didn’t like men, and who could blame her? She looked like a young Sophia Loren, and because of this she’d suffered men’s lusting after her body for a good twenty-five of her thirty-eight years. Whenever Salvatore saw her, he lusted after her as well. He liked to think he was good at keeping his thoughts off his face, but the medical examiner had antennae attuned to the slightest mental image that might pop up in the head of any male who gazed upon her bounteous physical virtues. This was one of the reasons she preferred to do things by phone. Again, who could blame her?
Forty-eight hours, Salvatore thought. Where had Roberto Squali been heading, then, forty-eight hours ago when his car had flown off the road and his life had ended? Was he drunk? he asked Cinzia Ruocco. He was not, she replied. Not drunk and, barring toxicology reports which would be weeks in coming, not impaired in any way. Except, she added, in the way of all men who think ownership of a fast sports car makes them more masculine than owning something sensible. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn this fool had possession of a motorcycle as well. Something huge, she said, to take the place of what—she was happy to report—he didn’t have in great size between his legs.
“Si, si,” Salvatore said. He knew Cinzia lived with a man, but he had to wonder how the fellow put up with her general disdain for males of all species. He rang off and considered a map he’d posted on the wall of his office. There was so much in the Apuan Alps. It would take a century to work out where the dead man had been heading, if, indeed, where he’d been heading was relevant to the case.
Salvatore had come up with a photo of Squali in better days, which was any day prior to the day on which they’d found his body. He was a handsome man, and with the picture in his possession, it was a small matter for Salvatore to reboot the tourist photographs he’d loaded onto his laptop and to verify that it was indeed Squali standing there in the crowd behind Hadiyyah, holding the card with a yellow happy face on it. Seeing this, Salvatore considered his next options.
They had everything to do with Piero Fanucci. Il Pubblico Ministero was not going to be pleased when Salvatore revealed to him that he might be wrong about his prime suspect. In the past two days, Fanucci had invested a great deal into Carlo Casparia’s ostensible guilt, allowing more and more details of the drug addict’s “confession” to be leaked to the press. He’d even given an interview about the investigation to Prima Voce. This interview had ended up on the tabloid’s front page as well as its website, which meant it would soon enough be translated by the British media, members of which group had started to show up in Lucca. They’d made short work of figuring out that the cafe down the street from the questura was the best spot to pick up gossip about the case, and like their Italian counterparts, they were dogged when it came to buttonholing police officials for direct questioning.
Because of this latter fact, when it came down to it, there was really no decision to make about whether to tell il Pubblico Ministero about the discovery of Roberto Squali, Salvatore realised. Should he not tell him, a reporter would, or—what was worse—Piero would read about it in Prima Voce. There would be hell for Salvatore to pay if that occurred. So there was nothing for it but to pay a call upon Fanucci.
Salvatore gave the magistrato every one of the details he’d so far withheld: the red convertible, the previous sighting of a man and a girl heading into the woods, the American tourist’s photos of a man in possession of a card that—so it appeared—he seemed to have given to the missing girl, and now the accident site with that same man’s dead body forty-eight hours in the out-of-doors.
Fanucci listened to Salvatore’s recitation from the other side of his vast walnut desk, twirling a pen in his fingers and keeping his eyes fixed upon Salvatore’s lips. At the conclusion of Salvatore’s remarks, il Pubblico Ministero abruptly shoved his chair back, surged to his feet, and walked to his bookcases. Salvatore steeled himself for Fanucci’s rage, possibly to include the hurling of legal volumes in his direction.
What came, however, was something else.
“Cosi . . . ,” Fanucci murmured. “Cosi, Topo . . .”
Salvatore waited for more. He did not have to wait long.
“Ora capisco com’e successo,” Fanucci said thoughtfully. He did not sound the least bit concerned about the information he’d just been given.
“Daverro?” Salvatore sought clarification. “Allora, Piero . . . ? ” If Fanucci did indeed see how the kidnapping and everything related to it had happened, he—Salvatore—would be only too welcoming of the magistrate’s conclusions.
Fanucci turned back to him with one of his inauthentic and paternal smiles, in itself a sign of worse things to come. “Questo . . . ,” he said. “You have the link you have sought. This we must now celebrate.”
“The link,” Salvatore repeated.
“Between our Carlo and what he did with the girl. Now it all fits together, Topo. Bravo. Hai fatto bene.” Fanucci returned to his desk and sat. He continued expansively with “I well know what you will say next. ‘So far,’ you will say, ‘there is no link to join these men Squali and Carlo Casparia, Magistrato.’ But that is because you have not yet found it. You will, however, and it will show you that Carlo’s intentions were what I have declared them to be. He did not wish this child for himself. Have I not told you that? As you can now see and as I saw the moment you told me there was a Carlo, he wished to sell the child to fund his drug habit. And this is exactly what he did.”
“To make sure I understand, Magistrato,” Salvatore said carefully. “You mean that you believe Carlo sold the little girl to Roberto Squali?”
“Certo. And Squali is the direction you are to head in: to find the point in the chain where the link exists leading you from him to Carlo.”
“But Piero, what you suggest . . . A simple comparison with the tourist’s photographs shows that Carlo is not likely to be involved at all.”
Fanucci’s eyes narrowed but his smile did not falter. “And your reason is . . . ?”
“My reason is that one of the photos shows this man Squali with a card that, in a picture that follows, appears to be in the hand of the girl. Does this not suggest that he and not Carlo followed her from the mercato on the day she went missing?”
“Bah!” was Fanucci’s reply. “This man Squali . . . He is in the mercato how often, Topo? This one time? While Carlo and the girl are there weekly, si? So what I’m telling you is that Carlo knew this man, Carlo knew what he wanted, Carlo saw this girl, and Carlo laid his plan, based on the girl’s movements that he and not Roberto Squali had studied. So we will talk to Carlo again, my friend. And from him we will learn this Squali’s intentions. Prior to this he has not mentioned the name Roberto Squali to me. But when instead I say it to him . . . ? Aspetta, aspetta.”
Salvatore could see how it would play out, now that Fanucci had a name to use in another interrogation of Casparia. He’d pull him out of custody and back into an interview room for another eighteen or twenty or twenty- five hours without food or drink, just enough time for Carlo to begin “imagining” how he and Roberto Squali came to be best friends, intent upon kidnapping a nine-year-old girl for reasons that would be invented on the spot.
“Piero, for God’s sake,” Salvatore said. “You know in your heart that Carlo is not involved in this. And what I’m telling you now, with these details about Roberto Squali—”
“Salvatore,” il Pubblico Ministero said in a pleasant tone, “I know in my heart nothing of the sort. Carlo Casparia has confessed. He has signed his confession without coercion. This, I assure you, people do not do if they are innocent. And Carlo is not an innocent man.”
VICTORIA
LONDON
Barbara Havers sat through the morning’s meeting in the incident room with her mind in turmoil, although she managed to keep her expression attentive to DI John Stewart’s endless droning. She also kept her wits about her when he required from her an oral presentation of what she’d gleaned from her three interviews on the previous day. Never mind that she’d been at the Yard past ten o’clock at night, dutifully putting her reports in order for the man’s perusal. Stewart was obviously still on his mission to trip her in her tracks.
Sorry to disappoint you, mate, was Barbara’s thought as she made her report. Still, it gave her little enough satisfaction to prove the DI wrong about her. For most of her was in a decided twist over what she’d heard from Dwayne Doughty when she’d spoken to him at the Bow Road nick.
