David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

The man who’d helped her out looked into the dead mouth of the hole and pointed downwards. “Not good,” he said. “Boy, was he moving.”

“How deep is it?”

“ Very deep. We’re doing some work on the metro.”

“Wow,” she said, and couldn’t stop herself beaming, in spite of the bruises and what felt like a cracked rib.

There were sirens in the distance. The lights of police cars. She thought about Falcone and his temper. Then she thought about Randolph Kirk and a lost girl called Suzi Julius, who was the point of all this in the first place.

“We’re getting a crane in,” the man said. He hesitated. “Did you two argue or something? We called a doctor.”

Teresa Lupo nodded, smoothing down her clothes, trying to put on a professional face, wondering how she could even begin to square this with Falcone.

“A doctor?” she asked. “Thanks, but I’m fine.”

The man gave her an odd look and nodded at the big black chasm in the ground. “For him…”

“Oh?” She walked to the edge of the hole and peered into nothingness. Then Teresa Lupo picked up a big block of smashed concrete and launched it into the air, watching it tumble downwards and yelled, “ Impudent fucking bastard …”

She came back and took the man by the arm. He flinched.

“I can deal with him,” she said with a smile. “I’m a doctor. I’m with the police too. So go tell the rubberneckers to run along now. Nothing to see here.”

POLICE TAPE RAN around the site of Randolph Kirk’s excavations. Floodlights stood over his portable office illuminating the bloodstains on the bare floor. Monkboy had been assigned the job of dealing with the body. Teresa Lupo had argued, with some justification, that she should be kept away through a conflict of interest. In truth, she wanted to be with the second team, watching the cranes lower a recovery section down into the big black hole near Fiumicino, waiting for them to come back with a corpse, desperate to see it transformed from the dark insect of her imagination into a real and dead human being.

Falcone had deferred to her judgement. He didn’t even look mad. Maybe he was saving his fury for a time when she’d feel it more.

Nic Costa watched Monkboy and his men remove the corpse. Falcone stood to one side with Rachele D’Amato, deep in some private conversation, Peroni eyeing them, making grumpy noises all the time.

“She’s here for the duration,” Costa said when he could stand no more. “Best learn to live with it.”

“But why? This guy didn’t work for the mob. He was a professor, for God’s sake.”

“We don’t know,” Costa said. “We know less than we did a couple of hours ago.”

Suzi Julius was somewhere, though, even if her name, and her mysterious disappearance, were now sinking deep into the squad’s collective unconscious, despatched there by bigger, more pressing events. Maybe she was nearby. Here, even, dead already because all those well-laid plans for two days hence suddenly seemed impractical. He glanced around the site, at the other office and the low, hulking shape of the old Roman villa.

“I’m going walkabout,” he announced. “Falcone won’t miss me.”

There was nothing of any interest in the other office. The villa looked more promising. It could have been an old church or something: brick walls, loose, crumbly mortar. The darkness hid most of the detail but he guessed the building was that familiar pale honey colour he knew from the spent masonry on the Via Appia Antica where he’d grown up. The place was about forty metres square with an open courtyard at the front full of wrecked stones and, fenced off, a small mosaic, unidentifiable in the dark. The colonnaded entrance was open to the air. He walked in and found himself inside a cold, dank anteroom with two adjoining chambers on either side running back into the heart of the building. They were open too, and empty. The centre of the place must have been a windowless hall. The design was odd. This couldn’t be a normal home. It didn’t make sense.

There was an old wooden panelled door blocking the way to the interior, with a padlock on a rusty chain keeping it closed. He went back to the car and returned with a big torch and a crowbar. It took a minute to prise the rusty links from the lock. Then the torch made a bright arc into the pitch-black interior, illuminating the shadows on the walls. The place seemed empty: just a bare room. So why was there a padlock on the door? What was it protecting?

He made a careful circumnavigation of the small, windowless space: nothing. Then, just before he gave up, his foot stumbled on something. It was a wooden panel on the floor, built into the ancient brickwork. Modern, by the looks of it. And it had a padlock too, bright and shiny, hooked through a clasp.

Costa worked at it with the crowbar and forced the fastening free. When he removed the panel he exposed a series of narrow, shallow steps leading down into blackness, a subterranean cavern of some kind.

There were lights here too. Wires ran down one side of the steps, with a switch cut into the rough wall at the base of the stairs. A bare bulb, perhaps the first of several, dangled ahead in the darkness. Nic Costa didn’t know anything about archaeology but that struck him as odd. Surely they would use portable floods? A string of bulbs seemed like normal lighting, the kind you got in a hall.

Costa checked himself. You were supposed to do these things in twos. It was possible there was someone else around. This could be a perfect place to hide, to stay out of sight until it was all over.

And then drag Suzi somewhere else. Or just leave a body on the mouldy earth.

“No time,” he said to himself. Besides, he was sick of the way they kept giving him that tired look whenever he mentioned the girl.

He took his gun out of its holster, hugged the wall, and walked down into the subterranean cavern, step by step. The temperature immediately seemed to fall a couple of degrees. The place had the dank, fungal smell of something rotten.

There wasn’t a sound. At the bottom he flipped the switch on the wall and walked through a doorway so low he had to duck to get through.

The room was brightly lit. This must, he realized, have been restored somewhat. It was impossible that original wall paintings could have remained so bright and vivid for two thousand years. Or maybe they weren’t original at all. Maybe someone painted them there recently for some reason.

Nic Costa looked at them and thought: here lie nightmares . And maybe that was what they really were. Some desperate effort to take this poison out of the human mind, to exorcize it by transforming the living demons inside a man’s head into images on some ancient, pagan wall.

They ran around the rectangular chamber in a series of frames, each with the same bright red background behind the detail. A figurative mosaic frieze of dolphins and sea monsters capped every scene. Painted columns divided one frame from the next. The pictures were designed, he understood, to be viewed as a series, a set of linked images which told a story. From what he recalled of Teresa’s brief lecture that morning, it had to be that of an initiation into the Dionysian mysteries.

To his right, covering the short wall by the door, was what he assumed to be the beginning of the tale. An imposing male figure, the god himself perhaps, reclined lazily on a golden throne, with a horned satyr on each side, both peering into silver water bowls. At his feet lay a young woman, her face covered by a veil, holding a phallic object topped with a pine cone: Teresa’s thyrsus. The long wall next to this contained three further frames. A naked child read out loud from a scroll. Three female dancers, hands clasped together, faces ecstatic, turned around an urn. An old crone in a dark robe, crouched on a decaying tree trunk, peered malevolently at a beautiful young woman seated in front of a mirror, toying with her hair.