The Medici Murders
Contents
Cover
Also by David Hewson
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One: The Capitano’s Demand
Chapter Two: The Gilded Circle
Chapter Three: The Passeggiata of Blood
Chapter Four: The Far Assassins
Chapter Five: The Wolff Bequest
Chapter Six: Riddles
Chapter Seven: The Palimpsests
Chapter Eight: A Trip to Verona
Chapter Nine: The Ridotto
Chapter Ten: The Circle, Unbroken
Chapter Eleven: A Phantom in the Shadows
Chapter Twelve: A Stiletto in the Heart
Chapter Thirteen: Ashes on the Water
Author’s Note
Also by David Hewson
The Nic Costa series
A SEASON FOR THE DEAD *
THE VILLA OF MYSTERIES *
THE SACRED CUT *
THE LIZARD’S BITE
THE SEVENTH SACRAMENT
THE GARDEN OF EVIL
DANTE’S NUMBERS
THE BLUE DEMON
THE FALLEN ANGEL
THE SAVAGE SHORE *
Other novels
CARNIVAL FOR THE DEAD
THE FLOOD *
JULIET AND ROMEO
DEVIL’S FJORD *
SHOOTER IN THE SHADOWS
THE GARDEN OF ANGELS *
* available from Severn House
THE MEDICI MURDERS
David Hewson
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2023
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
This eBook edition first published in 2022 by Severn House,
an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © David Hewson, 2022
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of David Hewson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0656-5 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0770-8 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0771-5 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
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ONE
The Capitano’s Demand
The morning I was summoned to unravel a murder was bright and icy and full of pigeons. They were everywhere as I walked from my home in Dorsoduro, across the Accademia Bridge, through San Marco and past the cafés in the Piazza, where a grey and busy flock kept buzzing a group of Carnival-goers foolish enough to eat their pastries outside.
The Romans feared the owl, Edgar Allan Poe the raven. An old farmer I knew when I was a child in Yorkshire used to claim a robin flying into the house foretold a coming death. Unless it happened in November, in which case you might live. Pigeons, rats with wings, are perhaps too common, too greedy and annoying to be portents of death. In any case, they were late to the party. The corpse was on the slab already, which was why I was making my way across Venice that February day, all too aware of the noisome creatures flapping and pecking around me. It almost felt as if they were cooing a warning: This is Carnival, icy cold, full of strangers hiding behind masks. Nothing here is real or settled, fixed or safe. Beware.
Though doubtless that was my imagination. Something about Venice always sparks flights of wild and random thoughts.
My destination lay just beyond the tourist mecca of the Doge’s Palace and the great Byzantine basilica that is the city’s time-worn heart. The small square of Campo San Zaccaria was, as usual, empty. Few among the crowds milling aimlessly in the piazza around the corner seemed to know what lies along a narrow side alley from the Riva degli Schiavoni waterfront, with its much-pictured view across the bay of the Bacino San Marco to the stately campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore, marooned on a small island of its own.
There’s the charming San Zaccaria church, where early doges remain interred within a dark and atmospheric crypt that often floods with the waters of the lagoon. Appropriately, since three of them were assassinated in the streets around the campo by angry mobs and conspirators. Once, the area was home to a group of nuns who, under pressure from the then doge, sold off their nearby orchards so that the state could build the Piazza San Marco. The small seat of worship that remains pre-dates its celebrated basilica neighbour. It’s named after Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, murdered by Herod’s soldiers during the Massacre of the Innocents, who is supposedly interred in the crypt too. Since he also has tombs in Azerbaijan, Constantinople and Jerusalem, Zaccaria – to give him his Venetian name – seems a well-travelled sort of chap, though to most outsiders he’s simply a stop for the vaporetto.
I’ve spent most of my life dealing with history one way or another. From what I’ve seen and learned, the past in Venice is much like that elsewhere, fluid, malleable, easily changed to suit the viewpoint of the narrator. Only larger, grander, more ambitious. Remember, always, that in Italian storia means both ‘history’ and ‘story’. The gap between truth and fable is slender, sometimes barely visible at all.
San Zaccaria’s altar boasts Bellini’s Madonna Enthroned with Child and Saints, one of the city’s great masterpieces, as wonderful as it’s ignored. Works by Tintoretto, Van Dyck, Palma Vecchio and his great-nephew Il Giovane decorate the chapels and nave walls. I make a lone pilgrimage to those pews from time to time. Just to sit there, an atheist enthralled by visions of paradise and a world of quiet order and settled belief. Though that day all my head was filled with was the rattle of pigeons, shuffling and grunting on the roof.
NO SOLITARY VIGIL IN the belly of San Zaccaria’s nave lay in wait that dazzling, bone-chilling morning. My destination was more mundane: the Carabinieri headquarters, a charming old ochre building next to the church, perhaps something clerical at one time. I don’t know and I wasn’t minded to ask. I’ve never had many dealings with the police, apart from the one time our Ford Escort was vandalised outside the house in Wimbledon, and a lot of use they were then. But I had been summoned, by a captain it turned out. A woman, mid to late thirties, with the alert, intelligent face of a university lecturer paired with the trim figure, painted nails and perfect hair of a fashionable middle-class Venetian lady. She wore the standard Carabinieri uniform, dark blue with red flashes, cut very neatly it seemed to me, perhaps custom-tailored. The jacket and trousers looked as if they’d come straight from the press of a dry cleaner that morning, and their owner fresh from the beauty salon.
‘Signor Clover,’ she said in a low and confident tone that was dry but not unfriendly. ‘Do take a seat.’ There was only one, opposite her desk in a small office, just the two of us, a phone, a computer. It didn’t feel like Scotland Yard. ‘Thank you for coming.’
‘I wasn’t aware I had a choice.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘True.’
I hoped I wasn’t trembling. I’d been living in Venice for three months. My papers were surely in order after all the many meetings with rubber-stamp-wielding bureaucrats I’d suffered. No need to fear any of the routine hazards that sometimes befall the foreigner in Italy. All the same, something about this woman made me uneasy. My only knowledge – if it could be called that – of police interrogations came from dramas on the TV. They seemed, well, more dramatic. This encounter had a close and personal air about it, which somehow made the atmosphere more uncomfortable.
‘Capitana …’ I checked the nameplate on the desk, ‘Fabbri.’
That got me a hard, judgemental stare.
‘Capitano. The title describes the job and has nothing to do with gender. I thought your Italian was better than that.’
Valentina Fabbri had a direct and laser-like gaze to compete with that of my late wife. I felt myself wilting beneath it in that stuffy, overheated little room.
‘My Italian was not the problem. It was my comprehension.’
‘Call me Valentina if you find it easier.’
‘I was wondering why you—’
‘Please, Arnold! You surely know. I have a corpse on my hands,’ she said, as if the idea greatly annoyed her. ‘At least in a fridge in the Ospedale Civile. A bloody corpse. Tha
t of a famous English historian. A lord.’
‘A knight,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s not the same.’
‘I stand corrected.’
Something that didn’t happen often, judging by the tone of her voice.
‘How may I help?’
‘It’s Carnival. We have our hands full dealing with drunken foreigners in stupid costumes fighting one another and winding up in canals.’
‘That’s what happened, isn’t it? A tragic case of street violence.’
She appeared outraged. ‘Here? In Venice? No! This would appear to have all the hallmarks of murder, foul and deliberate. Yet the only murders we have are those committed in the ridiculous fictions written by foreigners. It’s unthinkable. Unacceptable. This is a city of beauty, art and culture. And of seeing as many tourists as possible pass through Piazzale Roma then leave as quickly as we may dispatch them.’ She leaned forward. ‘Alive.’ A jab of her painted fingernail. ‘Always … alive.’
‘A reasonable wish your visitors would applaud, I’m sure.’
‘You and I both understand no local killed your famous historian. You and I both know the answer to this riddle lies in – what do you call it? – your Golden Circuit.’
‘Gilded Circle.’
‘Exactly. Well, they’ve been in the cells since yesterday. Along with the young American woman who accompanied the fellow here and his son.’
‘I believe Miss Buckley was meant to be his producer.’
‘Meant to be. None of those I hold in custody seems consumed by grief.’
I kept my peace.
‘You don’t seem surprised?’
‘I’m sure they have their reasons.’
‘Precisely! And this is what I would like to understand. Their reasons. The truth of the matter. I am owed it. Luca Volpetti, a man I like and respect, not least because he once stepped out with my cousin, tells me you’re an intelligent, resourceful fellow, and you know them all.’
Thanks for that, Luca, I thought. ‘I know of them. Though not the American woman much, or the son.’
She checked some notes in front of her. ‘All the same. You have more experience of these people than anyone else. You’re English too. So perhaps you have some insight into the dark maze of their minds that I lack. Volpetti says you’ve been involved in this odd business the dead man had here.’
‘As has he, but—’
‘Let me be perfectly clear. I wish this problem gone. You and I will apply our minds to solving it. Immediately. By this evening I would like the matter resolved.’
I was, by now, expecting the first part. Not the deadline. ‘Don’t murder investigations take much longer than that? I mean … forensics? Science? All the things you see on television?’
She groaned in a way that told me the question was preposterous. ‘This is Venice. Carnival time. Not television. I want this settled by tonight. My husband, Franco, runs Il Pagliaccio, the restaurant. The Clown, as you say. Near the Accademia. You know it?’
The fanciest and most expensive hip establishment in the city’s most fancy and expensive sestiere.
‘A touch beyond my budget from what I’ve heard. Also …’ I gestured to my clothes. A tweed jacket at least fifteen years old. Beneath that a lumberjack shirt, red tartan, a Christmas present from God knows when. Tattered jeans, a budget supermarket brand. And on the hook behind the door, the duffel coat I’d brought from Wimbledon, a good decade old. ‘I never felt I’d pass the dress code.’
‘He’s experimenting with a new menu this evening. I am duty bound to taste it and tell him what he’s got wrong. Seven thirty. By then it would greatly suit me if this case was … dealt with.’
‘So quickly?’
‘I’m an optimist. Aren’t you?’ She hesitated. Slowly a smile emerged, then vanished seconds later. ‘Help me, Arnold. Together let us establish the facts. Then you may join me for dinner. Wear your pyjamas for all I care. Cuisine from the lagoon, every item on the menu. Risotto di gò, with the little fishes prised from deep mud. Moeche. Soft-shell crabs.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Canoce, the mantis shrimp with claws so fierce they can break your finger. Wine from the best vineyards in the Veneto that would cost you a fortune if you were paying. You like fish and wine? For free?’
Mostly, on my budget, I lived off supermarket takeaways, pizza and an occasional kebab. ‘That would be nice.’
‘Nice?’ She stared at me. ‘Then we must get to work and solve this bloody riddle.’
I looked around the small room. There wasn’t a sound from outside. The Carabinieri headquarters seemed remarkably relaxed. ‘On our own, Capitano?’
‘Valentina, I said! On our own. How many people do you think my husband’s going to give free food? We can do this. A dead man. A handful of suspects, all of them reluctant to speak a word of truth. A portion of pastry, as you English say.’
‘A piece of cake.’
‘Speaking of which …’ She picked up the phone and rattled off some orders. Very quickly a young man in uniform came in and deposited two cups of strong coffee on the desk along with four tiny shell-like Neapolitan pastries, sfogliatelle. ‘These are your favourite, filled with zabaglione.’
‘They are indeed. How …?’
‘Volpetti, of course. Think, Arnold. Make connections. Let us pick apart this tale with logic. That’s your calling, or so Luca told me. Now I need your faculties more than ever.’
‘I see.’
‘Start at the beginning. Tell me everything you know. About Marmaduke Godolphin and his Gilded Circle. Why they’re here. How they get on with one another. Let us explore these people with the same incisive intelligence a pathologist friend of mine is using to explore our unfortunate cadaver in the Ospedale Civile.’
The beginning. People always ask for that. Yet I was never entirely sure where stories truly originated. One could usually see the end, and the middle was clear enough. But the seed, the spark that generated them, so often stayed hidden in the shadows of the past, unwilling to make itself known. Or, just as often, distorted by individuals determined to place their own stamp on history and obliterate the marks of others.
Outside I heard church bells chime nine. Pigeons cooed behind their dying toll.
‘I am waiting,’ she muttered as she rapped her scarlet fingernails on the desk.
‘Very well,’ I told her. ‘But I must warn you. This may take a while.’
WHILE I GENERALLY ADHERE to Donne’s maxim that each man’s death diminishes me, it must be admitted that some diminish one rather less than others. Sir Marmaduke Godolphin, a man of barely hidden shallows despite a plethora of academic gongs, a dodgy knighthood and – this surely mattered most – fame as one of Britain’s most-watched TV historians, remains a case in point. Not that I was in any way delighted that one cold February night he should be found floating face down in the grubby waters of the rio San Tomà, bewigged and bejewelled, made up like a Renaissance gigolo seeking custom, the costume of a doge around his plump form, a stiletto blade in his chest, his life bleeding away into the foul grey shallows.
Why should I be? Until his final few days in Venice I barely knew the man any more than he and his Gilded Circle of adoring acolytes were conscious of me. Our paths had crossed only in passing at Cambridge, where Godolphin was the glorious academic of the hour, a handsome fellow, popular with the women, especially after the BBC made him the face of their lightweight documentaries on the empires of Greece and Rome and beyond. A few years after I graduated, he ceased to be Marmaduke Godolphin, Professor of Classics, and was transformed into Duke Godolphin, minor pedagogue turned major media star. Duke on Persia. Duke in the Footsteps of Caesar. Duke Dissects the Tudors.
Like Roman crowds rushing to the Colosseum for bread and circuses, the public flocked in droves to his breezy, abbreviated retelling of history. I watched with bemusement. It seemed humdrum, pop-documentary stuff, full of dubious theatrical ‘reconstructions’ in which our charismatic chap bestrode the world with aplomb while wearing his trademark denim jacket, safari boots and glittering smile. The accompanying bestselling books only added to his celebrity and fortune. Marmaduke Godolphin was the public face of the past for millions.
I, on the other hand, a decade younger, was a state-aided student from a council house in Rotherham, a commoner with a stutter and a northern accent to boot, far too impoverished and, more importantly, proletarian to join his glittering clique. Not for me Eton and a family lineage traced back to the Norman Conquest, certain destiny for Oxbridge and future eminence. Instead, I was headed for a 2:1 in history and English, which, in the early 1980s would serve as an entry point into the quiet and anonymous world of a professional archivist, first at the Historical Manuscripts Commission, then, when we merged with the Public Records Office, the National Archives at Kew.