The Villa of Mysteries (38 page)

Costa passed through four small chambers, each barely lit by a single bulb dangling from a wire in the centre, just like at Ostia. In the shadows he could make out more rooms and corridors, stretching into the gloom. The place was a subterranean labyrinth, an ancient maze cut into the rock. He wished now he’d waited for back-up. He wished he could hear what the man in the darkness was saying.

He tried to picture what lay ahead of him but it was impossible. When he thought he was heading for the sound, he would turn a corner and find himself floundering in an impenetrable darkness. After a while he couldn’t work out which way was forward, which back. His legs dragged across the rough stone floor. His head hurt. More than once he tripped, and was aware of the noise he made. The distant voices rolled incomprehensibly around him from every direction.

Then he ducked to stumble through a low opening and found himself dazzled by the intensity of what lay beyond.

Three bulbs dangled from this ceiling, burning like miniature yellow suns. On the rock walls around him, plastered everywhere, covering each other like an overlapping skin of living images, were colour photographs, all of the same two faces in the same two poses: Suzi Julius, happy and smiling, bright blonde hair waving around her face, and Eleanor Jamieson, this photo slightly faded from the years, still shocking in its similarity. They could have been sisters, he thought, not for the first time. No wonder Kirk saw her and began to remember.

He turned around, feeling giddy, wondering where to look next, where to go, clutching for the gun instinctively, feeling his hand wander to the wrong places.

“Oh, Jesus,” said a frightened female voice floating out of the darkness. Then the breathy words faded, were replaced by the sound of something sweeping through the air.

Nic Costa felt an agonizing pain crash into the back of his skull. He was aware of falling, still dazzled by the bright intensity of the room. Then darkness.

S
OMETHING STIRRED AT THE BACK OF TERESA LUPO’S MIND, rumbling around the darker corners of her sleep, buzzing, shifting position, now near, now far. She swore, felt her heavy eyelids start to stir, then rolled awake at her desk in the morgue, just in time to see an equally sleepy honeybee lurch through the air then head off back to the open window.

It was morning. A warm spring morning, just after seven. The city was already alive beyond the window, cars and people, sounds so familiar, so normal that it took her a moment to remember this was no ordinary day.

She’d called in help, from the carabinieri and the health department, from anywhere she could think of, old, retired colleagues, med students looking for some experience. For the moment it had been a question of coping rather than discovering, filing material as she thought of it. Then, sometime after three, she’d placed her head on the desk and fallen fast asleep. Silvio Di Capua had had similar ideas. He was still curled up in a crumpled, foetal heap on the floor in the corner of the morgue. A couple of admin people, only one of whom she recognized, were busy with paperwork. A bunch of medic types were working at the tables: the little accountant had just reached his place in the queue. Barbara Martelli’s father was next.

“Any more signed up for the ride?” she asked the admin men.

“No.”

“Thank God for that.” She wasn’t sure she could cope with another damned corpse. She wasn’t sure she could cope with the ones she’d got. Her nose felt as if someone had jammed a couple of wads of leaky cotton wool up each nostril. Her throat was like sandpaper. Sweat soaked her hair. Teresa Lupo looked a mess. She knew it and she didn’t care.

Then a figure came through the door, Gianni Peroni, so fresh and alert it was unnatural.

He walked over and peered into her eyes, curious, a little judgemental perhaps.

“What drugs are you on that make you so bright and chirpy?” she asked. “And do you have any for me?”

“Let me buy you a coffee. Outside this place. By the way, have you seen Nic?”

“No . . .” The question puzzled her. She’d almost forgotten she belonged to a world beyond those shining tables.

“Come,” he said, and took her weary arm then led her down the corridor, out into the waking morning.

It was the beginning of a beautiful day. She could even hear birdsong. Or perhaps, she thought, her mind had some preternatural acuity after the recent shocks. Her head didn’t feel right. It hadn’t for a while. Something was different after the sleep, though. She felt exhausted, drained, physically and mentally. But there was a measure of control inside this state too, and that was welcome.

Peroni led her to the café around the corner, ordered two big black coffees, stirred some sugar sludge from the glass on the counter into his cup, then did the same for hers.

“When you work vice,” he said, “you come to know about getting through the night. You get to like it after a while. The world’s more honest then somehow. People don’t have to look you in the face when they’re lying. You get to know about the value of coffee too. Here . . .”

He held up his cup and, instinctively, she clipped it with hers.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Tidings of joy. Information. Enlightenment. For one thing, I’d like to know who Professor Randolph Kirk phoned to start all this crap.”

“Nic asked me that too,” she said. “Tell you what. I’ll ask old Randolph when I get back.”

“You do that. Any further gems for me?”

“Stand in the queue. It’s a long one. How’s Falcone doing? How’s that woman of his?”

He made a tilting motion with his hand. “She’s still in intensive. She’ll pull through. That woman’s made of stone. As for Leo, I dunno. He’s not looking lovelorn anymore. Maybe that pisses him off too. Who cares? We got work to do. Big work, Teresa, maybe bigger than even we can handle. We need to get somewhere fast. So you see why I’m here? We need all the help we can get.”

She found herself thinking seriously about Gianni Peroni for the first time. He wasn’t the arrogant, bent vice creep she’d first thought. Underneath that curiously ugly exterior he possessed some stiff, unbending spine of integrity that made his disgrace all the more poignant, all the less understandable. Falcone and Nic Costa were lucky to have him around, although she wondered how much the older man appreciated that.

“When are you going back to your old job?”

Peroni winked. It was a comic gesture. She almost found the energy to laugh. “Between you and me? As soon as this shit is over. I bumped into my old boss in the corridor during the night. They drafted him in too. Nice guy. Understanding guy. He had some warm words for old Gianni. Thank Christ. This detective stuff is not my scene. It brings you into contact with the wrong sort of people.”

She waited a moment to make sure she understood that last statement correctly. “And vice doesn’t?”

“In vice you just meet people who want to mess with your body. These guys are forever hanging around those who just can’t wait to mess with your head.” She didn’t say anything. “But then I think you know that already.”

“Possibly,” she conceded. “So tell me what you want me to do.”

“Me?” Peroni replied. “Hell, I don’t know. None of us has a clue where to begin here. We haven’t had a gang war in Rome in living memory. If that’s what it is—”

“What else could it be?”

“Search me. But if it is a gang war it’s a pretty one-sided affair, don’t you think? Somehow from behind his iron gates, with no troops whatsoever except a few golf buddies, the American whacks Neri’s accountant and lays out all those documents that mean Neri has to take to his heels. At least I guess that’s how he feels. Then the fat man goes ballistic and puts a little leaving present outside his own house for us.”

She knew what he meant. “It’s a funny kind of war.”

“Sort of unbalanced, don’t you think? And Wallis. He’s just sitting there in that big house of his, twiddling his thumbs, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. The DIA’s bugging his phones. Bugging him direct too, I suspect, because they just love playing with those toys of theirs. He’s not retaliating. He’s not doing a damn thing as far as we can work out.”

Teresa sat up straight. She could talk cop again, and she liked that. She smoothed down the crumpled front of her blue shirt, wondered if it wasn’t time to lose a little weight from the old frame. She was big-boned. That was what her mamma always said. But she could get fit if she wanted. She could meet these men at their own game. “What about Barbara Martelli’s old man? You’re telling me Wallis didn’t do that?”

“Now there,” he said with a sudden assurance, “we do know something. Wallis had nothing to do with it. Not unless he’s running Neri’s family for him. We got a good ID from a man who was seen leaving the building. The guy saw someone go in before Martelli got shot. It was Neri’s own son did that one. Dumb bastard left prints too. Makes sense. I guess Neri thought Martelli might tell us what was really going on in that fuck club of theirs. So he sent his boy round. Still doesn’t add up to a war. Not in my book.”

“Unless it’s over already,” she suggested. “The American’s thrown in the towel.”

Peroni didn’t look convinced. “Maybe. A part of me hopes that’s so. The trouble is, I can’t help thinking that if that is the case we’ll never get to the bottom of anything. We never get to understand why poor Barbara whacked the professor and then drove into that big hole chasing you.”

This repetitive refrain was beginning to piss her off. “Poor Barbara . . . Why’s she always ‘poor Barbara’?”

He seemed surprised by the question. “Because she’s dead, Teresa. And whatever happened, whatever she tried to do to you, it wasn’t
her
. It was something else. Something that affected her. Surely you can see that?”

She could, but she didn’t want to face it just then. She’d come close to the edge herself at times. There was craziness in the air.

“What about poor Suzi Julius?”

He shrugged and looked abruptly despondent. “We thought we had a sighting last night. Just before the bangy thing went off. Nic went over there to chase it.” Peroni hesitated, reluctant to go on.

“Well?” she wondered.

“Haven’t heard a word from him since. His phone’s dead. No sign of him in the street. Never went home.”

It always happened with bad news. A picture of the person involved just flew into her head. Teresa Lupo had, maybe unwittingly, got very close to Costa over the last year. He had qualities she didn’t see in abundance around the Questura: persistence, compassion and a dogged sense of justice. And he never caught the cynicism bug either, which, perhaps more than anything, made him stand out from the crowd. “Oh crap. What the hell can have happened?”

“We have no idea,” Peroni said honestly. “But I like that young man, Teresa. He is going to be driving me around when I go back to my old job. No one’s taking that privilege away from me.”

He flexed those big shoulders and she began to understand something else about Peroni. He wasn’t a man to give up easily.

“You could have told me about Nic earlier.”

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

“So what do you want from me?” she asked again.

“Look, I’m not telling you how to do your job. Nor is this a request from Falcone or anything. To be honest with you, everyone back there’s clutching at straws anyway. I just want to say this. We’re all short on resources right now. We all have to think about priorities. You’re a good pathologist, you know the rules, you stick by them, mostly—”

She finished the coffee, looked him in the eye and said, “Cut the crap.”

“OK, OK. I just can’t help thinking that somewhere in that workload of yours there’s something that can help us. And it’s not going to be in the obvious places, or the most recent ones. I know you got to do it on all those poor bastards. I was just hoping you wouldn’t kind of focus on the easy ones first. I mean, Toni Martelli, the accountant guy. Those people from outside Neri’s house. We
know
how they died. We need forensic, sure, but I don’t think our answer’s going to come from looking at those corpses. Whereas—”

He left it at that, hoping she’d pick up the bait.

“Whereas—?” she wondered.

“Oh God. Do I have to say this? You were right all along. Whatever prompted this shit began with that kid we dug out of the bog. If we could work out what the hell happened to her, and where, then maybe we’d get some better perspective on what’s going on.”

She looked across at the skinny bartender playing with his ponytail and said, “After you’ve washed your hands you can make me another coffee.” The youth slunk off to the kitchen then returned and started working the espresso machine.

Peroni eyed her, just a hint of admiration in his face. “You’re direct, Teresa. I like that in a woman.”

“This Mickey Neri. He killed Barbara’s old man. The Julius woman identified him hanging around her daughter too.”

“Yeah?”

“And if I recall correctly,” she continued, “this same Mickey Neri met Eleanor Jamieson. I saw the notes. They said Wallis and she took a family holiday in Sicily with the Neris six weeks or so before she died.”

“Stands to reason—”

“Oh yes.” She swallowed half the cup of coffee and felt the caffeine and sugar buzz start to hit the back of her head.

“You want to be careful with that stuff,” he said. “It can give you nightmares.”

“I don’t need coffee for that. Do you?”

Peroni glanced at his watch. “Well?”

“We haven’t touched any of yesterday’s,” she said. “Well, hardly anyway. I spent most of last night trying to complete the autopsy on Eleanor Jamieson. I did try to come up and talk to you people about this. Around two thirty. If I recall correctly, you were all too busy.”

His mouth hung open, hungry for information. Quite deliberately she slowly finished the coffee then wiped out the dregs with her index finger and sucked it, making little squeaks of pleasure all the time.

“Please—” he begged.

“I got it wrong, twice over, big time. She wasn’t some virgin sacrifice. Or to be more accurate, she may have been a sacrifice but she wasn’t a virgin. I was wrong too that you couldn’t get any DNA out of a body that’s been sitting in all that acid peat for sixteen years. There’s one circumstance that allows this.” She looked at him. “You want to guess?”