Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

suspicions about Signor Mura,” he replied.
    “Would you mind if I talked to him? About more, I mean, than merely explaining the nature of Carlo Casparia’s ‘confession.’”
    “I mind not in the least,” Lo Bianco said. “
Nel frattempo
, I shall be looking at the other
calciatori
on his team. One of them may drive a red convertible. This would, I think, be interesting to know.”
    PISA
    TUSCANY
    As far as he was concerned, meeting anywhere near Campo dei Miracoli was lunacy since there were dozens of other places where they could have met unnoticed in the city. But it was to Campo dei Miracoli that he’d been summoned, so he went to that site of tourism run amok. He worked his way through what seemed like five hundred people taking photographs of their mates pretending to hold up the tower, and he crossed between the Duomo and the Baptistery to the
cimitero
behind its high and forbidding walls. He went to the room he’d been instructed to find: where several of the location’s
affreschi
had been moved after their restoration. No one would be there, he’d been assured. If, when the tour buses stopped and debouched their passengers at the gates to Piazza dei Miracoli, the
gitanti
were given forty minutes to scurry about and have their photographs taken before being carted off to the next site on their list, they weren’t about to seek out the cemetery. With its half-demolished
affreschi
and its one decent sculpture of a woman in repose, this place would be deserted, and they would be safe from scrutiny here.
    Safe from scrutiny they needed to be, he thought sardonically, considering what his employer looked like. For never had vanity led a man to such stupidity in the area of his personal appearance as it had led Michelangelo Di Massimo.
    Di Massimo was already there, waiting. As promised, he was the only person in the room with the restored
affreschi
, and from a bench in the centre of the room he was studying one of them—or at least pretending to do so—with a guidebook opened on his knee and a pair of half-moon reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. The professorial air they lent him was completely at odds with the rest of him: the bleached yellow hair, the black leather jacket, the leather
pantaloni
, the stiff black boots. No one would mistake him for a professor of anything or even for a student of anything. But then, no one would mistake him for what he was, either.
    There was no point to hiding his approach, so he did nothing to stifle the sharp tap of his footsteps on the marble floor. He lowered himself onto the bench next to Di Massimo, and he gazed upon the fresco to which the other man was giving his rapt attention. He saw that Di Massimo was fixed upon his namesake. Sword in hand, Michael the Archangel was either driving someone out of paradise—at least he reckoned it was paradise—or he was welcoming someone into paradise. Who really cared? For he simply couldn’t work out what all the shouting was about when it came to the rescued
affreschi
in this place. They were faded and worn and in spots whatever they depicted was barely visible.
    He wanted a cigarette. Either that or a woman. But the thought of women took him directly back to his wallow in the dirt with his half-mad cousin and he preferred not to think about that.
    He couldn’t fathom what got into him whenever he saw Domenica. She’d been pretty enough once, but that time was long past and
still
when she was in his presence, he wanted to possess her, to show her . . . something. And what did that say about him, that he still wanted the madwoman after all this time?
    Next to him on the bench, Michelangelo Di Massimo stirred. He snapped his guidebook closed and deposited it into a rucksack at his feet. From this he took a folded newspaper. He said, “The British police are now involved.
Prima Voce
has the story. There’s been a television appeal. You saw it?”
    Of course he had not. In the evening when the
telegiornale
was broadcast, he was at his regular job at Ristorante Maestoso, unavailable to the television news. During his days, he was preoccupied with seducing the
commesse
in the fancier shops and boutiques in town in order to talk them into ringing up a pair of socks for him while they bagged a fine linen shirt instead. Thus he had no time for television or tabloids. Whatever he knew about this matter of searching for the missing child, he knew only from Di Massimo.
    Di Massimo passed the copy of
Prima