David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

“What about poor Suzi Julius?”

He shrugged and looked abruptly despondent. “We thought we had a sighting last night. Just before the bangy thing went off. Nic went over there to chase it.” Peroni hesitated, reluctant to go on.

“Well?” she wondered.

“Haven’t heard a word from him since. His phone’s dead. No sign of him in the street. Never went home.”

It always happened with bad news. A picture of the person involved just flew into her head. Teresa Lupo had, maybe unwittingly, got very close to Costa over the last year. He had qualities she didn’t see in abundance around the Questura: persistence, compassion and a dogged sense of justice. And he never caught the cynicism bug either, which, perhaps more than anything, made him stand out from the crowd. “Oh crap. What the hell can have happened?”

“We have no idea,” Peroni said honestly. “But I like that young man, Teresa. He is going to be driving me around when I go back to my old job. No one’s taking that privilege away from me.”

He flexed those big shoulders and she began to understand something else about Peroni. He wasn’t a man to give up easily.

“You could have told me about Nic earlier.”

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

“So what do you want from me?” she asked again.

“Look, I’m not telling you how to do your job. Nor is this a request from Falcone or anything. To be honest with you, everyone back there’s clutching at straws anyway. I just want to say this. We’re all short on resources right now. We all have to think about priorities. You’re a good pathologist, you know the rules, you stick by them, mostly—”

She finished the coffee, looked him in the eye and said, “Cut the crap.”

“OK, OK. I just can’t help thinking that somewhere in that workload of yours there’s something that can help us. And it’s not going to be in the obvious places, or the most recent ones. I know you got to do it on all those poor bastards. I was just hoping you wouldn’t kind of focus on the easy ones first. I mean, Toni Martelli, the accountant guy. Those people from outside Neri’s house. We know how they died. We need forensic, sure, but I don’t think our answer’s going to come from looking at those corpses. Whereas—”

He left it at that, hoping she’d pick up the bait.

“Whereas—?” she wondered.

“Oh God. Do I have to say this? You were right all along. Whatever prompted this shit began with that kid we dug out of the bog. If we could work out what the hell happened to her, and where, then maybe we’d get some better perspective on what’s going on.”

She looked across at the skinny bartender playing with his ponytail and said, “After you’ve washed your hands you can make me another coffee.” The youth slunk off to the kitchen then returned and started working the espresso machine.

Peroni eyed her, just a hint of admiration in his face. “You’re direct, Teresa. I like that in a woman.”

“This Mickey Neri. He killed Barbara’s old man. The Julius woman identified him hanging around her daughter too.”

“Yeah?”

“And if I recall correctly,” she continued, “this same Mickey Neri met Eleanor Jamieson. I saw the notes. They said Wallis and she took a family holiday in Sicily with the Neris six weeks or so before she died.”

“Stands to reason—”

“Oh yes.” She swallowed half the cup of coffee and felt the caffeine and sugar buzz start to hit the back of her head.

“You want to be careful with that stuff,” he said. “It can give you nightmares.”

“I don’t need coffee for that. Do you?”

Peroni glanced at his watch. “Well?”

“We haven’t touched any of yesterday’s,” she said. “Well, hardly anyway. I spent most of last night trying to complete the autopsy on Eleanor Jamieson. I did try to come up and talk to you people about this. Around two thirty. If I recall correctly, you were all too busy.”

His mouth hung open, hungry for information. Quite deliberately she slowly finished the coffee then wiped out the dregs with her index finger and sucked it, making little squeaks of pleasure all the time.

“Please—” he begged.

“I got it wrong, twice over, big time. She wasn’t some virgin sacrifice. Or to be more accurate, she may have been a sacrifice but she wasn’t a virgin. I was wrong too that you couldn’t get any DNA out of a body that’s been sitting in all that acid peat for sixteen years. There’s one circumstance that allows this.” She looked at him. “You want to guess?”

“No!”

“If there’s a foetus. Even a tiny one. Eleanor Jamieson was pregnant. Six weeks or so I’d say. Probably just at the stage she was starting to notice, starting to wonder whether she dare tell the father.”

Peroni’s eyes were shining with hope and outright joy. “Jesus, you beautiful woman.”

“I said to cut the crap. The point is that she’s pregnant six weeks or so after she met Mickey Neri, who’s now been hanging around her look-alike, a sixteen-year-old kid who happens to have disappeared.”

It came so suddenly she wished she’d had the time and the strength to react. Gianni Peroni stepped forward, grabbed her face with both hands, then kissed her rapidly on the lips. She sat, transfixed. The ponytailed waiter was staring at the pair of them.

“Don’t ever do that again,” she whispered. Then added, “Not without asking first.”

“Give me more.”

“I don’t have any more,” she objected. “Not until the lab gets back on the DNA.” She smiled. “We’ve Mickey Neri on file already. He was accused of rape two years ago. Somehow the thing never got to court. It could be waiting on my desk right now.”

“Oh sweet Jesus.”

Gianni Peroni was beaming. “Don’t even think of kissing me again,” she warned. “Too early in the morning. Just go and find Nic, will you?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, nodding. “You bet.”

He stopped and stared out into the road. A tall dark figure was walking across the road, towards the Questura. It was Vergil Wallis, leather coat flapping around his shins, striding deliberately like a man with a mission.

“Two miracles in a minute,” Peroni murmured. “Maybe there is a God.”

NIC COSTA WOKE UP on a large, old double bed in an enclosed chamber that stank of damp. A single yellow bulb cast a pool of waxy light into the cold, dusty room. His head hurt. He ran his fingers gingerly over the faint, tender bump on the back of his scalp then sat upright, legs over the side of the bed, trying to think. His jacket lay crumpled on the floor. Costa picked it up. The mobile phone was still in the pocket. He stared at the screen in vain. He was deep inside the rock of the Palatine now. There was no chance of a signal. No sign of his gun either, or a soul anywhere nearby.

He stood up, paused for a moment to let the pain at the back of his head subside, then walked around the room. It looked like the kind of place Randolph Kirk would have used, professionally and for his private pleasure too. There were paintings on the walls, old, rough ones, never retouched over the centuries. He stared at the images that, just like at Ostia, ran around the place in a continuous frieze a good metre deep. It was the same theme that he’d seen in the underground chamber by the coast, an initiation ceremony. A young girl, more puzzled than frightened on this occasion, was being led through a crowd of revellers, only some of them human.

As he walked round the room, following the story, he realized this was different somehow. The rape looked more like seduction here. The girl seemed passive, willing even, with bright, knowing eyes and the hint of pleasure in her face. There was a graphic depiction of her coupling with the god, locked in his powerful arms, eyes closed, mouth just open, ecstatic, but this was no longer the final piece in the saga. It appeared midway through the frieze and was followed by some kind of frenzied orgy, in which the girl took part voluntarily, watching the fights and the lovemaking, the vicious wrestling bouts and the acts of bloody violence around her with a nonchalant sense of detachment. Then, in the last frame, she was the central figure once more. The girl stood in front of the god who was now tethered to a stake, his arms held both by ropes and the grip of two female acolytes, his body shrinking in fear. Now she held a knife which she plunged into his right eye. Blood soaked his dreadlocks. A silent scream rose from his throat. The girl was laughing like a maniac and Costa found himself thinking of Randolph Kirk, slaughtered in his grimy little office by a Maenad much like this one, greedy for vengeance over some unseen, unexplained crime. Had the “god” failed her, and Barbara too in some mysterious way? Was she now more important than him? Or was this simply the last part of an intrinsically inexplicable drama, the fury in which every participant, man and woman, human and mythical, visited the extremes of their imagination?