McLeod handed over his passport and sized up the receptionist as she photocopied it. She was beautiful. He'd pay good money to have her sent up to his room along with a stack of beer and some decent air-conditioning. Man, Italy may be great on historic buildings but it sure sucked when it came to keeping things cool.
'Thank you,' said Maria.
McLeod smiled at her. 'How do you say that in Italian? Is it the same as in Spanish, gracias?'
'No,' said Maria sweetly, 'not quite. We say grazie.'
'Grat-sea,' he tried.
'Perfetto,' said Maria, deciding it would be rude to correct his slight mispronunciation. 'You are in the Scorpio suite,' she told him, taking a key from a set of hooks on the wall behind her. 'Please go straight down the corridor, here to the right of me, then first left and up some stairs, that's Scorpio.'
'Scorpio,' he repeated. 'Are all the rooms named after star signs?'
'Yes. Yes, they are,' said Maria, now growing tired of him and wishing he would go, so she could return to the magazine under her desk.
'How many are there? In total, how many rooms?'
Maria had to think for a moment. 'Six. No, eight. There are eight rooms in all.'
'Eight,' repeated McLeod, thinking for a minute of how he might be able to persuade the beautiful Maria to spend some time with him in one of them. Later. There would be time for that later. First though, he had a lot of planning to do. Business first – pleasure later.
40
Rome The Cristina Barbuggiani case conference was due to start at two p.m., but Massimo had insisted they took a leisurely 'catch-up' lunch at a restaurant around the corner, explaining that in Italy two p.m. meant any time before four.
The conference was being staged in a dedicated Incident Room and people were chattering loudly and pointing at whiteboards as Jack and Massimo entered. The Direttore introduced Benito, Roberto and the pathologist, Dottoressa Annelies van der Splunder. 'Orsetta Portinari I think you already know,' he said, suppressing the start of a smile.
'Very pleased to see you again, Mr King,' said Orsetta warmly.
'And you, Inspector,' said Jack, a little less enthusiastically. 'Forgive me,' he went on, turning to the pathologist, a tall, plumpish woman in her late thirties with straw-like short blonde hair. 'Your name doesn't sound particularly Italian.'
'You really are a detective,' joked the Dottoressa. 'I'm Dutch. Had the good fortune to fall in love with an Italian and moved here about seven years ago. I worship Rome; this is home for me now.'
'Jack and his wife are also Italophiles,' added Massimo. 'They have a small, but I'm told very exclusive, hotel in Tuscany.'
'Sounds gorgeous,' said the pathologist. 'You must give me details. My partner Lunetta and I are always looking for places for a long weekend away.'
'Lunetta?' interjected Orsetta. 'Lunetta della Rossellina, the fashion model?'
'Yes,' said the pathologist, pleased the name had been recognized. 'Lunetta's love is clothes, and mine is food and wine – as I think you can see.'
'Then Italy is perfect for both of you,' said Massimo diplomatically. 'Dottoressa, Jack has read your report, but I'm wondering if you'd be kind enough to update him on the conversation you and I had last night about Cristina's blood type.'
'Of course,' the pathologist said. 'Do you mind if we sit down? I need to get my glasses to go through some notes.'
The team gathered around a long, plain conference table made of beech and Annelies van der Splunder put on some round wire-framed glasses that Orsetta thought made her look half-headmistress, half-owl.
'The examinations I carried out were on the dismembered limbs, torso, stomach contents and head of a young white, Italian woman in her mid-twenties, who I now know was Cristina Barbuggiani, a citizen of Livorno. The dismembered body parts were delivered to me over a period of about a week, the poor woman's head being the last to arrive for my attention. The decapitated head gave me the most information, and from this I was able to ascertain that Cristina was AB Rhesus negative.'
'That's quite rare, isn't it?' asked Jack.
'Yes, it is. And even though blood typing is my pet subject, I'm afraid it's hard to say exactly how rare in Italy; probably less than nine per cent of the population are of the AB grouping. AB is the rarest and incidentally the newest of discovered blood groups. O is the oldest, it goes back to the Stone Age. A is the next oldest, and has its roots in the farming settlements of Norway, Denmark, Austria, Armenia and Japan. AB, however, dates back less than a thousand years and came about as all the blood groups began to mix in Europe.'
'And the Rhesus factoring?' asked Jack.
Annelies removed her glasses for a moment. 'As I'm sure you know, the D antigen is the most common. If it is present, we describe the grouping as positive. In Cristina, it was missing, therefore she is Rhesus negative. Probably only about three per cent of the population share her blood type.'
'This really helps us,' said Jack, turning to Massimo, 'but only if you can find it on him, or find the scene where BRK cut up Cristina's body. Evidentially, tying her blood to a suspect would be a very powerful argument in court.'
'Yes, but finding the scene?' said Benito, shrugging his shoulders. 'So far it has not been possible.'
'Where have you tried?' asked Jack, non-judgementally.
'We've had to focus mainly on Livorno and the big cities that have strong links with the town and province,' said Benito, 'so we're working out towards Pisa, which is twenty kilometres away, Lucca, forty kilometres, Florence, about eighty and finally Siena, which is about a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty kilometres away. We're looking at hire car businesses, hotels and guesthouses and even longdistance trucking companies. We are asking them all if they have had to clean any blood from any of the vehicles or property used by recent clients. So far nothing.'
Jack doubted the search would provide anything to build a case on but he understood that they had to go through the motions. Often it was the routine checks, rather than brilliant detective work, that provided critical breakthroughs.
'Let me get this right,' he said, addressing the pathologist again. 'According to your report, you believe the killer kept the head for maybe up to two weeks before he sent it here?'
'Approximately,' said van der Splunder, cautiously. 'Please be careful not to mix up death and decapitation. Death was on, or about, the fourteenth; decapitation and dismemberment were most likely on or around the twentieth.'
'You mean death wasn't through decapitation – he killed her, kept her corpse, then beheaded her?'
'Exactly.'
'How did she die?' asked Jack.
The pathologist flinched. 'I found some evidence of pre-mortem focal bruising on the larynx.'
'She was strangled, or choked somehow?' asked Jack.
'I believe so,' said van der Splunder. 'There was no evidence of ligature strangulation, so I imagine it was done manually. Indeed, some of the marks on the throat are consistent with continuous deep pressure, possibly from a man's knuckles.'
Jack knew what it meant, and why she had flinched. It would have taken about four minutes to strangle Cristina in this way. He hoped that she'd blacked out after about thirty seconds when her brain became starved of oxygen, but he was sure it would still have been a horribly slow death. Perhaps the most horrible imaginable, with the killer using his hands to choke her to the point of death, then easing up and letting her recover, before choking her again. Jack knew many stranglers who had turned the act of murder into a sexual marathon, indulging their violence in small ebbs and flows, before brutally climaxing with the final fatal pressure of their fingers.