David Hewson - A Season for the Dead

“No! I don’t resent him at all. I just kick myself for failing to see what he saw. He didn’t understand why Falcone kept putting me at the front of everything. Letting Sara stay at the farm so readily. Pushing me to pretend we were having some kind of relationship. As if…”

It could be wrong to take this further. He was aware of her intense, concerned attention, aware too that he didn’t want to involve someone else in his own troubles.

“I don’t like what I’m hearing, Nic.”

“Then forget it once I’ve said it. But I have to ask, Teresa. Why me? Why not someone with more experience?”

“You did your best.”

“That’s not the point. I did what I was told. I always do, without question. And I should have been asking more questions. I should have made Luca want to say all this to me direct instead of putting it down on some piece of paper he thought no one else would ever see.”

He took the diary and turned it to a page near the back. The tiny handwriting was even more shaky here, as if Rossi were scribbling down his thoughts in a frantic rush. He stabbed his finger at a passage. She took the diary and looked at it, trying to interpret the scribble.

“ ”Rinaldi: dope in the bathroom. And they missed it! Message on the computer, appointment with the killer. And they missed it! Are we lucky or what? And this: someone from the Vatican phoned that morning to make the date. Fosse? No. He was in exile. Who?”

She looked at him and he knew now he wasn’t wrong. Teresa Lupo was scared.

“It was the obvious question and I can’t believe I never asked it,” he said. “Gino Fosse couldn’t have made the arrangement to meet Rinaldi. Fosse was banned from Denney’s office more than a week earlier. The way Rinaldi behaved in the library, looking for the video cameras, suggested there was some accomplice. This surely confirmed it, and makes it look like someone with access to Denney’s office. But we let our heads go somewhere else. We got taken up by events and never stopped to think about what was really happening.”

“You had a serial killer on your hands, Nic. What else do you expect?”

“And something else,” he said, ignoring her question. “I checked. Before Falcone sent us around to Rinaldi’s apartment, the place had been searched by six experienced men who know scene-of-crime inside-out. You see what Rossi’s asking himself here? How come six men missed two such obvious and crucial pieces of evidence?”

“People screw up. It happens all the time.”

“No,” he insisted. “Not like that. It’s too convenient. Rossi knew all along.”

“So why didn’t he say anything to someone?”

“Who to? Me? He tried to, I think. But I wouldn’t listen, and look what he says in the diary. He didn’t think I could handle it. He thought that, if I suspected the truth, I’d take it too far, start screaming for justice instead of doing what he thought was right: keeping quiet, keeping my head down. He wanted to protect me as much as he could. Could he tell Falcone? Think about it. If Luca was right, the reason the search team found nothing in Rinaldi’s apartment is there was nothing to find. Someone, Hanrahan maybe, put it there later. And then Falcone sent us around to find it. What interpretation do you think Luca put on that?”

She was beginning to look around the room, making sure no one was eavesdropping. “Too much. You’ve got to look for simple answers. They always tell you that.”

“You’ve got to look for answers that work. Do you believe Fosse is doing all this on his own? Just ticking off a list of Sara Farnese’s lovers for the hell of it? Surviving in the city without any help?”

She was silent. It was too much to accept. There had to be someone else.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Costa persisted. “So let’s move on to the next point. Do you believe this is even about Sara Farnese at all? If Fosse’s so pissed off with her, why didn’t he kill her when he had the chance? The two of them spoke, remember, when I was lying half conscious on the ground. She somehow persuaded this lunatic to let us both live. Have you worked out how?”

“No.” Her face said it all. It was ridiculous that they should both have survived.

“There’s only one answer. Because I didn’t matter. Neither did she, except as some kind of trigger for his actions. A trigger someone knew how to pull. How?”

“He’s psychotic, Nic. You saw those pictures. He had a sexual obsession for her.”

“No. Someone made him like that. Deliberately. And then they set us on his tail knowing the direction we would take, because it was a direction they had already laid out in advance.”

It was the only explanation that made sense, but even so there were gaps. “And that destination was Michael Denney, all along,” he continued, thinking about the man in the Vatican, with the Caravaggio copy on the wall of his poky little apartment, desperate for a life beyond those walls. “I picked up the fake appointment with his phone number attached to it. I brought Denney into this case just like I was supposed to. Luca was trying to tell me all along the whole thing stank. Now Falcone has the man wriggling on the line. He’s got the evidence that’s forced the Vatican to eject him.”

His head was spinning, trying to comprehend the possibilities. “And it can’t just be Falcone.”

She reached out and touched his hand. “You’re going too far, Nic. Take some advice. The world isn’t black and white. Sometimes you have to look the other way. Leave this alone.”

He stared at her." I don’t like looking the other way. It’s not why I came here. Think of the people who want Denney dead. A few politicians. A few Mafiosi. A few people who worked alongside him in the Vatican. They knew each other anyway. Luca understood that. I was too stupid to listen. Fosse is loose in the city, a crazy priest who’s never, as far as we know, had to fend for himself for one day of his life. Someone’s looking after him. Someone’s providing him with weapons, money, presumably. Falcone couldn’t do that. The risk would be too great. I doubt it would come from inside the Vatican either. But there’s plenty of criminals who could help. We keep trying to fool ourselves this is just one lunatic working his way through a list. It’s not like that at all. This is a concerted, organized campaign. Three distinct sets of people, each with their own agenda, working together to get Cardinal Denney on the run because that will suit them all. I just walked right in and did what they wanted. Now Luca and some other poor cop are dead and Falcone’s walking around with something on his face you could just about mistake for guilt.”

She glowered at him. “Don’t judge people without the facts. Not yourself. Not Falcone either. It was Gino Fosse who murdered these people. Whatever took him there. All of this is conjecture. Luca just had doubts, that’s all. There’s no evidence. Just a lot of inconsistencies.”

“Inconsistencies,” he repeated. “You’re right. Here’s the biggest. Why did Gino Fosse start in the first place? He was bad material, but there’s nothing to suggest he was a killer before. What was his trigger?”

He recalled the picture on the TV: Sara Farnese with her arms around the old man. “They were lovers, I guess,” he continued. “Sara and Denney. I know she denied it but they were. Gino Fosse knew her through his work in the Vatican. He knew she was sleeping around somehow but not with Denney, not to begin with. When he found out…”

He waited for her to interrupt, in vain. “He what? Went 'crazy’?" he said. ”That’s all it ever comes down to and it isn’t enough. Fosse is crazy, I don’t doubt it. Everything we know about these killings confirms that. But it still doesn’t tell us why it began.“