Chapter 34 - A Killer in the Crowd

Image copyright Joao Gilas from Unsplash

The scene unfolding before Gary might well have belonged to a horror flick courtesy of Cinecittà.  Gary starred the role of handicapped superhero, unable to fly to the rescue. As he willed his aching foot into doing its job, time slowed to a ponderous trickle, the passing of every second accompanied by the thump, thump of a dying heart.

Here was Brigitte, pale face upturned towards the broken lumps of rocky arch tumbling from the tempestuous skies over Rome Even a somersault would not save her from their crushing weight of the Roman archway—

Hang on. How lethal was fibreglass?

Dreamtime snapped back to the present.

The heartbeat became thunder, the booing hiss of an invisible audience turned out to be rainfall flooding the paved road.

Brigitte swung her arm and aimed an overfull handbag at the nearest clump headed her way. Burgundy calf leather, bulging with unknown objects stuffed inside, connected with a solid thump, the piece of arch veered off track and landed in the straggly weeds covering a carter's workshop.

Batsmanship completed, Brigitte didn't wait for more debris to land, pirouetted aside and staggered towards the curb. Behind her,  the rest of the construction came down in a series of hollow bangs.

"Yay," said Jon. "Would be cool to have her in the school volleyball team."

"You'd need handbags instead of balls. So uncool." Gary had always wondered why women insisted on lugging around the kitchen sink.

ow he knew. Their bags were lethal weapons.

Still feeling jittery with shock, he turned up the collar of his jacket against the driving rain and picked his way past the puddles and the chunks of fake Roman arch littering the street.

"You okay?"

"This place me fait chier!"

"It makes you sneeze?"

"It drives me mad! Nothing is as it seems and what is there is broken."

Gary stretched out his hand, and Brigitte took it. "Well, be grateful for that. Otherwise, you wouldn't have been able to do your home run. Now, let's get back under that roof before we both catch pneumonia."

They hobbled (Gary), dashed (Brigitte) back towards the dubious shelter of the leaky shed. Not a minute too early—the heavens opened in earnest and sheets of rain hissed onto the cobbles, dancing and twisting as if directed by a puppeteer sneering above.

They found Jon and Boris snuggled into the mouldy safety of a broken sedan chair, straw leaking from the cushions. All around them, water plopped from the roof, dripping onto damaged statues, tools and building debris.

"Should be over any minute," Jon said, looking up from his weather app, grinning.

Brigitte leaned against a winged horse but jumped away when it tilted to one side. She knocked on its flank. "Not even fibreglass. Paper-mache. Me, I think, I will develop a persecution complex."

Gary found a dry spot close to a wooden pillar and shifted his weight from his foot to his crutches. "Because of what happened? I don't think it was sabotage this time. Just bad luck. And bad weather. The stunt with that statue is different. As nice as those shots are, I still haven't worked out whether Ike is at the centre of these attacks or if somebody has it in for LiteraTours. There's something we're still missing. And you can shoot me if it isn't related to those senior citizens who arrived at the statue before our lot came."

Brigitte huffed and went on a fishing expedition into the hidden depths of her handbag. "The pictures that Jeff person took did not show us anything new. We knew about the man in the hedge. I got my own photo of the little cretin. Or rather: his hand. And that stick."

Gary decided it would be unwise to point out Jeff's shots were a lot clearer than the fuzzy snapshot she'd taken. Not while she was clutching the handbag. "Yes, the rod, pole or whatever it is. It would help if we knew what it might be."

"Post it," Jon said, bored.

"Huh?"

"Post a picture of the thing on the Internet and see what comes back. There are fora for that."

Gary felt pride warming his heart. His son would go places. Here was the proof. "Not a bad idea."

Jon banged his scrawny chest. "Of course. It's my idea."

He would need to tone down the attitude, but not bad otherwise. "We'll try that when we're back in the hotel. I hope Jeff sends those pics quickly so I can check out the shot of that first group. There's something about those people that bothers me."

Brigitte looked up from the photo on her phone. "Scared of the old ladies?"

His subconscious woke from a deep slumber and flopped around like a stranded fish.

"No," he drawled. "Not the ladies."

Mirth tugged at the corners of Brigitte's thin lips. Her eyes sparkled like sooty diamonds. "Ah bah! You're not trying to tell me one of these old folks was lurking behind the hedge, poking at the statue with a walking stick? Which this rod-thing isn't either. Wouldn't be long enough.

"And how would that person have known the head wasn't fixed to the rest of Lord Byron? Okay, Ike mentioned there might have been an earthquake, and it got shaken loose. If that were the case, the area should have been blocked off. It wasn't. Not when the other group came, not when we arrived. If you ask me, the fact somebody knew the statue had a problem is even more important than the pole that guy used."

Jon tsked but didn't look up from his game, his fingers blurring on the screen. Boris had draped himself over his feet, morosely observing the steady patter of rain still coming down outside the shed.

Gary had to admit he had taken the wobbly head as a given. "You might have a point there. And unless I'm very mistaken, there was a knotted ball of red and white plastic lying in one corner. Might have been a barrier. Somebody at Villa Borghese should be able to tell us. But that's not what is bothering me."

A pencil-thin eyebrow arched towards the soggy strands plastered across Brigitte's forehead. With an impatient gesture, she pushed them out of the way. "So tell us."

"I think I recognised a face. One man in the group that came before you."

"Who?"

"That I haven't worked out yet. Only, that I know this person from somewhere."

Another flop of the subconscious. For a nanosecond, he held the answer to the riddle. Then it slipped through his fingers like a piece of wet and slimy soap and sank under the surface. "It's gone again."

"What is?"

"Whatever I just realised."

Brigitte stared at him, all merriment gone. "Can you please remember?"

"It will come back to me, sorry. Once I have Jeff's copy."

Jon's fingers made that blurring motion again. "Not there yet."

"Oy! Paws off my mailbox."

Jon grinned widely.

Nothing was safe these days. He would need to ask Adrian how the cops protected their data against hackers. Perhaps, that would keep the boy away from his mail. Thinking of Adrian . . . "Once we receive the pictures, and once they have hopefully jogged my memory, we contact Guidetti, be it directly or via Adrian. He can take it from there. There's enough for him to take his mind off Ike. As far as Jon and I are concerned, we'll get on the next plane back. Latest tomorrow morning."

Jon thrust his head from between the rotting drapings of the sedan chair. "Dad, no! We've only just arrived, and I haven't even seen this Colossus thingy yet."

"Colosseum. Sorry mate. We need to return because there's a rather nasty person around and I don't want you to get hurt."

Jon vaulted from the chair. "No! I'm not going back. I like it here." He stomped on the ground. "This is so unfair. Whenever it gets exciting, you run for cover. That's so wimpy!"

Gary counted to three before responding. "I run because I want to get you to safety, yes. Have you already forgotten the little problem with your grandfather? Do you want the court to grant your grandparents custody because all the murderous lunatics of this world come after us? Do you really want to live with Bill and Sandie? I bet you don't. Nor do I want you to. If anything happens to you while you're in my care, we are in real trouble. Plus, I wouldn't forgive myself. Especially not after what happened last time."

"What do you mean—oh that dead professor? Yeah, was a bit of a shock. But I never really saw him. Well, I'm over it. No need to keep on shrinking me."

"I'm not. Brigitte, would you stop laughing please?" The woman really had a warped sense of humour. "I don't know how we could end up with a murder on the tour again. The likelihood of that happening was virtually nil."

Another grin. "It's like these small-town mysteries, mon cher. More people dead than after la peste. I suggest we return to the hotel and touch base with Ike. By then our friend Jeff might have mailed his pictures, and perhaps you know it is you need to remember. Then we tell the assorted detectives, and perhaps between them, they can arrest the culprit, non?"

That was not how things worked.

Do let me know if you have questions or comments on my novel. Constructive suggestions and feedback are always welcome! And thank you for reading. In doing so, you give my writing a purpose.