For The Love Of A Woman

By Paddy Bostock

Ravaged by sun, mosquitoes and his partner Claudia’s extended family while on a summer holiday to seaside Italy, PI Jake Flintlock is keen—despite having been asked to stay to solve a local murder—to return to London for good. But then, after a second murder, he and his PI associate Bum Park are made an offer they can’t refuse and once in Rome, discover a whole new meaning to the words la famiglia

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: May 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781613091395

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Paddy Bostock

A Wings ePress, Inc.

Suspense Novel

Edited by: Jeanne Smith

Copy Edited by: Joan C. Powell

Senior Editor: Jeanne Smith

Executive Editor: Marilyn Kapp

Cover Artist: Richard Stroud

All rights reserved

Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Wings ePress Books

Copyright © 2013 by

ISBN 978-1-61309-139-5

Published by Wings ePress, Inc. at Smashwords

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Dedication

For Dani with love and thanks for the help with all things Italian

One

I’d about had it with the Lazio coastline. August in Italy is too hot anyway, but add in global warming, and you’re talking Dante’s nastiest level of hell. It’s not that I dislike sun in principle; temperatures of up to seventy degrees I can tolerate as well as the next bloke. Don the floppy hat and dangle the feet in some limpid pool, all very pleasant. But temperatures sufficient to fry eggs on pavements, forget it. During our holiday with Claudia’s mother at the little seaside resort of Tor San Lorenzo, I’d longed every moment of every day with every ounce of my being for rainy, windy, dank, dark days back in London town.

Not that the local eagle-sized mosquitoes shared my abhorrence of their habitat. No siree. Local mosquitoes very happy with the crazed sun, and the presence down by their befouled bit of the Mediterranean of a tasty Englishman. Mosquitoes delirious at the prospect and sucking me practically bloodless as I lurched about the villa-lined streets drenched in sweat slapping at myself as gaggles of Italian youths sped by on their silencer-free Lambrettas with bronzed, bikini-clad nymphets riding pillion, all of them laughing at me and chanting their football songs.

And that was just the daytime.

The nights—which weren’t a whole lot cooler than the days—I would spend stalking our bedroom with a rolled-up back edition of the Rome Evening Echo splatting manic insect Stukas in a vain attempt to kill enough of the bastards to allow for one hour’s sleep before dawn. Fat chance. These beasts were some form of genetically modified superbreed capable of reproducing in picoseconds, oblivious to light or dark, and thus able to maintain a round-the-clock bite rate.

Dracula, eat your heart out.

Not that Claudia or any other member of her hugely extended family ever got stung, the entire thrust of the malaria campaign having been directed at the sole fair-skinned person in the neighbourhood—me. What we were talking here was a focused attack on the life of Dr. Jake Flintlock—a thinly veiled vendetta of Sicilian dimensions and one to which, despite my best efforts with newspaper coshes, I was forced to concede defeat.

You know what the final statistics in this deadly game were according to my own—therefore accurate—tally, the one I kept in biro on the bedroom wall? Mosquito hits: 1,486,217; Jake Flintlock hits: 506. A crushing defeat, no question about it.

And this whole nighttime scenario played out against the thumping backdrop of the Lambretta lads and laddettes dancing their brains out at a Mafia-financed disco/swimming pool a stone’s throw from the back garden of our villa until four every morning whilst howling phonetically faulty renditions of outdated British pop songs.

Sleep? Don’t even think about it. Even when the moskies left off their dive-bomb tactics for the odd half an hour, there were still the sodding Spice Girls and the wailing Roman wannabes to contend with. I couldn’t remember a time in the whole of my previous existence so far when I’d been at a lower ebb—and that was saying something. Not that Claudia evinced sympathy for my plight. Scathing dismissals of my misery as a symptom of Merseysiders’ inability to adapt to foreign climes were her usual response, to which I would riposte I had adapted to many foreign climes in the past, thank you very much, in my capacity as sleuth. But some climes were beyond the pale and that was that.

"I’m not exaggerating, I would tell her as I roamed the furnace of a bedroom whose white walls I’d turned vermillion with the undigested remains of my own blood. There’s a conspiracy around here to kill me."

You are loony-tunes, you know this, Jakie? You have the paranoia.

So you keep telling me.

This definition of my sanity—or lack of it—had become the leitmotif of our relationship ever since Claudia had swallowed Sigmund Freud whole after escaping Threadneedle Street with squillions stashed away in offshore accounts only moments before the credit crunch hit, and then applied herself to making even more squillions by shrinking people’s minds. Claudia had already earned more money in her short lifetime than my entire family had squandered since we’d been fifth columnists at the Battle of Hastings. (Yes, yes, we Flintlocks are a family with a history.) Plus she looked a lot like Sophia Loren in Two Women. Looks and money…that was our Claudia.

"Cretino, she would comment, tanned, unbitten and naked as she lay beneath the single sheet. And who is gonna paint these walls when we go? Mamma? Poverina. So stop behaving like the child and come to the bed."

Patting at the mattress.

What Claudia wanted was sex, and ordinarily I would have been only too happy to oblige. But not when I was under insect attack! The last thing I needed was to start feeling the earth move only to be distracted by the distant whine of a V-bomber followed ineluctably moments later by a sting in my bottom and concerns about black death and/or plague. That’s why I spent the nights hunting the swine. So they would all be gone and I would be able to perform my partnerly duties in peace. Not that I succeeded, as evinced by the match stats.

I guess I should have been grateful to Claudia for still taking an interest in me at all, given she was so much younger, richer, saner and more beautiful than me, but during these nights of gladatorial combat, gratitude of that kind was pretty far down my agenda. If Claudia thought I was bonkers, well so be it. Once we returned to the Primrose Hill mansion she’d bought from her stock-market whizz-girl bonuses, the je ne sais quoi about me she’d first fallen for—that subtle yet alluring potpourri of downsized academic, plagiarist, failed crime-fiction writer and part-time detective—would no doubt be back on stream big time.

But for another thirty-six hours I had bugs to slaughter.

Two

The morning of our last day in the hell-hole began the same way as all the others. Claudia emerged from her sleep looking languorous, then showered and took cappuccino and biscottini with her mother, Loredana, in the shade of a fig tree out in the garden while I thrashed about in the blood-drenched bed until maybe ten o’clock trying to be asleep but failing.

By the time I arrived in the garden in my Liverpool FC dressing gown, therefore, I was looking peeky as usual, and Loredana—as usual—wrinkled her nose, raised her eyebrows, peered at me as if I were ET, then turned her eyes onto her only daughter, shrugged, and sighed. No need for language. The meaning was clear.

What in the name of all that’s sacred are you doing with this dork? was the meaning.

Not that Loredana dwelt much on the problem of her sole offspring’s love life, because, ever since her vastly wealthy husband, Giorgio, had died a year earlier, she’d devoted most of her time to commuting between the seaside and Rome proper in her red BMW Seven Series partying.

Nonetheless she felt obliged to make her point.

You do not look so well, Jaik, she told me in Italian while firing up her second Marlboro Light since my appearance.

"Bene, bene," I counter-shrugged.

The thing about me and Italian is I can understand quite a lot of it because of speaking French and having overheard so many telephone conversations between Claudia and Loredana down the years. I can even pronounce it quite well, and am pretty spot-on when it comes to body language. Shrugging I’m especially good at. It’s just when I try to say things, I have no idea what they mean. With French I have syntax to support me. With Italian, I don’t.

I wasn’t all that surprised, therefore, in response to my intervention, to hear Claudia say: Pffafff, and Loredana to stub out her Marlboro Light as if it were me. Claudia and Loredana were wealthy women who expected more than phatic platitudes. Like asking them how they were feeling today and commenting on the brightness of the sun and the exquisite smell of the flowers or the texture of the coffee. Italians are a rhetorical people who expect to be able to wring shades of meaning from the tiniest detail and then discuss them at reason-defying lengths—a capacity I shared on neither a linguistic nor an intellectual level.

So, what with one thing and another, the whole when in Rome business wasn’t going down a bundle.

Again.

~ * ~

Anyway, once breakfast was over and Loredana had tired of alluding to my peekiness and turned to more important matters such as a telephone conversation with her newest post-Giorgio Casanova, Claudia dragged me off to the beach down the road with the speed humps designed to make the Lambretta riders slow down.

As if... All the barely clad ragazzi did was treat the humps as ski-jumps and go even faster, causing me to flip them the finger and yell: Slow the fuck down, which did little to endear me to Claudia after yet another moskie-vendetta night and rudeness-to-mother morning. By the time we reached the beach, therefore, Claudia was already cross, and I was sweating for Britain.

Thank Christ this is our last day, I told her as she peeled herself out of her to-the-navel Tee-shirt, applied unguents to all uncovered parts of her fabulous body—which were most parts—adjusted her RayBans and flaked out on her bath towel to add the final touches to her tan.

"Pfaff. Ungrateful bastardo, she grumbled, closing her eyes and digging her heels into the baking sand. Why not you go take the swim?"

To Tangiers maybe and with luck drown on the way.

Don’t think so, darling.

I’d tried swimming off the Tor San Lorenzo spiaggia on the first day of our holiday and sworn it would be the last. I mean, where’s the fun in tippy-toeing yowling across a white hot beach, kicking sand over massive Italian families who scream obscenities at you, and then pelt you with half-masticated salami sandwiches? And when you finally reach the water, find it is foamy brown and clogged with nameless lumpy objects I thought of as condoms or faeces? Even if I liked swimming—which I don’t—I wasn’t intending to grace this corner of the Mediterranean with the Flintlock body under any circumstances ever again.

"Swim?" I therefore replied, peering morosely at my mosquito-ravaged, sun-blistered, six-foot-odd frame.

Sure. The salt will heal the wounds.

There’s salt in there?

Sea has salt.

Not this one.

"Go dive in the water, Cicci, okai? And everything might be fine," she said, turning onto her tummy.

"Might be?"

"Sì."

Despite her enormous success with the stock market and the reshaping of the human mind, English modal verb forms are not Claudia’s strongest suit. Call me pedantic, call me anything you like, but diving into an ocean of poo on the basis of dodgy grammar wasn’t my idea of reassurance. Not at all it wasn’t.

"And if it isn’t?"

Isn’t what?

"Fine. You told me how the Mafia keep this part of the sea dirty so people will go farther up the coast to the clean part Cosa Nostra own and be made to pay more. They’re the ones putting the condoms and poo in there, right?"

Pfaff, Claudia said.

Pfaff had become the linguistic marker of our stay in Italy, its metonym, if you will.

So, if you don’t wanna swim, lie down and enjoy the sun.

"Enjoy the sun? The sun has been burning me to death for two weeks."

But Claudia shut down all her Jake-communication systems and buried her head in the sand, leaving me with little alternative but to extract yet again from my satchel the factor eight-thousand-and-forty-seven-anti-skin-cancer cream, daub it all over my ravished body, apply my triangular white plastic German-invented nose protector, and then lie down under the family parasol and writhe.

~ * ~

The writhing went on until around midday, which was when Claudia sprang up from her towel, checked out her top-of-the-range iPhone, said: Omigod, is this the time? and told me to get my blades on—she meant skates but I let the lexical slippage slide—because Loredana was holding a surprise farewell luncheon party for us back at the villa and we mustn’t be late.

"Party?" I said. I’m not much of a party animal.

"Sì. All the famiglia will be there so you gotta behave," she said, stuffing things into bags and flicking at her wonderful Sophia Loren-type hair.

In Italy the famiglia comes second only to God when it comes to duty, sometimes first. Claudia’s like putty in their hands, which I find irritating given the way she manipulates me.

Come on, Jakie. Hurry.

I don’t like being called Jakie, but lost the argument years ago on the grounds that Claudia could call me anything she wanted, seeing as she owned the mansion I lived in.

"If it’s supposed to be a surprise party, how come you know about it?" I nevertheless grumbled as a couple of shoulder blisters popped.

Mamma, she tell me, Claudia shrugged. Now get off the arse.

And so it was that we made our way back to the homestead, Claudia practically sprinting while I loped along behind shouting Anglo-Saxon oaths at the Lambretta youths and dodging the snakes, lizards, geckos, and other nameless reptiles that slithered out of their path and into mine. By the time we arrived, I was in no fit state to speak to anybody. Always assuming I could have—which, because of my Italian syntax deficiencies, I couldn’t.

Oblivious to my discomfort, however, once we’d made it through the villa’s gate, Claudia dragged me straight toward the massed ranks of her at least forty-fold famiglia who’d turned up for the party during our absence in their flashy cars and were strutting about the garden jabbering in MSPMI (Million Syllables Per Minute Italian) and gesticulating at each other, while hordes of their offspring emulated their parents’ verbosity as they raced around the villa’s pathways on their baby-Lambrettas, discussing this and discussing that as they crashed into each other.

My understanding of conversation is that one person speaks while another person listens; then the other person says something back while the first person listens until he or she decides to make a further point...and so on. Quietly. Sequentially. But this isn’t the Italian idea of conversation. In Italy everybody shouts at the same time and nobody listens, which, in my view, is the reason for the country having had sixty-two governments in the past sixty-three years.

Probably better if I freshened up first, darling, I therefore hissed at Claudia, gazing at the assembled rabble. Pretty stinky what with one thing and another, I added, sniffing at an armpit. Shower’d do me good, I reckon.

"Pppffffaaaafff," Claudia counter-hissed with one side of her mouth while smiling obsequiously at her rellies with the other, which was both bad and good.

Bad because I don’t like being counter-hissed at, but also good, because, seeing her, the squabbling mob then ran across shouting: "CIAO BELLA!" and clutching her to their bosoms while pecking at her cheeks. Pretty soon she was engulfed and I was delivered the perfect opportunity to sidle off to the bathroom.

~ * ~

I spent the better part of the following half hour standing under what in principle should have been cold water, seeing as I’d operated the shower’s blue tap…but, given the merciless sun in this part of the world, cold meant at best tepid.

Bugger, I therefore said, as brown water dribbled over my lobster body.

If anything, by the time I quit the shower, I was sweatier than when I’d first stepped into it. A naked, utterly unfreshened-up Flintlock still facing the prospect of a party he didn’t want to go to in the first place.

Bugger, I said again.

But we Flintlocks aren’t ones to baulk at a challenge, vide our long and valiant history. Okay, so up and at ’em, I therefore muttered before larding myself with mosquito repellent, donning my Union flag shorts beneath a Liverpool FC shirt, and returning to the garden bravely to join the multitude.

I’d taken no more than a couple of steps across the parched brown grass when there came this spitting of my name from beneath the fig tree. Puzzled, I turned, cocked an ear, and there was Claudia, wincing and finger-hooking me over for a word in my ear.

Words in Jake’s ear are never promising.

"You cannot go to the party dressed like that," she said.

Why not?

Claudia looked as if she might be having some sort of a fit as she gestured at her kinfolk all gathered around a laden trestle table stuffing themselves and were, I now noticed, mainly decked out in Gucci and Armani—even the brats—and encrusted with enough jewellery to make a rap star jealous.

I also noticed that, while I’d been off showering, Claudia too must have left the party for a quick change of outfit, seeing as she was now wearing the nifty black Alberta Ferretti number she’d bought on one of our days out in Rome. Plus some kind of glittery necklace.

"I buy you the nice Issey Miyake shirt and trousers and you not put them on for this occasion to your honour?" she hissed.

Um, I frowned. Bit hot for trousers, darling. Thought p’raps shorts and...

"The football shirt? Holy mother of Christ and all His angels! Claudia mega-hissed. You are looking for trouble or what is this?"

It’s the latest look, actually, darling. People tell me it’s fashionable. Especially, I said, turning to show her the shirt’s back emblasoned with the legend FLINTLOCK above the number 10. With the name and...

"Moron," Claudia said, performing little pogo-sticky springs which worried me she might headbutt a fig-tree branch and knock herself out.

But then her taste-guru image was shattered by members of her family noticing me, clapping, and shouting: "JAIK! COME STAI, BELLO?"

Since James Bond, The Beatles, Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana, middle-aged Italians had become—mind-bogglingly, in my view, but nonetheless—besotted with Englishness. I knew this because Claudia admitted as much when she first came to London and fell in love with me.

So, ignoring her and playing the Cool Britannia card to my best advantage, I strolled over to a trestle table groaning under the weight of spaghetti with meatballs, and prodded at one raffishly. It was unfortunate my mosquito-repellent cream should have been catalysed by the sunlight to give off a greenish haze and an unpleasant smell, but the famiglia were polite enough not to comment. Just coughed and wafted hands at their noses as I took my seat.

And, to Claudia’s chagrin, there was hardly any carping at the dress code I’d adopted, guests sufficiently in awe of my status as Queen’s subject, I reckoned, to keep their mouths shut. Probably wondering how they could achieve such degrees of sang froid.

~ * ~

We’d moved through the meatballs-with-pasta and were onto the main course—a monster fish ferried in from Anzio that very morning, I was told excitedly—when some serious backfiring started up in the street outside. Not that anybody paid any attention as the famiglia held out their plates for helpings of whatever the monster fish might be—shark possibly. Given the plague of Lambrettas, backfiring happened around Tor San Lorenzo all the time.

It was only when the wah, wah, wahing of the cop-car sirens finally drowned out the fish interest around the table that guests began to realise something might be radically amiss.

Three

It was the ring at the doorbell that brought the luncheon to a halt.

I say ring. The sound more closely resembled a pale imitation of the boing Charles Atlas made when whacking his outsize gong at the start of the Rank Organisation films. The effect was produced by pressing a bell at the villa’s entrance, which jerked a rope, which in its turn unleashed a hammer onto a cloche if your luck was in.

That’s how I thought of it anyway. The device’s only concession to modernity was it had at some stage in its career been electrified.

"Anybody home? Carabinieri!" a voice shouted once the tintinnabulation had ceased.

"Mamma mia," a number of the Gucci- and Armani-clad famiglia around the trestle table ululated through mouths crammed with shark remnants. It seemed to me several were secreting things in their doe-skin briefcases as they gagged, but I could have been wrong about that.

"E allora? Non c’è problema," Loredana shrugged, before slinging down her napkin and stomping off to the front door.

Mind you, by the time she returned, maybe five minutes later, even she was looking as wan as a rich, tanned, Italian woman in her second coming could look. So wan—as my uncle Albert would have spluttered in mirth during his short stand-up comedy career on Liverpool’s pub circuit—she was almost two.

"Dio mio," she muttered, grabbing Claudia by a wrist as she headed in my direction while brats were dragged from the trestle by their parents, the lot of them then lurking off to merge with foliage in the farther reaches of the garden. Fathers whipping out cellphones, punching in numbers, peering about and whispering hard.

And then there was my cometh-the-hour-cometh-the-man moment. A Flintlock who’d spent the whole of the last two weeks the butt of ridicule and insect onslaught suddenly thrust into the limelight to confront what was to turn out to be a nasty case of murder.

Any port in a storm.

~ * ~

"Tell Jaik to tell the carabinieri he is an international detective, Loredana hissed at her daughter in MSPMI, hoping I wouldn’t understand a word of it. And, if he can’t, you tell them. That he will take charge, no? Better even him than the idiot police."

But Loredana hadn’t counted on the powers of my passive Italian gleaned from all those years of overheard telephone conversations. And so it was, before Claudia could open her mouth to reveal this plot, I made my preemptive strike.

"No. Nuh-uh, no way," I said, waggling an index finger about in front of my nose for extra emphasis just in case my words hadn’t hit the mark.

"Ma sì, Loredana insisted. Now is the time for you to make yourself useful around here, Jaik."

The question of Jake’s usefulness had been the subject of tortured debate back in London ever since the first impact of my je ne sais quoi moment on Claudia all those years ago wore off. The most recent assessment was I was a waste of space. No money at all from the failed crime fiction. A pittance of an income from the plagiarism, and as for the international detection, well, that was just an excuse for me and my PI partner, Dr. Bum Park, to bunk off on foreign holidays and flirt with exotic women. Plus why, seeing as we were supposed to have solved all these cases in other European countries—which we had—couldn’t I write them out in books and make big bucks in Hollywood? Eh, Jakie, eh?

But that wasn’t the story Claudia told Loredana over the years. You know how it is with daughters. How they want their mothers to think their boyfriends aren’t total oiks. So it was that she’d edited out all reference to my failures and hyped the international detective narrative, such that Loredana now believed it to be true.

Ironic, eh?

Anyway, that’s why the lady wasn’t taking no for an answer and, in spite of my protestations, grasped me by a slippery, mosquito-repellent, greenish arm and led me off into the street to witness the bloody remains of a beach trinket seller who looked as if he’d been mown down by a goodfella in Chicago.

~ * ~

"The signore is a famous English detective. He will find the killers, Loredana began explaining to the blue boys sprawled on the bonnets of their Alfa Romeos smoking cigarettes. Tell them, Claudia."

"È vero," Claudia muttered with more reluctance than I felt strictly necessary. Then, swallowing hard—and more to add credence to the stories she’d told her mother than for any other reason, I reckoned—she added stuff about my international credentials.

Not, to my relief, that the cops looked impressed. Just went on puffing at their Nazionale ciggies and wincing at my attire. Two sniggered behind their hands, while a third stared at my Liverpool shirt, cleared his throat, and then spat fulsomely onto the sandy road. Liverpool FC not popular in Rome and environs.

The African was a mess though, no question about it. So was his buckled bicycle, one of those sit-up-and-beg jobs I’d ridden as a kid before mountain bikes were invented. He was lying in a pool of blood beneath its twisted frame, and all his trinkets were spilling out of the handlebar basket onto which a severed hand was still clutching. We’d seen him that very morning on the beach attempting to offload scarves, paste jewelry and other knicknacks onto the massive Italian families who’d either stared right through him, or told him to piss off.

What happened to these people was they made their way from North Africa to Sicily, where they got their passports ripped off on the promise of Italian replacements when they’d sold enough trinkets. Only they never sold enough trinkets, so they became stateless and available for even less pleasant employment. Now there were the Albanians and ex-Yugoslavs to add to the list. And Italians were getting restless, hence the increased support for post-Mussolini political parties.

"Allora? Ecco? I told the unimpressed coppers, employing words I thought of as meaning: So what?" Raising my palms to the burning sky, scrunching my shoulders, rolling my eyes, and making it as clear as I could this was none of my business. I told you how proficient I was at Italian body language.

You will take the case, no? Claudia whispered in my ear, evidently keen to see my in-her-view-fake powers of detection put to the test.

But I paid her no attention. This was a case I wanted nothing to do with, and was quite sure Bum wouldn’t either. And mercifully, the carabinieri were right behind me on the issue.

"Thank you for your concern, signore," said a pompous person with pinned to his chest a gold badge bearing the legend Capitano Aurelio something-or-another—Frascati possibly—as he elbowed his way through his tittering companions. However, in Italy, we do not wash our dirty linen in public, so your assistance will not be required.

"Bene, bene. Bravo, bravo," I said, clapping him on his crimson-tassel epauletted shoulder and making to head off back into the villa.

But Loredana wasn’t buying that.

Now, listen up here, you excuse for rat’s piss, she told the capitano. This almost son-in-law of mine is an international crime-solver and I think he should be on this case immediately. You know who I am?

"Sì, signora."

I got the feeling the capitano knew only too well who Loredano was. After all, Giorgio had been a prominent man in the region and men don’t become prominent in Italy without connections, recommendations, bungs, and other even less subtle forms of personal advancement. I just hoped whatever nefarious connections he’d had with Giorgio wouldn’t persuade the policeman I should indeed try to find out who’d killed the African, because the last thing I needed right now was to be stuck for any longer in Tor San Lorenzo with its mosquitoes and blasting sun, investigating what looked to me a lot like a Mafia hit. All I cared about was the plane back to Blighty the following morning.

However, this was Italy and nothing was going to be resolved quickly or without discussion.

While Loredana and the capitano were locked in heated debate, locals began to throng about peering at the corpse and arguing with each other over potential causes of death, the nature and expected time of rigor mortis, the appalling immigration overload Italy was currently experiencing and who was to blame for it. Plus the need for a thunderstorm soon or they would all bake to death. Plus who was and was not on AS Roma’s transfer list this summer.

Pretty soon I was struggling for survival in the midst of a yet another jabbering mêlée.

When brought to order with difficulty by Capitano Aurelio and then canvassed about my role in the investigation, however, no more than two percent of those asked to raise their hands deemed it sensible to tender the case to a Liverpool FC supporter giving off green fumes, never mind how hard Loredana tried to persuade them of my sleuthy acumen.

I rewarded this response with a cleverly crafted loony leer, a happy thumbs-up, and a cheerful wave, which earned me a jab in the ribs from Claudia and a lot of hissing in my ear about wimpishness. Nonetheless, I kept my attention focused on the matter in hand.

Aurelio, after dusting off his medals, puffing out his chest and inviting his underlings to douse their Nazionales and unclip their Beretta holsters, was now launching into round two of the vote.

"And who amongst you good citizens of Tor San Lorenzo, he said in stentorian tones, would prefer me to take charge of the investigation into this poor man’s death on the holy soil of our nation? The choice is yours. This Englishman, he snorted, or a son of our beloved Italy, a poor Roman risen through the ranks to his current honourable position, a man of his country who..."

Well, what with the rhetoric and the Berettas, that did it for the good citizens whose nationalistic fervour—rightly in my view—led them to chant: "AURELIO, AURELIO, CAPITANO, CAPITANO," raise their hands in the air—many of them employing two hands as is the custom in Italian plebiscites—and whoop their support for his leadership.

I let out a long relieved breath, clapped to show fraternity for this demonstration of local democracy, waved some more, and then began elbowing my way back through the crowd to the relative safety of the villa. Patting locals on their backs as I went, receiving condolences from them, being told that was just the way things were around here, always had been, so no hard feelings. Some of them even told