The response from the carabinieri, relayed to the manager from reception desk, was exactly what he had expected. The room was to be sealed, nobody allowed in or out, and the police were on their way.
The manager had already used his handkerchief to close the door, and he then summoned a porter from the lobby to stand outside it until the police arrived. His mission to find the missing waiter then took on a new urgency. Unless the waiter himself had murdered the Englishman for some reason and then fled — which seemed extremely unlikely — then something else must have happened to that man.
The search didn’t take long. In a linen closet at one end of a corridor, the manager discovered the silent and unmoving body of the missing man, crouched down on the floor on his hands and knees, almost as if he was praying. The manager’s cursory examination showed a complete absence of blood, but a very obvious red mark around the dead man’s neck indicated that he had been either strangled or garrotted.
When the carabinieri arrived outside the hotel, to the inevitable accompaniment of a self-generated fanfare of sirens and squealing tyres, the manager was waiting for them in the lobby to explain that the body count had doubled since his staff had made the initial call.
‘Before we go up to the room,’ he said to the two senior detectives, ‘you need to know that I’ve just found a second body, a member of my staff, hidden in a linen closet, and it seems fairly clear to me that the two cases are related.’
‘We’ll be the judge of that, thank you,’ the senior carabinieri officer snapped. ‘There could be any number of explanations for two bodies being found in the same hotel on the same day. There’s no need to look for a connection that isn’t necessarily there.’
‘Of course,’ the manager replied equably. ‘I’m just not entirely certain how many unconnected explanations there can be that will explain a dead waiter stuffed in a linen closet and missing his jacket, nametag and badge, and a man shot to death in a room down the corridor, a room in which I also found the waiter’s jacket and the breakfast trolley. But,’ he added with a smile, ‘you men are the experts, not me. Shall we go up, gentlemen?’
Two hours later, both bodies had been certified as dead, by far the easiest and shortest part of the entire proceedings, and had then been removed after dozens of photographs had been taken of the corpses in situ. The specialist investigators had then moved in to examine the two established crime scenes while another group searched for the third one. There was no doubt that the Englishman — his passport identified him as Stephen Taverner — had been murdered exactly where he was found, but the situation with the waiter was different. He could have been marched at gunpoint down the corridor and into the linen closet and strangled there, or he could have been attacked somewhere along the corridor itself. But the carpet and beige walls had so far revealed no signs of a struggle at any point.
A team of detectives was already looking at the hotel CCTV recordings, but without any particular expectation of finding anything, because the coverage was very limited, basically just a couple of cameras on each floor beside the lifts which provided a few shots of the corridors towards the bedrooms. Numerous people had been seen entering and leaving the building throughout the night — an entirely predictable characteristic of an airport hotel — and the vast majority looked like tourists or businessmen.
Inevitably, the unexpected arrival not only of several police vehicles but also of the vans and cars belonging to the crime scene investigators attracted the attention of the press, and the barter system immediately began to bear fruit for the reporters. They quickly found that chambermaids and cleaners, working for the minimum wage, were only too happy to share what they knew — or what they thought they might possibly have heard, in many cases — in exchange for folded high-denomination euro notes. News of the murder was broadcast on the local radio stations around lunchtime, and went out on the wires to other media outlets during the afternoon.
By that time, the only piece of information that was not publicly available was the name of the dead Englishman, simply because the Italian police were making arrangements to inform his family in the UK before the news broke.
28
When Bronson and Angela reached the vicinity of Orleans Angela managed to tune into British Radio 4. After a few minutes, the programme ended and then a man with a very deep BBC voice began reading the news. Bronson turned up the volume — both he and Angela were desperate to hear whether or not news of the events in Iraq had broken internationally. If they had, they both guessed the massacre would be headline news.
It soon became clear that nothing had been released about it by the Iraqi authorities, but just before the end of the broadcast they both registered the importance of one other breaking news story: the body of an Englishman, believed to be an archaeologist, had been found murdered that morning in a hotel in Milan.
When the broadcast ended, Angela reached up and switched off the radio. Her hand covering her mouth in horror, she turned to Bronson.
‘That was Stephen,’ she said quietly, ‘wasn’t it?’
Bronson sighed heavily. ‘I’d like to say that it wasn’t, that it was just a bizarre coincidence, but I don’t think it was. I’m sorry,’ he said, and squeezed Angela’s shoulder.
Angela was staring straight ahead through the windscreen, taking in deep breaths to steady herself.
‘They got to him so quickly. I mean, how did they manage that?’ Her voice was quiet with shock.
‘Realistically, he wouldn’t be that difficult to find. If they had access to the airline schedules of Kuwait City our three names would have popped up as probably travelling together, because we bought tickets at exactly the same time.’
‘But they were in Iraq! They couldn’t have got to Milan any quicker than we did. It doesn’t make sense.’
Bronson shook his head.
‘Unfortunately, crime is a business these days — an international business, in fact — and it’s quite common for one criminal organization to contact another one in a different country to arrange a particular job. In fact, and especially with assassinations, this is a really good technique — from their point of view — because it provides a complete separation between the person who actually orders the killing and the victim. The murder is committed by someone who has never met the victim and has no possible links with him, and that type of crime is virtually impossible to solve.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Angela said. ‘So you think someone in Iraq just picked up a telephone, rang a contact in Italy and told him to find us and kill us?’
‘That’s about the size of it, yes. Obviously you can’t just open up a telephone directory, look under “M” and expect to find the Mafia listed, but there’s a lot of international cooperation between criminal organizations in those areas where they’re not directly competing with each other. In fact,’ Bronson added, ‘what probably saved us was the time it took the men in Iraq to establish their bona fides.’
‘Sorry, you’ve lost me.’
‘Even in the criminal world, committing murder is still pretty serious, and it would take a lot more than one phone call to convince some Mafia capo to send out a group of his soldiers to track down and kill three people. There would have been checks and double checks and then they’d have to agree the fee and the payment method. All that would have taken time. My guess is that our aircraft had probably already landed in Milan several hours before the Italians were ready to move, and they were playing catch-up all the way.’