The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 5



‘There was nothing in his car, either,’ Inspector Perini said, sitting down at his desk and glancing across at Lombardi. ‘It was parked a few metres down the street from his apartment, and I checked it over before I came back. It looked to me as if somebody had searched that as well, but it’s more difficult to tell with a motor vehicle. What about the computer? Anything on that?’

‘Nothing so far,’ the sergeant replied. ‘I’ve done a scan of the directory structure using one of our analysis tools, and there’s no sign of a hidden or encrypted folder or anything of that sort. So now I’m just working my way through his emails to see if there’s something of interest there – and I haven’t found anything, or at least not so far – and then I’ll take a look at his documents. There’s not even any porn, which is a bit unusual.’

‘You’re probably wasting your time looking for anything like that,’ Perini said. ‘Let me guess: it wasn’t protected by a password, was it?’

Lombardi shook his head.

‘Right. That probably means it was a work computer, supplied by the museum, so if he had some big secret, some crucial piece of information, that laptop would be the last place he’d keep it, because any of his colleagues could access the machine when he wasn’t there. He would have kept anything confidential on a personal laptop or tablet, and it doesn’t look as if he had one. Maybe he wasn’t into technology. Perhaps he preferred to read books rather than use a Kindle, that kind of thing. What about his mobile phone?’

‘The techies found it in a drawer in his apartment,’ Lombardi said. ‘A cheap and cheerful pay-as-you-go, nothing fancy, and I’ll bet when we see the call record there’ll be nothing of interest.’

Perini grunted in irritation.

‘Not too surprising, really. Any useful information from your interviews, by the way?’

‘No, nothing. Or almost nothing. Our professor seems to have been a workaholic man of mystery, the main mystery being why the hell he didn’t get a life outside Renaissance poetry. Takes all sorts, I suppose.’

‘You said “almost nothing”. What did you find?’ Perini asked.

‘Oh, yes. The only thing that any of them came up with was that Bertorelli apparently published an article recently in some professional journal, and according to a couple of the people who knew him, he was quite excited about it. But just how excited you can really get about that particular subject I don’t know. I took a note of the name of the journal, and once I’ve finished checking his emails I’ll go through his word processing files, because there’s almost certain to be a copy of it in there somewhere. But I’m pretty sure it’ll turn out to be a red herring.’

‘Do that,’ Perini said, ‘but don’t bother reading it yourself. Just send it to my workstation and I’ll check it over. What about a police record, anything like that?’

‘Nothing. Not even a parking ticket or a speeding fine.’

‘Right. Now, we should get his bank statements and other financial records fairly soon, so you get stuck into those and start looking for any anomalies. I’d better go and see the Chief Inspector and give him a briefing on our progress so far. That,’ he added, ‘shouldn’t take very long, because as far as I can see we haven’t made any.’

When Perini strode back into the office about twenty minutes later, Lombardi pointed towards the inspector’s computer workstation.

‘I found the article,’ he said, ‘and I’ve sent it to you. I looked at the first few paragraphs, and it’s really dull and really dry. Nothing to get excited about, at all, unless I’m missing something.’

Perini nodded.

‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘Unless this is a completely senseless crime, a killing without a motive, which I really can’t believe because of what was done to him, we are most definitely missing something, but maybe that isn’t it.’

He sat down at his desk, switched on the screen of his workstation, found the article Lombardi had sent him, fished a pair of rimless reading glasses from his jacket pocket and began to study it.

Twenty minutes later, Perini removed his glasses and leaned back in his chair.

‘Anything?’ Lombardi asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ the inspector replied. ‘How much do you know about Dante?’

Lombardi shrugged.

‘Apart from the fact that he wrote The Divine Comedy, which I haven’t read, I know the square root of sod all. And you’re asking because?’

‘Because that’s what this article by Bertorelli is all about. I knew roughly as much as you do about Dante before I read this. Now I know a bit more about his life and work and I’m really bored by both. I wasn’t expecting some huge revelation in this article, because we know it’s already been published, so anybody with a few Euros can go out and buy the magazine and read it for themselves. Anyway, to keep it fairly brief, during his researches at the university Bertorelli believed he’d found another version of one part of The Divine Comedy, just a couple of verses.’

Lombardi stared at him in silence for a moment or two.

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it,’ Perini echoed. ‘Obviously the professor didn’t believe in keeping things brief, because it took him about four or five thousand words to explain where he found the fragment and to print the new verses and explain what he thinks they mean. I reckon most people could have done it pretty comprehensively in about four hundred words. Or even forty.’

Lombardi looked even more puzzled than he had done two minutes earlier.

‘I don’t see what that’s got a do with him being killed,’ he said. ‘As you said, the information’s in the public domain, so that can’t be important. Unless the fragment itself is particularly valuable, as a relic, an antique, I mean.’

‘No, that’s not it. When I said “fragment” what I meant was a fragment of verse, not a fragment as in a piece of parchment, though actually in this case it’s both. According to this article, what Bertorelli had found were two verses in a book of Renaissance poetry that were previously not attributed to anyone, and which had been found years ago on a piece of paper in a bundle of old manuscripts in a bookshop in Ravenna. What our professor claims to have done is to have recognized the last couple of lines of one the verses as having come from The Divine Comedy, so he claims that the rest of the text is entirely new material. He has no idea whether or not Dante himself wrote it, or if somebody else did it at a later stage, after the poem was published. But he says in the article that it’s certainly in the style of Dante, and he’s also suggested that if a full version of the poem is published, including the new verses, it should be called the “Ravenna Variant” to distinguish it from the original.’

‘Well, maybe that paper with the new verses on it has a value.’

‘It very probably has,’ Perini agreed, ‘but it’s sitting in an armoured glass case in a museum in Ravenna, as Bertorelli states clearly in the article. If it was hand-written by Dante, it would certainly have quite a considerable value, because as far as I know none of his original hand-written work has survived, and he is reckoned to be the greatest of all the Italian poets. But it is only one sheet and a handful of lines of text, so I doubt very much whether anyone would think it was worth killing for. And in any case, anyone who read the article would know exactly where it was. If whoever snatched Bertorelli wanted that paper, they were wasting their time torturing the professor, because he had no special access to the relic. What they should have been doing was making plans to knock over the museum in Ravenna.’

Lombardi nodded.

‘So I was right. There was obviously a really good reason why the professor was kidnapped and killed, but it can’t have anything to do with his work. It must be something in his personal life. As I said before, he must have had something or known something that made him a target, and my money’s on something tangible, because you don’t ransack an apartment if you’re looking for something which you know is inside a man’s head.’

‘I agree. And the two obvious questions are what information did Bertorelli have, and did he tell his kidnappers what they wanted to hear?’

‘You can bet he told them. When people start working you over with a box cutter and then snipping off joints of your fingers with a pair of pliers, you tell them whatever they want to know.’

At that moment, a uniformed junior officer walked into the office and strode straight across to Perini’s desk and handed him a large buff envelope.

The Inspector nodded his thanks, unsealed the flap and pulled out a couple of sheets of paper. He glanced at the top of the first page, scanned through the rest of the information and then read the final paragraph on the second sheet carefully. Then he slid the sheets back into the envelope and tossed it on his desk.

‘Pathologist’s report,’ he said shortly, ‘and not telling us anything we didn’t already know, or guessed, anyway. The victim died of asphyxiation, and the doctor is reasonably certain that the killer used a garrotte because there’s a circle of fairly consistent tissue damage all the way round his neck, which is what he told you at the scene. Obviously if he’d just been strangled there would only be damage to his throat and the front of the neck. Whoever did it was strong, which suggests it was a man, not a woman, just because of the pressure that was inflicted on his neck. And, frankly, that kind of gratuitous violence and torture isn’t the kind of thing I’d associate with any woman.’

‘It was probably those two that the witness saw driving down the road. Real shame he didn’t get the number, or at least a better look at them.’

‘You’ve issued a watch order, though?’

‘Yes, but it won’t do any good. We don’t even have a confirmed make of vehicle. All I’ve done is ask our patrols to look out for any occupants of a small white van, probably two males, who seem to be behaving suspiciously. But if it was them, they’ll most likely have dumped it by now.’

‘What about the financial stuff?’ Perini asked. ‘Anything there?’

‘Our Professor Bertorelli might have been a whizz at Renaissance poetry, but in his private life he was quite startlingly boring. He had a healthy bank account, never overdrawn, and two credit cards, one that he seemed to use for the everyday stuff, buying meals, food, petrol, that kind of thing, and another one that he used very infrequently, and only for bigger purchases and expenses. For example, he used it about three months ago to buy a flat screen TV, and again six weeks ago to pay for a service on his car, and that was a big bill.’

‘Well it would have been, wouldn’t it?’ Perini remarked, a slight smile on his face.

‘What to do you mean?’

‘He owned an Alpha Romeo. Cheap to buy, but really expensive to run.’

‘Oh, right. Anyway, he had no credit card debts, because he always settled the balance at the end of every month. He was paid a decent salary, and seems to have a few cautious investments as well. No big withdrawals, and no in-payments that aren’t fully documented. Nothing suspicious, in other words. Clean as a whistle. So where do we go from here?’

Perini shook his head.

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said, then turned back to his computer and slid a memory stick into one of the USB slots on the front of the system unit.

‘What are you doing?’ Lombardi asked.

‘I’m taking a copy of that article Bertorelli wrote to look at it again when I get home. Right now, that seems to me to be the only aspect of his life that isn’t totally normal and above-board. And there’s the timing to consider. That article, according to a note he included with the version on his computer, was published just over two weeks ago. It seems to me to be a bit more than a coincidence that, after living for close to sixty years without ever once coming to anyone’s attention – I mean, not even a parking ticket which is almost impossible to avoid in Florence – within two weeks of that article being published, he’s kidnapped and tortured to death.’

Perini removed the memory stick from the USB slot and slid it into his jacket pocket.

‘So I’m going to read it again this evening, see if there’s anything I missed the first time round. Because if that was the trigger, there has to be a reason.’