David Hewson: A Season for the Dead

He thought of the tiny enclosed room in the tower and the stink of meat in it. “But what the hell does that mean?” The inspector scowled. “It means you don’t understand riddles. And you just wasted a lot of effort not answering the question you were asked. "I met a man with seven wives…" They were all going in the opposite direction. There was just one person going to St. Ives. The narrator. You were looking in the wrong place all along. The obvious isn’t always the right answer."

Nic Costa shook his head. “That’s the kind of game a lunatic would play.”

“And not finish the line?” Falcone asked. “Why would a dead man set an incomplete riddle? Can you tell me that?” There was no ready answer. “I want you to go round to Rinaldi’s home,” Falcone ordered. “We’ve been there already but maybe we missed something. Try to work out what kind of man he was, whether there’s anything to explain this. And try not to piss off Hanrahan again. He’s been on the phone twice to me already. You certainly made an impression there.”

Costa failed to understand the relevance. “Hanrahan? You know him?”

“Oh, we’re just the best of friends.”

Falcone was, Costa hoped, being sarcastic. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

“Now…”

He was out of his seat, standing in front of the window with his back to them, watching the traffic in the street, thinking, or so he wanted them to believe. Another Falcone ritual. The two detectives knew when their time was through.

Rossi led the way out of the room.

Six

The Rinaldis owned a large, restored apartment in a late nineteenth-century block on the Via Mecenate, a residential street by the park which led from the Via Merulana toward the Colosseum. The neighborhood was on the cusp of acceptability. It was only a few minutes’ walk to the smarter, older quarters of the Caelian Hill. Nero’s Golden House lay beneath the parched summer grass about a hundred yards from the entrance to the block.

The apartment was well decorated in a lean, modern style, generously proportioned and quiet, since it gave out onto the vast internal courtyard of the building, not the street in front. Still, Nic Costa was unable to dispel the idea that the Rinaldis were not exactly rolling in money. The Via Merulana was not a place to wander with pleasure at night. It was only a little distant from the squalor of Termini Station.

If he looked closely outside he would see the signs: needles in the gutter, used condoms in doorways. At night the park became a haunt for rent boys. A university professor would prefer to live somewhere else, Costa felt. It was one of those neighborhoods that was always up and coming but never quite got there.

The apartment had been thoroughly searched already. Costa and Rossi studied the preliminary report: a small amount of cannabis, no messages on the answering machine, no incriminating letters, nothing on the cheap desktop computer that sat in the tiny study next to the bedroom. He wondered how Falcone expected them to come up with something new.

Rossi found the Rinaldis’ bank statements tucked into a drawer of the computer desk. Costa’s suspicions were correct. Rinaldi and his wife maintained separate accounts and both were in the red, Stefano Rinaldi’s to the tune of a quarter of a million euros. There were threatening letters from the bank too. Unless the Rinaldis cleared some of their debt, even the modest apartment in the Via Mecenate was in jeopardy of disappearing from beneath them. Was this enough to turn someone like Stefano Rinaldi into a multiple killer? Falcone would never accept such a flimsy idea. Where was the evidence?

Costa made a note to re-interview the neighbors. The preliminary report came up with so little. All the usual comments they got in domestic incidents, stories that painted the victims as a quiet, solitary couple, with few friends. No one had ever seen Mary Rinaldi with a bruised face. No one had heard her complain about the behavior of her husband. They were, it seemed, a bland, childless pair struggling to make ends meet.

Falcone was right: There had to be more. The bank statements and the threats from the bank were symptoms, surely, of some larger malaise in the Rinaldis’ life.

Something else bothered him. Mary Rinaldi didn’t work, the report said. Rinaldi must have earned a decent package at the university. They should have been able to survive. Yet here they were with a sizeable debt outstanding on a mediocre home, fighting to keep their heads above water. Where was the money going? He went back to the bank statements and found the answer: cash. Stefano Rinaldi’s salary from the university amounted to almost six thousand euros a month after deductions. Even with a tidy mortgage, that should have been enough to live on.

The statements told a different story. Rinaldi immediately transferred a quarter into his wife’s bank account, standing payments accounted for a further half, and the rest disappeared in credit card bills and some huge cash withdrawals, sometimes as much as one thousand euros a week.

Nic Costa had been around long enough to understand there were only so many reasons why a man wanted ready money in his hand in this kind of quantity: women, booze and drugs being the main ones. Maybe Sara Farnese had been expensive to maintain, though somehow he doubted that. The woman seemed too independent to rely on someone like Rinaldi for money. Maybe there was someone else now in her place. But if that was the case, why was Rinaldi so furious with Sara that he wanted to kill her current boyfriend? There was always a simpler answer.

While Rossi ran through the answering machine Costa went into the bathroom which was small, covered in mirrors and had just a toilet, a washbasin with a plain cabinet above it and a shower in the corner. He opened the cabinet door and looked inside: a woman’s razor, some headache pills, a packet of laxatives, and two neat rows of white plastic tablet containers from a health store. He read the names: evening primrose oil and ginseng, gingko biloba and selenium. There were eight different preparations in all. One or both of the Rinaldis must have rattled like a pillbox when they went out of the apartment in the morning. Costa picked up the biggest container, the one with evening primrose oil inside, opened it and looked at the round, shiny yellow capsules.

There were only about ten left and they sat on a wad of cotton wool. Gelatin health pills nestled on a soft white bed of fluffiness. He hated cotton wool. The feel of it gave him the same shivers some people get from running their nails up and down a blackboard. It seemed so pointless. They put cotton wool in pill containers only to stop things rattling around and breaking. A flexible gelatin capsule couldn’t break, not easily.

Costa turned the container upside down and emptied the visible contents into the sink. Then he righted it and gently pulled out the cotton wool from the base. Beneath it was a small transparent plastic bag containing white powder. Costa swore at the incompetence of the squad who had made the first search. He took out the bag, unwrapped it, tasted the coke, confirming what it was. The source of the Rinaldis’ cash problem was now apparent.

Perhaps dope would explain Stefano’s excitable state. Except that the autopsy had so far failed to uncover any trace of drugs. Costa swore again. It had to be significant: It was the only thing he’d found so far that was. He returned to the living room and showed the dope to Rossi, who commented, “And these are supposed to be intelligent people? Why do they go around picking up gutter habits like that?”

“No family,” Costa said. It was astonishing how often that factor cropped up in his line of work. Except every dopehead had a kind of family: the person who fulfilled his or her needs. In the case of the middle classes that was usually fixed, regular, like a visit to the doctor.