Lone Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  What else could be the cause of it? Stray dogs?

  He would need to monitor their behaviour more carefully, and that would take a lot of time that he didn’t have. Not with Harris and the investigation into the murder at Stansted Airport. Not with Lucia Grossi getting so deeply involved in it, dragging him away from his job.

  He had written the time, 23.35, in his log.

  If Lori was staying down at her parents’ place that night, that would give him a bit more time. Another hour would be useful, though it might be worthwhile grabbing a blanket and a groundsheet from the Land Rover if he was going to be there for another hour. Only one thing was certain: it wasn’t going to get any warmer.

  He fished out his mobile phone, brought it to life. The screen lit up, throwing pale light on the leaves of the clump of grass behind which he had taken cover.

  The wolf let out a low, grumbling howl, acknowledging him, perhaps.

  The wolf didn’t often show it, but it was more than probable that he always knew when Cangio was there. It was almost an honour, Cangio thought, to know that though he wasn’t exactly welcome, he did not represent a threat.

  He pressed himself closer to the ground and covered his mouth with his hand, waiting for Loredana to answer the call.

  ‘Seb, are you OK?’

  She sounded worried. She always did when she was at home alone at night, and he was out on the mountainside or in the woods.

  ‘Are you at home?’ he asked, though there was no need to ask.

  ‘I would have told you if I was staying down at Mum’s,’ she said.

  She didn’t bother asking him where he was. She knew. If he was whispering into his mobile as midnight approached, then he was on the mountain watching his wolves.

  They were both silent for an instant.

  ‘When are you coming home?’ she said, her voice building up to battle-cry. ‘I … I haven’t heard from you all bloody day. I was going to phone that Captain Grossi, but I thought it probably wouldn’t have been appreciated.’

  ‘I’ll be home in two ticks,’ he said.

  He cut the line, and the display light died.

  He picked up the night-glasses, took a last look at the den.

  The outline of the lead male was constantly on the move. Prowling round and round the den, then climbing up on top of the earth mound, twirling around to left and right, as if he might catch sight of something by surprise.

  Why was the leader on guard? he wondered.

  Why had the others stood down?

  He watched and waited, feeling the same paranoia mounting in his breast.

  He would have fought to defend them, though that was not his job.

  His job was to watch over them, keep tabs on them, and nothing more.

  And if a predator came along while he was away, then so be it.

  The cantoniera house

  It was a quarter to one by the time he finally slipped into bed.

  Loredana was fast asleep. She opened her mouth and let out a moan, turning away from him. She didn’t react when he whispered her name. He stretched out his hand, resting it against her flank, feeling the warmth. It was better than a cast-iron stove.

  ‘I’m home,’ he whispered.

  He fell asleep thinking about the wolves, their senses and their perceptions.

  Did they only see what was there? Or did they have ‘feelings’ about their territory, ‘suggestions’ and ‘intuitions’ which might lead them to do things for the wrong reasons? Could wolves imagine the existence of things that they couldn’t see?

  Could they fear things that didn’t exist in Nature?

  Like men who fear their own fears …

  Next morning

  He was shaving when the phone call came in.

  It was 6.23, they’d just said on the radio.

  The man’s teeth were chattering.

  ‘C … can you … c … come up n … now?’

  ‘Just give me time to get in the car,’ he’d said.

  Then Cangio had asked again, just to make sure. ‘Are you all right?’

  Dino De Angelis had cut him short, teeth still clacking, saying, ‘I’ll be waiting.’

  As if he didn’t like being up there alone any longer than was necessary.

  It had taken him almost thirty minutes to drive there in the Land Rover.

  Once he crossed the river and left the road behind, climbing the gentle slope of Monte Galluro with Monte Cavogna to the north, the view of Valnerina opened out before him. Bathed in early morning sunlight, the mountains were densely forested with pines and holm oaks. Rocky outcrops soared into the sky, or fell straight down into the valley below. Tiny villages spotted the mountains on the other side of the river gorge, cottage windows flashing as they reflected the light.

  Idyllic was the word for it, though Dino De Angelis didn’t seem to think so. He was living on top of a mountain in a hole that was as deep and dark as Hell. Was the hole of his own making? That was what Cangio was asking himself as he drove through the village of Rocchetta, saw the signpost, and turned left.

  The farmer lived at the end of a track that was rutted by winter run-off. Large stones and jagged flints littered the track and made for a bumpy ride, the Land Rover bucking and jerking as it climbed the gradient. As snow melted off at the top of the mountain, water came trickling, then cascading, down into the valley in a thousand streams and rivulets which swelled the River Nera.

  If you wanted isolation, this was the place to look for it.

  Maybe De Angelis had lost his mind living up there on his own.

  You met some odd characters in his job, Cangio was thinking, when a man jumped out in front of him, waving an ancient double-barrelled shotgun.

  Dino De Angelis had hair like a lion’s mane, white like his straggly long beard. He was wearing a weathered army combat jacket with a torn, ragged sleeve, and knee-high rubber boots. He looked as if he had no wife or family to tell him that he looked a mess, though it wasn’t so, as Cangio would discover later.

  He checked the Parks Police logo, then waved Cangio out of the LR with the shotgun.

  ‘I hope that isn’t loaded,’ Cangio said.

  The man looked at the gun in his hands, then lowered it.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ he said, his voice rough, as if his throat was parched.

  Did he always narrow his eyes and clench his jaw when he met a stranger?

  ‘Follow me,’ he said, not wasting words, turning away and heading up the track past a rough stone hut to a byre of perforated bricks with a rusty corrugated-iron roof.

  ‘The cows are in here,’ he said, as he pushed the byre door open.

  The stench of mulch hit Cangio in the face.

  ‘Just look at this!’ De Angelis said, his anger lending strength to his voice. ‘In forty years, I’ve never seen nothing to match it.’

  A full-grown black-and white-cow lay disembowelled on straw that was soaking with her blood. All that remained of a newborn calf was the head and spine and part of the ribcage.

  ‘You’ve had visitors,’ Cangio said, trying to keep it light.

  It wasn’t the sort of thing you saw every day of the week, though he had witnessed the mass slaughter of sheep by wolves on a number of occasions.

  ‘You can claim compensation,’ he said. ‘The State pays for damage caused by wolves.’

  ‘Wolves?’ The man snorted with disgust, waving his hand at the dead cow and calf. ‘Is that what you think, ranger? Wolves?’

  Cangio ignored the protest. ‘Did you leave the door off the latch, by any chance?’

  The farmer turned and looked at him, wide-eyed, amazed.

  ‘D’you think I’m mad? Leave the door open? That’s asking for trouble.’

  Cangio dropped down on his haunches beside the carcases.

  The throat of the heifer had been ripped wide open. There were deep claw marks on the pale pink, hairless flesh beneath the animal’s jaw, slashing cuts, quite unlike anything a wolf might do.
>
  Though if it wasn’t a wolf …

  He was careful not to voice his doubts.

  Dino De Angelis swore, a constant stream of obscenities.

  ‘When they’re starving,’ Cangio started to say, ‘they’ll go to any lengths …’

  ‘Like opening closed doors? Come off it, will you?’

  Cangio stood up, then turned to face him.

  Before he could speak, De Angelis said, ‘I did NOT leave the door open!’

  It wasn’t quite a shout, but it was more than a denial.

  Was he making a scene? Was that it? The authorities wouldn’t pay him a euro if they thought he hadn’t closed his animals in for the night. Judging by the state of him, Cangio got the impression that De Angelis might have been lost to the world at the bottom of a bottle the night before.

  And yet what the man had said made sense. The rest of the herd was closed up safely in the byre. And that was where the heifer and calf had died. What if De Angelis had closed the door, as he said? Who could have opened it? Not wolves, that was for sure.

  ‘This isn’t the first time,’ De Angelis was saying. ‘There’s strange things going on up here.’

  Cangio pulled out his mobile, started taking photographs of the dead animals.

  ‘Are you saying that this has happened before, and you didn’t report it?’

  ‘I’ve been up here for almost week now,’ De Angelis said. ‘The lad who watches over the herd, he’s sick in hospital.’ He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand as if he were sweating.

  Cangio breathed on his hands, then rubbed them together. It was cold in the byre.

  ‘Five or six nights ago, I heard a noise,’ De Angelis said. ‘I was in the hut, sitting by the fire. There was something … a noise outside, something scratching at the door. Trying to get in, that’s what I thought. Dio santo!’

  ‘A dog?’ Cangio suggested.

  ‘I don’t keep dogs,’ De Angelis said. ‘Not with the cows.’

  ‘So, what was it?’ Cangio asked him.

  ‘You tell me,’ the man said, his voice sinking low. ‘Then, later on, I heard this … What would you call it? Not a scream exactly, more a wailing noise, as if someone was in pain. It sounded as if it was coming from those woods further down the hill.’ He waved his hand over the dead heifer and the remains of the calf. ‘I should have shot it then, when I had the chance.’

  Cangio let him finish, watching as the man caught his breath.

  ‘It?’ he asked.

  De Angelis nodded. ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘In the woods, you say?’

  ‘That’s where the noise was coming from.’

  ‘An owl out hunting, probably. Hares often squeal …’

  ‘That weren’t no owl, no hare,’ De Angelis said, and he cursed again. ‘There’s talk of a …’ The farmer closed his eyes and shook his head, as if afraid to put the idea into words. ‘If you had heard about it, ranger, you’d know what I’m talking about.’

  The way he said it took Cangio by surprise.

  Not you’d know what, but you’d know what …

  ‘What’s that, then?’ Cangio asked him, curiosity leading him on, though good sense told him to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘Ask anyone down in Valnerina,’ Dino De Angelis said.

  He glared at Cangio, challenging him, daring him to deny what everyone knew, or was supposed to know down in the valley.

  Were they all going mad? Cangio asked himself. First, the kid at the school in Borgo Cerreto, now a grown man. They saw these things on television and thought they were true. Witches, ghosts, and werewolves …

  He took another photo of the scene, then put his phone away.

  ‘Thanks for calling me, Signor De Angelis. I’ll submit my report, saying that your cows have been attacked by wolves … Let’s keep it simple, shall we? It doesn’t matter how they got in, it’s what they did that matters to you. Put in your claim as a wolf attack, and it will be dealt with. I’ll make a point of saying that the byre door was securely shut, all right?’

  He hoped the concession would calm De Angelis down.

  ‘It was shut,’ De Angelis said defiantly. ‘And that was no fucking wolf.’

  ‘If you want compensation,’ Cangio said, insisting, ‘it was a wolf.’

  He walked out of the byre and left the man to it.

  It was either that, or call an ambulance and have him carried off to the funny farm.

  As he was driving back down the track, he heard a pulsing, throbbing sound above his head.

  At first he thought there was something wrong with the Land Rover, then he heard a swoosh, a rush of air, and the chopper cut across the sky a hundred yards in front of him.

  Flying low, much too low, he thought.

  The helicopter was white with red stripes, a four-or six-seater, similar to the ones they used in Castelluccio for mountain rescue, emergency services, and tourist jaunts, though the colours were all wrong.

  Another private helicopter, probably.

  It circled above the trees, as if the pilot was looking for something. Then it reared up in the air, and disappeared from sight. The woods on the right of the road were dense, wild, and untended, with an air of long abandonment about them. Were they the woods that Dino De Angelis had been talking about? A rough stone wall marked the right-hand side of the road, closing off the estate.

  He saw a sign as he passed a stone gateway, a lane leading up into the trees.

  Villa San Francesco.

  He stood on the brakes, jerked to a halt, then sat there staring at the sign.

  Villa San Francesco?

  There must be a house in the woods. A grand old house if the fancy name was anything to go by. It might be anything at all, of course. A private retreat, a new hotel, a business of some sort, with rich guests, or top executives flying in and out by helicopter to overcome the isolation of the place.

  Francesco …

  That name had been written on the side of the vehicle at Assisi Airport. Was there something similar about the way the name was written? The same type of lettering, maybe?

  He drove in through the gates, and started heading up the lane.

  If anyone stopped him and asked what he was doing there, he could always say that he was following up on the report that Dino De Angelis had made.

  Had they seen wolves, or heard strange noises at Villa San Francesco?

  THIRTEEN

  Villa San Francesco

  The road wound through dense woodlands.

  A real road, Cangio realised suddenly, a narrow ribbon of slick black tarmac, not the usual unpaved gravel track that served as a private road in most parts of Italy.

  Whoever was living out there was treating themselves well.

  He drove for more than a kilometre, the trees and bushes closing in on either side. And as he rounded the final bend, the building came into view.

  Villa San Francesco wasn’t a villa at all. It was a convent or monastery, some sort of religious foundation. There were hundreds of them scattered all over Umbria. Monasticism had taken root in Norcia over fifteen hundred years before with St Benedict, and St Francis had fuelled the fire five hundred years later.

  Unlike most of the other monasteries in Umbria, this one showed signs of recent and extensive renovation. The red-tiled roof was new, the copper drainpipes burnished and gleaming, the ancient stone walls pointed to perfection.

  There was a car park, too, three cars standing on the wide expanse of sand-coloured pebbles. The cars were newish, relatively up-market, a boxy-looking Audi, a Japanese model that he didn’t recognise, and an F-reg Fiat 500 Sport.

  Guests, or workers? he wondered.

  He put it down to the earthquakes.

  There were lots of these properties knocking around, most of them empty. Such buildings were too big for ordinary people. It stood to reason. Anything old would cost a fortune to maintain. Most religious buildings were Grade Alisted, filled with frescoes, sculptures, and oth
er works of art. State subsidies were offered to help with the upkeep, but it would take more than an occasional handout or a tax rebate to keep them in order.

  That was the trouble with Umbria; there was almost too much art and too many old buildings that had to be preserved.

  The only people who really benefited were the builders and restorers.

  A lot of them had grown rich as a result. Every time there was an earthquake, they rubbed their hands with glee. If something fell down, they knew it would have to be put right again. The local tourist industry was the only real industry. And if all the churches fell down, why would anyone bother to visit Umbria?

  He pulled up on the gravel, and climbed out of the car.

  A vast amount of cash had been used to put Villa San Francesco back on its feet.

  The chapel with its two-bell tower and Romanesque facade was probably the oldest part of the complex. New stained glass gleamed brightly in the large rose window high above the stone-framed door. But the building was vast, by the look of it. How many monks or nuns would have lived in such a place? It was laid out around a cloister, he imagined, with cells and dormitories, kitchens and workshops, and maybe a scriptorium where the monks had worked, illuminating manuscripts. There must be barns and outhouses for keeping animals, a hostel for pilgrims, a hospital for victims of the plague.

  There were few real monasteries left now.

  They were just big, draughty places that no one wanted. Not even the Catholic Church. There was a crisis in religious vocations, everyone said. All the monks and nuns appeared to come from the Philippines, Africa, or South America these days. Most of these buildings had been converted into luxury hotels, health spas, time-share holiday rentals, or cultural centres which offered just about everything from gongs and yoga to belly dancing.