The Milan Contract Read online

  “Unless there’s something that we don’t yet know.”

  “Perhaps. We need to talk to the sister – she’s arriving tomorrow I hear,” Conza said, flicking through his notes until he found the page headed ‘Lukas Stolz’.

  “What about his job? He had access to high-grade military data. Is that relevant?”

  “I thought about that as soon as I heard he worked for Skyguard. They’ve been in the press quite a lot over the past two years. But it’s all a bit ‘James Bond’ isn’t it? I know someone in England who may be able to help. I keep meaning to call him.”

  The two policemen sat in the gardens as chattering shoppers and tired-looking office workers strolled by. They didn’t speak for a while, but once again, Moretti was the first to fill the void.

  “Maybe it was just a really unusual, screwed-up robbery. Maybe we’re looking for something that isn’t there. His cash and mobile were taken, but not his credit cards. That smacks of an opportunist theft, despite the hole in his head.”

  “But why leave his briefcase?” asked Conza, staring into the distance. “Men like Stolz usually carry iPads and other valuables in their briefcases. No, it’s all wrong.”

  “And the chauffeur going missing,” said Moretti, picking up on Conza’s doubts. “His disappearance is another anomaly, but not as concerning as the evidence being stolen.”

  “I agree.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “Well, the first thing you need to know is that I’ve found the other witness; the girl.”

  Moretti raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  Conza told him about his visit to the bakery and brief encounter with Nyala Abebe. Moretti wrote her name and the address of the warehouse in his notebook.

  “How did you know it was a bakery?”

  “She more or less told the idiot on the cordon,” Conza responded with a grimace, “he just forgot to mention it in his report. I’m fairly sure she knows the Vespa rider. She’s terrified but I think she’ll talk. I’ll go see her again tomorrow. She’s a good kid.”

  Moretti briefly wondered at Conza’s final statement but decided to leave it.

  “Do you want me to file a report on the girl?”

  “No thanks, Georgio, I’ll come back to the station and file it myself. But I’d be grateful if you could get yourself on the detail to meet Stolz’s sister. We need more on his background. In the meantime, I’ll call my friend.”

  “If you’re coming back to the station, you may want to stay out of the commissioner’s way,” warned Moretti with a grin.

  25

  Apartment 3, Villa Nuova, Genoa, Italy

  Kadin spent most of Monday pacing the apartment and watching television. At lunchtime, while forcing himself to eat the last of the meat from the fridge, he flicked onto a channel reporting on the Hotel Napoli killing. A picture of the front of the hotel appeared, and a female voice in serious tones stated the police had yet to confirm the identity of the victim, but were appealing for witnesses, in particular anyone who saw a Vespa leaving the crime scene. An inner-city map was displayed showing the location of the Hotel Napoli and the route of the fleeing Vespa. Kadin felt sick.

  ‘She hasn’t told them’ he suddenly realised. The notion produced a strange mix of emotions and he wasn’t sure he welcomed the realisation that Nyala had failed to name him as the murderer. It scared him and, for a second, made him wonder whether he’d known her at all. He paced the lounge. ‘Maybe she didn’t recognise me?’ But he gained no comfort from the idea. He knew it wasn’t possible.

  ‘OK, when she saw me, she didn’t know there’d been a murder. She was going into town to deliver bread. It’s what she always does on a Sunday. Why didn’t I remember that before?’ he chided himself bitterly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now, focus. When would she have found out about the murder? Probably not until the evening, from the television maybe, or the internet?’ Kadin knew Nyala didn’t usually follow the news. ‘Surely, she would come across it somewhere. Someone would have mentioned it to her. Her father? Her grandmother maybe? Or maybe she still doesn’t know – is that possible?’

  Kadin almost laughed, but then it struck him. ‘I didn’t turn up to collect the rent yesterday and she would have been calling my mobile ever since. Even if she doesn’t know about the murder, she knows something’s wrong, but she can’t get hold of me to find out what. My absence is going to make her ask around. Talk to my family maybe? At some point, she’s going to find out the man on the Vespa killed someone and then she’s bound to tell the police who that man was.’

  Kadin had reached another dead end, another reason to hate and to cry.

  He sat at the lounge window and watched container ships sailing in and out of the port. He paced around the apartment. He thought of his father and cried. He thought of his mother, Soraya and Youssef, and he cried. He thought about Nyala and chewed at the skin around his fingernails until they bled. He tried to see beyond the next hour but couldn’t. He had no plan, no ideas, no hope.

  He heard himself promising his father that he would, ‘stay out of sight, contact nobody and watch the television’. Instructions he’d been made to repeat, over and over again. ‘But what am I waiting for? I will need to buy food. I’ve got money, but it won’t last for ever. Did father pay rent? Bills will start to arrive, surely? There must be an end to all this, but what had father seen as that end? Me, living the rest of my life alone in Genoa? Or eventually being arrested? Or returning home having evaded the police? Does he really believe I could go back to a normal life after what I’ve done?’

  His father didn’t seem to have a plan at all, and constantly Kadin was haunted by the threat hanging over his mother, brother and sister. Would they be burned alive in their beds if Kadin made a wrong decision? Or if he failed to interpret correctly what his father had been trying to tell him?

  As far as Kadin knew, the thugs in the barn would still believe he’d followed the instructions given to him.

  “When you’ve finished at the garage, go home and wait to be contacted,” that’s what they heard Issam say.

  ‘Do they already know that I’ve disobeyed them? Do they know that I’m not at home? Would it be important to them? Now I have done as asked and the grey-haired man is dead, will they leave my family alone?’

  ‘And my father – what will they do to him? Will they let him live? And why the hell did father think it important that I watch the damned television – what am I looking for? News of the murder maybe?

  ‘None of this makes sense,’ Kadin thought as he fell into his father’s bed just after midnight.

  26

  Central Police Headquarters, Milan, Italy

  Conza and Moretti arrived back at the Central Police Station. Moretti withdrew to a quiet back office to write up the Skyguard interview and Conza found an empty desk in the incident room to type a report on his encounter with Nyala. He printed off a copy and placed it in a new folder that he labelled ‘Nyala Abebe’. He left it on the desk in Captain Brocelli’s office.

  While he was at the police station, he decided to catch up with the active case file.

  Europol had conducted a search by name and passport number. Lukas Stolz was ‘clean’ across Europe and North America. Conza wasn’t surprised.

  An A3-sized road map of Milan had been produced, on which thin black lines were drawn between dots annotated with times and dates. Conza recognised the triangulated positions of Stolz’s mobile phone signal as he’d moved around the city. Stolz’s locations correlated with Conza’s notes. He’d been tracked moving between the airport, Hotel Napoli and Skyguard’s office between Thursday and Sunday of last week. The mobile trace ceased at around the time of the murder. ‘The killer wasn’t stupid,’ Conza thought.

  The murder weapon hadn’t been recovered, but the cartridge cases were confirmed as ‘.22LR Rimfires’, a bullet used in a thousand different gun makes around the world.

  Frustratingly, Stolz’s bank w
as still refusing to grant authority to trace his bank cards until a formal identification had been made. Stolz’s sister was due to arrive tomorrow afternoon at 14:10 on a flight from Stuttgart. Sergeant Moretti had already volunteered to pick her up from the airport and escort her to the mortuary.

  CCTV footage taken from the front of the hotel was of little help. Conza flicked through the black and white stills. Evidently, the camera was fixed to the ceiling in reception, just inside the main doors, pointing towards the street. The first picture showed the empty road and pavement immediately outside the front doors. In the upper right quadrant of the second photograph, Conza could see the radiator grill of a Mercedes. The third picture was an image of the back of a tall, slender man carrying luggage as he stepped through the doors. The final photograph was taken a couple of seconds later. The man had moved to the right edge of frame, his jacket and bag still in his left hand, briefcase in his right. There was a note on file that told him CCTV taken from buildings adjacent to the hotel and along the Vespa’s escape route were being analysed. Conza smiled. ‘Perhaps Brocelli wasn’t so lazy after all.’

  As for identification of the Vespa rider, Conza read that little progress had been made, although the Department of Transport had been asked to provide a list of all Vespas registered to owners living in the Milan area.

  “Good luck with that,” he said out loud, thinking of the thousands of Vespas that littered the city’s streets.

  Finally, Conza read the statement taken at the home of the missing chauffeur; Sami Ricci. His girlfriend had seemed genuinely distraught; Ricci had never gone missing before and it was out of character for him to go a day without contacting her. A passport photograph of the young man had been clipped to her statement, along with a note saying Ricci’s friends and family were scheduled for interview over the next few days.

  Satisfied that he was up to date, Conza left for home where he ate reheated pasta and drank a cold beer.

  Before going to bed, in his ‘QUESTIONS’ list, he underlined the words ‘Hotel – breakfast?’

  At least that was one anomaly he would resolve in the morning.

  27

  Tuesday

  Parco Ticino, Italy

  The old pontoon bridge, with its bleached planks and battered barges straddling the Ticino River, is the unmarked entrance to the park of the same name, a narrow strip of forest and scrub hugging the river running south-west of Milan and north-west of Parva.

  On summer days, Ticino Park is popular with ramblers and nature lovers. On Friday and Saturday nights, adolescent couples would drive their parents’ car down one of the narrow tracks cutting across the wooded floodplain, and in the shadows of pine trees, make promises that wouldn’t be kept.

  It was Tuesday morning, and on Tuesdays, Gabriele cycled across the bridge on his way to the convenience store where he filled shelves, counted stock and readied the recycling bins for collection.

  Gabriele had yet another new love in his life, and today he was grinning to himself as the bike’s front wheels met the first of the uneven boards.

  The barges’ hulls were hollow, which made the dull and heavy knocking sound rise above the rush of the petulant river as it frothed and bubbled in frustration at being divided by the pontoons. He stopped his bike, curious as to the cause of the thumping sound, which was at its loudest just past the centre section of the bridge. Laying his bike on its side, he leaned over the grey-painted fence and peered into the dark, foam-speckled water. The thin steel cable that would normally have moored the middle barge to the framework had snapped and was hanging from its cleat into the river. The trailing wire had snagged on a passing tree branch and grey-green twigs scratched spitefully at the prow of the barge in its effort to escape. A thick section of the branch drummed slowly on the hull to the rhythm of the surging water. He tutted and began to turn away, but the flash of pale white bobbing up between a tangle of twigs made him stop. Narrowing his eyes, he stared at the flotsam just a few metres below.

  At first, he thought it was just a plastic bag, but leant further over the railing to gain a better view. It was then that he made out the mottled, bloated and ghostly-pale face lying just below the water’s surface, the nose and forehead bobbing up into the air as if trying to snatch a breath before sinking gently back below the waves. Each time the face rose to the surface the branch of the tree thumped against the barge.

  Clutching the rail in excitement and disbelief, he quickly shifted left to confirm what he’d begun to suspect. In the tangle of cable and branches he could see a pale white ribbon which ended in fingers, gnarled and broken, their tips black and stunted.

  Gabriele snatched up his bike and ran alongside it until he’d gained sufficient speed, before leaping onto the saddle. The bridge rattled and bobbed as he sprinted back home, from where he would report that he’d found a lifeless and broken body snagged against the barge bridge in Ticino Park.

  A body that the corpse’s grief-stricken girlfriend would soon identify as Sami Ricci.

  28

  Hotel Napoli, Milan, Italy

  Conza dropped by his office in Finanza before heading off to the hotel. He wanted to update the colonel on his findings and to advise him that despite his misgivings, he believed the killing of Lukas Stolz should remain a State Police matter. As it happened, the colonel wasn’t in, so Conza began drafting a memo, but changed his mind and left a message with the colonel’s secretary instead. He asked her to tell his boss that, ‘Lieutenant Conza hasn’t yet reached a conclusion on the Hotel Napoli murder.’

  Conza took the tram and on the way, sorted through the hotel staff’s witness statements. He reread them and made a few notes.

  The street outside the hotel had been cleaned. Only a dark patch of tarmac bore witness to the violent event committed two days previously. The police cars, vans and ambulances were gone, the cordons dismantled. A sign appealing for witnesses had been fixed to a lamppost.

  On the internet, Hotel Napoli was described as ‘boutique’ and the prices were set to dissuade the casual traveller. It had a reputation for discreet service and was the venue of choice for city professionals, the well-heeled, and those seeking a quiet venue to further their extra-marital affairs. The rooms were individually styled and offered comfort as well as understated decadence. In each room, the glass-fronted refrigerator contained French champagne and hand-made Swiss chocolates. There was no charge for these ‘en suite’ luxuries; it wasn’t necessary. The Napoli didn’t encourage the sort of guests that would abuse its generosity.

  The foyer was brightly lit by suspended teardrops of steel and frosted glass. The panelling, which extended even into the lift, was teak, inlaid irregularly with brightly coloured ceramic tiles. The carpet felt like a deep sponge and the reception desk was a wall of red and gold glass cubes, topped with yet more teak.

  As he stepped through the sliding glass doors, Conza caught the scent of roasted almonds, which together with the lights, made him think of Christmas and his father. He would have approved of the Hotel Napoli.

  Conza was invited into the manager’s office and commenced the meeting by asking about Stolz’s bill.

  “Mr Romano, it says here that Mr Stolz was charged for breakfast in his room on Friday and Saturday morning. Am I understanding that correctly?” he asked, pushing a copy of Stolz’s invoice across the desk.

  The manager glanced at the dated entries with a stern expression.

  “That is correct, Lieutenant – Mr Stolz had room service for breakfast on both those days.”

  “Then perhaps you could explain why one of your staff swears they saw Stolz eating breakfast in the restaurant on Friday and Saturday?” Conza placed a witness statement in front of the manager.

  “May I?” Romano asked with an embarrassed smile as he picked up the document. Conza watched him read it before tapping at his keyboard. He shook his head in dissatisfaction.

  “One moment please, Lieutenant,” he said, picking up the phone.

 
; “Ask Lucia to come into my office for a moment please.”

  A short, bespectacled, middle-aged woman knocked before entering. She smiled weakly at Conza and, almost curtseying, stood in front of Romano’s desk, hands behind her back, head bowed.

  “Lucia, there’s nothing to worry about. This is Lieutenant Conza. He has some questions about the poor man who was killed here on Sunday.”

  Lucia bobbed awkwardly and began to whimper.

  Conza smiled. “Lucia, in the statement you gave to the police, you said Mr Stolz had breakfast in the restaurant on Friday and Saturday. Is that correct?”

  She wiped her eyes with a well-used tissue.

  “It’s true sir, Mr Stolz was in for breakfast twice last week. I served him myself.”

  The manager considered her assertion for a second before rising and pulling at a drawer in a metal filing cabinet.

  He handed a sheet of paper to the waitress.

  “Lucia, the man you served at breakfast on Friday, what room number did he give you?”

  Lucia scanned the entries and pointed.

  “Room 29. That’s it there. He told me Room 29.” She had started to cry again and with a sympathetic pat on her shoulder, the manager ushered her out of the office.

  “I think I can explain what has happened,” Romano said, once again rifling through the filing cabinet.

  He placed in front of Conza a photocopy of an English passport in the name of ‘Salterton’. The man in the photograph looked vaguely familiar.

  “Mr Salterton stayed in Room 29. I believe it was he who was served breakfast in the restaurant by Lucia.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  The manager placed on the desk a similar image, this time of Stolz’s passport.