Conor Fitzgerald - Fatal Touch

“ ‘Is that what you needed to tell me?’ I asked him. ‘Why didn’t you confront Nightingale first? I never saw the need for all the deception.’

“Then Treacy, he gives me a look which… I can’t describe it. Proud and sad at the same time. Partly a leer, partly a look of pity, and he says, ‘John Nightingale is an English cuckold. Three months after he took Angela from me, I went back and took Angela from him, only he never knew it. And I took her back time and time again. Ask her. Ask your mother. John Nightingale is not your father. I am.’

“I think I screamed,” continued Emma. “I pushed him hard. Really hard, in the chest with the heel of my hand. I hit him there three times, and he fell backwards. I heard his head crack against the cobbles, only I didn’t believe then that sound could have been made by his head. I only heard the crack afterwards, thinking back. I hear it now. But at the time I didn’t hear it and Treacy wasn’t even unconscious, because he kept calling my name as I ran away.”

Emma sat with her hands folded in her lap as she spoke, her voice calm. She even gave a deeper and heavier intonation when repeating Treacy’s words, and she would have been a model of perfect composure had it not been for the tears on the sides of her face.

Caterina thought of the handsome fair-haired youth that sat above Treacy’s desk in the gallery, and wondered how neither Emma nor Nightingale had ever seen the likeness. She wondered how Emma’s mother could have hidden the story from her daughter all these years, and why.

Emma asked for the bathroom and when she came back she had washed her face clean. She went back to the chair, picked up her purse, and pulled out her BlackBerry and showed it to Caterina, saying, “Look. It’s switched off. That way she can’t call me and the Colonel can’t find me.”

“So your mother can’t call you?” said Caterina. She did not bother mentioning that Emma would need to remove the batteries, too, if she didn’t want to be traced.

“I need to find a place to stay,” said Emma. “But where? With my lying mother, my pathetic boyfriend Pietro…”

“What about your own place?” said Caterina.

“The apartment paid for by the gallery? In other words, by my dead father and my ex-father or whatever I am supposed to call them. I’m not going there.”

“Sooner or later you are going to have to talk to them about it.”

“Why should I? My mother didn’t tell Nightingale, Nightingale thought he was fooling Treacy. I kill Treacy, and now it’s up to me to stage some sort of family reconciliation? Nightingale, Treacy. I don’t even use their first names.”

“Emma, if you say once more that you killed him, if you indicate to me that what you did was deliberate, I will arrest you now and have you taken to the station to be charged.”

Emma looked at Caterina in shock.

“So, tell me, did you deliberately kill Treacy?”

Emma shook her head. “No. I… no. I was just clearing space between us… no.”

“Did you think he was badly hurt when you ran away?”

“I didn’t care.”

“I repeat: Did it occur to you that he might be badly hurt?”

Emma closed her eyes and let out a long breath. “No. It did not. I have never hurt anyone physically in my life. I had no idea it could be so easy.”

“People are frail,” said Caterina. “Even so, you withheld vital information from us when we arrived the following day, and that is an offense with which you will be charged. But we can do that tomorrow some time.”

“Can I stay here?” said Emma.

“What? No. Of course not.”

“Just for tonight?”

“There are two bedrooms. My son is in one. I’m in the other.”

“I could sleep on the sofa you’re sitting on.”

“Out of the question,” said Caterina. “Apart from everything else, there’s the legal aspect. I am a police inspector. You have just admitted to what could be construed as involuntary manslaughter…”

“Oh. You just said…”

“Forget what I just said. I’m sure there is a hotel you could check into. I don’t think money is much of a problem for you, is it?”

“No. That’s not my problem. It’s just I get this feeling I’m being followed. The Colonel frightens me. You can’t send me out there.”

“I am expecting Commissioner Blume to arrive soon. He can accompany you somewhere. You’ll be safe with him.”

“Will he arrest me?”

“I don’t know, Emma. He might have to.”

Caterina’s cell, set to silent, began to vibrate against the glass coffee table between them, and rotated around till it faced Emma who leaned over to look at the name on the display. “That’s your Commissioner now.”

Caterina wondered how Blume would react to her proposed change of plans for the evening, and was anxious about what he would say to her having Emma in her apartment like this. But she need not have worried. As soon as she answered, he announced, “Can’t make it. Something else has come up.”

Then he hung up without waiting for a response, without asking her whether she and Elia were OK.

Bastard.

Half an hour later, as she applied cold cream to her face and massaged the tense area around her eyes with her fingers, she thought of the almost elegant movement with which old Corsi had knelt down before stretching out on the floor of his dilapidated palace, stabbed in the back by his clumsy, unhappy child. She wiped the sink shiny with the towel she had just used and set out a fresh towel over the edge of the bathtub.

Passing the living room on her way to her bedroom, whispering so as not to wake Elia, she said, “The bathroom’s free now, Emma.”

Would it be by phone or face-to-face? Blume opened his car door, threw in the accursed notebooks, and pulled out his phone and looked at it in case it had rung on silent. Nothing. He walked back toward Paoloni’s house, back down the sidewalk covered in dogshit and trash. A dark car came the wrong way up the one-way street.

Face-to-face, then, thought Blume.

The car stopped beside him. The Colonel rolled down his window and spoke out of the dark. “Where’s your friend going?”

“Aren’t you people following him?”

“My resources are a little stretched,” said the Colonel. “Where is he going?”

“To look for his son,” said Blume.

The Colonel considered this. “His son is fine,” he said after a while.

“He’d better be,” said Blume.

“I didn’t want to worry the poor man,” said the Colonel. “The idea was that you would see what was at stake.”

“I see what is at stake,” said Blume. “Where is Fabio?”

“The son? Torvaianica, I believe. We used your name to pick him up. Now he thinks he’s being recruited for something exciting, and has been sworn to secrecy. Apparently the hardest thing was to keep a straight face as they told the kid to check for people following and to search out a certain face in a bar. It’s been an evening of entertainment for everyone.”

“When is he coming home?”

“When are you going to get my paintings back?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” said Blume. “That’s the earliest I can do it.”

“Then that’s when your friend’s son is coming home,” said the Colonel. “Simple enough.”

The Colonel’s words disappeared into the blackness of the car, and then reappeared inside Blume’s head. It would not do, but he had to keep calm.

A blue flare turning yellow lit up the Colonel’s cheeks and nose. Blume watched and waited as the Colonel set his cigar aglow, and took comfort that the ritual suggested the Colonel was prepared to negotiate. He moved closer, picking up a scent of sweet wood and orange peel from inside the vehicle. The Maresciallo was in the driver’s seat.