David Hewson - The Sacred Cut

“Peter,” she said quietly, “I have to go. I don’t want this to sound wrong. Please believe that. I’m not in the habit of picking up men in strange bars. Certainly not priests. But we rented an apartment round the corner. For the next two weeks, would you believe. It’s as empty as the grave with just me rattling around in it. The TV doesn’t even have cable and I can’t understand a damn word of those Italian stations. If you need somewhere to stay, you can take the sofa or the floor. It’s up to you.”

He did something odd at that moment. He looked at their two glasses-his almost full with red, hers empty-and very carefully moved them so they were in a perfect line, parallel with the edge of the table. It was a touch obsessive, she thought. Or perhaps not. His pale, smart face had turned thoughtful.

“I don’t know,” he murmured. “I can find somewhere, I’m sure.”

“It’s got a terrace,” she added. “We’re right on the top of the block. You can see the dome of St. Peter’s. You can see places I don’t even know the names of.”

“A terrace?” he repeated.

“One of the best damn terraces in Rome. That’s what the agent said and I can’t imagine a Roman would lie, now would he?”

“Not for a moment,” he replied and raised his glass to her.

Five minutes later they went outside. She was giggling, light-headed, and scarcely noticed the softly falling snow. A handful of office workers were struggling through the deep, crisp drifts in the street. Peter had just a small bag with him, a black polyester one stuffed to bursting, the way single men did.

He reached into his coat pockets, pulled something from the depths, stretched it out and looked ready to begin adjusting it over his finely sculpted grey head.

His quick, intelligent eyes caught hers. He was unsure about this for some reason.

“I’d look a fool now, wouldn’t I?” he asked, abruptly stuffing it back into his pocket as if he’d just had second thoughts.

It was one of those stupid Disney-style hats that kids wore. Big Mickey Mouse ears you tied around your own ears.

“You’d look a fool,” she agreed, then took his arm when he offered it, leaning on him as they struggled through the snow, past a deserted Piazza Navona, on towards home.

LISTENING TO GIANNI PERONI cough his way through a series of bathroom ablutions, Nic Costa flicked through the prints that had come back from the photo shop and found himself bugged by the minutiae of the last sixteen hours. The focus of the investigation was now fixed understandably on the man in black, who stood on the steps of the fountain, locked in the Weaver stance next to the frozen dolphins, dispensing deadly fire from his outstretched hand. Trying to summon up a vision of that distant figure made it easy to forget there was one other unknown actor in the scene: the person who was trapped inside the Pantheon when they arrived, the individual who had brushed against Nic Costa as he fled the cavernous interior of the hall, with its macabre secret trapped beneath a growing mountain of ice and snow.

Costa knew it was important to gather information on the man in black, to find out where he stood in the story the FBI agents were about to share with them. But he couldn’t forget the other player in events either, someone who seemed an interloper at the scene, whose presence there-as accomplice or accidental spectator?-demanded an explanation.

He tried to remember his impressions of those hurried moments in the dark, tried to follow Falcone’s sensible if caustic admonition: interview yourself, and don’t leave out the tough questions . He’d scarcely seen the figure who dashed in and out of the murky corners of the airy, freezing hemisphere that night. Mauro’s photos didn’t help either. Costa had scanned through most of the two hundred prints, covering everything from their time in the bar to the last moments outside the Pantheon. In the crucial shots all Mauro had captured were vague, ghostly shadows, black smears on film. Once they returned to the Questura, he would pass the photos to a specialist in forensics, but his gut told him there was nothing there worth keeping.

Or worth killing for. Surely the man in black would have understood that too?

Interview yourself . Nic Costa knew he’d seen nothing but shadows. But there were other senses. He closed his eyes and tried to think. There was something there. He recalled the moment now, and it was surely the very oddness of the memory that had sent it to the back of his mind since it seemed so implausible.

When the fugitive had brushed past him two things had happened. A hand-small, quick, nimble-had flicked at his jacket, automatically searching, as if it did this always without thinking. And there was a fleeting fragrance-something musky and lingering, familiar too, a scent that was fixed to a single connection in his head.

He looked at the slight shadow slipping out from the corner of the illuminated portico in the last-but-one photograph Mauro Sandri took in his life.

The perfume was patchouli oil. Nic knew the kind of person who liked to wear the old hippie scent these days too. Street kids, the ones who’d worked their way in from the Balkans, Turkey and beyond, looking to find a welcoming paradise, discovering, instead, that for many the only way to stay alive was to develop, as quickly as possible, a talent for pickpocketing or worse.

Peroni walked into the room and stared over his shoulder. “Anything there?”

“No,” Costa replied, tapping his forehead. “It was there. I should have known. Whoever was in the interior, it was a bum. He tried to get something out of my pocket on the way out. He had that… kind of perfume you get on the street kids. Sweet. Almost like dope. Patchouli. You know the smell I mean?”

Peroni sat next to him on the sofa. He was fresh from the shower. Costa liked the way his partner looked now. Activity was good for both of them.

“Oh yes,” Peroni said with a nod.

“It’s an eastern thing. You see them selling the stuff in the Campo a lot.”

“Around Termini too,” Peroni added. “From what I recall you tend to find that stuff only on girls. Which means they’re into dope. Or selling themselves. Or both. On very rare occasions, they can be remarkably conscious of their personal hygiene for kids who live on the streets.”

Costa thought about that light, fluting voice in the dark. “It’s a girl, then.”

Peroni frowned. “Why’d she try to lift something from you? If I’d been running out of that place, you wouldn’t have seen me for dust.”

“Maybe she’s a pickpocket.”

“It’s possible-”

“They’re not all into dope and prostitution, Gianni. Just the ones you met. I’ve dealt with plenty of street muggings too. Some of these kids are professionals in their own way. They steal out of second nature.”

“I believe you.” Peroni didn’t look convinced.

“So tell me again about the CCTV. In the Pantheon.”

“Nothing to tell.” Peroni grimaced. “There were four cameras. He’d done something to each of them. The security guy I talked to didn’t know what. He said it had to be in the control box or something. It wasn’t just a matter of snipping the wires either. If he’d done that-”

Costa interrupted him. “The alarm would have gone off.”

“Quite.” Peroni pulled on a tie and yanked it roughly around his bull-like neck. “What are you getting at?”

Some small certainty was growing in Costa’s mind. “Somehow he got into the place without triggering the alarm. Maybe he’d some keys, we don’t know. He must have talked the woman inside somehow too. He couldn’t risk attacking her in the square, even in weather like this. And he did what he wanted without triggering the alarm either. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been out of the place by the time we arrived. It took us, what? Ten minutes, no more, to get from the bar to the Pantheon after we got the call. He had to kill the woman, undress her, make that mark on her back. That must have taken the best part of an hour, possibly more.”