Just One Evil Act: A Lynley Novel
Page 28
“I was afraid of that,” Lynley admitted. “With due respect, it is a decidedly odd way to proceed. In my country—”
“Sì, sì. Lo so,” Salvatore said. “Your prosecutors do not involve themselves in an investigation. But you are in my country now, and so you will learn that often we must allow certain things to play out so that other things—unknown to the magistrato—can play out as well.”
Salvatore waited to see if Lynley would follow what he was hinting at. Lynley observed him for a long moment as a group of tourists entered the café. They were loud and aggressive, and Salvatore winced at the hardness of their language. Two of them went to the bar and ordered in English. Americans, he thought with resignation. They always believed the entire world spoke their language.
Lynley said, “What, then, actually comprised the confession of Carlo Casparia? The parents will want to know this, and for that matter, I’d like to know it as well.”
Salvatore told him how Fanucci envisioned the crime, based upon the drug addict’s words, dutifully committed to paper. It was simple enough, according to il Pubblico Ministero: Carlo is at the mercato in his usual position with Ho fame hanging round his neck. The little girl sees this, and she gives him her banana. He sees her innocence, and in her innocence, he also sees an opportunity. He follows her as she leaves the mercato, heading in the direction of Viale Agostino Marti.
“But why would she be heading there?” Lynley asked.
Salvatore waved off the question. “A mere detail that does not interest Piero Fanucci, my friend.”
He went on with the rest of the crime as Fanucci envisioned it: Carlo snatches the little girl somewhere along the route. He stashes her at some stables where he has slept rough since first coming to Lucca when his parents tossed him out of their Padova home. There he holds her until he can find someone to whom he can hand her off for money. This money he uses to feed his drug habit. You will note he stopped begging at the mercato after her disappearance, no? Certo, he has no need for drug money at the moment and now we know why. Mark my words well. When this monster runs out of money, he will turn to begging at the mercato once again.
As far as il Pubblico Ministero was concerned, Salvatore explained, everything was neatly in place to mark Carlo Casparia as culpable: His motive was and would always be the acquisition of money for drugs. Everyone knew that Ho fame indicated the vagrant’s hunger for cocaine, marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine, or whatever other substance he was shoving regularly into his system. His means were as obvious as being able to rise to his feet and follow the little girl once she generously and innocently handed over her banana to assuage his supposed hunger. The mercato itself was his opportunity. It was, as always, crowded with both shoppers and tourists. Just as no one had noticed the child being snatched from the vicinity of the accordion player—which, of course, we now know didn’t happen anyway—so also no one had noticed Casparia taking her by the arm and guiding her away.
To all of this, the Englishman remained silent, but his face was sombre. He stirred his cappuccino. So far, he’d not tasted it, so intently had he been listening to Salvatore’s tale. Now, he drank it straight down, and he broke his dolce into two pieces although he ate neither. “Forgive me for not entirely understanding how you proceed when this sort of conclusion is arrived at,” he said. “Has the public minister any evidence that supports this man’s confession or his own picture of the crime? Does he need any evidence?”
“Sì, sì, sì,” Salvatore told him. The magistrato’s instructions—coming fast on the heels of Casparia’s confession—were now being followed.
“And they are?” Lynley enquired politely.
The stables where Carlo Casparia had been living rough for so long were now being sorted out by a group of scenes-of-crime officers. They would be looking for evidence of the child’s being held there for whatever period was necessary before Carlo decided what to do with her.
“Where are these stables, exactly?” Lynley asked.
They were in the Parco Fluviale, Salvatore told him. He had been intending to head there when Lynley arrived at the questura. Would the Englishman like to accompany him to see the scene?
He would indeed, Lynley told him.
It was only a brief ride round the enormous city wall to reach the quartiere of Borgo Giannotti. There, from beyond its main street with its line of busy shops, one ultimately gained access to the parco. During this ride, Lynley asked the questions that Salvatore had been anticipating as he told the tale of Carlo Casparia’s recent confession.
What about the red car? the detective enquired. What did il Pubblico Ministero think about it? And was it the magistrato’s opinion that Casparia had given Hadiyyah over to the owner of the car, who then took Hadiyyah into the hills? And if the date on which this red car, the man, and the child had been sighted was the actual day on which Hadiyyah had gone missing . . . didn’t it then follow that Carlo Casparia would have had to know all along to whom he was going to deliver the child? Didn’t this suggest quite a degree of planning on his part? Did Signor Fanucci envision Casparia as capable of this? Did Salvatore himself envision this?
“As to the red convertible car,” Salvatore said with an approving glance at Lynley, “the magistrato knows nothing of this car. Even as you and I go to the parco to ensure his will is being carried out, one of my officers is driving into the Alps with the man who saw that car. They will attempt to identify the point at which he saw it. A search will then be conducted of the immediate area of the lay-by where the car was parked. If nothing is found, every lay-by between the village where the mother of our witness lives and the start of that road into the Alps will be searched.”
“Without the magistrate’s knowledge?”
“Sometimes,” Salvatore said, “Piero doesn’t know what’s good for Piero. I must help him realise this in the best way I can.”
LUCCA
TUSCANY
The stables in the Parco Fluviale stood perhaps a mile along the lane that skirted the springtime rush of the River Serchio and coursed through the southern section of the park. They comprised a derelict set of buildings, long unused for their intended purpose, and out in front of them a faded sign giving the costs of horse hiring had been the victim of ill-talented graffiti artists and hunters looking to practise their shooting on its surface.
A crime scene van was parked on a narrow gravel access road into the stable area, and Lo Bianco pulled next to the police tape that marked the site as inaccessible to the few journalists who had already received word that some kind of action was happening in the parco. Lo Bianco muttered when he saw them. He ignored their demands of “Che cosa succede? ” and took Lynley into the immediate vicinity of Carlo Casparia’s home away from home.
At the moment, the activity was centred on a single stable backed by a tree-studded berm. This was situated behind a line of tangled shrubbery, most of which appeared to be wild roses coming into bloom, and it comprised a line of some dozen stalls with tall doors hanging open to display the disreputable contents within. Obviously, the entire place had been used as a dosshouse for ages by any number of people, and contained within it was so much rubbish that sorting through it all for a sign of a particular little girl’s presence was going to take weeks. Filthy mattresses lay everywhere. Used hypodermic needles, limp condoms, and discarded takeaway food containers were scattered on the ground. Plastic cartons, old clothing, and mildewed blankets formed mounds in corners, while carrier bags filled with rotting food sent into the air a foul miasma, which had attracted vast clouds of flies and gnats.
Within all of this detritus moved two crime scene officers. “Come va?” Lo Bianco called out.
One lowered his mask and answered, “Merda!” The other said nothing but shook his head. It seemed, thought Lynley, that they knew their occupation was going to be a useless one.
Lo Bianco said to Lynley, “Come with me, Ispe
ttore. There is something more to see in this place,” and he walked to the back of the stables, where a faint trail through the tall wild grass and wildflowers led up the berm and between two chestnut trees.
Here, Lynley saw, a path had been created by dog walkers, cyclists, runners, and, perhaps, families out for a passeggiata on long summer evenings. It was well worn, and it followed along the top of the berm in both directions, mimicking the route of the lane through the parco as well as the course of the river. Lo Bianco began to walk along it. In less than one hundred yards, he broke to the left, descended another berm, crossed a wooded area thick with sycamores, alders, and beeches, and came out on the edge of a playing field.
Lynley saw at once where they were. Across the field lay a patch of gravel suitable as a small car park. To the right of this two picnic tables rested beneath the trees. In front of them and across a path was the playing field, divided by more concrete paths along which saplings grew. Far to the west of all this stood a café in which, he assumed, the parents of the children who came to this place to be coached by Lorenzo Mura might wait, enjoying refreshments as they watched their budding football players undertaking another session with the man in order to improve their skills.
Lynley looked at Lo Bianco. The chief inspector, he saw, was not the fool of Piero Fanucci, no matter what the magistrato might think in the matter.
“I wonder,” Lynley said, indicating the playing field, “if Signor Casparia might be able to ‘imagine’ something more, Chief Inspector?”
“What would this be?” Lo Bianco asked.
“We have, after all,” Lynley said, “only Lorenzo Mura’s word for it that Hadiyyah was taken from the market that day. You must have thought of that at some point.”
Lo Bianco smiled slightly. “This would be one of the reasons why I have had my own suspicions about Signor Mura,” he replied.
“Would you mind if I talked to him? About more, I mean, than merely explaining the nature of Carlo Casparia’s ‘confession.’”
“I mind not in the least,” Lo Bianco said. “Nel frattempo, I shall be looking at the other calciatori on his team. One of them may drive a red convertible. This would, I think, be interesting to know.”
PISA
TUSCANY
As far as he was concerned, meeting anywhere near Campo dei Miracoli was lunacy since there were dozens of other places where they could have met unnoticed in the city. But it was to Campo dei Miracoli that he’d been summoned, so he went to that site of tourism run amok. He worked his way through what seemed like five hundred people taking photographs of their mates pretending to hold up the tower, and he crossed between the Duomo and the Baptistery to the cimitero behind its high and forbidding walls. He went to the room he’d been instructed to find: where several of the location’s affreschi had been moved after their restoration. No one would be there, he’d been assured. If, when the tour buses stopped and debouched their passengers at the gates to Piazza dei Miracoli, the gitanti were given forty minutes to scurry about and have their photographs taken before being carted off to the next site on their list, they weren’t about to seek out the cemetery. With its half-demolished affreschi and its one decent sculpture of a woman in repose, this place would be deserted, and they would be safe from scrutiny here.
Safe from scrutiny they needed to be, he thought sardonically, considering what his employer looked like. For never had vanity led a man to such stupidity in the area of his personal appearance as it had led Michelangelo Di Massimo.
Di Massimo was already there, waiting. As promised, he was the only person in the room with the restored affreschi, and from a bench in the centre of the room he was studying one of them—or at least pretending to do so—with a guidebook opened on his knee and a pair of half-moon reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. The professorial air they lent him was completely at odds with the rest of him: the bleached yellow hair, the black leather jacket, the leather pantaloni, the stiff black boots. No one would mistake him for a professor of anything or even for a student of anything. But then, no one would mistake him for what he was, either.
There was no point to hiding his approach, so he did nothing to stifle the sharp tap of his footsteps on the marble floor. He lowered himself onto the bench next to Di Massimo, and he gazed upon the fresco to which the other man was giving his rapt attention. He saw that Di Massimo was fixed upon his namesake. Sword in hand, Michael the Archangel was either driving someone out of paradise—at least he reckoned it was paradise—or he was welcoming someone into paradise. Who really cared? For he simply couldn’t work out what all the shouting was about when it came to the rescued affreschi in this place. They were faded and worn and in spots whatever they depicted was barely visible.
He wanted a cigarette. Either that or a woman. But the thought of women took him directly back to his wallow in the dirt with his half-mad cousin and he preferred not to think about that.
He couldn’t fathom what got into him whenever he saw Domenica. She’d been pretty enough once, but that time was long past and still when she was in his presence, he wanted to possess her, to show her . . . something. And what did that say about him, that he still wanted the madwoman after all this time?
Next to him on the bench, Michelangelo Di Massimo stirred. He snapped his guidebook closed and deposited it into a rucksack at his feet. From this he took a folded newspaper. He said, “The British police are now involved. Prima Voce has the story. There’s been a television appeal. You saw it?”
Of course he had not. In the evening when the telegiornale was broadcast, he was at his regular job at Ristorante Maestoso, unavailable to the television news. During his days, he was preoccupied with seducing the commesse in the fancier shops and boutiques in town in order to talk them into ringing up a pair of socks for him while they bagged a fine linen shirt instead. Thus he had no time for television or tabloids. Whatever he knew about this matter of searching for the missing child, he knew only from Di Massimo.
Di Massimo passed the copy of Prima Voce over to him. He scanned the story. Scotland Yard, a detective inspector in Lucca to act as liaison with the parents of the girl, more information about those parents, dismissive remarks about British policing from that idiot Fanucci, and a carefully worded statement from Chief Inspector Lo Bianco indicating cooperation between the two police forces. There was an accompanying photo of the English detective in conversation with Lo Bianco. They were in front of the questura in Lucca, Lo Bianco’s arms crossed on his chest and his head lowered as he listened to something the Englishman was saying to him.
He passed the tabloid back to Di Massimo. He felt rather irritated with him. He hated having his time wasted, and if he’d had to come from the centre of town to Campo dei Miracoli merely to see something that he could have seen by stopping at the nearest giornalaio and purchasing a copy of the newspaper, he was going to be more irritated still. Thus he gestured rudely at the paper and said, “Allora?” in a way that indicated his impatience. To underscore this, he got up and paced the distance to the farthest wall. “This cannot be a surprise to you, Michelangelo. She’s missing. She’s a child. She’s gone without a trace. She’s British.” The implication was obvious: Of course the English coppers were going to stick their fingers into this pie he and Di Massimo were baking. Had Di Massimo expected something less?
“Not the point,” Di Massimo said. “Sit down. I don’t want to raise my voice.”
He waited till his order had been complied with before he went on. “This man and Lo Bianco . . . they came to my calcio practice the other day.”
He felt a sudden shift in his equilibrium. “And they talked to you?” he asked.
Di Massimo shook his head. “They thought—I expect—that I did not see them. But this”—he tapped the side of his nose—“has a talent for knowing when the cops are present. They came, and they watched. Less than five minutes. Then they were gone.”
“Aspetti.” Di Massimo went on to say that the two men had come to see him on the previous day, interrupting his appointment with his parrucchiere in the midst of having his blond locks maintained.
“Merda!” This was the worst possible news. “How in God’s name did they find you?” he demanded. “First at calcio and then this other? How the hell did they find you?”
“How does not matter,” Di Massimo said.
“Of course it matters! If not to you, then to me. If they’re on to you . . . If they’ve found you already . . .” He felt panic rising. “You swore to me enough time had passed. You said that no one would connect you to this matter of the girl.” He thought rapidly, trying to see what other connections were possible for the police to make. For if they’d found Michelangelo Di Massimo within a week of the girl’s disappearance, how much longer would it be till they found him as well? “This has to be taken care of,” he said. “Now. Today. As soon as possible.”
“Which is why you and I are meeting, my friend,” Michelangelo told him. He looked at him levelly. “I find that it’s time. We’re clear on that, yes?”
He nodded once. “I know what to do.”
“Be hasty about doing it, then.”
FATTORIA DI SANTA ZITA
TUSCANY
Lynley wasn’t entirely honest with Lo Bianco about speaking to Lorenzo Mura. He also wanted to talk to Angelina. So with the chief inspector’s blessing on the matter, he drove out to the fattoria. It appeared to be a busy day at the place, with all evidence saying that, one way or another, life had to go on.