The Villa of Mysteries nc-2 Read online

  “No,” she replied immediately. “There’s no need.” She paused. “I’m sorry. About last night. Embarrassing you like that. It was inexcusable.”

  “Forget it.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “I won’t forget it. Most men… well, I know what most men would have done. I guess… thanks.”

  He didn’t want to prolong this particular line of conversation. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Just walk around the place. Think. Hope. Just sitting in that stupid apartment on my own is driving me crazy. She’s got my mobile if she needs it.”

  He gave her his card. “Call me. Anytime. For any reason. Even if there’s no news. If you just want to talk.”

  She put the number in her bag. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said hesitantly. “I didn’t mean it last night when I said I had a habit of doing that. Sleeping with strangers. It wasn’t strictly true. I don’t want you to think… it was just automatic.” She glanced directly into his eyes for a moment.

  Peroni saved him. He walked back into the room, shaking his head, saying there was no news from forensic, but they were still looking, they were starting to take phone calls from the public.

  Then he sat down next to her, took off his jacket and placed it round the back of the chair, looking serious, businesslike. “We’re doing the best we can, Mrs. Julius,” Peroni added. “If there’s anything you can think of that’s occurred to you since yesterday…”

  She clutched her arms tightly to her chest and nodded forward, a tense, nervous gesture. Her fair hair bobbed with the momentum of the sudden movement. “Nothing.” Then she came to life briefly. “No. I’m sorry. I’m not thinking straight. Last night, after you’d gone, I found one of those throwaway cameras in Suzi’s room. I got it developed just now. There’s nothing there. It’s just… stuff. Places. A young man. It’s just the usual holiday snapshots, though. No pictures of specific people, not that I can see. But you’re welcome to it.”

  “That could be incredibly useful,” Peroni said confidently. “This is exactly the kind of help we need, Miranda.”

  Costa looked at his partner and realized he was beginning to like him. A lot. They both knew there was nothing in the photos. Peroni was just helping her feel involved.

  She reached into her canvas shoulder bag, took out an envelope of prints and handed them to Costa. He flicked through them: all the usual tourist jaunts. The Spanish Steps. The Trevi Fountain. The Colosseum. Suzi had done the rounds.

  “We’ll take a close look,” he promised.

  They saw her out, watched her leave.

  “I hate lying to people,” Peroni said when she was out of earshot. “We’ve had three calls, and all them from the usual nutcases. I can’t believe no one’s seen the kid.”

  “That’s exactly what happened with the Jamieson girl.”

  Peroni looked sceptical. “Come on, Nic. I know enough about these things to understand this is what happens half the time. Let’s not leap to conclusions. That poor woman knows we’re doing that anyway and it’s just scaring her stupid.”

  Costa sighed. Peroni was right.

  “The trouble is,” Peroni went on, “I’m just like everyone else here. I can’t stop thinking about Barbara. It’s driving me crazy. What the hell went wrong there? Her old man is an asshole. A crook and a cheat and a bully. Barbara seemed so different. I used to look at her and think: yeah, you can beat off all the crap you get in this world, so long as you try. And I was wrong, wasn’t I? She’d got the poison just like the rest of us. Only worse. Why?”

  Costa had seen Falcone briefly before he went to forensic. He knew where they were supposed to go next. “You worked with her old man?”

  “I had that privilege,” Peroni replied, suspicious all of a sudden. Then he looked Costa in the eye. “Oh no. Don’t tell me. Falcone wants you and me to go have a little talk with the bastard. Please, for God’s sake tell me I’m wrong.”

  Costa threw his hands open in exasperation. “You know him, Gianni. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The men who went round to talk to him last night came away with less than nothing.”

  Peroni picked up his jacket from the chair and stood up, grimacing. “Why does this have to happen to me? Let me ask you something, Nic. I’ve got a daughter too. She’s just at that age where you start to see something adult beginning to emerge from all the kid stuff. So how’d you spot if they’re going down that road? How’d you know they’re not sucking some dark part out of you that you can’t even see yourself?”

  The big ugly face stared at Costa, full of bewilderment and something close to grief. “If I couldn’t spot that in Barbara Martelli, if she could take all of us in so easily, how are you supposed to know?”

  Costa was only half listening. There wasn’t time to deal with Peroni’s guilt. There was scarcely time to flick through the snaps again, seeing what he saw before, just familiar pieces of stone and crowds of people, tourists mainly. A sea of expressionless faces keeping all their secrets.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  SHE HAD ACHES AND PAINS from the car crash. A plaster was attached to part of her scalp where she’d headbutted the dashboard. Still, this should have been a good morning in the Rome city morgue, one full of interest. Two fresh bodies on the slab. A blank cheque to start running whatever tests she liked on the curiously mummified corpse of Eleanor Jamieson. The work had never been this promising, not in the eight years she’d worked there. Nevertheless, Teresa Lupo leaned against the exterior wall that linked her office to the Questura, hunched deep in thought, puffing on the third cigarette of the day. Events were moving around her. Falcone had left with an entire team. Nic Costa and Peroni had nodded goodbye as they set off a few minutes later. And they were all, she suspected, headed in the wrong direction.

  One obsessive thought had filled her head when she took the risk and drove to Ostia: a young girl called Suzi Julius was in big trouble and didn’t know it. Somehow this kid had walked into the hands of a lunatic. An intelligent, careful lunatic, true, but a lunatic all the same. At best she might get off with being raped, and probably not in the missionary position either. At worst…

  Teresa thought of the tanned, leathery body on the slab and, for the first time in her career, began to wonder whether the job was finally beginning to get to her. Was it possible her fears for Suzi Julius were really just a manifestation of something else, a deep and growing malaise with the innate futility of what she did? She liked her work. Occasionally she came up with something that helped. She was good, better than average, which was why the authorities tolerated her behaviour. But whatever she did, however smart, however prescient, it always occurred after the event. You could comfort yourself with the thought that putting away some murdering creep could—just possibly—have prevented him killing someone else in the future. It still didn’t bring back the ones who were already dead. She was, when push came to shove, just a prurient mourner at their funeral, offering tears and sympathy and nothing else. She helped, but it wasn’t enough. Not in Teresa Lupo’s eyes anyway.

  And now she wasn’t even doing that. When she’d gone to Ostia there’d been, at the back of her mind, the hope that she would find something to prove the bigger picture, to make it plain that some odd strand of recurring history linked Eleanor Jamieson’s death with Suzi Julius’s disappearance. It had to be that way. There was no longer any question of it in Teresa’s head, even though she was unable to rationalize her certainties. Falcone was a good cop. Give him the evidence, give him the cards to play, and there could be no one better on the case. But she’d seen the look in his eyes when he sat in the apartment in the Teatro di Marcello the previous day. He already had one certain murder, albeit a crime that was sixteen years old. Next to this—and the gangland connections that were common knowledge around the station even before she left for Ostia—the wilful disappearance of a teenage girl seemed, if not unimportant, certainly minor.

  The thyrsus, the dates, the curious collec
tion of seeds… all the evidence she and Nic Costa had found in Suzi’s bedroom carried insufficient weight. Maybe Suzi had been hooked on some Dionysian cult on the Internet. There were plenty there. Teresa had checked that morning. Maybe the tattoo on the shoulder was just one of the things kids did. Still, she didn’t really believe this for a moment. Falcone probably felt the same way. But without something stronger, something he could work on, he was lost.

  Which was, she thought again, why she’d broken all the rules and driven out to see Professor Randolph Kirk, expecting to find Harrison Ford touting answers and bumping, instead, into Booger Bill who could only offer more complications and unfathomable mysteries. It was the worst possible decision in the world, and not just because it could end up getting her fired. With Kirk’s death, Falcone got another real crime to sink his teeth into, another spur to push Suzi Julius further to the back of his consciousness. When Teresa got chased by the helmeted beetle on a superbike, only to discover later it was an off-duty cop who was trying to whack her, and one whom most of the Questura lusted after daily, everything moved onto a different level altogether. A missing teenager became peripheral.

  Teresa had sent Monkboy walkabout gathering gossip in the Questura that morning, before starting the autopsy on Barbara Martelli, a task she did not relish. Monkboy was good at this. The cops half pitied, half ridiculed him, and along the way he picked up all manner of information. He’d yet to report back. She knew, though, what he’d say. No one had seen Suzi Julius. Try as they might, no one had found any reason to believe this was anything more than the usual: a teenager trying to find out what adulthood was all about, not caring how shit-scared her mother might be in the meantime.

  She’d taken a quick walk through the station herself too and seen the looks in their faces, understood what they’d have said if she raised the subject. So there’s this gorgeous traffic cop with hair the colour of gold and tits that never quite fit beneath her leather bike suit. One day this angel, this sex goddess with shades and a Ducati, whacks some university professor guy for no apparent reason. After which she tries similarly to off Rome’s resident eccentric pathologist only to wind up dead herself down some stinking pit outside Fiumicino. And you’re asking about a missing teenager who, when last seen, was smiling, waving a weirdly intense mamma goodbye as boyfriend number one drives her off in search of a suitable source of condoms? Does the word “priority” have no meaning where you come from? Do you ever stop to wonder how that sobriquet “crazy” came about?

  They had a point. A cop point. But she’d seen something else on their faces. When they looked at her it was as if they somehow felt she was to blame. If she’d never driven out to Ostia, Barbara Martelli and Randolph Kirk would still be alive, and we’d all be none the wiser about why one would, if a person was to press all the right/wrong buttons, render the other stone dead.

  “Yeah, but—” she said out loud, stabbing a finger at an imaginary antagonist standing in front of her, arguing with the thin, fume-filled air of a Roman spring. “Not knowing doesn’t mean there wasn’t something bad there all along. We just didn’t understand what it was, or why it existed.”

  And we don’t now, she thought miserably. We know nothing.

  “Could’ve happened anyway,” she mumbled to herself. “Not my fault. Ignorance isn’t bliss.”

  The back door to the station opened. Monkboy stumbled out and shambled towards her, head down, not wanting to meet her eyes.

  “Silvio,” she said cheerfully. “My man. My eyes and ears. Tell me, darling. What are they saying about your beloved boss hereabouts? Am I up for Commissioner next? Or should I think of running for President instead?”

  He leaned back on the wall next to her, accepted a cigarette, lit it with all the skill and precision of a nine-year-old, took one deep puff then had a coughing fit.

  “You don’t have to smoke for my sake,” Teresa observed. “Frankly, Silvio, I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke at all. You don’t look like a smoker. These things don’t fit your face.”

  Obediently, he threw the cigarette on the floor and stamped on it with his foot. “They’re all assholes. All cops. Every last one of them.”

  She took his arm, leaned into his shoulder and, just for a second, twiddled girlishly with his lank, long hair. It required her to duck down a little. Silvio was not the tallest of men. “Tell me something I don’t know, dear heart. What about the Julius girl?”

  “They’ve got nothing new.”

  “So what are they doing?”

  “Falcone’s gone to see a hood or something. They sent Costa and the weird-looking guy with him to dig up Barbara Martelli’s past. Try to work out why she’d want to kill the professor dude.”

  “And me. Let’s not forget that, Silvio. She tried to kill me too.”

  “Yeah.” His eyes darted across the yard.

  “And?” She wasn’t letting him go just then. There was more to come.

  “They’re pissed off with you, Teresa. They are really pissed off.”

  “That makes a change.”

  “No.” His round, liquid eyes came to fall on her and for a moment she actually felt guilty for getting him this scared. “You don’t get it. I’ve never heard them talk like this before. It’s as if—”

  He didn’t want to say any more.

  “As if it’s my fault?”

  He stared at his shoes. “Yeah.”

  She thought of slapping him out of this state, then decided it might not be the best decision in the circumstances.

  “But it isn’t. Is it? Look at me, Silvio, for God’s sake.”

  He did. His mournful face wasn’t a pretty sight.

  “Say ”It’s not your fault, Teresa.“ ”

  “It’s not your fault, Teresa.”

  “Good. So what is their… theory, if you can call it that.”

  “They don’t have one. They think there’s some mob connection with the mummy girl from way back. They think—and this is something they do not want to face—that Barbara Martelli was getting paid by one side to keep tabs on things. Informing. Running errands.”

  She couldn’t get that black helmet bobbing at the car window out of her head. “That was an errand?”

  “They don’t really know, Teresa. They’re still in shock I think.”

  “And Randolph Kirk? Where’s he supposed to fit in?”

  “When you started talking to him someone got worried he might blab about something or other and sent Barbara out to whack him and nip it all in the bud. They didn’t want witnesses either so she went after you.”

  “The prof being in the mob too, then. I mean, that’s how most Mafiosi hide out from the cops these days, isn’t it? By holding a chair in classical antiquities at the University of Rome or something?”

  “Didn’t get that far,” he mumbled. “Didn’t like to ask.”

  “And they really think the Julius kid is just coincidence?”

  “They don’t know what to think. You know what they’re like. They’re primitive organisms. They don’t multitask. There’s only so much they can handle at any one time. Also they got lots of staff off with this virus thing. Hell, so have we.”

  She ran a hand through her hair. She hadn’t been as careful as normal with it that morning. It was a mess, if she were honest with herself. Just like the old days. “But, Silvio. Suzi Julius is still alive. At least until tomorrow, if I’m right. Doesn’t anyone understand that?”

  He muttered something about priorities and how it was unfair to throw all this at him, then looked helpless again. She hated herself for venting her anger on this hapless minion. It was cruel, unjustified. It was the kind of thing cops did.

  “Sorry,” she whispered. “It’s not aimed at you. It’s aimed at me if you want to know.”

  He put his hand on her arm, which was, all things considered, a little creepy. “Let’s just go back inside, Teresa. We’ve got work to do and you and me are just about the only two people here right now who aren’t sneezi
ng up buckets. Let’s keep our heads down and get on with things until it all blows over. They’re paid to deal with this crap, not us. If we stay quiet, maybe it’ll all go away. They’ll find what they want and forget about the rest.”

  Which was a nice idea, she thought, and one that had not a snowball in hell’s chance of becoming reality.

  “There’s nothing in there you and the rest of the team can’t handle,” she said abruptly. “Let’s face it. You don’t need to be a genius to know how the beautiful Barbara and the professor died. And the bog girl’s there more for the science than the criminology. We might as well admit it. We’ve got no answers for them. We should be trying to make sure Suzi Julius doesn’t go into our in-tray instead.”

  He took his hand away. He looked scared. “That’s what they get paid to do. We’ve got a big workload on. I can’t cope on my own.”

  “You can cope, Silvio,” she said. “You can cope better than you know.”

  “What if something else happens? What if—”

  She took his arm again, smiling. “Look. Statistics. How many violent deaths do we get in Rome? There’s a week’s quota lying on the slab right now. Nothing’s going to happen today. Trust me. I need a break. I need to think.”

  The pale, flabby face blushed off-pink. “You’re going somewhere,” he said accusingly. “I know you. This is like yesterday all over again. You’re going somewhere and it isn’t good at all.”

  “I just thought I’d—”

  “No! No! Do not tell me because I don’t want to hear. Two wrongs don’t make a right—”

  “I wasn’t wrong! Stupid maybe. But two stupids just make you… stupid. And most of the jerks in there think that of me anyway. So where’s the harm?”

  “Please.” His little hands were together now, praying. “I beg of you, Teresa. For my sake. Don’t do this. Whatever it is.”

  She kissed him lightly on the cheek and watched the blood make a big rush all the way from his jowls to his eye sockets. “Nothing’s going to happen, Silvio. Listen to your friend Teresa. Just hold the fort for an hour and then I’ll be back. And they’re none the wiser.”