Authors: Thomas Mogford
Two attractive, dark-haired women in trouser suits strode ahead, each carrying pink-ribboned legal briefs: with its tax breaks and online gaming firms, Malta had almost as high a proportion of lawyers as Gibraltar.
At the end of the street rose the City Gate, a monumental arch signifying the outer limits of Valletta. Milling around its columns lounged half a dozen bored-looking black men. The odd Maltese waited alone, checking a watch, using the gate as an after-work meeting point. Spike searched for Maltese and Africans together but found none.
Passing beneath the central archway, Spike saw a plaque on the wall declaring Valletta’s status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He emerged onto the walkway which ran across the St James Ditch, a vast, fifty-foot-deep moat built to protect Valletta’s landward approach from intruders. The rest of Valletta was surrounded by sea walls: winch up this drawbridge and the city became an island within an island.
Ahead sprawled the bus terminus, a roundabout of concentric circles with a fountain in the middle, three bronze statues of Triton, son of Poseidon, holding up a spurting dish. Spike remembered Malta’s buses as clapped-out Bedfords and Leylands, customised by their owner-drivers with grilles and slogans, their orange-and-yellow livery more suited to the 1960s Caribbean than to Europe. Now, a fleet of low-floored Arriva buses encircled the fountain, painted in cream and aquamarine, their EU-regulated, reduced-emission engines droning away.
Next came the Phoenicia Hotel, a luxury art-deco affair with verdant lawns and an eager team of porters opening a shiny car door for each arrival. The contrast with the two-star dive where Spike and his father were staying was marked: last-minute rooms in central Valletta had been hard to come by. Spike stopped, checking the tatty tourist map he’d picked up in reception. The street names were all in Maltese: ‘triq’ this, ‘triq’ that, the bizarre accents and clusters of ‘x’s, ‘j’s and ‘q’s rendering even a mental pronunciation impossible.
The suburb of Floriana felt more Gibraltarian in its loose masonry and discarded sun-bleached rubbish. Spike came into a square where two broad rectangular buildings faced off against each other. The first was of rusticated stone, a bas-relief of the madonna set above the pediment and a polished marble plaque revealing it as the Curia, the administrative headquarters of the Catholic Church. The second looked more functional: satellite dishes on the roof, walls topped with razor wire. The twin guardians of Maltese society, Spike thought to himself: Church and Police.
2
The fat duty sergeant almost filled the glass booth. His blue uniform looked British-inspired, but his face – already blackened by half a day’s stubble – was pure southern Mediterranean. Spike imagined him gunning down rare songbirds in the summertime, then barking at his wife to roast them up.
‘I’m here about the Mifsud case,’ Spike said.
‘I’ll need some . . .’ the sergeant began, but Spike was already sliding his British Gibraltar passport through the gap beneath his window.
Breathing heavily through his nose, the sergeant scrutinised Spike’s photo, frowning as he tried to reconcile the easy smile of a few years back with the stern face of the man before him. Blu-tacked to his booth were various A4 mugshots of African men. A dog-eared poster offered instructions on how much of a drug called ‘khat’ was considered legal.
‘Signature,’ the sergeant grunted, returning the passport, then shoving a clipboard through the gap.
Once Spike had signed, the sergeant passed over an envelope containing heavy iron keys. ‘Forensics finished already?’ Spike asked as he examined their skeletal, old-fashioned shape.
The sergeant shrugged.
‘Where I come from, a murder investigation isn’t something we tie off in a week.’
‘And where might that be?’ came a voice.
Spike turned to see a young man in a well-cut, navy suit standing behind him. The man’s slicked-back dark hair and finely boned features appeared too delicate for police work; he looked more like a catalogue model, or a heart-throb head boy ready for prize-giving.
‘Gibraltar,’ Spike said.
‘Where they still do things the British way.’
‘The thorough way.’
The young man turned, then punched a code into a keypad. ‘You’d better come with me, Mr Sanguinetti,’ he said, holding open a side door.
3
The corridor carpet was thin and frayed, the ceiling mosaicked with fungus. ‘My PA said you’d be coming by . . . I thought you’d be younger, somehow,’ the man called over his shoulder. ‘You’re the nephew, right?’ His Maltese English had an Italianate bounce, more aggressive than Spike’s gentle Hispanic lilt. The legacies of Empire ran to accents.
‘Yes, but I’m here in a professional capacity.’
‘Oh?’
‘Executor of the wills.’
The man stopped and turned. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, a full decade younger than Spike. ‘Assistant Commissioner Mark Azzopardi,’ he said, holding Spike’s gaze. ‘I had charge of the case.’
‘Spike Sanguinetti.’
Azzopardi pumped Spike’s hand, then ushered him through another door. Given the colonial scale of the main building, the squad room was surprisingly small, a dozen or so plain-clothed officers squeezed opposite one another at desks, computer monitors back to back. Azzopardi glanced at each as he passed; they responded with a polite nod.
The assistant commissioner’s office was little more than a desk surrounded by filing cabinets. Evidently the Curia was winning the battle for Malta’s taxes. The walls were crammed with diplomas: between Azzopardi’s ‘Firing Range Commendation’ and ‘Malta Police Academy Order of Merit’ hung a cracked icon of the madonna.
‘My condolences,’ Azzopardi said as he sat. ‘Now, how can I help?’
‘I was just curious,’ Spike said, folding himself into a chair opposite, ‘to understand why you aren’t still at the murder scene.’ The back of the desk obliged him to contort his long legs to one side.
‘The case is closed.’
‘You don’t think it’s strange that a man with no history of violence would kill his wife then himself?’
Azzopardi uncrossed his arms. He wore a striped friendship bracelet on one wrist. ‘Solicitor or barrister?’ he said, as though offering Spike a choice between heads or tails.
‘In Gibraltar the profession is fused.’
‘Malta too. But do you do much criminal work?’
‘Enough.’
Azzopardi reached into a drawer and pulled out a file. His hand hesitated. ‘Mrs Mifsud . . . Teresa. I presume she’s the blood relative?’
Spike shook his head. ‘David was my mother’s brother.’
An edge of reappraisal entered Azzopardi’s gaze. ‘But you were close?’
Trying to read Spike’s expression, but failing, Azzopardi passed over the first photograph. David Mifsud lay on his back on the tiled kitchen floor. He wore black tie, his dinner jacket open, tails splayed behind. His hands were clasped across his stomach, like a knight on the lid of a tomb, Spike thought, dimpled knife hilt glinting between interlaced fingers. The entire blade was concealed beneath his ribcage. What had once been a white dress shirt was now rusty with blood.
‘Mr Sanguinetti?’ Azzopardi said.
Spike stared down at his uncle’s bespectacled face. The grey tip of his tongue was visible, as though he were doing up his shoelace, or trying to change a light bulb. His expression of concentration reminded Spike so much of his mother that he had to lay the photograph on his lap to stop his hands shaking.
‘They’d been out at a ceremonial dinner,’ Azzopardi said, tipping his chair back and tucking his hands behind his head. ‘Drunk a lot of wine. Your uncle topped up with rum when they got home.’
‘Who called it in?’
‘Neighbour said they weren’t answering the door. The bodies had been there forty-eight hours by the time we arrived.’
‘Suicide by stabbing . . . Seen much of that?’
Azzopardi said nothing.
‘Why not just slit the wrists?’
‘The forensic psychologist tells me a knife to the belly is a sign of the profoundest self-loathing. It does happen, apparently.’
Azzopardi tipped his chair forward, then handed Spike two more photographs. The first showed Teresa, slumped on her front on the kitchen table. Her grey hair pooled around her head; her cheek lay flat on the knotted wood between her arms. Decorating the wall behind her was an explosion of blood. There followed a close-up of her face, sagging neck encrusted with blood, eyes pearlescent, glaring down with what looked like hatred. A greenish tinge to the forehead gave a first hint of decomposition.
Spike formed the photographs into a pile and passed them back, hand now steady. ‘My uncle was not capable of this.’
‘His prints were the only ones on the knife.’
‘Someone could have broken in. Dressed the scene.’
‘A ground-floor apartment? The front door triple-bolted, the windows barred? In order to gain entry, my Mobile Squad had to take a hacksaw to the bedroom window . . .’
Spike looked over at the photographs on the desk. Teresa was missing her dressing-gown cord, he saw.
‘The only other prints in the flat were your aunt’s. They didn’t even have domestic help.’
‘Assuming for one moment it was murder–suicide – what’s the motive?’
Azzopardi glanced down at his perfectly filed nails. ‘There’s an aspect of the case we’ve chosen to treat with delicacy.’
‘Which is?’
‘The pathologist who carried out the post-mortem on your aunt. He found traces of spermicide. The quantity suggested use of a condom.’
‘So?’
‘So in Malta, married couples don’t tend to indulge much in contraception. Especially when they’re of a certain age.’ Azzopardi pressed on hurriedly. ‘Forensic tests on your uncle showed no indications of recent sexual activity. No prophylactics of any kind were found in the flat . . .’
‘So you’re trying to tell me my aunt was having an affair?’
Azzopardi returned to the file, flicking through like an estate agent seeking particulars of the right property. Lighting upon one photograph, he passed it over. A broken bottle; next came an image of a towel discarded by the kitchen doorway. ‘Your aunt’s prints were all over the bottle of rum,’ Azzopardi said, leaning back again in his chair. ‘Your uncle downs half before confronting her. They struggle, the towel falls. She grabs the bottle and breaks it over his head. Then he really loses it. They’re in the kitchen, he goes for a knife. An argument over adultery turns into a bloodbath. It’s a common scenario, even in Malta. Just rarely with this much violence.’ A note of relish had crept into Azzopardi’s voice; Spike gave him back the photographs the wrong way up.
‘Any DNA evidence from this third party?’
Azzopardi shook his head.
‘Then why aren’t you trying to track him down?’
Azzopardi glanced up at the icon of the madonna. ‘As you may have noticed, Mr Sanguinetti, Malta remains an extremely Catholic country. Until recently, the Church wouldn’t allow the burial of suicides on holy ground. Abortion is still banned, we’ve only just legalised divorce. Do you know the only two countries behind us in that regard? The Vatican and the Philippines.’ He hazarded a sympathetic smile. ‘You want the whole of Valletta society to know your aunt had a lover on the side? At times like this the police prefer . . . discretion.’
‘Church and police in perfect harmony.’
‘You got it,’ Azzopardi said, apparently missing the ironic tone.
Spike put his palms to his cheeks, feeling the rasp of fresh stubble. When he looked back, a business card had appeared between Azzopardi’s elegant fingers. ‘Any questions, you can reach me here at the Depot.’
‘The Depot?’
‘Our local word for the police station.’ He stood. ‘Let me show you out.’
Spike declined, walking alone through the squad room back to the foyer, where the fat duty sergeant still sat at his booth, filling in forms.
Out in the square, Spike leaned against the side wall of the Curia, jaw clenched as he steadied his breathing. Then he turned back towards Valletta.
4
Just 6.10 p.m. and the city was deserted. A cool February breeze was gusting in off the Mediterranean up the deep, straight gullies of the streets. Spike could see why Jean de Valette, Grand Master of the Knights, had chosen a grid structure for his city: ventilation. He tugged down the sleeves of his navy V-neck and continued towards Triq Sant’Orsla.
A red British phone box stood guard on the street corner. The cobblestones fell away: Valletta’s limestone promontory was kinked in the middle, weighed down by its residential cargo, like a beast of burden with a buckled spine. The pavements at the sides of the road were notched with steps.
At each cross street, Spike looked up at the omnipresent statuary: saints slaying dragons, madonnas cradling babies, Jesus lugging his cross. He found himself pining for the mildewed concrete of Gibraltar.
At last he saw the palazzo, dominating the entire corner of Triq it-Teatru l-Antiq – Old Theatre Street, presumably. After walking beneath its protruding, covered balcony, he stopped outside his uncle and aunt’s front door.
A window further down was boarded up. As Spike manoeuvred the iron keys from his pocket, he caught a twitch of movement to the left. He looked up, but the windows of the palazzo were dark, the curtains still. The wind whistled through the empty street behind as he slotted the first key into the lock.