David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

“Really? What role did you want?”

“Good cop,” Peroni insisted. “Maybe not with assholes like him. But temperamentally I’m much better at it. Whereas you… I think you could out-hardball Falcone if you wanted. Doesn’t that worry you a little, Nic?”

“Not often these days.”

Peroni shot him a puzzled glance. “I wish you wouldn’t do this to me. Make me think like a detective. It hurts. It’s not what I’m built for.”

“What are you thinking?”

He nodded back at the apartment block. “Martelli was on the take. That we know . So Barbara must have got into it too. Or maybe her job was some kind of reward for something Martelli had done. She just inherited the crooked mantle.”

Peroni stared at his partner, half offended. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’re imagining things,” Costa said with a smile. “This is good. Maybe you could make detective.”

The older man laughed and pointed to the car. “Hey, what I make next is inspector. And you get to drive for me. This is just a temporary hiatus, a blip in the natural order. Some things never change.”

But they do, Costa thought. The world was different already. Cops were killing people in their spare time, and getting killed in return. Something was loose, and random too, but that didn’t make it any less powerful.

Costa got behind the wheel, waited for Peroni to strap himself in, then set off into the traffic struggling round the big, busy square, thinking about Miranda Julius and her missing daughter, trying to work out if there was a way in which they might be unwitting parts of the shadowy, broader picture which had taken Barbara Martelli down to Ostia on a murderous mission less than twenty-four hours before.

“At least we’ve found out something,” he said.

“We have?”

“Whoever it was on the motorbike that picked up Suzi Julius yesterday, it wasn’t Barbara Martelli. She was on duty. I’ll check her movements but there’s no way that could have been her in the Campo. She couldn’t have changed uniform, changed bike, without someone noticing.”

Peroni nodded. “That’s right. Jesus, I should have seen that myself.”

“You’re doing fine, Gianni. You just have to keep looking for the connections. Imagining what they might be.”

“I don’t want to imagine,” Peroni objected, scowling. “I wanna ask and get told. OK? And don’t say I ain’t a partner.” He started delving into Costa’s jacket pocket as the Fiat sped down the hill towards the Colosseum.

“This is over-familiar,” Costa declared.

Peroni took out the envelope of holiday snaps Miranda Julius had given them and waved them in Costa’s face. “I can look, can’t I? There’s nothing private going on between you two? Not yet anyways?”

“Hah, hah.”

Peroni snorted. “That’s good. Get all the impertinence out of your system now, Nic. You won’t be able to come out with all that stuff when I’m your boss. Firm but fair is my rule. I don’t take any crap though and—”

He went quiet. Costa drew to a halt at the red light, tucked in behind a tram, watching in despair the way the tourists ignored every traffic signal on the road, risking their lives dodging between the cars.

“What is it?” he asked.

Peroni had four photos fanned out in front of him. Just crowd scenes outside the Trevi Fountain.

“Did you see our late professor friend out at Ostia?”

“No. I was busy looking around the place.”

“In that case you should have watched the TV this morning. They showed a mug shot of him. We’ve got the same guy. Here.” He pointed at a bland, middle-aged man in the crowd, staring back at the camera, interested.

“And here.” It was another shot at the fountain, probably just a minute or so later. The crowd had changed, but Randolph Kirk was still there, still staring intently.

“And here. And here.”

“Four shots,” Costa said, and didn’t know whether to feel pleased or horrified.

“So was the creep stalking her?” Peroni wondered. “Was he a distant admirer or something, and never took it any further? Or is this just coincidence?”

Costa glanced in the mirror, hit the pedal and pulled out into the oncoming stream of traffic, generating a furious howl of horns.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m right out of coincidences.”

“IT DOESN’T RHYME with ”vagina.“ Try again. I have a rule about this. Kindly indulge me.”

Teresa Lupo was struggling for words. She’d expected some boring university administrator, not this slender, middle-aged Scotswoman dressed in an elegant, black velvet dress, a string of pearls around her pale, flawless neck, and sitting bolt upright behind a gleaming teak desk. A large, imposing brass nameplate stood between them bearing the name Professor Regina Morrison, Director of Administration, followed by a string of academic letters. Teresa wasn’t sure she knew how to cope. What was more, she was starting to feel sick. Her head hurt. Her throat was going dry, her eyes itchy.

“Excuse me?”

The woman adjusted a photograph of a small terrier on the desk so that the dog stared directly into Teresa Lupo’s eyes with a fierce, unbending gaze. “Re- jeen -a Morrison. I’m not responsible for my own name. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I ought to change it to something more usual. But then I think: why ? Why bend to an ignorant world? Why not make it bend instead?”

“Re- jeen -a.”

“There,” the woman beamed. She had a very neat, mannish haircut, her too-black locks clipped close to her scalp. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now tell me. You’re a police officer?”

“Teresa Lupo. I’m from the police department.”

Regina Morrison leaned forward and put her hands together in the kind of gesture she must have used with recalcitrant students all the time. “So you’re not a police officer?”

There was, she thought, no point in trying to fox this woman. “Not exactly. I’m a pathologist. This is Italy, Professor Morrison. Things get complicated.”

“In the six months I’ve worked here I must say I’ve noticed. Still, I imagine I should be grateful anyone’s turned up at all. If this were Edinburgh I’d have no end of people trampling through my office asking all manner of stupid questions with half a dozen TV stations stumbling in their wake. It’s almost a day now since Randolph was killed. And all I have is you. Should I be grateful? Or offended?”

“Ask me that when the real cops turn up,” Teresa observed wryly. “My money’s on grateful.”

The slender shoulders moved just a little. That seemed to amuse her. “So why are you here and not them?”

“Because—” she shrugged. “The woman who killed your man was a cop and that changes things somewhat. The focus shifts, to her, not him. For now anyway. I got a look at the report this morning. It said Kirk was something of a loner. He lived by himself. No relatives in Italy. Not many friends. Cops are just like…” she tried to think of a good analogy, “… university administrators. They put their resources in the places where they think they’ll get the best return. The woman who killed Professor Kirk is someone they all knew. I guess they think they’ll get further, faster, by checking her first before driving round all day trying to track down any barflies Kirk drank with in his spare time.”

“Randolph Kirk drank alone, poor man,” Regina Morrison said with some firmness.

Then she opened a drawer and took out a half bottle of Glenmorangie malt and two small glasses.

“Cheers,” she said, pouring a couple of shots, picking one up and staring directly across the shining desk at her visitor.