don’t think she ever planned to kill me.’ Even as she says this, she remembers imagining Elsa going on a rampage around the apartment. At the time, she had not been so sure that the older woman didn’t have murder on her mind.

  She tells Valenti what Elsa said about Don Tomaso, about him wanting her to tell Marta the truth about her great-grandfather’s death. Valenti asks a series of sharp questions. Did Elsa confess to killing Don Tomaso? If not, did she know who did kill him? What had she said about the priest’s death?

  ‘She didn’t exactly confess,’ says Ruth. ‘And she became upset when I asked her directly.’

  Valenti says something to Linda, sounding rather regretful.

  ‘He says that Elsa is too confused to interview at the moment,’ says Linda. ‘A doctor has said that she’s in a state of nervous collapse. She’s in hospital.’

  ‘Has Angelo seen her?’

  ‘Yes, he’s with her now, apparently.’

  Valenti says something which Linda does not translate. Ruth remembers that he is not one of Angelo’s fans. Valenti asks Ruth to complete and sign a witness statement and then she is free to go. In the street outside, Ruth manages a few words with Linda.

  ‘How was Nelson when he left this morning?’

  ‘Quiet,’ says Linda. ‘Stunned. I think it’s hit him very hard. He must be so worried about his wife and daughter. Especially as his wife is pregnant.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ruth. ‘It’s such an awful thing to happen. I knew the policeman who died. He was a nice man, quite young. I keep thinking about his family.’

  ‘Your holiday hasn’t been very peaceful, has it?’ says Linda. ‘You must be longing to get home.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ruth. ‘Shona’s trying to change our tickets now.’

  *

  When she gets back to the apartment, she finds a note from Shona. She has managed to get them flights home tomorrow. She and Graziano have taken the children for a last visit to the swimming pool. Thank God, thinks Ruth. We can go home. Suddenly she longs to see Flint again, to sink her face into his orange fur, which always smells faintly of circuses.

  She sets about tidying the flat. She sweeps and washes the marble floors, wipes down every surface, sorts the recycling into its multiple categories and leaves it in bags by the front door. She also wraps yet another broken glass in newspaper and hides it at the very bottom of the ‘mixed materials’ bin. For some reason, it feels imperative that they leave not a trace of their occupancy. From a forensics point of view, she knows this is impossible. ‘We always leave something of ourselves behind’ – that’s what Mike Halloran, one of Nelson’s crime scene investigators, says. But Angelo is hardly going to be swabbing the floors for traces of saliva, or looking for fibres in the bath plug.

  She had secretly hoped that she could leave without seeing Angelo, but she had sent him an email say that she was leaving tomorrow (‘for personal reasons’), so she is not entirely surprised when the intercom buzzes and Angelo’s voice says, ‘Ruth. Can I come in?’

  His first words are, ‘I’m sorry about last night. About my mother visiting.’

  ‘Visiting’ is not quite how Ruth would describe Elsa breaking into the apartment and threatening her with a gun, but she says, ‘That’s OK. She was . . . confused.’

  ‘Exactly,’ says Angelo, starting to stride around the flat, slipping slightly on the newly washed floors. ‘That’s what Valenti can’t see. The doctors say that she’s had a complete breakdown. She’s under sedation.’

  Ruth makes appropriately sympathetic noises.

  Angelo is now looking into the children’s bedroom. Ruth is slightly irritated by this. She hasn’t started tidying in there yet, because the Kate and Louis will only untidy it again. She’ll strip their beds in the morning. Then she sees that Angelo is looking at Giorgio’s picture, which she has hung back on the wall. The subject matter is now so obvious to Ruth that she can’t believe she ever considered the painting an abstract.

  Angelo stares at it for so long that Ruth almost asks him if he’s all right. Then he turns back to her. ‘Did Mamma say anything about Don Tomaso?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ruth carefully. ‘She said that Don Tomaso knew that your grandfather killed Giorgio. She said that he wanted to tell Marta.’

  Angelo is still standing very still. Ruth sees that this news is not a surprise to him.

  ‘Nonno told me something of
the sort in his last illness,’ he says. ‘Giorgio was passing resistance secrets onto the Nazis. My grandfather shot him. It broke his heart. Giorgio was his dearest friend. That’s why he held on to this terrible picture. He made me promise not to sell it.’

  ‘Did you know that Giorgio was buried in the church graveyard?’ says Ruth.

  ‘Yes,’ says Angelo. ‘I think it was as close as my grandfather could get to consecrated ground. That’s why I didn’t want to do the excavation there.’

  ‘Don Tomaso told me that he had something to show me,’ says Ruth. ‘Do you think it was Giorgio’s body?’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Angelo. ‘Who knows?’

  Ruth says tentatively. ‘Do you think that your mother quarrelled with Don Tomaso?’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ says Angelo. ‘That an old woman, barely weighing one hundred and twenty pounds, hit her oldest, dearest friend over the head with a candlestick and killed him? It’s preposterous.’

  ‘I wasn’t implying anything,’ says Ruth. There’s a silence and then she says, ‘Do you want me to post the keys through your letterbox tomorrow?’

  The ugly look fades from Angelo’s face. ‘I’m sorry, Ruth. That would be fine. Do you want a lift to the airport?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ says Ruth. ‘Marta’s taking us.’

  *

  When Angelo has gone, Ruth gets out her phone to call Commissario Valenti. She sees now that it was Angelo who killed Don Tomaso. Otherwise how would he know that a candlestick was the murder weapon? She should have known really as soon as she saw the stone in the priest’s mouth. It’s as if she had looked down at Angelo’s feet and seen, instead of handmade Italian loafers, cloven hooves. She remembers what Angelo had said, with his Mephistophelean smile, that first evening, at the café. All priests are charlatans, he’d said then. Being a hero doesn’t make you popular.

  She imagines that Angelo confronted Don Tomaso about his wish to tell the truth about Giorgio’s death. The murder would have been committed in the heat of the moment but it was still a murder. Angelo killed Don Tomaso and may even have tried to kill Ruth and Kate by forcing their car off the road. Because he would have known that Ruth would make the link with the stone. The stone put in the mouth as a punishment for treachery. Why hadn’t she done so earlier? Because Angelo was a colleague, an ally, her friend in a strange land. Well, all she can do is pass her suspicions on to Valenti and hope that Angelo, lapsed Catholic that he is, will still retain the impulse towards the confessional. It’s a strong compulsion, as Ruth herself knows. Hadn’t she too been tempted by it, that evening at the table with Don Tomaso?