Michael Dibdin - End games

Apart from the lake beside which they had spent the night, in a car park off a minor road, there appeared to be little more to detain them in the interior. After breakfast, they would therefore abandon these rugged heights and descend to Cosenza (visite 3 heures environ) and thence to the coast, where Claude had located a recommended camp site with good facilities close to shops and the beach. On the way he proposed a detour to the abandoned town of Altomonte, whose ruins were on a plateau now inaccessible to vehicles and required a stiff climb to reach, but which the guidebook described as suggestif, one of the highest terms of commendation in Monsieur Rousset’s touristic lexicon.

They arrived shortly after ten o’clock. There were two tracks leading up to the ruins, one of which left from the outskirts of the new town which had replaced its earlier namesake, but the guide made it clear that the other, accessible off a narrow and winding road with passing places, was the more suggestive. It was accordingly this route that Claude had chosen. The heat was still bearable and the small unpaved parking area was shaded by a grove of giant holm oaks. Having inspected the prospect with a beady eye, Madame Rousset professed herself perfectly content to remain in the camper while her husband explored this particular aspect of Calabrian savagery to his heart’s content, just so long as they got to Cosenza in time for lunch. Her husband indicated gesturally that while he would not of course contest this decision, the loss was hers. Fifi, on the other hand, was clearly dying to stretch her legs and to stake a urinary claim on yet more virgin territory.

At first the path wound gently upwards through a dense undergrowth of scrub and spindly trees, but after a while the character of the landscape abruptly changed. The vegetation died out for want of soil and the way ahead became a series of steep and abrupt ramps quarried out of the crevices and gullies in the sheer rock face. The reasons given by the guidebook for both the construction and the abandonment of the original town at once became clear. In the centuries when marauding armies had processed through the area every few years — Greeks, Romans, the Goths led by Alaric, and later the French, the Spanish and Garibaldi’s ragged army of liberation — this site had been a natural and virtually impregnable fortress, conveniently hidden from the invaders’ view and, if discovered by chance, requiring infinitely more time and effort to conquer than it was worth.

It was only more recently that the disadvantages of the now unthreatened location had come to outweigh the benefits. Frigid winters with no shelter from the wind, sweltering summers with no shade from the sun, and a subsistence economy dependent on the male population leaving for months at a time to work on the great estates of the region. Once that population decided to emigrate en masse to America, Argentina and Australia, the town began its slow decline. The final blow had been an earthquake in the 1950s which demolished most of the houses, rendered two of the four original access paths unusable and persuaded the remaining waverers to move to a new settlement in the valley below. The original Altomonte was now completely uninhabited, although the townsfolk still returned once a year, on the feast day of their patron saint, to celebrate mass in the small twelfth-century church of their ancestors.

Claude Rousset was a devotee of le footing and liked to consider himself supremely fit for a man of his age, but by the time he had hauled himself up the final stretch of sun-baked rock and taken refuge in the shade of the shattered guard tower which rose beside the remains of a fortified arch at the brink of the cliff face, he was beginning to envy his wife, who was no doubt nibbling one of her mid-morning snacks in the verdant cool far below. Even Fifi looked momentarily disconsolate, but after a lot of loud lapping at the bowl her master produced from his backpack and filled from the litre of Evian he had also brought along, she quickly recovered and set off in search of adventure.

Claude took longer to recover, but he had also brought the guidebook and a camcorder, so as to be able to include this curiosite in the two-hour video presentation with accompanying commentary with which the Roussets regaled their friends during the winter months. He therefore set off towards the only two remaining structures of any size, taking panoramic shots of the general situation as he went. Twenty minutes should do it, he thought. They’d be on their way again by eleven-thirty, and down in Cosenza shortly after noon. Just time to find a parking spot, enjoy an aperitif in some pleasant cafe and then proceed to the restaurant which the Michelin had recommended for the typicality of its cuisine.

Somewhere out of sight, Fifi had started yapping loudly. If his wife had come along, she would be having hysterics, but Claude saw the poodle as a dog rather than a substitute grandchild. Dogs do what dogs do, and in this case Fifi had probably startled a hare or some other small mammal that lived virtually undisturbed in this wilderness. Well, let her have her fun. The sun was now significantly higher and hotter. He made his way over to the church and poked his head inside the unlocked door. ‘Austere but of harmonious proportions’, the guidebook said, which was on the generous side. Claude shot forty-five seconds, which he would later edit down by half, then did a slow pan of the former piazza. Unfortunately Fifi was still barking her head off, thereby ruining the impressive ‘silence of desolation’ audio angle that he’d had in mind. The next thing he knew, the little bitch was right there in front of him, yelping away and making runs towards the centre of the square, returning when he didn’t follow.

Claude ignored her. The one remaining item on his clip list was the length of walling opposite. According to the guidebook, this had originally formed part of the facade of a fortified palace belonging to the Calopezzati, an illustrious family of the locality, which had burned down during the war. The remnants weren’t much to look at, but Michelin had mentioned them so they had to be recorded. He set to work, panning slowly in to focus on the ornamented portal in the middle, the most impressive vestige of the original. It was only once Claude lowered the camera angle and zoomed in on the steps that he noticed the misshapen lump sprawled across them, and realised that the dark stains on the marble slabs were not in fact shadows cast by the contorted fig tree posed in the gaping doorway.

Aurelio Zen’s journey to the crime scene was both more and less arduous. He was transferred by helicopter from the centre of Cosenza to the central square in Altomonte Vecchia in less than ten minutes, but he had been called in the middle of a horrible lunch and arrived both spiritually and literally nauseous.

Claude Rousset’s original emergency call had been made minutes after his discovery of the body. Unfortunately a communications problem of a different kind had then delayed everything for over an hour. Monsieur and Madame Rousset had a clear division of labour when it came to the smattering of foreign languages necessary to maximise the value of their touristic experiences — he did German and English, she did Italian and Spanish, and there was no one in the police emergency call centre who spoke French.

Since Madame Rousset’s phone was switched off, it was not until her husband had negotiated the even trickier and more tiring descent to the camper van that things started to happen. Twenty minutes after that a police patrol car arrived at the spot where the Roussets were parked. It took another twenty for the officers to climb to the top, assess the situation and call in by radio. Preliminary visual inspection appeared to suggest that they were dealing with a particularly brutal and premeditated homicide of a very unusual kind. The new chief of police had made it clear that he was to be summoned instantly in the event of anything out of the ordinary which might conceivably be related to the Newman disappearance, so he was duly hauled away from a plate of gristly meatballs in tomato sauce and deposited at the scene together with the forensic team. The latter were now kitted up and establishing secure perimeters. These were a bit vague, given that the body parts were spread over a wide area and the fact that Rousset and his damned dog had had a chance to wander about the place before they got there, so Zen felt that he wouldn’t be compromising the science work too much by donning a pair of plastic galoshes and moving in for a closer look.