David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

And just in case they were in any doubt about the nature of this object before them there was the matter of the neck. When Bobby had come down hard with the shovel he’d done what he hoped: split through into the interior. Bobby and Lianne Dexter were now looking at the inside of another human being’s throat and it was black and complicated and messy, with bones and sinews and passages that looked vaguely familiar from some distant school lesson in anatomy.

“Holy shit,” Bobby muttered and started shivering.

A 747 swooped low over them. They felt the heat of its breath. They inhaled the chemical stink of its fearsome engines. When the roar of its gross presence diminished Bobby Dexter became aware of another noise. It was his wife, screaming.

“No,” he pleaded. “Not now, Lianne. I’m trying to think for chrissake.”

Then he gave up altogether. Two men, one short, one tall, were walking towards them, staring intently. Some way behind them there was something else: a red fire engine struggling down the lane trying to reach the charred and smoking remains of the Clio.

The men were waving badges. They didn’t look sympathetic.

The older cop was a bull-necked gorilla of a man with a disfigured, scowling face and piercing, aggressive eyes that looked as if they could see everything. The younger, shorter one was staring at the thing in the ground, the shit-coloured cadaver with the head all to one side where Bobby had lopped it with the shovel.

“This day just gets stranger,” Gianni Peroni murmured. “Pinch me. Tell me I’m dreaming.”

“You’re not dreaming,” Nic Costa replied. He couldn’t stop looking at the object half-hidden in the mud. Not for the weeping woman who looked as if she’d thrown up and was now hunched in a ball down by the edge of the river. Or the man, who held a shovel uncertainly in his hands, his body swaying rhythmically.

A man who, for no reason at all, suddenly pointed the spade at both of them and, with a slow, effortful slur to his voice, said, “Listen. Don’t fuck with me. Don’t even think about it. I’m an American citizen.”

The Ides of March

HOW LONG HAS SHE BEEN LYING THERE? ANSWER ME that.“

Teresa Lupo stood next to the brown cadaver that lay at a stiff, awkward angle on the shiny steel table in the morgue. The pathologist looked even more proprietorial than usual about the corpse in her care, and immensely pleased with herself too. It was two weeks now since Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni had encountered the body and the screaming American couple by the muddy banks of the Tiber, just a couple of kilometres from the sea at Ostia. Bobby and Lianne Dexter were back home in Washington State, talking to lawyers about their divorce and who should have custody of the cats, still feeling lucky to have escaped Europe without facing a single charge (which proved, Lianne thought, exactly what kind of people they were over there anyway). Costa and Peroni had, in the meantime, become, if not quite a team, partners of a kind, able to get through the day with a sense of shared duty and the promise that soon their artificial relationship would be over.

The body had made international headlines for a few days. Somehow a photo had been smuggled to the media, showing the serene, frozen face that had emerged from the chemical-smelling peat. It was a genuine mystery. No one knew how old the body was. No one knew whether the girl had died of natural causes or was the victim of some obscure crime. There was wild speculation in some of the Italian tabloids, stories which talked about ancient cults that had killed followers who had somehow failed the entry ceremony.

Nic Costa hadn’t taken any notice. It was pointless to speculate until Teresa Lupo had passed judgement. Now she had made up her mind. They had been summoned to the morgue for ten that morning. At noon Teresa planned to give a press conference outlining her findings. The very fact she’d arranged this herself without asking advance permission from Leo Falcone spoke volumes. It meant she was confident there was no criminal investigation on the way. He and Peroni had simply been invited along out of politeness. They found the specimen; they deserved to hear its secrets revealed. Costa wished Teresa had left them out of it. He was starting to get the feel for police business again, starting to like the idea he could be good at it. If this really was a closed case, he’d rather be somewhere else, dealing with a live one.

The three of them—Falcone, Peroni and Costa—sat on a cold, hard bench watching her make a few last-minute, fussy observations of the corpse. Costa understood what this was: a dry run for the press conference which would be part of her re-entry into police life. Teresa Lupo had briefly quit her job after the Denney case, vowing never to return. She had been close to Luca Rossi and felt the pain of his death as much as anyone in the station. More, perhaps, than Nic Costa. More certainly than Falcone who, while quietly racked by guilt over the loss of his man, was too obsessed by the job to be distracted for long.

Grief chased her from the tight, close embrace of the force. Grief brought her back to the fold. She was like the rest of them: hooked, incapable of staying away. She loved getting to know her customers, trying to understand their lives and what had brought them to her slab. Unravelling these mysteries fulfilled her and now she was starting to show it, Costa thought. She was carrying a little less weight. The ponytail had gone, replaced by a businesswoman’s crop, black hair short and sculpted carefully to hide the outline of her heavy neck. She had a large, animated face and slightly bulbous blue eyes that darted around constantly. There was something a touch obsessive inside the woman, something that quickly chased away most men who tried to get close to her. Maybe that was what made her the pathologist the cops always wanted on their side, however fierce her temper, however sharp her tongue…

“Ten years. Twenty max,” Peroni suggested. “But what do I know? I’m just a busted vice cop. You got to bear the responsibility for any screw-ups I make, Leo. I’m used to dealing with people I know are guilty from the outset. All this detection stuff… it’s not my thing.”

Falcone put a hand to his ear. “Excuse me?”

“Sir,” Peroni said meekly. “You got to bear the responsibility, sir.”

Falcone sat there in a grey suit that looked as if it were new that morning, letting his fingers run through his angular, sharp-pointed silver beard, staring at the body, thinking. He’d returned from a holiday somewhere hot only the day before. A deep walnut tan stained his face and his bald scalp. It was almost the colour of the corpse on the slab. The inspector seemed miles away. Maybe his head was still on the beach, or wherever he went for enjoyment. Maybe he’d been through the force disposition. There was a flu epidemic gripping the city. People were calling in sick from everywhere. The Questura had so many empty desks that morning it looked like Christmas Day.

Teresa was grinning. Peroni had said exactly what she wanted to hear. “That’s a good and sensible suggestion, even for a busted vice cop. Your basis for it being… ?”

He waved his hand at the table. “Look at her. She’s a touch messed up but she don’t stink too bad. Nothing going mouldy. I’m sure you people have seen worse. Smelled much worse too probably.”

She nodded. “The smell’s from the treatment. She’s been lying in a shower ever since we got her here. Fifteen per cent polyethylene glycol in distilled water. I’ve been doing a lot of research on this girl. Reading books. Talking to people. I’m in touch with some academics in England by e-mail who know exactly how to handle a body in this condition. After ten weeks or so maybe we’ll need to get her freeze-dried to finish the job properly.”