David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

Silvio Di Capua wandered in from the corridor. He looked into her smiling face with a frightened devotion that threatened to bring the black clouds of depression straight back.

“Silvio, my man,” she said, her voice still husky from the cold. “Tell me about the good professor. What news of him?”

“News?” he replied, bemused. “He got shot. What news do you want?”

“Oh, how he feels about the whole thing. Who he wants to call.”

He did call someone. The memory, which was less than two days old, now seemed shockingly distant. Randolph Kirk called someone and all hell started to break loose straight afterwards. The conventional thinking around this place, she reminded herself, was that Eleanor Jamieson was the Pandora du jour . It was her ossified corpse that summoned the four riders from wherever else in the world they’d been, whipping up a little apocalypse for tea.

“Up to a point,” she said to herself.

Monkboy looked a little scared again. “What?”

“It was Randolph Kirk.” She recalled that disgusting habit he had with his nose. “Booger Bill. He started this crap off. With a little help from me, of course. Bog girl had been out of the ground for two weeks up till then, and nothing whatsoever had happened.”

Silvio Di Capua blinked then performed a polished impersonation of a terrified rabbit. “Lots of work to do, Teresa. Nice routine stuff. You’ve already given the boys next door a present to get along with. From what I hear there’s plenty more to occupy them besides.”

Her ears pricked up at the scent of gossip. “Plenty more what?”

He didn’t say a word.

She picked up a pair of scissors and snapped them open and shut a couple of times. “Speak, Silvio, before I am filled with the urge to snip a testicular sac or two.”

He gulped. “I heard one of the guys talking down the way. He says this mobster’s son’s straight in the frame now, even without the paternity stuff. Seems he’s trying to get himself a little holiday money by holding them to ransom.”

“Them?” She didn’t understand. “He’s only got Suzi Julius.”

He swallowed hard. “Not anymore. Seems he’s got the mother too.” He hesitated and dropped his voice to a whisper. “And a cop.”

Something black turned in her head. She advanced on Di Capua still holding the scissors. “What cop?” she demanded.

“That guy you like,” he said feebly. “Costa. God knows how. Or where. But they’ve got a picture of him and the mother tied up somewhere.”

“ Nic ?” she screeched. “Oh shit. What are we doing—?” She was looking round the morgue, mentally counting all their options. “Let’s think this through.”

Silvio Di Capua drew himself up to his full height, which was still a good measure below hers, and yelled, “ No ! Don’t you get it? I don’t want to fucking think this through! It’s not why we’re here!”

She’d never made him this mad before. Perhaps that was a failing on her part. This newly assertive Silvio Di Capua seemed a little more human somehow.

“And for God’s sake, Teresa, stop saying ”we.“ ” He calmed down a little now. “They are cops. We are pathologists. Different jobs. Different buildings. Why don’t you get that?”

“Because Nic Costa’s my friend.”

“Good for you. He’s their friend too, isn’t he? Don’t they get the chance to be heroes sometimes? While we settle down to a nice routine of cut and stitch and let things run their natural course?”

“Natural course?” Her voice was a touch too loud. She was aware of this but it didn’t help somehow. “Have you been following the events of the last couple of days, Silvio? What the fuck is natural about any of this? Also—”

“ No, no, no …” His head was down, bald scalp shining under the harsh morgue lights, long hair, even more lank than normal, unwashed for days, revolving around his podgy little shoulders.

Monkboy’s miserable face rose to greet hers. “Promise me, Teresa. Promise me you won’t go anywhere this time. Promise me you won’t set foot outside this place. Falcone’s handling this kidnapping crap himself. It involves ransoms and money and surveillance and all those things we know nothing about. Let’s stick to what we do for a living, huh? Just for a change. You shouldn’t be involved in these things. If you’d been here more we wouldn’t be in this shit in the first place.”

“You sound like one of them,” she said.

His flabby cheeks sagged as if they’d been slapped. “Maybe. But it’s true.”

“I know that. It’s just—” How did she explain this? There was something irredeemably personal about what had happened two days before. It wasn’t just her own near-death. The memory of Randolph Kirk, Booger Bill, nagged at her. He’d died in her presence, his rustling shade had somehow whistled past her, too busy to say goodbye.

After he called someone .

Booger Bill. Mister No-Friends, whose personal habits surely precluded closeness of any kind, except when wearing a mask and dealing with doped-up juveniles.

She looked at Monkboy. “Didn’t you find anything useful in Kirk’s pockets? An address book or something? A note with some numbers on it?”

“No,” he said sulkily. “And before you ask—yes, I looked.”

She bunched up her sizeable arms, folded them on her chest and began to walk. “Everyone’s got to write things down from time to time,” she said, moving briskly across the morgue, towards the storage drawers, Monkboy in her wake, whining every inch of the way.

Teresa Lupo found the one with Kirk’s name on it and pulled the handle, listening to the familiar sliding noise, steeling her nose for the inevitable rush of chemical odour that always followed.

“What are you doing?” Monkboy moaned. “We’ve finished with him. We got a whole load of others standing in line.”

“Well, tell them they can wait.”

Randolph Kirk looked pretty much like any other dead person post-autopsy. Stiff, pale and somewhat messed around. Monkboy never was any good with a needle and thread.

She took a long, professional look at the cadaver in front of them, and picked up each dead wrist in turn. “Has he been washed?”

“Sure!” Monkboy answered. “And I gave him a manicure and dental floss too. What do you think?”

“Just wondered.”

“Wondered what?”

She was starting to get annoyed with him now and didn’t mind if it showed. “Wondered, as it happened, whether he’d got around to scribbling something on his hands or his wrists. Something like a phone number. Disorganized people do that kind of thing. Or am I not supposed to know that? Doesn’t it fit the fucking job description?”

“Yes,” he answered mutely. “Sorry.”

She went back to the desk, retrieved her notes from the previous day and called Regina Morrison, heard the surprise at the end of the line.

“You have the time to call me?” said the dry Edinburgh voice. “I’m amazed. Things can’t be as busy as the newspapers say.”

“Oh, but they are,” she snapped. “Busier, actually. Now can you tell me please, Regina? Did Randolph Kirk keep some kind of personal address book at the college? Did you pick that up on your rounds?”

There was a pause on the end of the line. Teresa had remembered enough to pronounce the woman’s name correctly. That wasn’t enough, though. She wanted some deference, and right then there just wasn’t the time. “No. So this isn’t a social call?”

“What about a pocket diary? Did you see him use something like that? One of those electronic organizers perhaps?”

A long sigh made its way out of the earpiece. “Clearly you didn’t spend enough time in Randolph’s company to gain a true picture of the man. That was the most messed-up technologically challenged disaster of a human being I ever met. I wouldn’t trust him in the company of a toaster.”