David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

She reached for the papers, elated. He stopped her.

“We haven’t gone over those yet,” he cautioned. “Afterwards, you’ll get to see them. I promise.”

“Do you know what this is?”

“I didn’t. From what you’ve said, I think I do now.”

She was ecstatic, triumphant. He wished he could share her elation. “These go back years. We can put Emilio Neri away for good. We may be able to nail anyone who did business with him. Have you thought of that, Leo?”

“Right now I’m thinking about a murder,” he answered. Then he wondered: was that the direction you were supposed to take in the circumstances? Did this bloody dumb show exist in order to make you miss a larger though more subtle point? He couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the information that lay on the table. However useful it was, something about its provenance troubled him. This wasn’t the way the mobs normally went to war, killing underlings, leaving damning information on their enemies for the police. Not without some payoff anyway.

For a fleeting moment he wished he’d never left that beach in Sri Lanka, never caught the plane home to these complexities. He’d felt old recently. The renewed, chaste presence of Rachele D’Amato did his mental state no good at all. The pressure was something he could take. It was the doubts that bothered him. He wanted certainties in his life, not shadows and ghosts.

“Where the hell is everyone?” he scowled, and felt, for the first time in many a month, the edges of his temper beginning to fray.

THE MOMENT TERESA LUPO LEFT Regina Morrison’s office Monkboy was on the line, screaming for all he was worth, making it dead plain that Falcone was possibly in the foulest mood in history and wanted her on the scene now . She drove through the choked streets, thinking about what she had heard, not wondering for a moment how she would explain her absence or the fact that, for the second time in two days, she’d wilfully trodden on cop territory.

Dead people didn’t run away. There was nothing she could do for this new corpse that Silvio Di Capua couldn’t. All the hard work came later. Falcone would surely realize that. Most of all, she had a result . She didn’t expect him to be grateful. She didn’t expect to get bawled out either. While the rest of them were stumbling around in the dark, grasping at cobwebs, she’d found something concrete: the photograph of Barbara Martelli and Eleanor Jamieson in the private files of Professor Randolph Kirk, a man the lovely Barbara had despatched so efficiently the day before.

“Shithead,” she mouthed, with precious little enthusiasm, at a white van blocking the street. Some Chinese guy was unloading boxes out of the back and, very slowly, running them into a little gift shop. She looked into the window. It was full of the crap cheap Chinese gift shops sold: bright pink pyjamas, plastic back-scratchers, calendars with dragons on them. It all seemed so irrelevant .

She opened the window and yelled, “Hey. Move it.”

The man put down the box he was carrying, turned and said something which sounded very like “Fluck you.”

Red mist swirled in front of her eyes. She pulled out her ID card, hoping the state police seal would do the trick, waved it in his direction and screeched, “No, asshole, fluck you .”

He hissed something underneath his breath that made her glad she didn’t understand Cantonese, then slowly climbed into the van and started to clunk it through the gears.

The riddle still hung in front of her, grey, shapeless. Was her own presence at the site merely a rotten coincidence? Did Barbara decide to off the professor anyway—maybe through some recurring bad dreams—then add the one and only witness to the list? Had Kirk called her to say someone was around asking awkward questions, in such a panic that she decided to shut him up for good? Was that what a Maenad did? Dispose of the god if he lost his sparkle? Or did Kirk phone someone else, someone who knew Barbara Martelli, understood she’d become a Maenad somewhere along the way and just given her the job: out you go, girl, it’s whacking time, and don’t forget to clear up any prying pathologists who happen to walk into the firing line .

They’d never know. The first thing the cops had checked was the phone records. She’d asked that morning. They hadn’t a clue whom Kirk had called. There was no redial button on Kirk’s ancient handset. The phone company didn’t log local calls.

She was starting to think like a cop now and it scared her. All these possibilities lay in the dark, limitless recesses of the imagination, a place she was trained to avoid. A place that, if she were honest with herself, had begun to scare her. That was why she started blubbing in front of a complete stranger, why it took her a good fifteen minutes to recover sufficient composure to get on with the day. That and the shitty virus fighting it out with two quick shots of Glenmorangie in her bloodstream. Life would be so much easier if the dead could come back and talk, just for a little while. She’d drive over to the morgue, stare at the mummified cadaver that had once been Eleanor Jamieson, and murmur, Tell Teresa all about it, sweetie. Get it off your mahogany chest .

Still, that corpse had spoken to someone. It had said: not everything dies . And Suzi Julius, with her fateful blonde looks, had sparked something too. Cause and effect didn’t respect mortality.

The white van lumbered off the pavement and rolled down towards the low shape of the Colosseum at the end of the street. Teresa Lupo’s new yellow Fiat, provided by the insurance company and already sporting a couple of fresh dents, sat stationary in the road. The horns behind her began to yell.

She wound down the window and yelled back at the creep in the Alfa on her tail. “Can’t you see I am thinking , you crapulent piece of pus?”

Then she put the car gently into gear and drove down the Via dei Serpenti at a measured, steady pace, trying to put her thoughts in order.

When she walked into Beniamino Vercillo’s cellar she felt like putting her hands over her ears, like running away from everything and finding some oblivion in a long, cold drink. She’d seen this so many times before, the path team hanging round the corpse, waiting to be told what to do, the scene-of-crime men in their white bunny suits combing the place for shards of information. And Falcone, this time with the woman from the DIA, standing at the back, watching everything like a hawk, throwing questions at Nic Costa and Peroni, unhappy, uncommunicative.

The tall inspector broke off from barking at his men. “And where’ve you been? In case you haven’t noticed there’s work to be done.”

She held up both hands in deference. “Sorry,” she answered meekly. “Don’t feel the need to ask how I am. I get people trying to kill me most days.”

Falcone demurred slightly. “We need you.”

“I’ll take that as an apology though a simple sorry would have sufficed. How’s it going with the missing girl by the way?”

“What?”

“The girl?”

Falcone scowled at her. “Leave the live ones to us.”

She looked at the body behind the desk. There’d been so many over the years, it was like being on a factory line. Now something was different. When Teresa Lupo looked at this corpse, the professional, unconscious side of her already assessing what she saw, a low, rebel voice started sounding in her head, getting louder and louder and louder, until it drowned out everything else, the blood, the questions, the tension and the fears.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she murmured, and wondered who was speaking: her or the rebel voice. And whether they were, perhaps, one and the same.