‘Vanessa Langstrum.’
‘What are you doing in Malta?’ he asked. The combination of alcohol and cigarette smoke was having an effect on his social skills. Normally, he was pretty shy and reticent with women, but for some reason he wanted to talk to this one.
‘I’m a photographer on assignment for a Scandinavian woman’s magazine.’
‘Nice,’ Donaldson said. He swayed slightly. Despite his bulk, he wasn’t too good at holding his drink. ‘Care to step around and maybe we could restart our relationship?’ He gave her a very childish smile.
The MIR was silent. The lights were lowered, the hush respectful as DC Jerry Tope took centre stage at the front of the room. He set up his laptop, wirelessly connected to the ceiling-hung data projector. For a few seconds it looked as though technology was going to let him down as the screen turned blue and the words ‘NO INPUT DETECTED’ came up.
He pressed a couple of buttons and the screen came to life with the photograph of a man — short, grey- haired, sitting at a street cafe, leaning across the table pointing at someone who was out of shot. The man looked angry. In front of him was a large cup of coffee and in his left hand was a walking stick.
Tope positioned himself so that he could see his laptop screen without having to crane his neck to look at the projector screen behind him and the audience in front.
‘Let me present our victim: Rosario Petrone,’ he said. The eyes of all the assembled officers flitted between the screen and him. ‘Although we have yet to have a formal ID, information suggests that this is the man who was murdered last night in Charnley Road. Comparison between the photographs of the dead man and photographs I have acquired are pretty conclusive — plus, this.’
He pressed the enter button and the next slide came up.
‘The photo you’ve just seen is one of a series of surveillance shots taken by an anti-Mafia task force in Naples — and this is a blow up of one section of that photo.’
And indeed it was. It showed, in quite good detail, Rosario’s left hand, his fingers gripping the walking stick. ‘The head of the walking stick in this shot is the same as the walking stick found at the scene of the murder… so I have no doubt that Petrone is our victim.’
He picked up the remote mouse and right-clicked. The next slide came up — showing the first slide again of Petrone at the cafe table. Tope held up the walking stick that had been found at the scene, which, back from forensic analysis, was in a long, thin plastic cover, just to emphasize his point.
‘So, who is Rosario Petrone and why did he die?’ he posed the question dramatically. ‘Why,’ he went on, ‘did the head of one of the most ruthless Mafia families in Naples, otherwise known as the Camorra Mafia, end up dead on a Blackpool street?’
Everyone sat and listened earnestly.
‘But I’ll come to that later,’ Tope said, easing the tension in the room, rather like the evil quizmaster with everyone in the palm of his hand. ‘First off, I think it might be useful to give some background on the Camorra, so it’ll give you an idea of what we might be dealing with…’
The next slide was simply entitled ‘Camorra’ and had a series of bullet points under it, which came in with the special audio effect of gunfire, a simple device that seemed to please Tope no end. He spoke over the prompts.
‘The Camorra is like the Mafia and is based in and around Naples in Italy. Its activities include drugs, protection rackets, smuggling people and goods and the production of high quality fake goods in factories in the area previously mentioned. Murder levels are horrendously high in the areas it operates in and to put that boast into perspective, the Camorra have been blamed for…’ With a flourish he jerked the remote mouse at the screen and a figure ‘4’ appeared thereon, accompanied by a gun shot, then three zeros — ‘0’, ‘0’, ‘0’ — each with their own sound effect. ‘Four thousand deaths in the last thirty years, mostly in that geographical region.’ The next slide, mercifully appearing silently, showed a map of Italy with the Campania region highlighted.
‘Da-da-daah!’ one of the detectives in the audience said dramatically, causing a ripple of laughter.
Tope shot the offender a look of stern disapproval. ‘Hm,’ he muttered, not impressed. This was his show. ‘Anyway, the Camorra have probably been in existence since the 1700s and they’ve always operated in a decentralized way, meaning their structure has always been flatter than the hierarchical structure of the main Mafia clans. Because of this, the Camorra clans are always at each other’s throats, but they are more resilient when their top men are arrested, or go into hiding.
‘The 1980s saw the number of clans increasing and today, if Wikipedia is to be believed, with over a hundred clans and over six thousand members, they outnumber the Sicilian Mafia. Rosario Petrone is — was — the head of one of the most ruthless clans of them all. No prizes for guessing its name… the Petrone clan.
‘This lot produce fake luxury goods in their factories in Naples, they traffic thousands of people across the world each year, they control unions in Naples — particularly in public service facilities. They deal drugs, prostitution, money laundering and kidnapping. They are huge and are reckoned to turn over about a billion Euros each year
…’
‘Did you say a billion?’ someone asked.
‘Yeah, you heard right, a billion and, depending on the exchange rate, about eight to nine hundred million pounds — ish — every year. They are phenomenally rich and well organized.’
‘So what was Petrone doing in Blackpool?’
‘He was in hiding following a particularly brutal fallout between clans, as a result of which it’s believed about thirty people have been murdered in the last three years. Certainly a dozen have, and the figure may be as high as fifty. Lots of people just disappear and are often never found. Some have fled, like Petrone, others are encased in concrete or rotting on rubbish dumps… whatever.’
Henry Christie, watching and listening to all this at the back of the MIR, felt his arse twitch with excitement again. He loved it. Loved being in murder room briefings, loved setting off on the hunt for a killer. He knew it was the sort of thing he did well and the thought of having to hand it over to someone just because he was going on a short break made him sweat with frustration. Damn the holiday, he cursed inwardly.
‘Let me take you back about three years,’ Jerry Tope was saying at the front of the room. ‘To a tale of jealousy, revenge and murder
… and garbage.’
‘I should apologize for my earlier forwardness,’ she said. ‘I was a little tipsy and a little annoyed, I suppose.’
‘Annoyed?’ Donaldson said. He and his neighbour were out on his balcony, sitting alongside each other on loungers. He was sipping a small beer from the minibar and she had a gin and tonic from the same source. Donaldson’s supplies were sparse now.
‘My boyfriend. He was supposed to be joining me but,’ she shrugged, ‘pressure of work, or so he says.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘In Sweden… probably being laid by the twenty-year-old tramp I caught him texting last week,’ Vanessa said fiercely. She took a long drink of the G amp;T. ‘So I was annoyed and I made a bit of a fool of myself because of my rocky relationship.’
‘Ah, rocky. I know that.’ Donaldson raised his glass to salute that intangible phrase.
‘So I am sorry.’
‘Apology accepted.’
‘But.’ She turned to him and despite his best intentions he could not keep his eyes off her cleavage. ‘I would still like to fuck you
… you know, now that we have ironed out our misunderstandings. I know you are an FBI agent, not a pervert. You know I was a bit mad, but I’ve had some sleep since then and my head is clear.’
Donaldson averted his eyes and squinted across the harbour. Even in the extended trough that his relationship with his wife was foundering, he had never been unfaithful to her. He’d had the opportunity. Women at work. A very sexy female Cypriot detective he’d met — and that had been a very close run thing — but he’d always held back, hoping things would improve with Karen. A forlorn hope. Even though both had tried, it was a struggle.
His head turned.
Seconds later they had dragged each other through to the bedroom, wrestled each other out of what little
