Later that evening, when everyone else had gone, James and Ottolenghi sat round the fire with Lombroso, sipping brandy in a companionable silence. It seemed to James, on this night when there had already been so many revelations, that the time had come to tell them his secret. Not only that, but with his imminent return to Edinburgh there were practical considerations. He had wanted to speak to Sofia about their future and he could wait no longer. He could feel his heart pounding as he tried desperately to find the right words with which to begin his story. But before he could speak Lombroso looked at him.
‘I think you have something to ask me, Murray, do you not?’
James looked at him, astounded. ‘How did you know, Professor?’
Lombroso smiled. ‘You could say that I have deduced it from the evidence before me.’
James remembered using those very words during his first meeting with the professor, but what evidence had he provided?
‘How could you have done that, based on the little I told you?’
‘You did not say a great deal, it is true, but it was enough,’ Lombroso said. ‘For example, you spoke of your father when we first met.’
‘Yes, but I did not say what had happened to him.’
‘Ah, but you did, Murray,’ Lombroso said cryptically. ‘Let me explain. You told me he was dead but as you did so you looked away. That alerted me to the possibility that you might not be telling the truth.’
‘That could have been a coincidence, surely,’ he protested.
‘Perhaps, and on its own it was hardly conclusive; however, there were other signs.’
‘What were they?’ James asked, intrigued.
‘You flushed slightly and there was a thin film of sweat on your brow.’
‘I do not see that this signifies anything,’ James said.
‘Really?’ Lombroso said. ‘What do you think, Ottolenghi?’
Ottolenghi nodded. ‘These are almost certainly physiological signs of stress, the sort of stress that can only be produced from lying.’
‘I have been conducting some experiments in this regard, Murray,’ Lombroso said. ‘I am developing a machine that can detect such physical changes. If I am successful it could revolutionise the investigation of crime. Think how much easier it would be to interview suspects if we knew when they were lying.’
James looked at him, wide-eyed, realising that he had only begun to scrape the surface of the science of crime. Lombroso, it seemed, was not just a theorist but also a practitioner. Perhaps he had misjudged him. But James still needed an answer to his own question.
As if he knew what was on his mind, Lombroso spoke. ‘We’re listening, James,’ he said quietly.
Then James revealed all that he had told Sofia about his father and his fears about his own character that this experience had produced.
Lombroso listened carefully. Every now and again he would nod encouragingly and finally, when James had finished, he paused before speaking as if to allow what had been said to settle a little.
‘Your father’s behaviour is not unheard of, Murray. Indeed, I would go further. This is a danger for every scientist – when we allow our work to dominate our minds to such an extent that it takes away our humanity.’
‘But it was my humanity that deserted me, Professor,’ James said miserably. ‘That is what disturbs me. And now you know everything about me, you will see me differently.’
‘As I have told you, I knew of your background from the beginning, Murray,’ Lombroso said. ‘I hope that you have learned enough from all that has happened and all that we have done here to understand that you are just about as different from Borelli, Vilella and Horton as you could possibly be. You were angry, and rightly so. And you were going to do the right thing. It was your father who had lost sight of his humanity, not you. You are not a criminal of any kind, born or otherwise. And I should know. After all, I am the expert.’
Ottolenghi made it clear that he agreed completely with Lombroso’s diagnosis, as he put it. Sofia had been right. He should have believed in her a little more. But then perhaps there was still time for that.
‘Professor, I have something I need to speak to Sofia about. Would you excuse me for a moment?’
Lombroso nodded sagely. ‘Of course, but . . .’ He looked at James steadily. ‘She has suffered more than most of us over this whole affair, so take care. Her answer may not be what you wish to hear.’
James looked at him. So he had known about them all along. He supposed he should not be surprised. Lombroso was, after all, a keen observer of those around him, even if his conclusions were not always sound.
‘I will, Professor,’ he said quietly.
He made his way to the kitchen where he told Sofia all that had passed between him and Lombroso and Ottolenghi. When he had finished, she gave him her usual enigmatic half smile.
‘Did I not tell you the same thing? Perhaps I should be a scientist!’
James pulled her to him. They embraced for a moment and then he put her at arm’s length and looked into her eyes.
‘Sofia,’ he said, his heart pounding as never before. ‘You know that I love you.’
‘Oh, caro,’ she replied, softly. ‘What am I to do with you?’
‘Sofia, I have to return to Edinburgh. My father is ill.’
There was a pause as she took in the news. ‘I see,’ she said gravely.
‘I know this is madness, but I want you to come with me, Sofia.’
‘No, caro, it can never be.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Our lives, our worlds, are too different. It would never work. You – we – would be shunned. You could not be the man you should be. I would stand in your path.’
‘I don’t care what other people think.’
‘You do, caro. I know you do,’ she said tenderly. ‘You care for your sister.’
‘And I care for you!’
James wrapped her in his arms, not wanting to let her go, for he feared that once he did, it would be forever. Sofia took his hands gently from her waist and stepped away from him.
‘It is over, caro. Go back to Scotland, to your sister, be what you should be.’
She turned away but he could not accept what she had said. He went over to her and pulled her round to face him.
‘No, I cannot leave you like this. Come with me, marry me!’
Sofia looked at him in surprise and then with a small smile she shook her head. ‘No, James.’
It was as if someone or something was stabbing at his heart. ‘Sofia, please . . .’
She sighed and pushed him away firmly.
‘James, it was good, what we had together, but now it is finished. You must understand this. My life is here. I do not want to go with you.’
He opened his mouth to speak but before he could Sofia stopped him.
‘I am only a servant . . . You, you are a brava persona, a gentleman. What you ask can never be.’
‘You cannot mean it! We can make it work, Sofia.’
He reached out for her hand but she snatched it away from him.
‘Please . . . do not make this harder than it needs to be. It must end, James. There is no other way.’
‘I don’t believe you would give up so easily.’
‘You must believe it. Now go back to Scotland, where you belong.’
She turned away from him again with what, for James, seemed like a terrible finality. He knew then that there was no choice but to obey her. He started to head towards the door but something made him turn back. Sofia was looking at him with tears in her eyes and he understood everything. She did love him and that was why she was telling him to go.
He went to her and held her to him. This time she did not resist. He looked again into her eyes. There was so much he could say but for moment or two he could not speak.
‘Caro, forgive me,’ Sofia said, ‘but I had no choice.’
‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘But now I understand and there are two things I am sure of.’
She ga
zed back at him. ‘What are they, caro?’
‘Firstly, I will come back to Turin. This city is in my heart because of you, and I have no choice in the matter.’
He put his hand up to her tear-stained cheek and she put hers over his as she had done all those weeks ago.
‘And the second thing?’
‘When I do come back, we will be together.’
Sofia started to protest but he put his finger on her lips. ‘Hush now. You must trust me. I will find a way.’
He held her in his arms and as they stood there together he knew that for the first time in his life he was certain of something. It wasn’t science or criminal anthropology – he was certain of himself.
When James rejoined Lombroso and Ottolenghi the three of them sat at the fireside, lost in their thoughts. James looked at Lombroso’s face, which was full of sadness, almost reflecting his own feelings.
‘Are you all right, Professor?’ he enquired.
Lombroso turned to him. For the first time there was a glimmer of uncertainty in the older man’s eyes. He sighed deeply. ‘I wonder . . .’
‘What?’ James asked.
‘Could we have prevented any of these deaths if I had not been so stubborn? Perhaps if we – if I,’ he corrected himself, ‘had not been so intent on following my own theories then we might have established the identities of the murderers sooner.’
Ottolenghi shook his head. ‘You must not think like that, Professor. Perhaps if the crime scene had been better preserved and some system of scientific examination introduced then there could have been a swifter resolution. There can be no doubt that we were hampered by Machinetti’s chaotic handling of the whole affair.’
‘Perhaps, Ottolenghi, perhaps, but I cannot help wondering if my theories led us astray and cost us valuable time.’
‘No, Professor,’ James said. ‘You did all you could.’
Lombroso sighed. ‘Yes, but it was not good enough.’
James shook his head. ‘If I had realised the significance of what I found in the library sooner then perhaps I could have saved DeClichy and Rosa Bruno.’
‘But still,’ Ottolenghi said, ‘how could we have known that there was not one but two criminals amongst our number? We would not have made the necessary links. Besides, both men called themselves experts in crime. It was almost inconceivable that they were experts in the practical application of violence as well as the theoretical.’
‘But the question remains in my mind,’ Lombroso said, ‘could these crimes really have been prevented by the application of criminal anthropology?’
James hesitated. Should he say what was really on his mind? He took a deep breath. ‘No, Professor, in this case I don’t think they could. I think we must accept that the criminal type is not always the answer.’
Lombroso looked over to him, his face a picture of inner torture. ‘Then I have caused people to die?’
Ottolenghi interjected. ‘No, Professor, you have not. They may have been affected by their upbringing, but they may also have been born criminals. Horton, in particular, fitted many of the physical characteristics that you have named. But we know nothing of his childhood and the effect it may have had on him.’
‘Ottolenghi is right, Professor,’ James said. ‘We cannot know everything about the human psyche. Science cannot be the answer to everything. What is in the human heart will always be something of a mystery.’
Lombroso stared into the firelight and nodded slowly.
‘Those are wise words indeed, Murray. I promise you that I will not forget them, my friend.’
James looked at Lombroso and Ottolenghi sadly. ‘There is something more I must tell you.’
They looked at him expectantly.
‘I know I have more to learn, but I cannot stay here. My father has been taken ill and I must return to Edinburgh, for the time being at least.’
Lombroso nodded. ‘Of course, we understand.’ Then they all stood and he seized James’s hand in both of his and pumped it up and down vigorously. ‘Take care, Murray. I hope you’ll be back with us before long.’
‘I hope so too, Professor. You have taught me more than I can say,’ James said gratefully. ‘Despite all that has happened, I would not have missed this experience for the world.’
‘And neither would I, Murray. We have both learned much over the last weeks, I think,’ Lombroso said.
James turned to leave.
‘Before you go, Murray, there is something I should say to you,’ Lombroso said very seriously.
‘What’s that?’
‘We must all be vigilant. Horton is still at large and we know him better than most. He is an habitual killer and his appetites will not be sated by his actions here for very long. If any of us see or hear anything that may indicate his whereabouts then we should meet at that place and ensure that he is apprehended once and for all. Are we agreed?’
The three men shook hands solemnly at this and James finally made his departure.
A few days later James was walking down the Via Legnano for the last time. Before long he would be back in Edinburgh with Lucy, telling her of his adventures. He had missed her terribly and it would be wonderful to see her again, despite the circumstances that had forced him to return to her. But their reunion came at a cost. He had to leave behind the woman he loved.
James felt a familiar jolt of pain in his heart as he thought of Sofia and the distance that would lie between them. But he had a duty as a brother, and indeed as a son, and that had to come first. There was no way to resolve his dilemma but perhaps one day there would be. That little nugget of hope would have to keep him going in the months to come.
He took a detour and made his way towards the museum. As he did so, it seemed to him that the atmosphere had changed. With the death of one killer and the departure of another it was as though a pall had lifted. Even the air smelled sweeter and he felt as if he could finally breathe deeply again. The place was not completely devoid of its shadows. There were plenty left there, hoping to re-emerge as time went on, as there are in any city. But for now they had withdrawn into the darkness. And if they stayed there, even for a while, then that really would be a more than fitting tribute to Lombroso.
Author’s Notes
Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) is known as the father of modern criminology. His theory of the born criminal dominated thinking about criminal behaviour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Essentially he believed that criminality was inherited and that criminals could be identified by physical defects that confirmed them as being atavistic or savage throwbacks to early man.
Lombroso studied medicine at the Universities of Padua, Vienna and Pavia, and shortly after graduating he volunteered as an army doctor and was stationed in Calabria. It wasn’t until the 1870s that he began to focus on the study of criminals.
In 1871, on examining the skull of one Giuseppe Vilella, an elderly Calabrian peasant who had been imprisoned for theft and arson, Lombroso wrote:
At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal – an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheekbones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages and apes, insensibility to pain, extreme acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.
From the Introduction to L ’uomo delinquente,
Cesare Lombroso, 1909 edition. xxiv-xxv
This, he claimed, was a turning point for him and inspired his life’s work in criminology. He was appointed as a Professor of Legal Medicine and Public Hygiene at the University of Turin in 1876. Ove
r the years he became one of the most well-known and prominent thinkers in Italy, writing prodigiously and performing many experiments using some of the equipment described in City of Devils.
He was endlessly curious about crime, criminals and their motivation for offending, as well as their culture, and this led to two things. Firstly, Lombroso collected artefacts created by and belonging to prisoners he had encountered in his long career as well some more bizarre exhibits, such as carnivorous plants and a mummy, as described in the book. These he housed at the University of Turin, informally at first and then later in 1892 as a museum open to the public. This closed in 1914 but has recently reopened. One of its most prominent exhibits is the head of Lombroso himself in a jar of preservative, a legacy he kindly donated on his death in 1909.
So what kind of a man was Cesare Lombroso? Reading between the lines of his work he seems to me to be a basically kind, occasionally capricious and always ebullient man who believed in the essential rightness of what he was doing. He was a national celebrity during his lifetime and as a result his lectures often played to packed houses. His opinion was sought on all kinds of subjects, probably because he was not afraid to court controversy. He had a theatrical turn of phrase and was, perhaps, something of a showman. If he was alive today, doubtless he would be an avid user of Twitter, a frequent blogger and perhaps even have his own television show.
Notwithstanding his celebrity status, as a scientist he was dis-organised and even chaotic and had a tendency to buttress his less successful results with the use of anecdotes, proverbs and literary passages. He was also not above bending his findings to fit his theories when occasion demanded. This was food for his many academic critics but also made his work more accessible and therefore even more popular with the public.
Until relatively recently his reputation as a criminologist was somewhat tarnished, not only by his rather slapdash approach to the collation of data but also by his attitudes to women and certain racial groups. In addition, much of his work was never adequately translated into English. Perhaps as a result of these things, both the man and his work were at best misunderstood and at worse largely forgotten. However, with the translation in the last few years of his two major works, Criminal Man and Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman (Rafter and Gibson 2004/6), and the reopening in 2009 of his famous museum in Turin, this is beginning to change.
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