David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

He led her into a small interview room overlooking the courtyard behind the Questura. She sat down immediately and said, “I know you’re looking, Nic. You don’t have to prove that to me.”

“I just wanted you to see it for yourself.”

The stress was starting to show. The impression Nic Costa had first had of her—as a model who’d gone into something manual just to prove she was more than she looked—came back to him. She sat on the other side of the table, hunched inside a plain black bomber jacket, snatching anxiously at a cigarette, trying to blow the smoke out the half-open window. Her sharp, intelligent eyes never left him.

“Do you have any idea where she is?”

Costa was careful with his answer. “It takes time.”

She stared out the window, squinting at the bright, late afternoon sun. “I ought to say it again. I’m sorry. About last night. It must have been very embarrassing for you.”

The sudden close contact they shared continued to bother him. He could, he knew, have gone along with her so easily. “Forget it. I have.”

For a moment an odd look, almost like anger, crossed her face. He wondered if he’d said the right thing.

“Sometimes I drink,” she said. “Not to blot things out. It’s just that events can make more sense that way. Or it appears they do. I don’t imagine you understand what I’m talking about.”

He’d never forget the lost days after his father died, when he would sit alone in the old man’s wheelchair for hours on end, talking to the bottle, trying to gauge how much of the hurt was physical, from his wounds, how much existed in his head alone. And how easy it would be to drown both in booze.

“I understand. Will you promise me something?”

“I don’t like making easy promises,” she answered quickly. “You disappoint people if it turns out you can’t keep them.”

“It’s just this. We need you, Miranda. We need you to think about anything we find. Possibly to react to it. I just don’t know. But when that moment happens, it’s important for all of us, Suzi most of all, that you’re not—” He let the sentence drift off into nowhere.

“Drunk?” she wondered. “Don’t worry. That won’t happen.”

“It’s not a great idea being on your own. Isn’t there someone from home who can come? You mentioned your mother.”

“She’s on holiday at the moment. In California. I spoke to her this morning. What with the time difference, changing tickets… she can’t be here until Sunday.” She gave him a sudden intense glance. “By then… We’ll know, won’t we?”

There was no avoiding an honest answer. “I think so. All the same… I could arrange for a woman officer to be with you.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said firmly. “I don’t need to be treated like a victim. Suzi’s the victim here. She’s the one I want to help. You just do your job and I’ll try my best. Any way I can.”

“Good,” he said, then reached for the tape recorder button, dictated the standard header to the interview—date, time, subject, interviewee, officer—and tried to think of the right questions, the ones that would unlock something hidden, something lost inside Miranda Julius’s complex, hurting head.

“Is there anything new that’s occurred to you?”

“Not really.” She shook her head, as if she hated herself for being like this. “I keep trying to think of something. There’s nothing that stands out I haven’t mentioned already.”

“The people you’ve met here—”

“They’re just people. People in shops. People in cafés. People in restaurants. We’ve talked to them. Of course we have. But nothing stands out. It never went beyond just being polite.”

He placed one of the photos from Suzi’s camera on the table. Randolph Kirk was there at the edge of the crowd by the Trevi Fountain, staring directly into the camera with an odd, focused expression.

“Do you recognize him?”

She peered at the picture. “No. I’ve never seen him before. Not until I saw the paper this morning. My Italian’s not great but I get the message. He was the man killed out at this archaeological place, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

She came directly to the point. “You think he had something to do with this other murder too? The girl from sixteen years ago?”

“There’s evidence that he used young girls for his own… entertainment. With others.”

She swore under her breath. “So what happens now? Where is she, Nic? Just locked up somewhere this monster’s left her? Waiting to be found? It could take forever. God—” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I can’t bear to think of her like that. It’s just so horrible.”

“We’re circulating her picture everywhere. Someone must have seen her.”

“None of this makes sense. Suzi wouldn’t just disappear with a man like that. It’s preposterous. He’s old. Look at him. What could he possibly offer her? You don’t think he was on that motorbike, do you?”

“No,” he admitted. “Maybe he just found her. Someone else did the rest.”

“But why Suzi? Why her?”

“Bad luck,” he said with a shrug. “Coincidence. These cases are sometimes just that. Kirk seemed to have a fondness for blondes. Maybe she reminded him of someone else.”

She knew immediately what he was talking about. “The dead girl you found? I saw pictures of her. They do look similar, I suppose.”

“It’s just a theory. We have two avenues to work on here. We can do all the usual things. Make sure as many people as possible see her picture. Monitor the calls we get from that. And we can work to try to understand what really happened. Why Kirk played these games. Who with, and where.”

“It could be anywhere, couldn’t it?” she asked.

“No.” There was an important point here somewhere, he thought. This was a ritual. It didn’t take place at the Villa of Mysteries in Ostia. Teresa’s careful forensic work had proved that much already. Kirk had to have another location, larger, more important. In the city most probably. Perhaps Suzi was there now, trapped, waiting. But for whom?

“I need you to look at some more pictures,” he said, and reached for the files.

Miranda Julius stared at a standard police ID photo of Barbara Martelli. “I saw her picture in the papers too,” she said. “Blonde. She was another one of his women? The police officer?”

“We think so.”

“Was that why she killed him?”

“We’ve no idea,” he admitted. “Have you seen her before, Miranda? Please. Think. Is it possible you or Suzi met her somewhere? Anywhere.”

She sighed. “We’ve asked the police for directions a few times, I suppose. Maybe we talked to her. I don’t know. I don’t think I’d remember one way or another.”

“OK. Point taken. How about him?”

He placed a photo of Vergil Wallis on the table.

“No,” she said immediately. “Is he Italian?”

“American. Have you talked to any Americans since you arrived?”

She couldn’t understand the point of the question. “I don’t think so. I think I’d remember someone as distinctive as that. What’s the meaning of this, Nic? Why would an American be involved in this kind of thing?”

“Bear with me,” he said. “We have to keep trying. Do you know this man?”

She looked at a photo of Beniamino Vercillo. “No.”

“Him?” Emilio Neri’s big, ugly face glared up at her from the table.

She shook her head. “He looks like a crook. He looks… horrible. Are these the kind of people you think could have Suzi? She’d never go away with someone like that. She’s not stupid.”

Costa shuffled through the pile of pictures. “That was taken in the Questura, when we were interviewing him about something. He doesn’t always look like that. People have different faces for different occasions. You have to try to think beyond what you see sometimes.”