Aidan Conway - A Cold Flame - A gripping crime thriller that will keep you hooked

“A spectacular?” said Carrara. “In Rome? That’s turning the clock back forty years.”

“Well, someone’s opened the betting. It all depends if the stakes rise. And who’s playing the game. Look,” said Rossi, “Bianco’s here.”

The sergeant was approaching their table with his customary heavy tread now even heavier. He flopped down into a chair.

“Relatives,” he said. “In the mortuary. What a fucking job.”

He gave them the low-down on things. A temporary mortuary had been set up in a ground-floor classroom. The air-conditioning helped. Despite being August, the road diversions and massive security clampdown combined with a general heat-stoked hysteria was wreaking havoc on the city’s traffic. The scene-of-crime magistrate had agreed with the City Prefect to keep the bodies at the scene until things calmed down and until they could get next of kin informed, at least in the case of the local victims. Then they would see to the overseas students.

“Dario’s forming his opinions already, isn’t he?” said Carrara, waiting then for Rossi’s reaction.

“He’s going through hell! A guy like him cooped up 24/7 with an escort, as good as living on the run. There are Mafia scum who’ve got more freedom to walk the streets. The least he should be doing is concocting another conspiracy theory.”

“As far-fetched as the last one wasn’t? I mean The Carpenter case turned out to be just about as fucked up and twisted as you could imagine. Faked deaths, suicides, triple bluffs. You couldn’t have made it up.”

“Take every case on its merits, Gigi. Follow the facts until they prove you were right not to believe somebody’s wild theorizing, or until what you do see begins to eat away at your long-held notions of the rational and believable. Otherwise you lose your direction. There’s a place for instinct, for gut feeling but it’s the catalyst, not the constituent in the equation. Or the angle; the right kind of lighting that illuminates what you hadn’t noticed before.”

“So how do you see this one shaping up? Us against the bad guys in a nice straight fight? Do you see a tall dark stranger?”

Rossi gave a nervous look over his shoulder to the tables behind him in the canteen nearest to the coffee machines and the free food. They were all there. Known and unknown. Uniformed and non. Some friends and a sprinkling of well-seasoned foes. Yes, thought Rossi, it took events like this to really shake up the law and order establishment. It was like some sort of world cup and everyone was suddenly going for glory and sensing the opportunity to get their hands on the trophy.

“Or another one where we’re watching our backs and wishing we were on traffic detail again?” Carrara added.

Rossi flicked a used sugar sachet into his cup. “I predict interesting, Gigi. That’s what I see. As in very ‘interesting times’.”

Carrara had set up a meeting with Dr Okoli. The professor was waiting in an interview room but without any of the accompanying security. Rossi noted that unlike the usual suspects they had to face across a desk in there, he seemed quite unperturbed by the surroundings.

“So, it seems I am a lucky man,” he said with a broad smile as he rose to greet Rossi and Carrara with a powerful handshake.

“I tend to agree,” said Rossi as he introduced himself. “We’ll keep this as brief as we can, Professor. I’m sure you have a lot to attend to.”

Okoli nodded and sat down again. He had the relaxed air of a writer for whom ideas come easily and in abundance. No tortured soul here. Rossi was getting the feeling that this was a man who had probably seen worse on many occasions. Much worse.

“Enemies?” said Rossi.

“How long do you have?” the professor chuckled. “That part of the Nigerian establishment which is corrupt to its rotten core and in cahoots with the petrodollar touting rabble and the foreign ‘investors’.” He made his own inverted commas for Rossi and Carrara’s benefit. “Speculators, predators, depredators of our country would be a more accurate term. But investors is what they like to be known as.”

He reeled off a list of names. Carrara took notes.

“Some of these people have form as they say. Nothing proved, of course. There never is. But take it from me, they would like me out of the way. Ever since I resurrected the ghost of my old friend Ken Saro-Wiwa, when I called for his name to be cleared, for a state pardon and recognition of his innocence, and for his murderers to be finally brought to justice. I went too far for my own good it seems.”

Rossi knew the story well. The writer who had championed the cause of the oppressed and exploited in the Niger Delta, where the oil companies and their friends in government were the kings. He had finished up on the end of a rope, widely believed to have been convicted on trumped-up charges. The whole thing stank.

“So do you think they could be pursuing you?” said Carrara. “You may have heard we’ve had some race-related incidents in the city. Hate crimes we think. Far-right groups targeting foreigners. That kind of thing. Did you receive any threats? Any signs of intimidation?”

The professor listened and pondered for a moment. He shrugged. Non-committal but open.

“Someone let down the tyres on my car once. Someone else lets his dog shit outside my house every day. Maybe the same person.”

“That could just be Rome,” said Carrara.

“Apart from that,” Okoli continued, “the attack on me and my family was out of the blue, gentlemen, but not, shall we say, entirely surprising.”

“Did you lose much?” said Rossi. “In the fire. Your work?”

Okoli shook his head.

“Some possessions, but I left Nigeria in rather a hurry, you know. The possessions I had I knew I would not have much chance of holding on to, so I sold or gave away what I could before leaving.”

He put his hand in his pocket and took out a USB drive.

“Everything else of real importance is on here,” he said. “My research. My sources. I never part from this. They’ll have to kill me first if they want it.”

Their eyes locked for a moment in understanding before Rossi moved things along.

“We’ll see to it that you get the right security. Do you have some work lined up?”

The question had come out spontaneously and was inspired by goodwill, but as soon as he had said it, Rossi realized it made him sound like some sort of fake-casual immigration official.

Okoli smiled.

“I was thinking of selling my body, officer. I have heard it’s all the rage among the Nigerians in Rome. Haven’t you?”

Rossi stood on his balcony watching the cloudless sky as the sun’s first rays began to cancel night’s all too brief dominion. It was an implacable scene, like a Cyclops’s blank stare. The temperature gauge in his living room had dropped by two degrees overnight. Small comfort. No breeze. Nevertheless, as he drank his cool coffee and looked out at the still-sleeping metropolis, his mind felt fresh, at least for now, and he reflected on what had emerged from the previous day’s events.

They had not kept Doctor Okoli long. He had his life to reorganize, again. He had not been able to put any substantive leads their way other than to indicate that plenty of well-protected diplomats in Rome were probably just as likely as any fascist organization to have been trying to kill him. He seemed perfectly credible and their background checks matched his own story. But his final wisecrack about male prostitution had set Rossi thinking more than a little. Okoli had not elaborated, had backtracked even and glossed over it, but the suggestion was that his reluctance might have been because he was working on something and may even have had confidential sources to protect.