Michael Morley - Viper

'It's not!' Franco stared straight into the man's eyes.

Valsi sized him up. 'Fucking weirdo.' He turned back to the grandfather. 'Be ready to sign the documents my men bring you.' He pushed Franco to one side. 'Stay out of the fucking daylight, Freak Boy; it's not Halloween for another year.'

Valsi and his laughing henchmen left. The door swung loose and banged in the wind.

Antonio ignored it and wrapped his arms around his grandson. 'Ignore them, Franco. I love you and God loves you. Everything will be all right.'

Franco fought back his rage and nodded as his grandfather held him.

'It will be all right, I promise,' repeated Antonio. But they both knew that it wouldn't be.

Everything was going to be far from all right.

JFK Airport, New York City The United flight rose in slow motion above the insipid winter whites of snowbound New York, then disappeared into the dark December night.

Ten hours later, Jack King dejectedly peered through the window at rain-sodden clouds barrelling across the Bay of Naples. Dozens of container ships swayed slowly in a sludge of polluted foam beneath him. On the dockside, metal cranes bent their iron beaks and pecked poisonous cargoes of illegal drugs, counterfeit goods and smuggled immigrants. This was one of the world's busiest ports, a crossroads of global criminality.

Thunder boomed as the plane touched down at Capodichino. Rain beat like ball bearings on the metal roof of the 737. They surfed to an air bridge on a wave of runway water.

Naples is Italy's third largest city, the birthplace of pizza and home to more than a million people. On passing Customs, Jack thought each and every one of them had turned up at the airport for what must be National Talk as Loud and as Fast as You Can Day. He caught a cab and watched the city unfold before him. His mind soaked up the surroundings that may have shaped the psyche of a serial killer.

The journey was long and depressing. A few fields of denuded cherry trees and ranks of industrial greenhouses reminded him of Naples' agricultural heritage. The rest looked like urban wasteland. Traffic was as bad as, if not worse than, New York, and there was a palpable anger and aggression in the way people drove. Driving was combat. Parking was territorial. Pedestrians were prey.

Management at The Grand Hotel Parker's told him with pride that they'd upgraded him to a luxury room with a sea view. The description was only partly right. The view across the bay was indeed stunning, but the room fell short of luxury. Modest and clean were the kindest descriptions he could come up with. Like the city, the hotel lived on past glories.

He unpacked, hung his shirts over a hot bath to let the creases fall out and was fighting off the first wave of jet lag when Massimo Albonetti rang and said he was in reception.

Even in the most fashionable crowd, his old friend always stood out. Today he wore a bespoke mid-length black calfskin leather jacket, evocative of Marlon Brando's motorcycle days. He matched it with understated charcoal-grey trousers of wool and silk, a cashmere jumper and a grey cotton T-shirt.

'I curse Naples. Driving in this city is now completely impossible! How are you, my friend?' Massimo extended both arms and Jack surrendered to the inevitable cheek-kissing. If the truth be known, it still made him feel awkward.

'I'm fine. Red-eyed, but good. You got time to grab a bite?'

'Hey, I'm Italian; I always have time to eat. In here, or we go out?'

They settled on a table upstairs, at the hotel's famous George's restaurant. Jack's body clock was already out of kilter. Jet lag reduced the distinctions of breakfast, lunch and dinner into a simple desire to eat. They drank fresh orange and espressos while they perused the menu. Massimo put his glass aside and from the look on his face Jack knew something was troubling him.

'What's on your mind?'

'It's your friend Luciano Creed and his missing women.' Massimo Albonetti interlocked his fingers and cracked his knuckles. 'I received a phone call on the way over to you. It was from Sylvia Tomms, a carabinieri Capitano here in Naples.'

'And?'

'She's been working a case out near Pompeii, not that far from where a couple of Creed's women lived. Some human remains were found in a stretch of woods, way off the tourist road that leads up to the top of Vesuvius.'

'The volcano?'

'Yes, the volcano,' Massimo smiled. 'It is the only Vesuvius we have.'

Jack raised an eyebrow to acknowledge the levity. Humour always surfaced when cops got down to the blackest aspects of a case. 'Were they bagged? In a sack, a case, or anything that might give forensics?'

'You think Italian killers are more stupid than American ones?'

'I live in hope.'

'Sadly not. No container. They were just dumped in the soil. Not much chance of trace evidence from the killer, though the labs are sifting through samples. Let me get to the main point, though. Tomms has had a local anthropologist and his team piece together the bones recovered from the site. These people are good. They're used to digging up corpses that are centuries old, so they put this skeleton together very quickly -'

'And?'

The last of the levity left Massimo's eyes, 'And, it's a woman, one of the ones you mentioned.'

Jack took a slow breath. 'Which?'

'Francesca Di Lauro.' The lines on Massimo's forehead rippled again. 'Her jawbone had been smashed in more than a dozen different places but they pieced much of it together again. One of Sylvia Tomms' team managed to get some X-ray transparencies from her last dental check-up. The fit is identical.'

'You got a time on when she was buried?'

'Not yet. But we're talking years, not months.'

Jack voiced what was in both of their heads. 'So Creed was right about her being missing and being murdered. And if he's right about her, then he may well be right about the other missing women as well.'

'Why was he right, though?'

'Because he killed her?'

Massimo fell deep in thought. 'I don't know, Jack. The only thing that I'm certain of is that we're going to have to reopen all those damn cases. And believe me, that's going to cause a hell of a lot of work and generate huge political opposition. We're not going to win any friends with this one!'

Centro di Visitatore, Pompeii Franco Castellani and his cousin Paolo Falconi slipped past the glass-screened kiosk without paying. Within seconds they'd vanished in the labyrinthine ruins of Pompeii.

They were serial non-payers and knew the place like the back of their hands. Pompeii was their playground. First stop, as usual, Forum Olitorio. Through iron bars, Franco stared into the old granary, studying every inch of the plaster casts of victims engulfed in the torrent of lava that erupted from Vesuvius back in 79@C.

When the site had been excavated in the 1800s, imprints of the dead had been found in the hardened lava. By pouring plaster into cavities left in the bed of ashes by the gradual decomposition of a corpse, it had been possible to recreate a near perfect replica of the victim's form.

The figure that always fascinated Franco was that of a young man, sitting with his knees tucked up and his hands on his chin, his moment of thought preserved forever by the awful lava flow that had consumed him.

Franco stared intently at Ash Boy, as he called him. He had the frame of a youth, but the plaster and the pose suggested someone older. Someone old before his time.

Dead before his time.

The observation resonated with Franco. The disease that had engulfed his own body – slower but just as deadly as the lava – had already stolen his youth. It had cruelly taken the years in which he should have been most attractive to women, the years in which he should find his soulmate.