The Villa of Mysteries (14 page)

He looked at Falcone. “Of course
I
knew there was a body. A parent who loses a child, even a stepparent, looks at the newspapers differently. We think: is this the end? Do we now
know
? Because that becomes the source of the pain. Not the loss itself. Not the images in your head about how she might have died. It’s the absence of knowledge, the doubt that nags away at you, day and night.”

Wallis made a gesture with his hands. He had no more to say.

“You could have called us,” Costa said.

“Every time a girl’s body is found in Italy? Do you have any idea how often I’d be on the phone? Do you know how soon people would start labelling me a crank?”

He was right. Nic Costa had seen enough missing person cases to know what happened when the investigation dwindled to nothing: no body, no leads, no clue as to how someone had disappeared. There was all too often an awkward juncture at which the grieving parents became a burden, one which ought to be supported by the counselling services rather than the police, since they were the only ones who, in truth, could help.

“You’re sure?” Wallis asked again. “You’re absolutely sure?”

“Yes,” Falcone said.

“Yet the papers said something about the body being old?”

Falcone frowned. “It was a mistake on the part of the pathologist. She’d been laid
in
peat. It made it hard to carry out the normal tests. Also, I was on holiday. There was no one around from the original investigation who could put two and two together.”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Wallis said. “What can you possibly want of me in these circumstances?”

“I need you to come to the Questura for formal identification.”

Wallis shook his head and almost smiled. “What’s the point in identifying a sixteen-year-old corpse? Besides. You said you knew it was her already.”

“It’s not what you think,” Costa intervened.

“No. I know that. They printed a picture of her in the papers. I saw it at the time and thought . . . maybe. But what you’ve got isn’t my stepdaughter. It’s a corpse. I’ll make arrangements with an undertaker for the burial. I’ll see her then, when we’re both ready.”

“No,” Falcone said firmly. “That isn’t possible. This is a case of murder, Signor Wallis. The body won’t be released until I allow it. If we bring someone to court . . .”

They all heard the uncertainty in Falcone’s voice.

Wallis stared at him. “If—”

“I need you to think back to that time again. We have to reopen the case. We have records but perhaps something else has occurred to you.”

“Nothing’s occurred to me,” Wallis replied immediately. “Nothing at all. I told you everything I knew back then. Now I remember less, and maybe that’s for the best.”

“If you think about it,” Costa suggested.

“There’s nothing to think about.”

“The girl was murdered,” Costa said. “Brutally. Perhaps in some kind of ritual.”

Wallis blinked. “Ritual?”

“An ancient Roman ritual. Dionysian perhaps,” Costa continued hopefully. “There’s a place in Pompeii. The Villa of Mysteries. A professor at the university wrote a book about how they might be interpreted. Have you read it?”

Wallis’s cropped head turned sideways. Something in this idea intrigued him. “I read history, not conjecture. I don’t know anything about any Dionysian rituals.”

Costa glanced at Falcone. The villa was full of imperial Roman artefacts. It had been built on the site of an ancient temple. For all he knew, Wallis spent six months of the year pursuing only his private, historical interests. It was inconceivable that he was entirely ignorant of the subject.

“Signor Wallis,” Falcone said quietly. “This may be coincidence, but another girl is missing. It’s possible she ran away today with someone. It’s possible, I put it no more strongly than that, that someone acted out these rituals when your stepdaughter was killed. It’s possible the same person is re-enacting them now. Do you have any idea whether Eleanor was mixed up in some kind of cult?”

Wallis’s passive face creased in surprise. “What? Are you guys kidding me? She was too smart to mess around with that kind of crap. Besides, I’d have noticed something, wouldn’t I?”

“And you didn’t?” Costa asked. “The day she went missing was just like every other?”

Wallis scowled. “I told you all this sixteen years ago. The day she went missing she climbed onto her scooter and rode off for the language school. I watched her go and you know something? I
was
worried. A kid like that riding a scooter through the middle of Rome. I was worried someone might knock her over. Shows how smart I was, huh?”

Falcone handed over one of the photos from Miranda Julius’s apartment: Suzi, smiling happily outside in the Campo. The man’s reaction was extraordinary. He seemed more shocked by this than anything else they had said or done. Wallis’s face creased with the same pain Costa had seen on the videophone at the gate. He closed his eyes and was silent for almost a minute.

Then he looked at them all, one by one, peering into their faces. “What is this shit? You think you can pull some kind of stunt on me?” Wallis shook his head, unable to go on.

“This is no stunt,” Costa said carefully. “That’s the girl who has just gone missing. She met someone. Someone who persuaded her to have the tattoo on her shoulder, the same one that Eleanor had. Someone who talked to her about these rituals, and told her something would happen. On 17 March, the same day Eleanor went missing. Do you know her?”

Wallis listened attentively. He took a final look at the photograph then handed it back to Falcone. “No. I’m sorry.
I
shouldn’t have lost my cool like that. The girl reminded me of Eleanor. Her hair . . . blonde like that. It’s just the same, that’s all. I suppose that’s what you wanted.”

Falcone avoided the man’s fierce gaze. “I want the truth. That’s why we’re here. Nothing else.”

“This is the past for me. You must have some ideas.” Wallis seemed to be pleading for a way out.

“Nothing,” Falcone admitted bitterly. “A corpse. A few coincidences.” He stared at Wallis. “And you.”

“I’m no use to you, Inspector. I’m no use to anyone. Just an old man trying to find a little dignity out here on my own. My stepdaughter’s long dead. I knew she had to be, years ago. You never really believe they just disappear like that, go marry, raise kids or something, and never call. Let me mourn her. This missing girl now . . . If there was anything I could do
I
would, I promise.”

Falcone was beginning to flounder. “I need you to come to the station. I need you to identify the body. Go over the statements you made—”

“Statements I made sixteen years ago! There’s nothing I can add to them now.”

“Sometimes, sir,” Costa interjected, “you remember more when you see things from a greater perspective. Small details that meant nothing to you then become important.”

“No,” Wallis said firmly. “I had enough of this crap back then. Listen. Am I under suspicion or something? Do I need to consult a lawyer?”

“If that’s what you want,” Falcone replied. “You’re not under suspicion as far as I’m concerned.”

“Then there’s nothing you can do to force me to come with you. Don’t forget, gentlemen. Way back when I did a law degree. Put through college by guys who needed legal people bad. Maybe this was American law but I still got the attitude if I want it. Don’t pull any funny business. I won’t allow it. This meeting is at an end. I’ll appoint an undertaker to talk to you about the body. When you’re ready for me, I’ll bury the child.”

Wallis clapped his hands. The girl in the white smock came into the room, bending her head, awaiting her orders.

“The gentlemen have finished their business here, Akiko. You’ll show them out, please.”

She bowed and looked pointedly at the door.

“ ‘HERE’S THE DEAL. I don’t go around cutting up bodies. You don’t go around interrogating potential witnesses.’ Who does Falcone think he is? If it wasn’t for me he wouldn’t even know half of what he does now. Gratitude, I know, is unreasonable. Just a little respect now and then wouldn’t go amiss.”

Teresa Lupo was at the wheel of her cherry-red Seat Leon doing 160 km/h on the
autostrada
that led to the coast past Fiumicino airport. Her remarks were addressed to the grubby orange Garfield toy that dangled from the mirror, flaked with grey tobacco ash, like a polyester puppet caught up in the aftermath of Pompeii. The cat was her constant companion on the many solitary journeys she made. It was a good listener.

Falcone’s remarks had stung her all the way back to the office. They burned in her head as she finished the preliminary report on the body from the bog, based on just a few exploratory procedures. They didn’t, she hoped, cloud her judgement. On the face of things there was nothing more to be said about the corpse than they already knew. The girl had died because someone had cut her throat. The knife wound was, she now accepted, rather clean and tidy, more so, in all probability, than one might have expected in Roman times. Then there was the collection of grain and seeds which she’d sent off to a horticultural expert in Florence for analysis. These were the plain facts and, though a fuller autopsy would take place in the morning, Teresa Lupo knew from instinct there was precious little else to be extracted from the body. All the scraps of information that helped them in normal cases — fabric threads, paint, human hairs, traces of blood and, most of all, DNA — were either never there in the first place or got washed away by the brown acid waters that had worked on the poor kid’s corpse.

What continued to bug her was the way Falcone was so cool about the cornerstone of her original theory. Maybe the girl had died only sixteen years before, not the couple of millennia she originally thought. Nevertheless, the idea she first came up with — that all this was somehow hooked into the obscure rites and rituals of Dionysus — still stood. When she held Miranda Julius’s taut, nervous body in the apartment in the Teatro di Marcello she knew that Nic Costa was right. That part of the mystery — who had disappeared with Suzi and why? — still deserved an explanation. Maybe it was more important. Suzi was, as far as anyone knew, still alive.

Falcone was taking a cop’s-eye view of affairs. He could be right. He usually was. Still, she couldn’t shake off the idea that there was an intellectual argument that needed resolving too. Come tomorrow, when Suzi Julius would surely still be missing, Falcone could, if he felt like it, throw people on the street looking high and low for her. He could give her picture to the TV channels and the newspapers and hope someone would recognize it. These actions were, she felt, good and proper. They just weren’t happening soon enough. Falcone had missed a bigger question. With Eleanor Jamieson someone had acted out a ritual that was a couple of thousand years old. Why? What kind of people would behave that way? What motivated them? And — this seemed to her a very big question indeed — where did they get their ideas from? Was there an instruction manual, handed down from generation to generation? If so, by whom?

Teresa Lupo couldn’t shake the picture of Miranda Julius from her head. She had no idea what it was like to be a mother. Instinct told her she never would. All the same she’d felt some extraordinary emotion burning inside the woman on the sofa in that plush, impersonal apartment, a place that already felt as if it belonged to one person alone. Maybe Miranda was a lousy parent. Maybe the kid was just wilful, playing some kind of game. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d launched a missing person inquiry on the basis of what was nothing more than a childish prank. But none of that mattered. They were still under a duty to act as if this were the most serious possible crime imaginable, and keep on acting that way until Suzi Julius walked safely back into her mother’s arms.

Or not.

This, she told herself, was why she was driving like a crazy woman, racing down the
autostrada
out to the coast and Ostia. This was why she was bending the rules so much they might fracture in a million different directions, any one of which could seriously damage her career. They needed to know more about the side of things that Falcone seemed least interested in: what happened with those ancient rituals, and why someone seemed to think they deserved resurrection.

There was, she knew, only one man to talk to. Professor Randolph Kirk of the University of Rome ought to hold the answers. His book refused to leave her imagination. It wasn’t just that it was the single academic work on the subject she could find. It was also part academic, part speculation. Kirk almost sounded as if he knew every last answer to every last question and didn’t want to let on. Maybe there was a sequel in there somewhere. Maybe she’d offer to proofread the manuscript when she got to the dig where, as she’d ascertained in a couple of phone calls, Randolph Kirk was working this very day.

She turned off the motorway and pulled into a side lane to check the map. This really wasn’t very far from where the girl’s body was found — two, maybe three kilometres. A random thought surfaced. She pushed it away. Five minutes later she found the place. It was on the edge of the established archaeological site of Ostia Antica, not far from the station on the slow line back to Rome. There was a wire fence around the property and modern walls to protect the dig. She kept her finger pressed on the bell at the gate, wondering if it was making a noise anywhere. Peering through the fence, the only accommodation she could see appeared to be a couple of portable office buildings parked at the back.

After a while a lone figure came out. He was a balding man in his fifties with a scraggy grey and black beard, thick glasses, and absent-minded eyes. Randolph Kirk was about her height and running to seed a little. His cheeks were florid behind the beard. His nose looked like a rosy-red pincushion. Booze maybe. He walked with a funny, rolling gait, like someone who had hip problems. Instead of the safari suit she’d expected he wore very baggy, very cheap jeans and a faded-green windcheater. She couldn’t help but be disappointed. She had been imagining an Indiana Jones kind of figure, unkempt but romantic. Maybe digging up old houses didn’t attract that type.