The Abduction: A Novel Read Free

the sergeant spoke again. “Nothing’s been moved or disturbed. Your medical people got here around an hour ago.”
    “When were the remains discovered?”
    “Approximately two-thirty. We had a security ingress – protestors cut through the padlocks and forced open a gate. The gates are alarmed, and our cameras have night-vision capability, so we were well prepared for them. They let off these flares you can see, sprayed some graffiti, then split up. Two chained themselves to cranes – those are my biggest headache; we’ll have to call in abseilers to cut them loose. My men followed another to a 319D – that is, one of the big excavator trucks. By the time they caught up with him, he was on his phone to the police, saying he’d seen a skeleton in the tipper. One of them went to check, and it turned out he was right. At least, there was a skeleton.”
    Piola noted the implication. “You don’t believe the rest of his account?”
    “Well, sir, I don’t want to pre-empt your investigation. But on the cameras, we could make out that he was carrying a large holdall when he broke in. It seems possible he brought the skeleton with him, threw it in the truck himself, and then reported it, in the hope of holding up construction.” Pownall glanced across at Piola. “No offence, Colonel, but Italian bureaucracy can be notoriously slow, and it wouldn’t be the first time the antis have tried to get us tangled up in red tape. That’s why we made sure we got the Carabinieri, rather than the State Police, to run this investigation. You people get that this is a military schedule we’re dealing with.”
    Piola chose not to respond directly to that. “Have the protestors broken in before?”
    “Negative – this would be the first time since Transformazione began.”
    “ Transformazione? ” Piola echoed.
    Pownall shrugged. “That’s what the consortium call it. I guess you’ll see why. It’s rather more than your typical building project.”
    In fact, Piola could still see very little. Tattered fronds of fog greyed the Jeep’s headlights as they drove. He thought he glimpsed some earthmovers to their left, through a gap in the fog, but appearances were deceptive: it was at least another minute before the Jeep drew up beside them.
    As he followed Sergeant Pownall towards the vehicles, stepping gingerly through the mud in an effort to preserve his shoes, he realised why he’d been confused about the distance. The machines were vast – at least twice normal size, the tyres alone the height of a man. On the door of the nearest one, some graffiti had been sprayed – a round circle with an A in it, like the anarchy symbol, except that there were also a smaller D and M nestled between the A’s feet. The graffiti was very recent, the black paint still running in the moisture-laden air.
    The truck was so big that to see into the tipper he had to climb a ladder that was placed next to it. Peering over the edge, he saw two white-suited figures crouched amongst a heap of rubble, examining some bones by the glare of a portable arc light. Piola made out a skull, brown with age, and below it the hoops of a ribcage. Nearby, but separate, was a leg, still attached to a foot.
    “Good morning, Dottori,” he greeted them. One of the figures looked up.
    “Ah, Colonel. I was beginning to think we wouldn’t see you before breakfast.” Hapadi’s voice was muffled by his mask.
    “I’m not sure why I’m here at all,” Piola said. “As opposed to someone more local, I mean. What can you tell me?”
    The forensic examiner pulled down his mask and stood, stretching to ease the stiffness in his back. “I’d say it’s a man, from the size of the pelvis. DNA will confirm it – we’ll have to use mitochondrial, there isn’t enough adipose for a conventional assay.”
    Piola nodded, although he barely understood these technical details. “Any idea when it dates from?”
    They both knew this was the crucial question, and