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

It certainly made him laugh out loud to see how the hoi polloi now were running scared. The bars, too, were suddenly so much emptier once darkness fell, the proprietors fretting over lost revenues, cursing the killer who had made their neighbourhood a no-go-zone. Then there were the furtive looks on the frightened faces when a foreign workman threw down his bag and hefted out a hammer as he set to mending the city’s roads and broken paving stones. He knew what they were thinking now. Was one of them the Luzi killer or the Marini killer? Did he pick them up in his van, violate them, smash their skulls then dump the bodies?

He had heard the talk himself, irony of ironies, as he sipped his morning coffee and pretended to pore over the latest local gossip in the Roman Post. Perhaps he would start killing some of them too – the stranieri, the foreigners clogging up the country like the saturated fat in a sick man’s veins. Perhaps he would start slaughtering the fat men themselves, the ones he watched askance as they suckled like oversized infants at the dry, consoling teat of the sports pages in these self-same bars. Or maybe the pensioners and half cripples who fed their fistfuls of small change into the fruit machines from dawn until dusk in hopes of sudden ecstasy.

The letter stared back at him, pierced by the upright blade – night’s sundial casting its dead meridian. It complicated things? Or made everything much simpler? An existential question then – which was his stock in trade. To be or not to be. Life and death. Smell the flowers? Crush them while you can. But he would lead them a merry dance and oh how he would laugh. Laugh at them all. Them all.

Sixteen

Beware of Carrara bearing gifts, thought Rossi as the door to his office was opened by a jab of his colleague’s foot. He was balancing takeaway coffees on a stack of files and had the spritely demeanour of a cop on the verge of cornering his man.

“Cat that got the cream?” quipped Rossi from a semi-horizontal position in his office chair. Carrara gave a wryish smile and set the mini plastic cups down where there was an islet of desk space. Yet more caffeine to fuel the sluggish afternoon. “Let’s have it then.”

“Well, first up, she was working for one of the top guys in the MPD. Luca Spinelli. Legal consultancy, voluntary, by the way.”

“So she was working for a political party,” said Rossi. “Not the crime of the century, is it?”

“No, but they were also having an affair. And he’s married.”

“So, what? She was a single woman, pretty, good luck to her.”

But Carrara hadn’t finished.

“And she broke it off, much to the disappointment of aforementioned high-ranking MPD lover.”

He reached into a file and pulled out a sheaf of printed papers.

“Exhibit A: e-mails from one pissed-off politician, or should I say anti-politician, citizen. What do they call themselves?”

Rossi, graduating to an upright, seated position reached out to take Carrara’s first fruits. He scanned the pages. The content was a disturbing mix of insane affection, lust, suicidal reverie, and some degree of menace.

“Enough for a motive? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Enough to merit digging deeper, wouldn’t you say? And the method’s the same as Gentili and Luzi. He could be our man.”

“Where did you get these?” Rossi asked.

“The ex. Her ex-husband. He arrived last night, and I went over for a chat. I asked if there was anything I might need to know regarding Maria and he told me straight out about the affair. Seems she’d been trying to get things back on track. That was the initial reason she ended the relationship with Spinelli. But there were some furtive phone calls and stuff and the ex starts smelling a rat, gets a bit nosy and decides to print off her private e-mails – he just happens to be an IT security consultant – in case he might need proof for divorce proceedings and so on. Not too bothered otherwise, it seems. He confronts her, thinks she’s not playing a straight bat, but she plays the whole thing down; says your man’s all bark and no bite. But hubby’s not having any of it and they break off again and, well, the rest is history.”

“Did she go back to Spinelli?”

“Seems not, but she did continue working for the party. She was helping them with libel cases. You know how the bigs have been trying to cripple them in the courts, scare them off with huge damages actions. She might have been able to use her father’s contacts to some extent, but we don’t know that for sure.”

“And the ex is going to get custody, of the kid? You do remember, don’t you, she had a son? Do you think he wants it?”

“I doubt it. He mentioned something about his work commitments ‘not being negotiable’ and the kid’s grandparents being ‘the easiest solution’ for everyone.”

“Nice guy.”

Carrara gave a shrug.

“Haven’t you noticed how many kids get brought up by their grandparents in Rome?”

“Has Maroni got any of this then?” said Rossi.

“It’s not his case,” said Carrara. Ever the idealist, thought Rossi.

“It’s always Maroni’s case, especially when he needs it. But does he know what you’ve got?”

“Came straight to you, Mick,” said Carrara, “but listen, there’s more.”

“Go on.”

“Well, the forensics, for one. They’ve got some DNA from her clothing and in the car and if they match with the other crime scenes we might be onto something. We could try Spinelli.”

Rossi let out a sigh.

“Are you telling me that this Spinelli guy has faked himself as a serial killer as a perfect cover, or actually became a serial killer, murdered one or two innocent women just so he can bump off his ex-lover? Sounds a bit off the wall, don’t you think?”

“Unless,” countered Carrara, “he heard about the note on the second victim, got a tip-off or something about it being a possible serial killer. Then he hatched himself a plan.”

Rossi was swinging in short, rapid, pensive arcs in his chair.

“Iannelli knows. I told him to keep it to himself, in return for tasty morsels, obviously. But it’s way off the mark.”

“But we’re still going to have to give this to Maroni, right?” said Carrara, “and then the public prosecutor might want to make a move. Impatient for an arrest and the like. You know they want to be informed.”

Rossi felt it was Carrara who was piling the pressure on now. Time to release the valve, he thought.

“I think we’d better make a little visit to Mr Spinelli first, don’t you? Just for a chat. As someone who knew the victim, he has valuable information to offer. No need to make it official. No lawyers. Routine enquiries. Can we hold off until tomorrow?”

“Possibly,” said a guarded Carrara realizing he’d have to put the champagne moment on hold.

“Any of the guys go with you to the ex?”

“Just Bianco, and he’s onside, I’m pretty sure.”

“Well tell him to keep it under his proverbial. And the press conference? We’ll have to put it back to eight o’clock now. They’re going to hate us but it might give us time to see what this crazed lover has got to say for himself.”

Carrara made a note.

“We can say we’re still waiting on some forensics. I’ll have a word with Loretta in the lab. She’ll cover up if we need her to.”

“Good,” said Rossi. “What’s his name and where can we find him?”

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” said Rossi.

“Call from Chief Superintendent Maroni, sir,” said a uniformed female officer whose name he couldn’t remember but whose smile always brightened his day. “Says it is of the utmost urgency.”

But Rossi had already got to his feet and was gesturing to Carrara to do likewise.

“Tell him I’m not here. I’m out. No, at the dentist. Terrible toothache. Can’t even speak. Face out here,” he said miming a mild deformity of the cheek area. “He can call me on my mobile,” he said, grinning now while grabbing his coat and giving Carrara the definitive signal to move out. “And I won’t be answering that in a hurry,” he added, sotto voce, as they headed for the car.

Seventeen

Early forties, exuding a twitchy, impatient enthusiasm and an earnest if weary expression, Luca Spinelli was the new face of Italian politics. They had agreed to meet at his office where it was clear that he’d been both working and living since the break-up with Maria and the subsequent collapse of his own marriage.

“I’ve made a pretty good job of losing it all, don’t you think?” he said as he faced Rossi and Carrara across his desk. “A marriage, the woman I loved. Still have my work though,” he said with a liberal dose of acid irony.

“And we won’t be keeping you from it for long, I’m sure,” Rossi reassured him. “Just a few questions but it would be helpful if you could tell us anything you think may have aroused your suspicion in recent weeks.”

“With pleasure, Inspector,” he replied maintaining the same satirical tone.

Rossi passed the sheaf of e-mails across the desk. “You can, I presume, confirm that you wrote these? In particular, the last one, written in the early hours of the day on which Maria was later killed.”

Spinelli’s expression went from shock and embarrassment through to apparent incredulity.

“How did you get these?”

As Rossi explained, Spinelli went back to leafing through them, reliving the strange, voyeuristic dislocation that comes from seeing your own words already become a form of history. He stopped and held out one of the sheets.

“I didn’t write this,” he said. “I couldn’t have written this. I mean it’s not possible. It’s not me. It can’t be me.” He began to read out some of the more incriminating sentences: “‘If I can’t be with you then you can’t live either, you are coming with me, then we will always be together, I won’t let you get away with this so easy, if I can’t have you no one can … I’ll do myself in or both of us …’”

“It’s your e-mail account,” said Rossi, “and we can pretty quickly ascertain if it came from your own computer, in which case, if it did, it makes things, shall we say, at best, awkward for you.”

“So you’re saying that I did it, that I’m a suspect?”

“I am saying that circumstantial evidence could implicate you as a possible suspect at this point in the investigation – for the murder of Maria Marini and those of both Paola Gentili and Anna Luzi. Unless perhaps you can explain why you wrote it.”

“Or who wrote it,” he added. “Who, Inspector.”

Spinelli’s tone had turned combative, and he now had something of the cornered look in his eyes, a look Rossi had seen many times before.

“Does anyone else have access to your account?”

“No.”

“So you are the sole user.”

“That would appear to be the case.”

“And you aren’t in the habit of letting other people write e-mails for you. A secretary, an aid. Maria herself, maybe? She was helping you, I believe.”

“Oh, yes,” said Spinelli, “and I often give people the keys to my flat too and say ‘walk right in, go on, help yourself’.”

Rossi gave a partially muted sigh.

“So, when you say ‘who’ wrote it, what do you mean exactly?”

“Well,” began Spinelli, “call me an MPD conspiracy theorist, by all means, but has the thought not occurred to you that they might have hacked it, Inspector?”

Rossi never liked the way the final inspector was tagged on like a sardonic Post-it note, but he’d grown used to it. Comes with the job, he mused internally, nobody likes a cop, unless they need one, and then they’re never there, are they? Ha, ha. Come to think of it, he didn’t even like being called inspector when it wasn’t used ironically and would happily have deployed his first name but then it just wasn’t done, was it? Hi, I’m Michael and I’m here to help you. Like fuck you are. You’re here to bang me up as quick as you can and get yourself another stripe. Back to work.

“And you think there might be a reason for that.”

“To frame me, of course!” Spinelli exploded.

“But do you have reason to suspect that someone is trying to frame you, Dr Spinelli?”

Spinelli fumbled in his jacket pockets then wrenched open a desk drawer before locating his cigarettes. He lit up and smoke-whooshed a reply.

“Her ex, for starters. Or maybe just the whole political establishment,” he added with a mock-ironic flourish, standing up and beginning to pace the small office, making it look, at least to Rossi’s eyes, as if it were turning into a cell. He stopped at the window and turned around. Rossi could see he was shaping up for a confession of sorts. But which? There were those that revealed all, those that left out the awkward or shameful particulars, and those made up to take the rap for someone else.

“Look, Inspector,” he began with greater, if rather more, mannered sincerity, “I wrote a few things, in the heat of the moment, which I shouldn’t have. You see, I’d already been drinking, rather a lot as it happens, and since the break-up, well it had just got worse and worse.” He made a hand gesture towards the street. “I’ve been spending most of my evenings in the piano bar round the corner from here. I get something to eat and try to switch off a bit, and then I come back, sleep on the sofa and then I dust myself down and start work again in the morning. The glamorous world of politics.” He stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and sat back down again. He paused to collect his thoughts, joining his hands and holding the fingertips just under his nose, as though gently drawing up through his nostrils some delicate perfume they exuded.

“That day, the day Maria was killed,” he went on, “I woke up and my mind was almost a complete blank. I was still wearing my clothes and my head was pounding. At first, I thought I must have been hitting it harder than usual and perhaps, perhaps, when I had come back the night before I logged on and just started writing that stuff, but it wasn’t me. It was someone else; I was out of my mind; I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t want to kill anyone.”

Rossi looked him in the eye.

“Did you kill her? Perhaps while, as you say, you were out of your mind? Had you gone drinking again that afternoon?”

“No.”

“Did you follow her, stalk her?”

“Stalk? No. Look, I went to her place once or twice when I was drunk, on other occasions, to talk, but that’s as far as it went. Just me leaning on the bell until the madness passed.”

“Did you want to kill her?”

“No, of course not!”

“Did you ever fantasize about killing her, for revenge, for going back to Volpini, for screwing up your marriage?”

“Do you really want me to answer that question?”

“Yes, Dr Spinelli, I do.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “the thought might have occurred, in my mind, in my wildest moments, in my worst moments, but I would never, ever have done it. Haven’t you ever thought about revenge, Inspector?”

Oh, yes, thought Rossi. How he had thought about revenge, planned it even, down to the last detail. The hit, the getaway. The cleanest, most perfect of crimes only a cop could commit.

“Yes,” said Rossi, snapping back from the reverie, “probably, but as far as I know, I have never as yet put it in writing.”

“And neither have I.”

A good firm answer. Rossi liked that. It meant he was on the right lines. It might mean less work, too, and he wanted Maroni off his back about this guy. He was clean. Screwed-up but clean. And besides, there was no material link. No weapon. No witness. No DNA.

But Rossi sensed Carrara was uneasy. He would be concerned that his squeezing of Spinelli was going too far emotively. Carrara was Mr Logic. It was what he did and he did it well, and Rossi knew he was itching to put his oar in. He gestured to his colleague, ceding the floor to him.

“I was just wondering,” began Carrara, “do you think I could take a quick look at the computer, Dr Spinelli?” he asked, glancing askance at Rossi and, like seasoned team players, getting his immediate tacit assent. “I think we might be better off just checking a few things here and now.”

“Feel free,” he said and machine-gunned his password into the keyboard.

“That’s not written anywhere, is it?”

“No. Memorized and difficult to crack. Numbers, letters and symbols and case-sensitive.”

Rossi was more than glad of Carrara’s serious nerd tendencies when it came to computers; it meant he could save precious time and dispense with tedium. He was clicking around now on Spinelli’s e-mail, opening strange windows he’d never seen before and seemed to have already located something of interest.

“I note,” he said, sounding very much the doctor rather than the policeman, “that you’ve been checking your sent items a lot.”

“I honestly don’t remember,” Spinelli replied.

“On the night before the murder you checked some recent e-mails you sent to Maria. Why would you do that?”

“And why would I do that?” asked Spinelli his tone a blend of puzzlement and returning mild contempt. “I was drunk and emotional. I couldn’t give a damn what I’d written about the night before. I might have been hitting all the wrong keys. There’s any number of explanations.”

“Well,” said Carrara gauging from Spinelli’s reaction that there was no damning sign of guilt, “I don’t know for sure, and we may need a linguistics report on this, but could it be that someone, someone else, really was in your account and was trying to, shall we say, discover your style, see how you write, and then,” he looked up at a frowning Spinelli, “write as if he, or she, were you?”

Rossi, intrigued now, was eager to combine forces.

“Doctor Spinelli, are you sure you came home alone that night?”

“I told you. I was very drunk. I remember next to nothing after 9 or 10 o’clock. I blacked out and woke up with a headache from hell.”

“Do you think anyone could have seen you, as you were coming home or leaving the bar?”

“The barman, maybe. There was a girl, actually; I remember that.”

“And did you drink with anyone? Did anyone buy you drinks?”

“Maybe, yes, usually, but I couldn’t say who. Some people know who I am and we often get talking but, really, it’s all a blur. There was the concert, people coming and going.”

Rossi turned to Carrara.

“Luigi, why don’t you take this man for a quiet drink in his usual bar and see if you can find a witness who saw him leave and with whom. Then get him down to the lab, if that’s all right with you,” he said, turning his attention back to Spinelli who now had his arms crossed tightly across his crumpled, white-shirted chest, “and run a blood test and a urine test.”

“A blood test?” spurted Spinelli.

“For what?” said Carrara.

“Anything,” said Rossi, “but sedatives mainly, fast-acting ones, although I do get the sneaking feeling we could be talking Rohypnol here.”

“The date-rape drug?” said Spinelli, shifting in his chair.

“Got it in one,” said Rossi. “And if it was, we should still be able to pick up any traces. Judging by your symptoms, the blackout, the after-effects, I’d say you got a spiked drink. Maybe someone taking a shot at you, or a poor-taste wind-up. I don’t know. Whether or not they then came back here with you or slipped in while you were distracted is more difficult to prove.”

Rossi turned to Carrara.

“And see what prints you can get off the PC, the door. We can always run them through the databases and see what comes up.”

Spinelli seemed more relaxed; like he’d been through the mill, yes, but to some extent relieved. The look of an innocent man who has found someone to believe him?

“Time to cut down on the sauce, perhaps?” Rossi ventured, more than a little pleased with himself, and then remembering what Spinelli was going through, added, “I’m very sorry about Maria. We’re going to do everything in our power.”

“Thank you, Inspector,” said Spinelli.

As Rossi headed for the door, leaving Spinelli in Carrara’s capable hands, a thought occurred to him. He turned towards the now ex-suspect, as far as he was concerned.

“Do you think there could have been other reasons why they, or whoever it was, wanted to kill Maria? Did she have anything in her possession, did anything go missing that you might be aware of?”

“She had a laptop, of course, disks, memory sticks with a lot of our data on. You know, the court cases, the legal actions against us. The work we were doing on constitutional reform. The prison reform. You didn’t find anything, presumably.”

“Nothing. Her bag was ransacked and subtracted from the scene.”

“Well, our new lawyer is going to have some work to do. But not to worry. Starting from scratch is what we’re good at. Or perhaps I should say climbing the mountain. Yes, mountaineers. That’s what we are. Well-prepared, with clear objectives, and a tough lot.”

Not Kremlin mountaineers, I hope, Rossi thought but decided to save it for himself. You can’t expect everyone to be into Mandelstam, he conceded, but the comparisons being drawn between Stalinist control freakery and the power structures within the movement were maybe not so far off the mark.

“Like Sisyphus?” he said, compromising.

“Maybe,” said Spinelli, “or maybe that’s how you see things, but I like to think we’re actually getting somewhere, Inspector, that it’s not all quite so futile. And I think we’ve got a lot of people in high places more than a little scared. You see, solving Italy’s problems is not difficult, despite what they say. What’s difficult is getting the privileged to give up their cosy little arrangements. They cost us billions, the Church too, with all its privileges. But when the people begin to understand, we’ll put our plan into practice. We’ll remove the Church from every part of civic society. No more secret banking. The Lateran Treaties guaranteeing the cosy coexistence of the Vatican within the Italian state and all their fascist inheritance will be torn up.”

“But the treaties are part of the constitution,” cut in Carrara.

“Exactly,” he said, his eyes burning red now, from grief, anger, and exhaustion, “and when there’s enough support we’ll change the constitution and Italy will be a real Republic. Not this hobbled pseudo-democracy taking orders from the cardinals, multinationals, and old-money fascists. Then we’ll be free. And Maria will be a hero. She won’t have died in vain.”

“Well,” said Rossi, enjoying the speech and the little game that had sprung up between them, “just remember, that when you do get near the top of this mountain you’re climbing it’s merciless, it’s lonely, progress is painfully slow, and you’ll need to carry all your own oxygen.”

“The oxygen of the truth, Inspector, or just the plain old stuff that keeps you breathing?”

“Oh,” said Rossi, “I’d say you’d do well to have them both, and in abundance.”

Eighteen

“I tried not to,” said Bianco to Rossi, who had just slipped back into the office to be greeted by a grim, conspiratorial silence. “He was, shall we say, insistent. Very insistent.”

Maroni had been going berserk. In Rossi’s absence, the whole team had incurred his wrath and, homing in on the weakest link, Maroni had managed to squeeze at least some information out of Bianco.

“He’s got a lot of people on his back,” Rossi countered, having grasped where it was all leading and beginning to soliloquize.

“Oh, and he said he wants to see you ‘physically in person,’” Bianco added, “about Spinelli but before the press conference.”

“And they’ll be pushing for an arrest,” a newly bored Rossi continued, slumping into a vacant chair, “just to keep things quiet and to keep the hacks happy. Give the dogs a bone. Then he’ll go to trial and he’ll probably be convicted, on circumstantial evidence. Then there’ll be an appeal and after about four years they’ll all realize what idiots the judge and, of course, the police had been the first time round and he’ll be out again, and the news, the talk shows, and the afternoon trash TV will be talking of nothing else. Sound familiar?” Bianco just hung his head.