The Monster of Florence by Magdalen Nabb Page B

This is clearly not the moment to tryto get to the bottom of what might or might not have been a crime of passion, just as it might or might not have been some sort of settling of accounts between rival Sardinian clans.
    “Sufficient to say that for the purpose of our present investigation the Sardinian line is irrelevant, given that the Beretta twenty-two, the only solid fact which connects that crime to those of the Monster could only too easily have changed hands between nineteen sixty-eight and nineteen seventy-four.”
    And that was that. The “Instructing Judge formerly involved” and his years of fruitless struggle were consigned to the archives. The Marshal knew too little about it all to have any real opinion on the matter. He did, however, have a real opinion about Simonetti who was making signs at their driver now from the larger car slowing down in front.
    “Surely we’re not here …?” The Marshal peered out. They were still on an asphalted road.
    “He’s pointing out the disco, here to the right.”
    A strange pagoda-shaped building set in a garden at a fork in the road.
    “They left there about eleven and drove on up the hill here to park.” The cars picked up speed again between an olive grove high on their left and orchards and vineyards sloping down to their right.
    “Here we are.” The cars were slowing again and turning into a narrow country lane.
    “Have you been here before?” The Marshal felt around for his hat, remembered he wasn’t in uniform and opened the car door.
    “In the good old days when I was a marshal I worked on this case for a bit, eighty-one and again in eighty-three. This one was eighty-one.”
    They left the cars and walked a little further along the gravelly ochre lane, breathing in the sweet, damp air that still smelled faintly of wine lees. To one side of them tiny black and green beads ripened among silvery olive branches and on the other, red and yellow leaves fell from the vines as tiny birds searched for the treasure of some forgotten bunch of grapes, withered and sweet with a bloom of mildew on them.
    “The boy’s body was in the car, as you know …” Simonetti consulted his clipboard, loaded with maps and photographs. “And the girl’s body lay here. Now, there are two possible versions: one is that, since the body wasn’t dragged, he carried her this distance before working on her with the knife. The other is that she was trying to escape and he caught up with her here.”
    “Excuse me …?” It was young Lieutenant Bacci who had travelled in the last car and was now standing behind the Marshal. “I understand she’d been hit by five bullets so does that mean the first hypothesis is the more likely—?”
    “I’ll make one thing clear,” Simonetti said with a smile hardly consonant with his words. “I’m not interested in hypotheses. There have been enough hypotheses in the past about these crimes to last us all a lifetime. If we don’t know something for sure, we don’t know it. Full stop. And while we’re about it, I’ll say a word on another, to some extent related, subject. If you look around you, you’ll see that the scene of the crime consists of a country lane, some trees and bushes, a nearby stream. The crime was committed between ten and twelve on a night of the new moon. You will find that these conditions will be the same at every one of the seven scenes we visit and we’ve heard enough hypotheses about that to last us a lifetime, too. I am not interested in occult explanations of any of these conditions and I’m telling you this because the idiotic explanations of these things didn’t come from the newspapers as one might reasonably expect, but from people calling themselves serious investigators. As far as this enquiry is concerned, the new moon is the darkest time of the month when a lurking murderer can reasonably expect not to be seen lurking. Likewise he needs bushes or vines to hide behind just as he needs water to