Until the kids had arrived and the party had kicked off.
He watched them through the binoculars. They were picking up the empty bottles, collecting the plastic bags they’d brought the food in, stashing the rubbish in the boot of the old jalopy. Then they turned their attention to the campfire, unzipping their jeans, pissing on the flames, stamping the ashes. OK, they were regular partygoers, but they turned out the lights and picked up the rubbish when it was time to go home.
He checked his watch. 00.55. The same as last time, more or less.
As he heard the slam of doors and the motors roar into life, he turned his attention to the serious business of the night. Once peace settled on the park again, he knew that the she-wolf would bring up the cubs for a breath of fresh air.
TWENTY-FIVE
The same night, in town
The signal improved when the car stereo was switched off.
Finally, he could hear them speaking. Lorenzo Micheli was telling his sister to take her unidentified girlfriends home while he climbed into the bugged Fiat Uno in the company of Riccardo Bucci, Federico Donati and Davide Castrianni.
The Watcher sat up in bed and raised the volume. He had been recording them since they headed out of town at 22.20, and he wondered what the Legend would make of the music. In his opinion, it was crap.
‘So, what’s cooking tonight after the sausages and hash?’ he murmured, a cigarette clenched between his teeth. ‘Give me something to work on, lads, then we can all go home to our own beds.’
The motor of the Fiat Uno coughed back to life, like a terminal lung cancer patient coming out of a coma. There was an exchange of shouts between the two cars, grunting and groaning noises from the bugged car, then Lorenzo voice telling the others to ‘Shut the fuck up!’ with all the volume he could muster, and Riccardo Bucci saying, ‘I heard a wild boar, I’m telling you.’
‘Wild boar, my arse!’ Davide told him. ‘That was Federico farting after all the sausages and shit he shovelled down.’
‘I bet you were a pig in another life.’
It sounded suddenly as if the car was full of grunting pigs, but the voice of Lorenzo Micheli was still as clear as a bell.
‘We heard the cry of rebellion from the centre of the …’
‘It was an earthquake, Lorè. Not a big one, but …’
They started cheering, as if an earthquake was something to get worked up about.
‘That’s right,’ Lorenzo went on. ‘It came from the core of the Earth. That’s where everything started, Mother Nature fighting back, telling us she doesn’t like what’s going on, warning the fuckers that are too deaf to hear. We heard her, though, didn’t we? Didn’t we?’ he shouted again. Then, like a battle cry, he shouted: ‘Parvis e glandibus quercus!’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Federico asked him.
‘It’s Latin. “Great oaks from tiny acorns grow”.’
Riccardo laughed. ‘Why didn’t you say so? Y’know, keep it simple.’
Davide was giggling. ‘Lorenzo’s a poet! Lorenzo’s a poet!’
Federico yawned. ‘It’s obvious, ain’t it?’ he said. ‘Trees grow. They grow from acorns, right? So fucking what?’
The only one who wasn’t laughing was Lorenzo Micheli.
He sounded deadly serious. ‘It means that big things start from little things, you fucking idiot. It means you’ve got to start somewhere. Tonight we heard the voice of Mother Nature—’
‘That was Federico burping!’
‘She told us, didn’t she? Anything that tries to put her down will be destroyed. Concrete, new buildings, all that stuff. That earthquake was a little one, a message for us, announcing what will come, sooner rather than later. The big one—’
Only Davide Castrianni objected. ‘Come off it, Lorenzo! We’ve had our fill of earthquakes. My grandma’s house got fucking bulldozed, didn’t it? That stuff we smoked is going to your head. You’re having visions of the Apocalypse.’
‘We have to start the Apocalypse!’
Shouts and screams drowned out the rest of what Lorenzo Micheli was saying. Once he got going, he sounded like the Pope, the Watcher thought. And the other boys seemed to agree with him.
‘Sometimes you’re a fucking asshole, Lorenzo,’ Federico was saying.
‘Sometimes?’
‘Always,’ the Watcher said, but no one in the car could hear him.
They were young, doped up, ready for fun. The night hadn’t started yet. They didn’t sound so much like rebels as a bunch of idiots, and Lorenzo Micheli was the worst of them, full of himself and half-baked radical ideas.
The Watcher lay back on his hotel bed and lit another cigarette.
Federico was right. Lorenzo was an asshole. He took himself so seriously. The others didn’t seem to give a monkey’s but they went along for the ride. It was the same damned thing every night: drinking, smoking, hanging out in the woods. He was sick of listening to them. They weren’t going anywhere. The operation was turning into a washout. God only knew what had got into the Legend’s head. There was no promotion coming out of this lot.
‘Hey, I’ve got an idea!’ Lorenzo was saying again.
The Watcher frowned. Were they going to prove him wrong?
There was a lot of oohing and aahing, then the car screeched to a halt and the doors swung open.
He couldn’t make out what was going on, but he heard the noises.
It was 01.47 when he phoned his supervisor.
‘Are you awake?’
The supervisor groaned. ‘I am now.’
‘They’re smashing up one of the building sites. If we call out the local cops it shouldn’t be too hard to catch them red-handed.’
The supervisor laughed. ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘Leave them to dig their own graves.’
The phone clicked; the line went dead.
As the Watcher was cleaning his teeth, getting ready for bed, he stared at his face in the mirror of the hotel bathroom.
Whose graves were the boys supposed to be digging?
TWENTY-SIX
Later that night
A lump the size of a squirrel surged into his throat.
Cangio swallowed hard and tried to hold it down, then he gasped for breath and vomit came hurtling out of his mouth.
As he was turning the Land Rover into the final bend near the summit, heading for the ranger hut on the other side of the mountain, the headlights had picked out something for an instant. It was dangling from a sign which told tourists that they were 976 metres above sea level. He’d braked hard, and the ancient crate had skidded to a halt. He’d left the motor idling, headlights on, and gone back down the hill on foot, flashlight in hand, to take a closer look. One glance had been enough. His stomach had reacted faster than his brain.
A wolf.
A young wolf, but not his wolf. It was something to be grateful for, but not much. Some bastard had hacked the animal’s head off, hooked a piece of wire through one of its ears then left the trophy hanging from the altitude marker. Saliva hung in sticky strands from its jaw. Blood had dribbled halfway down the metal pole.
Cangio spat to clean out his mouth, wiped his lips on the sleeve of his shirt then began to root through his pockets, looking for something to cover his hand with. In his breast pocket he found the soft rag he used to clean the lenses of the binoculars. It wasn’t the blood that he was worried about so much as the saliva. A wolf in the wild might be carrying rabies.
He twirled the rag around his finger, jabbed at a spot where the blood had clotted on the sign pole. He felt the clot give beneath the pressure. When he pulled the cloth away, he saw the smear that his touch had left. The animal had been butchered in the last half hour or so, he guessed.
He shone the torch on the wolf’s gaping jaw. The teeth were long and still white. None were missing or broken. A young wolf, and a healthy one, too. No sign of mange or scabies. No scratches either, so it hadn’t been part of a pack. Not part of a pack? That wasn’t possible …
Its dead eyes glistened in the powerful beam of yellow light. The head had been hacked from the body with a hunting knife by the look of it, the incision jagged, as if it was the first time for whoever had committed the atrocity.
So where is the rest of the wolf?
He stood back and shone the flashlight on the ground. A wide semicircle of bloody drips had sprinkled on the dry dirt road. There was no sign of the carcass.
Those damned kids?
Maybe they weren’t the harmless nature lovers that he’d taken them for. He ought to have have nailed them the first night he’d caught them roasting sausages over an open fire. If he’d charged them with lighting fires in a restricted area this might never have happened. They would have steered well clear of the park, the wolves and him.
No, he thought, it wasn’t the kids. Would they have been capable of catching and killing a wolf?
He flashed his torch on the ground again.
There was a single footprint in the dust, and no sign of tyre tracks except his own. Whoever the killer was he hadn’t used a vehicle. Cangio followed the spots of blood across the track. Someone had cut across country from the ridge above, leaving a trail of blood that he might be able to follow.
Someone who lived on the mountain, then. Or a poacher …
There had been reports of poachers in the last few weeks and signs of their passage: discarded shell-casings, roughly-made ‘hides’, the remains of a boar which had been shot but had managed to get away before it bled to death. Even inside a national park, poaching was inevitable. Boar meat was tasty. Deer meat, too.
But who would eat a wolf?
And if you were looking for trophies, it was the head you would keep. Which left the craziest idea of them all …
Marzio had told him about the weirdoes who sometimes celebrated black masses in the abandoned churches scattered over the park. A couple of months earlier they had found a crow on an outcrop of rock, its breast splattered open, its wings spread wide as if it had been crucified. Marzio had started raving about devil-worship, though the lab results stated that the crow had eaten a rat that had been poisoned. It had dropped out of the sky and been smashed to smithereens on the rocks. But Marzio preferred his own satanic version of what had happened.
The head of a young but fully-grown wolf hanging from a road sign in the middle of nowhere was certainly weird, but was it satanic?
He tried to stick with the facts.
There might be a simpler explanation. A shepherd who had lost lambs to a hungry wolf perhaps taking revenge, exhibiting the head to catch the attention of the authorities, a silent protest about the fact that the area was so vast and there were only two park rangers to keep an eye on everything. But there had been been no reports of a wolf or wolves attacking dogs or sheep.
The trees and bushes rustled in the breeze, the wind picking up. At the summit, the mountain flattened out into a sort of grassy ridge where wandering shepherds brought their flocks to graze in summer. There was a hilly bump on the northern flank where a couple of farmhouses and shepherds’ huts were strung out on the lee side to avoid the savage winds of winter. That was the place to start looking.
He ought to call Marzio. Never go after poachers alone – that was the first rule. They were usually armed to the teeth. But Marzio was celebrating his grandson’s first birthday and Cangio had insisted on doing the last sweep. Knowing that Marzio liked his drink, Cangio had offered to do the first tour of the park the next morning as well. Marzio had given him a mock salute.
‘I’ll pay you back,’ he promised. ‘But if anything comes up, make sure you call me.’
Marzio was thinking of a forest fire, but setting fires was a daytime thing, sun on glass, or herders burning off the woods to make more grazing land for their sheep, blaming the damage on picnickers and day-trippers. That night had been as calm and untroubled as all the other nights he had been working there. Since leaving London, he felt as though he had ended up with a paid job in paradise.
Now, paradise seemed a sinister place.
Someone was close by, burying the carcass under cover of darkness. He had to catch the culprit and secure evidence that would lead to his conviction. You couldn’t just cut the head off a healthy specimen of a protected species.
He walked back to the Land Rover, grabbed a heavy-duty rubbish bag from the rear cabin then let out a contented growl. Marzio had jammed his work gloves in beside the spare wheel. They were old, worn and smeared with grease. Marzio never went out on patrol without them.
‘Try changing a tyre in winter when it’s wet,’ he said. ‘Handling a python’s easier.’
Cangio put the gloves on, then carried the plastic sack back to the altitude marker. He stretched up on his toes and began to pull at the wolf’s head. He felt like being sick again at the sound it made, the blood stuck like superglue to the metal post. The flesh came away like a rubber sucker on glass. He got the head inside the mouth of the rubbish bag, edged it in with his boot, then hauled it over his shoulder and carried it back to the Land Rover. He hadn’t expected it to be so heavy – he was panting by the time he had finished.
As he put the vehicle into gear, he felt a surge of anger. He wanted to kick the bastard who’d done this in the balls. Anyone who killed a young wolf was worse than scum.
Five minutes later he cut the motor, took the Beretta pistol from the glovebox, checked that it was loaded, clipped the holster on to his belt, slipped a pair of handcuffs in his top pocket, grabbed his flashlight and set off on foot across the ridge. He had never had to play the policeman before but that’s what a park ranger was, whether he liked it or not.
He headed towards the nearest farm.
If he saw any blood near the farmhouse, he’d call Marzio.
He didn’t bother with the torch, just followed the track, keeping his eyes on the ground, knowing that his pale face would shine brighter than the half-moon above him. He dropped down behind the curtain wall as soon as he reached it. Far away he heard the rattle of a train down in the valley four miles away. The silence magnified the sound, reminding him how vulnerable he was. If he made the slightest noise, it would be heard.
A sheep let out a bleat. It was like a shotgun going off, and his heart skipped a beat.
Another sheep took up the cry, then silence settled on the place again.
He should have called Marzio from the radio in the Land Rover when he had the chance. If he were to use his mobile phone, his voice would be heard a mile away. Marzio might have known who lived there, but now it was too late to ask him.
And what if there really were devil-worshippers about? They might have left the wolf’s head on show to lure him into their circle.
The chosen victim …
He smiled at himself. It was hard to imagine a devil so demanding it could only be placated by the blood of a twenty-seven-year-old park ranger with sallow skin, dark hair and coal-black eyes. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. Two a.m. The witching hour was long gone.
He clasped the pistol close to his chest and got ready to move.
The sheep bleated again, and he dropped down behind the stone wall.
‘Coward!’ he murmured, forcing himself to stand up. All he had to do was look around, see if there was any sign of blood. If there was, he would run back to the Land Rover, call Marzio over the short-wave radio and tell him to bring the carabinieri.
He didn’t need to confront anyone.
He doubled over and went in through the gate like Chuck Berry doing the Duck Walk, crossing the yard in front of the house and making for the barn, a low stone building with a double wooden door.
The barn door was secured with a nail and a loop of wire. He slipped the loop off the nail, pushed open the door and stepped inside, pointing the gun and his torch in the same direction, catching his breath against the stench of the animals closed inside for the night.
The barn was bigger than he had imagined, divided in two sections by a stone arch. The beam of light lit up t
he gleaming eyes of half-a-dozen sheep closed inside a wicker pen. Next to the pen was a brick wall enclosing three or four pigs in a sty. One of them grunted out loud then shied away from the light. A cow was tethered to a manger against the far wall. It shifted and a chain clinked gently. Then it lifted its tail and let go a pat that must have weighed a couple of pounds.
He stepped beneath the arch.
That half of the barn was empty, except for a large wire cage that might have served as a kennel. Whatever it was, it was empty. If the farmer had dogs they might be guarding the farmhouse.
No, he corrected himself. One dog only.
There was a chain and a collar lying on the ground inside the cage. Did they let the dog loose on the hillside at night?
He turned to the right and the squirrel surged into his throat again. He swallowed hard to hold it down. There was a dark damp stain on the dry earth floor. The wolf had probably been butchered there. But that was not what had made him feel ill.
There was a feeding trough made of cement.
Next to it, two large glass jars bound with wicker work. On the neck of one of the jars was a yellow label with a large black skull and crossbones: Nitric Acid – Danger!
He glanced into the trough and his stomach clawed up into his throat again.
The park and paradise disappeared in a flash. All he could see was the bloody mess in the trough, while his nose burned with the reek of acid.
He heard a noise and spun round, his pistol pointing at the heart of a man who stood there in the beam of the torch.
The man held up his hands. ‘Don’t shoot,’ he said. ‘I’m not armed.’
Cangio recognized him straight away. It was the man who had crept up behind him the week before while he had been watching the wolves digging their den. The man from the south who wouldn’t say where he was from that day they’d met in Enrico’s bar.
‘I thought you might pass by tonight,’ the Calabrian said.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The same night
Cry Wolf Page 13
