David Hewson: A Season for the Dead

Nic Costa felt his stomach spasm, then looked at her. Sara Farnese was unable to take her eyes off the bloody, stripped corpse. She looked as if she were going insane inside her own head.

He crossed the tiny room in two strides and knelt down, between her and the flayed corpse, touching her hands with his. “You’ve got to get out of here. Now. Please.”

She tried to avoid the obstacle of his body, tried to see once more. Costa placed his hands on her cheeks and forced her to look into his face. “This is not your doing. This is not something you should see. Please.” Then, when she failed to move, he bent down and lifted her into his arms with as much care as he could muster and walked down the circular stone stairs, feeling her weight in his arms, avoiding as best he could the diminishing drip of blood from the ceiling.

Rossi stood outside the door. As they passed he muttered something about support being on the way. Costa carried her into the nave. At the front he placed her on the bench pew. She was staring at the altar. Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “I’ve got things to do,” he told her. “Will you wait here for me?” She nodded.

Costa beckoned Rossi to stand by the woman’s side, then took a deep breath and returned to the tower and the bloody room on the second floor, to sort through what he could.

Four

The woman was easily identified from an ID card in her handbag. The skinned man’s clothes lay in a tangled pile near his body. In the jacket pocket was a UK passport and the stub of a ticket for a flight from London that morning.

Ten minutes later the teams began to arrive, clambering up the stairs, filling the tiny room: scene of crime, lab people, an army of men and women in white plastic suits who wanted him out of there, wanted to get on with their work. Teresa Lupo, Crazy Teresa, the woman pathologist the police admired in a distant, scared fashion, was leading the way. It made sense; Costa couldn’t see Crazy Teresa passing up on a case like this. She must have known the big man was there too. Station gossip had it that something had been happening between them recently.

Leo Falcone walked in and considered the stripped corpse as if it were an exhibit in a museum. The inspector was as well dressed as ever: pressed white shirt, red silk tie, light-brown patterned suit, shoes that picked up the full yellow light from the single bulb and still managed to shine like mirrors. He was a striking figure: completely bald, with a perfect walnut tan and a silver beard cut in a sharp, angular fashion, like that of an actor playing the Devil onstage. He stared at Costa and said, with what sounded like venom in his smoker’s voice, “I heard what happened in the Vatican. I sent you out to catch bag-snatchers. What in God’s name is this?”

“The dead guy in the Vatican,” Costa replied. “This is his wife. I looked in her purse. It’s with the other one’s pile of clothes.”

“And the other one?” Falcone demanded.

Nic Costa felt like screaming at him. He hadn’t asked for this. He didn’t want to come to this place. Most of all he didn’t want to watch Sara Farnese going steadily crazy in front of him. “Working on it,” he said, and walked down the stairs, leaving them to get on with their business.

Rossi, to his disappointment, had not stayed with Sara Farnese. Costa located him outside trying to find some shade in the hot, cobbled square, sucking on a cigarette as if his life depended on it.

“Did she say anything?” Costa asked.

Rossi was silent. The horror of the crime was bad enough but Costa knew there was more to his distress than mere shock. There was something about this big, complex man he failed to understand. “Not a word.” Luca Rossi didn’t look Costa in the eye. He frowned. It put a big double chin on his pale, flabby face. “I was scared in there. I didn’t dare go into that room. You could feel it. Bad…”

“It’s enough to scare anyone.”

“Bullshit!” Rossi hissed. “You walked in like it was just another day.” He motioned to the scene-of-crime people outside the church door, smoking just like him. “They’re the same.”

“Trust me. They’re shaken. We’re all shaken.”

“Shaken?” Rossi mocked him. “Falcone looks like he could eat breakfast off that corpse.”

“Luca.” It was the first time Costa had used the big man’s Christian name. “What’s wrong? Why are we working together? Why did they move you here?”

The big man’s watery eyes cast him an odd, sad glance. “They never told you?”

“No.”

“Jesus.” He stubbed out the cigarette with a shaking hand and immediately fumbled for another. “You really want to know? I went to some road accident. Happens all the time, I know. This one wasn’t so different. There was the father behind the wheel, dead drunk. And on the road his kid, who’d gone straight through the windshield and was now in pieces. Dead. Very dead.” Rossi shook his oversize head. “You know what bothered the father? Trying to wheedle his way out of the accident. Trying to convince me he wasn’t drunk.”

“There are jerks in the world. So what’s new?”

“What’s new?” Rossi repeated. “This. I picked the jerk up by the scruff of his neck and started throwing him around the place. If the traffic cop on the scene hadn’t been there, I would probably have killed the moron.”

Costa looked back inside the church, checking that she was still there. When he turned away, Rossi’s sad, liquid eyes were burning at him. “They moved me as part of the deal to stop him from suing. To be honest, I don’t really care, not anymore. I’m forty-eight, unmarried, unsociable. I spend my nights watching TV, drinking beer and eating pizza and, right up till that moment, I didn’t mind, I didn’t care. Then something hits you out of the blue. Sometimes the scales just fall from your eyes for the stupidest of reasons. It happened to me. It’ll happen to you one day too. Maybe you get tired, with some bright new kid snapping at your ankles and then you just see this stuff for the shit it is. Maybe it’s something worse. You’ll finally realize this isn’t just some game. People die, for no reason whatsoever. And one day it’s you.”

“I never thought it was any other way,” Costa replied. There was some personal resentment toward him in Rossi’s voice. Costa didn’t like to hear it. “Go home, Luca. Get some sleep. I’ll deal with everything.”

“Like hell you will. You think I want Falcone busting my balls tomorrow?”

Costa put a hand inside the older man’s jacket and pulled out his cigarette pack. It was almost empty. “Well, in that case, get some serious smoking done. We can talk about this later.”

Rossi nodded at the church. “You want to know something else too? I’ll tell you now. I doubt you’re going to listen.”

“What?”

“She scares me. That woman in there. A woman who could watch all that stuff and hold it tight inside her. What kind of person can do that? She almost died today. She saw whatever was up in that room—no, don’t tell me. I don’t want people with no skins on them walking around inside my head at night. It’s not healthy. You look at her and you think: She doesn’t mind a damn. That might just be where they belong.”

Costa felt his hackles rise. “You didn’t see her there, Luca. You can’t judge. You didn’t stay long with her at that altar either, from what I can work out. You didn’t watch her, not knowing where to look, wanting to bawl her eyes out. It takes time with some people. You ought to know that.”

Luca Rossi prodded him in the chest, hard. “You’re right. I didn’t see.”

Crazy Teresa came out into the bright sun too, saw them, came over and cajoled Rossi for a smoke. When he reluctantly agreed, the pathologist climbed out of her white polyester suit and stood there, a heavily built woman in her thirties, with a long, black ponytail. She wore the baggiest pair of cheap jeans Costa had ever seen and a creased pink shirt. She looked like Rossi, a little wasted.