A Season for the Dead

by David Hewson

  ‘This Stefano,’ Rossi asked as they pulled into the piazza in front of the church. ‘He was a friend of yours?’

  She said nothing, and was stepping out of the door before they had come to a halt.

  ‘One scary woman,’ Rossi grunted just out of earshot, and shook his head. The two men followed her and looked at the church. It was hard to believe there could be anything wrong here. It was an old, unspoilt corner of the city, with a cobbled piazza where you could sit in the shade away from the murmur of traffic that ran along both banks of the river.

  ‘You think we should call in?’ Rossi asked.

  Costa shrugged. ‘What’s the point? Let them hang us in their time, not ours.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the older man agreed. ‘Let me see if I can find a warden. Get some keys.’

  The woman was already at the door of the church.

  ‘Hey,’ Costa yelled. ‘Wait.’

  But she was gone. Costa swore and raced after her, shouting for Rossi to follow.

  The place was empty. Costa stood in the nave, framed by the polished columns on either side, feeling the way he always did in churches: uncomfortable. It was a matter of upbringing, he guessed. The places just spooked him out sometimes.

  They looked in the dimly lit side chapels. They tried a couple of doors that opened onto tiny storage rooms full of dust.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ she said.

  They stood in the nave, Costa trying to think of other options. She was disappointed, anxious, as if this were some intellectual puzzle demanding a solution.

  ‘It was worth a try,’ he said. ‘Don’t blame yourself.’

  ‘I blame myself already,’ she said softly. ‘There has to be more to it than this. We did some work here once. There was a temple, to Aesculapius, before the church. Maybe something underground.’

  ‘Aescoo— who?’

  ‘Aesculapius. He was the god of medicine.’ She looked at him. ‘That makes it appropriate too, don’t you think?’

  ‘Maybe.’ He was out of his depth and knew it. There was more going on in the woman’s head than he understood. He wondered how much she acknowledged herself.

  Rossi returned waving a set of large, old keys. Costa felt awkward. Somehow he seemed to have taken the initiative which was surely Rossi’s prerogative. He was older, more senior. He knew more.

  ‘We’ve been everywhere,’ Costa said. ‘It’s all open anyway. Nothing.’

  ‘Best we call in then,’ Rossi said, and seemed relieved at the idea someone else might have to pick up the pieces.

  She was staring intently at a small door on the left, before the altar. ‘Over there.’

  ‘We tried it,’ Costa said.

  ‘No. There’s a campanile here too. We didn’t find the way into the tower.’

  Costa led the way and threw open the door. The room was small and dark. He pulled out the little torch from his pocket and saw instantly why they had missed the exit earlier. The stairs were hidden in the dark far corner, behind an iron screen that was secured with a huge padlock. Rossi grunted then went to it, fumbled with the keys, found the right one and pushed through into the darkness, scrabbling up the stairs.

  ‘Jesus! What was that?’

  The big man’s screech echoed up the stone staircase.

  Costa’s hand finally found a light switch. It illuminated the ground floor of the tower and the stone spiral leading upwards through a first floor of old, dry planking.

  Rossi staggered down the stairs, still squealing. His bald head was now stained with blood. It ran down his temple, into his eyes. He squirmed trying to clean it, scrubbing at his head with a handkerchief, yelling all the time. For the first time in his police career Nic Costa felt bile rising in his throat. Now they were at the staircase there was a smell inside the hot enclosed oven that was the tower’s interior. It stank of fresh meat starting to go sour. He flashed the torch upwards. From the wooden ceiling above the stairs there was a slow, steady drip of coagulating blood that Rossi had walked beneath the moment he put a foot on the first step.

  ‘We need help,’ Costa said grimly, pulling the radio from his pocket.

  He looked at her, not believing his eyes. Sara Farnese was already on the stairs, squeezing past Rossi. ‘Hey!’ he yelled, seeing her slim form disappear completely out of view. ‘Don’t do that. Don’t touch anything. Jesus …’

  His partner was losing it. He was scratching at his face as if the blood there were poison, acid, ready to eat into his skin. Costa took the radio and made a short, urgent call. Then he told Rossi to stay downstairs and wait for him. He didn’t like the look on the older man’s face. There was something crazy there, something that said this was all travelling a little too far from home. Nic Costa felt the same way but she was gone, she was upstairs with whatever else lived there, and he couldn’t accept the idea she might be there alone.

  He heard the sound of a switch overhead. A dim, yellow light cast shadows down the stairs. Then Sara Farnese made a noise, something halfway between a gasp and a scream, the first real sign of emotion she had uttered since the carnage in the Vatican Library half an hour before.

  ‘Shit,’ Costa cursed and took the stairs two at a time.

  She was slumped with her back to the wall. Her hands were over her mouth, her green eyes were wide open in shock and amazement. Costa followed the direction of her gaze. He saw the corpses in the full beam of the single bulb and fought to keep the contents of his stomach down.

  There were two bodies in the room. The woman’s was fully dressed in a dark skirt and red blouse. It was suspended from a beam by a makeshift noose. Close to the dangling legs was an old wooden chair which might have been kicked from beneath her – or, perhaps, had fallen away as she tried to keep herself upright. Costa did not look too closely at her face but she appeared to be in her mid-thirties, with streaky fair hair and thin, leathery skin.

  Two metres away was a second figure, strapped upright to a supporting timber beam: a man with a striking shock of golden hair and a face contorted by the agonies of a terrible death, with a gag tied tightly across his mouth, raising the bloodless lips and perfect white teeth into an ironic smile. He hung by his arms which were tethered above his head to a blackened beam. His legs dangled free to the wooden floor. There was skin on his face, hands, feet and groin alone.

  A buzzing cloud of flies hovered over the fleshy torso. Their noise filled the tiny circular room. Around the walls, painted time and time again in the dead man’s blood, was the message Sara Farnese had first heard in the Vatican Library, written in rough capital letters: THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS IS THE SEED OF THE CHURCH. And, once only, a couplet in English, one Nic Costa could understand enough to realize it was even crazier. It was painted on the wall behind the body so the writing stood behind his head. The words read like the first two lines of a poem …

  As I was going to St Ives

  I met a man with seven wives.

  Nic Costa felt his stomach give a single heave then looked at her. Sara Farnese was unable to take her eyes off the bloody, stripped corpse. She looked as if she were going crazy inside her own head.

  He crossed the tiny room in two strides and knelt down, between her and the flayed corpse, touching her hands with his.

  ‘You’ve got to get out of here. Now. Please.’

  She tried to avoid the obstacle of his body, tried to see once more. Costa placed his hands on her cheeks and forced her to look into his face.

  ‘This is not your doing. This is not something you should see. Please.’

  Then, when she failed to move, he bent down and lifted her into his arms with as much care as he could muster, and walked down the circular stone stairs, feeling her weight in his hands, avoiding as best he could the diminishing drip of blood from the ceiling.

  Rossi was outside the door. As they passed he looked back and muttered something about support being on the way. Costa carried her into the nave. At the front he placed her on the bench pew. She was staring
at the altar. Her eyes shone with tears.

  ‘I’ve got things to do,’ he said. ‘Will you wait here for me?’

  She nodded.

  Costa beckoned Rossi to stand by the woman’s side, then took a deep breath and returned to the tower and the bloody room on the first floor, to sort through what he could. The woman was easily identified from an ID card in her handbag. The skinned man’s clothes lay in a tangled pile near his body. In the jacket pocket was a UK passport and the stub of a ticket for a flight from London that morning.

  Ten minutes later the teams began to arrive, clambering up the stairs, filling the tiny room: scene of crime, lab people, an army of men and women in white plastic suits who wanted him out of there, wanted to get on with their work. Teresa Lupo, Crazy Teresa, the woman pathologist the police admired in a distant, scared fashion, was leading the way. It made sense; he couldn’t see Crazy Teresa passing up on a case like this. She must have known the big man was there too. Station gossip had it that something had been happening between them recently.

  Leo Falcone walked in and considered the stripped corpse as if it were an exhibit in a museum. The inspector was as well dressed as ever: pressed white shirt, red silk tie, light-brown patterned suit, shoes that picked up the full yellow light from the single bulb and still managed to shine like mirrors. He was a striking figure: completely bald, with a perfect walnut tan and a silver beard cut in a sharp, angular fashion, like that of an actor playing the Devil on stage. He stared at Costa and said, with what sounded like venom in his smoker’s voice, ‘I sent you out to catch bag-snatchers. What in God’s name is this?’

  Costa thought to himself that one day he would lose it in front of all these people. One day someone would push him just a little too far.

  ‘The woman is Rinaldi’s wife,’ he said. ‘I looked in her handbag. It’s with the other one’s pile of clothes.’

  ‘And the other one?’ Falcone demanded.

  Nic Costa felt like screaming at him. He hadn’t asked for this. He didn’t want to come to this place. Most of all he didn’t want to watch Sara Farnese going steadily crazy as she began to accept what had happened in front of her.

  ‘Working on it,’ he said and walked down the stairs, leaving them to get on with their business.

  Rossi, to his disappointment, had not stayed with Sara Farnese. Costa located him outside trying to find some shade in the hot, cobbled square, sucking on a cigarette as if his life depended on it.

  ‘Did she say anything?’ Costa asked.

  Rossi was quiet. The horror of the crime was bad enough but Costa knew there was more to his distress than mere shock. There was something about this big, complex man he failed to understand.

  ‘Not a word.’ Luca Rossi didn’t look Costa in the eye. He frowned. It put a big double chin on his pale, flabby face. ‘I was scared in there. I didn’t dare go into that room. You could feel it. Bad …’

  ‘It’s enough to scare anyone.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ Rossi hissed. ‘You walked in like it was just another day.’ He motioned to the scene of crime people outside the church door, smoking just like him. ‘They’re the same.’

  ‘Trust me. They’re shaken. We’re all shaken.’

  ‘Shaken?’ Rossi mocked him. ‘Falcone looks like he could eat breakfast off that corpse.’

  ‘Luca.’ It was the first time he’d used the big man’s Christian name. ‘What’s wrong? Why are we working together? Why did they move you here?’

  The big man’s watery eyes cast him an odd, sad glance. ‘They never told you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jesus.’ He stubbed out the cigarette with a shaking hand and immediately fumbled for another. ‘You want to know? I went to some road accident. Happens all the time, I know. This one wasn’t so different. There was the father behind the wheel, dead drunk. And on the road his kid, who’d gone straight through the windscreen and was now in pieces. Dead. Very dead.’ Rossi shook his oversized head. ‘You know what bothered the father? Trying to wheedle his way out of the accident. Trying to convince me he wasn’t drunk.’

  ‘There are jerks in the world. So what’s new?’

  ‘What’s new?’ Rossi repeated. ‘This. I picked the jerk up by the scruff of his neck and started throwing him around the place. A lot. If the traffic cop on the scene hadn’t been there I would probably have killed the moron.’

  Costa looked back inside the church, checking she was still there. When he turned away Rossi’s sad, liquid eyes were burning at him.

  ‘They moved me as part of the deal to stop him suing. To be honest I don’t really care, not any more. I’m forty-eight, unmarried, unsociable. I spend my nights watching TV, drinking beer and eating pizza and, right up till that moment, I didn’t mind, I didn’t care. Then something hits you out of the blue. Sometimes the scales just fall from your eyes for the stupidest of reasons. It happened to me. It’ll happen to you one day too. Maybe you get tired, with some bright new kid snapping at your ankles, and then you just see this stuff for the shit it is. Maybe it’s something worse. You finally realize this isn’t just some game. People die, for no reason whatsoever. And one day it’s you.’

  ‘I never thought it was any other way,’ Costa replied. There was some personal resentment towards him in Rossi’s voice. Costa didn’t like to hear it. ‘Go home, Luca. Get some sleep. I’ll deal with everything.’

  ‘Like hell you will. You think I want Falcone busting my balls tomorrow?’

  Costa put a hand inside the older man’s jacket and pulled out the packet. It was almost empty. ‘Well, in that case just get some serious smoking done. We can talk about this later.’

  Rossi nodded at the church. ‘You want to know something else too? I’ll tell you now. I doubt you’re going to listen.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She scares me. That woman in there. A woman who could watch all that stuff and hold it tight inside her. What kind of person can do that? She almost died today. She saw whatever was up in that room – no, don’t tell me. I don’t want people with no skins on them walking around inside my head at night. It’s not healthy. You look at her and you could think she doesn’t mind a damn. That might just be where they belong.’

  Costa felt his hackles rise on Sara Farnese’s behalf. ‘You didn’t see her there, Luca. You can’t judge. You didn’t stay long with her at that altar either from what I can work out. You didn’t watch her, not knowing where to look, wanting to bawl her eyes out. It takes time with some people. You ought to know that.’

  Luca Rossi prodded him in the chest, hard. ‘You’re right. I didn’t see.’

  Crazy Teresa came out into the bright sun too, saw them, came over and cajoled Rossi for a smoke. When he reluctantly agreed she climbed out of her white polyester suit and stood there, a heavily built woman in her thirties, with a long black ponytail. She looked like Rossi, a little wasted. She wore the baggiest pair of cheap jeans Costa had ever seen and a creased pink shirt. Crazy Teresa lit the cigarette, blew a cloud of tobacco fumes into the scorching afternoon air and said, with a beatific smile on her face, ‘It’s days like this that make it all worth while, boys. Don’t you agree?’

  Costa swore, then went back inside the nave, cursing himself for the way he handled that one.

  She was still at the altar, on her knees, hands locked low on her blood-spattered dress, eyes wide open, praying. Costa waited a couple of minutes until she was finished. He knew what she was looking at. Ahead of her, behind a painting of the head of Christ, done in gold, like some Byzantine icon, was a bigger image on the wall. It was Bartholomew, about to die. He had his hands tied above his head, just as the corpse did in the tower. A grim-faced executioner stood next to him, holding the knife, looking into his eyes as if he just couldn’t work out where to begin.

  Finally, Sara Farnese got off the floor and joined him on the bench.

  ‘We can do this some other time,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t have to be now.’

  ‘Ask what you wan
t. I’d rather get this out of the way.’

  ‘I understand that.’

  She was calm again and he wondered about what Rossi had said. Sara Farnese was certainly a woman in control of herself.

  ‘This Stefano Rinaldi,’ he asked. ‘What was he to you?’

  She hesitated then said, ‘He was a professor in my department. I had an affair with him. Is that what you wanted to hear? It was brief. It ended months ago.’

  ‘OK. And the woman upstairs in the room. His wife.’

  ‘Mary. She’s English.’

  ‘I got that from the papers in her bag. Did she know?’

  Sara Farnese peered at him. ‘You want all this now?’

  Costa said, ‘If that’s fine with you. If not we can do this some other time. It’s your decision.’

  Sara Farnese looked at the painting behind the altar again. ‘She found out. That was why it ended. I don’t know why it began in the first place. It was a friendship that just spilled over into something else. Stefano and Mary’s marriage was shaky in any case. I didn’t make it that way.’

  He pulled out a plastic bag from his jacket pocket. There was a sheet of paper on it, a message from an office notepad covered in handwriting. ‘I was trying to work out what’s happening here. Not sit in judgement on anyone. I found this in the other one’s clothing. It’s a note that was left for him at the airport this morning I guess. It says it’s from you and asks him to meet you here, at the church, as soon as you can. Says it’s really important. Did you send that?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘How could Rinaldi know he was coming?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps I talked about it at work. I really don’t know.’

  ‘The other man was your lover?’

  She winced at the word. ‘We … met from time to time. His name is Hugh …’

  ‘Fairchild. I know. He had his passport with him. You want to look?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Next of kin. It says he’s married.’

  ‘No,’ she said coldly. ‘I don’t want to look.’