Читать книгу A Known Evil: A gripping debut serial killer thriller full of twists you won’t see coming - Aidan Conway - Страница 23

Early forties, exuding a twitchy, impatient enthusiasm and an earnest if weary expression, Luca Spinelli was the new face of Italian politics. They had agreed to meet at his office where it was clear that he’d been both working and living since the break-up with Maria and the subsequent collapse of his own marriage.

“I’ve made a pretty good job of losing it all, don’t you think?” he said as he faced Rossi and Carrara across his desk. “A marriage, the woman I loved. Still have my work though,” he said with a liberal dose of acid irony.

“And we won’t be keeping you from it for long, I’m sure,” Rossi reassured him. “Just a few questions but it would be helpful if you could tell us anything you think may have aroused your suspicion in recent weeks.”

“With pleasure, Inspector,” he replied maintaining the same satirical tone.

Rossi passed the sheaf of e-mails across the desk. “You can, I presume, confirm that you wrote these? In particular, the last one, written in the early hours of the day on which Maria was later killed.”

Spinelli’s expression went from shock and embarrassment through to apparent incredulity.

“How did you get these?”

As Rossi explained, Spinelli went back to leafing through them, reliving the strange, voyeuristic dislocation that comes from seeing your own words already become a form of history. He stopped and held out one of the sheets.

“I didn’t write this,” he said. “I couldn’t have written this. I mean it’s not possible. It’s not me. It can’t be me.” He began to read out some of the more incriminating sentences: “‘If I can’t be with you then you can’t live either, you are coming with me, then we will always be together, I won’t let you get away with this so easy, if I can’t have you no one can … I’ll do myself in or both of us …’”

“It’s your e-mail account,” said Rossi, “and we can pretty quickly ascertain if it came from your own computer, in which case, if it did, it makes things, shall we say, at best, awkward for you.”

“So you’re saying that I did it, that I’m a suspect?”

“I am saying that circumstantial evidence could implicate you as a possible suspect at this point in the investigation – for the murder of Maria Marini and those of both Paola Gentili and Anna Luzi. Unless perhaps you can explain why you wrote it.”

“Or who wrote it,” he added. “Who, Inspector.”

Spinelli’s tone had turned combative, and he now had something of the cornered look in his eyes, a look Rossi had seen many times before.

“Does anyone else have access to your account?”

“No.”

“So you are the sole user.”

“That would appear to be the case.”

“And you aren’t in the habit of letting other people write e-mails for you. A secretary, an aid. Maria herself, maybe? She was helping you, I believe.”

“Oh, yes,” said Spinelli, “and I often give people the keys to my flat too and say ‘walk right in, go on, help yourself’.”

Rossi gave a partially muted sigh.

“So, when you say ‘who’ wrote it, what do you mean exactly?”

“Well,” began Spinelli, “call me an MPD conspiracy theorist, by all means, but has the thought not occurred to you that they might have hacked it, Inspector?”

Rossi never liked the way the final inspector was tagged on like a sardonic Post-it note, but he’d grown used to it. Comes with the job, he mused internally, nobody likes a cop, unless they need one, and then they’re never there, are they? Ha, ha. Come to think of it, he didn’t even like being called inspector when it wasn’t used ironically and would happily have deployed his first name but then it just wasn’t done, was it? Hi, I’m Michael and I’m here to help you. Like fuck you are. You’re here to bang me up as quick as you can and get yourself another stripe. Back to work.

“And you think there might be a reason for that.”

“To frame me, of course!” Spinelli exploded.

“But do you have reason to suspect that someone is trying to frame you, Dr Spinelli?”

Spinelli fumbled in his jacket pockets then wrenched open a desk drawer before locating his cigarettes. He lit up and smoke-whooshed a reply.

“Her ex, for starters. Or maybe just the whole political establishment,” he added with a mock-ironic flourish, standing up and beginning to pace the small office, making it look, at least to Rossi’s eyes, as if it were turning into a cell. He stopped at the window and turned around. Rossi could see he was shaping up for a confession of sorts. But which? There were those that revealed all, those that left out the awkward or shameful particulars, and those made up to take the rap for someone else.

“Look, Inspector,” he began with greater, if rather more, mannered sincerity, “I wrote a few things, in the heat of the moment, which I shouldn’t have. You see, I’d already been drinking, rather a lot as it happens, and since the break-up, well it had just got worse and worse.” He made a hand gesture towards the street. “I’ve been spending most of my evenings in the piano bar round the corner from here. I get something to eat and try to switch off a bit, and then I come back, sleep on the sofa and then I dust myself down and start work again in the morning. The glamorous world of politics.” He stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and sat back down again. He paused to collect his thoughts, joining his hands and holding the fingertips just under his nose, as though gently drawing up through his nostrils some delicate perfume they exuded.

“That day, the day Maria was killed,” he went on, “I woke up and my mind was almost a complete blank. I was still wearing my clothes and my head was pounding. At first, I thought I must have been hitting it harder than usual and perhaps, perhaps, when I had come back the night before I logged on and just started writing that stuff, but it wasn’t me. It was someone else; I was out of my mind; I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t want to kill anyone.”

Rossi looked him in the eye.

“Did you kill her? Perhaps while, as you say, you were out of your mind? Had you gone drinking again that afternoon?”

“No.”

“Did you follow her, stalk her?”

“Stalk? No. Look, I went to her place once or twice when I was drunk, on other occasions, to talk, but that’s as far as it went. Just me leaning on the bell until the madness passed.”

“Did you want to kill her?”

“No, of course not!”

“Did you ever fantasize about killing her, for revenge, for going back to Volpini, for screwing up your marriage?”

“Do you really want me to answer that question?”

“Yes, Dr Spinelli, I do.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “the thought might have occurred, in my mind, in my wildest moments, in my worst moments, but I would never, ever have done it. Haven’t you ever thought about revenge, Inspector?”

Oh, yes, thought Rossi. How he had thought about revenge, planned it even, down to the last detail. The hit, the getaway. The cleanest, most perfect of crimes only a cop could commit.

“Yes,” said Rossi, snapping back from the reverie, “probably, but as far as I know, I have never as yet put it in writing.”

“And neither have I.”

A good firm answer. Rossi liked that. It meant he was on the right lines. It might mean less work, too, and he wanted Maroni off his back about this guy. He was clean. Screwed-up but clean. And besides, there was no material link. No weapon. No witness. No DNA.

But Rossi sensed Carrara was uneasy. He would be concerned that his squeezing of Spinelli was going too far emotively. Carrara was Mr Logic. It was what he did and he did it well, and Rossi knew he was itching to put his oar in. He gestured to his colleague, ceding the floor to him.

“I was just wondering,” began Carrara, “do you think I could take a quick look at the computer, Dr Spinelli?” he asked, glancing askance at Rossi and, like seasoned team players, getting his immediate tacit assent. “I think we might be better off just checking a few things here and now.”

“Feel free,” he said and machine-gunned his password into the keyboard.

“That’s not written anywhere, is it?”

“No. Memorized and difficult to crack. Numbers, letters and symbols and case-sensitive.”

Rossi was more than glad of Carrara’s serious nerd tendencies when it came to computers; it meant he could save precious time and dispense with tedium. He was clicking around now on Spinelli’s e-mail, opening strange windows he’d never seen before and seemed to have already located something of interest.

“I note,” he said, sounding very much the doctor rather than the policeman, “that you’ve been checking your sent items a lot.”

“I honestly don’t remember,” Spinelli replied.

“On the night before the murder you checked some recent e-mails you sent to Maria. Why would you do that?”

“And why would I do that?” asked Spinelli his tone a blend of puzzlement and returning mild contempt. “I was drunk and emotional. I couldn’t give a damn what I’d written about the night before. I might have been hitting all the wrong keys. There’s any number of explanations.”

“Well,” said Carrara gauging from Spinelli’s reaction that there was no damning sign of guilt, “I don’t know for sure, and we may need a linguistics report on this, but could it be that someone, someone else, really was in your account and was trying to, shall we say, discover your style, see how you write, and then,” he looked up at a frowning Spinelli, “write as if he, or she, were you?”

Rossi, intrigued now, was eager to combine forces.

“Doctor Spinelli, are you sure you came home alone that night?”

“I told you. I was very drunk. I remember next to nothing after 9 or 10 o’clock. I blacked out and woke up with a headache from hell.”

“Do you think anyone could have seen you, as you were coming home or leaving the bar?”

“The barman, maybe. There was a girl, actually; I remember that.”

“And did you drink with anyone? Did anyone buy you drinks?”

“Maybe, yes, usually, but I couldn’t say who. Some people know who I am and we often get talking but, really, it’s all a blur. There was the concert, people coming and going.”

Rossi turned to Carrara.

“Luigi, why don’t you take this man for a quiet drink in his usual bar and see if you can find a witness who saw him leave and with whom. Then get him down to the lab, if that’s all right with you,” he said, turning his attention back to Spinelli who now had his arms crossed tightly across his crumpled, white-shirted chest, “and run a blood test and a urine test.”

“A blood test?” spurted Spinelli.

“For what?” said Carrara.

“Anything,” said Rossi, “but sedatives mainly, fast-acting ones, although I do get the sneaking feeling we could be talking Rohypnol here.”

“The date-rape drug?” said Spinelli, shifting in his chair.

“Got it in one,” said Rossi. “And if it was, we should still be able to pick up any traces. Judging by your symptoms, the blackout, the after-effects, I’d say you got a spiked drink. Maybe someone taking a shot at you, or a poor-taste wind-up. I don’t know. Whether or not they then came back here with you or slipped in while you were distracted is more difficult to prove.”

Rossi turned to Carrara.

“And see what prints you can get off the PC, the door. We can always run them through the databases and see what comes up.”

Spinelli seemed more relaxed; like he’d been through the mill, yes, but to some extent relieved. The look of an innocent man who has found someone to believe him?

“Time to cut down on the sauce, perhaps?” Rossi ventured, more than a little pleased with himself, and then remembering what Spinelli was going through, added, “I’m very sorry about Maria. We’re going to do everything in our power.”

“Thank you, Inspector,” said Spinelli.

As Rossi headed for the door, leaving Spinelli in Carrara’s capable hands, a thought occurred to him. He turned towards the now ex-suspect, as far as he was concerned.

“Do you think there could have been other reasons why they, or whoever it was, wanted to kill Maria? Did she have anything in her possession, did anything go missing that you might be aware of?”

“She had a laptop, of course, disks, memory sticks with a lot of our data on. You know, the court cases, the legal actions against us. The work we were doing on constitutional reform. The prison reform. You didn’t find anything, presumably.”

“Nothing. Her bag was ransacked and subtracted from the scene.”

“Well, our new lawyer is going to have some work to do. But not to worry. Starting from scratch is what we’re good at. Or perhaps I should say climbing the mountain. Yes, mountaineers. That’s what we are. Well-prepared, with clear objectives, and a tough lot.”

Not Kremlin mountaineers, I hope, Rossi thought but decided to save it for himself. You can’t expect everyone to be into Mandelstam, he conceded, but the comparisons being drawn between Stalinist control freakery and the power structures within the movement were maybe not so far off the mark.

“Like Sisyphus?” he said, compromising.

“Maybe,” said Spinelli, “or maybe that’s how you see things, but I like to think we’re actually getting somewhere, Inspector, that it’s not all quite so futile. And I think we’ve got a lot of people in high places more than a little scared. You see, solving Italy’s problems is not difficult, despite what they say. What’s difficult is getting the privileged to give up their cosy little arrangements. They cost us billions, the Church too, with all its privileges. But when the people begin to understand, we’ll put our plan into practice. We’ll remove the Church from every part of civic society. No more secret banking. The Lateran Treaties guaranteeing the cosy coexistence of the Vatican within the Italian state and all their fascist inheritance will be torn up.”

“But the treaties are part of the constitution,” cut in Carrara.

“Exactly,” he said, his eyes burning red now, from grief, anger, and exhaustion, “and when there’s enough support we’ll change the constitution and Italy will be a real Republic. Not this hobbled pseudo-democracy taking orders from the cardinals, multinationals, and old-money fascists. Then we’ll be free. And Maria will be a hero. She won’t have died in vain.”

“Well,” said Rossi, enjoying the speech and the little game that had sprung up between them, “just remember, that when you do get near the top of this mountain you’re climbing it’s merciless, it’s lonely, progress is painfully slow, and you’ll need to carry all your own oxygen.”

“The oxygen of the truth, Inspector, or just the plain old stuff that keeps you breathing?”

“Oh,” said Rossi, “I’d say you’d do well to have them both, and in abundance.”