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

“It takes us back. Outside of time, even.”

“Meaning?”

Two pizzas as big as cartwheels sustained by a white-shirted waiter’s arms were flying across the restaurant high above the heads of the engrossed diners.

“ Capricciosa ?” the waiter boomed making some nearby foreign tourists start from their chairs.

“For me, said Rossi.”

“And Margherita?”

Carrara raised a hand in distracted acknowledgement.

“Meaning, I don’t know,” said Rossi. “But it could be significant.”

“And in the meantime? Every woman in Rome needs to stay at home. We bring in Sharia law? Or they’d all better get themselves a gun, or what?” said Carrara.

Rossi was already carving into his tomato base, spread with slices of cured ham, artichoke hearts, black olives, and all topped off with halves of boiled egg. A meal for lunch- and dinner-skippers; a policeman’s meal. He reached for his beer. It was icy-sharp, clean, and lightly hoppy. Already he was feeling it and the food’s anaesthetising, calming effect on his stomach and, as a consequence, on his mind. As he lowered the glass, making more room on the cluttered table-for-two, his eyes were drawn to that portion of the menu where the names of the dishes were translated into something resembling English for the convenience of tourists. They usually got it right, to be fair, but sometimes the renderings were comical. One word, which should perhaps have been platter, had become instead plater.

“Or maybe not all women,” said Rossi.

Carrara lowered his fork.

“Do you know something I don’t?”

Rossi took another large draught.

“And if, say, it wasn’t matter but mater?”

“As in ‘mother’, in Latin? You think he’s killing mothers?”

“I don’t know. Or it could be symbolic. The Mother Church even. Sancta Mater Ecclesia. Our Holy Mother the Church. Remember your catechism? Might need to check if they were practising Catholics.”

Rossi’s phone, for once occupying prime table space, began to vibrate.

“You’d better answer that,” said Carrara.

It wasn’t the phone call they had both feared and even in some way almost willed, yet it afforded them some relief. They needed time to think. But they also needed evidence and the killer was giving little away, aside from the sick notes. Sick notes. Rossi dwelt on the irony as he ate. Maybe there was something in that. For being excused, from games, from school. A sick note for life. I don’t belong to you and your moral order and here’s my little note that says why . He remembered how such boys had often been treated with open contempt by some teachers, at least at the school he’d attended in England for those few years. Pilloried and humiliated in the gymnasium and the changing room for their perceived weakness, cowardice, their lack of male vigour. Could they grow up to wreak such terrible revenge on society? Ridiculed outsiders wielding their new-found power and enjoying it. Repeating it. Needing it.

It was someone with a very big axe to grind. Someone hard done by and conscious of it, not like those wretched creatures who strangled and knifed but could never articulate the reason why. Maybe they never even knew themselves. They didn’t have the mental apparatus, the support system, to process their feelings and frustrations or even put a name to them. But kill they did. Often without warning or without apparent motive.

He shared some of his thoughts with Carrara as they both leant back, satisfied and contemplating dessert. There were also factors that pointed towards a clean skin, someone with no record of violence, at least in Italy. The foreigner theory couldn’t be discounted, though Rossi winced at such politically populist apportioning of blame. Or even the smouldering suggestion of an Islamic plot. Was it someone who hadn’t killed before? They had as yet unearthed no particular similarities with unsolved crimes. There was no clear motive. Unless this killer had been long-incubated, a slow burner, and had chosen a propitious moment to hatch from his dark cocoon.

“Look, we’re not fucking magicians, Michael,” Carrara concluded, tipsy now and a little the worse for wear from tiredness. Rossi glanced up from his plate.

“Kid been keeping you up?” he enquired. “Or is it the enforced abstinence?”

Carrara returned a forced smile.

They both opted for crème caramel, and Rossi asked for the limoncello , telling the waiter not to bring coffee until he asked for it. He wanted time, time to savour and time to think. Carrara declined the liqueur.

“You can leave the bottle,” said Rossi. The gruff waiter shot him a look askance, his hopes of an early finish dwindling.

“We definitely won’t be getting a smile out of Mr Happy tonight,” concluded Rossi.

They split the bill, alla Romana , each paying an equal share irrespective of what they had consumed, and decided to walk a little and drop in at a bar on their way home. They stopped at a news stand with international papers for Rossi to pick up Le Monde and El País . He liked to keep abreast of European events, finding their coverage superior to that of many of the Italian papers, obsessed as they were with internecine politics and endless wrangling and the labyrinthine complexities of one financial scandal on the heels of another.

A bill-sticker smothered in a hat and scarf was slathering election posters onto the wall next to the tunnel. Here we go again , thought Rossi. It was one constant election campaign. Governments forming, falling, then getting into bed together (literally and figuratively) in bizarre, mutually convenient coalitions. The brush-wielder slapped on more of the acrid adhesive and a rancid, hypocritical ghoul now loomed over the street. He held a pen in one hand, ostensibly symbolizing bureaucratic ability, saper fare , and, perhaps for the many less well-educated voters, simply his ability to read and write. His other hand was positioned on his knee, the wedding ring to the fore. Family man, and good for his word.

It repulsed Rossi, all the public money sliding down into the abyss of corruption, interests, and rampant, unashamed nepotism. Yet, it did now seem that they were living in more interesting times. No one had really believed that the MPD would actually start to threaten the big boys, but they had. They’d harnessed the Internet, seeing its potential earlier than anyone else, and had begun raking in huge consensus among the young, the underpaid, the unemployed, and students who saw no future. Now a power block was ominously taking shape, threatening the sclerotic party system and its cynical and systematic carving up of the country’s resources.

They took the tunnel back towards Piazza Vittorio and the Esquiline hill, one of Rome’s seven. Though dirty and ill-kempt, it was a characterful area and one that Rossi knew and liked, partly, if not only, for its preponderance of Indian restaurants and readily available supplies of oriental spices in the Bangladeshi mini-markets. Many of the other shops had become Chinese-owned, alleged fronts for money laundering, among other things. The older residents lamented the decline continually. Yet, it was a real melting pot, something of a bazaar and, despite some well-publicized concerns about racial tension, everyone seemed to get on with their own business and mingle on the busy streets quite peaceably.

At the steps leading down to the Metro, Rossi bid Carrara goodnight then set off to take a walk around the square. He knew its history, that it had been built following Italy’s unification and, as such, was typical of the northern Italian style. The echoey arcades with their rows of columns and arches afforded shelter from the inclement weather in the Piedmont, be it snow or rain, whereas here they served more as welcome shade for the searing Roman summers. It was under these same arches, too, that his courtship with Yana had begun, in another winter. They had played childish games of hide-and-seek behind the columns and then, arm-in-arm, had performed a comical three-legged walk she taught him, all the way back to her old shared apartment near Porta Maggiore.