The Monster of Florence by Magdalen Nabb

because there’d have been one. You can’t tell me that all those Peeping Toms trailing around the countryside on a Saturday night didn’t come across him. To hell with bizarre, it was the way they were running the enquiry that was bizarre! They were so busy with their psychological profiles and weird explanations that half the routine work went for a burton. Did you ever hear of a murder case where nobody checks the victim’s blood group? Anyway, the PP’s office was fed up to the back teeth and this new enquiry was started up whilst the Sardinian one was still running. A compromise, they called it. That was in eighty-four. ‘A different approach’ was what Simonetti called it when the new investigation was set up with the present Chief Proc in charge and Simonetti as his sidekick. Worked out very nicely for them both, all things considered.‘A fresh, unprejudiced approach,’ they said. ‘No Sardinians need apply.’ Then, when the Instructing Judge protested Simonetti said to him, ‘If your theories are correct then our respective results must converge.’ Never crossed his mind, naturally, that if they didn’t he might have got it wrong.”
    That was exactly the way the Marshal’s thoughts had been running that first morning as he’d listened to Simonetti holding forth. Always so sure of being right, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence of being wrong.
    “It’s true, of course,” he pointed out now in an excess of fair-mindedness, “that’s what would happen if they were both right.”
    “In a perfect world,” Ferrini laughed, “they’d both be right and they’d both be able to prove they were right and they’d each be holding half the physical evidence and the Monster could be photographed between them confessing all. It’s not a scene I can easily imagine, I don’t know about you. And if any physical evidence does turn up I can tell you now that, whoever finds it, it’ll be ours. Past experience. In any case, by this time we’re on our own so no converging need be looked for. All we’re looking for is a likely suspect who can be put behind bars and, unlike the last four, stay there. Open that window just a crack, there’s steam coming off us—No, no! Forget I said that. We don’t want a shower.” The driver pressed the button and the window slid back up. “No signs of it letting up … If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s people who lean on their horns in traffic jams—look at that stupid sod trying to get past us on the pavement … Imbecile! What was I saying? Oh, yes. Now, our pal the Monster—or Cicci, the Monster of Scandicci, as he’s popularly known, packed in years ago, in nineteen eighty-five, for reasons unknown. Could be dead, could have left the country, could be inside. Anyway, it’s been long enough for safety. I mean, if we get it wrong again we won’t get found out, shouldn’t do, anyway. The odds are against it and luck tends to follow people like Simonetti, don’t you find?”
    “I suppose so …” There was no getting away from the fact that all these ideas had passed, however briefly, through his mind as they’d tramped from murder scene to murder scene throughout thelong wet day. Even so, when his own thoughts were put into words by Ferrini they seemed somehow heavier, cruder.
    “You’re a bit cynical …” was his only comment.
    “Come on, Guarnaccia, what else can you be in this job?”
    The Marshal stared out at the rain and exhaust fumes, the huddled shoppers trying to protect their legs from splashing cars, the polythene sheets over the greengrocer’s wares. Ferrini was right about that, at least: there was no sign of it letting up. He’d always had a sharp tongue in his head, the Marshal remembered that from when they’d worked on the transsexual murder together. Still, he had been cynical then but now he was bitter with it. Of course, it could have been that, working alone on a case they’d had a good handle on,