by David Hewson
“We need help,” Costa said grimly, reaching for the radio in his pocket.
But Sara Farnese was already on the stairs, squeezing past Rossi.
“Hey!” Costa yelled, seeing her slim form disappear completely from view. “Don’t do that. Don’t touch anything. Jesus—” His partner was losing it.
Rossi 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 traveling 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 that 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 open wide 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 struggled to keep herself upright. Costa did not look too closely at her face but she appeared to be in her midthirties, with streaky fair hair and thin, leathery skin.
About two yards 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 only on his face, hands, feet and groin.
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 scrawled 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 was behind its 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 spasm, then looked at her. Sara Farnese was unable to take her eyes off the bloody, stripped corpse. She looked as if she were going insane 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 arms, avoiding as best he could the diminishing drip of blood from the ceiling.
Rossi stood outside the door. As they passed he 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 unshed tears. “I’ve got things to do,” he told her. “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 second floor, to sort through what he could.
Four
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; Costa 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 onstage. He stared at Costa and said, with what sounded like venom in his smoker’s voice, “I heard what happened in the Vatican. I sent you out to catch bag-snatchers. What in God’s name is this?”
“The dead guy in the Vatican,” Costa replied. “This is his wife. I looked in her purse. 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 in front of him. “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 silent. 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 Costa had 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 really 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 windshield and was now in pieces. Dead. Very dead.” Rossi shook his oversize 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. If the traffic cop o
n the scene hadn’t been there, I would probably have killed the moron.”
Costa looked back inside the church, checking that 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 from suing. To be honest, I don’t really care, not anymore. 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’ll 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 toward 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 his cigarette pack. It was almost empty. “Well, in that case, 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 think: She doesn’t mind a damn. That might just be where they belong.”
Costa felt his hackles rise. “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, the pathologist climbed out of her white polyester suit and stood there, a heavily built woman in her thirties, with a long, black ponytail. She wore the baggiest pair of cheap jeans Costa had ever seen and a creased pink shirt. She looked like Rossi, a little wasted.
Crazy Teresa lit the cigarette, blew a cloud of tobacco fumes into the scorching afternoon air and said, with a beatific smile, “It’s days like this that make it all worthwhile, boys. Don’t you agree?” Costa swore, then went back inside the nave, cursing himself for the way he’d handled that one.
She was still at the altar, on her knees, hands locked low on her blood-spattered suit, eyes wide open, praying. Costa waited until she had 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. The saint 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 want. I’d rather get this out of the way.” She was calm again and he thought 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?”
“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.”
“Okay. 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. “The dead guy in the tower had this in his pocket. It says it’s from you and asks him to meet you here, at the church, as soon as he can. Says it’s really important. Did you send this?”
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.”
“You didn’t know?”
“Does it matter?”
Costa wondered. Was he being prurient? And if so, why? “Maybe not. There was that thing about blood and martyrs written on the wall. You saw that, I guess. And that other stuff. Who’s this St. Ives? Is he another martyr or something?”
“No. It’s a place in England.”
“And seven wives?”
“I didn’t even know he had one,” she answered with some bitterness.
“So what do you think happened?”
Sara Farnese glowered at him, her green eyes full of resentment. “You’re the policeman. You tell me.”
“Anyone who looks at this will say one thing,” Costa said with a shrug. “Your old boyfriend found out about your new one and decided it was time to bring things to a close. For all of them, he and his wife included. Maybe you too.”
“I told you. Stefano didn’t want to kill me. And they weren’t ”boyfriends.“They were people I slept with from time to time. In Stefano’s case, months ago.”
Costa didn’t get it. Even now, pale and shocked, Sara Farnese was a beautiful woman. He couldn’t understand why someone like her would want to lead such an empty life. “People go crazy for all sorts of reasons,” he said. “Not always the obvious ones.” Men walked up a set of stairs and found someone’s blood dripping down their face. People you loved walked out in the morning and came home at night with a death sentence hanging around their necks.
“Perhaps.” She looked unconvinced.
“I’m sorry I had to ask these questions. You understand why?”
She didn’t say anything. She seemed transfixed by the painting behind the altar: Bartholomew about to lose his skin. “It’s apocryphal,” she remarked in a matter-of-fact way.
“What?”
“The story of the skinning. He was martyred, certainly. But probably something more mundane. Beheading was the usual method. The early Church embroidered these stories to encourage the waverers. To make sure the movement didn’t falter.”
“Hence 'the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church'?" She peered at him, surprised, he thought, that he had seen the point. “Is there some family I can call?” he asked.
“No one, thanks.”
“No one? Parents?”
“My parents died a long time ago.”
“There are people we can get to help in situations like this. Counseling.”
“If I need it I’ll let you know.” He thought again of what Rossi had sa
id. There was much more to this woman than met the eye.
“Don’t you ever pray?” she asked unexpectedly. Costa shrugged.
“Not a family habit. And I never knew what to ask.”
“You just ask the same old questions. Such as, if there’s a God, why does he let bad things happen to good people?”
“They were good people? This Englishman? The one who killed him?”
She considered this. “They weren’t bad people, if that’s what you mean.”
“Hey,” he added without thinking, “you should think yourself lucky you’re not a cop. We get to wonder about that and the other one too: Why do good things happen to bad people? Why did Stalin die in his bed? Why are the rich so rich and the poor so poor? My old man’s a Communist. I used to ask that one a lot when I was a kid, and boy, did I get whacked around the ear plenty.”
There was the slightest flicker of a smile on her face and it made Sara Farnese look like a different person, someone younger, someone with a fragile, interior beauty nothing like the cold, icy elegance that was her normal face for the world. Nic Costa was amazed. Against his own instincts he suddenly found himself understanding why a man could become obsessed by this woman. “Families matter,” Costa said. “They make you a team against the world. I don’t envy anyone who has to stand up against all this crap alone.”
“I’d like to go now,” Sara Farnese said. She rose and walked toward the door, where the sun was finally starting to lose some of its power and the day was starting to die. Nic Costa followed her all the way.
Five
The next morning Costa and Rossi found themselves summoned into Falcone’s office at eight.
The inspector looked grumpier than ever and uncannily alert, his sharp-featured face set in an unwavering frown. No one liked his temper. No one credited him with any great management skills. But Falcone was a man of talent, and there were insufficient of those in the higher levels of the force. He’d solved some difficult cases, ones that had made big headlines in the news. He had influence, beyond the police station. There was plenty of respect for him in the Questura, and little in the way of affection.