The Absolution (24 page)

KAT STEPPED OFF
the Alitalia flight to Palermo to be greeted by the unmistakable smell of Sicily. The last time she'd been here, years ago, it was springtime and the air had been thick with
la zagara
, the scent of orange and almond blossom. Today, the sun was so fierce that the runway seemed blasted a dazzling white, and heat-haze made the distant mountains shimmer and melt; but the scent was no less heady: a pungent mixture of jasmine, citrus, aeroplane fumes and the spicy, African smell of carob trees.

A
sovrintendente
from the local Polizia was waiting for her in the terminal building. “Hi. I'm Turi Russo,” he said, saluting laconically.

Only when they were in his car and driving towards the city did he raise the reason behind her visit.

“Frankly, I don't know why the Carabinieri are interested in this one.” A motorist pulled out in front of him without warning; Russo gestured angrily and leant on his horn, but made no attempt to pull him over. “Let alone AISI. It's a hate crime, pure and simple. We had it wrapped up within a day.”

“Wrapped up? You mean you arrested someone?”

“No,” Russo admitted. “I mean we got the investigation finished and the paperwork sorted. But the signs could hardly have been clearer. The victim was Muslim. When we found
him, his carotid artery had been severed just below the windpipe. The jugular veins to the heart were also cut, on both sides.” He glanced at her to see if she understood.

“So?”

“That's the method halal butchers use to kill an animal,” he said bluntly. “Ergo, hate crime. It's hardly surprising. Palermo's a racial powder-keg right now. We've got an official unemployment rate of twenty-five per cent, but the real figure is much higher. Meanwhile we're straining at the seams with Arabs, Albanians, gypsies . . . And that's before you even get to the
mulignane
.”

“The what?”

He laughed. “Don't you have that word up north? Aubergines. It's what we call the Africans. Senegal, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Congo, Somalia, Liberia . . . We don't need to read the newspapers here. We can tell where the civil wars are just by the colour of the
clandestini
climbing off the boats. We're meant to stop them coming in, but until the politicians decide to get serious, how are we meant to do that?”

Irritating though Russo's racism was, in truth his opinions weren't much different from those Kat sometimes overheard in the Carabinieri bar at Campo San Zaccaria. “Was anything stolen?”

“Not that we could tell.”

“What about computers?”

Russo looked sideways at her. “That's AISI's interest, I take it?”

“We picked his name up in the course of another investigation,” she said blandly. “You know how it is. Every lead has to be checked.”

In fact, the murder of the teacher, Jabbar Riaz Karimi, was still the only lead AISI had. They'd discovered that shortly
before his death he'd been searching online for any information linking the Fréjus road tunnel disaster to jihadists. When that hadn't turned up much, he'd tried adding a name – Hafeez Bousaid – and the words “identity theft”.

Hafeez Bousaid, they quickly established, was indeed the name from a stolen passport. Meanwhile, the agencies investigating the Fréjus road tunnel disaster were, Grimaldo had told Kat, starting to entertain the idea that it could have been some kind of cyber attack.

None of this, though, was to be shared with Russo unless it was absolutely essential. The Italian police had a long history of ending up on the wrong side of investigations: Grimaldo was determined to limit knowledge of this one to as few people as possible.

“I'll need all the paperwork and the crime-scene photographs,” she said now to Russo. “And I'd like to examine the crime scene myself.”

“No problem. The files are in the boot, so we'll head straight there.”

Despite his words, she suspected he made a slight detour in order to take her through the very centre of Palermo, “so you can see what it's really like down here”. He was quite right: she was taken aback. In Venice, as in most Italian cities, the
centro storico
was the cultural heart of the city, the focus of its nightlife and its smartest shops. In Palermo, the centre was a sprawling, crumbling
medina
, an African souk housed in semi-derelict
palazzi
, where the throb of African music and rows of makeshift stalls had ousted any semblance of Italy.

“I couldn't stop here,” Russo said as he drove slowly down the street. “Usually we come in a convoy of three vehicles.” He gestured into an alleyway. “There's probably only a few
hundred
clandestini
living here permanently. The rest stay just as long as it takes to get a
permesso di soggiorno
, then they move on.”

She gave him a sideways glance. “How do they get hold of the residence permits?”

He shrugged. “They all want to go north, where the money is. We don't encourage them to stay here, put it that way. If that means turning a blind eye to officials selling permits, so be it.”

“Do they give you much trouble?”

Russo laughed. “Not exactly . . . These Africans, they describe this area as
tranquillo
. Know why?”

“No.” It certainly didn't sound quiet to her.

“Because nobody bothers them. Nobody asks for their papers, nobody from the electricity company looks too closely at where their power comes from, nobody chases them when they steal a purse or lift a tourist's phone. So while it might be a little noisy at three o'clock in the morning, in all the ways that matter to them, it's quiet.” He hooted his horn to clear a group of dark-skinned young men out of the way. They scattered languidly, eyeballing him. “We've got a saying down here, ‘
Fatti i cazzi tuoi
' – you know it?”

“I know it,” she said. “‘Take care of your own dick.'”

“Even when one of their own is murdered, don't expect anyone to come forward and tell the Polizia they've seen something. They're all too busy taking care of their own dicks.”

He drove her across town to an area he referred to as “Zen”. She thought he was being sarcastic, until she saw the signs to “Zona Espansione Nord”. It was less claustrophobic than the centre, but bleaker. High-rise apartment blocks, covered in
graffiti, were surrounded by waste ground and stinking piles of refuse.

“Believe it or not, this is a relatively good area if you're an immigrant,” Russo said as he got out of the car and began picking his way through the litter. “To be fair, the rubbish strike isn't their fault. That's the council. Turns out there are more people in head office paid to supervise the rubbish collectors than there are actual rubbish collectors. Someone tried to do something about it, and they all promptly went on strike. So there you are – you can either have clean hands or clean streets. Not both.”

Up on the fifth floor of one of the high-rises – Russo didn't even bother to see if the lift was working – they found a door covered in police tape. “The door's still here, anyway,” he said cheerfully as he produced the key.

Inside, she was surprised to discover a pleasant if run-down apartment – the view alone, over the sea to the north, would have made up for the lack of amenities. There was a stack of microfibre overalls and gloves in the hallway, along with a police logbook. Kat suited up while Russo signed them both in. She noticed he didn't put on overalls himself.

“That's where the body was found.” He pointed towards the balcony. “When we checked with the people downstairs, blood was running down the outside wall into their kitchen. But they still claimed not to have seen or heard anything.”

She went through the photographs in the file. It was as he'd described, although she was struck by the way the bloodstains seemed to indicate that the body had been moved onto the balcony while the victim was still bleeding out.

She went and stood on the spot where the body had lain, looking out over the sea. She was in shadow now. So Jabbar Riaz Karimi had died facing south-east, she thought.

Getting out her phone, she brought up Google Maps.

“He was facing Mecca as he died,” she said, showing him. “The killer positioned him that way. Not just the general direction, either: the exact orientation. Still think it was a hate crime?”

He shrugged. “OK, so maybe it was another Muslim. A pious one with a grudge. It's not going to make any difference. Whoever did it wore gloves and cleaned up anything that might incriminate him. Cheeky bastard even looked it up on the internet.”

“What do you mean?” she said, puzzled.

“When our scene-of-crime people got here, they found the victim's own tablet computer open on a page about how to clean up crime scenes.”

“He didn't wear gloves,” she said slowly.

“What do you mean?”

“Look.” She got out her phone again. “When I used this just now to look up which way Mecca was, I had to take my glove off – it doesn't work with the touch screen. At some point he must have taken his gloves off to use the tablet. He may well have wiped it afterwards, but even so there could still be a partial or a smudged print.”

“Very well,” Russo said grudgingly. “I'll get the specialists to dust the tablet again.”

She shook her head. “I'll take it with me when I go back to Venice. The fewer people touch it, the better. And now I think I'd better see the technical college.”

The college was little more than half a dozen rooms in a run-down municipal building. The students were mostly non-Italian: Chinese, Middle Eastern, a smattering of Africans.

Kat spoke to one of Jabbar Karimi's students, who
confirmed the impression she'd already formed: the teacher was a mild, pious man, good at his job. He even helped some of the students get employment after the course was over, through his brother, who worked in IT recruitment.

A technician was working on the computers in Karimi's classroom. When she asked what he was doing, he told her that one of the students had downloaded a piece of freeware called Boot and Nuke. It had completely erased the hard drive of every single machine on their network.

Kat could feel the trail running cold. The killer had slipped into this place, then slipped away again, leaving not a single lead. That was unusual: most people left something. This man was either very lucky or very smart.

She turned to Russo. “Has there been any strange activity around here recently, anything that could be connected to computer hacking?”

“No,” he said immediately. Then, “Well . . .”

“What is it?”

“It's probably nothing, but . . . last week there was a businessman in Palermo who almost crashed his BMW. He had some crazy story about the car's on-board computer suddenly malfunctioning, switching the engine off and locking the steering when he was doing sixty kilometres an hour.”

Her interest quickened. “Was the car connected to the internet?”

“How did you know that? Apparently it was one of the newer models that has a built-in mobile broadband uplink. Anyway, the officers put it down as an ingenious story to avoid being charged with careless driving and referred the case to the prosecutors. I only heard about it because someone was joking about it in the canteen.”

Just like Fréjus
, she thought.
He's trying things out on a
small scale, getting the technology just right
. “Let me know if anything else in that line comes up, will you? And I'd better talk to the dead man's brother, the one who works in recruitment.”

“
LIVIA
?
LIVIA BOCCARDO
?”

As the teenagers streamed out of the classroom, chattering amongst themselves, the teacher looked up. “Yes?” Then, a moment later, “
Minchia!
Holly Boland? I don't believe it!”

“It's really me,” Holly assured her, as amused by the fact that her childhood friend was a teacher as by the profanity she'd just uttered in front of her students. “Do you have ten minutes? We could grab a coffee.”

Livia consulted her watch. “I have to go and supervise a conversation class in a minute. And the coffee here's undrinkable. But we could sit outside.”

“Why are the kids in school?” Holly asked.

“Oh, it's a summer school. The local council's almost bankrupt, so they rent the school buildings out during the holidays. Most of the teachers are happy to earn a little extra. Besides, these foreign kids are generally well behaved. They don't have the drugs problems our local kids do.”

“
Pisa
has a drugs problem?”

“Everywhere in Italy has a drugs problem. But tell me, what are you doing here? Last I heard, you were at college in America.”

“I live in Vicenza now.” Holly explained that she'd followed her father into the military. “It was our dads I wanted
to talk about, actually. I'm looking into that period when . . . when all the bad stuff happened.”

“Why?” Livia said bluntly. Leading Holly to a small playground, she pulled out a packet of cigarettes.

In the vaguest terms, Holly explained that she was considering the possibility both men had been put in danger because of their involvement with the Masons. “I know your father died in a car crash, but I'm just wondering – was there anything suspicious about the circumstances?”

Livia laughed hollowly. “You could say that.”

“In what way?”

“My mother told everyone it was a car crash because that's what she wanted us children to think. But before she died, she admitted to me that wasn't actually what happened. Papà was found with his throat cut, on the beach at Tirrenia.”

Holly stared at her. It was too similar to the way Kat's victim had been found to be a coincidence.

“She wanted to protect us from the truth, but I think she also felt it was something to keep quiet about. So she pretended it was just a traffic accident.”

“But he was definitely a Freemason?”

Livia nodded. “I found some of that weird regalia they wear when I was clearing out my parents' stuff.”

“You still live in the same apartment, then?”

Livia exhaled smoke. “Yes. 87A. Why?”

“I have an idea that my father was keeping some kind of record or notes, some evidence of what he and your dad discovered. Could we take a look at your apartment? Just in case it's there, and you never spotted it?”

Livia shrugged. “If you like. Come by in an hour, and we'll have some lunch as well.”

If Holly had been there for a different reason, having lunch at Livia's apartment would have been a fun occasion. She'd forgotten the Pisanese's amazing ability to throw food together for an impromptu meal. Yesterday's bread, torn into chunks and sprinkled with water, and a couple of roughly chopped tomatoes sprinkled with salt and oil from an unmarked bottle and garnished with basil leaves, turned into a
panzanella
salad, while the fridge yielded a thin booklet of greaseproof paper which unfolded to reveal a dozen slices of
prosciutto crudo
. There was red wine too, of course: Sangiovese, also from an unmarked bottle. Livia said she got both that and the olive oil filled up by the tobacconist down the street. “I don't ask where it comes from. It's a state secret. But it's always excellent.”

As they ate, they caught up on old times. Most of Holly's old classmates, it turned out, were still living in or around Pisa. “Alessia Abbado's gay now, she's living with a female fitness instructor. Tiziano and Elide got married. And Tomas Mazzi and Sofia Trentino were together for five years, then he went off with an Australian divorcee.” Not for the first time, Holly found herself wondering what her life would be like now if she'd stayed here instead of joining the US Army. She'd thought that by coming back to Italy she was coming home, but the truth was that to the Pisanese, anywhere outside Tuscany was still a foreign country.

“So what is it we're looking for?” Livia said at last. “A shoebox? A file? A trunk of papers?”

“I don't know,” Holly confessed. “At a guess, some kind of folder or notebook. But it could be anything.”

“OK,” Livia said dubiously. “There are a couple of places we could try.”

The apartment was so small that after twenty minutes they'd exhausted all of them.

“What happened to the picture that used to hang just here?” Holly asked, pointing at an alcove.

“We had a burglary. They didn't take much, but everything got broken.”

“When was this?”

Livia thought back. “It must have been soon after Papà died. I remember because they took some of his things – Mamma was really upset.”

“What kind of things?”

“Personal stuff from his desk, I think she said. I don't really remember—” She broke off. “You think it could have been connected?”

“I don't know. But it's a coincidence, isn't it? He's killed – then the apartment gets broken into?”

“In which case, do we assume they found what they were looking for?”

“Well, they didn't come back. So either they got it, or they were satisfied it wasn't here in the first place. I guess we'll never know.”