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

Among the scorched masonry and fallen timbers, one of the grilles lay across the small desert of debris, like the ribcage of a once living and breathing being strewn across a bleak savannah.

“Any names?” said Rossi.

“Just the one,” said Carrara. “The tough nut. Ivan Yovoshenko. He was found in the communal bathroom and had dog tags from his conscription days. But for them he would have been a zero like the rest. It seems he had at least tried to get out, got severely burnt in the process and maybe finally sought refuge in the bathroom. He could have struck his head and collapsed. Judging from the amount of alcohol they found in his bloodstream, he had to have been blind drunk and wouldn’t have realized just how hot the flames were. It was enough for him to survive as long as he did.”

“And nothing on the others?”

“Nothing,” said Carrara.

“Well, they can forget checking dental records,” said Rossi. “These guys could probably just about afford toothpaste.”

Carrara pulled out another sheet for Rossi.

“Presumed missing persons in Rome and Lazio for the last six months, but no matches with this address. The word on the street is that they were five single men, probably illegals, but anymore than that …”

“Sounds familiar,” said Rossi. “But no friends, no workmates?”

Carrara gestured to the desiccated blooms and a brown, dog-eared farewell note or two.

“Paid their respects then made themselves scarce, I suppose,” said Carrara. “If it’s a racial hate killing they were probably thinking ‘who’s next’?”

“But a landlord?” said Rossi, sensing an opening. “Tell me we have an owner’s name.” But Carrara was already quashing that hope with another printout from the case folder.

“Flat sold to a consortium two months ago as part of a portfolio of properties, a sort of going concern with cash-in-hand rents through an established ‘agent’ who hasn’t been seen since the fire.”

“That’s convenient,” quipped Rossi.

“Says here they always sent an office bod to pick up the cash in a nearby bar and the go-between got his room cheap as well as his cut. No contracts. No paper trail. No nothing.”

“And no name for the agent?”

“Mohammed. Maybe.”

“That narrows it down. And the bar? Anyone there remember him’?”

“ Nada .”

“A description?”

“North African. About fifty.”

“Great,” said Rossi. “Well, it looks like the late Ivan’s our only man, doesn’t it? Let’s see what the hospital can give us.”

“And then a trip to the morgue?”

“You know, Gigi, I was almost beginning to miss going there.”

“Yesterday was yesterday,” the checkout girl declared as Rossi, making one of his regular top-up shops, tried to pay the ten cents lacking from the previous evening.

Time to forget.

Time to move on.

After lunch and a short siesta he’d spent an hour in a bar, leafing through the papers thinking things over and watching the more popular TV channels to see their take on the Prenestina fire. The mayor had shown up, looked contrite, made a bit of a speech. A local priest was more outspoken, calling it ethnic cleansing. But it wasn’t as if there was any great rallying cry to get to the bottom of it, to trace and compensate the victims’ families, whether it was racially motivated or down to some underworld grudge. While the space being dedicated to the story was rationed after the initial reports, it was almost as if some sections of the media were giving the tacit impression that it had been, if not a necessary culling, then almost an occupational hazard for “illegals”.

As he left the supermarket a figure flashed past in the crowd. Was it? It couldn’t be. She was dead. He stood and watched as the dark-haired, athletic silhouette melted into the crowd, and then shaking himself back into something like rationality he proceeded homewards.

But the doppleganger had set him thinking – thinking about her again and the fallout from the Marini affair. It was almost unimaginable now to think that this same baked, arid city had been wreathed in snow and thrown into chaos while he and Carrara pursued a serial killer dubbed ‘The Carpenter’, trying to halt his murderous crusade against the city’s women.

It had been dubbed ‘The Carpenter’ case, but Marini had been at the centre of everything, playing an ambiguous role on the fringes of a coterie of obscure, occult power brokers in the Church, the state, and big business. For her own ends, she had played them both like violins almost all the way, before coming on board with him and Carrara as they made a pact to use her secret service skills to nail the killer. Her contorted rationale had been a part of a broader strategy, so she could control everything. They discovered that Giuseppe had had a history of working for the services and her cronies all along, and even if in a ragged way Rossi and Carrara did eventually get their man, the circumstances and the consequences still rankled.

He knew that the work of the dark, deep state, the powers-that-be, was not finished. It was an ongoing concern.

And then a decomposed body had turned up in the spring. Hers presumably, in the car she had escaped in through the snowstorm following that last encounter. The corpse had been buried in an unmarked grave, and Rossi and Carrara alone remained the custodians of the whole complex secret. But with no one having stood trial for either The Carpenter’s crimes or Giuseppe Bonaventura’s own murder and no one looking likely to, and while a file remained technically open, the case was considered as good as closed unless new evidence came to light.

All despite the misgivings and rumours that rumbled on in some quarters.

There was no shortage of paranoid speculation on the more radical fringes of the political world and within the world of crime investigation itself. No one but Rossi and Carrara knew the guilty truth. The tangled webs we weave, thought Rossi. They wouldn’t even believe it if he ever did try to come clean. Either way, he would go down for malpractice, perverting the course of justice, you name it. They would make sure of that.

But the dominant, accepted narrative was that the evil had been exorcized, the murders had ceased and The Carpenter had met a justified violent end.

One day perhaps it would all come out. One day.

The domestic political upheavals remained largely on hold now as the MPD faced up to its being so near yet so far from obtaining anything like real power. A general election was far off, unless the government were to fall, but that seemed unlikely. So little had changed in the city in terms of its politics and the penchant for corruption at every imaginable level. On the park walls, on the apartment blocks, the far-right graffiti, however, was fresh, with new variants and vile, resurrected favourites.

HONOUR TO THE FATHERLAND.

DEATH TO PERFIDIOUS JEWRY.

GYPSIES TO THE INCINERATORS.

The comments too that Rossi might hear from disgruntled older citizenry could be strikingly un-PC. “It’s an Islamic invasion, mark my words,” was one familiar refrain. No, the race issues had not gone away, as immigration, religious extremism, and the global terror threat continued to dominate the fear agenda.

He dropped his shopping onto the kitchen table and picked up one of the newspapers he hadn’t yet opened. He flicked through to the letters page, where citizens continued to rail against buses that still didn’t come, roads still full of holes, and, depending on how the breeze blew, the rubbish putrefying on the streets that continued to sour the evening aperitivo . He tossed the paper aside and set about about fixing himself a decent drink.