Page 31 of Murder at the Ponte Vecchio

First things first, I pulled out my phone and called the mayor. He answered immediately and, from the echo, I got the impression he was in his car.

‘Ciao, Dan. Any news?’

‘Ciao, Ugo. Yes, I’m pleased to report that I now have the full name of your daughter’s boyfriend. It’s Tiberio Carbone.’

‘Carbone?’ He sounded surprised. ‘Did you say Carbone?’

‘That’s right. Why, is something wrong?’

‘No, not wrong, but I think I now know why Monica didn’t want to introduce him to us.’ He produced a noise that was hard to identify. I couldn’t tell whether it was a snort or a laugh. ‘I think I know who he is; in fact, I’m sure of it. He must be the son of the leader of the main opposition party on the town council. I heard that his boy was studying medicine, so that must be this Tiberio. I’ve crossed swords in the Palazzo Vecchio with his father, Umberto Carbone, on numerous occasions.’ This time, I felt sure I could hear him laugh. ‘How wonderfully Shakespearean! Monica was afraid that I might not approve of the son because I don’t approve of the father. In fact, Umberto is a likeable and honourable man, even though his political views are diametrically opposite my own.’

‘Does this mean you have no objections?’

‘You must be joking, Dan. In this day and age, what a father thinks about his daughter’s choice of friends counts for very little. Good luck to her, and if it becomes serious then that’s fine with me. It could be useful to have a medic in the family. Of course, the problem I now have is what do I do? If I tell her that I know who he is and I’m quite happy about it, she’s sure to ask me how I found out who he is. If she knows that I hired a private investigator, she’ll probably go crazy – and I wouldn’tblame her. What would you do?’ He sounded genuinely troubled.

I thought about it for a moment or two before a solution presented itself. ‘If you and your wife are going to see the play she’s in on Saturday, you’ll see Tiberio in the lead role. I’ve been bullied into agreeing to play a minor role in the play myself, so I could always ask the director to introduce him to you if your daughter doesn’t. You then say, “Carbone? I don’t suppose your father is my good friend Umberto, by any chance?” How about that?’

That suggestion met with immediate approval and Ugo was sounding a happy man by the end of the call.

My mind returned to diamonds, and I tried calling Virgilio again. I had already tried phoning him to tell him what I’d learnt from Amélie and then from Sandy Mackintosh, but there was still no answer and I left a message asking him to give me an urgent call. I then spent the next twenty or thirty minutes leafing through the typewritten pages of the script, marking the lines spoken by my character, Cesare. I also took a good look at the stage directions, but I knew I’d have to get Zebra to go through that sort of thing with me in the morning.

By the end of it, I was feeling slightly reassured – but only slightly. There were probably no more than a hundred words altogether spoken by my character, but often the lines consisted of barely two or three words each, so my problem was not so much remembering my lines as remembering when to utter them. Ever since agreeing to do this for Zebra, I’d been regretting it, but, as she had said, the die had now been cast and I just had to get on with it.

I was interrupted by Virgilio calling me back. I started by asking him if he’d been able to give Luuc Berg a full interview. The answer was not yet.

‘I’ve been tied up all afternoon and I only got around to calling the villa a short while ago. I spoke to his sister, who told me Luuc’s spending the afternoon at the Uffizi gallery – on his own as usual – and she can’t contact him. She says he’s probably turned off his phone. I’ve left a message with her to say that I’ll go there at nine o’clock tomorrow morning to speak to him. I asked her about his movements and, in effect, he has no alibi for either of the murders or, indeed, for when Marco was knocked down, although none of the three Berg family vehicles have a scratch on them. She said he’d told her he left the Netherlands on Friday afternoon and stopped at a hotel in the French Alps late that night before setting off again early on Saturday morning – about five or six hours’ drive from here – but she didn’t know where the hotel was. Apparently, he arrived in Florence at lunchtime on Saturday and they all met up for lunch in town before going to their father’s villa. As for last night between ten and midnight, she said he was out walking around the town, and she had no idea where he went. Reading between the lines, I get the impression that there’s maybe a bit of a family rift going on.’

‘Mm, I wonder what might be behind that. Hopefully, the French hotel will have a record of him and he should be able to produce motorway or fuel receipts to back up his story. Mind you, if he can’t, the fact that he doesn’t have an alibi doesn’t necessarily imply culpability. In fact, considering how professionally the murders of the two Dutchmen were carried out, the fact that he hasn’t got a clear-cut alibi is actually in his favour. Surely a pro would have organised that in advance.’

Virgilio was still suspicious. ‘Luuc Berg is a tall, strong man who fits the CCTV imagery we have for both murders. He could easily have killed his father and/or Jacobs. Maybe he killed his father in revenge for dumping their mother and then he went after Jacobs for the sake of a box of gemstones.’

‘And Marco? Did Luuc set out to kill him as well and, if so, why, and in what vehicle?’

‘Maybe he rented a car…’ Virgilio was clutching at straws and both of us knew that. What possible reason could Luuc have had to want to kill Marco?

I added another query. ‘Besides, how did Luuc know about the diamonds in the box? You didn’t give the family any specific details of the contents of the safe or mention a connection with Jacobs, did you?’

‘Maybe his father said something to the housekeeper, who passed it on…’

I could hear that Virgilio was sounding less and less convinced so I offered my alternative theory in the hope of cheering him up. ‘Try this for size. I think I might have managed to find the missing link connecting Berg, Jacobs and the twoextracomunitari– and, by extension, the traitor in the Florence police force.’

I went on to tell him what I’d learned this afternoon. ‘So how about this as a scenario? David Berg has a regular deal going with somebody – probably an asylum seeker – at the main station. The man at the station buys smuggled gemstones from other asylum seekers on Berg’s behalf and passes them on in return for a fee. When Berg has a fair collection of them – like a cigar boxful, for example – he sells them on to his friend Jacobs.’

Virgilio grunted approvingly. ‘That would explain the deaths of the Africans. They were killed for the diamonds they were carrying.’

I carried on. ‘Exactly. However, somebody gets wind of what’s going on and decides to take over the operation. He manages to make one or both of the asylum seekers at the station talk before stabbing them to death – and discovers Berg’s name. I would think the last man to be stabbed is likely to have been Berg’sbuyer and it was he who gave away the Dutchman’s name. This somebody waits for Berg outside his shop on the Ponte Vecchio on Friday night, bustles him inside and tries to get him to hand over all the diamonds – little realising that they’re in the safe at the villa. Unfortunately, in the course of the interrogation, the old man dies, leaving our perpetrator with the problem of what to do with the body. He knows any competent pathologist will see that it was murder so he tries to make it look like suicide, but doesn’t quite get it right.’

Virgilio was sounding more and more enthusiastic. ‘Terrific, Dan, that sounds very plausible, but how did the murderer then find out about Axel Jacobs, assuming his death is the work of the same killer? The only people to establish a clear link between the two deaths so far are us, and the police report is highly confidential. This almost certainly implies inside knowledge – somebody in the police, no doubt the person who’s been destroying the files – doesn’t it?’

I decided to play devil’s advocate – even if I didn’t really believe it myself. ‘I suppose that’s the likely conclusion, but not necessarily. What if Berg, in an attempt to misdirect his assailant on Friday night, told him that the diamonds were with Jacobs? And what if that assailant was Luuc Berg? I’m not convinced, but it’s a possibility.’

‘I sincerely hope you’re right, Dan, but I fear in my bones that somewhere in the Florence police force, there’s somebody who has murdered not only the two asylum seekers but also a pair of Dutch jewellers and has attempted to murder Marco. That means I’m working with a serial killer. It’s a scary and a very distasteful thought.’

‘I’m afraid that’s probably right. It looks most likely that it was somebody on your force who was able to access the Berg file – and any senior officer could have done that – and from that, hemust have picked up on the fact that Jacobs was also in on it. Don’t forget that Jacobs was killed the night before the safe was opened, so the killer may well have hoped to find that Jacobs had the diamonds. Maybe the murderer went to his hotel room hoping to get his hands on either the cigar box of diamonds or the three hundred thousand euros, unaware that these were in the safe all along. Jacobs wasn’t a big, strong man, but he struck me as the sort of tough character who would try to stand up for himself, and that would explain the bruises on his body. Our killer maybe didn’t mean to murder him at first, but he just squeezed a bit too hard. What do you think?’

‘I think that’s almost certainly the way it went, Dan, although I suppose we should still keep Luuc Berg in the frame just in case. Let’s see what he says when I interview him tomorrow. So we currently have four potential suspects, but no proof against any of them.’ The frustration in his voice was clear to hear.

‘Any joy with CCTV or dashcam footage of Marco’s accident?’

---