The Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  “I think they’re doing their best in difficult circumstances.”

  His voice rose. “It’s difficult for all of us, girl!”

  Enough was enough. “It’s more difficult for them, Leapman. They think they’re being kept in the dark. They’re right. And one more thing.” She pointed a slender finger at his chest. “Don’t call me ”girl.“ Not ever again.”

  Or “Little Em.”

  He laughed and Emily Deacon was surprised to find herself thinking that this was, perhaps, what he wanted to hear.

  “So you can answer back,” Leapman said. “Who’d have believed it?”

  He leaned over to his PC, keyed in a few words, then turned the screen to face her. It was the RAI news website. The lead story was about another murder in the city, with a photo of a burnt-out car by the Spanish Steps.

  “We’re losing this, Emily,” he said in a flat, miserable voice. “And I don’t know why. He’s killed someone else and I’ve got to tell you that’s the last thing I expected. This isn’t part of any pattern I can figure out. He’s killed some poor, helpless bitch who got in the way somehow. I never…”

  Leapman fell silent and stared at the monitor.

  “You never what?”

  “I never thought he’d stoop to that.”

  He picked up the phone and hit a speed-dial button.

  “Viale?” he asked, and there was a different tone to his voice now, a resigned, almost scared resonance she scarcely recognized. “We’ve got to talk… Just a minute.”

  Leapman cupped the mouthpiece and stared at her.

  “I’d like a coffee, Agent Deacon,” he said. “Cappuccino. The good stuff, from that place over the road. And take your time. I’ve got work to do.”

  NIC COSTA TOOK a deep breath and found it amazing that, only an hour earlier, he’d been worried about Gianni Peroni. Wherever the big man was in the white, frozen world that was Rome, it had to be better than this: clinging to a narrow, icy fire-escape ladder a dizzying height above the cobbled streets in the labyrinthine quarter north of the Pantheon, trying to peer through the billowing blizzard that was sweeping all around him.

  Another time, in different weather, when the wind wasn’t trying to peel him off the roof and dash him to the ground below, it would have been quite a view. The Palazzo Borghese should have been somewhere ahead. On a good day the great dome of St. Peter’s would have shone from across the river. Now all he could see was the blinding cloud of ice swirling painfully around his face, threatening to confuse his senses.

  Falcone had made it plain: it was his choice. The sly old bastard knew all along what Costa would say too. Nic was the youngest there and the most suited for the job. He’d done some mountaineering once, solitary trips into the Dolomites and the Alps as a teenager. They could have waited until a specialist was brought in, but that meant time, in this weather perhaps a long time. The problem was simple. A woman in the block had reported that an American tourist living on the top floor had, unusually, been absent all day. The previous evening she’d been seen entering the building with a stranger. The same stranger had walked out that morning carrying a couple of big, expensive-looking suitcases. They’d got a description of the man. It could be the same person Costa and Peroni had seen twice now, outside the Pantheon and by the Tiber the previous night.

  So should they pile through the door with an entry team, blundering into the place, hoping he was still hiding there? Or did they check it out first to see whether it was occupied or not? And if it was empty, wait a while outside to see if anyone happened to call back?

  For Costa the decision was clear-cut. The killer was human, not a monster. It was important not to let go of that fact. The man needed somewhere warm and private to retreat to in weather like this. This could be the first real chance they had of trapping him.

  Ordinarily there were easier ways to find out if someone was inside. They could spy from neighbouring blocks. They could use listening equipment through the walls. Not this time. The place was a tiny, probably illegal cabin perched high above street level like a giant toy box flung onto the big, flat roof of the nineteenth-century apartment block. The windows were higher than any of the buildings around. This must be the only home in the area with a scenic outlook, which also meant it was impregnable, impossible to watch. The only way to find out what lay inside was to try to get close somehow, and not through the front door either, which lay up a narrow covered staircase leading from the top floor, giving no visual access into the cabin whatsoever. The fire escape was the only option. If the man was at home, Costa would, the plan said, see so through the outside window and call in the forced entry team. If the place was empty, he’d just take a quick look around, get the hell out of there, then wait with the rest of them until someone came home.

  Plans.

  Costa shivered on the shaky ladder and wondered what plans were worth now. He hadn’t thought too hard about the weather after he’d talked to the woman who first made the call. He’d just cleared his ideas with Falcone, then walked up three flights of stairs in the building, found the ancient fire escape and started climbing through the swirling snowflakes. He hadn’t thought much about the odd geography of the building either. Falcone and his men were parked discreetly outside, sufficiently close to stop anyone getting away, anonymous enough not to be noticed by someone walking in through the entrance. Or so they hoped.

  Still, it didn’t give Costa much room for manoeuvre. They’d agreed it was too risky to post a second person outside the apartment, even one posing as a cleaner or a deliveryman. The individual they were after seemed too smart for tricks like that. Any intruder would stick out like a sore thumb if the man came back in the meantime. So if something went wrong Falcone and his team would have to make an entrance from outside.

  Now that he’d climbed those steep, steep stairs Costa appreciated how long that would take. His instinct couldn’t tell him whether someone was at home, but if someone was, it was going to be vital not to alert him.

  On this side of the cabin was a blind ledge just a metre wide, pointing back towards the hill where Trinità dei Monti lay, now hidden by the blizzard. Around the corner was a private terrace made for another climate. A pair of small palm trees cut incongruous shapes in their giant terra-cotta pots there, ice fringing their dead leaves, making them look like fantastic Christmas trees. The snow was so deep Nic could only guess at what occupied the other areas of the roof from the rounded white outlines they made: a barbecue, an outside sink with a single, swan-necked tap, a collection of brushes and brooms carelessly left to rot in the open air.

  He took one final, careful step up the treacherous ladder, reached the wall and pulled himself upright onto the constricted strip of the ledge, teeth chattering, shivering uncontrollably, feet almost off the building’s edge.

  Falcone had ordered him to keep the ring tone on his phone turned off until they knew the state of the cabin. No one wanted the risk of an unwanted call. But in the freezing cold Costa found it difficult to think straight. His brain felt numb. Had he remembered to turn it off or not? And if so when?

  With numb fingers he struggled to pull the handset out of his pocket, fumbling it in his hands. The thing was off. He still couldn’t remember doing that. Then he tried to put the phone away, found it slipping in his frozen fingers, knew what would happen next, how the ineluctable laws of gravity and stupidity could collide at times like this.

  The handset turned in his dead, icy grip, revolved slowly through the snow-flecked air, bounced off the ledge and tumbled down into the street below.

  Costa closed his eyes, felt the flakes begin to fall on them instantly and cursed his luck. He couldn’t go back down the ladder. He was too weary, too cold. The icy rungs were perilous enough when he was climbing, with the odds and gravity in his favour. Nothing could persuade him to risk a descent.

  He took out his gun, checked the safety was on, the magazine loaded. He was a lousy shot at the best of times. Now, with unsteady
fingers and a head that felt like a block of ice, he’d be as much of a danger to himself as anyone else.

  Trying to clear an open space in his mind, he pushed the weapon into the side pocket of his jacket and hoped some warmth and blood would come back to his hand, and with them some semblance of control.

  Costa edged carefully along the narrow ledge, spent one dizzying, terrifying moment negotiating the corner, then rolled onto the deep snow of the terrace, glad that he finally had some railings between him and the precipice down to the street. When he got back his breath, when his head told him to keep moving or he’d just curl up in a tight, shivering ball, freeze and die on the spot, he stood up, clung to the wall and edged along it. There was just one small window here. A bedroom in all probability. He neared the glass. The curtain was closed. There was no light inside, not a sign of life.

  Keep it that way, he prayed and stumbled on towards the river side of the building.

  A memory came from his mountaineering days. Wind speed increases with altitude.

  A sudden, gusting blast roared round the cabin’s apex, crackling with vicious energy, dashing hard, stinging ice into his face. He huddled into himself, drawing his arms around his head, fighting to keep upright, vainly trying to wish away the blank numbness growing in his brain. Then the blizzard paused for breath. After a moment in which Costa doubted his ability to go on, he struggled towards the corner of the building, hugged the drainpipe there, steeled himself against another battering from the storm.

  Sometimes there were no choices. Whatever the situation inside the cabin, he’d have to break in. It was simply too dangerous to do anything else. He turned the corner, clinging to the brickwork. Most of this side of the building was given over to a French window, almost opaque under a glazing of ice, with just a small gap kept clear by an updraught from the heating inside.

  He crept forward and peered through the glass. From this angle he could see a table lamp glowing in the corner of the small, cluttered room. Costa tried to imagine what that meant. Then the wind abated briefly and his heart sank like a frozen stone.

  There was a TV on inside. He could hear it. When he stretched his head further beyond the edge of the French door he could see it: a distant, small colour set in the corner of the room. Rousing music, a horse whinnying and gunshots. He glanced at the screen and knew the scene instantly; it was one of those iconic Hollywood moments you never forgot.

  John Wayne with an eyepatch turning his horse to face the bad guys at the end of True Grit. Costa almost wept at the irony.

  Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.

  It’s so easy in the movies. You put the reins between your teeth and ride.

  He tried to convince himself he was feeling braver.

  Then he saw the man.

  People watch TV, stupid, his distant brain reminded him.

  He was where you’d expect someone to be while glued to the box. Upright in a chair on the other side of the little room, with his back to Costa and the window, just the top of his head visible, a good crop of brown hair now, not the stupid Mickey Mouse hat Costa had seen on two occasions.

  Costa pressed his back to the wall, slid his body down to sit in the snow, head against the brickwork, eyes closed, desperately trying to think.

  There was no alternative. His damn phone was gone. Falcone would wait in the street. Not forever. But maybe long enough for him to freeze to death in the vicious gale that gripped this cruelly exposed Roman rooftop.

  Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.

  You put the reins between your teeth and ride.

  He glanced at the French windows. No one expected burglars at this level. Then he took another look inside. The man was engrossed in the TV. He wouldn’t, surely, be sitting in an armchair with a weapon on his lap.

  Never assume.

  Someone who carved shapes out of his victims’ backs was impossible to predict. All Costa could do was take every precaution in the book, and add a few of his own.

  He got up quickly, stood foursquare to the windows, then kicked as hard as he could. The doors flew open, glass crashed to the tiled floor inside. The volume of the TV set suddenly seemed abnormally loud.

  “Police!” Costa yelled, and followed up that meaningless comment with all the other orders that were supposed to make sense on these occasions.

  The man didn’t budge.

  Costa moved purposefully towards the chair, wishing the damn TV would stop screaming like that, wishing the room wasn’t so stuffily hot and filled with a strong smell, aware, too, that there was something deeply strange here, that the walls were covered with a familiar pattern, repeating over and over, painted in a colour he didn’t want to think about too closely.

  And the man didn’t shift an inch, which made Costa feel foolish as he watched the back of his head and the thick brown hair, waiting for a response, saying, more than once, “Don’t move.”

  There was a noise: voices, the sound of wood smashing, the racket of an entry team on the other side of the door.

  Focus.

  “Don’t,” he said, accidentally nudging the chair, and watched in shock as a woman’s head, ripped from her body, red gore blackening around her throat, rolled sideways over the arm, fell on his foot, finished upright on the carpet, long brown hair flowing back from a pale dead face, mouth open, fixed in a scream, glassy eyes staring at him, seeing nothing.

  “Shit!” he gasped, and lurched over to the smashed French windows, turned his back on this crazy scene, breathed in as much of the freezing, snow-filled air as he could get into his lungs, hoping it would get the noxious smell of meat out of him somehow.

  They were inside now. He could hear their voices behind him, hear the shock and someone starting to retch.

  And it was as if someone had turned a key, opened the door to a little enlightenment. The unnatural heat and the stench had stirred something the frozen rooftop had put into cold storage. The pieces finally started to fall into place. Teresa Lupo had, in a sense, warned him, if only he’d pursued the point far enough to get the detail.

  She’s not exactly complete.

  The cord was in one of the suitcases, not around her neck, because it couldn’t have been…

  Nic Costa turned round and looked at the room. The geometric pattern covered half of the side wall and would probably have extended further had not the source run out. It was a running fresco painted in what could only be the woman’s blood. And a message too, in English. One word in big, bold, dark red letters, underneath the scrawls: WHO?

  The SOCOs would have a field day here. The place had to be crawling with promising material and that, in itself, was strange. Costa had read the files, had understood what happened in the Pantheon. The killer had always been meticulous about cleaning up afterwards. But here he seemed to be leaving a deliberate sign.

  I am nearly done. Help me.

  Falcone walked through the room, stared at the item on the floor, and sniffed.

  “Neat,” he said. “You just prop the poor bitch’s head up on a couple of cushions, turn on the TV and all you see is someone working on a couch-potato habit. Clever.”

  Then he came up to Costa, something in his hand.

  “You dropped this, that’s why we came up,” the inspector said, and gave him the mobile phone that, just a couple of minutes earlier, had tumbled all the way from the windy rooftop down into the drifts in the street. “Nothing personal, Nic, but I think it’s time you went home and got some sleep. Don’t you?”

  BY FOUR IT WAS DARK. By five the city was a treacherous warren of icy alleys, deserted under a blinding moon. But at least the blizzard was over. Gianni Peroni had taken the jeep everywhere he could think of. Back to the Serbian’s cafe next to Termini. Down to the dark corners by the river where she’d lurked the night before. It was futile. The Serbians knew nothing. In the streets there were plenty of kids: dark, miserable figures, huddled inside their black jackets, crowding round fires built from noxious-smelling trash. Not one adm
itted to seeing her. Peroni tried every last trick in the book—money, threats, sweet talk—and it was just no good. They knew her. That much was plain. But Laila was an outcast in this bunch for some reason. Too strange, too difficult, to fit in.

  The way they lived depressed him. It was all such a waste. And it made him think of his own children, warm in a comfy, fatherless home outside Siena, getting ready for Christmas, eyes glittering in anticipation of what was to come.

  For the first time ever he wouldn’t be there. Not for one minute. He wasn’t a reflective man. He hated looking back. There were too many painful memories lurking in the recent past. Time healed, he knew that. One day the hurt would subside and, with that miraculous capacity for self-deception every living being on the planet seemed to possess, the good times would come to be uppermost in his mind once more. Till then he just had to swallow down the awkward mix of emotions that kept gripping him. He’d been a good father but, in the end, a lousy husband. It was just another of life’s cruel tricks that one couldn’t cancel out the other.