Lights out, mental strobes.
Valnerina, Umbria
They were laid out on plastic sheets now.
It had been a very long day, but they’d got a result.
‘Sir?’
He turned around. ‘What is it?’
‘We should start securing the scene for the day, tenente. It’s getting on for eight o’clock. By the time they get the tarpaulins and the evidence trays back to Perugia and into the laboratory …’
‘Of course, of course. So, what’s the score?’
The pathologist smiled as if they might have been talking about football.
‘The score, tenente? Two, so far, but who knows what tomorrow may bring. We haven’t dug up half the floor, and … well, after what we’ve collected today, I have the feeling that there may be more. My team should be done by lunchtime tomorrow. Give or take a couple of hours.’
They watched the technicians folding up the plastic tarpaulins, each one containing a body.
‘Can you tell me anything at all?’
His voice faded away.
The light was fading now. As dusk fell over the hillside, the forest seemed to take a step closer to the farmhouse, like sentinels moving in to guard the house and its secrets.
‘Not a great deal,’ the pathologist said. ‘I need to reassemble the pieces, examine the bodies under bright lights, take X-rays, skin and fibre samples. The usual stuff. And yet …’ She paused, looked up at the sky, the pink turning red, the upper folds of the clouds now dense and black. ‘It seems so bloomin’ peaceful here,’ she said. ‘It isn’t the sort of place you’d think of as a dumping ground for dead bodies. I was wondering, well … you know, what brought them here. Who brought them here. That’s what I meant … Two men with one thing in common, at least.’
‘One thing?’
The pathologist smiled. ‘They both have good teeth. They seem to be pretty much of an age, too. Not so young, but not too old. Middle-aged, let’s say. Middle-aged men … with good teeth.’
‘I don’t follow you,’ he said. ‘Good teeth?’
‘Good teeth, a good life. It’s an axiom of forensic pathology. A regular dentist, regular care, a regulated life – that’s the assumption until you find some counterindication. I’ll probably stay at the lab tomorrow morning … Rather than come here, I mean. My men can handle it without my interference. I’d like to get started on the analysis straight away. If anything unexpected turns up, of course, just call me. I’ll be here within an hour.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. They were closing the vans, putting no entry seals on the undercroft doors. The local police would be keeping watch that night. ‘If you find anything unusual under the microscope, you’ve got my number.’
The pathologist turned away, walked towards her car, lit a cigarette before she climbed into the driver’s seat.
Funny, he hadn’t imagined that she was a smoker.
Then he got on the phone to Lucia Grossi in London.
Brixton, ten o’clock
A bucket of cold water woke him up.
He was sitting in a barber’s chair, his wrists tied tightly to the porcelain arms. He couldn’t move his feet on the footrest, something pulling at his ankles when he tried. His head was cushioned at the back with something hard. It might have been the headrest old-time barbers used when they pulled out the cut-throat razor and started to strop the edge on a leather strap.
He hoped there wouldn’t be a razor.
He prayed there’d be no shaving done tonight.
He looked up and saw two men. One was Franco Carnevale. The other one looked like a boxer – too old for the ring, but still a bruiser. The bruiser grabbed hold of Cangio’s broken nose, gave it a twist, waited until he stopped screaming, then said in a quiet voice: ‘Who the fuck are you, then?’
Cangio tried to remember what he had in his pockets. The electronic key to the hotel bedroom, his wallet, his mobile phone. He had left his passport in the drawer of the bedside table in his room.
‘Antonio … Antonio Benedetti,’ he said, his father’s first name, his mother’s maiden name.
The man flicked the end of Cangio’s nose with his nail, which made him cry out.
‘We haven’t started yet,’ Franco Carnevale said, pushing the other man aside, ‘so you’d better get your story straight.’
Did they know who he was?
‘What story?’
‘You tell me. What were you doing with that picture in the club?’
Cangio thought of the girl behind the bar.
Had she told the boss that he had been asking about the photo?
‘That picture? I found it,’ he said, his fright spiralling out of control. ‘It was lying there on the bench when I sat down with my drink. I thought someone had lost it. I …’
They must have been watching the scene at the bar from a hidden camera.
‘So you gave it to Sandy?’
‘The barmaid?’
‘And you started asking her questions.’
‘I was trying to … to chat her up.’
Franco Carnevale leant close, looking into his face, peering at his nose, examining the damage the cosh had done.
‘You won’t be chatting anyone up ever again if you fuck around with me,’ he said in Italian. Cangio tried to place the accent. Maybe London had taken the edge off Carnevale’s native tongue. He wasn’t Calabrian, that was for sure.
‘Ch’ cazz’ sta’ facenda cà, guaiò?’
Cangio’s blood ran cold. What are you doing here, my friend?
That dialect was from the bay of Naples.
Franco Carnevale was running nightclubs in London, drinking champagne with Vince Cormack who was dead, and the man with a tattoo that branded him as an ’Ndrangheta soldier. This was dangerous shit he had got himself into.
‘Listen,’ he said, desperation kicking in. ‘Sandy, the barmaid … I wanted to chat her up. Like I said … What’s the harm in that? A nightclub in London? I was cruising, looking for a girl. She was working late, she said. I couldn’t wait … I … I was going to try somewhere else …’
‘Where are you from, guaiò?’ Franco Carnevale hissed in his face.
Calabria was out, and so was Naples.
‘Jo so’ de Roma,’ Cangio said, moving his tongue, rounding out his vowels.
‘From Rome, you say?’ Franco Carnevale turned to the boxer, and said in English, ‘Gimme them pliers.’
A hand came out of the darkness holding a pair of spring-loaded pliers.
Carnevale twitched them twice in his hand, then prodded the prongs on either side of Cangio’s nose. ‘This is your last chance, son. Why the fuck were you asking about that picture?’
The pliers began to squeeze.
‘Spit it out!’
He managed to resist for a couple of seconds, then he screamed until his throat ached.
‘Fica, fica fica! I … I wanted to fuck her!’
Panic welled up in his chest. The pliers blocked his breathing. He started to retch. Then the pliers eased off a fraction.
‘Your first time down the club, was it?’
Cangio nodded, tried to breathe, felt blood bubbling out of his nose, running into his mouth, and down his chin. Had the CCTV been recording that afternoon when he had gone there with Lucia Grossi and Desmond Harris? Had the cleaner told the boss that the police had been there?
‘I came to Brixton hoping to score …’
‘Burning a fucking hole in your pants, was it?’ Franco Carnevale sneered, pressing hard on the pliers, leaning close to see the pain that he was causing.
Carnevale didn’t know that he’d been there with Grossi and Harris.
The pliers eased, the pain eased, too.
Franco Carnevale narrowed his eyes, then turned away.
‘Get shut of this wanker,’ he ordered.
The boxer stepped out of darkness, holding something that flashed in the half-light.
Cangio caught a whiff of ether, petrol, something c
hemical and nasty.
The needle plunged into his neck, and the lights went out again.
TWENTY-THREE
London
He couldn’t make out where he was.
Couldn’t figure out if he was dead or alive.
His head was spinning, each thought crowding out the last.
Waves of panic swept over him, though what he was frightened of, he couldn’t say. Nor did he know what to do about it.
His jaw ached, his nose ached even worse.
The corners of his mouth were cracked, and it hurt when he tried to speak. It was such a small word, but he couldn’t get it out. He could see what he wanted, see it running down a hillside, rolling through a river valley, gurgling into a pipe, then coming out of a metal tap, hitting hard on a porcelain sink, then splashing into the air, and making bright rainbows in the sunlight.
‘Water,’ he heard a voice say. ‘Water.’
He felt a warm hand slide beneath his neck, his head being lifted, then something cool being poured onto his tongue, dribbling wet and fresh down his chin. He tried to turn his head to catch the liquid with the corner of his mouth, which made him groan, then retch.
A voice that didn’t belong to him said, ‘It was really massive …’
He remembered the Tarantella, the DJ with the dreadlocks.
Diddy, the hip-hop king …
‘… a massive dose. He’s lucky to be alive.’
Then he closed his eyes and slept.
He could hear a murmur of voices … Like bees. Three of them at first, then two. A low, constant murmur. Then a different voice breaking in, saying more loudly, ‘You’ll have to wait outside please, we need to change him.’
Change him?
He felt himself being moved and shifted, first one way, then the other, then patches of dampness on his body, then some rough material grating against his skin which made him moan with pain.
‘There, there, dear. You’ quite safe now. Just be a good boy.’
‘He shoulda been a goo’ boy before …’
He must have blanked out.
When he opened his eyes again, Lucia Grossi was sitting next to the bed, staring out of a window, her face as dark as the clouds beyond the window.
He felt his legs twitch, his chest was aching, pulsing, his muscles like Plasticine.
‘Where am I?’ he groaned.
She turned her face and looked at him. ‘That was quite a night on the town,’ she said. Her voice was hard, disapproving. ‘I should never have let you out of my sight.’
‘Where am I?’ he said again.
‘Hospital. An emergency admission. What the hell did you take, Seb?’
‘I don’t know,’ he managed to say, feeling exhausted, his chest pumping harder, faster, now. ‘I didn’t … take … anything. They … they gave it … to me.’
Next thing, Lucia Grossi was on her feet screaming for a nurse.
Valnerina, Italy
Sergio heard his parents whispering.
He couldn’t see them from his bed, but he could hear them.
They must have opened the window in their bedroom.
He could feel the cold air coming through the open door from the corridor.
The numbers on the digital clock reflected off the ceiling, flashing, off and on. Four red numbers and a dot in the middle – 02.35.
He was frightened by the fact that they were up so late.
The fact that they were whispering frightened him even more, his mother’s voice, hoarse with terror, saying: ‘I don’t want to hear that word again. Ever …’
What was she talking about?
His father said something that Sergio couldn’t make out.
‘What are they doing up there, Luigino? At this time of night, I mean?’
‘They’re doing what they always do,’ his father said, ‘in cases like this …’
His father sounded gruff and tense, as if he had a sore throat.
Sergio lay still in bed and listened. He didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound.
He knew what they would tell him if he went into their room. Be a good boy, Sergio. Go back to sleep. Mamma just needs a bit of fresh air. It’s the asthma … you know the way she sometimes has trouble breathing.
But he knew what they were talking about.
He knew that they were scared.
His mother had said …
There were shadows in the doorway.
‘Sergio …’ his mother whispered. ‘Are you awake?’
‘He would have called, or come running to us.’
Sergio didn’t move, or say a word.
‘He’s fast asleep,’ his father murmured after a while.
‘Thank goodness for that. I mean … what would you tell him? How could you explain a thing like that?’
He heard the window close a short time later, heard the creak of the mattress as they got back into bed. He couldn’t stop himself from shivering. He would have liked to climb in bed with them, but that meant getting out of bed, crossing the room in the dark, running down the corridor, then into their dark room.
And anyway, they were scared, too …
He remembered what his father had said.
They’re digging up what Evil has devoured.
DE-VOUR-ED …
Sergio pulled the sheet up over his head.
He didn’t sleep again that night.
‘Heart failure,’ Grossi told him an hour later.
She was sitting in a chair beside the bed, eating a sandwich, and swigging Coke from a bottle. ‘I thought I might be taking you home in a box,’ she said. ‘You suddenly went blue in the face. Your girlfriend wouldn’t have been too happy, would she? Then again, you’re not the easiest man to live with, if this is anything to go by. That girl of yours, Seb. What’s her name?’ she said, and it might have been a test.
‘Lori … Loredana.’
‘OK, that’s fine. Now, tell me what happened.’
His head was lighter now, his memories clearer.
‘I didn’t meet up with a friend … We didn’t hit the town …’
Lucia Grossi stopped in mid-bite. ‘Where did you go, then?’
He buckled beneath a wave of pain, felt nausea, wanted to throw up.
She didn’t notice how ill he was, hardly seemed to expect an answer to her question.
‘I went to a club …’
She didn’t ask him which club, or why he had gone there, didn’t seem to be listening.
‘I have to get back home without delay,’ she thundered on. ‘Oh, what a mess you’ve caused! If you can’t make it, Seb, I’m going to leave you here. The …’
He pushed himself up against the pillow, thought that he was going to die.
‘That’s … exactly what … I was thinking,’ he said. ‘Help me, will you?’
She glanced at her wristwatch. ‘We’ve got five hours. Do you think you can manage? Will you be able to travel?’
He swung his legs off the side of the bed, felt giddy, felt pain. He gritted his teeth, and fought against the nausea. Why this sudden haste to go back home? Had something come out of her dinner date with Desmond Harris the night before?
‘What’s going on?’ he said, his lips cracked and painful.
The face of Harris appeared like a full moon rising over Lucia Grossi’s shoulder.
‘Things are moving, Seb. Lucia will give you the details when you’re feeling better. For the moment, you have to stay as calm and quiet as you can. Otherwise they’ll never let you out of the hospital.’
‘What’s he doing here?’ he asked Lucia Grossi.
‘We’re lucky he is here,’ she said. ‘Thank goodness he was with me last night. We were having a nightcap in the hotel lobby when the manager came over. The railway police had been on the phone. They’d found you wandering on the Kent Coast Line in a daze, with trains whizzing past every couple of minutes. You’d tried to stop a couple with your bare hands, they said. Luckily, you had the hotel key card in your w
allet, so they knew where to phone. Otherwise, we might have had another unidentified corpse to add to the list.’
She glanced at the Englishman.
‘Maybe you should tell him,’ Desmond Harris said.
‘Tell me what? What’s happened?’
‘Lucia told me that she had discovered the identity of Unknown Two.’
That she had discovered?
That was why she’d been glad to let him go off alone. Old friend, old flame, it made no difference to her where he was going. She’d wanted Harris all to herself. It wasn’t hard to imagine the look of triumph on her face as she told him that she had done what Scotland Yard had been unable to do.
‘You told him?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but there’s more. They called me from Perugia while we were eating. Yesterday, I ordered my men to start digging at the Argenti farmhouse. They’ve found some teeth, human remains. Two men for the moment. One of them may well be Peter Hammond. Unknown Two, let’s say, until we can verify his DNA. I’ve no idea who the other man may be. That’s why we need to get back to Umbria as fast as possible.’
Cangio pushed his arm into his shirt, trying to take it all in.
‘A third man dead?’ he said, thinking of the man with the tattoo. ‘Unknown Three?’
TWENTY-FOUR
Valnerina, Umbria
Cangio enlarged the face on the computer screen.
‘Gotcha!’ he murmured, more of a groan than a word.
His jaw was aching. His teeth were aching. He felt as if he was sucking air through a wet sponge. But that hadn’t stopped him booting up his laptop the minute Loredana left for the late shift at work. He had typed in the search term Tarantella Club + London, and Google had done the rest. Working his way through the list of items the computer spewed up, he had found what he was looking for on the third page.
As he read the article, everything fell into place.
It spelled bad news.
Bad news for London, but even worse for Umbria.
How would Lucia Grossi take it? he wondered. The information contained in the article would certainly lend weight to the Italian investigation, but would it be enough to convince her to go back on whatever arrangement she had worked out with Desmond Harris over dinner in London?
Grossi hadn’t spoken much that morning on the way to Stansted.
The truth of it was that they had hardly spoken at all. He had been in no fit state to talk, and she had only one thing on her mind.
Lone Wolf Page 20