David Hewson - The Sacred Cut

Peroni glanced at his watch.

“You’re five minutes late,” he grumbled at the ratty uniform now heading for the booth, then the big cop walked towards the altar, straight through the sharp beam of moonlight tumbling through the oculus.

The girl was just visible behind some kind of drape at the side of the altar, half-concealed by the cloth.

“Laila.”

He spoke her name firmly, with warmth and familiarity. All the same, it wasn’t enough. Her skinny frame stiffened visibly at the sound of a human voice and he began to wonder: if she ran now, was there any way a man approaching fifty could possibly stop her reaching the door and disappearing once again into the night?

“It’s me,” he said. “Peroni. You don’t need to worry. There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all.”

Except…

Just a sudden flashback of all those doubts that drifted wordlessly through the back of his head in the booth waiting for the caretaker to get back. All those wonderful little nightmares kids-or, more accurately, their existence-sent scattering through a parent’s mind at random times: car crashes and meningitis, the wrong friends, the wrong time to cross the road, rubella, crappy bike helmets, a random falling meteor.

And, Laila being a girl, all those fears about men. In the street. In the home. Men who ought to know better. Men lurking half-hidden under the cover of night, and all of them looking for the same thing: someone weak enough to fill the role of prey.

It was a shitty world sometimes, though Peroni guessed Laila had learned that at a very early age.

There was movement from behind the drape. She walked out. Her dark eyes were glittering, a little moist maybe. But she was smiling, smiling in a way he hadn’t seen before. Smiling naturally, a little shy, a little proud too.

She had something in her hands that looked very much like a man’s wallet and Gianni Peroni was suddenly aware that he didn’t give a damn about the thing, however interesting it might prove. The investigation could wait. There was something more important going on here.

“Hey,” he said and held out his arms, wishing to God she’d just run straight into them.

That was too much to ask. Laila walked up, holding the wallet in her right hand, grinning now, wiping tears-of joy, relief, fear, what?-from her cheeks.

Peroni put his arms round her skinny shoulders and hugged that frail, frightened body to his big chest.

“Don’t you go giving your uncle Gianni frights like that,” he whispered into her lank, musky-smelling hair. “He’s an old man, too old for this business.”

And she wasn’t going to the Questura tonight either. They could sleep at Teresa’s. Or Nic’s if she preferred. Anywhere there wasn’t a soul in uniform or the dead, disinterested face of a social worker looking at her, shaking a disappointed, middle-class head, thinking, “Damaged goods, damaged goods, put it down on the list and let someone else pick up the problem.”

Uniforms…

He hadn’t even spoken to the caretaker since the moron got back from his secret drink. It was time to kiss good-bye to this weird, spooky space and re-enter the land of the living.

Soon, too, because when Peroni turned he could see the idiot was now closing the door, that big vertical slab of bronze that had stood in the same archway for almost a couple of millennia, watching generation after generation walk through and gawp at the mysteries within.

Which was odd, given that he was supposed to be handing over that particular privilege as a reward to the dumb cop who’d stood duty while he’d lined his gut with cheap brandy.

“Hey, buster,” Peroni yelled, “you’ve still got some customers inside. Remember?”

The door kept moving. It slammed shut and the sudden absence of the electric lights from the square made Gianni Peroni blink, sent a brisk rush of pain and fear stabbing through the back of his head.

Laila was clinging to him. She was shivering. The caretaker was nowhere to be seen.

Gianni Peroni pushed the girl firmly back into the corner and whispered in her ear, “There’s nothing wrong here. Trust me. Just stay out of the way until your uncle Gianni sorts this out.”

She didn’t protest. She crushed herself up behind the drape again, so hard against the ancient slabs of the stone wall that it looked as if she were hoping she could somehow creep inside the cracks.

There was a sound from nearby, close to the little office the caretaker had shown him. Someone was flipping the circuit breakers. The lights were going off, one by one, in a circular dance. The CCTV cameras too, he guessed. This guy had been here before. Laila knew that, maybe straightaway, just from sensing his presence.

Smart kid , Peroni thought, then yelled out into the airy, pregnant darkness, lit now by nothing more than the silvery light tumbling down the oculus.

“Listen, mister, I’m armed. I’m a cop. And you’re not going anywhere near this kid, not unless you come straight through me. And that’s not gonna happen. Understand?”

Then, just for form, “Best give yourself up now. Or climb out the window and curl up in the cold somewhere. You hear me?”

It was just a laugh. The kind of laugh you got in the movies-hard-edged, nasal, knowing. Foreign too, somehow, because Italians didn’t laugh like that, they didn’t know how to make such a shapeless, wordless sound become a figure of speech in itself, full of meaning, brimming with malevolence.

All the same, a man couldn’t scare you just by laughing. Not even this guy, with his magic scalpel and his skilful fixation on shapes.

No. Peroni knew why the sound made him shrink inside himself, shivering, wondering which way to look. It was the way the laughter echoed symmetrically around the hidden axes of the building, the way it ran along some hidden geometric path, crossing and recrossing the empty interior, time and time again, almost as if the man who made the noise planned it that way, rolled his own voice into some mystic complex of ley lines until it floated upwards and out of the ancient dead eye, out towards the moon.

Peroni flipped the safety catch on his service pistol and tried to remember the last time the weapon had been fired in anger.

“LAURA LEE? Who the hell is Laura Lee?”

Emily Deacon had an answer already. She just wanted to make him earn it.

“Let’s take this one step at a time. Decode the first message before anything else. Remember, this is three days after Kaspar has killed my dad in Beijing. Can that be a coincidence?”

Anything could be a coincidence, Costa thought. You could ruin an entire investigation by reading too much into shreds of half-related information like this.

“Maybe.”

“No! Think about it. Kaspar’s reached right into the heart of the US diplomatic service here. He’s murdered a military attaché. He knows, as sure as hell, there’ll be all kinds of people on his back. So what do these guys chasing him do?”

It could be true. He saw the logic. “You think they sent him this message?”

“Damn right I do. Maybe it’s us. Maybe the CIA. I don’t know. But someone from our side is dialing into his private line. And they’re telling him, ”We know who you are, we know where you’ve been, we know what you’ve done. Time to call it a day, Bill K, before you get hurt too.“ ”

Costa wondered about the implications of that idea. “They seem very forgiving, considering the circumstances.”

“You noticed?” she replied with a brief, icy scowl.

“And Leapman?”

She cast him a sideways glance.

“Have you talked this through with him?”

“Do you really think that would be wise right now? If he doesn’t know already, he’ll go ballistic when he discovers how I found out. And if he does…”