‘How many sheep are we talking about?’ he asked.
‘Yesterday, there were ninety-two. I’ve found seven survivors so far. It isn’t the first time this has happened to me, but I didn’t have so many to lose back then.’
Cangio looked around the meadow and did a quick count. ‘Where are the other corpses?’
Tommaso Tulli pointed towards the woods. ‘The way I figure it, the devils must have circled down to the river before they launched the attack. The sheep were closed inside hurdles and the dogs should have been on guard.’
‘Should have been?’
‘They were locked up in the kennels.’
‘Who was watching over them, then?’
Tulli cleared his throat, then spat. ‘A right good-for-nothing,’ he said. ‘I gave him a job and thought I was doing him a favour. Look what comes of it! He gets himself drunk, forgets to let the bloody dogs out, then sleeps all night while a pack of wolves wipes out my entire flock, more or less!’
‘Where is he?’ Cangio asked, hoping to get some idea of when the attack had taken place.
‘I sent him packing,’ Tommaso Tulli said. ‘I even paid him, fool that I am!’
‘So, what did he tell you?’
Tulli grunted, though it might have been a bitter laugh. ‘Not much. He was … befuddled, let’s say. He hadn’t shifted from the hut all night.’ Tulli pointed to a small stone building on the riverbank. ‘Slept right through it, said he hadn’t heard a thing!’
Cangio knelt down beside a carcase, a mature ewe with a large swollen belly. ‘When were you expecting them to lamb?’
‘Seven or eight weeks,’ Tulli said. ‘Many of them were carrying. Apart from the loss of the sheep, I intend to claim for the loss of the lambs, as well. That’s why I need your report.’
Cangio placed both hands on the swollen belly of the sheep and pressed. He felt the dead-weight movement inside the corpse. ‘If that man of yours had done his job and saved some of the ewes,’ he said, ‘you might have cut your losses come lambing time.’
‘A fat hope now,’ Tulli said, as Cangio moved on to the next carcase. ‘If you wanted proof that wolves are killing machines, here’s the evidence.’
‘It’s their nature,’ Cangio explained. ‘Wolves are predators, the important thing is to give them nothing to prey on. The park is full of boar, and there’s a healthy population of deer. That amount of food keeps them happy as a rule, and it maintains the natural balance. Still, an untended flock of sheep is an invitation to a feast.’
‘I don’t see much sign of feasting,’ Tulli said sharply. ‘They didn’t kill because they were hungry. Why the authorities had to go and reintroduce wolves and bears in the park has always been a mystery to me. We spent centuries killing them off, and now we want to bring them back again. It beats me, I can tell you.’
Cangio moved on to the next ewe.
The fleece was streaked with bloody claw marks where a wolf had leapt on the animal’s back and dragged it down, a jagged red hole where the throat had been ripped away.
‘In the past when food was scarce,’ Cangio said, ‘they killed whatever came along, surviving on the meat for as long as it lasted. Now there’s more fresh food stock available, but that changes nothing. They kill whenever the opportunity presents itself. The survival instinct kicks in, and they slaughter everything in sight. You’re lucky any survived, Signor Tulli. Someone must have frightened them off. If it wasn’t your herdsman, it was you, I imagine?’
‘I heard the noise and came running. I grabbed the shotgun from the hut and let off half a dozen cartridges, but I didn’t manage to hit one, unfortunately.’
Cangio stood up. He didn’t like the role that he was going to have to play.
‘Wolves are a protected species,’ he said. ‘If you had killed one, you would have been in trouble. I’m here to protect you, of course, but I have to protect the wolves as well.’
Tommaso Tulli made that grunting laugh again. ‘The rest of the flock is scattered all over the hillside,’ he said. ‘Dead, it goes without saying.’
‘You should get a trailer, call for help and start collecting the carcases fast. Otherwise, they’ll be back tonight for the feast that you were talking about.’
Tulli lit another cigar. ‘I’ve got people coming to help me,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘You know, I’d happily sacrifice a sheep or two each season to keep them happy, but you can’t make bargains with wolves. Do they have to slaughter the whole damned flock?’
‘They don’t know where their next meal’s coming from,’ Cangio said. ‘You can’t really blame them, can you? How many wolves did you see?’
Tulli blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Six or seven. There may have been more in the woods, of course. I fired and they scarpered.’
Cangio was there for another two hours, his notebook out, working slowly through the slaughtered sheep, keeping a tally of how many ewes were carrying lambs. In the meantime, the farmer’s friends and helpers began to arrive, including the Pastore brothers and a few other men that Cangio recognised, offering a hand with the collection of the carcases. It was a grisly, unpleasant business, but it had to be done.
There were times when Cangio’s love of wolves was sorely tested.
And there was worse to come.
The pack had attacked the herd from the river, driving the sheep so wild with fright that they had broken down the enclosure fence and scattered into the woods, where they were even more vulnerable. The carcase gatherers were up in the woods, not far from where the truffle reserves of the Pastore brothers and Antonio Marra began, when one of the men came over, carrying something in his hands.
‘Hey, Ranger, I just found this,’ he said.
He held up a mud-caked piece of bone containing half a dozen teeth.
To Cangio it looked like a human jaw.
TWENTY-THREE
Holy shit!
Had he thought it, or had he said it out loud?
Antonio Marra looked nervously around the barber’s shop.
Nobody was staring at him, asking what was up, Antò.
His nerves were getting the better of him, that was the problem. He was thinking things, sometimes talking out loud to himself. One day he was going to get himself in trouble, saying the wrong things to the wrong people.
The wrong people?
He looked up quickly. Scissors kept on snipping, electric razors went on humming like busy little bees, the quiet exchanges of conversation between the barbers and their customers went on interrupted.
No one had heard him.
He was next in line for a trim, but two other men – faces that he vaguely recognised without being able to put a name to – were sitting on the sofas around the coffee table, reading the magazines and the daily papers.
He scanned the tiny newspaper article again. It was tucked away at the bottom of the sheet on the local news page, but an article all the same. And the worst thing of all, his name was in it. If any of his closer associates had been visiting the barber’s that day, they would definitely have asked him about it.
Thank God for small mercies.
‘The small Mercedes, Antonio?’ Rolando asked, his scissors freezing in mid-air, raising his head, looking over his shoulder. ‘You thinking of getting one of them? The new Class A’s a load of crap, they say. No acceleration, lousy suspension. The Class C’s one helluva motor, on the other hand …’
Next thing, the barbershop was alive with the talk of cars.
Antonio Marra’s eyes drifted down to the bottom of the page again.
WOLF ATTACK IN VALNERINA, the title read.
He might have laughed out loud, but he didn’t. There were wolves in Valnerina, all right! The two-legged kind …
‘ … on the boundary near the Pastore and Marra truffle reserves. Eighty-five sheep, half of them lambing ewes, were massacred by a pack of wolves, the carcases strewn all over the valley and the hillside.’
A wolf attack was no great surprise.
It was the next bit that had stunned him.
‘Assistant Park Ranger, Sebastiano Cangio, was at the scene supervising the clean-up operation when a shocking discovery was made. A human jaw with six teeth was found among the animal bones. When asked for an opinion, the ranger said …’
‘No fucking comment!’
‘I’m with you there all the way, Antò,’ Rolando said, razor poised above his customer’s throat. ‘I wouldn’t drive that Alpina Coupè if you paid me.’
Jesus, Antonio Marra told himself quietly, there must be some way out of this mess.
He reached for his phone.
Simone Candelora and his sidekick, Ettore, were in Ferentillo that morning, something to do with another financial investment they had made.
TWENTY-FOUR
Cristina di Marco seemed too young and pretty to be a forensic pathologist.
Decked out in a white lab-coat and blue Dr Scholl’s rubber clogs, she looked as if she might have graduated just the other day. Giulio Brazzini, an old friend from university days, had told him about her the night before on the phone. Dottoressa di Marco had taught a module for senior murder squad officers that Brazzini had attended at La Sapienza, part of the university in Rome the year before.
‘Watch your step,’ Brazzini had warned him. ‘Cristina’s a busy lady. Just ask her what you want to know, then get out fast. And remember, she doesn’t have to tell you a thing, so turn on the charm, OK?’
She didn’t give him a chance to turn on anything as she stepped out into the corridor and caught his eye. ‘Sebastiano Cangio? The friend of Giulio Brazzini? I’m not sure that’s a recommendation,’ she said.
Brazzini had told him to be waiting outside room thirty-four at a quarter past nine. Cangio had arrived at a quarter to nine, and now it was a quarter to ten. He’d been tempted to knock, but hadn’t wanted to interrupt whatever she might be doing.
‘Thank you for seeing me.’
‘Giulio didn’t give me the chance to say no. He said I’d find you waiting at my door, and here you are. So, what can I do for you?’
He’d been pondering how to introduce the subject gently for the best part of an hour.
‘I reported the jawbone found in Valnerina,’ he said straight out.
Cristina di Marco tilted her head and looked at him. ‘That was a surprise, I bet.’
She glanced towards a machine in the corridor. ‘Do you fancy coffee?’ she said. ‘I’ve been here since seven o’clock this morning. I’m dying for a shot of caffeine. It’s not the best blend in the world, but it does the job.’
Cangio put his hand in his pocket, searching for change. ‘Let me.’
‘Forget it,’ she said, holding up a key on a chain. ‘This is one of the perks of office. Without free coffee and lots of it, they know we wouldn’t get much work done.’
Giulio had led him to expect a man-eating ogress, but Ms di Marco was quite the opposite. She seemed chatty, ready and willing to humour him. At that moment a bell rang, and suddenly the corridor was full of students who were pouring out of lectures.
‘We’ll be safer in my lab,’ she said, handing him a plastic cup, ordering up another cup of coffee for herself. ‘Students are wonderful, but wouldn’t the university be a better place without them.’
‘Surely, you don’t see so many?’ he said, as they crossed the corridor against the flow, and she unlocked the door to room thirty-four.
‘You’d be surprised. I’ve just had ten medical students watching me do a post-mortem for the last hour and a half. At least no one threw up today!’ she said, closing the door, and turning the key again. ‘Safety precautions,’ she said. ‘This door must be kept locked at all times. I’d much prefer to work in a police forensic unit, to be honest, but … well, this job came up and I applied for it. A job’s a job in this day and age. You don’t say no, do you?’
Cangio smiled, thinking of Lori. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘I was stuck in a place I couldn’t stand, doing a job I hated, but the money was good and I needed it.’
Cristina sipped her coffee, her eyes on his. ‘Which place? Which job?’
‘Selling flats in London.’
‘You didn’t like London?’ she asked incredulously. ‘That’s a new one!’
‘I had a bedsit the size of a prison cell. I can’t stand pubs, and I don’t like burgers and chips. And worst of all, there are no wolves in England.’ He held up a finger to stop the question he knew was coming. ‘Wolves are my thing. I’m an ethologist. That’s what I do in the national park. I’m monitoring three packs, and one of them massacred that herd of sheep. That was where the jaw bone you’re working on came to light.’
‘Have a seat,’ she said, as she sat down on a stool beside a workbench.
He looked around the room, spotted a row of similar stools lined up against the far wall next to a steel frame holding six man-sized steel trays and a movable gurney. Everything was bright and spotlessly clean, even the dissected corpse that lay in orderly pieces on the tray that she had been using that morning.
‘You’ve been busy,’ he said, looking away.
‘An unclaimed body,’ she said. ‘We get one now and then before they’re buried at public expense. This fellow was a drug pusher and drugs user. Seeing the effects tends to frighten off students who might be tempted to experiment.’
She drained her coffee, put down her cup, then pursed her lips. ‘I shouldn’t be talking to you about a specific case, you realise that, don’t you? Giulio should never have told you to get in touch with me. Officially, I am gathering evidence for the procurator’s office here in Perugia, so I can’t say much at all. If you want to run some ideas by me, I’m prepared to listen, though. What would Giulio say if you told him that I wouldn’t help you?’
‘I’ll tell him you were as sweet as apple pie,’ Cangio said.
She smiled again, though the smile was a little frostier this time.
‘The carabinieri literally dropped a sack of bones on my desk. They just hand over the material and want it classified. Let me show you,’ she said, taking a large cardboard archival box from a shelf and removing the lid. Cangio read the label: the date of the find, the place where it had occurred, and nothing else. Then he leant over and looked into the box.
‘Apart from the jawbone, there are bits of ribs, plus various other odds and ends. I thought it was someone’s idea of a joke at first. I think they’d like to catch us out if they could. Some of these fragments are human, as you know, but not all of them. I’d have made a guess at a deer or a boar, but as you mentioned wolves, I reckon I can safely narrow it down to sheep.’
‘But the jawbone is human?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, taking two pieces of bone from the box, and holding one of them up to the light. ‘The human bones are easy to recognise from the way they’ve been severed. Can you see the difference here? This one is from a sheep. It has teeth marks three or four centimetres in depth, wide at the top, pointed at the tip.’
‘Those are typical wolf bites,’ Cangio said. ‘A healthy young male, three or four years old. I may even know him personally.’
Cristina di Marco laughed. ‘I should have asked Giulio for your phone number. You could have saved me some time by classifying the animal parts.’
Cangio smiled back at her. ‘Any time,’ he said.
She held his gaze for a moment or two, then picked up the other bone.
‘Now, have a look at this piece.’
Cangio edged closer to the table, his shoulder brushing against hers.
‘It looks like part of a scapula,’ he said, staring hard at an angular flap of stained bone that looked like a dried brown mushroom. ‘This one doesn’t belong to a sheep. It’s too big.’
‘It’s human,’ she said, leaning closer. ‘Can you see how it’s been broken?’
He was aware of her perfume now, a delicate trace of eau de toilette.
‘Sheared off with one clean chop,’ he said.
> ‘A sharp implement with a cutting edge, probably steel. Hacked to bits, I’d say, though he was certainly dead when the dismembering took place. A small mercy! We don’t have much of the skeleton, so it will be necessary to extend the search area if the police decide to follow up on the case.’
‘But we do have pieces of an unidentified corpse.’
She stared back at him, amusement twinkling in her dark brown eyes.
‘“Unidentified” is not a scientific description,’ she said lightly. ‘Bones can tell us a lot about the person that they once belonged to. They can’t give you a name, of course, but they may indicate how old the person was, the sort of life they may have led, and, finally – and this is the bit you’re really interested in, I imagine – roughly where the person came from. Funnily enough, the human jawbone is one of the most useful parts of the human body in that respect. I was checking the web last night, and I came across an intriguing article, “The Determination of Ancestry from Discrete Traits of the Mandible”, by a researcher from the University of Florida. She pointed out something odd, something that I couldn’t make any sense of when I was examining this jawbone yesterday.’
She raised her cup to her lips, found it empty and put it down again.
Cangio pushed his coffee cup across the table.
‘I haven’t touched it,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ she said with a Mona Lisa smile, but she didn’t touch the coffee. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what was odd? My first-year students would have leapt on it.’
‘What couldn’t you make sense of?’
‘The problem with your jawbone – well, not yours, but this one – is that it doesn’t … rock.’ She looked at him and raised her eyebrows. Her brown eyes were flecked with gold. ‘That doesn’t sound very scientific, does it? So, let me explain. When I first removed the mandible, or inferior maxillary bone, from the plastic evidence bag, and set it down on the lab bench, it lay quite flat on the surface. As a rule, a jawbone from Europe, America or Africa will gently rock if you touch it, a bit like an old-fashioned grandma’s chair. The point of gravity is somewhere in the middle, you see. But not all human jaws behave the same way. Indeed, the mandible of a person from the Far East tends to sit square and flat on a solid surface. That was the first thing that I noticed. The jaw bone didn’t rock, as I said, so I had to ask myself if I was dealing with a non-Italian jaw …’
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