At one time, all civilian crime in Italy had been investigated by the Polizia di Stato. Then the carabinieri had been turned from military police into civilian force, with responsibility for criminal investigations shared between them on a first come, first served basis. In Herculaneum, at least, the two forces did not get along well, each of them leaking to boost themselves and harm the other. Which was why, if this fire had anything to do with the recent death threats, Romeo Izzo needed to get there first.
He ran back to his Fiat, indifferent to how ungainly he must look in his skintight trousers. He undid his belt and zip, then buckled himself in and sped off so fast that he earned himself a reproachful look from Margarita. But he ignored her to call Valentina Messana on his hands-free. ‘Villa of the Papyri,’ he yelled, braking sharply at a junction. ‘I need you there now.’
‘On our way, boss,’ she told him. ‘Just got the call. Taddeo Santoro, no less.’
‘Hell! He’s not there himself, is he?’
‘Afraid so. Says it’s murder too. That photographer Raffaele Conte.’
‘Oh no.’
‘You know him?’
‘A bit.’ He reached Via Mare and took the turn too fast, his worn tyres slithering on the cobbles. ‘I was at school with his sister Lucia.’
‘She’s there too, apparently. Burned herself badly trying to get him out. Ambulance is on its way. Fire too.’
‘Good. Get hold of traffic. Have them close off Via Mare. Us and emergency only. And we’ll need scene-of-crime. Is Onofrio in yet?’
‘Not yet, no.’
‘Well get hold of him now. I want his arse down here. Fifteen minutes or he’s out.’ He neared the Villa entrance, but he needed to leave space for fire and ambulance, so he drove by the gates, then pulled in against the wall and hurried back on foot. The already burned-out car was a blackened husk with yellow tips. It was spewing toxic fumes still, and he could see a charred corpse in its driver’s seat, wrists tied to the steering wheel by twists of wire still glowing orange from the heat, like the filament in an old bulb. Pebbles of broken and molten glass glittered in thin puddles of sheeny liquid that made rainbows of the morning sunlight.
Four men were standing in a semicircle. Two he recognised instantly. Taddeo Santoro, the black-bearded, larger-than-life director of Naples’ Archaeological Museum, standing with his good friend Zeno D’Agostino, barely half his size, so that they always looked slightly comical together. Yet D’Agostino was an impressive figure in his own right, a professor of ancient history at their city’s university, and a regular on regional and even national TV. A third man with silvered hair stood slightly apart, murmuring and making the sign of the cross like a priest at a deathbed. But it was the fourth who demanded Izzo’s immediate attention, a young man in cargo pants and a leather jacket snapping photographs of the victim, no doubt to sell to the media.
‘Hey!’ he said. ‘The hell you doing?’
The man turned on him. Thirty or so, athletic build, his face grimy with soot. ‘This was murder,’ he said flatly. ‘Don’t you guys want a record?’
‘Oh,’ said Izzo. ‘Yes. Good. Thank you.’ He held out his hand for the camera. To his surprise, the man ejected the memory card without a word and gave it to him. He was about to ask his name and business when the first fire engine arrived. They stood back to let it go to work, turning the apron into a shallow lake whose surplus water cascaded over the edge of the escarpment to its foot thirty metres below.
Izzo looked around for Lucia Conte. She was sitting against a wall, her face harrowed with grief and her skin livid with burns, being tended to by a young woman with lotion and bottled water. The first ambulance arrived. The paramedics got out to attend her. He caught her eye briefly as they helped her into the back. But she only stared blankly at him and then she was gone.
‘This is on you,’ said Taddeo Santoro, advancing angrily upon him. ‘I hope you’re proud.’
‘I scarcely think that—’
‘They wrote us a fucking letter.’ His face was blacked up with soot while his tie hung over his shoulder like a gallows noose. He wiped tears from his eyes with the heel of his left hand. ‘They pinned it to this gate. I begged you to find them. I begged you for more security.’
‘I’m sorry, Direttore. Truly. But it was only a letter. Anyone could have posted it. An angry resident. A kid having a lark.’
‘A lark? Does this look like a lark to you?’
Izzo shook his head, respectful of Santoro’s grief, if not his logic. ‘No, Direttore.’
‘And that damned madwoman?’ Tears still kept leaking from his eyes. He fished a handkerchief from his pocket to dab them dry. ‘Did you even question her?’
‘Agnetta Gaudino? Of course. But the letter wasn’t her, I assure you. She can barely even read.’
‘So you say.’
‘Yes. So I say. We know her well around here. She’s always getting into one scrape or another, often because she can’t read her mail. If you think she’s been putting up a front all these years…’
‘Very well. Your Camorra friend, then.’
‘The people I put in jail rarely consider me a friend.’
‘Have you even spoken to him?’
‘To Giovanni Bruno? About the letter? Of course.’
‘And?’
‘He denied it.’
‘Oh, he denied it, did he? That settles it, then.’
‘Hardly.’ The local Mafia boss Giovanni Bruno was by far the most likely suspect. He had a record of gruesome violence and stood most obviously to gain, seeing as he owned two dozen or so properties above the Villa site. For years now, he’d been trying to bully the American foundation sponsoring the excavations into paying for repairs to any structural problems. But the recent quakes had been on a different scale, so he’d duly upped the stakes, bribing his tenants to march on the Town Hall demanding that all excavation work be suspended until the houses were repaired, and culminating in Agnetta Gaudino’s viral rant. So it was more than plausible that he’d also had the death threat letter posted. Yet plausible wasn’t enough when dealing with such a dangerous man. ‘But we in the police need something called evidence before we make arrests.’
‘What about the letter? What’s that if not evidence? Have you consulted a handwriting expert yet, like I asked? Tested the ink? Traced the paper?’
Izzo nodded politely. Il Direttore was too powerful to antagonise. Yet it rankled whenever such people demanded absurd pains be taken in their own cases, then squealed like trodden cats when it came to paying taxes. ‘We’ll do all we can,’ he said. ‘You have my word. But perhaps we might start by you telling me what you’re all doing here while activity is suspended.’
‘Excavation activity,’ said Santoro. ‘This was just a site visit.’
‘For what purpose?’
Santoro hesitated. A guarded look appeared in his eyes. ‘You know we found a new scroll after the earthquakes?’
‘Another Philodemus, yes?’
‘Exactly,’ said Santoro, though with the faintest flicker of his eyes. ‘And in remarkable condition. Far better than any of the still unopened ones. Good enough that we could unroll it, if we so chose, except we don’t do that any more. It causes too much damage. So my colleague Lucia Conte took it to Grenoble. They have one of the most advanced X-ray spectrometers in the world there.’
‘Yes,’ said Izzo. Thanks to Lucia’s involvement, he’d been following the story closely. The spectrometer was a remote sensing device of such extraordinary sensitivity that it could not only distinguish each wrap of the scroll from the ones on either side, but also make out the writing on it, thanks to the infinitesimal extra thickness of the ancient ink, and the faint traces of minerals it contained. And because the scroll was in such good condition, the rumour was that they’d been able to reveal considerable sections of text. ‘I know how it works.’
‘Yes, well, it’s a previously unknown work. Unknown but extremely exciting.’ He paused a moment, licking his upper lip and letting his gaze go distant, as if contemplating the scroll and just how remarkable it might prove – though Izzo had read enough Philodemus to doubt whether any of his writings could be that astonishing. But then Santoro frowned severely and brought himself back from wherever he’d just been. ‘Signora Conte therefore assembled a team of experts to help with the translation.’ He gestured at his two companions. ‘Professor Zeno D’Agostino I’m sure you recognise. My good friend and our city’s leading classical historian. But Rupert Alberts you may not know. A Canadian by birth, but in Rome so long now that you’d hardly know it, and a world-leading authority on… on this area. We’re delighted and grateful that he’s agreed to help us. This morning was his idea. He hadn’t visited the Villa for many, many years, and he wanted to see for himself where the scroll had been found. So we made an expedition of it, including having Raffaele Conte take photographs for when we go public with our findings. But Conte texted me earlier to say he couldn’t make it and would be sending his assistant Cesco Rossi instead.’
‘Why?’
‘He didn’t say. But it must have happened this morning. Because he came out to see me last night on an unrelated matter and gave no hint of it.’
‘An unrelated matter?’
Santoro sighed. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many artefacts my museum owns. We exhibit only a fraction at any one time. The rest we store in warehouses around the city, using a variety of cataloguing systems – even including paper index cards, God help us. A terrifying number have been broken, degraded or simply gone missing over the years. Frankly, my predecessors didn’t dare look too hard for fear of what they’d find. Tackling it was one of my first tasks. We’ve just finished building two new warehouses out in Villaricca. Now we’re transferring all our artefacts out there, cataloguing them as we go onto a single database that we plan to put online. A massive project, as you can imagine, especially as every piece needs to be photographed along the way. Don’t get me wrong, a few snaps with a digital camera is fine for most. But perhaps a quarter of them warrant proper studio photography.’
‘So you hired Raffaele Conte?’
‘Exactly. Phase one was nearly finished. He came out last night to discuss phase two.’
‘At your home? Not at the museum?’
‘Raffaele was a friend. He often came to visit.’ But his eyes flickered to Professor D’Agostino, and he added: ‘Besides, there were politics involved.’
‘What kind of politics?’
‘Nothing important, I assure you. Nothing to do with this.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said Izzo. But he decided to let it go for the moment. He looked around. ‘How did he even get in? The gate is left locked, yes?’
‘He had a museum phone. A laptop too, for that matter. They come loaded with electronic keys that give access to the sites you’re authorised to visit. They keep a record too, of course. Your GPS location, numbers called and texted, that kind of thing. Intrusive, I know. But we all have them, including me. We deal with enormous numbers of extremely valuable artefacts. We can’t risk any more going missing.’
Izzo squinted at him. ‘Are you saying you have a record of Conte’s recent movements and phone calls?’
‘Only the metadata. But yes. I could have it sent through, if it would help?’
‘Thank you, please. So who knew about this morning’s visit?’
‘It was hardly a secret. Anyone at the museum or library, as well as our staff out here. We didn’t want them getting alarmed when they saw our cars. I mean they’re all jumpy from that damned letter. Which is another thing, of course. Do you remember what it said?’
‘Of course. Why?’
‘It threatened us with punishments cherished by the ancients for their cruelty. The very first one was known as the Sicilian Bull. Victims were locked inside a brass bull, then roasted alive for all to hear their screams.’
‘I know what the letter said.’
‘Yes. But did you realise that Conte drove a Lamborghini? A Lamborghini Gallardo, to be precise?’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Lamborghini name their models after bulls. That’s why they use one for their marque. So what happened here this morning, Detective, is that someone locked my good friend Raffaele Conte inside a metal bull, then set it on fire as we arrived so we’d hear his screams. That is to say, they murdered him exactly as they threatened in that letter.’
‘Christ.’
‘And that was only the first punishment named. The first of seven. So tell me this, if you please. What if Raffaele is only this bastard’s first intended victim? What if there are six more of us yet to die?’