by David Hewson
Then, as he was about to dial in for assistance, his eyes came upon something worryingly familiar: a blonde woman in a long black winter coat. Emily was beyond the railings, just inside the mausoleum grounds. Costa briefly closed his eyes and murmured, “Wonderful.”
His wife was sitting on the wall of a weed-riddled flower bed just the other side of the tourists, trying to look like a visitor who’d plucked up the courage to vault the fence. And, to his eyes, doing a very bad job of it. She was too animated, too interested, to be genuinely absorbed by the miserable sight in front of her. As he was realising this, she turned, caught sight of him, nodded down towards the green ditch in front of her, and mouthed a single word: Here.
At that moment a vast lorry bearing construction equipment roared in front of him and stopped with a sudden deliberation that meant, Costa knew instantly, it wasn’t moving any farther. He dashed round the rear, a long way, heart thudding, found the temporary barrier for the works by the very side of the Ara Pacis, taking out his gun again, reminding himself there were now just two shots in the magazine, and probably no time to hope to reload as he ran.
When he rounded the timber hoardings, the tourists were still there. Emily was gone. His breathing halted for a moment. The police phone shook in his pocket. He took it out with trembling hands. It was Falcone.
“Where are you?” demanded the inspector.
“Augustus’s mausoleum. He’s inside. There are people around. We need to approach this carefully.”
“That goes without saying,” Falcone answered abruptly, and the line went dead.
“Indeed it does . . .” Costa murmured to himself.
He walked over to the tourists and told them to go somewhere else. They gaped at his face and his weapon, then fled. After that he climbed over the railings and scanned the area. The tramps were getting interested. One of them wandered over and demanded money. Costa brushed him aside. He came back.
“There’s a woman here. And a man in brown. Where?” Costa asked.
One of the seated figures, huddled in an ancient black overcoat, nodded round the corner, past some green and dingy buttress that looked ready to collapse.
“Thanks,” Costa said, nodding, and walked on, knowing, somehow, exactly what he’d see.
All the same, his heart froze the moment he found them.
They were no more than twenty metres away. The figure in khaki had met her—lured her?—into some dark dead end up against the deepest part of the moat, a place with no easy exit. He had his arm round Emily’s neck. She was struggling as he dragged her backwards. The gun dangled over her chest, its dull barrel pressing against the black fabric of her coat. He was dragging on the hood as he fought to restrain her.
Costa let his weapon fall to his side, walked forward, and tried to count his options. A thought occurred to him.
Emily knows you now.
THE KHAKI FIGURE DRAGGED EMILY ALL THE WAY TO THE MAUSOLEUM’S stone wall. There was nowhere else to go. Costa walked forward until he was no more than five paces from them. His wife’s face was livid with rage. She never responded lightly to violence. The shotgun had been hard at her throat for at least part of their journey into this dark, shadowy alcove in the masonry. She looked mad and ready to act. The figure in khaki had no idea the woman in his grasp was a trained law enforcement officer, a woman who’d learned how to deal with hostage situations, skilled in self-defence, one who possessed, in all probability, more knowledge and experience in dealing with this kind of problem than Costa himself.
“Half the police in Rome will be here any minute.” Costa said it quietly. “So how bad do you want this to be?”
“I really don’t mind.”
The voice behind the black hood was interesting. Cultured. Haughty. Local.
“Everyone minds in jail,” Costa said. “Ten years or twenty. It’s a big difference.”
The figure laughed and Costa got the feeling, again, that this was someone outside the normal criminal mould.
“I’m not going to jail,” the man responded, without a trace of doubt in his voice. “Not ever.”
The gun was still tight across Emily’s chest. There was fury in her eyes, and a part of it, Nic knew, was aimed in his direction for taking this gentle, firm approach, for not trying to nail everything down with force and unbending iron will. Officers possessed different styles, Costa suddenly realised. This hoodlum had his wife, and a shotgun at her throat. All the training in the world meant nothing, sometimes, out in the cold light of day.
“Please . . .” Costa said, and held out his empty left hand in a gesture of pleading.
“Don’t beg, Nic,” Emily spat at him. “You never beg. It’s the worst thing. You can do. The worst. . .”
He should have expected it. In one swift movement, Emily lifted her right leg and twisted it behind her, raking the man’s shin with her sharp, hard heel. Then she arced her elbow back and jabbed it fiercely into his left shoulder, finding the most tender patch there as she fought free.
Costa took one step forward, raised the pistol in his right hand, and aimed it straight at the black hood, straight into those dark unseeable eyes.
Emily had hurt him. The man was crying with pain from the vicious scrape to his leg, hugging the shotgun to himself the way a child clung onto a toy.
“Let go of the gun,” Costa said softly, “or I will, I swear, shoot you.”
He stole a glance at his wife. Emily was to his right, just a step away, not close enough for the man to seize her again, not with the gun trained on him.
“Emily,” Costa said firmly. “You don’t belong here. Go back to the entrance. Now. Everybody will be here in a moment.”
He could feel the heat in her gaze. This wasn’t the way she thought things ought to be done.
“I’m fine. There’s nobody else here, Nic. Can’t you see?”
The man wasn’t whining anymore. He was watching the two of them from behind the hood, his head cocked slightly to one side, listening, taking this all in. Taking in the fact they were more than mere acquaintances. Costa was certain of that.
He hadn’t moved the shotgun an inch. It still lay in his arms like some evil infant. Then he mumbled something.
“What?” Costa asked.
“Pretty white girl,” the man in brown said.
He laughed, and it was more like a giggle.
He leaned forward, looking conspiratorial.
“You know her.”
“The gun,” Costa emphasised.
The hood nodded.
Slowly, he held it out with both hands, one on the barrel, one on the stock, parallel to his body. He didn’t do anything else.
“Drop the damned gun!” Costa yelled, and found his own weapon stiff in his outstretched hand.
What came next was a shrug. A gesture so Roman Costa had seen it a million times. When a street seller didn’t have the change.
When an errant motorist got caught for speeding. On all those small occasions when a tiny tear appeared in the fabric of an ordered life, and everyone—the culprit, the victim, the witness—just wished above all else they could pretend it had never happened, had never been seen.
“Pretty white girl,” the hooded figure murmured again, in a different voice, one lower, one more serious, a voice that made Costa feel a chill run down his backbone.
He could see it now. The gun was horizontal in his hands, of no threat to anyone ahead, apparently unusable. But the thumb of the man’s right hand—a thumb enclosed in the black cotton of a soldier’s glove—was hooked through the trigger piece, ready, poised.
And the barrel had a certain, intent direction.
“Em—” Costa whispered, and was immediately aware that something—some bellowing, inhuman roar—wiped out the final syllables of her name.
One
A BRILLIANT WINTER’S DAY, SUNLIGHT STREAMING through the bedroom windows of the farmhouse, pigeons cooing noisily on the roof, the buzzing drone of a distant jet turning for Ciampino.
Costa woke and in that shifting, formless space between dream and reality was briefly disoriented as he struggled towards consciousness. From downstairs he could hear a soft, familiar feminine voice calling his name.
Still half asleep, he dragged himself to the door and walked to the head of the stairs.
“Nic,” she said, “it’s time. You have to get dressed. There are people here.”
Pepe, the small terrier that had accompanied his youth, now approaching sixteen and refusing to accept his frailty, sat at Bea Savarino’s feet, quiet and calm, staring at him placidly from the foot of the stairs. Bea wore black, just as she had for his father’s funeral, after all those long months of nursing him through the final stages of his illness. On the low table next to her sat a pile of unopened Christmas cards, most still with two names at the top of the address.
“Of course,” he said.
A person did not disappear easily. Emily was dead. It didn’t mean that every trace of her being, her sharp, keen personality, had departed the house. Bea had patiently, subtly taken her clothes to the charity shop during the ten days since the shooting, had cleaned the house, reorganised it so that his life did not fall apart any more than was necessary. There was an excuse, naturally. Her own apartment in Trastevere was undergoing some work, which made it convenient for her to stay at the farmhouse again, with Nic’s permission, which he gave willingly, not quite thinking or understanding much at the time, for a simple and obvious reason: inside he felt dead, utterly detached from anything that happened around him.
In his work he’d told so many bereaved relatives that it was impossible for their loved ones to be given speedy funerals because they were the victims of crime. He’d said, always, he understood their grief. Now he really did, and it wasn’t what he’d expected at all. Had Teresa Lupo not intervened with a clear-cut statement that she would not, under any circumstances, permit Emily’s body to lie in the police mortuary any longer, since there were no evidentiary or scientific grounds for its retention, his agony would be continuing, as it would have for most civilians. Instead, for him, came a fixed point in the calendar, a date on which the remains of his wife of a few, too-short months would make one final journey, then disappear behind a pair of velvet crematorium curtains. After which her physical presence would be gone forever, leaving a chasm in his own existence which seemed to grow with each passing hour, not diminish.
It was the week before Christmas and he was a widower before he’d turned thirty. Costa hadn’t wept yet. He’d still to find the key to that particular secret. It had eluded him from the moment he recovered consciousness after the figure in khaki clubbed him to the ground during those few, agonising seconds by the Mausoleum of Augustus, a sequence of events that continued to replay themselves inside his head with a cruel, vivid authenticity when he least expected it.
That, and the possibilities. What if she’d taken his advice and gone for a coffee, against, he knew, all her innate instincts? Or what if he’d shot the bastard straightaway when there was the slightest hesitation? As these images revolved in his brain, endlessly, never resting, her death seemed to swim in what-ifs and alternative endings. One more prominent than the other, and he could hear the words uttered from his own throat; as if he’d had time to say them directly to that figure with the black hood and the unseeable eyes: Shoot me instead. Take my life because it’s so much less worthy, so unimportant next to hers, which is bright and smart and leading to something she has yet to imagine for herself.
And that was the harshest thought of all. Because inside it lay something Emily Deacon—he’d never really thought of her with the married name—would not have tolerated for an instant. Selfpity. Defeat. The tantalising, appealing black pit of gloom into which it was so easy to descend, a place he knew already, a dark haven that beckoned him, in a bottle, in a wallowing morass of despair. Which was why the white lie about the apartment in Trastevere was invented, why his father’s former caregiver—and perhaps onetime lover—moved in so quickly to try to save him.
“NIC!” THE FAMILIAR FEMALE VOICE SAID AGAIN, WITH THAT half-scolding tone he’d come to know so well.
Bea walked upstairs carrying the black suit from the cleaners, a white shirt ironed so perfectly it seemed new, and a dark tie she must have bought for the occasion.
He took them and said thank you.
Bea, pretty Bea, the stiff-backed, elegant woman he’d loved, in a way, as a child, stood in front of him, her eyes full of concern. She had a tan from a winter holiday in South Africa. The customary gold necklace hung around her neck. There were wrinkles on the tanned skin now as she approached sixty, though she looked as beautiful as ever in an expensive dark funeral dress and shoes.
“You must come,” she said, and put a firm, warm hand to his cheek.
“I will, I promise,” he replied obediently.
She had something on her mind and was reluctant to come out with it.
He stared at her, waiting.
“For pity’s sake, Nic, let a little of this grief go,” she pleaded. “God gave us tears for a reason.”
It was a strange thing for a lapsed communist, even one as middle-class as Bea, to say.
“I didn’t think you believed in God,” he observed.
“I don’t know what I believe in anymore, Nic. Do you?”
Two
FOUR HOURS LATER THEY WERE BACK, MEANDERING around the table of food Bea had prepared, chattering in the idle, restless, uncomfortable way that happened after funerals. People he knew. Strangers from America, who were distant with him, for good reason. This was the first time they’d met Emily’s Italian policeofficer husband. It would be the last too.
Teresa Lupo had hardly spoken a word. She was in the kitchen, a disconsolate, untidy figure seated on a chair at the table, not eating or drinking, Peroni holding her hand, watching the tears pouring down her cheeks. The pathologist had been fine in the crematorium. It was the farmhouse, the place the four of them had spent so many hours, that got to her. Teresa worked with death, was comfortable with its presence in the surroundings where it belonged. In a house, one that had so briefly been Emily’s home, everything was different.
Costa walked over from the living room, placed a hand on her shoulder, saw the way she wasn’t able to meet his eyes, then received a knowing nod from Peroni. There came a time when there were no more words of consolation left, for any of them. This was that time. Emily was gone. He’d spent eleven days in some curious limbo where bureaucracy—formal identifications and death certificates—mixed with the ludicrous long hours dealing with funeral directors. And, in between, when he found the opportunity, trying and failing to convince Falcone to let him return from compassionate leave to work on the case.
Instead, the inspector had insisted he stay away, placing a car at the end of the drive to keep the determined army of curious media out and, Costa knew, him in. Emily had told him what the newspapers were like. A photogenic death always meant headlines. She’d been proved right, and the lurid facts of the case had only served to feed the media frenzy. The beautiful wife of a Roman police officer was dead, murdered in front of his eyes by a killer who’d fled a crime scene where, it later transpired, several other women, one of them an upper-class French art historian, had died. The story contained all the elements the media loved: attractive women, vicious crimes of a sexual nature, and an apparent inability on the part of the police to locate a single potential suspect, in spite of a huge, and national, hunt.
Costa had ordered every important newspaper, had watched most of the daily news bulletins, and had followed the case on the Web, the way Emily had showed him. Two things continued to nag at him. It was impossible, surely, to believe the police had not come across a single lead in a case so rich with forensic evidence. And no one ever mentioned the painting, the image of which had yet to be entirely displaced by the shocking memories of what came after.
He waited until people began drifting away. Leo Falcone had arrived
with Raffaella Arcangelo; the two seemed so friendly that Costa wondered if that romance had returned. A sudden death altered the landscape. Falcone was a man who enjoyed his own company, but had found something else during the time Raffaella had cared for him the previous year. Now that he was fit and active in the Questura, he had no need for her physical support. But emotionally . . . Costa wondered, as he watched Falcone slyly remove himself from the dwindling crowd, find the back door, then disappear into the garden.
He excused himself from the kindly American cousin who stood next to him, running out of words, and followed Falcone outside. There had been a time when the inspector would have been smoking one of his foul-smelling cigarettes. That habit had disappeared. He was seated by the decrepit wooden table that looked out over the bowed, blackened vines, a place where Nic and Emily had entertained all four of them—Falcone and Raffaella, Teresa and Peroni—often the previous summer.
Costa took a seat next to his boss and stared at the land. Everything—the house, the garden, the fields—seemed larger somehow. Emily’s absence magnified the world and its emptiness.
FALCONE CAST A QUICK LOOK BACK THROUGH THE FRENCH windows, into the lounge.
“I’d smoke if I could get away with it. Women . . .”
Costa briefly closed his eyes and stifled his astonishment—which should not, he knew, have been so great—at the man’s lack of tact.
“You and Raffaella . . . I don’t want to pry, Leo.”
“Oh.” Falcone kicked at some pebbles on the ground. Sometimes he was alarmingly childlike. “That’s back on. I called her.” He turned to look at Costa, as if asking for some kind of reassurance. “I needed to, Nic. Not just to make arrangements for today. I wanted to see her. Everything seemed so cold otherwise. It wasn’t that I felt alone, you understand.”
Costa made some sympathetic sound.
“God . . .” Falcone shook his head with a sudden bitter fury. “I miss Emily. I miss that bright mind. And talking to her. She didn’t think the way we do. I could listen to her throwing an idea around for hours. It’s all so . . . futile.”