David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

Costa went out to the reception area. Miranda Julius sat on a bench looking miserable. There were bags beneath her eyes.

He led her through to a reception room, past Teresa Lupo who scuttled along the corridor, head down.

Peroni followed and pulled up a chair at the desk, staring at her. “What can we do for you, Mrs. Julius?” he asked. It was, Costa guessed, a deliberate act, an attempt to make it clear they were a partnership, and she had to deal with both of them.

“Have you heard anything? Anything at all?”

Peroni frowned. “We’ll be in touch the moment we have some information. I promise.”

“So what are you doing?” she demanded. “What about the hair-band you found? Do you know for sure if it’s Suzi’s or not?”

The two men looked at each other. “Tell you what,” Peroni said. “I’ll just go ask about that outside.”

Costa watched him leave. “It takes time,” he said. “Everything takes time. You weren’t sure about that hair-band yourself. It’s probably just something left there by someone else. A school party.”

A school party out to study some Roman porn, he thought. Or a bunch from the university.

She leaned over the table and gripped his arm, peering into his face with that unavoidable intensity he was coming to know. “Nic. My daughter is missing. I heard on the TV all that speculation about rituals. You found those stupid things of hers in the apartment. What if she’s mixed up in this?”

He nodded. “As of now, there’s nothing to link Suzi directly with what happened in Ostia. Why should there be? Do you know either of these people on the news? The university professor? The policewoman?”

“No.”

Miranda Julius had the look he’d seen so often in these cases, a mixture of fear and self-loathing.

“Suzi ran away,” he said. “Probably with some stupid kid she met when you weren’t around. We’re circulating her photo everywhere. Someone will see it. Someone will recognize her. That’s if she doesn’t call you first.”

She looked at her watch. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I feel so… helpless.”

“It’s understandable. As I said, I can get someone to be with you if that’s what you want.”

“No,” she replied immediately. “There’s no need.” She paused. “I’m sorry. About last night. Embarrassing you like that. It was inexcusable.”

“Forget it.”

“No,” she said firmly. “I won’t forget it. Most men… well, I know what most men would have done. I guess… thanks.”

He didn’t want to prolong this particular line of conversation. “What are you going to do now?”

“Just walk around the place. Think. Hope. Just sitting in that stupid apartment on my own is driving me crazy. She’s got my mobile if she needs it.”

He gave her his card. “Call me. Anytime. For any reason. Even if there’s no news. If you just want to talk.”

She put the number in her bag. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said hesitantly. “I didn’t mean it last night when I said I had a habit of doing that. Sleeping with strangers. It wasn’t strictly true. I don’t want you to think… it was just automatic.” She glanced directly into his eyes for a moment.

Peroni saved him. He walked back into the room, shaking his head, saying there was no news from forensic, but they were still looking, they were starting to take phone calls from the public.

Then he sat down next to her, took off his jacket and placed it round the back of the chair, looking serious, businesslike. “We’re doing the best we can, Mrs. Julius,” Peroni added. “If there’s anything you can think of that’s occurred to you since yesterday…”

She clutched her arms tightly to her chest and nodded forward, a tense, nervous gesture. Her fair hair bobbed with the momentum of the sudden movement. “Nothing.” Then she came to life briefly. “No. I’m sorry. I’m not thinking straight. Last night, after you’d gone, I found one of those throwaway cameras in Suzi’s room. I got it developed just now. There’s nothing there. It’s just… stuff. Places. A young man. It’s just the usual holiday snapshots, though. No pictures of specific people, not that I can see. But you’re welcome to it.”

“That could be incredibly useful,” Peroni said confidently. “This is exactly the kind of help we need, Miranda.”

Costa looked at his partner and realized he was beginning to like him. A lot. They both knew there was nothing in the photos. Peroni was just helping her feel involved.

She reached into her canvas shoulder bag, took out an envelope of prints and handed them to Costa. He flicked through them: all the usual tourist jaunts. The Spanish Steps. The Trevi Fountain. The Colosseum. Suzi had done the rounds.

“We’ll take a close look,” he promised.

They saw her out, watched her leave.

“I hate lying to people,” Peroni said when she was out of earshot. “We’ve had three calls, and all them from the usual nutcases. I can’t believe no one’s seen the kid.”

“That’s exactly what happened with the Jamieson girl.”

Peroni looked sceptical. “Come on, Nic. I know enough about these things to understand this is what happens half the time. Let’s not leap to conclusions. That poor woman knows we’re doing that anyway and it’s just scaring her stupid.”

Costa sighed. Peroni was right.

“The trouble is,” Peroni went on, “I’m just like everyone else here. I can’t stop thinking about Barbara. It’s driving me crazy. What the hell went wrong there? Her old man is an asshole. A crook and a cheat and a bully. Barbara seemed so different. I used to look at her and think: yeah, you can beat off all the crap you get in this world, so long as you try. And I was wrong, wasn’t I? She’d got the poison just like the rest of us. Only worse. Why?”

Costa had seen Falcone briefly before he went to forensic. He knew where they were supposed to go next. “You worked with her old man?”

“I had that privilege,” Peroni replied, suspicious all of a sudden. Then he looked Costa in the eye. “Oh no. Don’t tell me. Falcone wants you and me to go have a little talk with the bastard. Please, for God’s sake tell me I’m wrong.”

Costa threw his hands open in exasperation. “You know him, Gianni. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The men who went round to talk to him last night came away with less than nothing.”

Peroni picked up his jacket from the chair and stood up, grimacing. “Why does this have to happen to me? Let me ask you something, Nic. I’ve got a daughter too. She’s just at that age where you start to see something adult beginning to emerge from all the kid stuff. So how’d you spot if they’re going down that road? How’d you know they’re not sucking some dark part out of you that you can’t even see yourself?”

The big ugly face stared at Costa, full of bewilderment and something close to grief. “If I couldn’t spot that in Barbara Martelli, if she could take all of us in so easily, how are you supposed to know?”

Costa was only half listening. There wasn’t time to deal with Peroni’s guilt. There was scarcely time to flick through the snaps again, seeing what he saw before, just familiar pieces of stone and crowds of people, tourists mainly. A sea of expressionless faces keeping all their secrets.

“I have no idea,” he said.

SHE HAD ACHES AND PAINS from the car crash. A plaster was attached to part of her scalp where she’d headbutted the dashboard. Still, this should have been a good morning in the Rome city morgue, one full of interest. Two fresh bodies on the slab. A blank cheque to start running whatever tests she liked on the curiously mummified corpse of Eleanor Jamieson. The work had never been this promising, not in the eight years she’d worked there. Nevertheless, Teresa Lupo leaned against the exterior wall that linked her office to the Questura, hunched deep in thought, puffing on the third cigarette of the day. Events were moving around her. Falcone had left with an entire team. Nic Costa and Peroni had nodded goodbye as they set off a few minutes later. And they were all, she suspected, headed in the wrong direction.