A Known Evil: A gripping debut serial killer thriller full of twists you won’t see coming

“So here we are again,” said Rossi. “We’re talking serial, or spree?” he proffered without raising his eyes from the plate.

“Looks that way,” Carrara replied, busy with his own.

“And Rome’s never had a serial killer.”

“Not like this.”

“And he’s leaving notes. In English.”

“He could be English. Or American.”

“He could be anyone, a freak, full stop. And the psychologist’s report? Are they building a profile?”

“Too early to say.”

Rossi looked up, knife and fork gripped. “What? We need a few more dead women first and then there’ll be something to go on? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m saying that it’s not that helpful. It’s the usual kind of thing. Nothing that really narrows the circle. Woman-hater. Egocentric. Low self-esteem. Absence of sexual relations. Abuse victim himself, possibly. Certainly above-average intelligence, though. Won’t let himself get caught, but leaves clues and likes playing games.”

“But he’s killing ordinary women, not prostitutes or foreigners. He’s not going for marginalized targets, outsiders. It goes against type.”

“True.”

“And now he’s giving us the answers?”

The waiter passed, and Rossi added two more beers to their pizza order.

“Right,” said Rossi. “Inside a black hole there’s dark matter. But what does that tell us?”

Carrara gave a shrug.

“Of course, there’s always time,” said Rossi, appearing to drift off with his thoughts.

“Time?” Carrara replied. “Time for what?”

“The black hole, Gigi. Bends time, doesn’t it? Einstein’s theory.”

“O-kay.” His friend was trying to keep up with him.

“It takes us back. Outside of time, even.”

“Meaning?”

Two pizzas as big as cartwheels sustained by a white-shirted waiter’s arms were flying across the restaurant high above the heads of the engrossed diners.

“Capricciosa?” the waiter boomed making some nearby foreign tourists start from their chairs.

“For me, said Rossi.”

“And Margherita?”

Carrara raised a hand in distracted acknowledgement.

“Meaning, I don’t know,” said Rossi. “But it could be significant.”

“And in the meantime? Every woman in Rome needs to stay at home. We bring in Sharia law? Or they’d all better get themselves a gun, or what?” said Carrara.

Rossi was already carving into his tomato base, spread with slices of cured ham, artichoke hearts, black olives, and all topped off with halves of boiled egg. A meal for lunch- and dinner-skippers; a policeman’s meal. He reached for his beer. It was icy-sharp, clean, and lightly hoppy. Already he was feeling it and the food’s anaesthetising, calming effect on his stomach and, as a consequence, on his mind. As he lowered the glass, making more room on the cluttered table-for-two, his eyes were drawn to that portion of the menu where the names of the dishes were translated into something resembling English for the convenience of tourists. They usually got it right, to be fair, but sometimes the renderings were comical. One word, which should perhaps have been platter, had become instead plater.

“Or maybe not all women,” said Rossi.

Carrara lowered his fork.

“Do you know something I don’t?”

Rossi took another large draught.

“And if, say, it wasn’t matter but mater?”

“As in ‘mother’, in Latin? You think he’s killing mothers?”

“I don’t know. Or it could be symbolic. The Mother Church even. Sancta Mater Ecclesia. Our Holy Mother the Church. Remember your catechism? Might need to check if they were practising Catholics.”

Rossi’s phone, for once occupying prime table space, began to vibrate.

“You’d better answer that,” said Carrara.

Nine

It wasn’t the phone call they had both feared and even in some way almost willed, yet it afforded them some relief. They needed time to think. But they also needed evidence and the killer was giving little away, aside from the sick notes. Sick notes. Rossi dwelt on the irony as he ate. Maybe there was something in that. For being excused, from games, from school. A sick note for life. I don’t belong to you and your moral order and here’s my little note that says why. He remembered how such boys had often been treated with open contempt by some teachers, at least at the school he’d attended in England for those few years. Pilloried and humiliated in the gymnasium and the changing room for their perceived weakness, cowardice, their lack of male vigour. Could they grow up to wreak such terrible revenge on society? Ridiculed outsiders wielding their new-found power and enjoying it. Repeating it. Needing it.

It was someone with a very big axe to grind. Someone hard done by and conscious of it, not like those wretched creatures who strangled and knifed but could never articulate the reason why. Maybe they never even knew themselves. They didn’t have the mental apparatus, the support system, to process their feelings and frustrations or even put a name to them. But kill they did. Often without warning or without apparent motive.

He shared some of his thoughts with Carrara as they both leant back, satisfied and contemplating dessert. There were also factors that pointed towards a clean skin, someone with no record of violence, at least in Italy. The foreigner theory couldn’t be discounted, though Rossi winced at such politically populist apportioning of blame. Or even the smouldering suggestion of an Islamic plot. Was it someone who hadn’t killed before? They had as yet unearthed no particular similarities with unsolved crimes. There was no clear motive. Unless this killer had been long-incubated, a slow burner, and had chosen a propitious moment to hatch from his dark cocoon.

“Look, we’re not fucking magicians, Michael,” Carrara concluded, tipsy now and a little the worse for wear from tiredness. Rossi glanced up from his plate.

“Kid been keeping you up?” he enquired. “Or is it the enforced abstinence?”

Carrara returned a forced smile.

They both opted for crème caramel, and Rossi asked for the limoncello, telling the waiter not to bring coffee until he asked for it. He wanted time, time to savour and time to think. Carrara declined the liqueur.

“You can leave the bottle,” said Rossi. The gruff waiter shot him a look askance, his hopes of an early finish dwindling.

“We definitely won’t be getting a smile out of Mr Happy tonight,” concluded Rossi.

They split the bill, alla Romana, each paying an equal share irrespective of what they had consumed, and decided to walk a little and drop in at a bar on their way home. They stopped at a news stand with international papers for Rossi to pick up Le Monde and El País. He liked to keep abreast of European events, finding their coverage superior to that of many of the Italian papers, obsessed as they were with internecine politics and endless wrangling and the labyrinthine complexities of one financial scandal on the heels of another.

A bill-sticker smothered in a hat and scarf was slathering election posters onto the wall next to the tunnel. Here we go again, thought Rossi. It was one constant election campaign. Governments forming, falling, then getting into bed together (literally and figuratively) in bizarre, mutually convenient coalitions. The brush-wielder slapped on more of the acrid adhesive and a rancid, hypocritical ghoul now loomed over the street. He held a pen in one hand, ostensibly symbolizing bureaucratic ability, saper fare, and, perhaps for the many less well-educated voters, simply his ability to read and write. His other hand was positioned on his knee, the wedding ring to the fore. Family man, and good for his word.

It repulsed Rossi, all the public money sliding down into the abyss of corruption, interests, and rampant, unashamed nepotism. Yet, it did now seem that they were living in more interesting times. No one had really believed that the MPD would actually start to threaten the big boys, but they had. They’d harnessed the Internet, seeing its potential earlier than anyone else, and had begun raking in huge consensus among the young, the underpaid, the unemployed, and students who saw no future. Now a power block was ominously taking shape, threatening the sclerotic party system and its cynical and systematic carving up of the country’s resources.

They took the tunnel back towards Piazza Vittorio and the Esquiline hill, one of Rome’s seven. Though dirty and ill-kempt, it was a characterful area and one that Rossi knew and liked, partly, if not only, for its preponderance of Indian restaurants and readily available supplies of oriental spices in the Bangladeshi mini-markets. Many of the other shops had become Chinese-owned, alleged fronts for money laundering, among other things. The older residents lamented the decline continually. Yet, it was a real melting pot, something of a bazaar and, despite some well-publicized concerns about racial tension, everyone seemed to get on with their own business and mingle on the busy streets quite peaceably.

At the steps leading down to the Metro, Rossi bid Carrara goodnight then set off to take a walk around the square. He knew its history, that it had been built following Italy’s unification and, as such, was typical of the northern Italian style. The echoey arcades with their rows of columns and arches afforded shelter from the inclement weather in the Piedmont, be it snow or rain, whereas here they served more as welcome shade for the searing Roman summers. It was under these same arches, too, that his courtship with Yana had begun, in another winter. They had played childish games of hide-and-seek behind the columns and then, arm-in-arm, had performed a comical three-legged walk she taught him, all the way back to her old shared apartment near Porta Maggiore.

She had worked hard after that, getting her MBA, setting up the business with Marta and, when the profits began coming in, finally making a down payment on a place of her own which she was now well on the way to paying off. A small but well-proportioned flat with a mezzanine split-level of her own design, it was where Rossi was now heading, specifically to the calm oasis of her bedroom.

The call in the restaurant had been from her. He’d gone outside to take it where it was marginally quieter, and they had talked. She had been more relaxed and interested to hear about the case. They’d both had tough days and amidst the mutual expressions of solidarity, Rossi had persuaded her to let him come over later. He had his own key but never entered without prior arrangement. Yana had her rules and had her reasons and he respected that. They were together, an item, maybe, but there were limits and lines drawn in the sand, even if he felt sometimes that the tides of their two lives changed and shifted the sands so much as to render such confines meaningless. Periodically, they disappeared completely only to then reappear, perhaps, in the cold light of day, or when he had overstepped the limits of reasonableness. That said, the bond, though unusual, was strong.

She would be asleep now. So, he would let himself in, as quietly as he could, slip off his shoes and maybe, no, definitely, help himself to another cold beer. He would watch a little TV with his feet up, perhaps glance at his papers then climb the wooden steps, placing his feet where he knew he wouldn’t cause the boards to creak before finally sliding in beside her. He’d test the water to see if she wanted to satisfy his more primal nocturnal needs, knowing she’d probably just shove him away. But tomorrow, if she was not working early, they could make up for lost time.

A shivering street-worker in black leather boots and a short fake-fur jacket peeled herself slowly off the corner where she had been trying her best to recline.

“Hello, darling. Looking for fun?” she said through gritted teeth.

Rossi stopped. Was she a mind reader? He smiled, and declined, adding a polite but sincere warning concerning the concomitant risks of being out at night, a woman, and alone. Not all the girls had pimps here, he knew. They wanted, quite rightly, to be free agents but it could be a double-edged sword, especially at times like this.

As a matter of course, he put a hand to his jacket pocket to check his phone. A missed call from Carrara. He rang back. He must have just got off the Metro, he thought. His heart was beating faster now. Not another victim. Not so soon.

“Gigi?”

“Yes, we’ve got news, Mick. ID on the third victim.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Very. She was Maria Marini. A lawyer, 35, single mother, separated and …” Carrara paused.

“And what?” said Rossi

“You’re going to like this. Her father’s a judge. Guido Marini, anti-mafia, Palermo pool, in semi-retirement but put a lot of people inside for a long time.”

“Has he been informed?”

“Informed? He identified the body. And we got a handbag with ID inside picked up by the Tiber. They ran some checks and it seems the lady had missed a regular dinner appointment with her father and wasn’t answering her phone. Out of character and all that. He called the police around 10 p.m. then came straight over.”

Rossi was thinking at full tilt. So, Maroni had kept that to himself until now.

“Are you there, Mick?”

“Yeah. What have you got on her personal life?”

“Like I said, her father told us she was separated, got a kid too.”

“And the ex?”

“Looks clean enough but not exactly in a state of shock. Took it rather philosophically, shall we say. He’s in Milan for work. Travels a lot. He’s been informed and is heading to Rome ‘as soon as he can’.”

Rossi had turned on his heel and was heading towards the square.

“Gigi, send a car to Piazza Vittorio, Fassi’s ice-cream place,” he said then shoved his phone into his pocket.

The girl was still propping up the wall like an eroticized flying buttress.

“C’mon on, hun,” she said. “You know you want to. We’ll have a ball!”

“No, thanks, love. Back on duty myself, I’m afraid.”

Ten

When Rossi awoke it took him a while to realize where he was and that he was alone. He listened for familiar sounds and, hearing none, threw back the covers. The heating was on, but the flat was still a bit on the chilly side. There was some coffee still left in the machine. It was more warm than cold. Drinkable. By the kitchen clock it was nine. So, Yana had performed all her morning duties without even waking him or perhaps without even trying to wake him. At least she hadn’t come around with the Hoover.

He had finally let himself in at, what was it? Four or five? He tried to reconstruct the night’s events. Yes, after they’d persuaded the judge to let them check out his daughter’s flat. It had been a hassle with that guy, and Rossi remembered his own exasperated words: “Anything could help, you must understand that, sir. So, if you’ll just give me the keys we’ll get it over and done with tonight.” It had been, as always, sobering, with the judge standing sentinel-like as he and Carrara and the officers had gone through bins, opened cupboards, drawers, the fridge, in the search of any indicator that might point to a motive other than sheer, random, insane violence. As he checked levels in liquor bottles, read personal notes and, ever the foodie, squeezed and sniffed groceries for freshness, Rossi could feel the judge’s disdain as though by these very actions his daughter were being violated for a second time. “Nothing much to go on here,” Rossi had concluded with the standard phrase. “We’ll come back tomorrow to tie up any loose ends, if you don’t mind.”

He had slept late. She must have given herself the early shift after all. Or changed it. He couldn’t detect any sign of emotion, neither anger nor indifference, in the otherwise empty flat and, scratching his head, he wondered whether she had let him sleep out of pity or a simple desire not to have to exchange strained pleasantries with him. Maybe she hadn’t felt she had the energy to confront him head-on. Maybe he didn’t either. Was that a bad sign? Time would tell, he concluded and splashed some milk into a saucepan then sat down to mull over more of the events of the previous night.

Of course, once the powers-that-be had learned of the possible judicial connection they had all become very interested. So, it had been a torrid night of claim and counter claim and a back and forth of theories about “reprisals” and “warnings” and “clear threats to the institutions” – the judiciary, the government, and so forth. Rossi, however, had resolutely maintained his line that it was pure coincidence. The modus operandi, the signature, were all consistent with the previous killings. Apart from the handbag having been subtracted from the crime scene – probably a self-conscious act of arrogant defiance – it bore all the key traits of the first murder.

They’d learned then that the girl’s father had been pulling all the strings at his disposition and had even wanted to take over the case and put his own men on the job. Rossi gave a dry little laugh to himself. How quickly things moved when tragedy touched the lives of the luminaries. Yes. When sometimes there wasn’t even money to put petrol in a squad car, along came one of the Establishment and they were sending up helicopters and cancelling leave right, left, and centre.

To his credit, Maroni had held his own, for the sake of the force, ostensibly. Possibly. He’d had to leave the opera midway through and was faintly comical in his evening garb. It was only the Rome opera though. Not as if he’d been to La Scala or San Carlo. He had, nonetheless, insisted on leaving the investigation in Rossi’s hands now that he had begun. “Rossi has my full confidence and the full confidence of my superiors,” he’d rather grandly announced at one point, which had tickled Rossi not a little. They had agreed to keep all and sundry informed of subsequent developments, should anything have arisen which might indicate a mafia or other organized backdrop. A press conference was to be arranged, in part, to placate an anxious business community now that the murders were becoming news, international news, and in part to keep a lid on the possible motives. The Home Secretary had even phoned from the ski-resort where he was contributing to the nation’s economic welfare by giving a significant boost to consumer spending, albeit with taxpayers’ money, and racking up a quantity of sexual misdemeanours sufficient to keep priests busy with confessions and journalists replete with favours paid for by their silence.

They had concluded matters in the very late early hours with Rossi agreeing to meet with the judge again the following day, which was, as Rossi now noted, today. Maroni wanted him to probe a little more into the woman’s private life and business affairs but also to keep her father at a manageable distance. “We don’t want a bloody judge sniffing around,” Maroni had hissed, “and following our every move, Rossi, so work on him. Soft soap him. You’re good at that, aren’t you?”

He tried to remember the time they had set for the meeting. His morning mind was fuzzier than usual and then he remembered how he had needed two or three visits to the bottom drawer, that of the filing cabinet, where the emergency supply of whiskey was located. That and extra nightcaps to wind down on the way back over to Yana’s. Not to mention the third of a bottle of Limoncello, and the beers. It was all mounting up to something approaching unjustified excess. Carrara would know. He went to look for his phone. God only knew where that was.

The front door clicked. Rossi turned to see Yana standing there.

“Well,” she said, “are you going to tell me what’s going on, or what?”

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” said Rossi.

“I felt guilty or something,” she replied, dropping her bag into the corner and pulling off her scarf. “And if we don’t talk now I don’t think we’re ever going to talk, are we? Besides what is it they say about never letting the sun go down on an argument?”

“Even if it was only in the form of a text?”

“You got the message though? I was expecting you at a respectable hour.”

“Am I forgiven?”

She threw her coat across the chair and walked over to him.

“Well, it’s winter and I didn’t fancy my chances of seeing you before dark tonight. Having a boyfriend in your line of work, one has to live for the moment, shall we say. You got drunk, didn’t you, last night?”

“We had a late one,” said Rossi. “There was all sorts of ‘shit going down’, as our American friends say.”

She went closer and sniffed around, testing him and still showing something of the disdain for him which was part and parcel of their sometimes tempestuous love affair.

“Well you brush up reasonably well, Inspector fucking Rossi. What time’s your first appointment?”

“Now, it’s funny you should mention that,” said Rossi, “but I can’t find my phone. Going to give me a hand?” But before Yana was able to do the time-honoured call-the-lost-mobile-routine, somebody had got there first. “It’s buzzing,” he said, throwing cushions hither and thither as he tried to home in on the vibrations.

“Got it,” said Yana sliding a hand down the side of the settee.

It was Carrara.

“Just reminding you not to forget that you’ve got an appointment with the judge at his place. All right?”

“What makes you think I would have forgotten?” said Rossi, knowing his gravelly tones were giving him away. But Yana, who had pulled the curtains in the lounge, had already begun to unzip her top and was shaking her head, mouthing “no, no, no.”

“Look,” said Rossi as Yana came closer now and put her arms around his waist. “Give him a call, will you?” he said. “Tell him that some lab reports have come through and that I’ll be over as soon as I can. It’s not like he’ll be going to work today, is it? The man’s got a funeral to organize.”

Eleven

“Rome is Afraid.” That would be the headline for tomorrow’s paper. That would get copies moving and, to his delight, ad-space had already been filling up fast. Giorgio Torrini, editor-in-chief of the Roman Post, was not quite rubbing his hands but had the look of someone who has just bagged a sizeable win on the horses or the lottery. Until now, the public had been taking more interest in the apparently drug-related killings spilling out of the usual run-down and deprived ghetto territories and into the “civilized” centre, sometimes in broad daylight. Yet people didn’t really feel threatened. Just like with the dodgy heroin-killing junkies, or the ex-husbands losing their jobs then losing the plot and massacring entire families; all that was still going on but it didn’t make people afraid. But now The Carpenter had made sure they were. More cautious husbands weren’t letting wives go out on their own. The city was becoming a virtual ghost town after dark. Taxis were doing a roaring trade.

Torrini had his best man on the story and he was dictating what line to take now that Marini had been identified.

“Nobody cares about Mafia,” he was saying. “Unless they start planting bombs outside the Stadio Olimpico, in St Peter’s Square, or in pizzerias, it’s water off a duck’s back. They’ve heard it all before.”

“So we stick with the serial-killer line?”

“Rome is Afraid,” he repeated, holding up hands which grasped the extremities of an imaginary banner headline.

“And tourism? Isn’t it going to hit tourism? All this negative publicity.”

“Tourism?” spluttered Torrini. “Tourism? They always bounce back. They can drop their prices. Probably boost tourism once it all dies down,” he added, “and I mean, how long is it going to last? A couple of weeks, a month or two? By Easter it’ll all be forgotten. Mark my words. It’ll be history. More history for Rome. More guided tours. ‘This is where The Carpenter killed his first victim.’ Blah, blah, blah.”

Senior reporter Dario Iannelli was taking notes. So far, he had only written “mad heartless fucker”. Dario knew a good story and had the knack of finding them but what he wanted was the scoop that went right to the top and could let him get at the real criminals. Serial killers were one offs, sad fucked-up losers, true enough. But the others, those who were selling the country down the river for thirty pieces of silver? They were the real nasty pieces of work. It was them he wanted to nail.