The Hermitage: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 9)

by LJ Ross

  “I’m not at the villa,” she surprised him by saying, when she answered the phone. “I’m around the corner, at a café in the Piazza Santa Croce waiting for you.”

  “You’re—around the corner?”

  “Magda’s with me,” she told him, so that he wouldn’t worry. “Meet us at the Caffe Gelato and I’ll order you a scoop of coffee ice cream.”

  Ryan hardly knew what to say, but there were few situations that couldn’t be resolved by sugared cream.

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” he replied, and a moment later he was drumming through the streets in search of his wife.

  * * *

  After meeting Anna and Magda in the square belonging to the church of Santa Croce, Ryan was brought up to speed with the results of Anna’s meeting with Andrea Conti while he worked his way through an enormous ice cream cone. Though he wished he could have been with Anna while she met with Conti, he had to admire her approach, which had ultimately been very successful and had elicited information about the Spatuzzi family much more quickly than his roundabout method with Inspector Ricci.

  “It strikes me that Monica Spatuzzi acted on her initial belief that a rival family took her son,” he said. “Everything Conti and Ricci have told us would support that,” he said. “But Riccardo still hasn’t been found and the spate of crimes are still ongoing, which could mean she’s still searching for answers. Sooner or later, Monica may turn her mind to the possibility of it having been someone else.”

  “Conti’s ‘little birds’ include someone in the police,” Anna said. “That seems obvious, and it also means he will be aware of who was interviewed earlier today. He’s already made the connection with you.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “It also seems obvious that, if Conti has found someone willing to talk, Monica Spatuzzi must have found several. Therefore, we have to assume she knows that we’re here and that Nathan Armstrong was interviewed earlier today. That puts him at risk.”

  “And it puts you both at risk,” Magda murmured.

  Two dark heads turned towards her, both having almost forgotten she was sitting beside them.

  “Yes,” Anna agreed.

  They sat there in the sunshine and watched the assortment of people passing by, idling away their afternoon, snapping pictures.

  “I’ll go and see her,” Ryan said, quietly.

  “Wh—?”

  “Monica Spatuzzi,” he clarified. “I’ll pay her a visit.”

  Anna stared at him, her face a mixture of fear and fury.

  “Over my dead body,” she warned him.

  “It is a very bad idea,” Magda agreed, practically wringing her hands together.

  “It’s a pre-emptive strike,” Ryan averred. “I don’t want to wait for her to come to us, on the basis of misinformation. I’ll explain to her that we pose no threat and aren’t connected to her son’s disappearance.”

  “Just like that?” Anna asked, dumbfounded.

  “Yes,” he murmured. “Just like that.”

  CHAPTER 17

  After a pit-stop at the charcuterie in Boldon, Phillips and Yates made their way back across the River Tyne and towards the Quayside, on its northern bank. It was an area they knew very well, being less than a couple of miles from Police Headquarters and the setting for a series of bombs which had laid siege to the city only a week before. The pace at which their lives moved onward with each new file that landed on their desks meant it was easy to forget past cases, but as they drove along the road leading to the courthouse, they were afforded a stark reminder. The Millennium Bridge directly overlooking the courthouse was still in tatters and its metal construct was in the process of being safely dismantled to make way for a replacement. Further upstream, the mighty Tyne Bridge still stood proudly against the cityscape, its bottle-green painted steel girders already in the process of being repaired and repainted and its tarmac restored to its former glory by an army of volunteer tradesmen, who had given up their free time as a matter of civic duty.

  “Makes you proud to see how people have pulled together,” Phillips said, gruffly. “It’ll take more than some fruitcake to kill off the community around these parts.”

  Yates nodded, thinking back to the widespread panic that had gripped the city.

  “Sometimes, I can sort of understand why people do what they do,” she said. “But bombing bridges and killing innocent people? It’s the worst kind of madness.”

  They stopped at a set of traffic lights and Phillips wondered how to respond. Melanie was still so young…but then, he remembered he’d been the same age when he started out in the business. It was their chosen path and there was no shying away from it.

  “There’s worse than that,” he said. “There’s no end to the kind of madness driving people to kill or to maim, to strike fear into the hearts of their neighbours. It’s human nature that some will be inhuman.”

  While Yates digested that, he pulled into a side street beside the courthouse and parked in one of the free bays.

  “That was lucky,” he said. “Better sort out a ticket, the inspectors are like bloody vultures ’round here.”

  A few minutes later, they made their way to one of the restored Victorian buildings lining the street. At one time, it might have been a shipping office or a storage warehouse but, now, it belonged to the shared offices of a group of barristers and called itself Riverside Chambers. The name of Edward Clarkson’s former workplace had been carved into the stone lintel above the doorway and, alongside it, there was a painted sign listing all the barristers who worked there. They were ranked in order of seniority and, as she ran her finger down the list, Yates spotted Clarkson’s name still listed on the entries.

  “They haven’t updated it since he left last year,” she observed.

  “Or maybe they thought he was coming back,” Phillips said. “Howay, let’s have a word with the clerks.”

  Once they were buzzed inside, they made their way up a narrow, plushly-carpeted flight of stairs and into a reception area where they were met by a young woman who had clearly been caught in the act of checking her social media accounts. After a brief word, she led them into a waiting room that reminded Phillips very much of a posh dental surgery he’d once been forced to attend after a particularly difficult encounter with a wisdom tooth. It was decorated with faux antique furniture and plants that were only just surviving, but the wallpaper was of expensively-striped silk and the carpet was a thick, ruby red, giving the overall impression of faded grandeur.

  “You both coppers, then?”

  They looked up at the unexpected sound of a broad Cockney accent and turned to see a man the size of a bear framing the doorway.

  “You’re about four hundred miles away from home, aren’t you, son?” Phillips joked.

  The man laughed good-naturedly and hulked into the room.

  “Colombia Road, born and bred,” he confessed, holding out his hand. “Stan Fowler, Head Clerk. Mind telling me who you are?”

  “DS Phillips and trainee DC Yates,” Frank replied, and once again retrieved his warrant card for inspection. “We need to have a word with you about Edward Clarkson.”

  “Ed? What’s he gone and done now, then?”

  Stan looked between them, as if he was expecting them to say the man had been caught streaking across a football pitch.

  “Ah, do you have a private room where we could chat?”

  Stan’s jovial face fell instantly as he realised things were not what they seemed.

  “Yeah, mate, no problem. This way.”

  He led them back out of the waiting room and up another narrow flight of stairs until they reached a large and well-appointed conference room with an enormous table in the centre of it, the kind Yates imagined navy admirals to have used when planning their strategies at sea.

  “How’s this?”

  “It’ll do,” Phillips replied. “Look, I won’t beat around the bush. Edward Clarkson was found dead yesterday morning and we’re treating it as
murder. We need to know all you can tell us about the man, professionally and privately, so we can try to find his killer.”

  Stan’s ruddy face lost a bit of colour.

  “I knew it,” he said.

  Phillips and Yates turned to one another in surprise.

  “What do you mean?”’

  “Well, it was bound to happen, sooner or later, wasn’t it?” Stan said, with a touch of sympathy. “You can’t go through life messing people around and not expect to have someone even the score. He always did fly too close to the sun, Eddie did.”

  “Are you saying he had a bad reputation, work-wise?” Yates asked.

  “Naw, love, Eddie knew his onions. It was just that he didn’t give a shit about anyone, that was his problem. You get some who know the law backwards and just don’t care how it affects people. Eddie was one of those.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Stan looked uncomfortable.

  “Look, I’ve been in this business all my working life. You get to know the different types.”

  Phillips left it, for now.

  “I understood that he worked for the CPS? Don’t they have their own offices?” he said.

  “Yeah, the CPS have their own offices for their internal lawyers and support staff,” Stan explained. “But they have an external advocate panel for court work—for most Crown Court trials, they’ll instruct a self-employed barrister like Eddie.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest, working in the same office space as the barristers who could be defending the person he was prosecuting?” Yates asked.

  Stan was mortally offended.

  “I don’t think you understand,” he said, very seriously. “Barristers are expected to have the highest standards of integrity. Just like in any law firm, they put Chinese Walls up—”

  “Chinese Walls?” Yates interjected. “Sorry, what do you mean?”

  “It’s like an invisible wall. If we have two barristers working from the same chambers, one for either side of a case, they understand that they should never discuss it except through the proper channels. There are strict rules of confidentiality, the Bar Council’s Code of Conduct and Ethics—”

  “Aye, that’s all very well and good,” Phillips said, slicing through the bumf. “But an arsehole’s still an arsehole, with or without a Chinese Wall.”

  One, two seconds ticked by and then Stan let out a roar of laughter that might have been heard back at the charcuterie.

  “You’re not wrong, there, mate,” he said, knuckling a tear from the corner of his eye. “Look, I’ll square with you: Eddie was a bit of a loose cannon.”

  Stan stole a glance over his shoulder, although the door was firmly shut.

  “He always liked a drink,” he confided. “And it got him well up shit creek, more than once.”

  “I didn’t see anything on his criminal record,” Yates put in.

  Stan ran a nervous hand over his chin.

  “Yeah…well, you wouldn’t, darlin’. Eddie knew a few people, pulled a few strings…you know.”

  “What people? What strings?”

  “I don’t know all the ins and outs, but I know he was pally with some bloke in CID a few years back…the feller who was sent down for dancing around toadstools in his undies? You know, that Gregson feller?”

  Phillips and Yates sighed in unison.

  “Yeah, we know him.”

  “Right, well, I reckon he’d be able to tell you more about how he got Eddie off on all those speeding charges,” he said. “Never went anywhere, so he must have had a word.”

  “Okay, thanks, we’ll look into it,” Phillips muttered, and mentally added it to the already burgeoning list of crimes and corrupt deeds that could be attributed to their former Detective Chief Superintendent Gregson, who was lounging behind bars at HMP Frankland, in Durham.

  “Coming back to Eddie, we understand he left chambers back in March of last year—is that right?”

  Stan scratched the top of his head, which was entirely bald and shone beneath the light of the central chandelier.

  “Yeah, would’ve been around then,” he said. “Dropped us right in the bloody shitter, n’all.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, he never gave us any notice, did he? Eddie just pitched up one Monday morning and said to me, ‘Stan, I’m packing it all in; cover all my cases and let me know what I owe for the ground rent’.”

  “Did he say why?” Phillips asked.

  “He clammed up like a bloody cat’s arse,” he replied. “All he said was, he wanted a fresh start. Thirty years I worked for him, thirty bloody years, and he gives me seven days’ notice and pisses off into the sunset. Left me with a right headache, I can tell you.”

  “Do you believe him, when he said he wanted a ‘fresh start’?”

  “Do I look like I was born yesterday?” Stan said, jerking a thumb towards his burly chest. “I knew straight away he must have got himself in over his head. Thought it’d be some sort of pyramid scheme or investment gone bad. If there was one thing Eddie liked more than the drink, it was money.”

  Yates nodded.

  “Can you be more specific? Did he ever mention anything that was worrying him?”

  Stan shook his head and echoed what Jill had already told them.

  “No, he wasn’t that sort. Eddie liked you to think nothing was too big of a challenge, at least not for him, and, as far as worries went, he didn’t have any. The most I ever got out of him was a mouthful, if a bundle of files hadn’t arrived on time.”

  Phillips looked out the window at the river as it chugged slowly towards the sea, at the gulls crying loudly as they swooped down to dive into the water, and thought of the kind of man Edward Clarkson, latterly Charon, had been. A picture was starting to build up and it wasn’t pretty. But, as Ryan would have said, every victim is equal in the eyes of the law and it wasn’t their job to judge the kind of life he had led; only to help deliver justice, whatever that meant.

  “Was he doing badly at work?” he asked, suddenly. “Had he had a run of bad cases?”

  Stan shook his head.

  “If anything, he was at the top of his game. Eddie kept himself trim and looked years younger than he was, not to mention that his brain was still sharp as a tack. Nobody even mentioned retirement because, honestly, I couldn’t imagine anyone less likely to while away his days doing arse all, watching daytime telly.”

  Stan grinned at what he thought was an outlandish possibility, then asked the obvious question.

  “Where’d you find him, anyway?”

  “In Warkworth,” Phillips replied. “Eddie was the boatman for the castle, giving ferry rides to tourists.”

  Stan let out another one of his roaring laughs.

  “You’ve got to be kidding! Eddie ‘Soft Top’ Clarkson, giving boat rides? Not in a month of Sundays,” he declared.

  “Well, certainly not anymore,” Phillips agreed, with a small grimace.

  CHAPTER 18

  If there was one thing Ryan had learned during his relationship with Anna, it was that words like, ‘no, you can’t come with me’ and ‘this might be dangerous’ held very little sway. Consequently, he found himself hijacked on the back of his own scooter, clutching Anna’s waist as she tootled through the backstreets of a city she hardly knew, in the general direction of the beautiful hilltop town of Fiesole, to the north of Florence.

  “I love it!” she cried out, while he spat out a mouthful of her long hair that was blowing into his face. “I can’t believe I’ve never ridden one of these before!”

  “Watch the road! Left, take a left!”

  “Right!”

  Ryan’s heart slammed against his chest in one hard motion as she swerved through a tiny gap in the traffic, pushing the scooter to its limits. They began to wind upward and into the verdant hills while the sun set behind them, casting wide arcs of pink and orange light over the city below.

  “How far?” Anna called back.

&n
bsp; “About another eight kilometres,” he told her, and was surprised to find that he was enjoying himself.

  “I love you.”

  “What?”

  “I love you!”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” he laughed, and held on a little tighter as she rounded another hairpin bend, zooming past a wide truck overloaded with livestock as they climbed higher into the Etruscan hills. “Get us through this in one piece and I’ll tell you again!”

  Twilight had fallen by the time they reached Fiesole. Anna slowed the scooter to a crawl as they navigated unfamiliar roads, passing the outline of vast estates and ruined Roman walls and amphitheatres that had been built against the rock-face thousands of years before. The historian inside her cried out to explore, to understand everything there was to know about the elite little hillside commune that had once been a stronghold, then a summer residence for rich and famous Florentines and artists such as Leonardo da Vinci.

  But there was no time for that.

  “It’s further along here, on the right, I think,” Ryan told her. “Stop for a minute.”

  She pulled the scooter into a narrow lay-by and shut off the engine, giving Ryan a chance to dismount.

  “There’s a restaurant further along the road, in the town centre,” he said. “You carry on and I’ll meet you there in an hour. If I’m not back by then, call Ricci.”

  She didn’t hesitate, but grabbed a fistful of his shirt.

  “You’re not going in there alone.”

  Ryan placed a gentle hand over hers.

  “You’ve brought me this far but, Anna, you don’t speak the language and I don’t want them catching a glimpse of you. It’s less risky this way.”

  Anna’s heart sank because she knew he was right. She didn’t speak the language and, besides, she wouldn’t know the first thing to say, even if she did.

  “Wait for me at the restaurant,” he said. “I’ll be there, I promise.”

  Anna felt a lump rise to her throat.

  “What if anything…anything happens—”

  “It won’t,” he said firmly. “It isn’t in her interest to hurt me, not when I can help her.”