David Hewson - The Sacred Cut

“The girl? Of course.”

“No. I meant Emily Deacon.”

Costa nodded. “Sure. I’m going to drive her to the embassy soon.”

“Has she told you anything?”

“About what? I wasn’t aware we were interrogating her.”

“Maybe we should be.” Falcone stayed by the door, not wanting this conversation to go inside. “About this Leapman character, for a start. What the hell’s he up to?”

Costa shuffled on his feet, uncomfortable. “I’m not sure she’s got anything to tell, to be honest. She’s just as much in the dark as we are.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Falcone murmured, then stamped his smart city shoes on the doorstep one last time and walked inside, throwing his coat onto a chair and following Costa into the kitchen.

Peroni was clearing away a huge dinner plate still bearing a few eggs and fried potatoes. “Hey, Leo. Want some?”

“I think I’ll pass,” Falcone replied, staring at the group around the table: Emily Deacon, Teresa Lupo, the Kurdish girl. “Am I interrupting something?”

Peroni shrugged. “Just breakfast. Out here in the big wide world people tend to take it together, you know.”

“Cut the lecture,” Falcone snapped. “You do have coffee?”

Teresa Lupo pushed the filter pot over to him. He stared mutely at the thing.

“This is a home, Leo,” she insisted. “A bachelor’s at that. Not a cafe. This is how coffee comes.”

Falcone looked at the girl and held out a hand. “I gather you’re Laila. My name’s Leo Falcone. I have the”-this was for their benefit, not hers-“dubious distinction of being their boss.”

The girl took his hand for a brief moment and stiffened. She didn’t like authority. No one could miss that.

“How old are you?”

“Th-thirteen,” she stuttered.

“I’m sure they’ve asked you this, but let me ask again to make sure. Is there anyone in Rome you want us to contact? Your mother. Your father. Do you know where they are?”

“My father’s dead. My mother’s in Iraq. Somewhere.”

She said it in that flat, neutral tone of acceptance Falcone knew only too well. The kid really did have no one.

He took a ten-euro note out of his wallet. “Fine. You know what I liked to do when I was thirteen and the weather was like this?”

Teresa Lupo gasped. “You were thirteen once, Leo? Now that’s a hard one to swallow.”

“When I was thirteen,” Falcone continued, ignoring her, “I just loved to build snowmen.”

“Snowmen?” the girl asked, wide-eyed.

“Absolutely.” He waved the note. “This is for you.”

Her hand reached out gingerly for the money. Falcone placed the note under a spare dinner plate.

“Once you’ve built me the best snowman I’ve ever seen. And here’s the best part.” He smiled briefly at Teresa Lupo. “Our friendly doctor here is going to help you.”

“ I am ?” the pathologist snarled.

Falcone leaned over and whispered to the kid, loud enough so they all could hear, “She’s good. I promise.”

Then he waited until the two of them had left the room, Teresa Lupo grumbling under her breath, waited until he heard their voices outside in the snow, ringing in that odd way they do in the extreme cold. Only then did he turn to Emily Deacon, take out a sheet of paper from his jacket and unfold it in front of her on the table.

“I have an ID for the man we’re all looking for, Agent Deacon. Your friend Leapman doesn’t know about this yet. You can give it to him when you go into your office if you like.”

Costa and Peroni crowded round to look at the imprint of the passport. It was issued in the name of Roger Houseman, with a contact address for a wife in London as next of kin, and a photo of an anonymous-looking man wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses.

“Is this who you saw last night?” Costa asked Deacon.

She shook her head. “No. I mean… possibly. It’s a fake passport, surely.”

“It’s a fake,” Falcone agreed. “We seem to be having a run on fake passports.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

Falcone repeated himself. “I said we seem to be having a run on them. The woman who was killed in the Pantheon had a false passport too. But I guess you must know that. After all, you were the people who were contacting her relatives.”

“What?” Deacon seemed genuinely amazed, Falcone thought. And Costa was already bristling on her behalf too, which was worth noting. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Margaret Kearney. Thirty-eight. From New York City. No such woman. No such home address. We checked. I know we’re not supposed to. We’re supposed to swallow every last piece of bullshit you and Leapman push our way. But just this once we didn’t. Margaret Kearney doesn’t exist. So who is she, Agent Deacon? Whose relatives are you comforting exactly?”

“I don’t know!” She was struggling to make sense of it. It didn’t look like an act, Falcone thought, then reminded himself of what she was. The FBI spent years training their officers. No doubt lying was top of the curriculum. “I didn’t deal with that side of things. I thought it was all handled by the usual people.”

“ ”The usual people.“ Are these the usual people?”

Falcone pulled out another piece of paper from his pocket and placed it on the table. “This came to me this morning from the Palazzo Chigi. It’s a list of five men. All FBI agents. Do you know them?”

She peered at the names, shaking her head. “I’ve no idea who these people are.”

“Really. Do you think they’re armed? I guess so. Are they looking for Roger Houseman or whoever this man is? I guess so too. I’ve worked in the Questura all my adult life, Agent Deacon, and I’ve never seen a piece of paper like this before. It says you have five men here doing God knows what and all I know is, if I happen upon them, whatever’s going on, I just look in the other direction, walk away and pretend they don’t exist. So you tell me: what’s happening?”

“I don’t know! I’d no idea anyone else was working on the case. What are they supposed to be doing?”

“You tell me…”

“ I don’t know .”

“You know who this man is-” Falcone began.

“ No !” she yelled. “Believe me. I am not part of this.”

Costa was going a little red in the face now. Peroni, sensibly, was keeping quiet. Both knew how Falcone worked. They’d seen this tactic often enough. You push and push and see how far you get. Emily Deacon was, it seemed to Falcone, telling the truth. But he had to make sure.

“Sir,” Costa interjected, “Agent Deacon helped us a lot last night at no small risk to herself. Without her we wouldn’t know anything right now.”

“Thank you, Nic,” she said under her breath. “I can’t believe I’m getting interrogated like this. Not after…”

Falcone finished the sentence for her. “After Roger Houseman, or whoever, nearly killed you. Or, to be more precise, chose not to kill you. Why was that?”

It was such a small thing. A flicker of hesitation in her face. But unmistakable.

“I can’t begin to guess. Perhaps it didn’t fit his plan. Laila had escaped. Perhaps he doesn’t just kill for the hell of it. In fact everything we know about him suggests that’s the last thing he does. He’s too careful. Too obsessed by detail.”

“I agree with the last part,” Falcone said. “Still… if he was faced with an officer of the law. One who was determined to apprehend him…”

“He was too smart for me. And too strong. He…” She thought about this carefully before saying it. “He knows how we work. He actually complimented me on how I’d cuffed the girl. As if he were an instructor or something. Can you believe that? As if he knew I’d done a good job .”