The Dante Conspiracy - By Tom Kasey Page 0,4

We’re both quite certain that if he had known the answer he would certainly have told us, simply to make us stop.’

‘And did you finish him?’

‘Yes. We had no option. He’d seen our faces, so we could hardly have just patched him up and then let him go, because he would immediately have called the police. We wouldn’t have wanted that, and neither would you.’

‘And there was nothing in his apartment either?’

‘No. We found nothing, and we looked everywhere.’

‘What about his computer?’

‘We didn’t find it. It wasn’t in the flat or in his car, so I assume it was still in his office.’

Again the man in the villa was silent for a few moments.

‘If you want,’ Marco suggested, ‘we can try and get into his office at the university to recover it. It shouldn’t be that difficult. For an additional fee, of course.’

‘You can do that, but there wouldn’t be any point, because the computer isn’t there.’

‘How do you know that? And where is it?’

‘I know because I have contacts, and by now I expect that it’s probably sitting on the desk of the senior detective appointed to investigate the murder. You were seen driving away, and somebody walked in and found the body within a few minutes of you leaving. There’s no description of you on the wires yet, and there probably won’t be, because the witness didn’t get a clear look at you.’

Now Marco was silent, considering the implications.

‘We’ve already dumped the van,’ he said, after a moment, ‘and we both wore gloves the whole time we were in it, so there’s probably no usable forensic evidence in the vehicle. And we were careful in the barn as well, so I think we’re probably fairly safe. Unless you know different,’ he added.

‘I’ve heard nothing, apart from what I’ve just told you. But we still need to find it. Keep your phone switched on all the time. As soon as I’ve worked out our next move, I’ll call you.’

Chapter 4

‘The more I find out about this man, the less sense it makes for him to be killed,’ Lombardi said, as Perini walked over to his desk. ‘I was wondering if the professor was working on some kind of cutting-edge technology, something that might possibly attract the attention of the Cosa Nostra or some other bunch of low-lifes. A scientific breakthrough they could steal and use for their own purposes, something like that.’

Perini slid the telephone to one side and half-sat on the edge of the sergeant’s desk, one slim leg dangling, and looked at him. Since the discovery of the man’s body the previous evening, he’d neither been home nor slept and now, mid-morning, it showed in his crumpled suit, the redness of his eyes and the five o’clock shadow which was approaching the stage where it could almost be called designer stubble. Lombardi also hadn’t slept, but somewhat irritatingly looked entirely unaffected by it – he was just his normal slightly overweight self. Of course, he was younger and more resilient, so he ought to be less affected by a sleepless night, or at least that was what Perini had told himself when he’d looked at his own haggard face in the mirror in the men’s room a few minutes earlier.

‘I take it you found nothing like that?’ Perini asked, scratching his chin.

‘You got that right. He was a professor of literature - Italian literature - specializing in mediaeval and Renaissance poetry, so there’s nothing there, as far as I can see. Whatever his killers wanted from him, it can’t have been anything to do with his job, so it had to be something in his personal life, and I’ve fired off a bunch of requests for information about him. The usual questions: bank statements, credit card transactions, that kind of thing, and as soon as I’ve had some responses I’ll go along and talk to the people that he worked with at the university. Is that okay with you?’

‘Yes. You talk to them and I’ll interview his wife or whatever close family members he had here.’

Both detectives were acutely aware that the first twenty-four hours in any murder investigation were always the most critical. Perini knew that unless they managed to identify a reasonable suspect within that time, or at the very least work out what the motive was for the brutal killing of the academic, there was a good chance that the murder might remain unsolved. There were very few inviolable rules in the art or