The Monster of Florence (28 page)
“Well,
I’d
have arrested him,” mumbled the Marshal, dropping the last of the report on to the floor by the bed and rubbing at his tired eyes. “Whole thing’s a disgrace. If we had even half that amount of evidence against our wretched Suspect …”
He felt himself drifting into unconsciousness even as he decided to switch his lamp off and go to sleep. It was dark, though, anyway. The Marshal’s most urgent wish was that the man beside him would keep quiet. He didn’t want to be distracted. He couldn’t understand quite why the scene passing before his eyes should be lit by a red glow when he’d just turned the lights off. Perhaps it was because otherwise, in the thick warm darkness, you wouldn’t be able to see anything.
His heart was beating very loudly and he knew the reason was fear, without his feeling the fear itself very clearly. In any case, he had to watch. He’d never been a Peeping Tom and he’d never even been able to imagine what it would feel like. Of course, he was here for work, so that was different.
The man beside him uttered a little panic-stricken whine.
“Hush …”
Concentrate. He had to concentrate. He was being given the chance to see everything and he must take in every detail. The thin figure dressed in black was pulling the girl’s body down the little slope below him, now. She was naked and her skin glowed pink because of the red light. Infrared, that’s what it was …
He was laying the pink body down and spreading the limbs. His movements were fast and jerky like in a silent film. Before beginning
work in earnest he seemed to rear up and stare straight at the Marshal, his red-tinged eyes glittering. But only one of the eyes, its pupil dilated with drugs, made contact with the Marshal’s own gaze. The other was fixed and dead.
Then he plunged down again, grunting.
“No …” But the scene rolled on inexorably, and beside the Marshal the Suspect began crying loudly. “Don’t … Be quiet.” To the Marshal’s relief he wasn’t shown the mutilation. The man appeared to be making frenzied love to the acquiescent body and it was left to him to work out for himself that each rapid kiss and bite at the neck was really a small knife cut, and that when he grasped her left breast and pushed himself into her with his other hand it was really the knife at work, cutting deeper.
The howling at his side grew louder. How could he cope with both problems at once? It was too much. Fortunately the Suspect was so tiny a version of his normal self that the easiest answer was to pick him up and take him away.
He tucked the tearful creature under his left arm and turned to go along the dark road.
“Come away. It’s nothing to do with you.”
He must have spoken aloud. He opened his eyes and could still sense the sound of his own voice in the room as his eyes gradually focused on the white wall, the muslin curtain, his dressing gown on the chair. He was sweating and his breath was shallow. His head seemed to have a great weight dragging it down behind. There was still that residue of fear that nightmares always leave in their wake and he was shamefacedly glad that he’d dropped off leaving the light on. He’d have been even more glad to find Teresa beside him. She’d have gotten out of bed, saying crossly as she always did, “If you can’t eat at a proper time at least eat something light. You might well have nightmares …” Then she’d make him a camomile tea. He could make himself one, then he’d feel as though she were with him. He struggled into a sitting position, trying to breathe normally, trying to shake the effects of the nightmare off. But although most of it had developed in that illogical way which seemed so real at the time and
dissolved the instant you opened your eyes, the image of the killer remained clear and detailed. It showed no signs at all of dissolving on impact with the waking world. He’d been thin, thin faced and sharp featured, and his hair had been clipped very close to his head.
“Camomile …” He got out of bed to go and make it. He didn’t think he had indigestion at all—he was more likely just overtired—but the tea would be soothing, anyway.
Sometimes, when you dream about somebody you know they have another person’s appearance. Could it be something of that sort?
“Better sleep on it …”
But the truth was that he wasn’t too comfortable about falling asleep again just yet. Besides, he was really very wide awake now. He carried the tea into his bedroom and set it down near the bedside lamp. Now there’s where the answer might be. He’d just finished the Romola report when he dropped off and before that he’d been looking at the book lying next to the lamp. It was one of Bacci’s books of case histories. Typewritten sheets were slotted in at intervals where Bacci had chosen a case he thought might be useful and given them a translation. In some cases Bacci had translated himself, making a precis, leaving out anything he thought irrelevant and writing very much in the style of an official report. The others, done by his girlfriend, who’d offered to give him a hand so as to speed things up, were complete, since she couldn’t know what was relevant and what wasn’t. It was something of hers he’d been reading. That glass eye was something she’d written about.
He soon found it.
I went to school but I don’t remember nothing about no lessons. I remember my ma put me in a dress. She made me go to school in this dress and she said that’ll learn you to behave like a boy and not be screamin’ and hollerin’ every time you get a beatin’. She give some terrible beatin’s.
There was a teacher once give me some shoes because I didn’t have none and she beat me for that,
for acceptin’ them shoes. And she beat me when I didn’t want to watch her with men. She liked me to watch her with her johns. I grew up watching her like that till I was fourteen, then I left home. I hated all my life. I hated everybody. You ask me if I ever loved somebody, I don’t think so. There was the mule and I loved him, I think. We was like friends and I’d talk to him. In the summer he’d have these sores on his legs and I’d tell him I know them sores hurt you, boy, I know that. I knew they hurt him because I had them the same as him. We was both hungry all the time as well and I’d get somethin’ for me and somethin’ for him. He’d eat most anythin’ and then he’d lick my hand for a long time and I liked that. I liked sleeping near him some of the time, ’specially after a real bad beatin’. He was soft and quiet and he’d breathe on me, warm like and I’d feel good. Only then my ma caught me doing that and she said you love that mule, don’t you? You love him? And I said I guessed maybe I loved him and she came out right away with a shotgun and she shot him right there in the yard. Then she beat the hell out of me because she had to pay for the truck that came and took him. They tied his four feet together and drug him off and his head was bent back, trailin’ behind like he was still lookin’ at me, and it was my fault he was killed. I never loved nothin’ after that. I’m bad all through like she said. That was one hell of a beatin’, but that wasn’t when my eye got took out, that was another time and I don’t remember much of that because I didn’t wake up for days. It was one of my “uncles” took me to the hospital and they took my eye out. He said I fell downstairs and I didn’t say nothin’, not then. He wasn’t really my uncle, he was one of her johns but he talked to me once in a while and he was the one first showed me about sex and stuff. He used
to do it to animals. He killed ’em first and then he did it and showed me how. He said you should get yourself some girl as well, you’re fourteen. So I went after this girl but she wouldn’t let me do it to her. She was scared of my eye, of the hole. Lots of people was scared of that because stuff come out of it all the time. She said I smelled bad too and she wouldn’t let me touch her. I had to kill her to get sex. Most of the time I had to do that, wasn’t no other way to get it. Killin’s the only thing I was ever good at and now I’ve been caught I’m not scared of dying. That’s the best thing for somebody like me. I know that.
That’s who it was, then. He’d got the glass eye later. Even so, it wasn’t his face, battered and crazy, that he’d seen in his dream. It was a younger man.
The Marshal flicked through the photos at the centre of the book, but this man wasn’t there. The only other book was a series of essays. No photographs in that, only tables and graphs and maps. Bacci had taken one or two notes and transferred them in Italian on to one folded sheet of typing paper slotted in at the back. It looked drier, less disturbing reading and it might be better to stick to that until he could get off to sleep again.
Background dimensions
Social class
Family background
Peer group associations
Contact with defining agencies
Definitional dimensions
Offence behaviour
Interactional setting
Self-concept
Attitudes
Recall of events
It was dry stuff, all right, and should send him off to sleep in no time at all.
Each of Bacci’s underlinings was numbered so that you could easily find the corresponding translation on the loose sheet. It was all done in pencil.
“Ouff!” The Marshal began flicking through the book faster, his eyelids drooping. An underlining in red ink stopped him. Oddly enough it wasn’t numbered. In the margin where the numbershould have been was written in Italian
“Is this us?”
Next to that a large exclamation mark. So why hadn’t he translated it, if it was so important? The Marshal stared at the original text, vainly trying to make something of it. It was about Special Investigation Forces, he could manage that much, but what they were saying about them he had no hope of deciphering. He closed his eyes and rested his head back on the pillow. Sleep. He needed to go to sleep.
“No! That’s a lie!”
“Refrain from making comments. Answer the question.”
“What question? You’re not asking me a question, you’re telling me a lie.”
Simonetti glanced at the Suspect’s lawyer, who laid a restraining hand on his client’s shoulder and whispered urgently to him.
“No, I can’t. I can’t listen to him. He just wants to crucify me. How can I keep calm?”
“The couple on this occasion lived near your village and already knew what you looked like before we showed them your photograph. You were lying on the bonnet of their car and when the young man looked up at the conclusion of their activities he found your face staring straight into his. Two more witnesses who had parked in the San Casciano area on a Saturday night in July of that same year saw you standing near their car holding a metallic object which they are sure was a gun. They started their car and drove away at once. The third couple saw you in broad daylight when they were out walking. You were standing near a hedge peering through it into a field, a clearing which was frequently used by couples at night.
Your scooter, described as grey with a broken saddle and a spoke twisted and hanging from the wheel, was leaning against the gate into the field.”
“That’s a lie! I haven’t got a grey scooter, I’ve
never
had a grey scooter!”
“You have a scooter with a damaged saddle.”
“But it’s red!”
“Please don’t raise your voice. We have examined your scooter and removed a small sample of paint. There were traces of other colours underneath, including grey.”
“I bought it used. It was red when I bought it. You can ask the mechanic in the village. I bought it from him.”
“We checked with the mechanic. He’s not sure what colour it was when he sold it to you. He thinks that you might have painted it red.”
“The bastard—he’s lying. He’s got it in for me because of a deal I made with some spare parts that he—”
“Please answer my questions without making comments. Also bear in mind that we have questioned all the other members of the band of Peeping Toms—”
“I’m not a Peeping Tom and they won’t tell you any different.”
And that was true, thought the Marshal, who, together with Ferrini and the two police detectives, was watching this scene in silence. They hadn’t really questioned all the band, only two of them, but they admitted to nothing. The first of them, shaking with fear, hadn’t even got in the door before he burst out, “I used to have a snack with him now and then. That’s all. I hardly know him. He’s not even a friend. We’d have a coffee and a sandwich in the bar, like you do. Just if we happened to be there at the same time—”
“Please sit down and give us your full name and address.”
“What?”
“Sit down and be quiet. We haven’t asked you anything yet.”
But the man, who must have been about sixty, was so terrified that though he allowed them to push him into a chair he couldn’t listen to or understand anything they said to him. He just stared
sightlessly at each of them in turn, repeating, “Just a snack, that’s all. I never went anywhere with him. I hardly know him. We used to have coffee and a sandwich …”
The other one was more in possession of his wits and told exactly the same story.
But why? That’s what the Marshal couldn’t understand as he watched the Suspect’s red face crumple and the tears begin to flow. To deny everything and anything was, of course, standard practice for men like the Suspect and his friends, and it all sounded logical enough on the surface. The Monster was a Peeping Tom so deny being a Peeping Tom. The Suspect was accused so deny knowing the Suspect. It was natural enough for them to be frightened. But something was wrong. After all, given the stage things had reached, the Suspect would surely be wiser to admit his voyeuristic vice which would explain his presence in certain places at night. There were hundreds of these men about. It didn’t make them murderers. Were they frightened of something else? It all slid out of your grasp. The Marshal had no doubt that the Suspect really was a Peeping Tom, even allowing for half this stuff Simonetti was coming up with being invented.
It was the same feeling he’d had about the business of the daughter. He didn’t disbelieve that the Suspect had abused her. And she was still lying.
Simonetti never tired of tormenting the Suspect.