Lone Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  Sergio told his story in a voice that sank in pitch as he ran out of breath, punctuated by gasps as he dragged oxygen deep into his lungs. He seemed to realise that he didn’t have much time before the teacher told him to stop wasting what remained of the lesson.

  ‘… you hear them howling, then they show their teeth, and the bones go CRRRR-ACK …’

  The class held its collective breath.

  Roberta frowned, and covered her ears.

  Other kids covered their mouths to stop from crying out, all of them hanging onto every word that came from Sergio’s lips.

  The kid might well be eccentric, but he was a natural storyteller.

  There was one in every village in Valnerina. Cantastorie was what they called them. Old men mostly, who knew the history of the towns and villages where they were born, all the tales of dark deeds done, of saints and sinners, and heroic resistance to natural disasters – storms and floods and earthquakes.

  Maybe the kid had learnt the art from someone in his family. If he had set out to take revenge on Roberta for digging him in the ribs he couldn’t have been more successful. He didn’t see the look of fright on the girl’s round face, the glistening eyes and the downturned mouth. Sergio wasn’t telling the tale, he was living it.

  ‘Grandad and his friends had heard it, they saw what had happened. Next day, it was …’ There was a long pause. ‘A lake of BLOOD, that’s what they found! As if the sky had been raining blood all night long. Those Jerries had been torn to bits by the werewolf.’

  There was a void, a silence.

  ‘Werewolves don’t exist, Sergio.’

  Mother Wolf’s voice was sharp and final, her eyes moving from face to face, daring anyone to challenge what she had just said. Finally they came to rest on the big brown eyes of little Sergio.

  ‘Yes, they do,’ the kid said defiantly.

  He was on his feet now, hands braced on his desk, as he stared back at the teacher. ‘Grandad’s dead and gone now, but they don’t die. Mam and Dad heard one the other night. I heard it, too, but I didn’t tell them. Mam was really frightened, see? That scream … Like someone’s heart was being ripped out of his body.’ His voice sank to a growling whisper. ‘Here in Valnerina, the Werewolf – has – come – back!’

  Had the rebellion started? Was the tiniest pup challenging the pack leader?

  ‘Sit down, Sergio. That’s quite enough for one day,’ the teacher said. ‘Werewolves and monsters do not exist, as I am sure Ranger Cangio will tell you.’

  She turned to Cangio, fixing him with a look that said: Please get us out of this mess.

  Cangio shrugged as if to say, They’re only kids. As if to admit that she was right, and that he had made a mistake by turning the spotlight onto little Sergio.

  ‘I’ve never seen a werewolf, to be honest,’ he said.

  A voice piped up from the back of the room. ‘Sergio’s grandad did. Maybe you will, too, one night in the park.’

  A couple of boys in the front row nodded their heads.

  The little girl had won the book, but Sergio now had a fistful of followers.

  Next time he spoke to a school group, Cangio thought, instead of blandly defending the wolves, telling the kids that they only attacked when they were hungry, he should spice up his talk with a bit of blood and horror. His wolves sounded like bank-clerks doing a routine inventory, while these kids wanted wolves that would thrill them and terrify them.

  You could teach them the truth when they got a bit older …

  He felt his phone vibrating against his thigh in his trouser pocket.

  He’d been getting messages all morning. Now, with the lesson nearly ended, he pulled out his phone and glanced at the list of calls he had missed. Three from Lucia Grossi, four from Loredana.

  Was something up?

  He raised his hand, holding up the phone to the teacher like a kid who needed urgently to go to the toilet. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ he said. ‘People are looking for me.’

  ‘Maybe it’s about the Werewolf,’ Sergio said.

  Mother Wolf waved her hand towards the door and raised her chin in a gesture which seemed to say, Go on then, you’ve caused enough trouble for one day.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Ranger Cangio,’ she said, turning her attention to the children, dismissing him in an instant.

  Cangio wanted to thank her for the opportunity to talk to the kids about the wolves in the park, but the woman was already telling the class to take out their maths books.

  He turned and waved his hand to the kids as he reached the door.

  Only Sergio waved back.

  Out in the corridor, he pulled a bottle of water from his backpack and took a long drink, washing away the taste of chalk and acidity on his tongue. Then he called Loredana, whose number was top of the missed calls on the list.

  ‘Seb?’ Lori’s voice was barely a whisper, which meant she was busy at work.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ he said, ‘but you called me …’

  ‘That bloody woman’s been ringing me all morning. Wanted to know why you weren’t answering your phone.’

  He thought he knew who she was talking about.

  ‘I’m at the school in Borgo Cerreto,’ he said. ‘I told you …’

  ‘The manager didn’t like it, obviously. She’s in a right bloody mood. You call her right away, she sounded like she’d blown a fuse.’

  Everything was bloody that morning. Sergio’s stories, Lori’s boss, Lucia Grossi. He had caught Loredana at an awkward moment, obviously. And all the time, one thought kept rattling through his mind.

  ‘Did she say why she was looking for me?’

  He hadn’t heard from Lucia Grossi since the press conference in Perugia six months before, the day she’d been promoted head of the Special Crimes Squad.

  ‘Do you think that I’ve got time to waste on her?’ Lori’s whisper was growing harsher. ‘She said to get in touch right away. Something important, she said, OK? So do it!’

  Who was giving the orders, he wondered, Loredana or Lucia Grossi?

  He closed the connection, and called the other number.

  The phone rang five times before it was picked up. Lucia Grossi wasn’t sitting over her phone then, waiting for him to ring her. Still, he thought he heard a note of relief in her voice.

  ‘Cangio! Did you get lost in the woods today?’

  ‘Lost in a deep, dark forest full of strange little creatures,’ he said. ‘I was talking to a class of schoolkids in Borgo …’

  ‘I’ve got a job for you,’ she cut him off sharply. ‘Can you get here right away?’

  ‘Where’s here?’ he asked.

  ‘My office in Perugia. In an hour, let’s say?’

  Lucia Grossi in all her splendour.

  Bossy, brash and totally unfeeling.

  All the reasons for which he had been so carefully avoiding her.

  The same day, Catanzaro, Calabria

  Don Michele was smoking a cigar, but he wasn’t celebrating.

  ‘What a fuck-up,’ he said to Rocco. ‘A right proper fuck-up …’

  Rocco Montale made the right noises.

  It didn’t do to make the wrong ones.

  ‘He was recommended, boss,’ he said. ‘It was their decision. What could we do?’

  Don Michele chugged on his Montecristo, sending clouds of blue smoke into the air like a tribe of Comanches on the war-path.

  ‘We need to tighten up security for a start,’ the Don was saying, talking to himself more than anything, going over the details, trying to put the situation into perspective. ‘We guarantee the staff, we find the right man for the job, we pay him on the nail, and everyone’s happy. What could be wrong with that?’

  ‘Like I was saying …’

  ‘No, Rocco. Like I was saying, they had to go and do it their own fucking way. Dio santo, fucking foreigners! They won’t listen, won’t take advice. We should have said no, should have left them in the shit. Instead, we did that goon
a favour. And what does he go and do? He sends me a package with a babysitter, and the sitter goes and tops the fucking baby! He flew out first thing the morning after, and no one even tried to stop him. We need a tighter checkout routine, Rocco. If anyone tops anyone around here, I decide who gets the fucking chop and who does the chopping. Right?’

  He glared at Rocco, maybe seeing him, maybe not, his elbow propped on the table, holding his cigar.

  ‘So, Rocco,’ he said, ‘what’s up, then?’

  ‘Carlo Piscitelli called me, Don Michè.’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘He’s got a batch of fresh fruit coming in …’

  Don Michele let out a sigh, then he stubbed out his cigar.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, though he didn’t sound keen. ‘Yeah. Maybe … just maybe, we’ll take a look when it gets off the banana boat …’

  Perugia, Umbria

  Traffic was heavy on the ring road, but that was nothing new.

  Every motor vehicle heading north, south, east, or west, had to skirt around Perugia.

  The medieval town on the top of the hill was pretty enough, but a new town had sprouted all around it like an ugly fungus. Development had started in the ’60s, and it was still going on. Speculators would buy a run-down farmhouse, knock it down, then build a ‘luxury high-rise residence’ for a hundred families. The result was a sprawling suburban mess. Driving to the town centre was a nightmare.

  Fortunately, he was heading to Elce, a residential suburb on the northern edge of town. With all the urban planning going on, he thought, wouldn’t it have made sense to park the carabinieri command headquarters closer to a major road?

  Lights flashed up ahead.

  Hazard lights came on as drivers stepped on their brakes.

  Cangio sighed, and did the same thing. A major hold-up by the look of it, a tailback disappearing inside the Prepo tunnel. An accident maybe. Or major roadworks that no one had been warned about. Repair work went on day and night on the busy ring road, beacons channelling four lanes into two lanes of traffic, or reducing two one-way tunnels into one two-way tunnel, while gangs of navvies tried to patch the road or prop up the tunnels.

  The work never ended because the traffic never ended.

  The poet Dante would have written an epic about the Perugia ring road.

  As the traffic edged forward, he sent an SMS: Traffic jam – going to be late.

  Late for what? That was the question.

  It was a quarter to eleven by the time he reached the Elce turn-off. At eleven o’clock he was circling the block for the second time, looking for a place to park. Twenty minutes later, he walked out of the lift on the second floor and knocked on a door marked Special Crimes Squad – Comandante.

  Special Crimes was bureaucratic double-speak; the politicians didn’t like to mention the word Mafia. No one wanted to admit that the ’Ndrangheta had taken hold in Umbria. The Squad had been cobbled together immediately after the shoot-out at the Marra olive-oil factory six months before.

  ‘Come in!’

  The comandante was sitting behind her desk.

  Her hair was shorter than he remembered it. Not a single luxuriant black curl was left. Lucia Grossi looked like a kid who’d been expelled from some tough orphanage, though the gleaming silver braid on her shoulders told a different story.

  Getting shot and saving Cangio’s skin had helped her career, no doubt.

  ‘Talk of the Devil,’ she said to a man who was sitting in front of her desk.

  The man stood up and turned to face Cangio, a worried smile on his lips.

  ‘This is Sebastiano Cangio,’ Lucia Grossi said, indicating him with her hand like an exhibit in a zoo. ‘He’s the ranger that I was telling you about.’

  Inspector Harris was from Scotland Yard’s Organised Crime Unit, Lucia Grossi explained in Italian. Evidently, Harris spoke enough Italian to understand her. He held out his hand. ‘Please, do call me Desmond,’ he said, as Cangio took it.

  A high forehead, a narrow face, a shy smile pulling at his lips. Intelligent eyes, thought Cangio, as those grey eyes studied him. What was Harris doing in Umbria? Then another thought bubbled up into his mind. The ranger I was telling you about.

  What had she been saying about him?

  ‘Perhaps we ought to sit down,’ Harris suggested, speaking English now. ‘There isn’t much to tell you, but … well … I understand from Captain Grossi that you have lived in London, Ranger Cangio.’

  ‘That’s right. I lived there for a while.’

  Harris nodded. ‘I imagine you know Stansted Airport, then? I flew in from there this morning. It’s a rural area apart from the airport complex. I was amazed at just how empty the countryside is when you see it from the air.’ He paused, and stared at Cangio. ‘Not the place for violent crime, you might think …’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Cangio said, wondering where this was leading.

  Harris reached for a battered briefcase on the floor beside his chair. ‘This is what was discovered near there last week.’ He glanced at Lucia Grossi. ‘May I?’ he asked.

  Lucia Grossi waved her hand. ‘Go ahead,’ she said.

  Harris took out a green cardboard folder, and handed it to Cangio.

  ‘I hope you’ve got a strong stomach,’ he said.

  Cangio opened the folder and found a sheaf of large photographs. The first one showed a naked corpse lying face up in long grass.

  ‘The place is called Horse Cross,’ Harris said. ‘It’s popular with courting couples, according to the local police. They received an anonymous tip-off, telling them to go and take a look. Other people may have seen the body and failed to report it.’

  The next few pictures showed close-up views of the face and the hands.

  ‘Doused with acid, then left to rot,’ Harris murmured. ‘We don’t know who the victim was. Male, relatively young, mid-to late thirties. But that’s about it. He was shot at point-blank range, so it’s probably a professional hit. A nine-millimetre bullet straight into his forehead.’

  Lucia Grossi was hovering behind Cangio’s shoulder.

  ‘A bit like putting down a sick horse,’ she said.

  The pictures made Cangio’s stomach roll.

  The acid had burnt a hole through the dead man’s face, eliminating the eyes, nose, and mouth, taking out the back of the skull and everything in between.

  ‘There are some minor dental remains,’ Harris said, ‘but they won’t be much use unless we can tag a name to him.’

  The hands were blackened fingerless stubs of bone poking out of acid-stained palms.

  ‘No hope of checking his prints on IDENT 1 …’

  Cangio looked up, and the Englishman smiled. ‘The UK Print and Palm database,’ Harris explained. ‘Whoever did this knew exactly what to destroy. A pro, as I said before. We ran our results through the NDNAD system, as well, but it’s relatively new. DNA from a man without a recent criminal record wasn’t going to turn up anything there, either.’

  ‘Is he a criminal?’ Lucia Grossi asked.

  ‘We don’t know who he is,’ Harris said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  Cangio held up the last photograph.

  ‘They really made it hard for you, didn’t they?’ he said.

  Acid had been poured into the Y where the dead man’s legs met his stomach.

  ‘They tried to cancel everything, even the genitals. It seems so gruesome … even senseless. A warning to others, perhaps, though there’s just no way of knowing.’

  Cangio looked to Lucia Grossi, asking silently for help.

  Why should he be interested in what had happened near Stansted Airport?

  ‘I’m a park ranger,’ he began to say.

  ‘A possible clue was found near the body,’ Lucia Grossi said.

  Harris reached into his briefcase again, took out a sheet of paper in a nylon sleeve, and handed it to Cangio.

  ‘This is a computer-enhanced image of a restaurant bill,’ he said. ‘There’s no name
, unfortunately, and the original was very dirty. It was found in a pool of mud near the corpse. There’d been a lot of heavy rain in the area the night before. But, as you can see, it appears to be from an Italian restaurant.’

  Cangio strained his eyes to read a few words, and a € symbol.

  ‘It’s all we’ve got to go on,’ Harris ploughed on. ‘The corpse was found late on Saturday afternoon, the 17th of March, not far from Stansted Airport, as I said. A pathologist examined the remains that evening. He estimated that the murder had taken place about forty-eight hours before the police were called to the scene. There was a Ryanair flight from Perugia airport to Stansted on the 15th of March, which arrived at lunchtime. We are working on the assumption that the victim was on that flight.’

  ‘The assumption?’ Cangio asked.

  ‘That restaurant bill,’ Harris said. ‘Traces of partially digested food in his stomach included, among other tasty things, truffles and trout. We presume that he ate them for dinner in Italy the night before he was killed.’

  Tasty things? Did the man have a sense of humour?

  ‘And that’s where you come into it, Cangio,’ Lucia Grossi said.

  She smiled a smile which seemed to say: You still owe me a favour.

  ‘I sent the UK pathologist’s report to the Parks & Forestry Commission laboratory in Norcia,’ she said. ‘And this is what they had to say …’

  She returned to her desk, sat down, and referred to a sheet of paper.

  ‘There are two species of trout in the River Nera,’ she said, ‘the fario variety, and the iridea. The fario is specific to the River Nera, while the iridea is produced in greater quantities. If you went fishing in the Nera, you might catch a fario, but if you went to a restaurant, you’d find an iridea on your plate. There are fish farms producing iridea trout throughout the area, as you certainly know, Cangio. Not long before he died, this man ate an iridea trout and truffles of a variety known as scorzoni, which are also commonly found in Valnerina. Chemical analysis revealed the presence of both of them, as well as various other minerals which are peculiar to the waters of the River Nera …’

  It all boiled down to this: Lucia Grossi wanted him to take Inspector Harris on a tour of restaurants serving trout and truffles in Valnerina.