by LJ Ross
“Okay, assuming they didn’t need to drug her, it stands to reason that this person lured Martina away from the events space at the Uffizi and into the Vasari Corridor on strength of character alone.”
“What about the workmen, wouldn’t they have seen her?” Phillips asked. “I thought there were renovations going on?”
“Not on a Friday afternoon,” Ricci said. “Our master craftsmen like their early finishes at the end of the week as much as yours, my friend.”
Phillips nodded. Who didn’t like a pint down at their local after work on a Friday? It was the only civilised way to live.
“Maybe they told her they’d found a new entrance, or maybe they wanted to show her their concerns about security access for the party?” Ryan thought aloud. “If they already had Martina’s trust, they could have told her any number of lies to get her away from the communal areas.”
“Poor lass,” Phillips said, gruffly.
“I agree that it must have been somebody who was already a guest at the party, or who managed to gain entry,” Ricci said, steering them back towards the facts. “Anybody who was registered to attend could reasonably have discussed security arrangements to find out how things run at the gallery. As for Armstrong himself, his public engagements are listed on his website—”
“Does he have an assistant?” Phillips asked. “Somebody to arrange things for him? He looks the type.”
“He certainly looks the type,” Banotti agreed, with a grin. “But no, he prefers to manage his own affairs.”
Never a truer word spoken, Ryan thought. Men like Armstrong wouldn’t like third parties looking too closely into their lives.
“How about his publisher?” he said. “I met somebody by the name of Gabriele last night who appeared to know Armstrong well.”
And they were of the same height and build, he added to himself.
“Gabriele Marchesa,” Ricci confirmed. “He is the Chief Executive of Elato, Armstrong’s Italian publisher and a patron of the arts in Florence. Publishing has been in his family for generations, although he only recently took up the position after his brother passed away, last year. We have an appointment to speak to him, first, at nine o’clock.”
Four pairs of eyes swung up to check the clock on the wall, which read five to the hour.
“Any minute now,” Ryan murmured
CHAPTER 33
A bracing wind circled the Florentine valley, humming through the tall trees and sweeping around the elegant old villa. MacKenzie was seated at the desk in the study with her laptop open, scrolling through a mind-boggling list of cases the late Edward Clarkson had prosecuted during his active years as a barrister, sent through by trainee DC Melanie Yates. She narrowed her eyes as she studied the list, recognising several cases she’d worked on over the years, tutting now and then as she thought of the memorable ones.
You could never win them all, but it was remarkable how many Clarkson had won during his time with the Crown Prosecution Service.
Perhaps too remarkable.
The law was there to provide checks and balances and, despite all she saw during her day job, she was firmly of the opinion that a person was innocent until proven guilty. She was not of the Old Guard, who sometimes believed that a conviction should be obtained at all costs, even if it meant bending the law. She believed in the process, which relied on them providing enough evidence to remove all reasonable doubt in the minds of a jury. If their case fell short…well, that was where the Defence came in.
There must be a balance on both sides, or justice meant nothing.
Unfortunately, that meant there were times when guilty ones walked free. But, from what she could see of Clarkson’s work record, he had been a man who liked to win. That kind of ambition was a double-edged sword, she’d always found, for where did it end? There was always the next conquest to strive for, the next notch on his legal belt.
Helpfully, Yates had taken the trouble to cross-check all the cases Clarkson had prosecuted against a list of prisoners who had recently been released, over an eighteen-month period. She’d highlighted those rows and, when MacKenzie clicked on their names, a separate summary note popped up giving pertinent details of each. A quick scroll down the spreadsheet threw up around a hundred different names.
“Okay,” MacKenzie said, clicking on the first highlighted name. “Here goes.”
* * *
An hour passed quickly and MacKenzie hardly looked up when Anna stuck her head around the door.
“Mac?”
“Mm hmm?”
“Brought you a cuppa,” her friend said, setting a cup and saucer down beside her. “How’s it going?”
“Slowly,” MacKenzie replied, rolling her shoulders to ease the tension. “When I look at these case summaries, there’s nothing obvious that jumps out at me. Yes, all these people had reason to dislike Edward Clarkson since he contributed to their guilty verdict. But, on the other hand, he was just a cog in the wheel, part of a wider system of justice. Although it’s a bit of a stereotype about ex-cons chasing down the people who put them away, it hardly ever happens in real life.”
Anna decided not to mention an obvious recent exception to that; it had only been a year since MacKenzie’s own ordeal with The Hacker, after he’d broken free from prison. It did no good to rake up the past, especially such painful memories.
“What kind of people are they? The ones who got out recently, I mean.”
MacKenzie decided they were too far gone to worry about breaching confidentiality; sometimes, it was a case of picking your battles.
“I’ve already discarded the ones who served a minor jail term,” she said, turning the laptop screen around so Anna could see the magnitude of her task. “It’s not outside the realms of possibility that somebody who was handed a two-year jail term held a grudge, but it’s much more likely that somebody who was put away for a good chunk of time would have hated Clarkson enough to kill him.”
Anna made a murmuring sound of agreement as her eye scanned the names.
“It’s more interesting that this guy—Clarkson, I mean—was the one to run away. He must have known somebody dangerous was about to be released and made preparations to sell up and change his name and address. He needed advance warning, to give himself time to do all that.”
MacKenzie smiled, thinking that her friend had a knack for detection.
“Yes, that’s what I thought, too. So, I’m prioritising serious cases where the prisoner completed their sentence up to six months before Edward Clarkson moved into Warkworth, last March. That takes us back to September 2016, potentially, but if nothing turns up I can always go further back in the records.”
“Narrowing down the timescale and looking at the nature of their crimes is good, but can’t you just find the leak?”
MacKenzie gave her a quizzical look and Anna shrugged.
“You know, his contact. The person who must have told Edward Clarkson when this dangerous person was due to get out?”
“If only,” MacKenzie sighed. “That sort of information could be found quite easily, through the proper channels, especially since Clarkson worked in the same sort of field. He probably knew loads of people who could have kept him up to date on this person’s movements.”
Anna pulled a face.
“Back to the spreadsheet it is, then,” she said.
“I’m afraid so,” MacKenzie said, and took a grateful sip of tea. “What about you? Ryan tells me you put together the Murder Board.”
She nodded towards the study wall, now heaving with information.
“I guess I’ve seen him do it so many times, at home, it seemed like the thing to do,” Anna said, a bit embarrassed. “I wonder how the interviews are coming along. Unless there’s some kind of breakthrough, I don’t know how they’re going to crack this one.”
MacKenzie toasted her teacup.
“If there’s a Ryan, there’s a way,” she said.
CHAPTER 34
“I can’t under
stand a bloody thing they’re saying.”
Phillips made his pronouncement from the observation area overlooking one of the interview rooms at the Gruppo, where he and Ryan had been permitted to stay and watch. Unfortunately, his Italian phrasebook just wasn’t cutting the mustard.
Not so for Ryan, who found himself stepping into the shoes of a translator for the duration.
“Ricci is asking a few warm-up questions of Gabriele Marchesa,” he said, his eyes never moving from the glass. “He’s saying that somebody with malicious intent is trying to damage Armstrong’s reputation—ha ha—and he’s wondering if Marchesa can help them to understand why. He’s asking how he first met Armstrong.”
Phillips turned to watch a smart, slightly red-faced man in his fifties gesticulate with his left hand, which sported a gold pinkie ring.
“He replied that he only met Armstrong about a year ago, at a dinner in London with Armstrong’s UK publishing house…” Ryan murmured. “He’s rambling on about the meal they had…Ricci is asking if that meeting coincided with him taking over the family business and Marchesa agrees. He’s saying his brother managed Elato Publishing for the past thirty years. He doesn’t go into the details, but says he returned from living abroad when his brother died, and the business had an uncertain future. He didn’t want to see it go under.”
“Wonder what he was doing with himself before,” Phillips thought aloud, mirroring the question Ricci had just asked in rapid Italian.
“He says he was a man of leisure, having inherited a trust from his maternal grandmother. He was also bought out of the publishing house when he was a younger man, allowing him to live freely. He only manages operations now, he doesn’t own any significant shares.”
“We already know the Spatuzzi’s hoovered up most of those,” Phillips put in.
Ryan nodded.
“Ricci’s asking him whether he saw anyone resembling Armstrong, or wearing the same mask, during the party,” he continued. “Marchesa says he didn’t, he was with Armstrong for most of the first half of the evening, introducing him to all the guests, then he gave a speech at around eight o’clock and Armstrong was standing near the front of the crowd. He came onto the podium and gave an impromptu speech and it was not an imposter. He says that, in the second half of the evening, people just mingled.”
“Bet that speech was scintillating,” Phillips said, with a chuckle.
“It was interminable,” Ryan muttered. He and Anna had found themselves near the front of the crowd, too, and had therefore been unable to beat a hasty retreat. “Banotti is asking him whether he left the Uffizi at any time during the night and Marchesa says he didn’t leave the room other than to use the facilities. Most people left at around midnight and he was among the last of them.”
They fell silent for a moment while those in the interview room paused to take a collective sip of water or coffee, before resuming their conversation.
“Ricci wants to know who liaised with the events planner at the Uffizi,” Ryan said, with approval. “Marchesa says he liaised with her himself, alongside one of their publishing assistants—a woman called Sienna—as well as several other parties who were contributing to the event, including private security teams and Nico Bellucci, a local art dealer who was also providing a bespoke ice sculpture.”
“Ice sculpture?” Phillips queried.
“That’s what the man said,” Ryan grinned, then rubbed absently at his throat. He’d taken the executive decision, against doctor’s orders, to remove his neck brace; primarily because it irritated him but also because there had been no adverse effects on his back or spine, at least none that weren’t to be expected.
Phillips reached for the warm camomile tea that was cooling on the table behind him and pressed it into his friend’s hand.
“Thanks,” Ryan murmured, taking a long slug of the soothing liquid before turning back to the interview that was playing out in front of them. “He looks relaxed, doesn’t he?”
“Doesn’t seem worried,” Phillips agreed. “Either he’s got nothing to hide, he knows nothing, or he’s used to being inside a police station.”
“Maybe all of the above,” Ryan murmured.
* * *
“It’s called prosecutorial bias.”
By lunchtime, Anna and MacKenzie had relocated to the more salubrious surroundings of the terrace and were nibbling the fresh pasta that Magda had placed before them.
“God, this is delicious,” Anna said, and scooped up another forkful. “What were you saying about bias?”
“Prosecutorial bias,” MacKenzie said again. “It refers to when members of the prosecuting team, including the barrister for the CPS, withhold evidence or act without the appropriate level of integrity just to get a conviction. It’s caused some massive scandals in the past, because so many cases were found to have been worthy of retrial or dismissed altogether on appeal thanks to their actions. It doesn’t help anybody, in the long-run, and undermines public confidence in the system.”
“You’re thinking Edward Clarkson might have dabbled a bit?”
MacKenzie chewed thoughtfully, then nodded.
“It’s certainly a possibility. The cases we’ve identified so far all concern convictions from the late nineties or early noughties, which was Clarkson’s heyday. We’re still dealing with the fall-out of numerous appeals from that period.”
“So your theory is that somebody was sent down for the wrong reasons? Maybe they were innocent altogether?” Anna said.
“It would certainly fit the bill but…” She paused, shaking her head. “An innocent man doesn’t get out and commit murder. That would make him guilty, after all.”
It was a moral minefield.
“If this person, whoever they are, has been in prison for twenty-odd years they might have changed,” Anna pointed out. “They wouldn’t be the same person as before.”
MacKenzie looked across the table at her friend and nodded.
“You’re right,” she said. “This wouldn’t be an innocent person, any more. It could be a broken, damaged human being who had lost all faith in the society that had thrown him behind bars. And it’s people like that who tend to commit the most dangerous acts because they think, ‘I’ve been in prison before and I’ve already served a long sentence—I’m not afraid to do it again’.”
They fell silent for a moment, the food forgotten as their appetite vanished.
“Let’s look at that list again,” MacKenzie said. “We have no forensic leads, no recent assaults, no history of threats being made or large payments to any one individual. It has to be somebody on that list, or we’ve nowhere else to turn.”
CHAPTER 35
The interview suite at the Gruppo’s headquarters had been a revolving door of Uffizi staff and guests, each suffering from varying degrees of hangover but none quite so much as Nico Bellucci. Through the glass partition, Ryan watched as the man wove into the room, clearly still inebriated from the night before, and plonked down heavily on one of the chairs.
“Looks like somebody enjoyed himself, at least,” Phillips laughed.
“I think he’s got a reputation for it,” Ryan said. “He was pretty far gone when Anna and I saw him last night.”
“Got to know your own limits,” Phillips said, sadly.
His own father had been a functioning alcoholic and it had caused them years of worry and heartbreak, before he’d passed away prematurely at the age of fifty-nine. Only a few years older than Frank was now, or than the man sitting in the room beyond.
He watched Bellucci clutch his hands together to stop them trembling and sighed, thinking that it was just another tell-tale sign.
“It’ll be a miracle if he remembers much,” Ryan said, without any unkindness. There were many kinds of people in the world, but he could safely say that none of them was infallible, least of all himself. “Ricci’s asking him how he came to know Armstrong. He says he only met him for the first time at the party last night. He knew of him but ha
d never met him before then.”
Phillips scrubbed a hand over his face and yawned.
“What’s he saying now?”
“Banotti’s asking who hired him to procure the ice sculpture…he says he was contacted by the events planner, Martina Calari. He’s saying how sorry he was to hear about what happened to her, she seemed like a nice girl…” Ryan trailed off, deeming the remainder more of the same. “He says he met with her twice. The first time was two months ago, to discuss the plans for the design, and the second time was on the day she went missing. He met her with Gabriele Marchesa, another publishing assistant whose name he can’t remember, and the Head of Security for the Uffizi. Matteo something or other.”
“At least he corroborates what Gabriele Marchesa said earlier,” Phillips said.
Ryan held up a hand so he could hear the next part, frowning as he focused on the discussion before relaxing again.
“Banotti asked whether he could remember who was the last to leave the meeting with Martina,” he said. “Nico says he can’t remember for certain, but it might have been Matteo because he left around the same time as the publishers.”
There was a short pause, then Phillips said what they were both thinking.
“When’s Matteo due to come in?”
Ryan smiled in the semi-darkness of the observation room.
“This afternoon,” he replied. “Apparently, he’s procuring the rest of the footage from last night, so we can track the movements of Armstrong’s imposter.”
“Let’s hope nothing gets corrupted, this time, eh?”
“You took the words right out of my mouth, Frank.”
* * *
“Look at this,” MacKenzie called out.
Anna moved across to the desk where Denise was hunched over her computer, the same position she’d occupied for the past forty minutes.
“What’ve you found?”
“This guy, Antonio “Tony” Manetti—”
“Italian?” Anna said, in surprise.
