The Assassin's Dog

by David George Clarke

  The dog’s expression changed, her ears lifting slightly as she recognised the sound of the language, if not the words, and was calmed by it.

  “You see,” explained Jennifer as she continued in Italian, “although my legs aren’t tethered to this damn chair, I’m attached to it in such an awkward position that they might as well be. I’ve tried standing up and the rest of the chair just gets in the way. I might, with some effort, get to an upright position, but even if I manage to move around a bit, there’s no way I’d be able to get down those stone stairs. I’d probably fall and break my neck.”

  Goccia continued to stare at her, but gradually, now she no longer felt threatened, the tiredness brought on by her efforts to escape overtook her and her eyes closed.

  “It’s all right for you, Goccia, my friend, you think I’m going to save you, but to do that, I’ve got to save myself. You see, no one knows we’re here.”

  Feeling ridiculous to be lying upside down on the ground, constrained by a chair and talking in Italian to a sleepy dog, Jennifer exhaled angrily.

  “Bugger it, I’m going to get this thing upright.”

  It was easier said than done, but after several minutes of easing herself along the floor away from the danger of falling over the edge of the platform, she arrived at a wall she could push against. She squirmed and wriggled the chair around until finally it was standing upright.

  She slumped in it, tired from the effort.

  Looking down at her wrists, which were chafed from the continual rubbing of the tight plastic ties against her skin as she was manoeuvring the chair, she pulled a face at Goccia, who had moved with her and was now stretched out at her feet.

  “I’m going to have to work on these things with my teeth,” she said, nodding towards the ties. “It’s the only way I can think of to get free. I’m afraid it will take a while.”

  To reach the ties with her mouth involved bending over awkwardly, making progress painfully slow. Jennifer had no idea how long she had been slowly and laboriously filing at the tie on her right wrist with her teeth, but it wasn’t until Goccia suddenly sat up and barked that she noticed the daylight was starting to fade.

  “What is it, Goccia? What can you …”

  Then she too heard it, heard a siren, two sirens, and ahead of them, far closer, she heard the sound of boots running on gravel and of several people pounding up the stairs, followed by shouted, insistent commands.

  “Armed police! Put down your weapons at once!”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  After three days of intensive debriefing that included several sessions with a police force psychologist, Jennifer was exhausted. On their drive to London the following Friday afternoon to meet up with Henry and Connie at Henry’s Hampstead house, Derek had let her sleep.

  Henry and Connie greeted them at the door.

  “I’m not sure you should be allowed out on your own,” said Henry as he gathered Jennifer into his arms, his voice breaking with emotion. “We were far too slow to make the connections. Thinking about what nearly happened is the stuff of nightmares that will haunt me for as long as I live.”

  Jennifer hugged him and then Connie before turning and bending to pick up the small pug now sitting patiently behind her.

  “Yes, I have this young lady to thank for everything,” she said. “Her timing on pressing the buttons on the remote control was perfect.”

  “Goccia the superstar,” said Henry, squeezing the wrinkled folds of skin on Goccia’s head.

  Goccia looked up at him, suspicious at first, but her finely tuned instincts quickly told her she was in the company of yet another friend. She had made many over the last few days and was rather overwhelmed by all the attention.

  “Let’s go inside,” said Connie. “If you are hungry after your journey, there’s plenty of yummy food along with tea and coffee, and for later we have Henry’s finest bubbly to toast Goccia.”

  As they turned to head indoors, there was a cry from the gate to the street. “Carissima!”

  Jennifer turned, a warm smile spreading across her face. She passed Goccia to Derek and held out her arms to greet Sofie Lukina, who was running towards her.

  “Jennifer, I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see you. You poor thing; this nightmare has been awful. As soon as I heard about Trisha, I wanted to take leave and join the search with you. But Paul said there were more than enough capable hands on the job. He also said he would act as liaison with Trisha’s squad in the Met for updates and insisted I didn’t pester you.”

  “I know,” said Jennifer, “but Paul’s version when I spoke to him briefly yesterday in between one grilling and another was that he’d had to tie you to your desk to keep you there.”

  “Not too far from the truth,” laughed Sofie, squeezing her friend again before turning to Goccia.

  “So this is the little heroine. Will she be getting a police bravery award?”

  “Several, according to Hawkins,” said Derek. “We’re thinking of hanging them all from her collar.”

  “Wow!” exclaimed Derek as he lowered himself into one of the deep sofas in Henry’s sitting room, his eyes soaking up the huge array of edible goodies Connie had ordered from Fortnum and Mason which were now occupying every inch of the coffee table in front of him. “This looks amazing.”

  “Tuck in,” laughed Connie, “just as long as you tell us what you can about developments this week.”

  “We can tell you everything,” said Jennifer as she reached for a slice of fruit cake. “We’re all involved and we know whatever we say won’t go beyond these walls.”

  “What have you managed to piece together,” asked Henry. “How did Gus Brooke get mixed up with Rosselli, a mafia assassin?”

  Jennifer smiled wistfully. “By chance, we think. We know that Rosselli had been recruited to kill me. He told me as much himself, although he wouldn’t say how much he’d been paid. I’m actually quite peeved by that.

  “When we saw him in the Horse and Hounds, he was searching for me, probably plotting how he would bump me off. We think his encounter with Gus was pure chance, that he was following us on the day Trisha disappeared and somehow got wind of Gus being involved.

  “According to Massimo Felice, Rosselli liked to set up elaborate plans for disposing of his targets so the deaths either looked like an accident or like someone else was to blame. Discovering the factory, which he must have checked out, and with Gus dumping Trisha’s body there, he developed a plan to kill me and have Gus blamed.

  “We know from a whole host of photos on his phone and computer that Rosselli discovered exactly what went on with Gus and Trisha and then used the information to blackmail Gus. He probably intended to persuade Gus into luring me to the factory, but in the end he didn’t need to since I turned up snooping around the fence.

  “There were surveillance recordings on Rosselli’s phone from a bunch of sophisticated cameras he’d placed in the factory buildings. He was staying only a few minutes’ drive away, probably spotted me on the video feed and hotfooted it to intercept me, summoning Gus as he did.

  “We think he intended to bump off Gus with the hoist-and-block-railway arrangement, making it look as if Gus had accidentally triggered the load, much like what actually happened to Rosselli himself. He hadn’t accounted for Goccia escaping and getting in his way.”

  “You’re sure it was Gus who met Trisha on the road?” asked Connie.

  Jennifer nodded. “Yes. As well as all Rosselli’s photos, forensics have found a load of evidence at the cottage. There were Trisha’s hairs in a brush in the downstairs bathroom and in the shower drains of two bathrooms that match not only in DNA but in the colour she’d had applied the afternoon she drove up to Nottingham. It was a rather stylish ash blonde. Probably couldn’t wait to see the surprise on my face when she walked in with it.

  “There were also Trisha’s fingerprints and DNA on a perfume bottle in the downstairs bathroom. On top of all that, there were fresh body fluid s
tains on the underside of the mattress in the master bedroom, mixtures of Gus’s and Trisha’s DNA.”

  “Underside?” questioned Sofie.

  “Gus must have turned the mattress when he cleaned up,” said Jennifer, “hoping forensics wouldn’t think of looking there.”

  “I wonder what would have happened if Rosselli hadn’t come along,” said Sofie. “Do you think Brooke would have got away with it?”

  Jennifer shook her head. “I doubt it. Derek and I were thinking strongly along the lines that he must be involved, which means as well as his house being searched once we’d persuaded Hawkins, the factory would also have been searched again and Trisha’s body found. Forensics also found bits of shredded plastic gloves with Gus’s DNA on them snagged on ropes near the body. We would have caught him.”

  “How is his wife?” asked Sofie.

  “Gutted, even though she knew what he was like. She loved him and was prepared to forgive him a lot. Although this might have been a stretch, even for her.”

  Henry was studying Jennifer’s face as she spoke. “There’s something else, Jennifer, isn’t there?” he said. “There’s something in your eyes; something you don’t understand.”

  Jennifer sighed in capitulation. “Just as well I don’t play poker. But yes, you’re right. There’s a bit of a mystery around whether Rosselli actually went inside the Brookes’ cottage. If that were the case and Gus were still alive, it could have blurred the evidence, even with all the DNA and so on putting him and Trisha in bed together.”

  She smiled at the look of anticipation in everyone’s eyes. Even Goccia had lifted her sleepy eyes to her.

  “Rosselli was certainly outside. We know that from the photos on his phone and, interestingly, from a few Goccia prints at the end of the garden.”

  “He brought Goccia along?” Sofie was incredulous.

  Goccia glared at her, a soft whine of dissent sounding in her throat.

  “Shush, Goccia,” said Jennifer. “She’s on your side.”

  Sofie reached out to reassure Goccia by stroking her much-petted head.

  “Trisha’s body was missing an earring,” continued Jennifer. “When forensics searched the cottage, they found one that matched in the drawer by Gus’s bed. But the strange thing is that among the photos Rosselli took of Trisha in the garage, when, incidentally, he must have unwrapped the towels from Trisha’s body, towels we see in place in later photos of the body, among those shots were several where Trisha is wearing earrings in both ears.”

  Henry frowned. “So you’re saying that he took one of the earrings and later gave it to Gus? Why would he do that?”

  “Not sure,” said Jennifer. “Maybe it was all part of the blackmail. But there’s a possibility he planted it in the drawer where we found it. If that were the case, it begs the questioned of what else he planted.”

  “He certainly wasn’t your run-of-the-mill assassin,” said Sofie. “And although I’m beside myself with gratitude that he was clearly rather eccentric, I still can’t understand why he didn’t just shoot you.”

  “Probably his fallback position,” agreed Jennifer, “but it looks as if he didn’t want me to anticipate the precise moment of my death. I mean, all the noise and the lights, he must have used them to stop me hearing the hoist thundering towards me.”

  “But Gus heard them,” objected Sofie.

  “No, he didn’t. He felt them,” said Jennifer. “Rosselli didn’t anticipate that. I felt them too but I was slower to react. When Gus felt them, he pushed me out of the way and took the full force of the impact himself.”

  Connie shuddered and reached out to squeeze Jennifer’s shoulder. “Doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “You’re right,” said Henry. He stood and walked over to where several bottles of Cristal champagne were chilling in ice buckets. “Nevertheless, we should thank our lucky stars that Signor Rosselli was a professional who enjoyed adding his own personal flourish to his work. That it finally failed thanks to his dog is poetic justice.”

  A cork popped. “It’s time to celebrate,” continued Henry as he filled champagne flutes and passed them round.

  “To serendipity,” he said, as they all raised their glasses.

  “And eccentric assassins,” added Sofie.

  Jennifer smiled as she bent over to kiss the top of Goccia’s head. “And,” she said, “pretty little pugs.”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Giorgio di Bari, Cosimo Graziano Rosselli’s lover of seven blissful years, was sitting in Cosimo’s favourite swivel leather recliner in the book-lined study where Cosimo had hatched so many of his plans.

  He stared through the rain-streaked window of the wet autumnal Rome day, but he saw nothing. His face was a crumpled wreck from more than a week of almost constant weeping, his mind a turmoil of distressed agitation. Cosimo’s daily calls had stopped, which could mean only one thing: his lover was dead.

  Tacit confirmation had arrived two days previously in the form of a Polizia anti-mafia squad who had made a brash, heavy-handed search of the apartment. They had told him nothing except that they would be back once they had decrypted Cosimo’s computer, after which he’d better have some answers.

  “Answers to what?” he had asked, but they simply sneered and left.

  Giorgio’s smile had been bittersweet as he stared at the door the angry police officers had slammed shut behind them. They would find nothing on the computer; it was a decoy designed to fool them. Rosselli’s real computer was long gone along with the phone Giorgio had used to speak to his lover. He had destroyed them both, the wealth of information they had contained now irretrievable. His obligation to Cosimo’s memory now was to remain strong enough to resist the interrogations he knew would follow, to face the Polizia down and give up nothing. At least having his highly connected lawyer present would prevent any brutal tactics.

  It helped that he could tell the truth in answer to at least some of the potential questions, since although he knew much about his lover’s activities, there were also important details that Cosimo had deliberately kept from him, details about which Giorgio could honestly say he knew nothing. If more than one person knows a secret, it is no longer a secret. That had been Cosimo’s credo and even with his lover and close confidante Giorgio, he had kept to it for the finer points of his strategies.

  But before the Polizia returned, there was one final instruction from Cosimo for Giorgio to follow, a procedure that Cosimo put in place at the very beginning of all assassination contracts, to be deployed in the event of failure.

  It was a simple enough process: a telephone number and a name to commit to memory, and instructions on where and how to make the call.

  However, for Giorgio it was harder than climbing the highest mountain, since by carrying it out he would be admitting to himself that his lover was dead, that everything in his life he cherished had gone forever.

  Cosimo’s rationale for the instructions was more dispassionate. He was the best at his trade, probably the best there had ever been, which meant that failure was unacceptable. To his warped way of thinking, should he ever fail, it would be owing to circumstances beyond his control, circumstances for which the client must therefore accept responsibility and, like Cosimo himself, pay the ultimate price.

  Giorgio dragged his feet to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head at his reflection, “I can’t go out looking like this.”

  Then he thought about it some more and realised he no longer cared. He splashed some water onto his face, pulled on a hoodie and headed for the street.

  The security boxes were in a grubby shop fifty metres down a dingy side street from the river Tiber. There were no keys to the boxes, only six-digit combination locks.

  Giorgio went to the smaller boxes at the rear of the premises and dialled six numbers into one of the locks. 7-0-3-3-9-1. Five of the numbers corresponded to the positions of letters in the alphabet, the sixth, which was
the second of the series, zero, kept the identical form to the letter it represented, the letter ‘o’. It was easy to remember. Goccia. 703391.

  Inside the box was a push-button Nokia phone left uncharged for months. Giorgio removed it and attached a portable charging block he pulled from his pocket. Once the phone had enough charge to fire up, he punched in the telephone number he had so reluctantly committed to memory.

  The answer came after several rings.

  “Si.” The voice was gruff, coarse.

  “Di Bari,” said Giorgio.

  “Si.”

  Giorgio paused for the briefest of moments before repeating the second piece of information, since he knew that in saying the words, he would be sealing a man’s fate.

  “Ettore Cambroni.”

  “Consider it done,” growled the voice.

  The call disconnected immediately.

  Clutching the phone like a grenade with its pin removed, Giorgio hurried back along the dingy street to the brightness beyond and without a pause, hurled it into the Tiber.

  Acknowledgments

  This novel could not have been completed without the help and encouragement of many people.

  First and foremost, my wife Gail is a source of constant support and encouragement. She is always there as a sounding board for ideas, a critical, constructive and patient reviewer of drafts, and an enthusiastic supporter as each book develops from isolated ideas into some sort of coherency. More than anyone, this book is dedicated to her, with love.

  In addition, I should like to thank my editor Susanna Moles for her incredible dedication in ensuring that as many rough edges as possible were polished out from the first draft onwards. Never afraid to criticise, she doggedly weeds out the waffle, the clunk and the irrelevant, invariably improving on the original. And the bits she likes, she raves about, which is wonderfully encouraging!