LITMIR.BIZ

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you want to know what it is you’ve signed? It could have been anything. You should be more careful.’

      ‘I trust you, my dear,’ he said, looking at her a little anxiously.

      ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘You’ve got that look on your face.’

      ‘A little job,’ he said.

      ‘Oh, good.’

      ‘Yes. A murder. Peculiar thing, apparently. But we may have to stake out a minor interest in it. The Carabinieri phoned up twenty minutes ago, asking if we could send someone down.’

      ‘I’ll go,’ she said. She didn’t like murder at all, but beggars can’t be choosers these days. Anything to get out of the office.

      ‘You’ll have to. There’s no one else around. But I don’t think you’ll like it.’

      She eyed him carefully. Here it comes, she thought. ‘Why not?’

      ‘Giulio Fabriano’s been promoted to homicide,’ Bottando said simply, an apologetic look on his face.

      ‘Oh, no,’ she wailed. ‘Not him again. Can’t you send someone else?’

      Bottando sympathized. She and Fabriano had been very close at one stage. A bit too close for Flavia’s liking, and their friendship had degenerated into squabbles, fights and general dislike several years back. Shortly before Argyll had appeared on the scene, in fact. In ordinary circumstances, she wouldn’t have had much to do with him, but he was in the rival Carabinieri – doing surprisingly well, considering his relatively limited intelligence, but then there wasn’t a great deal of competition in the Carabinieri – and had developed the habit over the past few years of ringing her up every time he was on a case which had even the most tenuous connection with art. For example, a man has his car stolen. He once bought a picture, so Fabriano would ring to see if there was a file on him. Anything would do. He was tenacious, our Fabriano. The trouble was he also had a quite extraordinarily high opinion of himself and, as Flavia continued to keep her distance, and indeed had taken up with a ridiculous Englishman, his tone had turned decidedly hostile. Cutting remarks. Sneering comments to colleagues. Not that Flavia particularly cared or couldn’t deal with it. She just preferred not to, if possible.

      ‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ Bottando went on, with genuine regret, ‘But there really is no one else here. I’m sure I don’t know what they’re all doing, but still …’

      In a toss-up between Fabriano and filing, Flavia was unsure which was the worse option. On the whole, she reckoned Fabriano was. The man just couldn’t stop himself from trying to demonstrate what a prize she’d let slip through her fingers when they’d broken up. But it seemed Bottando wasn’t going to give her any choice.

      ‘You really want me to go?’

      ‘I do. But I don’t imagine it will detain you overlong. Try and get back here as quickly as possible.’

      ‘Don’t worry,’ she said gloomily.

      It took about forty minutes before it dawned on her that Fabriano’s murder victim was the very same man that Argyll had been talking about the previous evening. To give her credit, thirty minutes of that delay was spent in a traffic jam trying to make her way out of the centre. Most of the remaining ten minutes was spent looking around aghast at the apartment. There was scarcely a book left on the shelves; all had been pulled off, many ripped apart then dumped in the centre of the little sitting-room. All the papers in the filing cabinets had similarly been removed and thrown on the floor; the furniture had been ripped, and the cushions cut up. Every picture had been pulled off the wall and slashed to pieces.

      ‘Hold everything,’ said Fabriano with fake amusement as she walked in. ‘Signora Sherlock’s here. Tell me quickly. Who did it?’

      She gave him a frosty look and ignored the remark. ‘Jesus,’ she said, looking around at the chaos. ‘Someone did a good job here.’

      ‘Don’t you know who?’ he said.

      ‘Shut up, Giulio. Let’s keep this professional, shall we?’

      ‘I stand corrected,’ he said, standing in the corner of the room and leaning against the wall. ‘Professionally speaking, I don’t know. Must have taken several hours, wouldn’t you say? To make a mess like this, I mean. We can rule out simple vandalism, don’t you think?’

      ‘Curious,’ she said, looking around.

      ‘What? Do we have a blinding insight coming our way?’

      ‘All the furniture and stuff was just shredded. Very violently, and carelessly. The pictures were sliced precisely. Taken out of their frames, the frames broken and in a pile, and the canvas cut up. It looks as though with scissors.’

      Fabriano delivered himself of an ambiguous gesture which was half sneer and half self-congratulation.

      ‘And you think that maybe we didn’t notice? Why do you reckon I called?’

      Nice to know some people don’t change. ‘What happened to the occupant?’ Keep calm, she thought. Don’t reply in kind.

      ‘Go and look. He’s in the bedroom,’ he said with a faint and worrying smile.

      She knew from the moment he spoke that it wasn’t going to be very nice. But it was much worse.

      ‘Oh, my God,’ she said.

      The assorted specialists who gather round on these occasions hadn’t finished yet, but even after they’d tidied up a little the scene was horrific. It was like something out of Hieronymus Bosch’s more appalling nightmares. The bedroom itself was domestic, cosy even. Chintz bedcovers, silk curtains, floral-patterned wallpaper all combining to give an air of comfort and tranquillity. It made the contrast all the greater.

      The man had been tied to the bed, and had been treated appallingly before he died. His body was covered in cuts and bruises and weals. His left hand was a bloody mess. His face was almost indistinguishable as anything that had anything to do with a human being. The pain he had suffered must have been excruciating. Whoever had done this had taken a good deal of time, a lot of trouble and, in Flavia’s instant opinion, needed to be locked up fast.

      ‘Ah,’ said one of the forensics from the corner of the room, reaching down with a pair of tweezers and putting something in a plastic bag.

      ‘What?’ said Fabriano, leaning as nonchalantly as he could manage against the door. Flavia could see that even he was having a hard time maintaining the pose.

      ‘His ear,’ the man replied, holding up the bag containing the bloody, torn object.

      At least Fabriano turned and bolted first, although Flavia was hard on his heels in her attempt to get out of the room as fast as possible. She went straight into the kitchen and poured a glass of water.

      ‘Did you have to do that?’ she asked angrily as Fabriano came in after her. ‘Did sending me in there make you feel any better or something?’

      He shrugged. ‘What did you expect? “This is no sight for a little woman,” or something?’

      She ignored him for a few seconds, trying to maintain calm in her stomach. ‘So?’ she said, looking up at him again, annoyed that she had seemed so fragile with him around. ‘What happened?’

      ‘Looks as though he had a visitor, doesn’t it? Who tied him up, ransacked the house, then did that to him. According to the doctor, he was shot to death eventually.’

      ‘Reason?’

      ‘Search me. That’s why we asked you people along. As you can see, whoever it was seemed to have a grudge against pictures.’

      ‘Organized-crime connection?’

      ‘Not as far as we can tell. He was the marketing director for a computer company. Canadian. Clean as a whistle.’

      It was then that

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