The Abomination Page 14

  Piola was more sanguine. “It’s a useful test. If he thinks his ridiculous sex-game scenario is plausible, so might a jury. We’ll look for his weapon. If nothing else, it’ll help to rule it out. Set up a briefing for the divers, will you?”

  Back at Campo San Zaccaria, however, they received the news that someone was waiting for them. “He won’t give his name,” Francesco Lotti told them. “Said he’d talked to you before. I’ve put him in Room Two.”

  In the interview room they found the young fisherman from Chioggia who’d told them about the lights on Poveglia. He was looking nervous.

  “Lucio, isn’t it?” Piola greeted him. “How can we help you?”

  The fisherman kneaded his fingers. “There’s something I didn’t mention last time,” he said anxiously.

  “Yes?”

  “When I told you about Poveglia . . . I didn’t tell you that I saw a boat as well.”

  “A boat? Did you recognise it?”

  Lucio nodded. “Of course. I know all the boats. And I’ve seen this one round there before.”

  “Go on.”

  “It belongs to Ricci Castiglione. But you must swear not to tell anyone it was me who told you.” He hesitated. “He goes there a lot, if you see what I mean. And not just to fish.”

  “Cigarettes?” Piola asked shrewdly.

  Lucio nodded again.

  “Is he the source of those Jin Ling you smoke?”

  “Yes, he is,” Lucio said, clearly surprised.

  “And what else does he bring in?”

  A shrug.

  “Is he connected? You know what I’m talking about, Lucio.”

  Reluctantly, Lucio nodded his head. “I believe so.”

  “Why have you come forward now? You must know it could put you in danger.”

  “I know Mareta, his wife,” Lucio said awkwardly. “She’s not a bad woman – she has nothing to do with what he does. But now he’s gone missing. And she knows enough to know she isn’t meant to call the police. So she asked me if I’d speak to you for her.” His eyes went to the door, suddenly fearful. “In Chioggia everyone knows when someone goes to the police station. She thinks it will be safer here in Venice.”

  That made sense. Chioggia was a notoriously close-knit community, a fact reflected in the number of families with identical surnames.

  “And does Mareta have any idea where her husband might have disappeared to?”

  “No. But I do. He has a cavana, a lock-up boatshed, just out of town. I’ve been there to buy cigarettes.”

  “Show us on a map,” Piola said. “And, Lucio – we do have to take an official statement. But we won’t tell anyone in Chioggia that it was you who told us.”

  When Lucio had gone, Kat and Piola looked at each other.

  “An organised crime connection,” Piola said. “This gets murkier and murkier, Capitano.”

  “But if there is such a connection – if we choose to pursue it – it doesn’t fit with Avvocato Marcello’s lovers’-tiff theory,” she pointed out. “We’d be doing the exact opposite of what he told us to do, in fact, which is to look for the gun with which Barbara Holton supposedly killed herself.”

  Piola nodded.

  “Screw it,” he said at last. “One of the sergeants can brief the diving team. They’re not going to find anything, anyway. Let’s get down to Chioggia.”

  Ricci’s cavana was the last in a row of a tumbledown boatsheds just to the south of town. It looked more like a marine scrapyard, Kat thought to herself, than a storage area. Half-rotted fishing boats, scraps of nylon fishing-net, old crab pots and rusting fish tanks littered the spaces between the sheds. The whole place stank of spilt diesel and fish guts, and the ground underfoot was iridescent with scales.

  Although it wasn’t yet lunchtime, there wasn’t a soul to be seen around any of the neighbouring lock-ups.

  “Were they expecting us?” Piola wondered aloud. “And if so – now, specifically, or just in general?”

  Ricci’s shed had once been painted a cheery dark blue. Now, rust poked through the peeling paint. Piola rapped on the steel door. There was no answer. Carefully, he slid the door back, wincing as it scraped on the concrete floor.

  Inside, it was just as messy as outside. They edged past a skiff raised up on trestles and found themselves in a dimly lit area Ricci had clearly used for storing the crabs he caught. Four large steel tanks, each about five feet square and four high, gave off a stench of brackish seawater.

  “Dear God,” Piola said suddenly, crossing himself. Kat followed his gaze.

  Sticking upright out of one of the tanks were a man’s feet, still clad in fishermen’s rubber shoes. Kat went to see where the rest of him was, ignoring Piola’s words of warning. For a moment she couldn’t make sense of it – the crab tank had to be deeper than it was, or those stones somehow had to have been piled on top of the body, or—

  Then the stones moved, and she realised what she was looking at. She gave a cry and stepped back just in time; as the bile reached her throat, she was able to turn her head away and avoid contaminating the tank with her vomit. But the image of those crabs would stay with her forever: dozens of them, like tiny, implacable Hermann tanks, shifting uneasily, trying to nudge and pull each other out of the way, their feathery claws buried deep in flesh, ripping it apart, as if the man’s face had exploded from within. One eye socket had been picked clean as an eggcup, right down to the bone; and the throat was now no more than a few pieces of skin flapping around grey vertebrae. She’d seen, too, the way one of the larger crabs had lifted its thick right claw towards its mouth, a morsel of ragged white meat held delicately in its pinchers . . .

  For a second time her vomit splashed on the concrete. “Sorry,” she gasped.

  “Don’t be. That’s . . . I’ve never seen anything myself. . .” Piola put his arm round her shoulders, his olive complexion now pale. “Let’s get you outside.”

  He made her sit on a wooden breaker right by the sea, where the cold wind from the mountains filled her lungs with clean air.

  “Stay here,” he instructed, once he was sure she wasn’t going to faint. He went back inside. She heard sluicing sounds, the noise of a brush on wet concrete.

  After a few minutes he re-joined her. “I’ve cleaned up. No one will know. And don’t worry – there’s absolutely no chance that there was any useful DNA on that floor. We haven’t done any damage to the evidence.”

  “Thank you,” she said, as grateful for that “we” as for the cleaning up.

  He shrugged off her words. “Forget it. Let’s call it in now. The place will need to be taken apart. There’s what looks like a couple of crates of Jing Lin cigarettes in there, still wrapped up in plastic, so that fits with what Lucio told us about the smuggling. And there’s a room at the back with an old mattress in it. I found ropes, too – fishing ropes, but with slipknots in them. It looks to me like someone’s been tied up in there.”

  “The victim?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe one of his victims. Whatever it is, I don’t think Marcello’s going to be able to make his stupid lesbian-witch theory stand up now.”

  It took hours to get the pathologist and scene-of-crime technicians to the site, during which time Piola packed Kat off to a bar for some restorative grappas. It took more time still to work out how best to remove what was left of the body. When at last Ricci’s remains had been bagged up and signed over to the pathology team, Piola went over to have a word with them.

  “What will happen to the crabs?”

  The head technician looked over at the tanks and shrugged. “They’re no use to us.”

  “Do me a favour, will you? Put them back in the sea. If we leave them here, sooner or later they’ll find their way to the market, and this case is ghoulish enough already.”

  After that the two of them went to inform the widow, Mareta, of her husband’s death. It was clear to them, however, that she already knew, or at least had had her suspicions. She had obviously asked Lucio
to speak to the police as much to get it over with as because she’d nurtured any real hope he might be found alive. Nor would she answer any questions. Fear of the Mafia ran deep here, and she could expect a widow’s pension if she kept her mouth shut.

  Even when she was shown some of the hundreds of packets of Jin Ling her husband had been storing, she still maintained that he was only a poor fisherman.

  “What about girls?” Piola asked. “Did he ever bring any women in via the lagoon?”

  Mareta’s eyes flashed with anger, and she muttered something under her breath. But she only shook her head. It was clear they’d be getting nothing out of her.

  “We’d better update Avvocato Marcello,” Piola said as they left her house. “But that can wait until tomorrow. He’s probably poncing about at the opera by now.”

  It was dark, and they had to wait for the ferry back to Venice. Kat suddenly felt desperately tired. Once the boat arrived she collapsed into one of the hard plastic seats on deck. Neither of them spoke much as the lights of Venice gradually neared across the lagoon.

  “Come on,” Piola said when they reached the city. “I’ll drop you off. It’s Mestre, isn’t it?”

  She tried to protest, but he was having none of it. Together they retrieved his car – a surprisingly elderly Fiat – from the multi-storey. Like most commuters who drove into the city each day, Piola used the car parks at Piazzale Roma or on the manmade island of Tronchetto, located next to the docks at Venice’s western edge.

  “Did you hear about the scam some of those car parks were running?” he said conversationally as they turned onto the Ponte della Libertà.

  “What scam?”

  “There was a spate of thefts from the cars. Often nothing very valuable was taken, but it’s a nuisance to get back from a day in Venice to find your car’s been broken into and a window smashed. So they introduced a ‘Left Valuables’ facility. For five euros a day you hand your camera, bags and so on to a man who locks them in a strong room.” He paused. “Have you guessed the scam?”

  “He steals them anyway?”

  “Better than that. The original break-ins were done by the same mob that runs the car parks. Not only did they get what they’d stolen, they created a business out of something no one had bothered to pay for before.”

  There was a part of her – an old Venetian part – that couldn’t help but be impressed by the sheer mercantile cunning of it. “How were they caught?”

  “They weren’t. Every time demand drops off, they just smash a few more windows.”

  “We’ll get them one day.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, and for the first time that day she thought that he, too, looked weary.

  “This is me up ahead,” she said as they neared her apartment. “But you can drop me at the corner.”

  He pulled over. “Goodnight then, Kat.”

  “Goodnight, sir.”

  He looked at her as if about to say something. She had a strong sense that he was going to tell her not to call him sir when they were alone.

  “Kat . . . I want you to know that you’re a good officer,” he said quietly. “One of the best I’ve ever worked with. Today was a tough day. Tomorrow won’t be.”

  On an impulse, she leant across to kiss him on the cheek. Not understanding, perhaps, he turned his head towards her. She stopped, her mouth a couple of inches from his.

  Hesitantly, he kissed her on the lips.

  She felt vertiginous, as if she’d jumped off a very high bridge and was now falling; falling through the air. She knew the moment of hitting the water must come, that the kiss must end, and that there would follow apologies and awkwardness and regret, but while she was still falling she couldn’t think about all that. She could only think about the feelings that had been blossoming in her ever since she’d been given this assignment.

  The feelings she had for Aldo Piola.

  She went on kissing him back. While she was kissing him, everything was all right.

  “Kat,” he whispered, breaking off but holding her head with both hands, as if he couldn’t bear to let her go completely. “Tell me to stop. Tell me to stop and I swear this will never have happened.”

  “I don’t want it to stop,” she said, and she kissed him again, more fiercely.

  A part of her was still lost in the moment, in the sensations inside her mouth and the sudden furnace of longing that had ignited in her belly, but another part of her knew that it was up to her to choose: leave it here or ask him up.

  “Come up,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He locked the car and followed her up the stairs to her apartment. As she put the key into her door she thought of all the other times she’d done this, the men she’d brought here when she was drunk or sober, happy or lonely, when she’d needed company or just decided that she liked the look of whoever was chatting her up. This felt different.

  She needed this more.

  Inside, she turned to him again. This time their embrace was more leisurely: the unhurried, frankly sexual embrace of two people who knew how this was going to end and could take their time getting there.

  Even so, he broke away to say, “You can still change your mind, you know.”

  “Are you crazy? I want this as much as you do. Or do you want to change your mind? It’s OK, you can.”

  Mutely, he shook his head. She went and found a bottle of prosecco, some ham, olives. The sofa felt too formal, so they sat on the floor, hip to hip, sipping the crisp, sparkling wine.

  She rested her head on his chest. “When did you. . .?”

  “The first time I saw you. At Santa Maria della Salute. Walking through the freezing water in those bare legs.” He ran a hand down her leg, as if unable to believe that he could. “These legs.”

  She shifted position, opening her knees so that his hand could slip between them. It travelled up the inside of her thigh, lighting a fuse of pleasure along the way. “And you?” he said, taking the hand away. She smiled. It was a good sign: a man who knew when to hold back.

  “I don’t know. At the mortuary, perhaps. Or when you took me to lunch that first time, at Chioggia, and you made the owner take your money.” She shivered. “Or maybe today.”

  He drank some more prosecco and turned to her. She felt the bubbles dancing in her mouth as they kissed, the sweetness of the grapes. His end-of-day stubble was rough under her palm.

  “Come to bed,” she whispered.

  Then there was the surprise of undressing, of being naked in front of him for the first time, and the astonishment of the pleasure as he touched her. He went slowly, methodically even, calmly bringing her almost to the brink with his caresses before she’d even got his shirt off. And then – at last! – she’d undone his belt, and had him in her hands, and it was his turn to groan with pleasure.

  Naked, there were swirls of dark hair over his chest and stomach, like rosettes. His body was thick and hard, as if he were a medieval count in his armour; the rounded breastplate and cuirass of an older man’s body.

  “Now,” she said, unable to wait any longer. “Now.”

  He slid inside her, and she wanted to scream with how good it felt.

  He paused. “You can still change your mind, you know.”

  She banged his chest with the side of her fist. “Now you’re just teasing me, you bastard.”

  He laughed. But after that there was no more teasing.

  Afterwards, still overwhelmed, it was all she could do to say, “My God. My God. How did on earth did this happen?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  She turned to look at him. “Do I call you Aldo now we’re in bed, or do I go on calling you sir?” she said mischievously.

  “Actually, I rather like the idea of being called sir in bed.” He reached up to cup her breast, smoothing his thumb over the nipple. “It makes it sound as if I could do anything I wanted.”

  She was always surprised how, in bed, e
ach relationship was different – how she was different, with different people. There were some men she was relaxed with, others with whom she was shy. She could be prim, or wild, or wary; with some men she wasn’t comfortable unless she was in control, whereas others somehow prompted total sexual abandon. And yet she’d discovered that you could never quite predict, until you got into this strange, naked arena of the bed, which it would turn out to be. The one thing certain was that, once it was fixed in the very first coupling, it was fixed for ever.

  She said, “But, sir, you can.” As she said it she felt a little thrill, and knew that this was going to be the dynamic of their relationship – one that she’d never experienced before, or expected to: that she was going to be, in some as-yet indefinable, tongue-in-cheek way, subservient to him.

  “Good,” he said. His hand continued to explore her body – delicately, not with the focused intent to arouse with which he’d touched her earlier, but as if he simply wanted to commit every inch of her to memory; as if she were a keyboard on which his fingers played a tune audible only to him.

  She reached for him and found he was getting hard again. The second time, their lovemaking was slower, more considered. She concentrated on giving him pleasure, and found herself deeply satisfied to discover that she could do this to him, that she had the power to bring him to the very edge of ecstasy.

  It was only much later, after she’d gone to get the wine and the olives again – discovering in the process that he was a man she enjoyed being naked in front of; which, again, was not something that happened with everyone – that he said quietly, “Of course, you know I’m married.”

  “Of course,” she said neutrally.

  “Kat, I can’t justify this. I can’t defend myself. I have children. . .”

  “I know,” she said. “Let’s not talk about it. Not ever.”

  The word, with its implied promise, hung between them for a long time.

  They slept, and then sometime in the night she woke to find him dressing. She pretended to be asleep – because this, too, was something that couldn’t be acknowledged: where he would go now, what lies he might have to tell. The furtive shower, perhaps the welcoming kiss.