shook hands and exchanged goodbyes.
De Crescenzo left the house and walked out into the sultry night. His mind was awhirl as he headed across the road to where he’d parked the Volvo. He patted his coat pocket for the ignition key. Not there. He was so distracted that he couldn’t remember if he’d locked the car or not – maybe he’d even left the key in it. In a daze, he reached for the door handle. It opened and he got in.
The key wasn’t in the ignition. He cursed softly and felt in his other pocket.
‘Good evening, Count De Crescenzo,’ said a voice behind him.
The airfield’s floodlights gleamed off the sleek fuselage of the SOCA Cessna Citation jet as it waited on standby a hundred metres from the giant hangar where Darcey had set up her temporary command centre. The huge space was alive with heavily-armed police and soldiers, technical personnel and government agents, and filled with vehicles and military trestle tables and flight-cased racks of radio and computer equipment. At the rear of the hangar, silhouetted in shadow, stood the official planes of the King of Spain and the country’s President.
Darcey was deep in a meeting with Comisario Miguel Garrido, one of Madrid’s most senior-ranking police chiefs, when, just after midnight, Paolo Buitoni came sprinting across the hangar and broke in on their conversation. He was out of breath and clutching a card file, full of apologies for the interruption but bursting with news.
‘I just had a call from Rome,’ he said excitedly. ‘Your idea to bring Ornella De Crescenzo into custody and put some pressure on her? We’ll probably get our balls – that is to say, we’ll probably get disciplined, but it worked. She remembered. She got it.’
‘Don’t beat about the bush, Paolo,’ Darcey said. ‘Tell me.’
‘The name of the man her husband rushed off to meet is Segura. That was all she could remember, but I ran a search using “Segura Spain fine art”. I came up with this guy.’ He plucked a glossy printout from the file. Darcey took it. It showed a serious-looking man in his fifties, with swept-back silver hair and broad shoulders, pictured at some kind of arts event, shaking hands with another man in front of a huge canvas.
‘Juan Calixto Segura,’ Buitoni said. ‘A well-respected art collector based in Salamanca.’ He snatched a sheet from his file. ‘I have the address right here. Million to one, Ben Hope followed Pietro De Crescenzo there tonight. And there’s more. Our men just discovered that Ornella’s car is missing. She says her husband left for Spain in his own Volvo.’
‘Ben Hope took it,’ Darcey said. ‘We’re looking for a bronze Maserati GranTurismo. Not too many of those around.’
Darcey turned to Garrido. ‘Comisario, we need your tactical teams and every available patrol officer in there, hard and fast.’
Garrido was already summoning his aides and issuing commands.
‘Darcey, Salamanca is just a hundred and fifty kilometres from here,’ Buitoni said. ‘The jet can get us there in less than fifteen minutes and I’ll have a police chopper waiting for us at the military base outside the city.’
‘Nice work, Paolo.’ Darcey flashed a brief smile at him, and then her jaw tightened and the fierce glint came into her eye. She grabbed her Beretta from a nearby steel table.
As she strode towards the mouth of the hangar she jacked a round into the breech, flipped on the safety and shoved the weapon into her hip holster. ‘Ben Hope isn’t getting away this time.’
‘She has that look again,’ Buitoni muttered under his breath as he ran after her. ‘God, I love that look.’
Pietro De Crescenzo’s eyes became huge and round in the rear-view mirror. He twisted round in horror to stare at the man who’d suddenly appeared in the back of the Volvo.
‘Good to see you again,’ Ben said. ‘Remember me?’
‘
‘That’s right,’ Ben said. ‘I’m a sick, sick man. A raving psychotic, just like the papers say. I killed Urbano Tassoni and I enjoyed doing it, just like I enjoyed killing a hundred other men, women and children before him. And I’ll kill you, too, Pietro, unless you do exactly what I say.’
De Crescenzo cowered behind the steering wheel. Ben dangled the Volvo keys from his fingers. ‘This town’s pretty by night. Why don’t we take a scenic tour while we talk?’
De Crescenzo took the key from him with a trembling hand. He was shaking so badly it took him three attempts to fit it into the ignition.
‘Don’t drive too fast,’ Ben said. ‘Don’t drive too slowly. Don’t do anything that might attract attention to us.’
De Crescenzo nodded frantically, took a deep breath and pulled away. The Volvo glided through the night streets. Traffic was thin. As they skirted the old city, the ancient sandstone buildings and domes and steeples were lit gold under the moonlight.
‘How did you know where to find me?’ De Crescenzo quavered.
‘The contessa was a great help,’ Ben said. ‘She even lent me her car.’
‘Ornella! You did not—’
‘You can relax, Pietro. She’s fine, apart from a hangover. Needs to ease up on the Smirnoff a little. As soon as I’m finished with you, you should think about getting home to her before she overdoes it. You’re not giving her the attention she deserves.’ Ben Hope, marriage counsellor.
De Crescenzo’s shoulders slumped at the wheel. ‘What is it you want from me?’
‘I came to ask you what the hell’s going on,’ Ben said. ‘But now I can see you don’t know any more than I do.’
De Crescenzo glanced back at him in the mirror. ‘You were there? In Segura’s home?’
‘I heard every word you said, Pietro.’
‘Then I can tell you no more. Please. Let me go. I promise – I
‘Tell me one thing, and you won’t see me ever again,’ Ben said. ‘Tell me about the first time.’
‘The first time?’
‘Something you said to Segura. “The first time, the crooks left with nothing.” You weren’t talking about the gallery heist, were you?’
De Crescenzo was silent for a few moments, then let out a long, sad sigh. ‘When Gabriella Giordani passed away in October 1986 from a heart attack, it was as the direct result of a violent intrusion at her secluded home outside Cesena. She was all alone when it happened. Her former maid and longtime companion and confidante was no longer living with her. When Gabriella was later found dead at the scene, the coroner’s conclusion was that the heart attack had been induced by acute terror.’
‘What were they looking for? Cash? Valuables?’
De Crescenzo grunted bitterly. ‘That is the strange thing. Gabriella Giordani had been an established artist for quite a few years and her work was worth a fortune. She was
