Lone Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  She placed her hand on his shoulder, leaning forward to get a better view.

  ‘A pity we’re not a little bit closer,’ she said.

  He hoped that she was talking about the house.

  She was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, which added a new dimension to her persona. She was wearing perfume, too, a fragrance which was sweet and spicy. Sexy, he might have said, if she had been anyone else. Every time she shifted in her seat, his head began to spin.

  If Lori ever got to hear about this outing, he’d be in serious trouble.

  ‘Just the place for a party,’ he said, ‘though no one’s raving …’

  She wasn’t listening, her eyes fixed on the shadowy outline of the building.

  The Argenti farmhouse seemed forlorn, forgotten, the windows broken, the paint faded, the wooden shutters rotten and crumbling. A footpath led to a flight of steps and the front door, the grass knee high, as if nobody had been there in a long time.

  ‘This operation isn’t authorised,’ she said. ‘It would be premature to involve an investigating magistrate at this stage. Then again, given what Carla Brunori told us, it seemed worth taking the risk.’

  She didn’t say a word about the risk that he was taking.

  He had called Lori at work that afternoon, told her he’d be out watching the wolves that night.

  ‘Why are you telling me?’ Lori had fired back at him, her voice sharp over the phone.

  ‘I wanted to warn you,’ he said. ‘Just in case I was late getting back …’

  ‘What’s so new about you chasing wolves, Seb Cangio?’

  It sounded more like chasing whores, the way she said it.

  ‘The female will be birthing soon,’ he had told her. ‘I’d like to see what happens next.’

  Lori had taken it in her stride. ‘The girls are going out for a pizza tonight. I was thinking of joining them, anyway. I would have phoned you. I’ll sleep over at Rita’s if we drink too much, so don’t you worry about me.’

  He was worrying now, but for the wrong reasons.

  He was alone in a car with a woman who smelled like a jungle flower, wondering whether she’d been joking minutes before when she said, ‘If anyone drives up here, Seb, pretend to kiss me, and I’ll go along with it.’

  She had laughed, but there was a lingering hint of something left unsaid.

  He had to get a handle on the situation, take control, change the way the conversation was going.

  ‘This afternoon you asked me if werewolves exist,’ he said.

  She turned to look at him, one half of her face palely lit by the moon. ‘Do they?’

  ‘Do you know what therianthropy is?’ he asked her.

  She shifted in the dark, her perfume wafting over him again.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, ‘though I guess you’re about to tell me.’

  ‘It’s a mental illness. Not very common, rare, in fact, but it exists. The sufferer believes that he is an animal, so he behaves like the animal he thinks he is.’

  ‘How come you know so much about it?’

  He felt better now, playing the expert, telling her something she didn’t know.

  ‘If you study wolves, you’re bound to come across the syndrome sooner or later. The wolf is top of the wannabe list by a long way.’

  ‘So, werewolves aren’t just Hollywood crap. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I once saw a man who exhibited the symptoms,’ he said. ‘If you’d been there, you wouldn’t forget him.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He was running around on his hands and knees, frothing at the mouth, trying to bite the doctors and nurses as they put him into a strait-jacket.’

  ‘Thank God I’ve got my gun,’ she said.

  He wondered whether she was laughing at him.

  ‘Do the carabinieri hand out silver bullets?’ he asked.

  Perhaps the word carabinieri triggered some conditioned impulse in her brain.

  ‘We’re wasting time, Seb, sitting here and talking nonsense,’ Captain Grossi said.

  Before he could say a word, she was out of the Land Rover, moving fast towards the farmhouse. He had to follow her. It was the basic rule of policing. Cover your partner’s back; argue about it later.

  As he pressed himself against the wall of the house, he saw a pistol glinting in her hand.

  ‘Silver bullets?’ she whispered. ‘I don’t believe Beretta manufactures those.’

  She skipped up the stone steps to the front door, and he ran up behind her.

  They stood on either side of an ancient green door.

  ‘Open it,’ she said, pointing her pistol downwards.

  He put his shoulder to the door, but nothing happened. It took two more attempts before the door swung back with a loud creak.

  ‘So much for silence,’ she jibed, stepping past him, pulling a torch from her pocket.

  He might have said that rangers weren’t housebreakers as a general rule. Instead, he pulled out his own torch, and followed her into what was evidently a big farm kitchen with low wooden beams and a massive open fireplace. The room was entirely bare except for a sagging sink-and-cupboard unit. Made of cheap white laminate, it might have seemed prosperous fifty years before, but now looked ready for burning.

  ‘Tourists love these places. With the right furniture, and a touch of paint …’

  ‘The lap of luxury,’ Grossi murmured.

  She pulled open one of the cupboards, found nothing but pellets of rat poison. ‘Let’s hope the tourists don’t think everyone lives like this in Umbria. Give me my nice modern flat in Perugia any day of the week.’

  ‘Someone’s been here recently, though.’

  She stepped close, standing at his shoulder. ‘What makes you say that?’

  He sniffed out loud. ‘Can’t you smell it? Bleach or something …’

  ‘The house may not be as empty as it seems,’ she said, and her gun came up in line with her torch.

  ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?’ he suggested.

  She didn’t answer as she made for a door on the far side of the room.

  She stopped there, as if uncertain whether to proceed.

  ‘Do you want me to go first?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m the one with the gun,’ she hissed back.

  Was it humour, or tension that he heard in her voice?

  ‘I’ll cover your back, then, as they say in the movies.’

  ‘Just keep out of my line of fire,’ she said. ‘That’s what the police manual says. Hold that torch up high, Seb. No one will shoot if they think there are two guns pointing at them.’

  The light from their torches danced off the walls as they entered a narrow hallway. There were four closed doors, two on either side of the corridor. She aimed her torch at one of the doors. ‘Let’s start here,’ she said, waiting while he pushed it open, then walking past him into the room.

  Her torch lit up a stained enamel bathtub, a plastic shower curtain, a toilet with no seat, and an old metal cabinet hanging on the wall beside a mirror.

  ‘I wouldn’t fancy stripping off in here,’ she said.

  He touched the plastic curtain with his hand. It felt damp, slick, but everything in the bathroom was damp. There were dark stains on the walls, green mold on the ceiling, a rank smell of closed, stale air.

  ‘The Brunoris would need to spend a fortune before they could rent the house out.’

  She opened the wall cabinet, looked inside. ‘One block of soap, unused. One pack of cotton wool, empty. One razorblade, very rusty.’ She might have been reading an inventory out loud. ‘This stuff could have been here since the end of the war.’

  The other rooms were full of junk, boxes bursting with mildewed books and yellow newspapers, old boots, broken chairs, sofas sprouting springs and horsehair.

  ‘Let’s try upstairs,’ she said.

  They tried to go quietly, but the wooden stairs creaked loudly beneath their weight.

  There were four m
ore doors on the floor above. The first two rooms were very small, the walls of no definable colour, the wallpaper faded. There was a smell of gloom, doom, and long neglect. Another room was packed with more miscellaneous junk, broken chairs, a stack of dated farmers’ almanacs, boxes full of nothing that would ever see the light of day again.

  ‘No sane person would sleep in here,’ she said.

  Had she ever seen the places where the homeless lived? He had stumbled on a few while studying the foxes in London’s parks at night. The foxes’ dens were cleaner than the tips where the alkies slept.

  The fourth room at the end of the passage was the largest.

  ‘The bridal suite?’ she joked, pointing her torch at a double bed frame, the rusting rack on which a mattress had once been laid, and a thin mattress of no distinguishable colour which was folding under its own weight against the wall. There were rectangular stains on faded wallpaper where pictures had once hung.

  ‘No one has lived here for ages,’ Cangio said, looking around. ‘Empty rooms, an abandoned house, there should be signs of mice and rats, as well.’

  ‘You sound disappointed,’ she murmured.

  ‘Just surprised. When Man moves out, Nature moves in.’

  ‘That smell you were talking about … It’s weaker up here,’ she said.

  ‘No smell would drive them away. Bugs and mice would move to a different part of the house, and wait until the stink died down. We haven’t seen a single spider, either.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  He looked around as if to confirm what he was thinking.

  ‘You know what this place reminds me of?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she said, a note of impatience rising in her voice.

  ‘A den where wolves have been living. Even if the wolves abandon it, other creatures steer clear.’

  She turned the torch on her face, turned her mouth down in derision.

  ‘Come off it, Seb. This isn’t Halloween,’ she said. ‘And we’ve found nothing. This is a waste of time. Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ he said. ‘This is a farmhouse, remember. There should be a cellar, a storeroom, a place to keep tools and things. Five minutes more won’t hurt. We just stick our heads inside the door, see what’s what, then we call it a night, OK?’

  ‘If you insist,’ she said.

  They found a padlocked door outside beneath the stone stairway that led up to the kitchen.

  One kick was enough to send the lock flying.

  ‘Santo cristo!’ Lucia Grossi covered her nose with her sleeve as they entered a cavernous chamber which ran from one end of the house to the other.

  ‘Could this be the smell that Nora was talking about?’ Cangio wondered.

  ‘I’d shoot any man that smelled like this. My eyes are burning.’

  Cangio moved the beam of his torch over a stack of chopped firewood, a rusty generator engine propped up on bricks, pyramids of broken furniture and farm tools piled in corners. An old tin bathtub had been used as a feeding-trough. A heavy old table stood in the centre of the space. The tabletop was scarred with cuts, the wood dark and unevenly stained. Cangio laid his hand on it, then held his palm to his nose and pulled a face.

  Lucia Grossi bent close, then pulled back quickly.

  ‘It’s soaked with something,’ she said. ‘Acid, maybe …’

  ‘These undercrofts are often used for butchering animals. Pigs, cows, sheep. The table was probably used to chop up the meat into manageable portions.’

  ‘Is that what’s been going on in here?’

  ‘The Brunoris live close by,’ he said. ‘They and their neighbours heard screams from this direction. Pigs squeal when they see the butcher’s knife. Could that be what Sergio and his parents heard?’

  ‘No, no,’ Lucia Grossi said impatiently. ‘It makes no sense. Why would anyone butcher pigs in the middle of the night?’

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Whoever it was, they went to a lot of trouble to wipe the place clean.’

  While he was speaking, her torch roved slowly over the flagstone floor.

  ‘What’s that down there?’ she murmured, pointing towards the stack of firewood. ‘Something flashed in the torchlight. Hidden gold, do you think? What are you waiting for? I thought you were a gentleman.’

  Cangio dropped down on one knee, peering between the logs.

  She squatted down beside him, sitting back on her heels.

  ‘It looks like a tube of something, glass maybe,’ he said, reaching out with his finger.

  She put her hand on his arm and held him back. ‘Don’t touch it,’ she said. ‘See if you can pull it out with something. Don’t park rangers usually go around armed with a Swiss army penknife? You know, with all the jiggly bits?’

  ‘We carry these,’ he said, pulling out his Land Rover key-ring, using the key as a probe.

  ‘It isn’t long enough,’ she said.

  ‘A twig might be better. Whatever it is, it’s caught between the logs.’

  She reached into her pocket, pulled something out, and held it up. ‘I was reading a report before I came out of the house. I never like to throw the paper clips away. It’s a silly hang-up, I know, but there you go.’ She straightened it out, formed a hook at one end, then gave it to him.

  He pushed the hook into the tube, and tried to pull it out.

  ‘It won’t budge,’ he said. ‘No, hang on a bit … it’s … coming.’

  A short glass tube rolled out on the floor, stopping centimetres away from his nose.

  They both stared at it in silence for a moment.

  ‘It looks like a vial for holding pills,’ he said, pushing the clip inside the little bottle, holding it up. ‘And there’s a label on it …’

  She brought the torch closer. ‘The Old Pharmacy, Lamb’s Con …’ she read in a whisper. ‘There’s something gooey blotting out the rest. Dirt, or mud …’

  ‘It looks to me like congealed blood,’ he said.

  They stared at each other, an unspoken question hanging between them.

  Is it human blood?

  ‘Unknown Two?’ suggested Cangio.

  EIGHTEEN

  Westminster, London, UK

  ‘Is this where the Yard buys its ammo?’

  Lucia Grossi was poking the peas that came with her battered cod and chips.

  ‘Fire one of these things from a .38,’ she said, ‘you’d blow a hole in a wall.’

  Hunger had grabbed her by the throat while they waited for Desmond Harris to arrive.

  Things had been moving fast up to that point.

  The decisions had been taken by Lucia Grossi, naturally. She had given the forensic lab in Perugia four hours to run preliminary tests on the bottle they had found at the Argenti farmhouse the night before. She had phoned him at six a.m. to confirm that it was human blood, telling him to be at the airport in Assisi by eight: they would be catching the first flight to London.

  ‘If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed,’ she said.

  The ‘mountain’ was still playing hard to get, dragging its heels, making things tough.

  Cangio stared at his own pub meal, and thought of the restaurant where he had taken Desmond Harris. Black truffles, fresh trout, and strangozzi rolled by Nora’s expert hands versus a congealed steak-and-kidney pie.

  Talk about a no-contest.

  ‘Maybe he’ll take us to the Ritz for tea,’ he said.

  Lucia Grossi pulled a sour face. ‘Tesco’s would be better. The only decent thing I ate in London were their apple pies.’

  Cangio popped a cold chip in his mouth. ‘I got by OK when I was living here.’

  ‘How did you manage that?’

  ‘I stayed at home and cooked for myself.’

  Lucia Grossi didn’t react. She was in no mood for joking. She had come to London with one thing on her mind, and had talked about nothing else for most of the flight.

  ‘I’ll show Scotland Yard a thing or two,’ she
kept on telling him, clutching a leather document case on her knees all the way from Assisi to Stansted. ‘This is just the sort of international operation that lifts a new department off the launching pad. From a PR point of view, it’s a first-rate opportunity for the SCS to make its mark.’

  He had settled down with his paperback and let her dream on.

  The three-star hotel in Paddington where they had stopped just long enough to leave their bags was on the cramped side, the dark single rooms the size of the holding cages at the carabinieri command station in Perugia, but even that hadn’t phased her.

  ‘Small, but comfortable,’ she had said. ‘Next time, we’ll be travelling in style.’

  Cangio hoped that there never would be a next time.

  She patted the leather document case that was sitting in her lap now, still chasing the hard green peas around her plate in the pub near Westminster. ‘Without us, Seb, Scotland Yard would still be bumping their noses in the dark.’

  When she said us, she wasn’t talking about him and her, but her and her department.

  ‘Maybe they know more than we do,’ Cangio said.

  ‘While we were risking our necks at the Argenti farmhouse last night, they were sound asleep in their nice, warm beds,’ she said.

  I wouldn’t mind sleeping in my own warm bed tonight, Cangio thought. He wasn’t sure what sort of welcome would be waiting for him when he got home. Loredana had hardly said a word to him before he left.

  ‘You’re going to London with her?’

  ‘It’s this investigation. I can’t get out of it.’

  Lori had looked him in the eye. ‘Did she book one double room, or two singles?’

  ‘She won’t solve the case by sleeping in my bed, will she?’ he had snapped back.

  ‘Are you quite certain, Seb Cangio? London … Dio mio, any excuse to go back there! And you’d almost convinced me that you hated the place.’

  For one moment he had almost told her about the photograph he had seen at Assisi Airport, the passenger with the salamander tattoo. If what he feared turned out to be true, he would have crawled to the South Pole with Lucia Grossi riding on his back to find out what was going on in Umbria, and to know how London tied in with it.

  They had to be stopped.

  Even if it meant arguing with Lori.