Viper Read online

The dogs scavenged as the boys ate. Crowds flowed past, heading to the Doric Temple and Great Theatre. A group of schoolgirls sauntered by. Multicoloured rucksacks swung low over tight blue jeans. Pretty hands marked off worksheets.

  ‘Francesi,’ whispered Franco, picking up their accents as they gabbled to each other.

  ‘Bonjour,’ shouted Paolo in poor French, then added in English. ‘You ladies need a guide?’

  The girls giggled.

  Franco’s Anglo-Saxon was less subtle. ‘Show us your cunts and we’ll do your schoolwork for you.’

  The giggling stopped. A young male teacher appeared from the back of the group. The cousins hadn’t spotted him. He was suntanned, fashionably dressed and had the kind of confidence that only teachers have. As he strode over he’d probably weighed up the two young men and, being several inches taller and far more muscular than either of them, no doubt felt confident about his task.

  He shouldn’t have done.

  Franco got to his feet. Before the teacher had uttered a word he adjusted his balance and thundered a kick between the man’s legs. More followed. Rapid, vicious kicks, delivered with all Franco’s hatred for the world and for what good-looking young men like this one stood for.

  The teacher doubled over, hands clutching his groin. Franco drop-kicked him in the chest. The impact made a dull and muffled sound. Ribs cracked like ice on a lake.

  The girls screamed. Franco felt jolts of power and energy surge through him. Violence made him feel good. Feel complete.

  ‘Bastardo! ’ swore Franco. He took a final kick at the man’s head as he lay unconcious on the ancient cobbles.

  Everyone looked away. A collective wave of nausea washed over them. Paolo pulled at his cousin.

  ‘Now, we go. It’s done. Come on!’

  Franco was in a trance. Fixated by the sight of the pain and chaos that he’d created.

  ‘Now!’ shouted Paolo. Finally he got Franco to move. Dragged him down Vicolo del Menandro. Through an ancient block of houses that pre-dated Christ, then right into the wide, ancient thoroughfare known as Via dell’Abbondanza. At the end of it they ducked out of sight and Paolo exploded. ‘What the fuck was that for? Why did you do that?’

  ‘Because I wanted to,’ wheezed Franco. ‘Because he’s a French cunt and he deserved to have his French cunt-face beaten to a pulp.’

  ‘Hell, the guy hadn’t even said anything.’

  ‘He didn’t have to. You saw the way those bitches looked at us.’

  Paolo let out a sigh. ‘Stupido, they only looked at us because we spoke to them. Nothing would have kicked off if you hadn’t asked to see their cunts.’

  The criticism stung Franco. ‘It was a joke. If you’d have said it they’d have laughed. But because I said it, they looked like they were going to be sick.’

  Paolo let it rest. When his cousin was in this kind of mood there was no point trying to explain that the world wasn’t always against him.

  Franco’s temper was snapping again. ‘Bitches. Fucking little bitches. They think they’re too good for me. Too pretty for me, all because of this!’ He slapped his hands on either side of his face then scratched up and down at his wrinkled and mottled skin.

  Paolo saw blood coming from his cousin’s cheeks. ‘Hey, stop it! Come on. Don’t do that.’ He pulled his cousin’s hands away from his face.

  ‘Too good? Huh!’ said Franco. ‘They’re no better than the bags of trash we burn every day. That’s what they are – trash. I’d like to take them down to Grandfather’s pit, fuck them one by one and then burn them all.’

  The pit was Franco’s private place. No one went there but him. And nothing seemed to calm him more than spending time alone there, burning things.

  ‘Fine. Whatever,’ said Paolo, ‘but unless we get moving again, the only burning you’re going to be doing is your backside on a prison bench.’ He put his hand on his cousin’s shoulder and tried to push him into a jog. ‘C’mon, let’s move.’

  ‘I’m not coming.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not running any more. I’m going to the Orto.’

  ‘Don’t be crazy. You nearly killed that French guy. Come on!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes!’ Paolo tried again to move him, but Franco wheeled away from his hand. ‘Those kids will have told another teacher by now. The guards and polizia will be all over us in a minute. C’mon.’

  ‘No! I don’t give a fuck. I’m going where I want to go. I always go to the Orto and I’m not leaving today until I’ve been.’

  Paolo stopped and thought for a brief moment. ‘Well, I’m not. Crazy fucker! You get caught by the polizia if you want. I’m gone.’

  Franco didn’t even watch him head off. Instead, he cut slowly back through Vicolo dei Fuggiaschi and wandered towards an area of Pompeii that had been a vineyard before Vesuvius erupted.

  Franco Castellani looked at the haunting sprawl and tangle of plaster mummies lying in the grey stony dirt of the Orto dei Fuggiaschi, the Garden of the Fugitives. More than a dozen adults and children had been found dead, huddled together, seeking the solace of human touch in the last moment of life.

  Human touch. Something he craved.

  He raised his eyes to the sky and felt a strange spiritual connection with the dead.

  What had killed them? The boiling flow of lava and the billowing fires? Or the choking whirlwind of pumice, ash and volcanic dust?

  Had they been good people? Bad people? Had they deserved to die? He doubted it. No one deserved to die such a horrible death. No one but those little French bitches. Such an end would have been perfect for them.

  Franco took his time wandering around. Paolo was right, the cops were soon everywhere. Swarming all over the place, like roaches. No problem, though. He knew the ruins like the back of his hand. He slipped outside the gates into the town of Pompeii. Disappeared down by the railway line heading east. He curled up behind a giant old hoarding advertising sanitary towels, and slept for several hours.

  It was dark and late when Franco Castellani crept back into the rusty caravan he shared with his cousin.

  Paolo looked up from his bunk, an old football magazine on his lap. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ mumbled Franco, his head down in shame.

  ‘Grandpa brought us two beers. I saved them till you came.’ Paolo nodded at the small second-hand fridge that buzzed and clanked beneath a worktop in the tiny galley kitchen.

  ‘Fuck!’ swore Franco as he opened the door and sharp white light blazed into his face. ‘Why does it have to be so bright?’

  ‘Opener’s on the top. Come sit with me.’

  ‘Peroni. He spoils us.’ Franco popped the caps. Foam fizzed over the bottle necks. ‘He say anything to you about the Camorristi?’

  Paolo took a beer from his cousin’s hand and clinked bottles. ‘Salute! They want the place. Plan to move us out. They’re going to build here, or something.’

  ‘What? You fucking joking?’

  ‘No. That’s what they say. They are going to send the guys round. Grandpa has to sign, and that’s it.’

  ‘The guys. I hate the fucking guys. Where we supposed to go?’

  ‘Like they give a fuck? It would have been different if we were guys.’

  Franco started to peel the label off the bottle. He always tried to get it off without tearing, but never managed. ‘Camorra soldiers. Us? You think so?’

  ‘Why not? We can do stuff. We can run messages, do deals, scare the shit out of people and that.’

  ‘Well, at least, I can. I’m not sure you can scare a fish.’

  Paolo laughed and took a long swig of the beer. It wasn’t as cold as it should have been; the fridge was playing up again. ‘Grandpa would never let us work for the System, you know his feelings.’

  Franco knew them well. The Camorra was the thing that he hated most. The thing that had ruined his life.

  ‘You going to stay in tonight?’

  ‘No. I’ll have another be
er with you, then I’m going out. You know I have to.’

  Paolo avoided his eyes. He never knew where his cousin went, or what he got up to. He just understood that sometimes he had to be on his own. It was better that way.

  22

  Stazione dei carabinieri, Castello di Cisterna

  The wet morning air tasted of stone and flint. Jack King clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and prayed he’d find decent coffee inside the local carabinieri HQ.

  It was a rectangular, purpose-built, brick barracks. Four storeys high and home not only to the investigation division but also more than a thousand soldiers. Grey metal gates opened as Massimo flashed his ID. They were ushered across a gravelled driveway, past a frayed but still fluttering Italian flag, into a small, cool dark reception area tiled in cheap, dull marble.

  ‘Wow, this place is depressing.’ Jack squinted down a warren of dimly lit corridors decorated in spirit-sapping greys and faded blues.

  ‘Not all of Italy is an art gallery,’ remarked Massimo stoically, as he led them past a series of closed doors. They were still several offices away from that of Capitano Sylvia Tomms when she appeared from the depths of the warren. Mass kissed her lightly on both cheeks.

  ‘Sylvia, this is Jack King. It’s best we talk in English but his Italian is quite good – especially the bad words – so be careful what you say about him.’

  Sylvia laughed and stuck out a hand. ‘Hope the jet lag isn’t too bad. Thanks for coming.’

  ‘I’ll survive. Please call me Jack. It sounds like you have quite a puzzle on your hands.’

  She smiled. ‘Step by step, little by little, we will solve it. Come to my room. I’ll get you both something to drink and show you what we’ve got.’

  The office was tiny and cluttered. Her desk was covered in papers, photographs, memos and maps. In the middle, a flat-screen monitor rose from a heap of plastic water bottles, sandwich wrappings, old cigarette packets and coffee cups.

  ‘Please take a seat. Just put those anywhere on the floor.’ Sylvia motioned to two hard wooden chairs and the skyscrapers of files she’d built on them. The floor was also stacked with documents. Jack and Massimo had to place the papers they’d moved under the chairs.

  ‘I’m sorry about the mess. I have an office three times smaller than any male Capitano, and whenever I try to order bookshelves or filing cabinets they never come. I think they’re trying to tell me something, no? Anyway, this is how I work, and for me it is no longer a problem.’

  Jack liked her. She seemed smart and didn’t let shit get her down. A good way to get through life.

  Sylvia pulled papers from beneath a thick teetering stack. ‘An old man walking his dog in Mount Vesuvius National Park discovered what he suspected might be a human bone. He was right. We recovered more than a hundred smashed and fragmented bones from the site.’

  Jack made a mental note of the severity of the destruction. The multiplicity of broken bones indicated a high level of rage and an urgent need for gratification.

  Sylvia ploughed on. ‘Local anthropologists managed to piece together the outline of a human skeleton. Here, look at this.’ She handed over a series of glossies showing a partially reconstructed skeleton.

  Jack was impressed. He’d seen experts back in the States struggle with similar cases. ‘It’s a good job. I’m amazed they got so much done so quickly.’

  Sylvia looked pleased at the compliment. ‘They are among the best in the country, maybe the best in the world. From the jawbone we have managed to get a conclusive match with dental X-rays. Our skeleton is that of Francesca Di Lauro, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Casavatore, last seen about five years ago.’

  Jack scanned the shots again. ‘The bones are black

  – I take it that’s from some kind of burning?’ ‘Total burning. We don’t know how or where or when, but all the bones were like that.’

  ‘Anything from Tox?’

  ‘Not much. Seems a regular accelerant was used to burn her. Paraffin.’

  ‘What kind?’

  Sylvia looked puzzled. ‘Paraffin is paraffin, no?’

  ‘That’s what I used to think. Have them dig deeper. I worked a case in New York and found there are dozens of types of paraffin. Some comes as wax, some is cheap and imported from places like India. I guess there’s locally produced stuff as well.’

  ‘Italian factories use paraffin a good deal,’ added Massimo. ‘Industrial paraffin, chlorinated paraffin oil, that type of chemical. There will be records, health and safety documents, batch numbers.’

  Sylvia scribbled a note to herself and Massimo wondered if she’d ever find it again amid the mess. Jack turned back to the photographs, fanned them out and looked for a close-up of the bone fragments. ‘You got any better blow-ups? Ones of the end of the bones, the splintered parts?’

  Sylvia slid Jack a BCU – a Big Close-Up – of a shattered hip.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Massimo.

  ‘I’m trying to work out when our killer set his fire. Looking at this shot, the hip is blackened, though there are traces of cream bone at the edge, where it’s been bludgeoned, chopped with something. If it had been chopped first, then none of the cream of the bone would be showing; the splintered end would be as blackened as the rest.’

  Massimo followed his train of thought. ‘So Francesca’s corpse was dismembered after it was burned? That seems unusual. I would expect a killer to try to dispose of a body, and any evidence attached to it, by dismembering it first, then burning it and all the clothing and anything else that he’d come into contact with.’

  Sylvia Tomms had worked gangland shootings, a rape murder, and numerous messy domestics, but this was new ground. ‘Go slow for the lady police officer,’ she said. ‘Let me get this right. You’re suggesting someone killed Francesca, doused her in paraffin, burned the corpse, then chopped it up and buried it?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Jack carefully. ‘But even that doesn’t quite make sense to me. Your ME should be able to set things right.’

  ‘What? What am I missing?’ asked Sylvia.

  Jack turned to Massimo. ‘You’ve got a dead body – what do you do with it?’

  ‘Dump it,’ suggested Mass, ‘in the woods or in the sea. Chop it up, bury it in a forest, or on some land that you own.’

  Jack wagged a finger. ‘Okay. So what’s with the burning?’

  ‘Like Mass just said, to get rid of forensic evidence, in case the body or part of the body is discovered,’ suggested Sylvia.

  ‘That makes sense if it’s after the dismemberment,’ said Jack. ‘Burning pieces of a corpse is easier than burning a whole body. Not many people have the space and privacy to light a giant bonfire and burn an entire corpse.’

  ‘Or the time,’ added Massimo.

  Sylvia was now in sync with their thinking. ‘Another explanation. One that fits with the cream ends to that burned bone, is that the fire was not only pre-dismemberment, it was also ante-mortem.’

  Jack nodded. ‘You’ve got it. That’s the next assumption. In fact, the most likely one. I suspect the killer set her on fire while she was still alive. Perhaps he even wanted to watch her burn to death. And if that’s the case, then the guy you’re hunting is not just a killer – he’s a sadist and a serial killer.’

  ‘Bad combination,’ said Massimo.

  Sylvia glanced down at the pictures of bone. Less than a week ago she’d taken charge of a low-level inquiry. Now, all of a sudden, it was turning into a manhunt for a serial killer – and, by the looks of it, one of the worst Italy had ever seen.

  23

  Casa di famiglia dei Valsi, Camaldoli

  The two six-year-old boys sat cross-legged in the corner of the lounge. White, black and red Lego was spread all around them. Small hands and big imaginations built space shuttles and heroic astronauts.

  The mothers of Enzo Valsi and Umberto Covella sat at the opposite end of the room. Coffee, cigarettes and the criminal world of the Camorra w
ere their playthings.

  Tatiana Covella was two years older than Gina, and her husband Nico ten years older than Bruno but ten times less successful – as she kept telling him. Nico was still a guaglione, a guapo; one of the guys that bosses like Bruno would send to do their dirty work.

  ‘The problem with Nico,’ explained Tatiana, passing a lit cigarette to her hostess, ‘is that he is troppo spavaldo. He is always happy with whatever he has, but sometimes, you know, he is just, just a…’ Her hands grabbed at the air as though trying to pluck the right word from somewhere.

  ‘Pagliaccio,’ offered Gina with a straight face.

  They both burst our laughing. ‘All men are clowns,’ said her friend, ‘but Nico, he is so gullheaded and macho. He is interested only in fucking me, not making our life better in any way.’

  Gina looked across at the children. Umberto was banging the two astronauts together in some imaginary intergalactic battle. Enzo was stealing pieces from his pile to finish the side of the space station. ‘I wish that, just once, Bruno would be a little more romantic,’ said Gina, not meaning to. The thought had just tumbled out, and was now lying there for her friend to see.

  ‘Give it time. When men are locked up, it messes with their minds. Bruno wasn’t just in jail. Nico says prigione di massima sicurezza is awful. The isolation, the brutality…’

  Gina laughed. ‘Not for Bruno. My father saw to it that he was no more in maximum security than you and me sitting here in this lounge. No one stood in his way. A hand was never raised against him.’

  ‘Still – prison – it poisons minds. It’s not natural to be locked up, you must give him time.’

  ‘He doesn’t want time,’ she snapped. ‘What he wants is nothing to do with me. He’s said as much.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean that. He’s just confused.’

  ‘Ha! Bruno, confused? Have you heard yourself?’

  The sharpness in her friend’s voice silenced Tatiana. Tra moglie e marito non mettere dito, she told herself. Never interfere between husband and wife. But curiosity is a terrible thing and she ached to know more. She lit a cigarette for herself. ‘Have you – you know? Sex – have you at least tried?’