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

“He threatened me with a transfer. Well, not exactly threatened, but you knew what he was getting at.”

Rossi nodded. He knew both Maroni’s methods and that it was always only a matter of time before he would have things moving in the direction he wanted. But while Rossi had time on his side and was still ahead, he could at least try to make hay.

“C’mon then. What did you give him?”

“I told him about the e-mails but,” he said, slipping back into his usual chatty tone, “but the funny thing is that he asked me if there were any.”

“He asked you if there were any e-mails?”

“Yes, he said there’d been an anonymous tip-off and he needed to know if it could be trusted. Said it could be life or death.”

Rossi dismissed Bianco, who seemed at least relieved to have got the whole thing off his chest. Then he sat down, took up a pencil and began to run through the possibilities. He took a deep breath.

Scenario one: Maria Marini’s killer had given the tip-off about the e-mails to throw them off the scent. So either he had known about the e-mail correspondence or he knocked them out himself, if the Rohypnol theory held up. Which meant he’d wanted to get Maria out of the way, leave the MPD with a serious PR headache, and have Spinelli and his party fighting for their political survival.

But if somebody just happens to tip-off the police, didn’t that actually presuppose that Spinelli was likely innocent and being framed? How could anyone have innocently come by the information. A casual comment from Maria’s ex? A worried friend? But it would still be way too shaky in a court of law.

Scenario two: Volpini, Marini’s ex. After all, he was the aggrieved party in primis , the cuckold. The e-mails had given him the perfect opportunity to lay the blame at his love rival’s door. But from what Carrara had told him he didn’t seem jealous enough, at least emotively. And if it emerged that Spinelli really had been drugged? Could Volpini have organized that little caper too? Again, unlikely, as Spinelli would have recognized him. And he was in Milan, unless he had hired help to get the drugs into Spinelli, gain access to his apartment and then write an incriminating final e-mail. But that was real professional stuff, way too far off the scale.

Third scenario , thought Rossi, his pencil blunting fast. What if it was all a ruse by Spinelli, first to set himself up in order to later get himself off the hook ? It would work like this, Rossi said to his junior detective alter ego: make sure the e-mails get found via an anonymous tip-off and it looks like it’s game over. There’s a strong sentimental motive, circumstantial evidence to support it, no cast-iron alibi, and no witnesses to his going to sleep early rather than to the usual bar. Sooner or later the investigators would check his e-mails, but Spinelli goes belt and braces and points the finger at himself with his own poison pen. Then the Rohypnol theory kicks in and throws enough doubt into the equation to theoretically save him .

What if we cops hadn’t come up with it? Well, that would be Spinelli’s ace in his sleeve, his alibi. He could have given himself a dose of the stuff, holding off but planning at the last minute to say “hey, look guys, I felt terrible the other night, what if I was drugged and while I was zonked out on the floor someone got into my computer and set me up?” And maybe he’d even left the bar with some MPD groupie, saluting all and sundry to make sure it looked like he hadn’t left alone, thus furnishing a nice suspect for the cops to run around after. It was a real gambler’s option but it would leave sufficient doubt for him to get away with it and leave the case wide open.

Rossi’s head was spinning. It was feeling more and more like science fiction. But he also knew that before the facts could become the facts they could be anywhere and could be anything. Reality wasn’t like a film, a book; the plot was unwritten or unwritable. People were being murdered and the chances were that it was by someone they knew. It was a question of probability. The difficulty lay in unravelling the human messes of love, hate, politics, revenge, and ambition, not necessarily in that order, and the technical and logistical framework within which they operated – put simply, space and time. That, and establishing how far someone was prepared and able to go in order to remove another human being from the face of the earth. So what was at stake?

His gut instinct was telling him Spinelli was clean, but experience now suggested that he was up against a formidable array of possibilities and a formidable confederacy of deviants, as well, probably, as some dunces, in his own camp. There was a slew of circumstantial evidence, there was political expediency and the constant, pressing need to get a quick conviction. The tip-off story stunk, too, and combined with the urgency trickling down the chain of command via Maroni, despite himself, he feared history might be repeating itself, that this might be another political case dressed up as common crime. Even if you did never step in the same river twice it was still a river, you still got your feet wet.

So much for the straightforward murder enquiry. So much for keeping Rossi on a case that had nothing to do with the powers-that-be. In substantive terms, Maroni knew no more than he did himself. But Maroni also had to jump when “they” said jump and jump bloody high.

No. The more he mulled it over, and the more he processed what had happened in the space of what, three or four days, or two weeks counting the Colombo killing, the more he began to think that something, some mechanism might have snapped into action. Apart from having a killer on the loose, he was going to be coming up against darker forces than he had expected to be facing. His mobile phone rang again. That would be him.

The atmosphere in the conference room where the journalists were gathered was verging on the festive. Working for state-funded newspapers and TV, if you were on a good contract, was a junket and the lifestyle was easy to get used to. Everyone knew everyone, some better than others, of course. And some – how many? – had got to where they now were by dint not only of their wordsmithery but also in varying degrees thanks to the intimacy of their acquaintances, although the gender balance was, stile Italiano , rather more skewed in the predictable direction. Others may have not slept their way to success and though bed-hopping was about par for this course, there were other variations that could be registered on your scorecard too.

The Grand Hotel, being central and within walking distance of Termini station and the underground, had been chosen both to accommodate the revellers and to cater for the expected stampede of local, national, and even foreign correspondents. It provided the necessary space for national TV crews and their entourages as well as for the usual mike-toting local hacks from the galaxy of more or less obscure cable stations.

There was a palpable sense of expectation. All murder enquiries brought out the feeding frenzy instinct and this one was no different. It guaranteed weeks of copy for the crime correspondents, what with the endless speculation, the tawdry spectacle of interviews with victims’ families and neighbours and the footage of the crime scene. Then, like some second stage in a feared and now all too real malady, there would be the morbid pilgrimages to murder locations that sometimes ensued when a killing was perpetrated within the community, or, even better, within a family. The apparent randomness and viciousness of these recent crimes had aroused a particularly grim interest and the hacks were fishing now for more juicy details.