The Monster of Florence by Magdalen Nabb Page B

car. The Marshal nodded to him as he let him out.
    “Stolen car?”
    Lorenzini got up and gathered a stack of papers together. “A found car, if you can believe it. We’d found it before he’d even noticed it was stolen. Whoever stole it couldn’t find anywhere to park it so he left it in the middle of the road. What sort of a day did you have?”
    “Wet. We did seven crime scenes, four of them in heavy rain.”
    “Cheery. Why seven and not eight?”
    “Simonetti’s not interested in the sixty-eight murder. I suppose he’s right. It was a normal murder, not a serial killer job, and weapons do change hands,” he said.
    “A
murder
weapon?”
    “I know. It’s not true. Of course, though, it could have been stolen.”
    “Hm. Funnily enough … it’s the only one I’ve seen—scene of the crime, I mean. I used to live near Signa as a kid.”
    “You? But you can hardly have been born in sixty-eight.”
    “I was four. I don’t mean I was round there the day after the murder, budding investigator! No, it was just a kids’ game later when I was at school. We used to call it the haunted lane and see if we could frighten ourselves to death going down there alone on dark winter afternoons, pretending to search for the gun in the stream.”
    “Pity you didn’t find it.”
    “I bet we would have done if it had been there. Whoever ownedthe land must have got fed up with us in the end and he put a chain and padlock on the entrance to the lane. Oh, well, I’ve got two more people to see out there.”
    “I’ll deal with them.”
    “You don’t mind? I could get the paperwork on this car seen to.”
    “Show them in.” The Marshal eased himself into his familiar chair with a sigh of pleasure. “Are they together?”
    “ ’Fraid not. And one of them’s foreign. Are you sure …?”
    “Show him in, show him in.”
    The undersigned complainant, Raymond Poigne, born in Sheffield, Great Britain, 1947, who thought his camera might have been stolen—though it was true, as his wife Marilyn had said to him, that he could have left it in that last bar and who was sorry he couldn’t speak Italian but knew a bit of French if that could help—must have been as surprised as he was pleased to find himself greeted like a long-lost friend.
    ANOTHER MONSTER!
5th time lucky?
    At a press conference held yesterday evening at Police Headquarters, Prosecutor Simonetti announced that he would shortly make a formal accusation against the man he believes to be the Monster of Florence. The Prosecutor was not prepared to reveal the name at this stage, but the Anti-Monster Squad has been increased to double its former size and is working round the clock. The Prosecutor described a visit today to all the scenes of the Monster’s crimes, a visit undertaken in absolute secrecy and in plain clothes. Despite pressure from journalists he made no revelations about what he had discovered, or even what precisely he was looking for. “It was vital that we checked every scene,” he said, “though I can’t say anything further at this stage. The reason for secrecymust be obvious: we could hardly have got on with our business surrounded by journalists.”
    Asked if he was confident about the new accusation given past form the Prosecutor was emphatic: “I am absolutely confident that the Monster will not strike again. I know over the past few years public opinion has tended towards the idea that the Monster enquiry was suspended or even consigned to the archives, but this is not the case. It was precisely when everything appeared static that we were working our hardest on every possible hypothesis. No stone has been left unturned.”
    The Prosecutor pointed out that his office had been dealing all the while with its normal workload and that it was a measure of the commitment of his men that they had nevertheless achieved so much, considering the complexity of the case.
    So what is really new about this enquiry to bring it to the