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

by LJ Ross

  Manetti lifted a shoulder.

  “When you’re diagnosed, you’re given a choice. Either take the drugs that’ll make the trembling stop alongside the other physical symptoms but be prepared for a mental decline. Or, vice versa. Put up with the physical symptoms but keep your mind intact for longer. I chose to preserve my mind, such as it is.”

  “You had a plan to execute,” Ryan prompted him, and Manetti nodded.

  “Yes. You have no idea how long I’d been waiting, never knowing if I’d ever be given the opportunity to try.”

  “Why go after Armstrong yourself?” Ryan asked. “If you knew he’d killed Andrew, why didn’t you tell the police? There’s no mention of it—”

  “I didn’t know until years later,” Manetti said, and Ryan watched his hands begin to tremble more violently; so badly he folded his arms and tucked them beneath his own body. “I went to prison never knowing who had taken Andrew from me, only that it hadn’t been me. I kept thinking that somebody new would come along and look at the files and give me another chance. When I read about the Circle and about all the people, in all walks, who’d been a part of it…I started to wonder whether Edward Clarkson was protected, if he knew people in high places. It isn’t so different from the mafia in my country.”

  He shrugged, but it was an angry gesture rather than a dismissal.

  “The police didn’t want to find out, anyway. It was easier to imagine we’d argued and I’d killed him in some sort of mindless, jealous rage. As if I would ever have hurt him…” Manetti swallowed back tears before continuing. “There are some who hate the gay community. They try to hide it, to pretend, but it shows itself at times like that. They just didn’t care enough to search for the truth and, even if they did, back in ’98 there were corrupt forces beneath the surface. I didn’t stand a chance.”

  “I read in the paperwork that there was a witness,” Ryan said.

  Manetti nodded, watching a pigeon swoop down and land nearby to peck at crumbs.

  “There was a bartender at the club in Newcastle. I never knew his name, but I was at the bar almost all night—he was the only one who could confirm the exact time I left to go home.”

  Ryan nodded, thinking of what that must have felt like. In his business, he was more often the sword and not the shield, though he tried where he could. He caught the bad guys and left the wheels of justice to finish the job. But he knew that mistakes could be made—thankfully, not on his watch, so far—but he was only human and the possibility of overlooking a crucial fact or drawing the wrong conclusion from the evidence was something he never forgot. Listening to Manetti’s story, it was a sombre reminder of the very real consequences of getting it wrong.

  “You haven’t told me how you worked out it was Armstrong,” he said, coldly.

  He would not pity this man. No matter the injustice, the indignity of prison, the freedoms he’d been forced to forego—it was never acceptable to kill.

  But he could not help but pity him, and therein lay the moral dilemma.

  “It was entirely by chance, a couple of years after I was incarcerated,” Manetti said. “I took a book off the library trolley and it was Armstrong’s new thriller, the first or second he’d published after Il Mostro. I knew his name, of course.”

  “You’d read his books?”

  Manetti frowned, then his face cleared.

  “Of course, you wouldn’t know,” he murmured. “It wouldn’t be in the case files.”

  “What wouldn’t?” Ryan asked, leaning forward.

  “I’d never met Nathan Armstrong, but I knew him by association. You see, Andrew worked as an assistant in a sports shop in Newcastle but that was only temporary. He was an amazing writer,” Manetti explained. “When I met him here in Florence, he’d been visiting the city to research a book he was hoping to write. A couple of years later, he did.”

  Manetti nodded, watching the dawning realisation on Ryan’s face.

  “The book was called Il Mostro.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Ryan felt the small hairs on the back of his neck begin to prickle as everything fell into place.

  “It was the first book Andrew had written and he didn’t have a lot of confidence, as it turned out,” Manetti continued, thinking of the modest man he had loved.

  “He’d met Armstrong at a book signing, one time, and asked if he could write to him for some advice about his book. Armstrong told him to contact his agent in London and they’d pass the message on. Anyway, he sent his manuscript and a covering letter to Armstrong’s agent, who must have forwarded it on. Months later, he got a reply.”

  “Saying what?”

  “A condescending letter from Armstrong saying that his work had promise,” Manetti spat. “Saying that Andrew would have more of a chance of breaking into the mainstream if he tried ghost-writing, first. Armstrong offered him a deal. He’d give him ten thousand pounds for all rights to the manuscript and he’d recommend Andrew to his agent and everyone who mattered, if the book went on to do well.”

  Manetti paused to gather himself together.

  “It came with a strict gagging clause,” he continued. “Andrew was never, ever to reveal that he was the book’s true author, or Armstrong would sue. You have to understand, ten thousand pounds was a lot of money, back then, and neither of us had any to begin with.”

  “So Andrew took the deal?”

  Manetti nodded.

  “The letter was so persuasive,” he said. “It promised him a new life, if he just gave up this first ‘effort’. We both reasoned that it didn’t matter, since Andrew was so talented he could write a hundred other books in the future, in his own name.”

  “I guess he wasn’t able to self-publish, back then?” Ryan said, with the ghost of a smile.

  “Sadly not. The world is more advanced, now,” Manetti replied. “But, back in those days, it was a case of finding a traditional publishing house.”

  “So what happened?”

  Manetti waved away a street vendor touting keyrings in the shape of a miniature Duomo, then called him back. To Ryan’s surprise, he handed over a few coins in exchange for one of them, which he turned over and over in his hand like a stress ball.

  “What happened?” Manetti repeated. “We used the money to enrol Andrew on a creative writing course at the university. We forgot about it, until Andrew spotted the book in a window display at one of the bookshops in Newcastle. Soon enough, Il Mostro was everywhere. It was top of the charts in the UK and, within a month, it was worldwide. Things just took off, while Andrew was forced to look on from the sidelines.

  “Do you know what the worst part was?” Manetti asked, not really expecting a response. “The bastard hadn’t even changed a word of it, except the name at the front. He’d written a gushing foreword, thanking everyone who’d helped him write the book, without thanking the one person he had to thank for his reflected success. Everything he’s ever written since has been tawdry, by comparison.”

  Over his shoulder, Ryan caught sight of Phillips and MacKenzie approaching them across the square and gave a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of his head to hold them back. He needed to hear all that Manetti had to tell him and, if they were interrupted now, the man might lose his nerve. Phillips raised a hand to acknowledge ‘message understood’ and they settled at a table several feet away, within sight, in case their help was required.

  “Andrew couldn’t stand it,” Manetti said, picking up the story. “Every day, he was getting angrier and angrier about what was happening. When Armstrong got a film deal and won his first award, he was like a wild thing,” he murmured.

  “Did Andrew do anything about it?”

  “He sent letters,” Manetti said. “He got no reply, of course. It was like he didn’t exist. After a while, Andrew stopped talking about it or telling me what was happening because it was starting to come between us. It’s why we were arguing the night he died. I wanted to put it behind us and move back to Italy, to get away from it all for a
while, but Andrew was adamant about staying put.”

  He sighed, presumably at his former self.

  “But you must understand, back then, it never seemed plausible that somebody like Armstrong would kill. Not for something so trivial as money, or status. The prospect never entered my mind, not even remotely. Even trying to imagine Nathan Armstrong inside the little flat we had…as I say, I never dreamed of it. It wasn’t until I saw the cover of his book in prison that I realised I’d been wrong.”

  “What was so special about the cover?”

  “It was the typewriter,” he said. “Some fancy photographer had taken Armstrong’s portrait picture sitting beside Andrew’s typewriter.”

  Ryan’s heart sank. How could everything rest on a typewriter? That wasn’t enough to pull Armstrong in.

  Sensing his disbelief, Manetti smiled.

  “You want to know how I’m sure it belonged to Andrew? Several things,” he said. “Firstly, I was the one to buy it for him, here in Italy. I can even show you the shop. Look closely at the picture and you’ll see the typewriter has the Italian-style keys, slightly different from the usual ‘QWERTY’ format, as in the United Kingdom or America.”

  “He could have come by a similar model,” Ryan was forced to point out.

  “But he didn’t,” Manetti said, and his eyes dared Ryan to argue. “I didn’t notice when I came home that night—all I could see was Andrew. And the police never took a proper inventory of the house, never listed everything belonging to Andrew. But the typewriter wasn’t there, and the only possible reason is because Armstrong took it, along with any other paperwork that would incriminate him, while he was in the house.”

  Ryan could imagine it. Dear God, he could imagine it.

  “Did Andrew keep a copy of the book on a computer, any other physical copies?”

  Manetti shook his head.

  “We didn’t own a computer. He used one from time to time at the internet cafes, but he wrote everything in notebooks or typed it out. That was the world back then,” he said. “He kept a master copy of Il Mostro at home and sent a photocopied version to Armstrong. The master must be long gone by now,” he said, sadly.

  But Ryan remembered something important, something Gabriele Marchesa had told him at the Uffizi party. He’d said that Armstrong’s UK publisher kept a copy of the original manuscript at their offices in London, for posterity.

  Find the manuscript, find the typewriter, and he might just find Andrew Wharton’s DNA alongside Nathan Armstrong’s. That, at least, was something the police had stored on their database and was a coincidence too far for any jury to ignore.

  He looked back into Tony Manetti’s face, which seemed as though it had aged during the course of their conversation. Sudden frustration overwhelmed him; impotent anger at the waste of life and the wasted opportunity.

  “Why didn’t you tell the police about this theory?” he demanded. “They would have looked into it!”

  He hoped.

  Manetti’s eyes flashed with his own share of anger.

  “I went through all the proper channels, time and again I tried. I begged them to listen, to hear my story, but nobody was interested. I might as well have been dead already. I strung it out a bit with Clarkson; sent him a few threatening letters so that he knew his days were numbered. From what I heard inside, any number of people wanted him dead. I expect that’s why he changed his name and tried to hide. It didn’t take me long to find him.”

  His eyes shone at the remembered thrill of finally catching up with Clarkson at the hermitage.

  “But Clarkson was just an appetiser. I spent long hours imagining what would be the worst punishment for Armstrong—and death was not enough. I needed Armstrong to know how it felt to be publicly shamed, to have his reputation in tatters, and to know how it felt to come home and find death. Besides,” he said, “prison is too good for him.”

  Ryan listened to him and then looked away as he thought about the best way forward. He prided himself on being an honest man and he could not say for certain what he would do if he came home to find Anna left in the same condition as Andrew Wharton. If he’d been imprisoned for years, left only to his own thoughts, tormented by the past. What might he do, if put in the same position?

  He had faced death countless times and had even lost those he loved to the hands of men who were little more than animals. But, when faced with the opportunity to take his revenge, the will to take another life had not been there. It had not been in him.

  And that was the difference between them.

  Feeling suddenly hot, Ryan unbuttoned the top of his shirt and began to roll up his sleeves.

  “I’m sorry for that,” Manetti said quietly, nodding towards the marks on Ryan’s neck before raising his gaze to look his victim in the eye. “You were not a person to me, then, but a means to an end. You were right when you said I have lost my soul.”

  His voice cracked on the last word and his lip quivered. He looked away, unable to face the cool, blue-eyed gaze any longer. The two men were silent for a moment, surrounded by the sounds of the city coming to life; the babble of the growing crowds of tourists, punctuated by the sound of a motorbike revving its engine along one of the many side streets between the high buildings that surrounded the square.

  “Come to the station and tell Inspector Ricci everything you have just told me,” was all Ryan said. “Turn yourself in and help us to bring in the man who killed Andrew, as well as others. Tell us what happened with the others and how many there are.”

  Ryan swallowed revulsion at the thought of how many had been sacrificed as a ‘means to an end’.

  Manetti scrubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes, then replaced his sunglasses to hide them.

  “I’ll come now,” he said. “I’ll help however I can.”

  After Ryan slapped some cash on the table, the two men stood up. Behind Manetti, Ryan saw that Phillips and MacKenzie followed suit and prepared to walk across to join them. Before they left, Manetti stopped.

  “Take this, as a talisman,” he said, offering the little keyring to Ryan. “Whenever you think of it, don’t think of a lost man, a murderer. Please think of this beautiful place and of innocence. Think of how far a man can fall, if he allows it.”

  Ryan hesitated, then reached out to hold the little Duomo tightly in the palm of his hand.

  The sound of the gunshot ricocheted around the square and suddenly Manetti’s body jerked, his blood spattering over Ryan’s face, and then his body fell forward against the little plastic table before slumping to the floor.

  CHAPTER 44

  The world seemed to move in slow motion.

  Ryan watched it happen as if from a place somewhere outside his own body, with a kind of numb detachment. His arms flew out to catch Manetti, but he was too late; the man fell heavily to the ground, dead long before he reached it. Birds scattered into the air, their panicked cries echoed by the people below. It happened in the blink of an eye, then Ryan spun around to seek out the source of the gunfire.

  And found himself staring down the barrel of a handgun.

  The man wore a mask to conceal his face and was seated atop a motorcycle he’d pulled to a screeching halt a short distance away with its engine running. Ryan told himself to dive for cover, to move.

  Move!

  The next thing he heard was the crashing of tables being thrust aside and then something hit him hard from behind, sending him tumbling to the floor not far from where Manetti lay in a pool of his own blood. Over his head, more shots pinged off the tables.

  “Shots fired!” he heard someone shout. “Get down! Get down!”

  Satisfied that Ryan was out of the direct line of fire, Phillips heaved himself up again and grabbed one of the glass bottles which had fallen to the floor as tables were upturned. He grasped the neck and then stood up, lobbing it towards the masked gunman before ducking down again. The bottle hit its target, connecting with the handgun and sending it flying across the cobble
d stones.

  Meanwhile, Ryan recovered himself quickly, scrambling to his feet to grasp Phillips’ arm, just once, to let him know he was grateful. Then, he turned to see the gunman already spinning the back wheel of his motorcycle to beat a hasty retreat, his job done.

  “Ricci!” Ryan shouted. “Get Ricci!”

  A short distance away, a woman on her morning commute was cowering behind the wheel of her car and Ryan ran across, reaching for his warrant card.

  “Polizia!” he shouted. “Ho bisogno della tua macchina!”

  He wrenched open the driver’s side door and helped her out—with more speed than finesse, it had to be said—before taking over the wheel.

  A moment later, he’d put the car in gear and was in pursuit.

  * * *

  The motorcycle’s engine echoed through the streets and Ryan followed its sound, racing away from the Duomo and past the Piazza della Republica. Up ahead, the motorcycle wove through pedestrians who dived out of its path, their shopping bags spilling onto the floor as they rushed to safety.

  Ryan had completed his Advanced Police Driving Course, but he was far away from home, in a strange car and only a sketchy memory of the road network, at best.

  “Get out of the way!”

  He thumped the horn on the old Fiat to give himself a clear path ahead and then pushed the car forward, flying past the café where Anna had met Conti, only days before, to join the road running parallel to the river.

  The motorcycle came into sight again, weaving further along the road as if its driver was drunk. Ryan tried to figure out where its driver was headed but, in Florence, that could have been anywhere. A tiny little garage, tucked away somewhere, or to a different city entirely if he managed to join the motorway half a mile further west.

  He slammed his foot on the brake as an old woman stumbled and half-fell into the street, missing his bonnet by a hair’s breadth. Passers-by stopped to help her, calling out obscenities at the motorcycle’s retreating back and Ryan felt a sense of defeat. Through his windshield, he watched the motorcycle gain valuable ground, putting more and more distance between them. A car was no match for a high-end motorcycle in a city that had never been designed for larger vehicles and he thumped the wheel again, this time in sheer frustration.