The Monster of Florence by Magdalen Nabb Page A

Prosecutor’s office, addressed to the only woman prosecutor to have worked on the case. The address was formed from letters cut from a magazine and contained a spelling mistake. Inside was a sheet of paper folded and glued at its edges. Inside the paper container was a small polythene bag. The bag contained a cube of flesh from Nathalie Monde’s left breast.

Four
    A thread of gilding glittered through the clean green and white marble of San Miniato for a moment and then the façade was swallowed in evergreen as the car neared the top of the avenue. The city spread itself below them to the right. It must have rained yet again during the night and the pattern of red roofs glowed this morning in the mild November sunshine.
    “River’s swollen,” remarked Ferrini. “You can always tell by that yellowy colour and the thick shine on it. I saw some film once of the flood. Did you ever see it?”
    “Yes. I saw it.”
    “Buses being tossed along through the streets like they were matchwood. The place looks better from up here.”
    More than anything it looked so quiet and sleepy, its towers and domes rising out of the terra-cotta tapestry in the tepid, misty light. The truth was that they were obliged to drive this way because they would otherwise have been trapped in the snarling filth of the traffic down there for hours. Ferrini turned away to look at Guarnaccia, silent behind his dark glasses.
    “You don’t look too suited. Disapprove of his Nibs’s speech this morning, did you?”
    “I can’t say I understood it.”
    “You were here in the eighties, surely?”
    “Well,” admitted the Marshal, “I was, but I had better things to do than follow all the ins and outs of some Instructing Judge’s squabble with the Public Prosecutor’s office.”
    “In that case, take my advice. Get the ins and outs of it sorted now or you’ll put your foot in it and that wouldn’t do at all, not with our friend Simonetti at the helm. Where do we go first? Scandicci, I suppose, if they’re turning here.”
    There were four cars in the procession, all of them unmarked. All of the passengers were in plain clothes. They didn’t want to attract too much attention as they visited the scenes of the Monster’s crimes. Simonetti had actually called him the Monster, which had surprised the Marshal, though, of course, he did so himself, as everyone did. He had no other name. Simonetti’s explanation had been plausible enough. The rest of his speech, too, had been plausible enough but the Marshal, whilst admitting he didn’t understand it, hadn’t believed it either.
    “I feel bound to make a purely lexical observation before going any further. If I have used, and continue to use, the term ‘Monster’ during the investigation to indicate the author of the crimes, this is for merely practical, time-saving purposes and is absolutely devoid of any moral weight, much less of critical weight. No value judgement is implied.
    “I would also remind you that the official clearing of the names of all the Angius family by the Instructing Judge formerly involved in this investigation means that the line of enquiry involving the Sardinian group connected with the nineteen sixty-eight murder of Belinda Muscas and Amadeo Lo Russo is now closed. The Instructing Judge’s report was punctilious, comprehensive and highly detailed and it was from him that we were given to understand that the confusing, contradictory and, I might say, evanescent elements of that story never had and can never have any value in a court of law.
    “Nevertheless, the conviction for this murder in nineteen seventy of Belinda Muscas’s husband, Sergio Muscas, should not necessarily be regarded as definitive despite his confession, later retracted. The convicted man, even whilst insisting on his own guilt, clearly demonstrated that the crime could not have been perpetrated in the manner he described and that one or more persons other than himself must have been involved.