The Villa of Mysteries nc-2

by David Hewson

  “I don’t have to take this shit,” Martelli wheezed.

  Peroni smiled, leaned over and took hold of his scrawny knee. “That’s the trouble, Toni. That’s the worst thing of all. You do.”

  “Where’s her mother? Does she know?” Costa wondered.

  “Back home in Sicily. Of course she knows.” Martelli’s dead eyes glared at him. “They got TV and papers in Sicily, haven’t they? How couldn’t she know?”

  “You should have called her, Toni,” Peroni said. “You got to bury these things sometimes.”

  A skeletal finger cut through the air in front of Peroni’s face. “Don’t fucking tell me what to do. Don’t go places you don’t belong. That woman walked out on me for no good reason. She can rot in hell for all I care.”

  Peroni’s face lit up at Martelli’s reaction. “She left right around the time Barbara joined up, didn’t she? Any connection there?”

  “Just get out of here.”

  It wasn’t grief that was eating the man up. It was hatred, and fear maybe.

  “Is there something we can do?” Costa asked. “Help make arrangements?”

  Martelli’s eyes fixed on the carpet. “Nope.”

  “Is there nothing at all you want to tell us?”

  He didn’t say a word.

  Peroni leaned back and closed his eyes. “This is such a nice apartment. I wish I could afford something like it. You know, I could just sit here all day, smoking, thinking. You got anything to eat, Toni? You want me to send the boy out and fetch something in while we wait for you to get your voice back? Couple of beers? Some pizza?”

  Martelli shook his head. “She was thirty-two years old, for God’s sake. A grown woman. You think she told me everything? It just makes no sense. She got here around three thirty after she came off duty. A little while later there’s a call and next thing I know she’s putting on that leather gear of hers, off for a ride. Hell, it was a nice day. I thought maybe she was doing it for fun. Maybe she was going to meet someone. I don’t know.”

  “She didn’t say anything?” Costa asked.

  Martelli turned to look at Peroni. “Where did you get Junior? Is this one of them work experience things the schools do?” The bony finger jabbed at Costa from across the room. “If she’d said anything I’d have mentioned it. I didn’t do the job you think you’re doing for more than thirty years without learning to put one foot in front of the other.”

  “Of course,” Costa nodded and thought again: where was the grief? Was Toni Martelli just holding it all inside? Or was there something that overwhelmed even that? Fear? A sense that his own skin might be at risk now too?

  “We could get someone round to talk to you. We could get you counselling.”

  “Send round some grappa and a few packs of cigarettes. Counselling? And they wonder why the force has gone to pieces.”

  “We could get you protection,” Costa suggested.

  “Why would I need that?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me. Barbara had secrets. That much we do know. Maybe some people think she shared them with you.” Costa leaned forward. “Maybe she did.”

  “Don’t try fishing with me, kid,” Martelli snapped. “Ate up minnows like you for dinner in my time. You ask something sensible or you get the hell out of here. I was planning to watch some football.”

  It was as if what had occurred was an everyday event. Or that Martelli refused to allow it to touch him, scared perhaps of the consequences. Costa couldn’t begin to understand this strange old man at all.

  Peroni looked at his watch then at Costa. They both knew they were getting nowhere.

  Costa persisted. “Tell me, Mr. Martelli. Did Barbara have a boyfriend?”

  The bleak, old eyes glared at him. “Nothing special.”

  “Any names? Did you ever meet them?”

  “No.” He lit a cigarette, took a deep gulp then closed his eyes. “None of my business. None of yours either.”

  Peroni nudged him, smiling. “It is now. We got to pry into Barbara’s bedroom, Toni. We got to do that for her sake as well as ours. Did she always come home at night? Or did she stay with them?”

  “You two getting off on this?” Martelli asked.

  Costa was unmoved. “Did she leave any phone numbers where you could contact her when she was out?”

  The old man went silent again, staring at them sullenly. He was thinking, though. There was some kind of revelation going on inside his head.

  “She didn’t go for men,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. She didn’t go for women either. She wasn’t interested. Not for a long while now. I…”

  Just for a moment he looked pained. “I wish she had fucked off with someone, got married, had kids. Instead of all this shit. All this lonely, lonely shit…”

  “Why was she lonely?” Peroni asked. “Barbara of all people? I mean, she could have had any man she wanted. Why wouldn’t she try a couple out just for size?”

  “I dunno,” he grunted, recovering his composure. “Why ask me? She never told me nothing.”

  Nic Costa felt an intense dislike for this desiccated man. Peroni had hit on something too. Barbara never did go out with anyone, though she must have been asked all the time. Was she scared of men? Had something happened that made her incapable of maintaining an everyday relationship?

  “I wasn’t interested in you,” Costa said. “Not directly. If it’s at all possible, Mr. Martelli, try to imagine yourself outside all this for a moment. I was asking about Barbara. We’ve only got three possibilities here. Either she did this of her own volition, just acting alone, for what reason none of us could begin to guess. Or she did it as a private favour. Or someone from one of the mobs kept her sweet over the years and used her to do jobs in her spare time. And paid her.”

  Martelli sucked desperately on the cigarette and blew a cloud across the room. Costa waved away the smoke.

  “You’re her father,” Costa continued. “You were a cop. Where’d you put your money?”

  The cigarette burned brightly again.

  “In fact,” Costa added, “talking of money, where are Barbara’s bank accounts? Where are yours for that matter?”

  “They took them,” Martelli snapped. “Last night. They’re clean. Not a hint of anything bad. Do I look like an idiot?”

  Costa stood up. “You don’t mind if we search the apartment again, Mr. Martelli? In case they missed something?”

  The old man turned his miserable gaze on Peroni. “I’ve had enough of this shit. You’ve got no papers that give you the right to do this.”

  Peroni shook his head. “We’re not going away empty-handed, Toni. There must be something. Something you remembered after they left last night. Otherwise we go out for the beer and pizza. I promise you.”

  “Thanks,” Martelli said with a scowl. “Tell them this. She was a good daughter. She cared for me. She always knew her family came first. I wish I’d appreciated that more. I wish—”

  His voice broke. His eyes filled with tears.

  Toni Martelli was crying for himself, Costa thought. None of this was supposed to happen. The company he kept had saved him from prosecution before. He must have thought himself untouchable, and believed, by implication, this sense of immunity applied to his daughter too.

  “It would be a terrible thing to live with,” Costa said quietly. “Knowing the events that led to your own child’s death came from you.”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Martelli croaked. “The pair of you. And don’t come back.”

  Costa thought of arguing. But there was no point. The old man felt protected. As long as he could stay inside the big empty apartment in the Lateran he could continue to fool himself into believing the world would never intrude upon his private hell. None of this could last, and he knew that as well as they did. It was just one of the reasons why he was steeped in such terror.

  They didn’t say anything as they left. The two men stumbled outside into the daylight. The morning was growing
painfully bright under the strong sun. It hurt the eyes. It made the city harsh and two-dimensional.

  “We need to work on this ”good cop, bad cop“ routine,” Peroni suggested as they walked to the car. “I got confused about my role in there.”

  “Really? What role did you want?”

  “Good cop,” Peroni insisted. “Maybe not with assholes like him. But temperamentally I’m much better at it. Whereas you… I think you could out-hardball Falcone if you wanted. Doesn’t that worry you a little, Nic?”

  “Not often these days.”

  Peroni shot him a puzzled glance. “I wish you wouldn’t do this to me. Make me think like a detective. It hurts. It’s not what I’m built for.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  He nodded back at the apartment block. “Martelli was on the take. That we know. So Barbara must have got into it too. Or maybe her job was some kind of reward for something Martelli had done. She just inherited the crooked mantle.”

  Peroni stared at his partner, half offended. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You’re imagining things,” Costa said with a smile. “This is good. Maybe you could make detective.”

  The older man laughed and pointed to the car. “Hey, what I make next is inspector. And you get to drive for me. This is just a temporary hiatus, a blip in the natural order. Some things never change.”

  But they do, Costa thought. The world was different already. Cops were killing people in their spare time, and getting killed in return. Something was loose, and random too, but that didn’t make it any less powerful.

  Costa got behind the wheel, waited for Peroni to strap himself in, then set off into the traffic struggling round the big, busy square, thinking about Miranda Julius and her missing daughter, trying to work out if there was a way in which they might be unwitting parts of the shadowy, broader picture which had taken Barbara Martelli down to Ostia on a murderous mission less than twenty-four hours before.

  “At least we’ve found out something,” he said.

  “We have?”

  “Whoever it was on the motorbike that picked up Suzi Julius yesterday, it wasn’t Barbara Martelli. She was on duty. I’ll check her movements but there’s no way that could have been her in the Campo. She couldn’t have changed uniform, changed bike, without someone noticing.”

  Peroni nodded. “That’s right. Jesus, I should have seen that myself.”

  “You’re doing fine, Gianni. You just have to keep looking for the connections. Imagining what they might be.”

  “I don’t want to imagine,” Peroni objected, scowling. “I wanna ask and get told. OK? And don’t say I ain’t a partner.” He started delving into Costa’s jacket pocket as the Fiat sped down the hill towards the Colosseum.

  “This is over-familiar,” Costa declared.

  Peroni took out the envelope of holiday snaps Miranda Julius had given them and waved them in Costa’s face. “I can look, can’t I? There’s nothing private going on between you two? Not yet anyways?”

  “Hah, hah.”

  Peroni snorted. “That’s good. Get all the impertinence out of your system now, Nic. You won’t be able to come out with all that stuff when I’m your boss. Firm but fair is my rule. I don’t take any crap though and—”

  He went quiet. Costa drew to a halt at the red light, tucked in behind a tram, watching in despair the way the tourists ignored every traffic signal on the road, risking their lives dodging between the cars.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Peroni had four photos fanned out in front of him. Just crowd scenes outside the Trevi Fountain.

  “Did you see our late professor friend out at Ostia?”

  “No. I was busy looking around the place.”

  “In that case you should have watched the TV this morning. They showed a mug shot of him. We’ve got the same guy. Here.” He pointed at a bland, middle-aged man in the crowd, staring back at the camera, interested.

  “And here.” It was another shot at the fountain, probably just a minute or so later. The crowd had changed, but Randolph Kirk was still there, still staring intently.

  “And here. And here.”

  “Four shots,” Costa said, and didn’t know whether to feel pleased or horrified.

  “So was the creep stalking her?” Peroni wondered. “Was he a distant admirer or something, and never took it any further? Or is this just coincidence?”

  Costa glanced in the mirror, hit the pedal and pulled out into the oncoming stream of traffic, generating a furious howl of horns.

  “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m right out of coincidences.”

  “IT DOESN’T RHYME with ”vagina.“ Try again. I have a rule about this. Kindly indulge me.”

  Teresa Lupo was struggling for words. She’d expected some boring university administrator, not this slender, middle-aged Scotswoman dressed in an elegant, black velvet dress, a string of pearls around her pale, flawless neck, and sitting bolt upright behind a gleaming teak desk. A large, imposing brass nameplate stood between them bearing the name Professor Regina Morrison, Director of Administration, followed by a string of academic letters. Teresa wasn’t sure she knew how to cope. What was more, she was starting to feel sick. Her head hurt. Her throat was going dry, her eyes itchy.

  “Excuse me?”

  The woman adjusted a photograph of a small terrier on the desk so that the dog stared directly into Teresa Lupo’s eyes with a fierce, unbending gaze. “Re-jeen-a Morrison. I’m not responsible for my own name. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I ought to change it to something more usual. But then I think: why? Why bend to an ignorant world? Why not make it bend instead?”

  “Re-jeen-a.”

  “There,” the woman beamed. She had a very neat, mannish haircut, her too-black locks clipped close to her scalp. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now tell me. You’re a police officer?”

  “Teresa Lupo. I’m from the police department.”

  Regina Morrison leaned forward and put her hands together in the kind of gesture she must have used with recalcitrant students all the time. “So you’re not a police officer?”

  There was, she thought, no point in trying to fox this woman. “Not exactly. I’m a pathologist. This is Italy, Professor Morrison. Things get complicated.”

  “In the six months I’ve worked here I must say I’ve noticed. Still, I imagine I should be grateful anyone’s turned up at all. If this were Edinburgh I’d have no end of people trampling through my office asking all manner of stupid questions with half a dozen TV stations stumbling in their wake. It’s almost a day now since Randolph was killed. And all I have is you. Should I be grateful? Or offended?”

  “Ask me that when the real cops turn up,” Teresa observed wryly. “My money’s on grateful.”

  The slender shoulders moved just a little. That seemed to amuse her. “So why are you here and not them?”

  “Because—” she shrugged. “The woman who killed your man was a cop and that changes things somewhat. The focus shifts, to her, not him. For now anyway. I got a look at the report this morning. It said Kirk was something of a loner. He lived by himself. No relatives in Italy. Not many friends. Cops are just like…” she tried to think of a good analogy, “… university administrators. They put their resources in the places where they think they’ll get the best return. The woman who killed Professor Kirk is someone they all knew. I guess they think they’ll get further, faster, by checking her first before driving round all day trying to track down any barflies Kirk drank with in his spare time.”

  “Randolph Kirk drank alone, poor man,” Regina Morrison said with some firmness.

  Then she opened a drawer and took out a half bottle of Glenmorangie malt and two small glasses.

  “Cheers,” she said, pouring a couple of shots, picking one up and staring directly across the shining desk at her visitor.

  “Sorry,” Teresa said. “I’m on duty. I didn’t mean anything by that. It was a f
igure of speech. If he was a friend of yours—”

  “No,” the woman answered, with equal conviction, and downed the whisky in one go. “He wasn’t that either. Not at all. I’m just a mite put out to discover that he, and by implication the rest of us in the academic community… we’re all somehow less interesting than this murderous colleague of yours.”

  Teresa took Kirk’s book out of her bag and waved it in the air. “Not to me you’re not. I was hoping he could clear up a few things that were bothering me. While I couldn’t claim to have made much personal contact with him during our brief meeting yesterday, I have read his book. And that I find very interesting indeed. That, Professor Morrison, is why I’m here.”

  “It was you?” she asked, intrigued. “The woman who was with him when this happened?”

  “Not with him. Locked in his office. He saved my life, I think. Not that he meant to.”

  “Don’t undersell yourself,” Regina Morrison said with some admiration.

  Unconsciously, Teresa stroked the plaster sticking to her scalp. “I’ll try to remember that.”

  “But I don’t understand why you, of all people, are here. I’d have thought you had plenty of real work to occupy you.”

  Regina Morrison had a way of coming to the point with a remarkable directness. It hit home too. When she thought about Monkboy being left to his own devices, Teresa Lupo felt far from comfortable.

  “I need to tie up some loose ends. You’ve read Kirk’s book?”

  “Oh yes,” she answered. “I’m an administrator now but I’m a classicist at heart. One day I’m going back to teaching. Sooner rather than later if I lose another member of staff this suddenly. I got parachuted in here from Edinburgh last autumn so don’t expect me to provide too many searing insights into Randolph Kirk’s persona. But I read his book and admired it greatly. When I took the job I hoped he had another one on the cards and perhaps I’d get an early look-in. That was one reason I came.” She thought carefully about what to say next. “Little did I know.”

  “Know what?” Teresa asked impatiently.

  “To be honest with you I thought I’d be telling all this to a real police officer.”