The Monster of Florence

by Magdalen Nabb

  The catalogue of their crimes, the torn and mutilated bodies, the dead raw flesh eaten or “raped” or used to decorate the room, was terrifying. Yet there was something even more terrifying in the catalogue of their own sufferings, something so dark and relentlessly evil that in the end it seemed preferable to be the victim than the killer.

  And their Suspect was a dirty old man. He’d killed his rival in love, killed him brutally, too. But how could you connect that with slaughtering strangers and stealing body parts? The Marshal decided that he, at least, couldn’t and that he had no intention of trying. As for the business of the daughter, that was far from being clear. But how much information might have been withheld there, too?

  Disturbed and distracted as he was, he overshot the little town of Signa, where he’d meant to make his first stop, and so had to turn back. There was a small car park in front of a bar in the square, and he stopped there and got out to look at the cinema opposite.

  THE GARDE CINEMA

  The façade was small and low and the tops of the trees in the garden beyond could be seen. They’d grown a lot in over twenty years. A plank had been nailed across the peeling doors and the G of GARDEN was hanging crookedly, about to fall as the N had done. It was so dismal, so forlorn, that it gave the impression of having been closed up on the night of that murder, avoided as a haunted place.

  “We went to the pictures and it was in the war and a house went on fire and then we went up there past the cemetery.”

  The rest of the little square was cheerful and busy, which made the crumbling grey cinema look like a bad tooth in a healthy smiling mouth.

  The Marshal stepped into the bar and ordered a coffee. It was a clean bright place with shelves full of boxes of chocolates and fancy liqueurs. There were two small tables with pink linen cloths on them and a man in a green loden overcoat was sitting at one of them reading the local paper.

  “One coffee coming up.”

  “Thanks. You don’t happen to know when that cinema across the road closed down, do you?”

  “I really couldn’t say. Before my time, anyway, and I took over here five or six years ago. Ask Franco there. Franco? You’ll know when the Garden Cinema shut down, you’ve been here longer than me.”

  “Born here. I couldn’t tell you the exact year, not to swear to, but it’ll be a good ten years or so. Didn’t get all that much custom since they built that bigger open-air place down near the supermarket, and there was already the one at the Communist Club. I know the owner of the premises, if that’s what you’re after, but she’s in her eighties and I don’t think she’s interested in selling.”

  “No, no … Just curiosity.” Not that he’d expected anyone to believe him but it didn’t matter. It mattered that he wasn’t in uniform. He’d no intention of calling to pay his respects to the local force. It seemed to him that anybody who knew anything at all about this business was bound to have taken sides at some point, and while it seemed clear that the carabinieri had lined up on the side of Romola, that didn’t mean someone would want to get involved in crossing the Public Prosecutor’s office.

  Why he should want to do it himself was a moot point. It hadn’t been by any choice of his that he was chasing a Suspect he didn’t suspect, but then that was probably what was irritating him into trying to get past the smoke screen and deal with something concrete. Like that bloodstained rag. The carabinieri had found it inside a flat straw bag hidden beneath blankets in a wardrobe. Two pieces of clean cotton printed with yellow flowers and between them the third piece, with its red and grey stains. Silvano had been there watching and he hadn’t turned a hair. When they asked him afterwards to explain the blood and gunpowder he had only shrugged.

  “I know nothing about it. Never seen the bag before, though I suppose some woman might have left it here—perhaps the woman I used to live with. If you say it’s blood, it’s blood—but there can’t be gunpowder on it.”

  And what sort of sense did that make? Either he knew or he didn’t know. And so Romola wanted to arrest him and the Public Prosecutor’s office refused. Romola asked for the rag to be sent to England where DNA testing was now possible. The Public Prosecutor’s office refused. The rag was sent instead for further testing in Rome and a report was finally produced in December 1987, three years and five months after the rag was found. The report said the sample was too old for significant conclusions to be drawn.

  In desperation Romola managed to get Silvano arrested for the murder of his first wife and he was removed to prison to stand trial in Sardinia. And the material evidence was too old there, too. Silvano was acquitted. He was at once ordered to present himself before the magistrate in Florence to answer questions about a certain Beretta 22 L.R. Instead of which he left the country. Then the murders stopped.

  The Marshal paid for his coffee and got back in the car, feeling better, at least, for having seen with his own eyes that broken-down cinema where this whole story had begun on the hot and very dark night of 22nd August 1968.

  Not that it was easy, just now, to imagine the heat. There was an icy wind blowing fit to freeze your ears off. He switched on the engine and let it warm up as he fished his notes and the rough map Lorenzini had drawn up for him out of his pocket. He decided to proceed in the same order as the original investigators. He would go back a little by the way he’d come and take the Pistoia road as far as the Rossini house.

  It was a long, straight road and the traffic was moving fast. It was similar to the road he’d taken out of Florence, with the same symptoms of sleepy countryside pimpled with rashes of new building here and there. It really wasn’t possible to go slowly enough to read the house numbers. When he tried there was an angry chorus of hooting and, once again, he overshot his mark and had to turn back. Well and good. The road he then had to take was, in any case, on the other side. He made an inspired guess, stopped his car as he turned in, and then got out to look at the white house on the other side of the road. Then he waited for a gap in the traffic and crossed. There was really no need to do that. The house was clearly numbered and recognizable, anyway, by the floodlight attached to it. But he couldn’t help himself. He needed the house, not its number. He needed the real, the concrete. He had no idea whether the Rossini family still lived there but he didn’t care. He just wanted to speak to someone, anyone, establish human contact with this twenty-year-old story.

  The green shutters of 154 were closed. At 154A a woman was peering out from between tight lace curtains. 152, the other half of the building, housed a trattoria. An elderly woman there was sweeping the steps and the last late luncheon customers were getting into their cars in the cindered space beside the whitewashed building.

  “Good afternoon.”

  She carried on sweeping and looked up at him.

  “We’re closed. It’s almost half past three.”

  “That’s all right. It was just some information I wanted. That lane across the road … If I’m not mistaken it’s a short cut to Signa. Only I haven’t been around these parts for years and I’m sure it sometimes used to be impassable. I thought, living here, you might know …”

  She’d barely paid him any attention once she’d established that it was too late to eat, but now her lips tightened and she stopped her sweeping to stare at him.

  “You can get through.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.” She gave him a black look and turned her back on him, starting to sweep again. When he was getting into his car he caught her watching him, peeping round from the side entrance, thinking, no doubt, that she was invisible. He sensed those lace curtains twitch slightly, too, and he felt the glittering eyes of the old woman trained on him as he started the engine. They were old enough to remember the story. Perhaps they thought he was a nosy journalist. Or perhaps he was becoming paranoid. For all he knew, they thought he was a tax inspector and they hadn’t even lived there long enough to know anything about the ’68 murder. Next to the big white house was a stone
farmhouse building with three doors. In one of those, Salvatore Angius had been living, and nobody had ever found out. Why hadn’t they? Why hadn’t they knocked at every door in the block that night and asked, “Did you see a small child cross the road alone? Did you see a man watching him?” It was easy enough to criticize, of course, from this distance. Nevertheless, he was quite sure he’d have done it, and in doing it he’d have seen this Angius and broken Silvano’s alibi then instead of sixteen years later.

  The woman with the sweeping brush came round to the front of the white building and stared across at him defiantly. He turned into the lane and drove down it, staying in second gear. He was being foolish. He wouldn’t have broken Silvano’s alibi because Silvano would never have given such an alibi if he hadn’t felt safe to do it. Angius had given his official address as being his brother’s house and before anybody could give the matter any thought Sergio Muscas had changed his story and the hue and cry was all for Flavio.

  This stony lane was clear enough, all right, probably because a couple of small factories, little more than long sheds, had been built in the fields. There was no sign of the boulders which had demonstrated that the child couldn’t have arrived by car and that he’d have torn and dirtied his socks if he’d walked.

  Even so, something was wrong. There was no sign of the Vingone which would have been running beside the road behind a screen of tall reeds. He slowed down more, looking about him. There was a line of reeds in the distance to his right but that was neither here nor there since they should have been to his left. The road was curving and rising now. It met another, wider country road that petered out to his right and became a tarred road to his left where there were a number of houses. This was all wrong. He stopped, wondering what to do. An old man with a stick appeared from the direction of the tarmac road and sat down on a low wall to get his breath, despite the cold which had reddened his hands and face.

  “Excuse me! I’m looking for the road that comes out near the cemetery!”

  The old man sat motionless and gave no sign of having heard, perhaps because of the wind. The Marshal got out of the car and approached him.

  “Excuse me? I’m looking for the cemetery. I thought this was a short cut. An old friend of mine’s buried there …” He really was getting paranoid, but he couldn’t help imagining Di Maira, who always seemed to be watching him, following in his tracks.

  “He was looking for the lane where that couple were killed …”

  “He had a Sicilian accent …”

  “The cemetery?”

  “Yes, I thought this road led there.”

  “You’re miles away.”

  “But can’t I cut across these fields?”

  “You’re miles off. This is Signa from here on. You’ll have to go up that road there into the centre. Then go back a mile or so till you get to the town hall and take the road to Castelletti. It’s about two miles, maybe a bit more, further on than that. You can’t miss it.”

  “But … the Vingone—doesn’t the Vingone pass by here?”

  “No, no. It’s beyond the town centre. If you turn left you’ll cross it. The traffic goes over the bridge.”

  “But it’s only a stream, the one I’m talking about. I understand it crossed these fields.”

  “I don’t know about that. The river’s all I know. You’ll see when you cross it.”

  The Marshal got back in his car. How could he possibly have gotten so lost? The lane started right opposite the Rossini house and came straight here. Then he remembered: somewhere in the judge’s report there had been that episode where Sergio, having confessed to the murder, said he had accompanied his son. They’d asked him to show them the way, starting from the Rossini house, and he’d ended up near Signa over a mile away from the scene of the crime. So he hadn’t known the road either. They had both made the same mistake.

  From the other end, then. He fished out Lorenzini’s sketch again. The cinema, the town hall, the road to Castelletti, the cemetery …

  He set off again with the sketch propped against the windscreen.

  Lorenzini had done a good job. After a couple of miles, just as the old man had said, he passed the marble pillars and wrought-iron gates of the cemetery, with its rows of black cypresses. Next there should be a fork … there … then the first lane off to the right. He signalled but couldn’t turn. The chain Lorenzini had mentioned as having been put up all those years ago was still closing the lane. He pulled in and got out of the car to check it. There was nothing to be done. The chain was thick and heavy and rusty and the padlock held firm. He locked his car, climbed over, and set off down the lane on foot. This was all right. A high bank topped by tall reeds hid the stream on the right from his view. About twenty, twenty-five yards … A curve that would have hidden the car from anyone passing on the road. And the car that followed? That too would have had to be hidden from the road. Had it slid down here with the engine cut and the lights out? It was probable.

  To his left were open fields. The grass was long and thick because the weather had been so mild and wet until Christmas. But now the freezing wind coming from the mountains, faintly visible on the purplish horizon, was howling across the fields so that the grass was billowing in green and silver waves. The Marshal stood still, his ears and face burning and his fingers, even in thick leather gloves, beginning to ache.

  The fierce iciness of the wind, whipping his cheeks and taking his breath away, was so cleansing, so exhilarating an antidote to his accumulated tiredness and stress, that he stood there for some time without thinking of anything.

  It was that small voice from long ago that brought him back.

  “Silvano was standing in the reeds.”

  He turned to look. The reeds were dead now, their canes dry and broken. They wouldn’t hide anyone. But in August they would have been thick and rustling with leaves.

  “There was a noise and he was in the reeds.”

  The black night had been windless and hot. Seven shots and one shot. That was the only safe way. Silvano had to make sure they were dead before he could risk letting the incompetent Sergio fire at them so as to inculpate himself. Seven shots entering the bodies close together, centre target. One shot, thought to have come from another direction, only just hitting her arm and grazing her side. And by then Silvano was hidden in the reeds as the child awoke and his dad pulled him out of the car. He’d seen his uncle, too, going through his mum’s handbag.

  “Get moving!”

  That had to be Silvano’s voice. There was no other way. He would never have been fool enough to risk being seen driving Sergio and the child back to Signa. Sergio had to take the child away himself and perhaps be picked up on the Pistoia road. But how had Sergio found his way in the darkness if he wasn’t familiar with the road? Who was familiar with the road? Angius. Salvatore Angius, young and penniless friend and lover of Silvano, who lived at the other end of that road and maybe used it as a short cut to Signa because he had no vehicle.

  “Was anyone else with your dad?”

  “I think there was a man only I don’t know who he was.”

  That was probably true. He didn’t know—and what interest could it have for a child whose mother has just been murdered?

  It was as clear as it would ever get unless Sergio one day told the truth. An unlikely event.

  The immediate problem was to get his car on to this lane so as to try and come out on the Pistoia road. He wasn’t intending to try it on foot. It took an hour or so each way and the cold winter afternoon was already darkening. He walked on a little and saw a decently maintained track coming from the direction of a cluster of houses beyond the fields further forward to his left. Beyond that he saw a car going by and felt pretty certain that the track was simply the next turning along the road to the one he’d come in by. He walked back to his car. It was true, thank goodness for that. A half-mile or so further along the main road he found the cluster of houses and the beginning of the lane, and within a few minutes h
e was joining the lane of the murder scene and proceeding in the direction of the Rossini house.

  “Ah …” There ahead was the explanation of his mistake. The lane curved right, and there in front of him was the tiny bridge over the stream where Nicolino said he’d been set down. You had to cross the bridge to pick up another little road coming from Signa, the one he’d driven down without noticing the bridge and the deviation at all. There was, in fact, nothing odd or contradictory about Sergio’s mistakes at all. He’d been driven to the scene of the crime in Silvano’s car and taken no notice in the thick darkness of where the lane began. He’d probably then been accompanied to this end where you couldn’t go wrong anyway, there was no way forward other than the right one.

  There was no way forward now, though, at all, because across the front of the bridge hung yet another heavy rusting chain and padlock.

  “Blast …” The Marshal was about to give up and go back when he thought he might take a bit of his own advice. “Check everything. Don’t take anything for granted.” He said it often enough to the young carabinieri in his care. Without any real hope he climbed out of the car and approached the bridge.

  “Which just goes to show …”

  The padlock was hanging open. All he had to do was to drop the chain to the ground. At a quickened pace the Marshal returned to his car and drove across, careful to stop again and replace the chain behind him, always feeling Di Maira’s steely gaze on his back.

  There! Ahead, the last little stretch of the lane hit the Pistoia road. And right facing him was the big white house with its floodlight. Number 154.

  With a little grunt of satisfaction he signalled and turned on to the main road back in the direction of Florence. This was his world, the real world, where you checked things and they were true or not. His satisfaction was out of all proportion to what he had obtained. It had to do with his putting an end to any attempt at believing the unbelievable, and with a deep conviction that if he checked out a few more confused routes from both ends he might find the right road at last.