A Dead Man in Naples
Read A Dead Man in Naples Online
Authors: Michael Pearce
A Dead Man in
Naples
Also by Michael Pearce
A Dead Man in Trieste
A Dead Man in Istanbul
A Dead Man in Athens
A Dead Man in Tangier
A Dead Man in Barcelona
A Dead Man in
Naples
MICHAEL PEARCE
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009
First US edition published by SohoConstable, an imprint of Soho Press, 2009
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
www.sohopress.com
Copyright © Michael Pearce, 2009
The right of Michael Pearce to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library
UK ISBN: 978-1-84901-081-8
US ISBN: 978-1-56947-607-9
US Library of Congress number: 2009026010
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
The bishop held up the round crystal box so that everyone could see. Inside were two phials of antique glass. Through the crystal you could see that each phial had a black dot inside it. Everyone – unusually in Naples – was silent. The minutes passed.
Suddenly the crowd stirred. Those nearest the box gasped. The black dot in each phial was changing, losing its darkness and becoming bright red, losing its solidity and becoming a liquid.
‘Twenty-one minutes,’ muttered the man standing next to Seymour. ‘Twenty-one minutes. Is that what you make it?’
Seymour looked at his watch.
‘Pretty well,’ he agreed.
‘No, no. Exactly. It’s got to be exact. Twenty-one minutes. Would you say that?’
‘Well, yes –’
The man darted away.
‘He’s gone to place a bet,’ whispered Richards.
‘A bet?’
‘Yes. In the lottery. He’s using the time the blood takes to liquefy. Twenty-one minutes. That’s the number he’ll use. He thinks it God-given, you see. God determines the moment when the blood turns. It’s a special moment and so a special number. Maybe it will work for him, too. Of course, others will be thinking the same thing so he’s got to get there first.’
‘Not a chance,’ said a man in the crowd dismissively. ‘They’ve got a system of signals, you see. A man at the front gets the exact moment and then he signals that to someone else at the back of the crowd and he sets off at the run.’
‘They take it that seriously?’ said Seymour, amazed.
‘Oh, yes. It’s a matter of life or death, you could say.’
The crowd of assembled dignitaries and assorted rabble began to break up.
‘That system’s no good,’ said a man standing nearby. ‘Everyone uses it these days. Me, I’m going for something different this year.’
‘Oh, yes?’ said his neighbour. ‘What’s that?
‘Number 13. That’s the number the Englishman was wearing when he was stabbed. No one else will have thought of that.’
When Seymour had been told that he was to go to Naples, he had gone along to the Foreign Office to glean what details he could of the murdered diplomat.
The man at the Foreign Office had pursed his lips.
‘Scampion,’ he had said, rather reluctantly, ‘was not, I am afraid, altogether satisfactory. As a consular representative that is. In himself he was a lovely man – went to Haileybury. But as a senior official in an important consulate . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Enthusiastic, of course. Very. In fact –’ he shook his head again, this time more definitely – ‘that was part of the problem.’
‘Enthusiasm?’
‘Yes.’
‘And . . . what form exactly did it take?’
‘Bicycling.’
‘Bicycling!’
‘Always at the edge of the new, that’s where he felt he ought to be. I don’t hold with it myself. If God had meant us to bicycle, he would have given us wheels, not legs. Oh, I know that in the Foreign Office we should keep abreast of the latest technology, but – what’s wrong with the traditional carriage, I’d like to know? I prefer a landau, myself. But Scampion, well, as soon as he got to Italy he took up bicycling. Of course, it was all the rage. Especially among the young men.’ He looked at Seymour significantly. ‘The Sursum Corda, for instance.’
Sursum Corda? Wasn’t that something to do with religion? He was losing the thread.
‘There has always been, of course, a strong link between the Church and the army. Especially in Italy. The club he joined consisted mostly of young army officers.’
‘Exactly.’ He held up his hand. ‘I know what you’re going to say. What is wrong with that? Fine young men, good families. Well connected. Just the sort of men we want our people to be mixing with. The trouble was that it was the Sursum Corda.’
‘Religious?’
‘Patriotic.’
‘Well –’
He held up his hand again.
‘I know what you are going to say: isn’t that what you would expect them to be?’
‘But it’s not what you would expect a senior member of a British consulate to be.’
British ‘No?’
‘No. Patriotism is all very well, but it’s got to be on behalf of the right country; your own.’
‘Was patriotic about someone else’s country: Italy.’
‘Italy?’
‘It came to a head over the war.’
War? What war was this?
‘Italy’s war with Libya. It may have escaped you,’ said the man from the Foreign Office kindly.
‘Well –’
‘It started two years ago. When all the Great Powers were carving up Africa. The British, of course, were the first. We took Egypt.’
‘Yes, yes, I remember now.’
‘The French took Morocco.’
Seymour actually knew something about this.
‘Germany got involved. And Spain. Well, Italy didn’t want to miss out. So it invaded Libya.’
‘I see.’
‘The war was very popular. In Italy, that was. Less of course, in Libya. And it was particularly popular in the army.’
‘The young officers?’
‘Exactly. They were especially keen. And even more so the ones in the Sursum Corda.’
‘The patriotic ones?’
‘Exactly. Especially when the army announced that it was forming a mounted bicycle brigade. And that was when he completely lost his head.’
‘Scampion?’
‘Scampion. He tried to volunteer. Of course, we weren’t having that. We had to put our foot down. Our policy is strict neutrality. If the Italians lose and get taken down a peg, that suits us fine. And if they win, well, it’s only Arabs, anyway. No, our policy is to keep out of it. And a very good policy, too, as we keep telling the government. If only they would listen.’
‘But Scampion –’
‘Wouldn’t keep out of it. He became very enthusiastic about the war and went round telling everyone what a good idea it was. It was the people he was mixing with, of course. The young officers. And the journalists. There was a big bicycling press in Florence, where he was at the time, and they were immensely patriotic. Bicycling rallies all over the place. Ride for victory, that sort of thing.
‘But it wasn’t just the racing. Through the journalists, and through his army friends, he came in touch with a lot of very strange people. D’Annunzio, for instance. You know about D’Annunzio? No? Lucky you! A complete poseur, in my opinion, but very popular with the young. A poet! Well, I ask you. Poetry is all very well, I quite like it myself. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and that sort of thing. But
his
poetry is totally incomprehensible. And the young lap it up! It leads them astray. Into wildnesses of all sorts.
‘Well, that’s D’Annunzio for you. And that was the man Scampion took up with. They went round together everywhere. Scampion was even his second.’
‘His second?’
‘In a duel. With a journalist. D’Annunzio lost, I am glad to say, but his opponent was so appalled at the injuries he had inflicted that he apologized. So D’Annunzio claimed he had won! And retired to the loving embraces of a Marchesa, two ballerinas, an actress, and a dubious young man who works in a hotel.’
‘Was mixed up in this lot,’ said the diplomat with disgust. ‘It became so bad that we had to transfer him to Naples. Where, of course, he formed a Racing Club and carried on much as he had done before.’
‘Different ones. There’s a big camp outside Naples. A transit camp. For soldiers on their way to Libya. He organized bicycle races every Saturday. And it was claimed at the inquest that it was rivalry arising out of one of these races that led to him being stabbed.’
Seymour considered.
When the Chief Superintendent had told him that he could expect to be sent to Naples, his heart had leaped. Would not that be the answer to his difficulties?
Chief among these difficulties was his girlfriend, Chantale, whom he had at last persuaded to leave her native Mediterranean and build a life with him in sunny London. Actually, he had been honest about that. She would find, he had told her, that the skies in London were not quite as blue as those in Tangier, her home town, the sun not quite as hot, the water of the East London docks not quite as sparkling.
It had turned out to be all that, said Chantale; but worse.
She had taken lately to scanning the travel pages of the newspapers, which offered holidays in Tenerife, Luxor, Madeira, and the Maldives. No chance, said Seymour. The best he could offer on his pay was a day trip to Brighton, which was not, in her view, quite the same thing.
So the prospect of Naples had come as a gift from heaven. Chantale could surely be smuggled somehow into his baggage and two could occupy a room, or a bed, as cheaply as one.
Now, however, as he was speaking to the man from the Foreign Office, honesty, a rare and not always a helpful quality in a policeman, compelled him to say:
‘Look, this is all very interesting, but I don’t quite see why it should have been necessary to send for me. Surely the local police –’
‘One would think so,’ said the man from the Foreign Office glumly, ‘and that we could have happily forgotten all about Scampion. Unfortunately it is not quite so simple.’
‘No?’
‘To start with, the claim that he was stabbed because of rivalries arising out of his racing was not sustained at the inquest. The verdict was left open. The claim was quite preposterous anyway. Not that that mattered too much: at least it meant that the whole business would be shelved for a while and then, perhaps, could conveniently be forgotten about.
‘But then we received a tip. From a quite discreditable source, of course: the Roman aristocracy. Discreditable, but well-informed, especially about what is going on in ministerial circles. So we could not afford to ignore it. It was to the effect that Scampion’s death was connected with politics at the highest level and that he had been on the edge of revealing something that would cause an enormous breach in international relations. And that the newspapers had got hold of this and would very shortly be in a position to publish what they knew.
‘We will deny it, of course. Whatever it is. But it would be helpful if we knew in advance exactly
what
it is that we would be denying. That, Mr Seymour, is where you come in. What exactly had Scampion been up to? What was the secret he had allegedly found out, the real reason for his murder? Oh, and, of course, although this is not terribly important, who actually killed him?’
His investigation was, said the man at the Foreign Office, to be ‘unofficial’. Seymour knew what that meant. It meant that, if anything went wrong, he could safely be disowned. Seymour, however, after one or two of these ‘unofficial’ assignments, was growing wiser in the ways of the world and the more he thought about this, the less he liked it. If things went wrong he could see himself spending the rest of his life in some disease-ridden Neapolitan jail. He had almost decided to decline it. Since it was an ‘unofficial’ assignment, he could do that. He wouldn’t be popular but he would get away with it. It would jeopardize his long-term career prospects but living, as opposed to dying, might be worth it.
He had, however, incautiously mentioned the matter to Chantale and she had taken a completely different view. If it was unofficial, didn’t that mean that he could do what he liked? He could, for instance, take her with him. Although that had been Seymour’s own first thought, he was now backing off the idea and said that he didn’t think the Foreign Office definition of unofficial stretched that far.
Chantale pondered on this. Her mind was always at its most fertile when she strongly wanted to do something and some objection by Seymour stood in the way.
‘Why shouldn’t it?’ she asked. ‘Wouldn’t that give – what is the word you use for this sort of thing? Cover – yes, it would give good cover. You could pretend to be taking a holiday and what would be more natural than to take me with you? No one could possibly suspect you of being on an official assignment then. You might even get them to pay for me.’
Seymour didn’t think the rubric, whether official or unofficial, would stretch that far, either, but it was worth a try. To his surprise, they agreed.
‘It would certainly remove any suspicion if your wife came with you,’ they said.
‘Um. Actually,’ said Seymour, ‘not wife.’
‘Ah!’
‘Yet,’ said Seymour hastily.
‘Ah, fiancée,’ said the man in Accounts. ‘Well, we should be able to manage that. Accommodation is cheap in Naples. Two rooms, then.’
Seymour kept his mouth shut this time and two rooms it was. Chantale was as pleased as Punch.
Seymour, reflecting still further, saw yet another advantage in the arrangement. While if he was on his own, and something went wrong, he might safely be disowned and allowed to rot away for the rest of his days in a Neapolitan prison cell, they would find it more difficult to do that if Chantale was in the cell with him. But he didn’t mention this to her.
Second – financial – thoughts had crept in at the Foreign Office and the two rooms were not now in a hotel but in a sort of boarding house or
pensione
. The
pensione
was owned by an old man, Giuseppi, whose heart was with the revolution but whose revolutionary activities these days were confined to making fierce noises, mostly about the government. It was run, however, by his wife, Maria.
As Richards was taking him through the tiny streets they went past the front of the
pensione
. Giuseppi and Maria were standing outside gazing along the street in astonishment. As was usual in Naples most front doors in the street were open and quite a few of the inhabitants had come out to gaze, too. At the end of the street was a solitary English lady holding a bicycle. That in itself would account for the astonishment but there was another cause of wonder, too.
‘Indecent, I call it,’ said old Giuseppi. ‘Indecent, and quite mad.’
‘But very practical,’ said his granddaughter, Francesca, who was standing with them.
‘Maybe,’ said Maria, ‘but don’t let me ever catch
you
wearing anything like that!’
‘Bicycles cost money,’ said Francesca. ‘Would you ever see me on one?’
‘Yes,’ said her grandfather. ‘I saw you on one yesterday.’
‘Francesca!’ said his wife.
‘With young Giorgio,’ said Giuseppi. ‘You were sitting on the cross-bar. Showing your ankles.’