That was where she worked, on the ground floor of the police headquarters, off via Medina and down near the sea front, in the cavernous Mussolini-era building in the room where the crime-desk hacks fed off the information they were given. She was relatively new to the city but her father had a business partner who had an uncle who had influence at the newspaper, and it had always been her ambition to work as a crime reporter. The link had secured her the job – the normal way of things in the city. The more senior staffers on the team were out of town because a supplement was being prepared on the Casalesi clan operating in Caserta, so her phone had rung – and her car hadn’t started. She might well take up the photographer’s offer to introduce her to a cousin who dealt in secondhand vehicles. What they said in the newsroom about the photographer told her that a car from that source would be cheap, but the chance of paperwork to accompany it was slight. She had her notebook out and a ballpoint pen.
‘So, what happened? Was he shot?’
‘You sure you want to know?’
‘Of course.’
‘Have you had breakfast?’
‘No – because the car wouldn’t start and I was late and-’
‘Better on an empty stomach. It’s not pretty.’
Most of the murders she had covered since she’d joined the crime desk had been pistol shots into the head of a man eating in a trattoria, drinking in a bar, sitting in a car, playing cards with associates. ‘Tell me.’
‘You asked. See there, behind where he’s lying? There’s a grocery. The drogheria, of course, has steel shutters down at night. The padlock was cut and the shutters lifted enough to get a man under. They needed electrical power. They took the cable in with them, found a point and plugged it in. Then they went two doors down, called at the place and the wife said her husband wasn’t in and went back to bed. They waited for him to come back from wherever, jumped him and dragged him to where the shutter was up. He would have seen – not much light on the street but enough – what they had waiting for him and he’d have been shitting himself, too scared to scream, and they’d started the engine – can you take this?’
‘Try me.’
‘They’d plugged in a circular-blade tile-cutter.’
‘Jesus, help us.’
‘One of the cops told me before the big apparatchiks took over. There’s no pretty way to say this, but they cut off his balls first, then put them in his mouth – forced open his teeth and shoved them in. This is the twenty-first century, this is Naples, a cradle of civilisation. You doing all right?’
‘Fine.’
‘They put some euro notes in too. Then they cut his head off. The blade can go right through a bathroom or kitchen-floor tile, so it wouldn’t have had a problem with a neck. They took his head off and laid it in his crotch so it covered up where his balls had been.’
‘Did you say “a cradle of civilisation”?’
‘They did all this on a pavement and there’s a streetlight no more than fifty metres away. People must have passed him in the night after they’d driven off. They must have seen him with his head in his crotch, gagging on his balls and the money, and must have stepped round him, kept going. People live over the drogheria and alongside it, but they never heard anything. Nothing heard and nothing seen. The grocery owner came to open the shop before going to the market and found him. What more do you want to know?’
She swallowed hard. If she had thrown up, she would have demeaned herself, and it would have gone straight round the city’s newsrooms and the hacks’ room at the Questura. She swallowed, gulped. Then she looked hard at the face of the widow, and thought she saw acceptance, not anger. She wondered if she could write her piece on the expression of fatalism, base it round the mood that seemed to grip the woman. She didn’t keen and the child didn’t weep.
‘I want to know what he’d done to be punished like this.’
‘He was a carpenter.’
‘Why was he killed like that, though?’
‘The policeman who talked to me said that the Borelli clan, who have this territory, wanted the pizzo from him.’
‘So they extort cash from him – a hundred euros a week?’
The photographer lit another cheroot, puffed at it, shrugged. ‘He shouted his mouth off. He said he’d go to the palace, inform – the police have that from the woman. Maybe he’d already made a statement to the prosecutor. Maybe he’d only said he would. In some districts you can do that and survive, but not in Forcella or Sanita. He’d threatened it, and that was enough.’
‘So that’s what they do to an informer?’
‘Yes. And nobody reported any noise or the body in the street, because they were frightened, and because nobody values an informer. He has the status of a leper.’
The scene-of-crime technician had folded away his tripod. The ambulance crew had carried the body on a stretcher to the vehicle. The woman and the child were escorted by a priest to their door, and the owner of the drogheria lifted his steel shutter, uncoiled a hosepipe and sluiced the pavement. The crowd dispersed. The reporter and the photographer drove off, to write copy, check pictures and hear the police statement in the Questura. Within minutes, there was no trace – on the pavement or in the street – of where an informer had been killed.
He glanced at his watch. She had promised detailed information on the functioning of the clan, her mother’s role in the running of the organisation, the dealings of Vincenzo, and the work Giovanni was put to in Forcella. What she had told him was merely headlines, but to an investigator it was mouthwatering, not that he showed enthusiasm. He took no notes, and didn’t wear a wire. He thought it important to be indifferent at this stage of his linkage with Immacolata Borelli.
In his mind were the bullet points of what he needed, and two were outstanding. He asked where Vincenzo had been that day. Did she know anything about his diary? Where could he be found after midday? She was vague. It was difficult for her, she said, to know her brother’s schedule. She gave him the address of the apartment they shared, his mobile number, the name and location of the cafe-bar he most often patronised, the warehouse where he stored the coats and shoes he imported and exported.
‘I emphasise and repeat, Signorina, that intense pressure will be applied to you when your family learn what you’ve done. In the first period, before a legal process, we will protect you, but we can’t protect all those who may be dear to you. Could they find, hold and hurt, maybe murder, a lover?’
‘No.’
Put a second time, the question was redundant, but it was his practice to examine the face rather than merely listen to words.
‘In Naples, there’s no lover, no boy?’
‘No.’
‘In London, are you in a relationship with someone you met here? An Italian boy? A boy from the college you attend?’
‘Is that important?’
‘It is, Signorina, because you’ll be sequestered, perhaps for months, in a safe-house and under protection. A boyfriend won’t be able to visit you. You can’t get on a plane and come back to London because you want him, because-’
‘It won’t happen.’
‘So there is a boy here?’ His eyes bored into her, looking for truth, demanding it, and he towered over her. He was aware then that the first thin sunlight had broken through the cloud and played on her cheeks. ‘I have to know.’
‘Yes, but not significant.’
‘What does that mean – significato? Is there or isn’t there a boy?’
‘We go to bars, we go to films, we go-’
‘You go to bed. But you say it’s not “significant” – yes?’
‘He’s just a boy. We met in a park. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘You won’t pine for him?’
She threw back her head and raindrops cascaded from her hair, the sun catching them to make jewels. ‘I’ll
