David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

Bruno Bucci let out a long sigh and struggled to say something.

“No problem,” Neri said, slapping him on the shoulder. “It just adds another job to the list. Now sit down. I want to talk.”

FALCONE LOOKED UP from the scattered piles of photographs on the table in his office.

“Close the door,” he said quietly. “We don’t have much time. I want this Julius girl found. I want that to be the focus of what we do from now on. Understood?”

“Sure.” Costa nodded.

Falcone looked beyond the glass partition, out into the office. He’d managed to fill most of the desks. The men and women out there were busy, following up calls, chasing the couple of possible sightings they’d had. “I’m stepping up the media on this. We’re telling them we think she’s in real danger, not that I’m saying why. We’ve as many people as I can afford on the case. But we need to go back over what’s gone before. Someone’s collecting the mother. When she gets here, you can talk to her, Nic. Just you. Too many people will make her clam up. Tell her what we know so far. Just the broad details. And go over everything with her again, every place she and the girl visited since they arrived here. There’s got to be something she remembers that’s of use.”

“Details?” Peroni asked. “We’ve got details? I’m missing them. What is it we’re supposed to think has happened here?”

Falcone didn’t look too confident. “We’ve got Kirk on her camera. That’s enough for me. Kirk has to have been involved in taking her. If that’s the case, we have to assume she’s where he left her for safekeeping. We have to find where that is. Not Ostia for sure. I’ve got a team rechecking that now. She’s not there.”

The three men looked at each other. No one liked to think of a kidnap victim being left stranded, trapped in some hole, unable to call for help.

Peroni wasn’t happy. “I buy that but some of these things still don’t add up. Kirk was just a dirty old man. The mother said Suzi went off willingly. We’ve got it on CCTV. The boyfriend riding that motorbike wasn’t some man in his fifties.”

“I know,” Falcone agreed. “I’ve got men looking into Kirk’s background. Trying to work out if he had any close friends. Nothing so far.”

“And Neri?” Costa asked. “Wallis?”

“All we have on them are some rumours from the past,” Peroni suggested. “Why put a fire under some old feud after all this time? Why start playing these games all over again?”

Costa thought of the mummified body in the morgue next door. “Perhaps because we found Eleanor Jamieson. Because that reminded someone of… the possibilities.”

“Let’s stick with the facts,” Falcone said firmly.

“Which are?” Peroni asked.

Falcone stared at the pictures. “These.”

Neither of them argued. The pictures were all home-developed. A search of Randolph Kirk’s house off the Via Merulana had revealed a darkroom in the cellar. A couple seemed innocent: young girls, clothed, smiling with older men. But most looked as if they were taken later, when the party began. When the rules disappeared.

Falcone glanced at Peroni. “Gianni. This is more your field than ours. What do you make of it?”

He shrugged. “Pretty obvious, isn’t it? We have a phrase for this kind of thing in vice. We call it a fuck club. Sorry. The language isn’t so great where I come from. What happens is you get some guys. You get some willing girls. Young girls in this case. Then you put them together and, without telling anyone, stick a camera up in the corner of the room, probably on a remote operated from somewhere else.”

Falcone turned over one of the prints. On the back, scribbled in pencil, was the date: 17 March, sixteen years before.

Peroni nodded. “These days they’ve got remote controls. Even things that let you see through the viewfinder from another room. Back then they didn’t have the technology to do this kind of shot too well. They just pressed the remote shutter and got whatever was there at the time. Hence all these heaving butts, all these shots where you can’t really see who’s doing what to who. You wouldn’t get that nowadays. Now it’d come back on DVD or something.”

“Why is it we just have the year the Jamieson girl went missing?” Falcone wondered. “Why would he just keep the one set?”

“Search me,” Peroni replied, flipping through the prints. “Maybe he only took pictures the once. Maybe they still had some value. Or it just happened on that scale once. Who’s to know? I’ll tell you something though. This is not the work of anyone on our books. These kids look like amateurs. Not hookers. Not that I recognize anyway. And the clientele? This is the fanciest fuck club I’ve ever seen. Where is this place? On the Via Veneto? Next door to Harry’s Bar or something? Hell, they do have some value. I could pick up the phone and do business with these today.”

Costa scanned the men in the photos. It was a little before his time but he still recognized plenty of faces.

“You got TV people,” Peroni went on. “You got newspaper people. Couple of bankers I dealt with in the past. And politicians too. They’re bound to be there. You know what puzzles me? Only one cop. What kind of club is it that has just one cop on board? And him that penpusher Mosca guy too? Can we go talk to him?”

“Dead,” Falcone said. “Died in prison. Knifed.”

“Shame. He’s in almost all of them. Seems he got pretty friendly with Barbara. I guess that tells you everything.”

“It does?” Costa wondered.

“Sure, Nic. Like I said. This is not just some gentleman’s evening. It’s a sting . Why else would they leave the likes of us out? If this was just a plain party for the boys we’d have a few more people there. You agree, Leo?”

Falcone nodded and left it at that.

“So,” Peroni continued, “it was a sting. When this was over and done with, when these morons had gone back to their wives and moaned about how late the trains were getting these days, they got a phone call. Maybe a photo of their heaving butt. News of an account to settle. Or a favour to be called in sometime in the future. And my, what favours. You ever seen a cast list like this, Leo?”

“No.”

Peroni smiled. “Embarrassing, huh? Couple of these guys are still jerking our chains now, aren’t they? Are we going to ask them if they saw the Jamieson girl before she died?”

“All in good time,” Falcone said. He sorted the photos in front of them, and pulled out a single shot: a beaming Filippo Mosca and Barbara naked, locked together on a thin mattress on the stone floor.

“Nice,” Peroni said.

Falcone threw another picture on the table. “This one’s even nicer.”

Peroni swore under his breath. The final shot almost looked posed: Barbara and Eleanor, dressed, standing around holding wine glasses, looking nervous, as if they didn’t know what came next but thought it might not be too great. They were wearing some kind of costume: a thin sackcloth shift, the one Eleanor Jamieson had on when she was placed in the peat. Next to them stood Randolph Kirk, Beniamino Vercillo and Toni Martelli, looking at each other expectantly, grinning guiltily.

“Jesus,” Peroni said. “So Mosca wasn’t the only one playing this game? Can you believe it? That sonofabitch Martelli was pimping his own daughter and getting off too? Look at the expression on those guys’ faces. ”Aren’t we the lucky ones?“ Assholes.”

“But they’re not,” Costa pointed out, “lucky, I mean. Three of them are dead. Martelli doesn’t look as if he’ll be around much longer either.”

Peroni picked up the picture. “Let me take this and ram it down the bastard’s throat. He’ll start squealing then.”