Back at the campsite Paolo checked on his grandfather. Antonio was asleep in his chair, looking older and more vulnerable than he'd ever seen him. He kissed his mottled head, grabbed a chunk of bread off a wooden chopping board and went out again.
The Skoda was parked in Via Plinio, cop noses pointing towards the west of the city. Paolo dropped back inside the camp and worked his way east along the fencing for more than a kilometre. He climbed back on to the road just where it met the railway line and Plinio became Viale Giuseppe Mazzini.
The street was wet and dark. Tourists were either gone or were heading back to their hotels for hot pasta and red wine. Paolo felt sure he was unwatched as he zigzagged across Via Colle San Bartolomeo. He skirted round the hospital, Casa di Cura Maria Rosario, then slipped into the southern part of the Pompeii ruins.
Unlike Franco, Paolo hated the place after dark. It gave him the creeps. And tonight, the biting December wind and pale moonlight did nothing to improve things. He'd looked here before in the daylight, but now, after searching everywhere else, he reckoned it had to be worth another try.
An hour later he found Franco. His cousin was sitting alone in the necropolis. Milky light played on the side of his face. Most of his body was hidden in the darkness of night. He was throwing sticks for a wild dog that was so thin you could see every rib in its body.
'Ciao, Franco.' His tone was as casual as if it had been only a few hours since he'd last seen him.
Franco looked up. 'Ciao, Paolo. You got the cops with you?' He sounded croaky. It was the first time he'd spoken in days.
'Like I'm that stupid.'
'You are that stupid.' Franco slowly got to his feet and the two cousins embraced.
'Come stai?'
'Not so good. I've been puking my guts out. I had some water, though, and a little food. But my stomach still hurts like fuck.'
Paolo held his arms. 'Cops had me and Grandpa in. They've got your face plastered up in windows, mail offices, every-fucking-where. They think you killed some people on the site.'
Franco pulled away. 'Well, I didn't. They can think what they want.'
They talked in hushed voices, their backs turned against the wind, their conversation constantly interrupted by the feral dog that wanted its stick throwing. Paolo told the whole story about him and his grandfather being arrested. Franco told everything – well, almost everything – about Rosa Novello, her boyfriend, and what was left of another woman in his fire pit.
The dog returned and Franco wrestled the stick in its mouth, pulling the mutt backwards and forwards. The two cousins chatted for nearly an hour before Paolo left. It had felt like old times. Batting the breeze. Talking about something or nothing. There weren't many people in life either of them felt that easy with.
Paolo climbed back out of the ruins and trudged home, lost in his own thoughts.
If he'd been more attentive, he may have seen the grey-faced man hiding in the slim shadow of a doorway opposite the campsite entrance.
The Don had asked Sal to find leverage with old man Castellani. The veteran Camorrista reckoned he'd done just that.
93
Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio The bones were almost entirely intact. The hands seemed to be the only parts that had been dismembered. And to make matters even easier, the victim had been buried in his suit and shoes. No doubt about it, stiff number eight was male. And by the cut of his clothes, he'd been buried several fashion generations ago.
Luella Grazzioli hadn't even needed to go back to the laboratory to make a skeletal assembly. The plastic sheeting that he'd been buried in had been lifted out of the grave and laid alongside the mound of lava rocks. Jack and Sylvia watched the scene, illuminated by arc lights, as Luella unpeeled the full horror of the sheet's contents. All manner of creatures had fed on the flesh, fat and ligaments but the plastic had preserved much of the clothing. Jack thought it ironic that many years ago the sheeting had probably been used to prevent evidence being left at the murder scene, and now here it was, hopefully presenting them with their clearest clues to date.
The skull was a little broken up, but still held together. There was a glaring hole in the right cheekbone and another through the forehead. Everyone guessed they were bullet wounds. The skull showed bigger but corresponding holes in the temporal and occipital bones. The rotted remains of a grey jacket and a shirt were opened up.
The guy's ribcage had been caved in.
'Is that the work of the ground, or his killer?' asked Jack.
'Most likely the ground,' said Luella. 'He wasn't lying flat in the hole. He was all scrunched up. Almost foetal. I expect the weight of the earth and rocks heaped on top of him would have broken his ribcage.'
'What about that?' Sylvia pointed at the left side of the chest, close to the heart. 'Is that rounded nick at the bottom of that rib consistent with a bullet wound?'
Luella looked up from her work. 'I'm sorry, you know that I'm really new to this. I helped Bernardo with the archaeology and the assembly, not the forensics. I'm really not qualified to tell you that kind of thing.'
'But it could be?' Sylvia pressed.
Luella let out a light sigh. She repositioned the skeleton and pulled up the tail of the tattered grey jacket. She looked closely at the back of the ribcage. 'I can't exactly line them up, but there's corresponding damage at the back.'
'The bullet's exit point?' asked Jack.
Luella smiled. 'I'm really, really not qualified to -'
'Don't worry, you're not in court and we won't quote you,' said Sylvia.
Luella hesitated. 'Okay. Yes, it looks like an exit wound.'
It all added up for Jack. This was most definitely Numero Uno. The first kill. Not nearly as professional as the later ones. He walked around the skeleton. The chest wound would have come from the killer's first shot. Probably aimed for the heart and missed. The victim would have just looked stunned, dropped to his knees, mouth open, hands to his wound. The killer would have panicked and rushed to finish him off. Hence the second shot to the cheekbone. Also not good. Finally the trigger-man would have got his shit together. Probably walked up close and finished the job with a bullet to the brain. Determined but messy. The work of a beginner.
The crime team didn't rush anything. Numerous photographs were taken. Dozens of items were bagged and tagged. Most were mundane and useless. Some were pure treasure. The hands had been hacked off, an old-fashioned way of stopping fingerprint identification, but the skull was good enough to get a very accurate facial reconstruction from. They'd get DNA as well.
There had been nothing in the pockets of the jacket or trousers but there was a label in the waistband, naming the tailor as Tombolini, Napoli.
Luella said she'd send bone samples to specialists in Rome for isotopic examination. It would take more than a month to get the results but she was confident they'd confirm her suspicion that the body had been buried for at least ten to fifteen years.
Aside from the forensic clues, there was a big psychological one too. The body hadn't been violated. It hadn't been stripped, let alone burned. It was almost as though there had been respect between killer and victim.
Respect.
Jack hung on to the word.
Maybe the kind of respect the Camorra would show to someone?
94
Centro citta, Napoli Cicerone consigliere Emile Courbit was the son of a French immigrant who'd died of bronchitis in a Neapolitan slum before his fortieth birthday. Emile vowed he'd never suffer the same fate as his father. As a consequence, he worked harder and longer than anyone Carmine the Dog had ever known. The two met just before midnight, the late hour not being a problem for either of them.