The Third Shadow

Twenty-nine

The call came a few minutes later as I was getting back in the van in Pozzetta. A midlands accent. Beery, excited. Marston.

"Just come up on the wires. Less than fifty metres from the holiday bungalow.
Bloody hell! Old inspector Nuzzo must have a bit of egg on his face! A whole bloomin' ommelette."

"Station Commander," I corrected. "Inspectors don't exist in the carabinieri." Nuzzo's rank had and would continue to be misquoted by all but the highest quality of the British press.

In keeping with his profession, Marston didn't seem much interested in precision though. "Been along to take a look yourself I suppose..."

I didn't see any harm in giving him a little copy - a brief description of the scene, the known initial details.

There followed a few moments of silence as he finished jotting down his notes. Back in the day, the hacks all used shorthand - an entire press statement summarised in a handful of indecipherable squiggles. At least there'd been some craft to their profession back then. These modern journos though, anything over the phone where they can't just press a button on their voice recorders, they're completely lost.

In the meantime, not having yet started the engine, I opened up the driver's door as wide as it would go, invited in any breath of breeze which might pass by. I'd been careful to park in the thin wedge of shade offered by one side of Pozzetta high street, but it was still sweltering just the same. The street itself was completely deserted: it wasn't yet three o'clock, riposino time.

Marston's voice rasped back into my ear. "Great, Jim. That's great." I could hear moist squelching sound then: he was knocking back a pint, clearly, the background murmur of voices which I'd taken as the newsroom obviously his fellow pub clientele. I wondered if it was the same pub he'd taken me to that morning we'd spoken. Three pints before lunchtime. At least I hadn't got to that stage yet. I wondered, if things kept going the way they had over the last couple weeks, whether I eventually might however... A divorced, financially-ruined alcholic. Was this what destiny had had in store for me all along?

"Anyway, I've done a bit of sniffing round," Marston went on. "The father. This theory of yours." There was another squelched slurp of lager. "I took a trip over to Raleigh bikes. Back in eighty-two hardly anyone had heard of a computer of course." Yes, and hadn't we been better off for it, I couldn't help thinking. "Still got all their old files though, just thrown in all together willy nilly in some windowless storeroom. It took me all morning to find it but find it I bloomin' well did. Holiday roster for that year. Millwood took off whit week - the last few days of May, first few days of June. A perfect fit."

I found myself nodding in appreciation at such a tenacious piece of investigative dirtywork. "You'd make a good detective constable Mr Marston."

"Steve, please." There was a laugh. "And I very much doubt it. Got too much imagination." His voice moved away from the receiver for a moment; it wasn't so muffled though that I couldn't make out the words another one thanks. "Couple of the old-timers remembered him well of course," he then continued. "He could turn at the drop of a hat they said, especially after he'd had a couple." Again, his voice became faint for a second: keep the change duck. "In the end it got so as no-one went for a pint after work any more. Didn't want to risk him coming along. Good worker though, that was the thing. The top brass never had reasonable grounds enough to sack him."

I wondered if Interpol had made any progress. Like Nuzzo's failed body search, it was one of those needle in a haystack situations. Even if I was right that Duggan had taken refuge behind the iron curtain, there was absolutely no guarantee he could be traced. In the murky Stasi underworld of East Germany, it might not have been so very difficult for a man to create a new identity for himself; the Cologne building sites would have ensured a wallet thick with deutschmarks. If he hadn't changed his name again, he would have germanised it at least, Brown morphing into Braun - there'd be plenty of those about to cross off any investigative list. There wasn't even any guarantee he'd remained in East Germany. After the wall came down, he might have headed back to the brighter economic climate of the west; or even, back in the eighties, have drifted further east in search of work, a marginally less hardline brand of communism: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary. The truth was, he could be anywhere. And even if eventually found, the hypothesis that Bracewell was with him, or that he'd at least been an initial harbour following his son's flee from Italy, remained precisely that: a hypothesis, a mere possibility. The only thing for certain was that now it had been confirmed - that what we were dealing with was a stone cold case of fraticide - every possible investigative effort would be made.