The Dante Conspiracy (2 page)
‘Somebody’s taken his statement?’
‘Yes, but that’s about it. The only other thing he saw that might
be helpful was a white van with two men in it heading down the road as he drove
up. They might not have had any part of this, of course, but even if they had, he
didn’t get the number, and wasn’t even sure of the make. He thought it might have
been a Fiat or maybe a Citroen.’
‘The number probably wouldn’t have helped,’ Perini said. ‘If
they were the people responsible, the plates would certainly have been false. And
he obviously wouldn’t be able to recognize either of the men he saw?’
It was more of a statement than a question, and Lombardi just
shook his head.
Perini glanced around the dilapidated barn, his grey eyes taking
a mental inventory as he looked for anything out of place, any clue that might suggest
why an academic had been brought to this lonely place and then tortured to death.
After a few moments he returned his stare to the body,
then
looked at Lombardi.
‘Cause of death?’
‘Strangulation, according to the doctor.
In fact, he thinks it was almost certainly a garrotte, because there are abrasions
all the way round the victim’s neck.’ He pointed at the charred pile of black-brown
fibres on the floor of the barn behind the chair. ‘That was probably the rope they
used, though there’s some rubber or plastic in there as well, maybe latex gloves
or a rubber sheet, something like that, which possibly kept the fire going, and
it was the flames from that which the man saw as he drove past. He must have just
missed them.’
‘Probably lucky for him that he did.
No sign of whatever they used to do this?’
‘No,’ Lombardi replied shortly. ‘But they used several different
tools. It looks like they started on his chest. Those cuts were obviously made with
a sharp knife, but they’re not deep and certainly not life-threatening, though they’d
have stung like a bitch.
Probably a box cutter or hobby knife,
something with a really sharp but quite short blade.
They started just above
his navel, cutting horizontally across his torso, then when he still didn’t tell
them what they wanted to hear they moved the blade up half an inch and repeated
the process. That way, they always had clean flesh to cut, because the blood obviously
flowed downwards. A professional job, if you like. The doc thinks there are traces
of salt in the wounds as well, to act as a bit of extra persuasion.’
The sergeant pointed at a couple of darker areas on the dead
man’s chest, in one of which the white of bone could be seen.
‘And he isn’t certain, but those patches suggest they used something
like a soldering iron, gas powered because there’s no working electricity supply
in here, and burned all way through his flesh to his ribs. And then they started
on his fingers.’
‘What this looks like to me,’ Perini said, into the silence which
followed Lombardi’s cool and clinical description of the injuries inflicted on the
dead man, ‘is an old-style Mafia interrogation. This is just the kind of thing they
used to do, back in the day, when they suspected somebody of being an informer.
Maximum pain to ensure they got every scrap of information out of their victim,
and then a bullet in the head. But you said this man was a professor, an academic.
A professor of what?’
‘Right now, we’ve no idea, but I’ll run him through the system
as soon as I get back to the office. I did have one thought, but it doesn’t really
seem to make sense.’
‘Mistaken identity?’
Lombardi nodded.
‘Exactly what I was thinking.
But if
they’d looked in his wallet, that would have told them exactly who he was. And they
had plenty of time to do it. They probably brought him up here drugged or unconscious,
stripped him and tied him to the chair, and then started work on him when he came
round. I can’t believe they didn’t at least check that they’d got the right man.’
‘They would have done. I’m quite certain of that. Nobody would
do this kind of thing without being positive that they were asking the right person
the right questions. So we need to find out what an academic like Professor Bertorelli
could possibly have done or known that could lead to something like this.’
A heavily-built man wearing only a pair of faded blue shorts,
his shock of unruly silver hair hidden under a baseball cap, sat in a padded chair
on the spacious terrace of a large and expensive villa. The property had been built
into the side of a hill to take full advantage of both the sun and the views down
the gentle slope towards the port city of Livorno and the Mediterranean beyond.
Half a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and the remains of a plate of assorted
pastries lay on the table in front of him, and he was drinking a long black coffee,
an
Americano
.
And waiting.
He wasn’t worried, but he was getting concerned. He had expected
to have had some news by this time, and again his glance fell on the two mobile
phones sitting side-by-side on the table beside a copy of an Italian daily newspaper.
One was an expensive smartphone and the other a cheap throwaway fitted with a pay
as you go
Sim
card. He had half a dozen such phones, some
still in their boxes, tucked away in the back of his wall safe in his study. In
his line of business, having a cheap and untraceable telephone was not just desirable
– it was essential.
He shook his head, and reached across to pick up the paper, but
as he did so the screen on the cheap mobile illuminated and a split second later
it began to ring. He knew immediately who had to be calling, because he had only
given the number of that telephone to one person.
‘Yes? Do you have it?’
There was a brief but distinct pause before the caller replied.
‘No, we don’t.’
‘That is not what I expected to hear. And it is not what I am
paying you for. What happened?’
‘We did exactly as you instructed, Stefan.’
There was a brief pause as Marco belatedly realized he’d just
used his employer’s proper name, something he was never supposed to do, though he
doubted if it was really that important. Both men were using disposable mobile phones,
effectively untraceable by the authorities, and
Sim
cards
which would be dumped at the end of the job, or even earlier if necessary.
But the name reminded the Italian that he wasn’t dealing with
a fellow countryman. Despite Stefan’s fluent Italian, Marco guessed he was probably
from somewhere in the Balkans, and that made him somewhat unpredictable, at least
in Marco’s view.
‘Get on with it,’ Stefan muttered.
‘Sorry,’ Marco said. ‘We searched the residence and we questioned
the owner. We found nothing and he told us nothing. In fact, we are quite certain
that he didn’t know the answers to the questions we were asking.’
The man on the terrace digested that piece of unwelcome information
in silence,
then
replied.
‘That is impossible. He had to know.’
‘I don’t agree. Our interrogation was’ – he paused for a moment,
apparently searching for the most appropriate word – ‘very forceful, as you had
suggested. We’re both quite certain that if he had known the answer he would certainly
have told us, simply to make us stop.’
‘And did you finish him?’
‘Yes. We had no option. He’d seen our faces, so we could hardly
have just patched him up and then let him go, because he would immediately have
called the police. We wouldn’t have wanted that, and neither would you.’
‘And there was nothing in his apartment either?’
‘No. We found nothing, and we looked everywhere.’
‘What about his computer?’
‘We didn’t find it. It wasn’t in the flat or in his car, so I
assume it was still in his office.’
Again the man in the villa was silent for a few moments.
‘If you want,’ Marco suggested, ‘we can try and get into his
office at the university to recover it. It shouldn’t be that difficult.
For an additional fee, of course.’
‘You can do that, but there wouldn’t be any point, because the
computer isn’t there.’
‘How do you know that? And where is it?’
‘I know because I have contacts, and by now I expect that it’s
probably sitting on the desk of the senior detective appointed to investigate the
murder. You were seen driving away, and somebody walked in and found the body within
a few minutes of you leaving. There’s no description of you on the wires yet, and
there probably won’t be, because the witness didn’t get a clear look at you.’
Now Marco was silent, considering the implications.
‘We’ve already dumped the van,’ he said, after a moment, ‘and
we both wore gloves the whole time we were in it, so there’s probably no usable
forensic evidence in the vehicle. And we were careful in the barn as well, so I
think we’re probably fairly safe. Unless you know different,’ he added.
‘I’ve heard nothing, apart from what I’ve just told you. But
we still need to find it. Keep your phone switched on all the time. As soon as I’ve
worked out our next move, I’ll call you.’
‘The more I find out about this man, the less sense it makes
for him to be killed,’ Lombardi said, as Perini walked over to his desk. ‘I was
wondering if the professor was working on some kind of cutting-edge technology,
something that might possibly attract the attention of the
Cosa
Nostra or some other bunch of low-
lifes
. A scientific
breakthrough they could steal and use for their own purposes, something like that.’
Perini slid the telephone to one side and half-sat on the edge
of the sergeant’s desk, one slim leg dangling, and looked at him. Since the discovery
of the man’s body the previous evening, he’d neither been home nor slept and now,
mid-morning, it showed in his crumpled suit, the redness of his eyes and the five
o’clock shadow which was approaching the stage where it could almost be called designer
stubble. Lombardi also hadn’t slept, but somewhat irritatingly looked entirely unaffected
by it – he was just his normal slightly overweight self. Of course, he was younger
and more resilient, so he ought to be less affected by a sleepless night, or at
least that was what Perini had told himself when he’d looked at his own haggard
face in the mirror in the men’s room a few minutes earlier.
‘I take it you found nothing like that?’ Perini asked, scratching
his chin.
‘You got that right. He was a professor of literature - Italian
literature - specializing in mediaeval and Renaissance poetry, so there’s nothing
there, as far as I can see. Whatever his killers wanted from him, it can’t have
been anything to do with his job, so it had to be something in his personal life,
and I’ve fired off a bunch of requests for information about him. The usual questions:
bank statements, credit card transactions, that kind of thing, and as soon as I’ve
had some responses I’ll go along and talk to the people that he worked with at the
university. Is that okay with you?’
‘Yes. You talk to them and I’ll interview his wife or whatever
close
family members he had here.’
Both detectives were acutely aware that the first twenty-four
hours in any murder investigation were always the most critical. Perini knew that
unless they managed to identify a reasonable suspect within that time, or at the
very least work out what the motive was for the brutal killing of the academic,
there was a good chance that the murder might remain unsolved. There were very few
inviolable rules in the art or science of detection, but in his experience that
was certainly one of them.
‘From what I’ve found out so far,’ Lombardi replied, ‘he hadn’t
got any. No wife or steady girlfriend, or steady boyfriend for that
matter,
and his parents live near Rome. Both the people I’ve
spoken to so far told me he was a bachelor, a single man who was totally dedicated
to his work. As far as I can gather, he hadn’t even got any outside interests, apart
from watching the occasional football match. Both men I called, by the way, worked
with him at the university, and they were the only two who answered their phones
when I started ringing around.’
Perini nodded.
‘Right.
Then we need to check his house
or flat. There were keys in his jacket pocket if I remember rightly.’
‘Yes.
Keys to his apartment and to his car.
Here’s the address.’
The inspector took the piece of paper, glanced at what was written
on it and then put it in his pocket.
‘I’ll go home, grab a shower and a shave and a change of clothes
and I’ll meet you at his flat at noon. Will that give you enough time to finish
up the interviews at the university?’
‘Plenty, if everybody there has got as little to say about him
as I expect. As far as I can gather, he got into work early, plodded away all day
researching whatever bits of poetry he had an interest in, quite often stayed late
and then went home. He didn’t tend to socialise with other people at the museum,
or with anyone else.
Not much of a life, really.’
‘There must be more to him than that, something we’re missing.
Plodding academics don’t get hauled off the street and tortured to death. He either
knew something or he’d found out something, and when we know what we’ll be a lot
closer to solving this crime.’
The second key Perini tried in the lock turned smoothly, and
he pushed open the door and stepped inside. Then he stopped so suddenly that Lombardi
almost bumped into him. The apartment was small – an estate agent would probably
have described it as ‘compact’ – and it had been completely trashed. It looked as
if every book had been removed from the shelves of the three matching bookcases
which ran along one wall of the living area, checked and then dumped in a pile on
the floor. There was a small knee-hole desk opposite the bookcases, and all the
drawers had been taken out and the contents emptied onto the floor. A computer keyboard
and mouse with USB connectors were positioned on top of the desk, but there was
no screen or system unit to be seen.