The Monster of Florence (9 page)

“You don’t look too suited. Disapprove of his Nibs’s speech this morning, did you?”

“I can’t say I understood it.”

“You were here in the eighties, surely?”

“Well,” admitted the Marshal, “I was, but I had better things to do than follow all the ins and outs of some Instructing Judge’s squabble with the Public Prosecutor’s office.”

“In that case, take my advice. Get the ins and outs of it sorted now or you’ll put your foot in it and that wouldn’t do at all, not with our friend Simonetti at the helm. Where do we go first? Scandicci, I suppose, if they’re turning here.”

There were four cars in the procession, all of them unmarked. All of the passengers were in plain clothes. They didn’t want to attract too much attention as they visited the scenes of the Monster’s crimes. Simonetti had actually called him the Monster, which had surprised the Marshal, though, of course, he did so himself, as everyone did. He had no other name. Simonetti’s explanation had been plausible enough. The rest of his speech, too, had been plausible enough but the Marshal, whilst admitting he didn’t understand it, hadn’t believed it either.

“I feel bound to make a purely lexical observation before going any further. If I have used, and continue to use, the term ‘Monster’ during the investigation to indicate the author of the crimes, this is for merely practical, time-saving purposes and is absolutely devoid of any moral weight, much less of critical weight. No value judgement is implied.

“I would also remind you that the official clearing of the names of all the Angius family by the Instructing Judge formerly involved in this investigation means that the line of enquiry involving the Sardinian group connected with the nineteen sixty-eight murder of Belinda Muscas and Amadeo Lo Russo is now closed. The Instructing Judge’s report was punctilious, comprehensive and highly detailed and it was from him that we were given to understand that the confusing, contradictory and, I might say, evanescent elements of that story never had and can never have any value in a court of law.

“Nevertheless, the conviction for this murder in nineteen seventy of Belinda Muscas’s husband, Sergio Muscas, should not necessarily be regarded as definitive despite his confession, later retracted. The convicted man, even whilst insisting on his own guilt, clearly demonstrated that the crime could not have been perpetrated in the manner he described and that one or more persons other than himself must have been involved. This is clearly not the moment to try
to get to the bottom of what might or might not have been a crime of passion, just as it might or might not have been some sort of settling of accounts between rival Sardinian clans.

“Sufficient to say that for the purpose of our present investigation the Sardinian line is irrelevant, given that the Beretta twenty-two, the only solid fact which connects that crime to those of the Monster could only too easily have changed hands between nineteen sixty-eight and nineteen seventy-four.”

And that was that. The “Instructing Judge formerly involved” and his years of fruitless struggle were consigned to the archives. The Marshal knew too little about it all to have any real opinion on the matter. He did, however, have a real opinion about Simonetti who was making signs at their driver now from the larger car slowing down in front.

“Surely we’re not here …?” The Marshal peered out. They were still on an asphalted road.

“He’s pointing out the disco, here to the right.”

A strange pagoda-shaped building set in a garden at a fork in the road.

“They left there about eleven and drove on up the hill here to park.” The cars picked up speed again between an olive grove high on their left and orchards and vineyards sloping down to their right.

“Here we are.” The cars were slowing again and turning into a narrow country lane.

“Have you been here before?” The Marshal felt around for his hat, remembered he wasn’t in uniform and opened the car door.

“In the good old days when I was a marshal I worked on this case for a bit, eighty-one and again in eighty-three. This one was eighty-one.”

They left the cars and walked a little further along the gravelly ochre lane, breathing in the sweet, damp air that still smelled faintly of wine lees. To one side of them tiny black and green beads ripened among silvery olive branches and on the other, red and yellow leaves fell from the vines as tiny birds searched for the treasure of some forgotten bunch of grapes, withered and sweet with a bloom of mildew on them.

“The boy’s body was in the car, as you know …” Simonetti consulted his clipboard, loaded with maps and photographs. “And the girl’s body lay here. Now, there are two possible versions: one is that, since the body wasn’t dragged, he carried her this distance before working on her with the knife. The other is that she was trying to escape and he caught up with her here.”

“Excuse me …?” It was young Lieutenant Bacci who had travelled in the last car and was now standing behind the Marshal. “I understand she’d been hit by five bullets so does that mean the first hypothesis is the more likely—?”

“I’ll make one thing clear,” Simonetti said with a smile hardly consonant with his words. “I’m not interested in hypotheses. There have been enough hypotheses in the past about these crimes to last us all a lifetime. If we don’t know something for sure, we don’t know it. Full stop. And while we’re about it, I’ll say a word on another, to some extent related, subject. If you look around you, you’ll see that the scene of the crime consists of a country lane, some trees and bushes, a nearby stream. The crime was committed between ten and twelve on a night of the new moon. You will find that these conditions will be the same at every one of the seven scenes we visit and we’ve heard enough hypotheses about that to last us a lifetime, too. I am not interested in occult explanations of any of these conditions and I’m telling you this because the idiotic explanations of these things didn’t come from the newspapers as one might reasonably expect, but from people calling themselves serious investigators. As far as this enquiry is concerned, the new moon is the darkest time of the month when a lurking murderer can reasonably expect not to be seen lurking. Likewise he needs bushes or vines to hide behind just as he needs water to wash off the blood after his butchering activities. And since couples who park their cars to make love do so in a quiet country lane and not, as a rule, on the motorway, I think that deals with the matter.”

Simonetti began to move towards his car. Ferrini made a wry face at the Marshal and murmured, “A perfectly sane explanation. Pity we’re dealing with a maniac …”

But the Marshal was watching the unfortunate Bacci who had
provoked the tirade and had to resist giving the lad a comforting pat on the shoulder. Bacci was his superior officer. His poor young face was white.

They drove on across the hills, taking in all the sites to the south of Florence, Montespertoli, Gli Scopeti, Galluzzo. As they drove, the mist on the hills thickened and the smudge of the city visible in the valley far below became fainter and fainter until, just after eleven, it began to rain. At the last scene to the south, near Galluzzo, their feet were sinking into the already well-moistened ground and fat raindrops dislodged the last of the glowing leaves from the vines. In the distance, the bruised sky was punctuated by black cypresses and umbrella pines. Beneath their wet boots, plastic carrier bags were trodden in with cigarette packets, syringes, bits of used condoms, and scraps of pages torn from pornographic magazines.

They used the motorway to bypass the city and reach the hills to the north. The Marshal continued to stick close to Ferrini who, every so often, was able to pass him some titbit of remembered information that hadn’t figured in the written synopsis they had been given.

“That was when they arrested Sassetti, a Peeping Tom. Remember?”

“Vaguely.”

“He was chatting in the bar early on Sunday morning about the Monster having struck again when nobody had found the bodies. Well, he’d found them, of course. He made no bones about his Saturday night activities but he never said a word about what he’d seen or found. They say he was terrified of something. Can you imagine what he could have been frightened of that was worse than being in prison accused of being the Monster?”

“Not really …”

“Me neither. They had to let him out, of course, in October when the Monster did for these two here.”

They were now standing around a stone cross marking the spot where Silvio Benci and Sara Contini had been found. It stood between rows of vines and carried their names and the legend:
THEY DIED FOR LOVE, OCTOBER
22, 1981.

The six men were standing with their backs to the lane where their cars were parked whilst Simonetti consulted his clipboard. To their right loomed the great bulk of the Calvana, the mountain plateau which divided this area from Prato to the north. It was a cold and inhospitable-looking mass at the best of times. Banks of dirty cloud rolled along its flat top and its slopes looked so dark a blue as to be almost black. The Marshal glanced back at the cross and then up at the menacing wet mass.

“The Sardinian line of enquiry …” murmured Ferrini, reading his thoughts.

Up there, as they both knew, Sardinian bandits and shepherds inhabited lightless, long-abandoned cottages. There they made their cheeses, hid machine guns, pistols, chloroform, kidnap victims. The police couldn’t get anywhere near them without being spotted half an hour before their arrival and the ground was too rough and stony to land a helicopter. It was a sinister place, as sinister as the place marked by the stone cross. Prosecutor Simonetti kept his back turned to it and continued his perfectly sane account of how a man attacked two complete strangers and took away with him parts of the woman’s body.

“In this case the mutilation was more vicious and more extensive, exposing as it did a large part of the intestine and even perforating it. A large lump of subcutaneous fat was found stuck to the inside of the girl’s thigh. Gentlemen, at this point I think we should break for lunch.”

In the restaurant, the Marshal noted that the young policeman who, up to now, had never opened his mouth, was sticking as close to Bacci as he himself was to Ferrini. He was evidently attempting to get some sort of conversation going with Bacci without attracting any attention, but Bacci, no doubt still stinging from Simonetti’s tirade earlier, was pretty unresponsive. The two police investigators were equally silent but for different reasons. From what the Marshal knew of them they weren’t the type to waste breath on hypotheses, much less polite chatter. They saved their breath for the moment when they could use it to say, “I arrest you …” and in the meantime
used it to cool their pasta. One of them had an angry-looking scar on the back of the hand turning his fork, which was almost certainly the result of a stray bullet. The Marshal reached for the grated cheese and wondered with an inward sigh what Teresa and the boys were having for lunch.

The light was dying when they reached the last scene, which, in fact, was that of the first of the maniac’s crimes in 1974. The rain was coming down more heavily now so that shoulders and feet were soaked and tempers short.

“Marshal …?”

“Lieutenant.”

Bacci had been eyeing the Marshal for some time, as the latter well knew, before deciding to speak.

“I just wondered …” He glanced to his right where Simonetti was talking intensely with one of the investigators who every now and then nodded and looked about him as he listened. “You don’t mind if I ask your advice?”

“Not at all.”

“It’s just that … You’ve worked with him before, haven’t you?”

“Once.” There was no need to name him. “Just forget it. Don’t worry about it.”

“I can’t really help worrying. This is such a very important case and, apart from that, the fact that we’re working together with the police means we really ought to try to put up a good show. Don’t you agree?”

The Marshal began moving towards the car.

“The last thing I want to do,” insisted Bacci, following, “is to make a bad impression.”

“Don’t worry about it. He was just using you to make that speech to us all. It wasn’t anything personal.”

“But even so …” Bacci glanced over his shoulder to where Simonetti was now deep in intimate conversation with both investigators, one of whom was listening, the other smoking and looking in another direction. Simonetti’s driver had got out of the car and was holding an umbrella over him but the other two seemed indifferent to the rain falling steadily on their heads.

“Those two, for instance, Esposito and Di Maira … They solved that big drug case, do you remember? The one where they were exporting heroin in shoe boxes. And Esposito—he got that bullet wound in a shoot out in Piazza Santa Maria Novella. I heard him telling Noferini at one point when we were up at Galluzzo.”

“Noferini? Is he the young policeman?”

“The lieutenant, yes.”

“Well, take my advice. Stick close to him. Talk to him. He’ll always know more about it than you do. Take your lead from him. It’s their show, this, don’t forget it.”

“I won’t. The last thing I want to do is to blot my copybook at this stage.”

“You’re due for promotion, you mean.”

“It’s not only that—I shouldn’t be bothering you with my business …”

“No, no … Leaving aside all else, I’ve known you a long time—since you were what? Eighteen or so, I suppose.”

“Eighteen, yes. Anyway, you know my situation, my mother being widowed, and so on, and my sister still at university … It’s been a bit difficult.”

“You’ve been a good son.”

“I hope so, but … In short, I want to get married and once I’ve got this promotion, on a captain’s pay I think I can manage it all …”

“Good. Good.” The Marshal put an approving hand on Bacci’s shoulder. “I hope she deserves you.”

“Oh yes.” The young man’s face was pink. “She’s …”

“Good, good.”

“But you see, Marshal, I don’t want her to have to work—oh, she can as long as she wants to, I don’t mean it in that way, in an old-fashioned way. She enjoys her job, she teaches Italian in a school for foreign students. But we do want children and with the best will in the world I’ll be no help to her—you know what it’s like in this job.”