Broken Faith

Broken Faith

James Green

Chapter One

A golden sun, a blue sky. A perfect summer day.

Wasted here of course.

This wasn't tourist Rome; it had no ancient glories like the Forum or the Coliseum, no wedding-cake grandeur like the Victor Emmanuel Monument, no film-fuelled romance like the Trevi fountain.

These towers of glass, concrete and steel weren't places of pilgrimage like St Peter's, unless, of course, you worshipped money.

This was where the business of Rome got done, and it could have been Canary Wharf, La Défense or Wall Street, except for the Roman sun bouncing off the concrete and glass.

A man was standing on the pavement, shading his eyes as he looked up.

He was middle-aged, of medium height, with a lived-in face and short grizzled hair. His casual summer clothes were well cared for and good quality, but he still managed to achieve a distinctly crumpled look. He carried no camera, map or guide book, so he wasn't a stray tourist, but nor did he look like someone who belonged in any of these offices.

But there he was, looking.  

Jimmy Costello lowered his hand. The tall office block was like all the others and nothing, he thought, could look less like the home of a venerable institute of learning founded in the seventeenth century. But the top two floors of the block he was looking at was home to the small staff of the Collegio Principe. It was here that they lived and worked and had their being.

The Collegio Principe's life began as a bequest in the will of Cesare Borgia and had originally been housed in a minor Palazzo close to the Vatican. In those days it was a semi-religious institution staffed by Dominicans and Franciscans. Cesare had endowed the Collegio with farmland on the outskirts of Rome which would provide the income to support the friars and fund their work. That ancient farmland now was the site of this business suburb, home to bankers, brokers and financial wheeler-dealers of all types and sizes. And on the top of one of its towers of commerce were the offices of that one, small, ancient institute of learning and research.

The old Palazzo close to the Vatican still existed, now an exclusive hotel catering to the rich and discerning, but its lease remained the property of the Collegio and the annual rental reflected its enviable position. Whatever problems beset the Collegio's staff, lack of money was not one of them. The envy of many other academic institutions, they didn't have to worry about funding while they carried out their founder's wishes, to study the relationship between religion, politics and power.

Jimmy smiled to himself as he set off towards the entrance. The place suited Professor McBride, because what you saw with her was definitely not what you got either. He crossed the road, left the summer heat and went into the cool, air-conditioned reception.

‘James Costello to see Professor McBride, Collegio Principe.'

The pretty girl behind the desk checked a screen then picked up a phone.

‘Signor Costello to see you, Professore.' She put the phone down and made a visitor's badge for him while he signed in. Jimmy took the badge, slipped the cord over his head and put the plastic identification into his shirt pocket.  The pretty girl smiled at him. ‘Please go up. You know the way?'

Jimmy nodded. He knew the way.

He went to the lift and pressed the button for the top floor where he got out and walked along the empty, carpeted corridor until he came to a door. He stopped and knocked.

‘Come in.'

The voice was American.

The office was oddly furnished, a heavy, old-fashioned darkwood desk with brass-handled drawers down either side and an ink-stained, inlaid-leather top dominated the centre. Along one wall was a set of ultra-modern cabinets which might have contained anything from drinks to state secrets. On one wall hung a large abstract painting in a severe, chrome frame. On the opposite wall hung a small, dark oil-painting in an ornate gold frame. The carpet was pale blue and might to have been chosen to draw into the office the view from the big window, which looked south towards the distant, blue hills of Frascati.  No phone, no computer, no paperwork, and no books: there was nothing to show that anything happened in this room. But the woman sitting behind the desk looked strangely at home there.

‘Please sit down.'

She was like she always was, smart in a black office skirt and ice-white shirt that emphasized the blackness of her skin. Jimmy sat down.

‘It is a small thing but it may be important. I want you to go to Santander in Spain and talk to an Englishman who lives there, a Mr Arthur Jarvis. You are to see if you think there is any truth in the information he passed on to Fr Perez, a local retired priest.'

She stopped. Jimmy waited. Nothing more came.

‘And how am I supposed to do that?'

‘By questioning him.'

‘About what?'

‘About –'

‘I know, the information he gave to Fr Perez. What information?'

Jimmy waited. She was always like this. Getting a straight answer out of her was like trying to pull teeth with your fingers. You were lucky if you could get any kind of grip on what she was actually up to.

‘It is very sensitive.'

‘Like a bad tooth.'

She raised her eyebrows. For her that was a big response.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Granted.'

The eyebrows returned to ground level.

‘I sometimes wonder if your help will really be worth having if I have to suffer your sense of humour alongside it.  It makes me ask myself if it was a mistake to bring you out of Denmark.'

He accepted the rebuke. She was quite right, he owed her. Without her help he'd probably be dead or doing life in a Danish prison.

‘All right, let's hear it.'

‘As I said, it is a sensitive matter. Badly handled it could become serious.'

‘And we wouldn't want that, would we?' She looked at him. ‘Sorry, carry on.'

He listened in silence while Professor McBride told him why he was going to Santander to talk to a man named Arthur Jarvis. When she had finished he agreed with her that yes, it was sensitive, and that if he ballsed it up it could indeed become serious, very bloody serious. He left the office and went back down to Reception, handed over his visitor's pass, and was signed out.

Outside, the day seemed even hotter than when he had arrived, but that may have been because inside it was eternally set to American hotel comfort levels. He headed back to the nearest Metro station, half an hour's walk away with nowhere to rest or shelter from the sun.

He was hot and tired, with the beginnings of a headache, when he finally went down into the comparative cool of the Metro. He was out of the sun but with an hour's journey still ahead of him. It was days like this, he thought, when he regretted not owning a car. But as he cooled down, the headache left him and he felt better, and he knew that a car would be as useless to him in Rome as it would have been when he lived and worked in London. In London the traffic had been a nightmare; in Rome it was a horror story.  The Metro wasn't crowded, the morning rush was well over and he was able to sit and relax as the train clattered its way to central Rome. He changed lines at Termini which was, as always, busy and noisy, and by the time he came out of the Metro at his home station, Lepanto, he didn't mind the sun and enjoyed the walk on the shady side of the quiet, tree-lined streets. Soon he would be back in his apartment and could get himself a cold beer.

Jimmy lived in a smart residential district north of the Vatican. His apartment was on the top floor of a four-storey building which looked just like all the other four-storey buildings that lined either side of the street, except that beside his main entrance there was a small restaurant, the Café Mozart.

He went up the stairs, let himself in, went to the kitchen and poured himself a cold beer. While he sat drinking he thought about Santander. He wondered if it would be as hot there as it was in Rome. Probably. But it was by the sea and that meant you got breezes. His mind slipped back to memories of another seaside town, Eastbourne on the south coast, where he, Bernie and the kids had gone on summer holidays. There had been brisk early morning walks, and evening strolls when they'd watched the sun setting over the sea. He remembered how evenings and mornings could be chilly even if the days were warm. He decided it would be a good idea to take along a light jacket. Santander wasn't Eastbourne, he knew that, but an ingrained English caution about seaside summer weather told him it was always best to be prepared. 

Chapter Two

The heat came at you from everywhere: it was in the glare off the sea, it bounced off the pavements and roads, it wrapped itself round you, and pressed itself against you.

At least that's how it seemed to Jimmy.

He was sitting at a table drinking a cold beer. The table was one of about a dozen beside a grove of palms which stood on a rectangle of hard sandy ground between the main road and the sea-front walkway.

Each table had its own bright parasol, but the shade from the trees and the parasols made no difference to the heat.  Jimmy picked up his beer, more to feel the cold of the glass than for any enjoyment of thecontents. To his old-fashioned, north London palate, the beer was too cold to have any discernable taste. He glanced through the palms at the buildings on the other side of the main road and toyed with the idea of crossing over into one of the many air-conditioned bars for his next beer, but he quickly gave up on the idea. He wanted to watch the big, white ferry coming in. He'd seen it, or one like it, leaving when he'd come into Santander from the airport. It had cruised out into the open water like some kind of liner, and he'd found it hard to believe when the taxi driver told him it was just one of the routine ferries that shuttled between Santander and the UK.

He put down his glass and looked out to sea. The ferry was still far away, quite small but slowly growing in size. While he watched he tried to tell himself that he was better off outside. If he'd sat in one of the bars he would have nothing to do but stare at his glass or the other customers or look out at the traffic. Out here he could look around, at the beach, the sky, the sea, the strollers on the walkway, and he would feel any breeze that might come in off the water. Except that when he looked at the sea he could see the heat-haze hovering over the sparkling blue that was almost a flat calm.

There was no breeze coming, not from the sea, not from anywhere.

He took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead, then gave his sunglasses a polish. He put them back on and looked at the crowded beach which lay just beyond the wide, paved walkway between the tables and the sand. All that bare flesh gently roasting.Thousands of otherwise sensible people paid good money to sit and lie in the burning Spanish sun and called it a holiday. He picked up his beer and took a drink. It wasn't quite so cold any more.

A young woman in sunglasses, wearing a white blouse and dark skirt, stepped off the walkway and came to his table, pulled out a chair and sat down.

‘Good afternoon.'

Jimmy looked at his visitor.

‘Do I know you?'

‘No, but I know you. You are Mr James Cornelius Costello.'

A copper.

Only a copper would use his full name because only the police would have bothered to find out what it was.

‘OK, so I'm James Costello. And you are?'

‘Detective Inspector Suarez from the Santander police.'

She took out her ID and passed it to Jimmy who took it, looked and passed it back. She was a good-looking blonde and spoke English with only a slight Spanish accent.

‘Is there something I can do for you, Inspector?'

‘Yes, there is. I would like you to leave Santander. In fact my superiors, who asked me to come and talk to you, would be happy if I could persuade you to leave Spain altogether.'

Jimmy took a drink of his beer. It reminded him of the bottled stuff he drank in Rome. It was OK, but it wasn't like a decent London pint. He missed London beer, especially Directors and London Pride.

‘Any special reason, or does somebody not like the way I look?'

The Inspector took off her sunglasses and looked. A middle-aged man in a short-sleeved shirt, with a face which betrayed nothing of what he might be thinking. She'd been told it was supposed to be a dangerous face, but there was something almost gentle, or even sad, about his eyes.

No, she thought, it wasn't the way he looked.

‘I'm sure you don't really have to ask, Mr Costello.'

‘Yes, I really do have to ask because I really do want to know.'

The waiter came to the table through the trees from the bar beyond them. The Inspector ordered a beer. Apparently she wasn't in any hurry to go.

‘You were a policeman in London. You left the police suddenly and disappeared. As far as we can gather it had to do with a gangland killing but it's hard to find out anything because nobody seems to want to talk about you, not even to another police force. After some years you returned to London, apparently doing some sort of work in a refuge. Two murders occurred, both connected with the place you were working. Again you disappeared and again no one wants to talk about it. Then, last year, you turned up in Copenhagen. More trouble and again you left, this time for Rome in the company of a Monsignor who –' the Inspector paused to give him what Jimmy's mum would have called an old-fashioned look, ‘– claimed you were carrying a Vatican diplomatic passport.'

Jimmy shrugged.

‘I resigned, the hours didn't suit.'

‘Just after you left Copenhagen an Englishwoman was arrested for the murder of her husband. When arrested she made the bizarre claim of self-defence, that he intended to kill her. When questioned your name cropped up in connection with an incident in Lübeck.  That incident turned out to involve two dead bodies. That's a long list of dead people, Mr Costello.' The waiter arrived with her beer, put it down and left. ‘By all means correct me if any of what I have said is wrong.'

‘Even if what you say is right I'm not wanted by any police force that I know of.'

‘No, Mr Costello, you're not wanted, certainly not by the Santander police. That's what I came to tell you, remember?'

‘Very clever, but what I meant was, no warrants were ever issued against me.'

‘No, that's correct. You're not on any list that we know of. We checked.'

‘Then why the big interest? None of that stuff would be anything to do with the Spanish police, if any of it was true, of course.'

‘It's true, Mr Costello, we both know that, so let's not play games. Bad things happen around you, people die. Now you've turned up in Santander and, like I said, my superiors want you to leave. Your name comes first on their not-wanted list. They sent me to tell you. Unfortunately, as you say, you have done nothing that I can use to make you leave, but I have given you the message and hope you'll have the sense to act on it  My advice, my very strong advice, would be to leave and leave soon.'

‘If your bosses want me to go, why not try asking me instead of threatening me?'

‘And if I asked you, would you leave?'

‘That would depend on how you asked.'

‘How would you suggest I should ask?'

‘With a gun in your hand, a finger on the trigger and in a voice which made me believe you'd use it.'

‘And if I did it that way would you leave?'

‘Oh, yes, I'd leave. Either that or, if I also had a gun, I'd blow your fucking brains out.'

She took a drink of her beer. If she was at all offended she didn't show it.

‘Why are you here, Mr Costello? What brings you to Santander?'

‘I'm taking a holiday. If all you say about me is true I think I must need one. Think of me as just another tourist bringing my much-needed euros into the local economy.'

‘That's a lie, Mr Costello.'

‘But you can't prove it's a lie, can you?' Jimmy finished what was left of his beer. It was almost warm now. His manner and tone changed. He wasn't here to get into trouble with the local police so why try to needle anybody? ‘I'm here to collect some information.'

‘Who for?'

‘My boss.'

‘And who is your boss?'

‘Someone in Rome. A senior academic at a college.'

‘Does he have a name?'

‘Doesn't everybody?'

‘If you are deliberately uncooperative, Mr Costello, I must assume you have something to hide from the police, that your reasons for being here are not ones that the police would approve of. They might perhaps even be criminal.'

‘Assume what you like. If you want me to tell you anything about why I'm here you'll have to wait until I get clearance to talk to you.'

‘I could arrest you, Mr Costello. We could talk at the police station.'

Jimmy tried a smile, it almost worked.

‘No need to get tough, Inspector, it doesn't suit you.'

He got a smile back.

‘Don't let appearances give you the wrong impression.'

Jimmy believed her. She wasn't big, but she was solid enough and looked to be in good shape. In fact, her shape looked very good. He wondered if she was trained in some sort of martial art. These days the muscle end of things was probably all scientific and factored into the training manual, it wouldn't be just using your fists and your boots in a cell any more.

‘Arresting me would probably mean involving politicians. I'm not official but the information, if and when I get it, will be passed on and when it gets where it's going it will become official. If I get kicked out before I get my information then questions will get asked. Do you want to get the politicians involved?'

She took another drink.

‘No, they are not usually helpful.'

‘Then why don't you just sit back and drink your beer before it gets warm and let me make a call and then we'll see if I can co-operate?' She didn't answer, she put her sunglasses back on, picked up her beer and looked out to sea. Jimmy waited a moment. ‘Make your call, Mr Costello.'

Jimmy pulled out his mobile. The woman carried on looking out to sea pretending she wasn't there and that she wasn't listening.

Jimmy put the number in then held the mobile to his ear.

‘I need to speak to Professor McBride. Yes it's important, at least, it's important if my being here is important. Personally I don't give a shit one way or the other.' Somebody at the other end took offence. ‘I know, I've been told before, I grieve over them at night. Look, just pass on the message. I'll give McBride half an hour to get back to me then I'll use my own judgement.'

He put the mobile down on the table. The woman returned to those present.

‘I don't have half an hour.'

‘If I'm right you won't need it. I'll get a call. Why not get me another beer while we're waiting?'

The suggestion got him another smile.

‘I thought the man did the buying on a first date.'

Jimmy smiled back and he didn't have to make an effort this time. He liked her.

‘No, you can't have it both ways. Either you're a tough guy in a bra and you buy the drinks, or you're a good-looking blonde chatting me up and I buy the drinks. It's your choice.'

She took off her sunglasses. This time Jimmy looked at her eyes. They were dark and she had a dark complexion so maybe her blonde hair came out of a bottle. It wasn't something he knew much about, but that was his guess. She raised a hand to a waiter who was clearing a nearby table. He came across and she ordered a beer. Then she put her sunglasses on again and looked out at the sea. It was still there. When the beer came the waiter put it down in front of her. She picked it up and passed it to Jimmy.

‘You not having another?'

‘No.'

Jimmy drank his beer and they both sat in silence. Then his phone rang.

‘I'm sitting at a table outside a bar looking at the sea and having a beer with a local police Inspector who knows my life story and says her bosses want me tarred and feathered and run out of town and out of Spain. How should I know, maybe they object to my aftershave? There's been a lot of checking up on me and my friend here says they don't like what they know about my past, at least that's the reason they're telling me. Yes, I know it could be true, but then again, maybe it isn't. If they've checked as thoroughly as they seem to have done then either they've been taking a close look at me for a long time or someone's been feeding them information. It also means they knew I was coming. How should I know who told them?' He took the phone away from his ear. ‘Who told you I was coming?' Suarez stayed silent so he put the phone back to his ear. ‘No, she didn't. I didn't think she would. So, what do you want me to do? Leave, tell them why I'm here, what?.' Jimmy listened for a moment. ‘OK, just as you say.' Then he put the mobile away. ‘I'm here to talk to a Mr Arthur Jarvis. He's English and retired here about three years ago.'

The sunglasses came off again. He wasn't sure whether they annoyed her or she meant it to annoy him. Maybe it was just a habit. And when she spoke the tone of her voice changed, whatever she had been doing, she definitely wasn't chatting him up now.

‘I'm sorry, Mr Costello, but you can't talk to Mr Jarvis.'

‘It's a Church matter. A Catholic Church matter. As far as I know it is nothing to do with the Spanish authorities, certainly not the police.'

That was a black lie, of course, but she wouldn't know that.

‘You're wrong. It is very much a matter for the authorities, especially the police. Mr Jarvis died two days ago.'

‘Died? How?'

‘A single shot to the head.'

That got all his attention. That, he had not expected.

‘Suicide?'

‘Suicides don't usually shoot themselves in the back of the head and then hide the gun so, no, I don't think suicide. Do you see now why we want you out of Spain? Your arrival coincides with a dead body, a resident Englishman. Like I said, bad thing keep happening around you, Mr Costello, and I'm Spanish which makes me a deeply superstitious person. Also I don't believe in co-incidences.'

‘When did he die?'

‘The day before yesterday.'

‘What time?'

‘Shortly before eleven o'clock in the morning.'

Jimmy shrugged. That let him out.

‘I flew in two days ago, but I didn't land until shortly after 10.45, so I don't see that I had time to have anything to do with it. Maybe I'm just a coincidence after all. They do happen.'