Requiem in La Rossa

Book 3: Daniel Leicester

by Tom Benjamin

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Private Investigators

Synopsis

'Devoured it. Great characters and brilliant use of the history and architecture of Bologna. His best yet' Trevor Wood

In the sweltering heat of a Bologna summer, a murderer plans their pièce de résistance...

Only in Bologna reads the headline in the Carlino after a professor of music is apparently murdered leaving the opera. But what looks like an open-and-shut case begins to fall apart when English detective Daniel Leicester is tasked with getting the accused man off, and a trail that begins among Bologna's close-knit classical music community leads him to suspect there may be a serial killer at large in the oldest university in the world. And as Bologna trembles with aftershocks following a recent earthquake, the city begins to give up her secrets...

Praise for Requiem in La Rossa

'I absolutely loved this book. Bologna is perfectly captured, the crime plot is fresh and intriguing, and the characterisation remains spot on. I found myself totally immersed and swept through this stunner of a story in 24 hours. Highly, highly recommend' Philippa East

'An atmospheric, intelligent crime novel that is an intricate portrait of the heart of Bologna. Beautiful, gripping, and very clever' Victoria Dowd

'A brilliant, involving crime novel' Louise Hare

'Clever and beautifully written... his best yet' Louise Fein

Praise for Tom Benjamin

'The locale is brought to life . . . the plot keeps you guessing' The Times

'A slow-burning, tense and brooding thriller' The Herald Scotland

'Tom Benjamin's debut novel blows the lid off a political cauldron in which Leftist agitators, property moguls, the police and city elders struggle for survival and dominance' Daily Mail

'It's an immensely promising debut, which leaves the reader feeling they really know the city.' Morning Star
'Another great crime novel set in Bologna' Reader Review

'The mystery smolders away nicely and the wrap-up throws some curve balls. Another indulgent offering in this rewarding series.' Reader Review

Release date: November 4, 2021

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 352

Sample

‘ONLY IN BOLOGNA’ yelled the headline in the Carlino. It certainly seemed extraordinary for a respected university professor stepping out of the opera house on a balmy July night arm-in-arm with his wife to meet his death at the hands of one of the drug addicts who habitually shared the portico with concert-goers. But this was Bologna, and ‘only’ in Bologna, famous for reconciling the irreconcilable – Luxembourgish wealth and red politics, meat-rich cuisine and ethical dining, cultural highs with the very visible degradations of the heroin trade around Piazza Verdi – could an incident like this occur, according to the Carlino, at any rate, the tabloid’s outrage-dial set to max.

I lowered the newspaper and watched my dog make his way methodically up the gravel path that led through the woods towards the church of San Michele in Bosco, moving between the trashcans like the Stations of the Cross, even though he and me both knew it was an act – woolly-haired, chocolate-coloured Lagotto Romagnolo, Rufus, an Italian breed prized for its truffle-hunting abilities, had no discernible sense of smell and was simply imitating the behaviour of other canines. Rufus may not have been able to sniff out prized fungi, but he damn well knew how to fake it.

Although there was currently no need for play-acting – it was barely seven in the morning and we were alone save for the saw of the cicadas and the heat that had settled like a blanket across the city and only been partly kicked away during the night. Inside what remained of its walls, Bologna’s red brick was still warm to the touch, and as the sun continued its daily passage, an acrid edge would begin to emanate from the old buildings until, around dusk, it would seem like the only thing missing from the sighing streets was floating ash. But for the moment, following Rufus into the woods among the rosemary, mint and sage that had run wild since generations of monks had cultivated this hillside, I enjoyed the kind of fragrance people came to Italy on holiday for.

Magari, I said to myself – I wish. Lovely though it may have been, my Italy was not up here among the summer herbs, it was down there in the smouldering city.

At least, most mornings.

We emerged, the pair of us panting, onto the bare hillside beneath the ancient, rose bulk of San Michele, with Bologna, La Rossa, laid out below – a view that, were it not for the tubular, cream Kenzo Towers on the horizon marking the Fiera district, had remained unchanged in half a millennia.

I sat on the first bench along. I liked to picture myself as one of those old monks when I came up here, perhaps taking a pause from tending the vines they had once cultivated on this hillside, the mineral-rich soil of Emilia beneath my fingernails. But this morning, for all my proximity to history, the past felt hopelessly out of reach.

I took a swig of mineral water before removing Rufus’s bowl from my daughter Rose’s multi-coloured Fedez rucksack, which had now been handed down to the dog, and filling it up. Despite his summer haircut, Rufus fell upon the bowl as if it were a sparkling pool in an oasis. I checked my watch then produced my phone, initiating the appropriate app. As if on cue, I heard a dog barking, watched it race excitedly past.

Rufus raised his head from the bowl, his woolly jowls dripping, before turning uncannily human eyes upon me. ‘No,’ I said.

There was barking from the other side of the path. Sure enough, the first dog – a kind of fluffy, fawn-coloured Corgi breed – had met its playmate, a puppyish-looking German Shepherd. Together, they tore down the hill, then back up again.

Rufus gave me another look. ‘Go on, then.’ He went after them, creating a proper doggy posse. Meanwhile, the Corgi’s owner, a sandy-haired woman with the lingering whiff of a little too much perfume, crossed to meet the German Shepherd’s – a handsome, fit-looking older fellow free of any hint of grey – stood at a bench dead centre of the hill. They engaged in a prolonged, passionate kiss, before lowering down and continuing their embrace, more intensely, I had to say, than usual, but then this was probably buona vacanza. Although Pasquale Grande would be working in Bologna right up until August, Laura Guerrera had no option but to take the children to her late mother’s old house in the countryside near La Spezia in case her husband became suspicious. In a sense, I was happy my firm, Faidate Investigations, had been hired by Pasquale’s wife to spy on them rather than Laura’s husband, because I could see that although both, I supposed, were equally guilty of adultery, Laura had a lot more to lose. And while, as far as we knew, Laura had never strayed before, Pasquale had form. I vaguely hoped our client, Signora Grande, would keep Laura Guerrera out of it, but in any case, that was neither my problem nor responsibility. Harsh? Perhaps, but we all had to earn a living, even the dog here.

‘Rufus!’ By now all three were circling the lovers’ bench like Apache in a Wild West movie, but Pasquale and Laura were oblivious. It was almost touching to see the middle-aged couple snog like teenagers, and really, I had enough material already, but for the absence of any doubt, I repeated: ‘Stop that, and come here, right now.’ Of course, I meant the dog, but the couple broke their clinch and looked up at me, again like teenagers – this time caught in the act. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said as Rufus came obediently to heel. ‘He’s always doing that.’

The sound of cicadas promptly ceased as if the insect army had paused to observe our exchange.

‘No problem,’ said Pasquale.

‘Well,’ I attached the dog’s lead. ‘I’ll be off.’ Pasquale gave me the wary nod of someone who was going to watch my every step until I was out of sight, when it happened.

It sounded like a gush of wind, but the trees remained perfectly still, the air dead, leaden even, with the gathering heat. The German Shepherd began to whine, Rufus pressed himself against me, but the sound kept building, seemingly rolling up from the red city through the very ground itself.

Of thousands of buildings, millions of roof tiles, shaking.

The ground shuddered. The chatter of the bench – Pasquale and Laura instinctively grabbed hold of it – a child’s scream from the foot of the hill.

The tremor stopped.

A moment of absolute silence, probably imagined, before a cacophony of car alarms. The sky, I realised, was crazy with birds. A dropping hit my shoulder, the bench, the bare ground around it.

‘Aftershock,’ said Pasquale. He looked at Laura. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

‘I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to them,’ I said.

The couple looked up at me as if to ask what I was still doing there. And they had a point – more than they could have conceivably imagined.

Rufus and I began to make our way down the hill. My phone rang. I was surprised – my girlfriend calling me this early in the morning. Stella Amore worked late and slept late.

‘Is everything okay?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and no. In short – I’m trapped.’

It had turned into a summer of tremors in the wake of ‘the big one’ that had struck the area around Modena, fifty kilometres northwest of Bologna, earlier that July, and which had caused some serious damage at its epicentre, including a dozen or so fatalities when a factory roof had collapsed. Since then, Bologna had rarely passed a day without experiencing an aftershock, and what at the beginning had filled the streets and parks with hastily dressed Bolognese afraid to return home, now received about as much attention as a clap of thunder. Unless the ladder you were scaling slipped in the process and sent you flying, which was as much sense as I could get out of Stella Amore. I dropped Rufus at home and set off across the city for Via San Felice.

By the time I got there, the sun had risen sufficiently to banish that early morning cool and cast a sultry shadow even along the porticoes, percolating a layer of perspiration through my clothing and settling upon my brow like a fever.

The portico opened into a more ample colonnade outside Stella’s place – a smart black door sandwiched between an upmarket florist and perfumery. Hers was the middle bell, although it wasn’t her name, but Lame, on the buzzer.

‘Chi è?’ It was Stella’s landlady, or ‘patron’, as she preferred to call her, Chiara.

‘It’s Daniel, Dan.’

‘Oh, yes, yes. Come right up, come!’ The door buzzed, once, twice, was still buzzing as I walked along the dim, cave-cold corridor and ascended the broad stone staircase.

Barking. Shuffling feet. Four drawn bolts, and, eccola, Signora Chiara Lame, instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the Bolognese art-scene, as I – since I’d begun dating Stella – had become. In the winter, Chiara would materialise at openings in a silver fox fur coat and matching trainers, with perhaps a frilly flared skirt beneath – a striking ensemble for any woman, but especially a lady in her seventies. Now, in a pillar-box red sari, she greeted me, her French bulldogs Jules and Jim snuffling around my ankles

‘Thank goodness!’ she said. ‘Stella’s down there!’

‘Down where?’ But Chiara had already turned away. I followed her through a room that might have escaped renovation for two centuries, from the busy mosaic of its stone Veneziana floor to the Napoleonic-era frescoes, onto a windowed corridor running beside a series of similar rooms in the gallery-style typical of old palazzi. The rooms were crammed with furniture, their walls crowded with tar-dark ancestral paintings; sofas, chairs and tables piled with the precious (crockery, glass and silverware) and pointless (coils of string and ribbon, broken picture frames, shopping bags sprouting dusty old desk lamps or dead pot plants).

Stella was in the final room – or rather, beneath it: beside an assemblage of cane chairs, a stack of books, a corroded mirror and a box of yellowed photos, an old iron-strapped chest had been pushed aside to expose a square, pitch-black hole radiating coldness. Chiara nodded warily.

‘She’s down there?’ I leaned over. ‘Stella?’

‘Hey,’ came a plaintive voice.

‘What—’ I took out my phone, switched on the light. Stella Amore looked up at me as pale as a prisoner, but otherwise apparently unperturbed. Dressed in her habitual black T-shirt and jeans, she was sat cross-legged about three metres below with a snapped wooden ladder across her legs, seemingly in the process of trying to lash it back together with some old curtain cord.

‘It broke.’

I leaned further into the hole and swung my phone around. I could vaguely make out dim shapes in the darkness.

‘What is this place?’

‘It’s …’ She glanced at Chiara behind me. ‘First things first – can you help get me out?’

I found a chair that seemed solid enough and lowered it through the hole. Stella climbed onto the seat then raised a foot onto its back. I grabbed hold of her arms and pulled. We fell back into the room like a pair of landed fish.

‘Bravo!’ Chiara clapped while Jules and Jim barked their appreciation. Stella and I got to our feet and pushed the chest back over the hole.

We declined an offer of coffee from Chiara, who wandered off chatting to her dogs, and I followed Stella back down the corridor towards the entrance. She swept open a gold velvet curtain that opened up to a huge room with four large windows looking onto a closed courtyard. The space had once served as a ballroom. It was now Stella’s studio-cum-living space.

‘It was for the exhibition.’ She meant where I’d found her. It was quite a big deal – her inclusion in the Comune-sponsored ‘multi-media event’ 500 Anni di Resistenza, ‘500 Years of Resistance’, opening in a few days’ time, where she was recreating a series of ‘hidden spaces’.

‘Your lucky day?’ She meant the bird shit crusted on my shoulder. I stripped off my shirt and went to a basin crudely plumbed into a concoction of pipes excavated from the plaster, part of a kitchen knocked together by her artisan friends with a bare wood work surface, a small fridge and an old electric hob.

‘What’s this?’ She held up a booklet that must have fallen from my back pocket snappily entitled: Concessione della cittadinanza italiana per residenza sul territorio italiano ai sensi dell’art. 9 della legge n. 91 del 5/02/1992

‘Oh, Rose picked it up from the Comune. She’s always badgering me about getting Italian citizenship, but take a look – it’s a hell of a faff.’

‘You wouldn’t expect it to be easy.’ Stella flicked through it. ‘Demonstrating you can navigate the bureaucracy is a rite of passage. So they’re finally going to kick you out, then, for being extracomunitario?’ She used the term commonly employed for anyone outside the EU, but which had become a pejorative for illegal immigrant.

‘Apparently that’s what she’s afraid of, but I keep explaining that since I settled here long before Brexit, there’ll no getting rid of me.’

‘Won’t it be good, though, to get another passport? I mean, one that lets you travel in the rest of Europe.’

I smiled. ‘I think the British one probably still works for that.’

‘What I mean is – live, work in these other places.’

‘I’m not planning on going anywhere.’ I began to run the tap, heard her pull off her clothes. She came to stand naked beside me and turned on the shower – basically a pipe sticking out of the wall, curtained by transparent plastic sheeting. She stepped in. After I had wrung out my shirt, I went to join her.

‘You heard about that prof killed coming out of the opera?’ Stella returned to bed having closed the shutters against the sun and nestled beneath the crook of my arm.

‘It was in today’s paper.’

She lifted a leg over mine. My daughter’s art tutor, we had been ‘together’ for a little over six months, although what that meant in practice I wasn’t quite sure. I was in my mid-forties, Stella in her mid-thirties, but our relationship seemed to combine domestic intimacy with the open-endedness of a pair of twenty-something Interrailers.

Stella was svelte yet unapologetically visceral. Her forearms – one tattooed with a faded Chinese dragon – ended in fine-fingered hands which ended in broken nails painted absinthe-green. Her long legs were scratched and scabbed from hiking in the countryside, bruised from the physical labour involved in preparing her show.

When I had been in my twenties, Stella Amore would have been precisely the type of woman I fantasised being with. Instead, I had met my late wife, Lucia, who had kept me on the straight and narrow and, in the process, almost certainly saved me from… myself. Now I was all grown-up, I wondered if Lucia had done her work rather too well: looking down through Stella’s mass of damp, shiny black curls to her prominent Roman nose, those chestnut brown, Sophia Loren eyes, I had the feeling of being vertiginously out of place.

Out of my depth?

Another tremor. The bed rattled, then stopped, but the chandelier continued to sway above us.

We shifted closer, staring it down until its lazy arc came to a halt. ‘Vesuvio,’ announced Stella. ‘You know …’

‘Your ex.’

‘He was at La Luna.’

‘He’s always at the osteria, haven’t you noticed? Since you took the late shift, he sees more of you than I do.’

‘He wanted to know if you could look into it for him.’

‘Into what, precisely?’

‘Apparently the guy who’s been arrested for killing this prof is a friend of his.’

‘A thief?’

‘I don’t know anything about that. But he was cut up about it. He wants to see if there’s anything he can do.’

‘Rich people think throwing money at a problem can solve anything. He would be better off hiring a decent lawyer.’

Now Stella pulled herself on top of me. Her hair tumbled forward to enclose our faces. The tips of our noses touched.

‘You’re sure you’re not jealous?’ She rubbed her nose against mine. ‘Not just a bit? I like a little jealousy in a lover. A touch of hot, Latin blood. It means,’ she flattened her palm against my chest, ‘there’s a sign of life.’

‘I’ve heard it said my Anglo-Saxon veins run with ice water.’

‘Really?’ She began to reach further down. ‘Well now …’ Her gaze softened. ‘Perhaps you’re not as English as you think.’

Displaying characteristic modesty, Vesuvio had taken his name from the volcano that dominated Naples, the city of his birth. In Bologna, however, he maintained a lower profile. The address Stella had given me for his studio was in a relatively unprepossessing part of the city, actually not far from our office in Via Marconi – across the rather shabby, nondescript park September 11, 2001, among brick-built former light industrial units. You would also find MAMBO out here, Bologna’s Museum for Modern Art, as well as university student residences and a weekend farmers’ market.

I’d walked past ‘Studio Fontanelle’ twice before I noticed it – a single buzzer beside a typically graffiti-riddled door.

Vesuvio answered the intercom, his smoky rasp immediately recognisable as one of the regular X-Factor judges – the rocker who had been someone to the previous generation and wanted to resurrect his career with the next although, judging by my daughter Rose’s reaction, he hadn’t much hope of that.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you in the courtyard.’ The door clicked open and I entered a small reception area. Through a further set of smoked-glass doors I could see a stone-paved open space – what had once, presumably, been the factory loading bay – where a pair of black Range Rover SUVs were being packed with equipment cases by roadies.

‘Daniel.’ Vesuvio was dressed in torn black jeans and a Clash, London Calling T-shirt, with a silver key chain fashionably drooping from his pockets. His jet black hair was tied back and perfectly matched his black goatee, bordered by a couple of days’ growth of grey bristles. He stood there as if I should have given him a round of applause or at the very least a hug just for being Vesuvio. Instead, I held out my hand. He looked a little crestfallen.

‘Come through,’ he said.

I followed him into the recording studio where he sat himself down on a high-backed ergonomic chair in front of an enormous slab of a mixing desk dusted with cigarette ash, presumably from long nights laying down tracks. He gestured for me to take the other chair.

I swivelled to face him, experiencing a sprinkle, albeit ever so slight, of stardust, despite myself. And possibly despite himself, Vesuvio appeared a little discomfited – good. I didn’t want to waste my time on celebrity bullshit, and we weren’t at an art opening where I might feel obliged to make an effort on behalf of my girlfriend. In truth, I could have done without being there, full stop, but I hadn’t wanted to seem too sensitive about her ex, and neither could I afford to simply turn down the work, quite frankly. But as far as I was concerned, if we were going to do business, it would be English-style.

‘You felt them, the tremors?’ Vesuvio asked tentatively.

‘Hard to ignore.’

‘La Rossa’s especially restless this morning. You never get them in England?’ I shook my head. ‘Such a placid country.’ He smiled as if recalling happier times.

The door opened. A woman – slim, blonde, with a serpent tattoo emerging from the top of her tight white T-shirt – stood with her hands on her hips.

‘Last chance,’ she said in American-accented English.

‘Excuse me.’ Vesuvio got up and went over, tried to take her in his arms but she wasn’t having it.

‘Fine!’ She stalked out, slamming the door.

‘Elvira’s a little pissed.’ Vesuvio sat back down. ‘They don’t have too many earthquakes in Holland, either.’

I scrolled to the story on my phone. ‘Stella said you want us to look into the … individual who has been arrested for involvement in the death of Professor …’

‘Bellario. I actually knew the guy, by sight – he’d just started teaching when I was in my final year at the conservatory, although by the looks of things he’s moved on since then – I read he’d become head of musicology at the university.’

‘Musicology,’ I said. ‘Sounds … theoretical.’ Vesuvio nodded.

‘The joke used to be that those who can’t make a living with their music, teach. Those who can’t teach music, teach musicology. But I’m sure there’s more to it than that.’

‘What makes you think we can help your friend … I’m sorry, I don’t know his name.’

‘Guido. Guido Delfillo.’ He winced. ‘It’s a terrible thing …’

‘What is?’

‘That boy – he had such a gift. A multi-instrumentalist, he could make any instrument sing – you name it.’

‘And you worked with him.’

‘He was a session musician, and he came on tours. He wasn’t cheap, either – I once got in a bidding war with Luca Carboni …’

‘So how, then, do you think this came about? From hitting the stage with “Vesuvio” to mugging this prof outside the Teatro Comunale?’

Vesuvio looked at his hands. ‘That’s what I want you to find out.’

‘They mentioned drugs,’ I said. ‘Was that always a problem for him?’

Vesuvio shrugged. ‘Drugs … I mean, in our business … but …’

‘What?’

‘He was a nice kid, but you could tell, even when he was working with us – he should have been on the top of the world, but there was always this tristezza … sadness. Try and have a conversation? Don’t bother! I asked one of the guys about the kid, like “what the fuck”? But no one could say.’

‘Maybe he was an addict all along,’ I said. ‘Maybe he was harbouring this problem, trying to keep a lid on it.’

‘He seemed the sober sort. Literally: didn’t smoke, rarely even drank. No one said a word, there were no “whisper. . .