David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

A couple of caribinieri were in the Campo now, standing stiffly upright by their vehicle as a slender blonde woman harangued them in mangled Italian, wagging her finger in their faces, holding a large, portrait-size photograph in her left hand.

“Don’t get involved,” Costa said to himself, and wandered over towards them in any case. The woman was livid. She knew a few good Italian swear words too. Costa took a bite of his bread and eavesdropped on what was going on.

Then he looked at the photo in the woman’s hand and something cold ran down his back, made him shiver so hard the pizzetta dropped straight from his fingers.

This was crazy. He knew it. The face in the photo reminded him of the picture Leo Falcone had thrown onto the strange corpse on Teresa Lupo’s dissecting table that morning. He thought of what he had seen there: an old image of a blonde-haired girl looking distinctly like the face he saw now, still at the beginning of her adult life, thinking there was nothing in the future but love and joy.

And it ain’t necessarily so, an old, old song sang at the back of his head.

THE CARABINIERI WERE the pick of the crop. Prize assholes, more interested in keeping their Ray-Bans clean than working out what seemed to have happened in front of their very noses. He thought he recognized one. But maybe not. They all looked the same. These two sounded the same as well, with their middle-class nasal voices. They were sneering at the woman in front of them, exuding boredom.

“Are you listening to me?” she yelled.

“Do we have a choice?” one of them, the older one, Costa guessed, replied. He couldn’t have been more than thirty.

“This,” she said, pointing at the photograph, “is my daughter. She just got abducted. You idiots watched it and yawned.”

The younger uniform shot Costa a warning glance that said: don’t even think about getting involved . Nic Costa didn’t move.

The talkative one leaned back on the Alfa, shuffled his serge-clad backside further up the shiny bonnet, took out a packet of gum and threw a stick past his perfect teeth.

She stood in front of them, hands on her hips, full of fury. Costa glanced at the photo she was holding. They could have been sisters, but ten or fifteen years apart. The woman was a touch heavier. Her hair was a shade darker, more fair than her daughter’s bright, almost artificial, blonde, straight, tailored short, a practical cut.

He walked over, watched her trying to get her breath back, then, struggling to remember his English, asked, “Can I help?”

“No,” the senior uniform said immediately. “You can just walk away and mind your own business.”

She looked up at Costa, relieved to be talking English at last. “You can get me a real policeman. That would be helping.”

He pulled out the badge. “I am a real policeman. Nic Costa.”

“Oh fuck,” the uniform with the working mouth muttered behind him.

He got up off the car and stood upright in front of Costa. He was a lot taller. “Her teenage daughter ran off with a boyfriend on a motorbike here. She thinks that counts as abduction. We think that sounds like some young kid looking for fun.” The Ray-Bans cast the woman a dead, black look. “We think that’s understandable. If you people playing amateur hour think otherwise, please yourself. Take her as a present from me. But just take her. I beg you.”

Costa managed to grasp her arm lightly at the elbow as it moved towards the man. Otherwise, he thought, the moron in the dark uniform would have been in for a shock.

“You saw this?” he asked them.

The younger one found his voice. “Yeah we saw it. Hard to miss it. You’d think the kid wanted the whole world to watch. You have any idea what you see if you hang around the Campo day and night? Caught a couple hard at it a few days ago. In broad daylight. And she wants us to start jumping up and down just because her daughter’s got on the back of some guy’s bike.”

The woman shook her head, as if somehow angry with herself, then stared in the direction of the Corso, the way the bike had gone, Costa guessed.

“It’s not like her,” she said. “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe you people won’t even listen.”

She closed her eyes. Costa wondered if she was about to cry. He looked at his watch. Peroni would be back at the car in forty minutes. There was time.

“Let me buy you a coffee,” he said.

She hesitated then put the photo back in the envelope. There was a stack of others there, Costa saw, and he wondered again: was he really letting his imagination run away with him? The girl looked so like the teenager in Falcone’s picture.

“You really are the same as these people?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, and made sure they heard every word. “I’m a civilian. It’s complicated. Even for us sometimes.”

She dropped the envelope into her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Then I’ll take that coffee.”

“Nice job,” Costa said and patted the senior uniform on his serge arm. “I love to see the carabinieri do public relations. Makes our life so much easier.”

Then, ignoring the torrent of curses directed at his back, he took her arm and led her away from them. She was pleased to go. When her face lost its taut anxiety she looked different. She’d dressed down, in jeans and an old, bleached denim jacket. But it didn’t fit somehow. It was almost a disguise. There was something alluring, almost elegant underneath, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

Costa led her round the corner, to a tiny café in an alcove behind the square. There were pots of creamed coffee on the counter, with people ladling spoonfuls into their cups to beef up the caffeine. She leaned on the counter, looking as if she came into the place every day.

“My name’s Miranda Julius,” she said. “And this is crazy. Maybe I’m crazy. You’ll regret ever asking me here.”

Costa listened as she told her story, slowly, methodically, with the kind of care and attention he wished he heard more often.

“What’s the matter?” she asked when the story was finished.

“Nothing.”

She stared into his face with a frank curiosity. “I don’t think so.”

He thought about what she’d said. Maybe the girl really had just run away with a boyfriend her mother had never even met. Maybe it was all as innocent as that. Her misgivings were based on intuition, not fact. She just felt something was wrong. He could understand why the assholes from the carabinieri just wanted to send her on her way.

“You said she came back yesterday with a tattoo.”

“Stupid, stupid. Just another reason for an argument. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t why we came to Italy.” She shook her head and it annoyed him he couldn’t stop watching her. Close up she was older than he first thought. There were stress lines at the corners of her bright, intelligent blue eyes. But they just added character to a face that, when she was young, must have been too perfectly pretty for its own good. She looked like a model who’d later taken up manual labour or something just to make life more interesting, just to get a few scars.

“What was it like?”

“The tattoo? Ridiculous. What do you expect from a sixteen-year-old? She had it done a couple of days ago apparently. It was only yesterday she plucked up the courage to tell me, when the scars had healed. She said it was his idea. Whoever he is. But she liked it, naturally. Do you want to see?”

“What?”

She reached into her bag and withdrew the folder of photos. “I took a picture, just for the record. I had the film developed this morning, which is why I have all this stuff with me. Taking pictures is what I do, by the way. Call it an obsession.”