The Strings of Murder (41 page)

Roaring and thrashing my legs, I managed to push myself upwards, but it was too late: I felt sick when I saw Giacomo contorting in an unthinkable way, almost
squeezing himself as if he had no bones, and passing through the narrow drain towards the streets.

Out of pure rage I reached the drain and stretched my arm out of the sewers; a feeble attempt to reach the bastard. No normal adult could get through that opening.

Giacomo cackled again. I could see the eyes of his mask and the red knife reflecting the light of the street lamps. He kneeled by the drain and made a stab at me, so I had to retreat.

He whispered as eerily as before: ‘
Four murders. One for each string …
’

‘McGray, toss me the gun!’

‘
You know what the letters mean? The wee letters on the paper?
’

McGray was throwing both weapons but I could not seize them without falling down.

‘The names of the people you have killed,’ I snorted.

Again Giacomo laughed: ‘
You know nothing of music. Four strings on a violin … a
quinta
of notes between each string …
’

‘What the Hell?’

He spoke slowly, as if talking to a retarded man. ‘
The lowest string, where it all begins. String of G … G for Guilleum
.’

‘Gui – Guilleum?’

‘
Then five notes higher, the string of D, Danilo, my uncle the idiot … then string of A, the fat man Alistair … then I have problems to find next string. Can you tell me what note follows?
’

My heart went ice cold.

‘
Oh, I see you know! And you know well: string of E
,
which of course is …
’

‘Elgie.’

I experienced a panic I had never felt before; a wave tearing through my chest, as the memory of a gypsy’s
whisper rushed into my head:
You’re about to lose your most beloved one
.

Giacomo cackled cruelly and again spoke in his terrifying, sly tone. ‘
I spy youse from the chimneys, I hear him play. I find him fit for me … Now I get youse lost down there. No way youse get out in time to stop me …
I win!
I get my fiddle set for Satan!
’

And then I saw him run maniacally down the street.

34

Defeated, I slid down the pipe, my entire body shaking. My legs sank in the murky waters and McGray had to pull me up.

‘Yer brother’s still in the New Club?’

A fit took hold of me. ‘Yes, but how do we get out?
How-do-we-get-out?
We’ll never be –’

‘Calm down, Frey! We just need to find a manhole –’

‘
Oh, do we?
’ I shrieked. ‘And how are we going to find it in this fucking mess?’

‘Yer forgetting I spent hours looking at those plans! I may remember. Now tell me: what did ye see up there? Any landmark ye recognized.’

‘N-no, I –’

‘Then get up there again and tell me!’

I did so at once, this time clinging with all my strength. ‘We are right under the Royal Mile …’

‘All right. Whereabouts?’

‘Erm … I see a church. It looks funny … curved outline and a tiny portico.’

‘Canongate Church,’ McGray said at once. ‘I think I remember one main pipe running along High Street … and …’

Then I lost my temper. ‘How are you possibly going to remember a single spot you saw days ago on a five-foot-long piece of paper?’

‘Och, shut it and let me think!’

McGray then covered his face with both hands, mumbling to himself.

I paced around frenetically, my nerves tumbling down. How could I have been so stupid? Following Nine-Nails into that blasted race had been my worst choice. And while he tried to remember, that murderer – that
monster
– was running entire blocks towards my youngest brother! The dreadful image of those hanging bowels made me shudder again, and I could not repress an anguished roar.

A burning rage followed. I was about to punch McGray in the face but right then he opened his eyes in exhilaration.

‘I’m so stupid!
Of course!
’

‘Did you remember?’

‘Aye, but not from the plans … There’s a huge manhole right in front o’ the Ensign Ewart pub! So if this is the Mile’s main pipe and Canongate Church is right there …
Follow me!
’

I ran after McGray in an anguished sprint until we found a wider drain that let in the yellow light of the street’s lampposts.

We both pushed the manhole plate, grunting and cursing. I did not expect the blasted thing to be so heavy! For a frightening moment it would not move, but then its rusty hinges squeaked and, painfully, we managed to push it aside. The aperture was barely wide enough to let me through.

‘I’ll have to find another way,’ McGray said, pushing me ahead.

I jumped out of the sewer and as I stood up McGray
howled something I could not catch. Only after having run halfway down the street did I realize he’d told me to take a gun, but it was too late to return now. I had no time to ponder my options; I set my mind on getting to the New Club and protecting my brother, trying not to think that it might be already too late.

Suddenly I was running at full speed, my legs about to collapse, ignoring puddles and passing carriages, but the world still seemed to move more slowly than ever. I descended through the closes of Castle Rock, crossed Princes Street Gardens, passing right next to the deserted art gallery, and almost lost my balance when the Georgian façade of the New Club finally emerged in front of me. I was so desperate I crossed Princes Road without even looking – I can only tell that there were no carts passing by because I made it to the entrance in one piece.

I stormed through the lobby, showing my credentials, and shouted at the sleepy clerk to fetch as many guards as he could. Then I darted upstairs and, after what had felt like an eternity, arrived at Elgie’s corridor.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw that the door to his room was ajar. I kicked it open, and then …

The room was empty, dimly lit by a weak fire and a lonely gas lamp.

It became hard to breathe; a suffocating pressure on my chest …

‘What is it?’

I cannot describe the relief I felt when Elgie’s head peered at me from behind an armchair. I ran towards him, pulled his slender body to me and squeezed him in the tightest embrace.

‘Good Lord, Ian, you stink!’ I could not expect warmer words from him.

‘Oh, shush! I need to get you out of –’

I turned around and a monstrous vision made us both scream.

Giacomo had arrived, the five glassy eyes of his mask gleaming as he slithered out of the fireplace. The edge of his cloak was ablaze but he carelessly extinguished it with his bare hand. He seemed shapeless, and bending like a snake he hurried into the room and stood right before the door. We heard the ghastly crack of bones as he moved his dislocated shoulders back into place.

I stepped in front of my brother and together we retreated to the very back of the room. ‘If you want him you will have to get me first!’

Elgie crouched behind me, trembling uncontrollably, and I knew that my words were empty. I had no weapon of any kind and Giacomo knew it. He cackled as he produced the long knife.

I gulped as the terrible truth hit me: we would die there and then. The face of that five-eyed demon would be the last thing I’d ever see …

‘
Come on!
’ I roared in a last act of bravado. ‘Come and get this sack of bones! He doesn’t have enough gut to give you half a string!’

I saw the shiny blade rising, so sharp it would slice us effortlessly. Giacomo was hissing like an angry bull.

Then a roar and a deafening blast … An explosion of blood spilt all over my face and then I saw the shiny blade flying away.

Giacomo’s hand had been shot clean through and he
fell sideways, roaring like the beast he’d become. I saw a tall figure by the doorframe and instantly recognized the square shoulders of Nine-Nails McGray, holding a gun in each hand.

The knife fell to the floor and McGray smashed it with his boot, pieces of red glass ejected all around. Giacomo tried to rise and attack him, but McGray hit him in the head with a gun’s butt. The misshapen devil fell unconscious onto the floor.

It had all happened so quickly … it had been barely a blink. After the thump on the carpet we fell into deep silence, our minds struggling to take in what we’d just seen. The first voice I heard was Elgie’s.

‘What the Hell is that?’

McGray leaned over Giacomo to pull off the hood and mask. I was astonished by how childlike he looked. Mrs Caroli had implied his young age, but I did not fully realize it until I saw his very sparse beard and thick locks of dark hair.

‘He’s a fiddler,’ McGray told Elgie. ‘Around yer age, laddie.’

At last I managed to take a deep breath, and exhaling felt like unloading the weight of the world off my shoulders.

It was all over.

All we had left to do was to face Campbell and explain everything.

35

Campbell’s office looked as compulsively neat as always, and the white snow that could be seen through the window made the room appear even brighter. As a result, the mighty bruise McGray had given him right in the eye stuck out like a raw steak on an immaculate china plate.

No wonder he did not want Nine-Nails around for the time being.

‘Will you please summarize your report, Frey?’ he said, leafing distractedly through the thin file.

‘By all means,’ I said, thinking that reading a four-page report was evidently beyond the man’s attention span – the fact that I’d spent hours questioning Lorena Caroli for the finer details was obviously irrelevant to him. ‘Basically, it all began seventeen years ago, when Lucía Zangrando – Mrs Caroli’s sister – sadly gave birth to an awfully deformed child, who she named Giacomo. I am not familiar with the young man’s condition – it is something I have never seen before – but it appears to be some sort of bone disorder that runs in their family; Mrs Caroli, for instance, has an unusually advanced case of arthritis for a woman of her age, and she told us that her mother and sister showed similar symptoms.

‘Lucía Zangrando and her husband were terribly embarrassed by the child – there were already rumours of the family being cursed with this bone condition, and
apparently Giacomo was an extreme case. However, they never gathered the courage to get rid of him. It is not rare that such children are abandoned or sent away as circus freaks, so they decided to simply keep him hidden. Giacomo, nevertheless, turned out to be an incredibly intelligent creature, and the boy easily mastered music, mask carving and glass blowing; all those Venetian arts.

‘Both of his parents passed away almost simultaneously, Lucía only a few months after her husband. On her deathbed she made her sister swear that she would take care of the boy, regardless of his abnormality, and that she would also keep him hidden … In Mrs Caroli’s words, her sister dreaded the idea of the world knowing that her womb had produced such a child. Lorena married Danilo Caroli, who eventually was invited to teach in Scotland, so Giacomo was brought along to Edinburgh – locked in a box, along with the hounds.

‘Mrs Caroli and her husband kept him hidden, albeit not as strictly as his late parents would have liked: they gave him a proper bedroom, dined with him, and only locked him away with the dogs when they had visitors. Mrs Caroli taught him how to read and write, and she would allow him to wander the town at night, when nobody could see him. She even arranged for her best friend in Edinburgh to teach him classical violin.’

‘Fontaine,’ Campbell said.

‘Yes, and thus he signed his death sentence. Mr Fontaine, being half French himself, understood perfectly the situation of the Carolis: they were new to Scotland, foreign-looking and with unfamiliar habits – not to mention Lorena’s illness – so it was hard for them to make
close acquaintances. They became so attached to the man that they decided to trust him with their darkest secret. I have come to understand that Fontaine had the most compassionate nature, yet he was childless, so he embraced the boy and agreed to train him in secret. For his playing, Giacomo’s deformity became an advantage: as I was unfortunate enough to witness, the boy has remarkably long fingers and he can disjoint them at will, which gives him dexterity unthinkable for a normal person. He can also disjoint his shoulders and pelvis, which enabled him to crawl through the narrowest passages; he would leave the Carolis’ home at night and then make his way discreetly through the chimney into Fontaine’s study. Giacomo soon mastered the classical pieces.’