The Black Rose Of Florence Read online

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 9780748129669

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 Michele Giuttari

  Translation copyright © 2012 Howard Curtis

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  PART ONE: MESSAGES

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  PART TWO: SPECIAL FRIENDSHIPS

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  PART THREE: THE WORSHIPPERS OF SATAN

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  PART FOUR: SURPRISES

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  PART FIVE: THE LAST PIECE

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Acknowledgements

  To Christa

  He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

  Prologue

  ‘I’m Italian … You’re in the Emergency Department … Can you hear me?’

  The wounded man on the stretcher nodded weakly. He was pale, his eyes staring straight ahead.

  ‘I’m Doctor Torrisi. I need to know if you can breathe.’

  The man half closed his eyes and nodded. He was conscious!

  ‘Don’t fall asleep! Hold on!’

  Silence.

  The man gave a long sigh. ‘Did they get him?’ he asked in a thin voice.

  ‘I don’t know. Just calm down, don’t worry about a thing.’

  In the meantime, a brisk, pretty nurse had inserted a butterfly needle, connected to a drip, into a vein in his left arm.

  ‘The oxygen mask, now,’ the doctor ordered. Then he bent over the patient and whispered, ‘We’ll get through this, you’ll see.’

  ‘Pe … ’

  But the wounded man could not complete the word. He closed his eyes and drifted off.

  He had just come through the toughest two weeks of his life.

  Two weeks that had begun one morning in June.

  PART ONE

  MESSAGES

  1

  Tuesday, 22 June 2004

  Silence hung heavy in the air.

  A long, deathly silence.

  The uncovered coffin was in the middle of the mortuary chapel, beneath a dim fluorescent light. The body, small and thin, was wearing a black dress and immaculate black shoes. The hair was short, smooth and white as snow. The hands, joined on the stomach, held a mother-of-pearl crucifix. It was the body of a woman of about eighty, who must once have been beautiful.

  Now, though, a scar disfigured her ashen face. In the middle of her forehead, just between her eyes.

  The police officers had been standing looking at her incredulously for some minutes. They were waiting impatiently for the pathologist to arrive. From time to time, one or other of them muttered a few words, to the effect that this was awful and that they had never seen anything like it before.

  ‘Poor woman,’ a tall, thin young man with fair hair and a freckled nose said out loud. This was Inspector Marco Cioni of the mobile unit, who had been the first to arrive on the scene.

  ‘This city … ’ Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara started to say, then let the phrase fade away and went back to chomping on the Toscano cigar clamped between his lips, still unlit. He was wearing a blue linen suit, sky-blue shirt and matching tie. At nine that morning he was supposed to be seeing the Commissioner to update him on the narcotics operation currently in progress. Instead of which, here he was, in the New Chapels of Rest at the Careggi Hospital.

  He moved closer to the coffin and stared down at the body for a while. Suddenly nauseous, he closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and opened them again. He glanced at his watch: 8.46.

  At that moment he heard a voice behind him.

  ‘Good morning, Chief Superintendent, sorry I’m late.’

  He turned. It wa
s Francesco Leone, the pathologist. They shook hands.

  ‘The usual morning traffic … ’ Leone said, with a shrug.

  He was a rather thickset man, with a bald, egg-shaped head. Ferrara trusted him implicitly. His post-mortem reports were meticulous, and the suggestions he made about the modus operandi of different homicides had frequently proved to be spot on.

  Leone unbuttoned his jacket, which was a bit tight on him, put on his glasses with their thin gold frames and began his examination, while the others looked on in silence. After a few minutes, he straightened up and said, ‘Whoever did this did a good job. Highly professional, in fact. Your men can check the inside of the coffin now, Chief Superintendent.’

  He walked out into the corridor.

  Ferrara gave the order, although he advised them to wait until the forensics team arrived so that the various phases of the operation could be photographed. ‘I’ll send some men from the Squadra Mobile,’ he said, then followed the doctor out.

  Yet another mystery.

  A Florentine mystery.

  Florence seemed to be doing everything it could to put him off staying.

  2

  ‘So tell me,’ Ferrara asked when they were face to face, ‘how long did such a … highly professional job take?’

  It had not been a simple operation, Leone explained, but one that had been carried out with great skill and with the appropriate instruments. It was highly unlikely to have been the work of anyone untrained in the surgical field or acting on the spur of the moment.

  ‘What kind of instruments?’

  ‘A scalpel, forceps and surgical scissors. In other words, the kind that doctors and paramedics can easily get hold of, but that you wouldn’t find in a pharmacy.’

  ‘I see. But how long did it all take?’

  ‘Not too long. Ten, fifteen minutes. Closer to fifteen than ten, I’d say, considering how clean the cut is. But I’ll be able to tell you more after I’ve had a proper look at the body.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They walked together to the exit, shook hands at the door and parted.

  Ferrara hurried across the courtyard. It was raining hard. By the time he got to his car, he was drenched from head to foot. The driver quickly opened the door and Ferrara got in.

  ‘To Headquarters,’ he ordered.

  He was late.

  The day had got off to a bad start. He had known that as soon as he’d got the call from the operations room telling him that the Commissioner wanted him to proceed immediately to the New Chapels of Rest. That was at 7.20, just as he had been having breakfast with his wife in the kitchen, which was imbued with the pleasant aromas of coffee and freshly baked bread from the nearby bakery.

  ‘Make it quick,’ he had said to the driver, getting into the metallic grey Alfa 156 a mere ten minutes later. ‘Use the siren and the flashing light if you have to.’

  Now Ferrara glanced at his watch again: 9.36.

  He didn’t know it yet, but this Tuesday would turn out to be a day he wouldn’t forget in a hurry. If ever.

  3

  Police Headquarters was in the Via Zara.

  It was a building with an eighteenth-century colonnade, to the north of the historic centre. It stood on the site of a lunatic asylum, the famous Spedale di Messer Bonifazio, which had become, between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the first psychiatric hospital in the modern sense. The offices of the Flying Squad were in a wing of the first floor. The chief superintendent’s office had two wide windows in adjoining walls, which filled it with light on sunny days. Today, though, wasn’t a sunny day.

  The driver parked the car in the courtyard, and Ferrara got out, entered the building and ran up the stairs to the second floor, where the Commissioner had his office.

  Filippo Adinolfi, who had been transferred to Florence during the time that Ferrara had been in Rome, had, paradoxically, spent most of his own career in the capital, first in various departments at Police Headquarters, then in different sections of the Ministry of the Interior. A solid bureaucrat, no doubt, but with no real experience as an investigator.

  As he got to the top of the stairs, Ferrara took a handkerchief from one of his trouser pockets and dabbed his wet hair. Then he pressed the button to the left of the door and the green light immediately came on. He went in.

  ‘Ah, Chief Superintendent, please come in and sit down.’

  As red-faced as a beetroot, Adinolfi was sitting behind the solid walnut desk, which was immaculately tidy. He was writing something on a sheet of paper, but as Ferrara advanced he slowly moved his pudgy right hand and put down his Mont Blanc fountain pen.

  He had only just turned sixty, but, perhaps because of his weight, he looked every one of those years, or even older.

  Ferrara sat down in one of the armchairs for visitors. Looking closely at the Commissioner’s face, he thought he detected, as well as his impatience to hear the latest news, a certain anxiety, a touch of nervousness. Had the day got off to a bad start for him, too? It was very likely.

  ‘Chief Superintendent,’ Adinolfi began in that baritone voice of his, ‘I’d like you to tell me exactly what happened in those mortuary chapels. The mayor has already been on to me a couple of times, and you know what a pain in the arse he can be. He sounded quite worried, but then people here in Florence seem to get worked up about not very much, or even nothing at all. Strange city! Be that as it may, tell me all about it.’

  Calmly, Ferrara filled him in on the details.

  ‘Could it have been an animal, do you think?’ the Commissioner asked when Ferrara had finished. ‘A rat, perhaps?’

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ Ferrara replied, unruffled. ‘The edges of the cuts seemed quite clean. It could only have been a human being. Someone who knew what he was doing, according to the pathologist, and used specific instruments, like a scalpel.’

  Silence fell in the room. The Commissioner looked more anxious than ever.

  ‘But why would anyone do something like that?’ he asked, looking Ferrara straight in the eyes.

  Ferrara was in no hurry to answer. He wasn’t in the habit of speculating about motives at the start of an investigation. Within weeks, days, or even hours, such speculation often turned out to be entirely unfounded.

  ‘That’s a complete mystery at the moment, Commissioner,’ he said at last.

  ‘Well, it’s a mystery that needs to be solved as quickly as possible, my dear Ferrara. We don’t want the wider population to be alarmed, which is what I assume the mayor is worried about.’

  ‘My dear Ferrara’! None of his previous superiors had ever called him that.

  ‘I can assure you, Commissioner, we’ll work flat out on this. I’m already in touch with the pathologist, and you should get the first results as soon as possible.’

  ‘All right. As you can imagine, even the Head of the State Police will want to be kept up to date, and I can’t disappoint him. In the meantime, let’s hope the news doesn’t leak out, or the press will be all over this. You can imagine the kind of stories the crime reporters would come up with.’

  Ferrara nodded, then changed the subject and gave Adinolfi a summary of the latest developments in the narcotics operation. It was clear, though, from Adinolfi’s attitude, that his mind was elsewhere.

  Finally, they both stood up and shook hands, and Ferrara left.

  Once alone, the Commissioner hitched up his trousers and sat down again. He picked up his pen and resumed his writing. At least now he had more details to send to the office of the Head of the State Police.

  Before anything else, the bureaucratic niceties had to be respected.

  4

  By the time their chief, Gianni Fuschi, joined them, the forensics team, who had arrived at the chapels with their heavy cases, had been hard at work for almost half an hour.

  Fuschi had received the request to intervene as soon as he had set foot in his office.

  ‘There’s something you should
see, chief,’ the oldest of the technicians had said over the phone. ‘It’s inside the coffin.’ Fuschi had hung up and come running.

  He was wearing a brown suit and a cream-coloured shirt, without a tie. He rarely wore a tie, except on official occasions. His informal manner of dressing was matched by his longish hair. Anyone who did not know him might have taken him for a university professor, certainly not a police official who worked with microscopes, test tubes, lasers, luminol and all the cutting-edge technology pathologists used these days.

  ‘Well?’ he said as he entered.

  ‘Look here, chief,’ replied the same technician who had called him, pointing to the inside of the coffin, which was now empty: the body had been transferred to the morgue at the Institute of Forensic Medicine.

  Fuschi approached the coffin, bent slightly and peered down into it, holding that position for quite some time.

  ‘Did you use a video camera?’ he asked, straightening up.

  ‘No. We took lots of photographs.’

  ‘Film it, too. And make sure we get some close-ups. Then put this stuff carefully in a bag.’

  Then he walked back out into the corridor.

  In the coffin, where the dead woman’s feet had lain, he had seen something that should not have been there, something that had clearly been put there intentionally. But God alone knew why. It was a substance that had been burnt at some point, apparently tobacco.

  He took out his mobile phone and dialled Ferrara’s number.

  ‘Michele?’

  ‘What is it, Gianni?’

  ‘We’ve finished here, but there’s something I should tell you before anything else.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can’t be sure of this yet, so this is purely a provisional assessment. In the coffin, under the dead woman’s feet, was a substance that, in my opinion, could be burnt tobacco.’

  ‘Tobacco?’

  ‘That’s right. Leaves of tobacco.’

  Ferrara did not reply.

  ‘Michele, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you still smoke cigars?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it could be leaves of cigar tobacco, but it’s best to wait for the results.’

  ‘You mean lab tests?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll personally drop the stuff at the Institute of Forensic Medicine and ask for it to be looked at urgently, but in the meantime I think you should take all due precautions. Do you understand what I’m saying?’