The Monster of Florence Read online

  “Now, we must be a bit careful here—I’m looking at all your faces and I can see the sort of reactions we all get on reading anything medical.” Simonetti looked about him with a brilliant smile. “Don’t any of you try to tell me that as I was reading all that you weren’t starting to wonder about yourselves. ‘I suffer from migraine headaches’; ‘I’m jealous of my wife or girlfriend’; ‘I can’t spell.’ Am I right? Well, keep calm. The insidious nature of these behaviour patterns, as our expert is fortunately kind enough to point out in this report, means that, by themselves, the patterns are usually benign. However, in combination with one another, such patterns become progressively more dangerous and can compromise a person’s ability to function in society. And—this is a very important factor—once the boundary between violent fantasy and actual violence has been crossed, the next act of violence is going to be very easy to commit. I won’t bore you any further with theories. I think at this point we should take a preliminary look at our suspect so that you’ll have his background filled in when you meet him later today—by the way, the press have got hold of something, I don’t know how, but just in case, I’ve taken every possible precaution and I’m sure you’ll appreciate my motives for reconvening here this afternoon at two-thirty before moving on to a destination where I shall have our suspect brought. I’m relying on your good sense here in assuming that you understand the reasons for this. I don’t think for a minute that any of you would leak any information to the press, but it’s to your advantage to know that if there is a leak, you can’t be suspected of it. I wonder if, before we go any further, a coffee might be in order—keep you all awake during my dull perorations …”

  Another brilliant smile denied any such real necessity, but the young policeman, Noferini, was already on his feet, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever.

  “I’ll see to it.”

  The Marshal, at least, was glad enough of a chance to stretch his legs after sitting still so long, whilst the others felt in their pockets for cigarettes.

  He stood a moment looking down at the traffic splashing through the rain in Via Zara until he became conscious of a drift of smoke at his shoulder and turned, expecting to find Ferrini beside him. He couldn’t have been more surprised when he saw the scarred hand lifting the cigarette which was parked between the thin lips as the hand was offered.

  “Guarnaccia, I’ve just realized who you are.”

  What did that mean? The Marshal searched his mind for the name of this detective. The formal introductions had been made at the first meeting but they hadn’t resulted in much and the Marshal’s mind was a blank.

  “Esposito,” the other man offered. “I must confess your name rang no bells with me at first, though I remembered Ferrini. You worked on that transsexual murder together, am I right?”

  “Yes. Yes, we did.”

  “I thought so. My compliments. A real textbook investigation. I followed it.”

  “You did?”

  “I certainly did. Impressive. Very impressive.”

  The Marshal could only stare at him in astonishment.

  “When I cottoned on to who you were I was a bit surprised that you were here at all, you know what I mean? Just goes to show it doesn’t always pay to listen to gossip.”

  At which point their coffee arrived and the Marshal had to keep his amazement to himself for the next hour or so as Simonetti introduced the character and previous convictions of the Suspect.

  “A violent man, a morbidly jealous man, a man of whom his family and even his friends are afraid. He was born in the Mugello area, north of Florence, in nineteen twenty-five to a peasant family, and he himself has worked as a peasant farmer for most of his life. His first conviction came in nineteen fifty-one at the age of twenty-six when he quarrelled with a girl he was engaged to and she started a relationship with another man. Refusing to accept this situation he followed the two of them one night into the woods near the village and hid himself to watch. The couple began to make love and at a certain moment, at the moment when the man uncovered the woman’s left breast, he leapt from his hiding place and attacked! His attack was furious, swift and deadly and in a matter of seconds his rival lay bleeding to death from stab wounds. But that wasn’t enough, his rage still wasn’t spent. He then began kicking at the head of the prostrate and dying man, kicking and kicking until the brains were spilling out of the shattered skull and one eye was loosed from its socket. His rival was dead but still he wasn’t satisfied, and what happens next is what separates this man’s crime from so many other banal crimes of passion. What he did next was to turn to his ex-fiancée and say to her, ‘Now it’s your turn.’ And right there, on the ground, beside the bleeding corpse of her lover, he raped her.

  “Hours later, he returned to the scene of the crime. Evidently unmoved even by the results of his viciousness, he went through the dead man’s pockets and stole his wallet which contained twenty thousand lire. He then dragged the body deeper into the woods and hid it.

  “By the time this case came to court, enquiries had revealed that he had made numerous threats against his victim prior to the murder and the prosecution claimed premeditation with intent to rob. The accused insisted on his story of a surprise discovery of the couple and a moment of blind rage and jealousy. The court accepted his plea. He was condemned to twenty-two years’ imprisonment of which he served thirteen.

  “On coming out of prison in nineteen sixty-four he returned to live with his mother and worked for some time as a cobbler, a job which gave him considerable expertise with blades and awl. He had, of course, done his National Service at the usual age and so was quite capable of handling a firearm.

  “He soon married his present wife and rumour has it, though there’s no proof of this, that he actually bought her from a band of tinkers passing through the area. Be that as it may, she and her father moved in with our Suspect and his mother and before long, discovering an incestuous relationship between his wife and her father, he threw the father out.

  “In nineteen sixty-nine he left his mother’s house and moved to a village in the countryside to the south of Florence, then to the nearby village of Pontino where he is still resident. A daughter was born to the couple in the meantime and she was the innocent cause of the sentence he is at present serving in prison.

  “This young woman, now twenty-six years old, confided one day in her employer—she’s in domestic service—that her father had abused her from the time she was nine years old. For years and years he had forced her into every possible variation of sexual intercourse. The little girl had been obliged to sleep in her father’s bed whilst her mother was sent to sleep in the child’s bedroom. The employer—whose identity will be protected because of the excessive press interest in this case—convinced the young woman to report the abuse officially.

  “The mother confirmed her daughter’s denunciation, made with the encouragement and protection of the girl’s employer, explaining that neither of them had dared speak out against him because he beat them frequently and savagely.

  “Apparently, these sessions with his daughter were not limited to the bedroom. She and her mother described being taken out in the car at night by the father and being made to perform sexual acts, some of them perverted, in the car or even outside on the ground in the woods. There seems to have been no limit to what he required of them.”

  Simonetti paused and looked at them all, one by one, before announcing, “In a little over a month’s time this man will be released from prison. We know that as long as he has been inside there have been no more of these murders. We know we are dealing with a killer in our Suspect because he has been convicted of murder, and an extremely vicious murder at that. We know we are dealing with a man who is sexually perverted to an extent which all of us find difficult to imagine, almost impossible to contemplate, to accept. Nevertheless, he is about to be returned to his family and loosed on our society. We can’t prevent this because we have no proof against him. Your job, our job,
is to find that proof. Gentlemen, I have every intention that we should find it, no holds barred.”

  He paused again and then opened a thin file which lay next to the psychiatric profile on the table in front of him. Inside it was a transparent plastic envelope containing a single sheet of paper.

  “Given his previous conviction for a crime of violence, we already had this man’s name listed as a possible suspect. We also received, some years ago, an anonymous communication which, like all such communications, was checked out at once. A search was made of his home without results and the matter dropped, particularly as, at that stage, we had no reason to suspect him of any sexual perversions. Following on the accusation by his daughter we remembered this letter and examined it again.”

  He slid the sheet from its transparent cover.

  “It is addressed to the Marshal of Pontino and was passed on to the examining magistrate by him.”

  Will you please investigate the murderer of Pontino because he’s the one who killed all those couples in cars.

  He is vicious and violent.

  He’s a Peeping Tom.

  He’s a dirty pervert and you should arrest him.

  “As you know, an anonymous letter has no value in a court of law. Nevertheless, given a situation in which all the people surrounding this man, including, for obvious reasons, his family, go in fear of him, it is hardly surprising that any information which could damage him is likely to reach us anonymously. This is particularly so now that he is about to be released from prison. Consequently, any such communications must be regarded in a serious light.”

  He glanced at his watch. “I think, if I want you back here by two-thirty, I’d better let you go to lunch. Please be punctual. We have a lot to get through this afternoon.”

  But first they had to get through the cold rainy streets and find somewhere to eat, since, apart from Bacci who lived on that side of the city, they had no hope of getting home and back in the time given.

  The police contingent disappeared on their own account and Ferrini and the Marshal stood hesitating inside the main entrance, buttoning their raincoats and adjusting their hats. The marble floor was patterned with dirty wet footprints and on the steps outside a group of journalists huddled under umbrellas.

  “Oh! Marshal!” It was Nesti from Nazione who broke away from the group and stopped them as they came out.

  “Nesti. How are things?”

  “Fine. Glad to see you. Just the man to tell us where the meeting this afternoon’s going to be.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Of course you can. You know Simonetti—whips up all this mystery to keep us interested and then makes sure there’s a leak. You know he’ll be furious if we don’t turn up.”

  The Marshal stared at him. “Well … I suppose you might be right, but if you are, we’re not the people you’re looking for. He hasn’t told us where we’re going.”

  “Typical! He’s never been on the best of terms with the carabinieri. He’ll leak everything through the police so as to attract press sympathy to them. You have to admit he’s sharp—there they go! Excuse me …”

  Nesti ran off in the wake of his fellow journalists who had spotted the two detectives across the street. The Marshal couldn’t help noticing that, whatever the result might be, the conversation was going on a lot longer than a simple denial would necessitate.

  “Do you think Nesti was right?”

  Ferrini only shrugged. “Who gives a stuff? Let’s get something to eat.” And he continued down the steps, the Marshal in his wake.

  “Are we heading for somewhere in particular? I don’t know this part of town.”

  “There’s a good place down here on the left. Friend of mine. He’ll give us a good meal and a good price. Just stick with me.”

  The Marshal did as he was told, wondering as they dodged in out of the rain and were met by a roaring log fire and a wonderful smell of cooking, why some men always did know a chap who would give you a discount, find you a good used car, a seat in a booked-up train, a room in a full hotel, a ticket for the match. Also why he himself had always been excluded from this brotherhood. It was a closed world to him but he was grateful enough to Ferrini for his membership when he saw a table prepared for them on the instant and a bottle of good wine set on the white cloth. And just as the troops were lining up for the daily battle between conscience and appetite, Ferrini waved away waiter and menu and started pouring. “Piero knows what to give us. Leave it all to him.”

  A truce was instantly declared.

  “Ah …” An even deeper sigh as a generous bowl of spaghetti was set before him. “That looks perfect.” And all his troubles vanished as he plunged his fork into the glistening tomato sauce.

  “The intestines are spilling out here, as you can see, and you can probably make out the perforation here. Now, compare this for a moment to the slide before … there we are. Practically three clean cuts and the pudenda is excised. There’s a big difference which you must interpret as best you can. Are you looking at a different weapon, a different hand, a different level of anger, even? Let’s go back now to the first victim, nineteen seventy-four, Sandra Palladini. Ninety-six stab wounds, deep stab wounds all in the thorax and abdomen. So what’s your level of anger here? Nobody in a normal condition could inflict ninety-six stab wounds as deep as that. You’d have to be in a frenzy, induced perhaps by drugs, by madness, by alcohol, who knows? Caterina Di Paola again: one stab wound. One. Then the three clean cuts. Let’s switch this thing off for a minute and you can look at the photographs you have in your files. Can we have the lights on?”

  Only the lights on the platform came on. The rest of the bunker courtroom with the empty cages along its length and empty tables and chairs for the public remained in shadow.

  They were seated where judge and jury would normally be seated, facing the public and with a view of a screen on their right which was placed where the jury but not the public could see relevant slides. Professor Forli stayed where he was in front of the screen and paced about, as was his wont, whilst he talked.

  There had been no time to express their surprise when the professor appeared from the wings instead of the suspect and Simonetti’s brief introduction had merely mentioned in passing that they were taking advantage of Forli’s availability and the equipment which the courtroom provided. After that the professor had launched into his explanations and the professor, once launched, was unstoppable. He was a good pathologist, the best there was, but he was also a born teacher and he was teaching them now, having quite forgotten that they were not his students.

  “Entry wound in upper left arm, no exit wound because the bullet’s lodged in the heart. The second bullet—fired from inside the window—victim already dead, enters centre back of neck here and—”

  “So the body slumped forward on death.”

  Silence. It wasn’t Bacci this time but Simonetti, settled back in his chair, arms folded, smiling.

  “I beg your pardon?” Forli obviously wasn’t used to having his students interrupt him.

  “I was just pointing out that if the first bullet entered the left arm and the second entered the back of the neck then the body must have slumped forward.”

  “Oh.” Forli considered this for a moment and then asked politely, “Were you there?”

  “Was I …? No, I was simply—”

  “I wasn’t there either so I can’t say whether the body slumped forward in death or spun sideways away from the driver’s door on the impact of the first bullet or whether the assassin pushed or pulled the victim forward. We’ll continue.”

  Forli continued for another hour or so without apparently drawing breath. When he had said all he had to say and had shown the rest of the slides, he was about to switch off the projector but Simonetti stopped him.

  “Just in case, while we’re waiting, we want to go through our notes and look at something again.”

  “These slides must go back to the Medico-Legal Institute.
”

  “You’ll have them back within two or three hours.”

  For a moment Forli looked puzzled, then he looked amused.

  “I understand. Good morning to you.” He picked up his battered briefcase and shambled off down the long darkened room.

  What had he understood? The Marshal was asking himself this and Ferrini was prodding him and whispering, “That was a good one, ‘Were you there?’ I liked that. Thank God somebody has the guts to tell him where to get off … This must be it …”

  Simonetti was on his feet, his hands clasped behind him as though pushing his gown back, looking towards the door next to the cages. The Marshal followed his glance in time to see the door open and two carabinieri appear in the doorway.