Aidan Conway - A Known Evil - A gripping debut serial killer thriller full of twists you won’t see coming

“With pleasure, Inspector,” he replied maintaining the same satirical tone.

Rossi passed the sheaf of e-mails across the desk. “You can, I presume, confirm that you wrote these? In particular, the last one, written in the early hours of the day on which Maria was later killed.”

Spinelli’s expression went from shock and embarrassment through to apparent incredulity.

“How did you get these?”

As Rossi explained, Spinelli went back to leafing through them, reliving the strange, voyeuristic dislocation that comes from seeing your own words already become a form of history. He stopped and held out one of the sheets.

“I didn’t write this,” he said. “I couldn’t have written this. I mean it’s not possible. It’s not me. It can’t be me.” He began to read out some of the more incriminating sentences: “‘If I can’t be with you then you can’t live either, you are coming with me, then we will always be together, I won’t let you get away with this so easy, if I can’t have you no one can … I’ll do myself in or both of us …’”

“It’s your e-mail account,” said Rossi, “and we can pretty quickly ascertain if it came from your own computer, in which case, if it did, it makes things, shall we say, at best, awkward for you.”

“So you’re saying that I did it, that I’m a suspect?”

“I am saying that circumstantial evidence could implicate you as a possible suspect at this point in the investigation – for the murder of Maria Marini and those of both Paola Gentili and Anna Luzi. Unless perhaps you can explain why you wrote it.”

“Or who wrote it,” he added. “Who, Inspector.”

Spinelli’s tone had turned combative, and he now had something of the cornered look in his eyes, a look Rossi had seen many times before.

“Does anyone else have access to your account?”

“No.”

“So you are the sole user.”

“That would appear to be the case.”

“And you aren’t in the habit of letting other people write e-mails for you. A secretary, an aid. Maria herself, maybe? She was helping you, I believe.”

“Oh, yes,” said Spinelli, “and I often give people the keys to my flat too and say ‘walk right in, go on, help yourself’.”

Rossi gave a partially muted sigh.

“So, when you say ‘who’ wrote it, what do you mean exactly?”

“Well,” began Spinelli, “call me an MPD conspiracy theorist, by all means, but has the thought not occurred to you that they might have hacked it, Inspector?”

Rossi never liked the way the final inspector was tagged on like a sardonic Post-it note, but he’d grown used to it. Comes with the job, he mused internally, nobody likes a cop, unless they need one, and then they’re never there, are they? Ha, ha. Come to think of it, he didn’t even like being called inspector when it wasn’t used ironically and would happily have deployed his first name but then it just wasn’t done, was it? Hi, I’m Michael and I’m here to help you. Like fuck you are. You’re here to bang me up as quick as you can and get yourself another stripe. Back to work.

“And you think there might be a reason for that.”

“To frame me, of course!” Spinelli exploded.

“But do you have reason to suspect that someone is trying to frame you, Dr Spinelli?”

Spinelli fumbled in his jacket pockets then wrenched open a desk drawer before locating his cigarettes. He lit up and smoke-whooshed a reply.

“Her ex, for starters. Or maybe just the whole political establishment,” he added with a mock-ironic flourish, standing up and beginning to pace the small office, making it look, at least to Rossi’s eyes, as if it were turning into a cell. He stopped at the window and turned around. Rossi could see he was shaping up for a confession of sorts. But which? There were those that revealed all, those that left out the awkward or shameful particulars, and those made up to take the rap for someone else.

“Look, Inspector,” he began with greater, if rather more, mannered sincerity, “I wrote a few things, in the heat of the moment, which I shouldn’t have. You see, I’d already been drinking, rather a lot as it happens, and since the break-up, well it had just got worse and worse.” He made a hand gesture towards the street. “I’ve been spending most of my evenings in the piano bar round the corner from here. I get something to eat and try to switch off a bit, and then I come back, sleep on the sofa and then I dust myself down and start work again in the morning. The glamorous world of politics.” He stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and sat back down again. He paused to collect his thoughts, joining his hands and holding the fingertips just under his nose, as though gently drawing up through his nostrils some delicate perfume they exuded.

“That day, the day Maria was killed,” he went on, “I woke up and my mind was almost a complete blank. I was still wearing my clothes and my head was pounding. At first, I thought I must have been hitting it harder than usual and perhaps, perhaps, when I had come back the night before I logged on and just started writing that stuff, but it wasn’t me. It was someone else; I was out of my mind; I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t want to kill anyone.”

Rossi looked him in the eye.

“Did you kill her? Perhaps while, as you say, you were out of your mind? Had you gone drinking again that afternoon?”

“No.”

“Did you follow her, stalk her?”

“Stalk? No. Look, I went to her place once or twice when I was drunk, on other occasions, to talk, but that’s as far as it went. Just me leaning on the bell until the madness passed.”

“Did you want to kill her?”

“No, of course not!”

“Did you ever fantasize about killing her, for revenge, for going back to Volpini, for screwing up your marriage?”

“Do you really want me to answer that question?”

“Yes, Dr Spinelli, I do.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “the thought might have occurred, in my mind, in my wildest moments, in my worst moments, but I would never, ever have done it. Haven’t you ever thought about revenge, Inspector?”

Oh, yes , thought Rossi. How he had thought about revenge, planned it even, down to the last detail. The hit, the getaway. The cleanest, most perfect of crimes only a cop could commit.

“Yes,” said Rossi, snapping back from the reverie, “probably, but as far as I know, I have never as yet put it in writing.”

“And neither have I.”

A good firm answer. Rossi liked that. It meant he was on the right lines. It might mean less work, too, and he wanted Maroni off his back about this guy. He was clean. Screwed-up but clean. And besides, there was no material link. No weapon. No witness. No DNA.

But Rossi sensed Carrara was uneasy. He would be concerned that his squeezing of Spinelli was going too far emotively. Carrara was Mr Logic. It was what he did and he did it well, and Rossi knew he was itching to put his oar in. He gestured to his colleague, ceding the floor to him.

“I was just wondering,” began Carrara, “do you think I could take a quick look at the computer, Dr Spinelli?” he asked, glancing askance at Rossi and, like seasoned team players, getting his immediate tacit assent. “I think we might be better off just checking a few things here and now.”

“Feel free,” he said and machine-gunned his password into the keyboard.

“That’s not written anywhere, is it?”

“No. Memorized and difficult to crack. Numbers, letters and symbols and case-sensitive.”

Rossi was more than glad of Carrara’s serious nerd tendencies when it came to computers; it meant he could save precious time and dispense with tedium. He was clicking around now on Spinelli’s e-mail, opening strange windows he’d never seen before and seemed to have already located something of interest.