Finn ordered coffee, spoke Italian well enough to feel part of the general rush, although Spanish was the language he swam in. The value of the magistrate would come in the form of names, not anecdotes (which Finn already knew), and through inflection — the weight he placed on certain events, and the sequence in which he ordered them. Aside from this, a senior magistrate who wasn’t willing to go on public record but still had something to say (unofficially) would make an excellent introduction to his book, not to mention the boost it gave the project: people were still interested. Finn couldn’t imagine a better situation. He didn’t expect to uncover anything new, not after a year, but he did expect to find new people and new perspectives — much the better if they wanted to remain anonymous.
As a figure, the magistrate didn’t disappoint — reassuringly familiar (as if cast into the role) — tall and thin, slightly wild grey hair, a hint of stubble, a man both preoccupied and focused. Distinctive, Finn thought, an air of instinct about the man, an intelligence and concentration he’d like to describe. As expected the information was less than revelatory: the magistrate ran through what he knew to be happening.
1. Since his release from custody, Niccolò Scafuti had returned to his apartment at the Rione Ini estate on the outskirts of Ercolano, where he now lived a solitary life. If the magistrate had any personal regrets, it was the involvement of Scafuti in the investigation and he wished that the man had not taken the walk that night and discovered the American’s clothes and brown bag. But he didn’t think, a) given the circumstances, b) Scafuti’s unwise decisions, and c) what they knew at the time, that anything could have played out any differently. Scafuti had destroyed evidence, it was unfortunate, a criminal offence which had caused great damage. Who knows what might have happened if they’d read the notebook?
2. Marek Krawiec. Now here was an entirely different situation, and the magistrate remained clear and absolute about the fact that Krawiec could not be interviewed, and neither would he be coaxed into any kind of acknowledgement of where Krawiec was being held (most likely Rome). The case was under judicial review. On this the magistrate remained firm. Marek Krawiec could not be interviewed. He could say, though, that investigators were hopeful about finding the missing bodies. Krawiec was still emphatic about his innocence.
3. The palazzo, of course, was indeed the palazzo at via Capasso 29 close to the Duomo and the tourist district — everybody knew this and it had featured in many news reports over the year. This didn’t stop a rumour that this palazzo was not the actual site of the murders — that there was some kind of cover-up because somebody important lived in the building where the killing had actually occurred. This was plainly untrue.
4. Evidence. There were many other rumours which were not true: the evidence taken from the basement room on via Capasso and discovered on the shoreline at Ercolano was not destroyed or lost, and was not mishandled or contaminated as many reports had speculated. Much of the blood evidence was destroyed by the sea, but even so, there was plenty of other evidence to confirm Krawiec’s presence in the room (which, interestingly enough, he never denied).
5. The missing student, otherwise known as ‘The American’, ‘The Student’, or less frequently as ‘The First Victim’, seen once and only once at the Circumvesuviana station dressed in the hunter-green T-shirt with the five-point star design, had not yet been identified, and no other remains had been discovered. The DNA from the shirt, shorts, undershorts, matched the blood evidence on the plastic taken from the room and recovered from the shoreline, and these were assumed, until new evidence or Krawiec told them otherwise, to belong to the American. The American was picked up probably before he had a chance to check into a hotel. The only blood evidence belonged to the American.
6. The man known as ‘The Second Man’ (the body discovered in the abandoned paint factory in Ercolano) had never been mistaken for the missing student — ‘The American’, or ‘The Student’. This death, the autopsy demonstrated, could be attributed to a combination of factors: a blow to the head, the resulting haemorrhage, and drowning after he was dumped in the storage tank. Because of evidence found in the tank with the Second Man — the novel, a wallet, a digital player — assumed to be items taken from the student — this ‘victim’ had always been looked upon as a co-conspirator, although they were unable to establish his identity.
7. The body of Mizuki Katsura, AKA the missing ‘Second Victim’, had also not been traced nor recovered. And here the magistrate wanted to talk about what he called the situational context. ‘Imagine,’ he calmly laid out the facts, ‘in a region of four and a half million people, how many more transient people come and go who are not accounted for?’ Some legitimate, but a good number without account. There is immense opportunity here for exploitation. Both victims were linked by one known circumstance; they were both known to have passed through the Circumvesuviana station in the early morning. A friend at the language school confirmed that Katsura saw two men, had noticed them at the station, and commented on it in her class. The magistrate believed she had seen both Krawiec and the Second Man hunting, as it were. Katsura’s belongings were found in the room she had rented in Portici. The name and address she’d given the language school were not genuine — who knows why?
8. The star. Now here’s a coincidence — which might one day be explained by Krawiec when he finally talks. Fact 1: Mizuki Katsura went to school in a building on which there was a sign showing the outline of a five-point star held within a circle. Fact 2: The American, and this is still all they really know about him, wore a T-shirt with the same design. Again, there were theories about this, many wild and ambitious, semi-occult ideas. To the magistrate this spoke of something both deliberate and accidental. A coincidence, which, examined in the right light, would open up a methodology, systems of thinking, habits which could be key in definitively identifying Krawiec and the Second Man as the killers.
9. The existence of the Brothers. From the start the killings were considered as crimes which had to be committed by more than one person. The logistics of erasing not one, but two people would require resources not open to a single individual. Krawiec’s story about brothers from France was exactly that, a story, a fancy, implausible at best — a ploy to get the system tied in knots while they chased down phantoms. The people who could supposedly confirm the existence of these brothers, other residents at the palazzo, had never in fact met or seen them. The building supervisor, Amelia Peña, was a fantasist.