The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  There was, she knew, only one man to talk to. Professor Randolph Kirk of the University of Rome ought to hold the answers. His book refused to leave her imagination. It wasn’t just that it was the single academic work on the subject she could find. It was also part academic, part speculation. Kirk almost sounded as if he knew every last answer to every last question and didn’t want to let on. Maybe there was a sequel in there somewhere. Maybe she’d offer to proofread the manuscript when she got to the dig where, as she’d ascertained in a couple of phone calls, Randolph Kirk was working this very day.

  She turned off the motorway and pulled into a side lane to check the map. This really wasn’t very far from where the girl’s body was found—two, maybe three kilometres. A random thought surfaced. She pushed it away. Five minutes later she found the place. It was on the edge of the established archaeological site of Ostia Antica, not far from the station on the slow line back to Rome. There was a wire fence around the property and modern walls to protect the dig. She kept her finger pressed on the bell at the gate, wondering if it was making a noise anywhere. Peering through the fence, the only accommodation she could see appeared to be a couple of portable office buildings parked at the back.

  After a while a lone figure came out. He was a balding man in his fifties with a scraggy grey and black beard, thick glasses, and absent-minded eyes. Randolph Kirk was about her height and running to seed a little. His cheeks were florid behind the beard. His nose looked like a rosy-red pincushion. Booze maybe. He walked with a funny, rolling gait, like someone who had hip problems. Instead of the safari suit she’d expected he wore very baggy, very cheap jeans and a faded-green windcheater. She couldn’t help but be disappointed. She had been imagining an Indiana Jones kind of figure, unkempt but romantic. Maybe digging up old houses didn’t attract that type.

  Then he sneezed, an astonishing sneeze, a two-lungs-ful sneeze, with a big hooting follow-through loud enough to wake the dead and decidedly liquid too. Automatically she closed her eyes, aware that the air around her was, for a good few seconds, misty with fluid. When she opened them Randolph Kirk was digging into that big, red bulbous nose as hard as he could with the scruffiest hankie she’d ever seen, one covered in dark curlicues that looked like alien hieroglyphics.

  “Professor Kirk?” she asked, smiling and wishing she could stop the little refrain “Booger Bill, Booger Bill” running round her head like a schoolyard chant.

  “Yes?” He looked around. He was on his own, she guessed. Was a lone woman that frightening?

  “Teresa Lupo. I called. About the book.”

  She’d laid the praise on thick over the phone. People who wrote books always liked that.

  “Oh, excuse me,” he gasped, attacking the padlock with some keys. “I’m being so rude. Come in, please. You’re most welcome.”

  He spoke with that clipped, precise accent the educated English always used in Italy. The kind you got from Cambridge and Oxford academics who thought a touch of local slang and vernacular was beneath them.

  He broke off for one more cataclysmic sneeze. “Blasted cold. Hate these things.”

  She circumnavigated him at a suitable distance. They walked past the excavated remains of an old villa, covered in scaffolding and tarpaulins, and on towards the bigger of the two portable blocks. There, Kirk led her to his office, which was a mess. Papers everywhere. Bits of rock. Photographs of paintings. And one small window that hardly let in any light. He slumped into an old leather chair that looked as if it had come out of the Ark. She perched on a flimsy cane stool opposite that was, she guessed, meant for students. He offered her a warm can of Coke. She declined.

  “You liked the book?”

  “I loved it, Professor. It opened my eyes. You know, I always thought that period of history was so interesting. You just lit up so many new corners for me.”

  “My,” he sighed then popped a couple of pills in his mouth and washed them down with the Coke. “Too kind. And you know I never did make any money out of it at all. Damned publisher paid me a pittance for the manuscript, printed a few copies then hid them in a garage on Romney Marsh somewhere. It’s a miracle you found it.”

  “Miracles happen.”

  “They do,” he said smiling, toasting her with a can.

  She looked outside. The place was deserted.

  “Not digging today?”

  “The rest of the team are on a field trip in Germany for a week. I just came in to do some paperwork.” He waved a hand at the pile of documents on his desk.

  “Are you sure you should be at work? What with the flu and all?”

  “It’s needed,” he said then added, with no small measure of pomposity, “I am a head of department, you know.”

  “Of course,” she said ruefully, unable to take her eyes off the hankie which was burrowing away again.

  “Would you like to see it?”

  “What?”

  “Our Villa of Mysteries? What else? Normally we don’t let people in without an appointment. And then we’re pretty choosy. You wouldn’t believe the amount of theft that goes on around here. Only a couple of weeks ago we had two Americans hunting around outside the gates with a metal detector, would you believe? Had to send a couple of lads to chase them off.”

  “Quite. Later, perhaps.”

  He seemed disappointed by her reaction. She should have looked more enthusiastic. “It’s not as famous as the one at Pompeii, of course, but that doesn’t make it less interesting.”

  “Is it as big?”

  “Oh yes. Bigger probably, once we finish digging.”

  “As big as they get? Temples like this?”

  He looked briefly uncomfortable, as if this was a question he hadn’t expected. “Temple’s not the right word. These places were more a private religious establishment. Temples tend to be more public.”

  “Of course.” She thought about the dirt beneath the dead girl’s nails. It couldn’t have come from Ostia. It was Roman, no doubt about it. “I just wondered . . . if you find something so fascinating in the suburbs. What would a place like this be like in Rome?”

  He sniffed. “Vast. Astonishing. It’s out there somewhere, I imagine. Waiting to be found. As I said in the book, it is the Palace of Mysteries. The wellhead of the cult. The place every acolyte wished to visit, perhaps, before they died. Not that anyone will give me the money to look for it, of course.” He stared sourly at the papers in front of him. “Even if I had the time.”

  He was a curious mix of arrogance and self-pity. He liked to tantalize, too. Perhaps that was all his book amounted to, a kind of historical tease. “I would love to see around, Professor,” she said. “The thing is, I have some important questions I need to ask you first.”

  He suddenly looked worried, off-guard. “You do?”

  She folded her arms, placed her elbows on the desk and peered frankly into his beady eyes. Randolph Kirk didn’t look well and it wasn’t just the cold. He seemed tired, as if he hadn’t been sleeping much lately. Nervous too. “I’ve got to be honest with you. When I said I was a fellow academic who needed a little advice I wasn’t being entirely frank.”

  “You weren’t?” he said quietly.

  She pulled out her ID card. “Professor, strictly speaking this is not official business. Actually no one back at the Questura even knows I’m here so there’s no need to get worried or think this is a police thing in any way. I won’t waste your time with the reasons.”

  You wouldn’t even believe them, she thought. You wouldn’t credit how stupid cops can be when it comes to using academic, intellectual resources.

  “The point is this. I’m a pathologist attached to the state police. I’ve got a corpse on my slab right now that, for the life of me, looks as if it came from one of the selfsame rituals you described so accurately in your book. The corpse those same Americans who came here found. The papers wrote all about it.”

  “They did?” he bleated. Randolph Kirk didn’t look as if he read papers much or wa
tched TV.

  “She’s got a tattoo on the shoulder. A mask. Screaming. She’s clutching a thyrsus. Fennel with a pine cone on the end. There’s grain in one of her pockets. Just the kind of thing you wrote about. The body was found not far from here. In peat, which preserved it and threw out conventional dating techniques, which confused me . . . us for a while.”

  He shuffled in the old leather seat, making it swivel and squeak and squeal. “Oh.”

  She was starting to find him annoying. “All that is just as you described in the book. She was sixteen, too. The right age. What’s different is this. Her throat was cut. From behind. One move, sharp knife.”

  Teresa Lupo made the gesture, arcing her arm as if she were wielding the blade. Kirk’s florid cheeks went a shade paler and the hankie performed a double dance across his face.

  “And it can’t be what I thought. She’s not a peat body from a couple of thousand years old, maybe sacrificed here and then buried in the bog. We know who she is. Or at least we think we do. And she died just sixteen years ago. They even put a coin in her mouth. A tip for the ferryman. Can you beat that?”

  “No,” he whispered. “I can’t.”

  “I just need to understand more about what motivated these people. What exactly did they hope to gain? Knowledge?”

  He shook his head. “Not knowledge.”

  “What then? Some kind of personal advantage? Or was it just like joining a club or something?”

  He thought about those ideas. “A club,” he said. “That’s an interesting idea.”

  Teresa was beginning to get exasperated. “I was hoping, because you knew so much about all these rituals, you could maybe help me. You see, there’s another girl. She went missing today and somehow . . .” she struggled for the right words to describe this odd situation, “. . . it all looks similar. It all looks as if something could happen the day after tomorrow, 17 March.”

  “17 March?” He had another habit, too, when he wasn’t poking at his adenoids. He kept moving his glasses up and down his red, pockmarked nose with the forefinger of his right hand. Thinking, she guessed.

  “You’re a police officer?”

  “No,” she corrected him. “I’m a pathologist working with the police.”

  “You didn’t tell them you were coming here. Why?”

  “Because—” It was an odd question. The alarm bell that was beginning to sound somewhere at the back of her head was just plain stupid. It had to be. “Can you help me, Professor?”

  The glasses were going up and down his nose. He didn’t look the physical type. He didn’t look anything much at all.

  “You must excuse me,” Professor Randolph Kirk said, suddenly getting out of his chair. “I have a digestive problem. I really have to go.”

  He paused at the door and looked back at her. “One moment, please. I may be a little while.”

  Thirty minutes later, feeling more and more stupid, she got up and tried the handle. Randolph Kirk had locked it. She walked quickly to the window and took a good look at the frame. The ancient clasp for the latch had rusted long ago. It must have been years since anyone opened the thing.

  “Shit,” she groaned. “Shit, shit, shit and double shit.”

  There was just the trace of a signal on her mobile phone. She wondered who to call, what to say. Falcone was going to go ballistic. As if that were the biggest of her worries.

  “Don’t sweat, girl. He’s an academic. He’s got a nose like a pineapple and flu bugs doing the Macarena in his veins. Unless he comes through that door wielding a pickaxe I’ve got no problem at all.”

  All the same she looked around the room for something to use as a weapon. There was a small, short hammer on a filing cabinet, nothing more.

  “Nic,” she murmured, starting to dial. “Come save me, Nic. Oh crap—”

  The number rang once and then went dead. There was a sound outside. It was a motorbike. A powerful one, judging by the low rumble of the engine.

  She stopped dialling and listened hard. This could be important.

  After a couple of seconds, Teresa Lupo couldn’t hear a thing. Some unseen force, the pumping of her own blood in her ears maybe, was drowning out the sounds beyond the door and she felt she ought to be grateful. She was familiar with death, not with dying. Just then she was an outsider, overhearing some important dumb show happening in the shadows. Even when she was a real medical doctor and people died in hospital it was, somehow, appropriate. Nothing ever really came out of the blue, violently, as it did for so many of the customers on her shining silver table. But she knew nothing of what it was like to witness such an act.

  And here it was, happening unseen just a few metres away, beyond the flimsy door of Professor Randolph Kirk’s office. Over the beating of her heart, she could hear the drama being enacted, like a scene from a radio play leaking out from a neighbouring window. The voices, two, both high, one rising, one falling in grim fear.

  Then the scream and the report of a gun, so loud it blocked out everything.

  Her breathing stopped for a moment. Something had happened then. A void had opened in her head, a blank page of expectation, and into it walked some dark, shrouded certainty that a human being, Professor Randolph Kirk to be precise, had, at that instant, ceased to be. A living person was gone from the earth and the scariest thing of all was that Teresa Lupo, in her imagination, felt as if something, his spirit perhaps, his departing shade, had stepped through her own body leaving a single word imprinted in her mind: run.

  She couldn’t think straight. She could hardly catch her breath. There were footsteps and she found herself frozen, looking at the door, hearing someone rattle a set of unfamiliar keys at the lock, searching for the right one.

  “Turn that damned thing off,” Falcone barked. “I want to think.”

  They were in Falcone’s office watching the clips of CCTV from the Campo when Costa’s phone rang. It sounded once before he hit the power button. The mood wasn’t good. Rachele D’Amato was nursing a tender ego and uninterested in pursuing any link with Suzi Julius. Falcone had scowled at a skimpy preliminary report on the Jamieson girl from Teresa Lupo. The video seemed predictable at first but it bothered Costa all the same.

  The bike rider wore a shiny helmet with an opaque visor and a full-length black leather suit, just like a street punk out to do some bag-snatching. The girl had “tourist” written all over her. Here she was, dashing through the dwindling crowd in the Campo, dressed in tee-shirt and black jeans, a small canvas bag over her shoulder, right in front of the two uniformed carabinieri men who stood by their car yawning, uninterested. Costa couldn’t believe their lack of attention. Suzi seemed to be running from something, or so it seemed to him. It should have rung an alarm bell somewhere.

  The rider’s wrist flicked on the throttle. There was something odd going on with the girl. He couldn’t work out whether she was laughing or crying. Then another figure came into view, sprinting: Miranda Julius fighting her way through the tangle of shoppers, yelling at her departing daughter’s back.

  Costa wondered whether he was reading this all the wrong way. Sometimes cops took too much upon themselves. They walked into domestic situations that were best left alone. They interpreted events mistakenly and wound up with egg on their faces. Suzi reached the big, powerful bike, kissed the side of the helmet quickly, then hopped on the back, wrapping her arms around the rider’s waist. The machine bucked once as it went into gear. Then the two of them were off, bobbing and weaving through the crowds.

  As the bike negotiated the corner of the square the girl turned round, one hand still clinging to the rider’s waist, looking for someone. Miranda halted then looked back at the carabinieri. She was panting, out of breath. Suzi brought her fingers to her lips and blew a farewell kiss across the Campo before the bike disappeared, out into the Corso.

  Just a teenager running away with her boyfriend? Maybe, Costa thought. This was meant to look like some simple, domestic drama, almost enacted delibera
tely for public consumption. Maybe for the girl it was. But there was something wrong here. The bike didn’t have a number plate. Even street hoods didn’t favour black like that, with opaque visors. Nor did they like such big, powerful bikes. Little scooters were cheaper, more manoeuvrable. It was all too much of a giveaway.

  “I don’t like it,” he said when the clip came to an end. “Why does the bike have no plate?”

  Rachele D’Amato wriggled on her seat. “Can we focus on the task at hand, please? I’m not here to chase runaway teenagers.”

  “It could be linked,” Falcone said. “Costa’s right. There’s something strange going on there.”

  He got up and threw open the door of the office. The staff room was horribly depleted, no more than ten men at the desks, close to half the normal manning level thanks to the flu. Falcone looked at the officer nearest to the door.

  “Bianchi. Who’s hottest on this CCTV stuff around here?”

  The man thought about this for a moment. “You mean of the people who’re in? Me. Ricci’s the real expert but he’s home sneezing his eyeballs out. I can call him, though. Get some tips. What do you want?”

  “Get some footage in from the cameras in the Corso. Find out where that bike went afterwards.”

  Bianchi hesitated. “Er, that’s some job, sir. You get no more than a hundred metres or so coverage from each camera. I’ve been through this before. All you can manage is about a kilometre a day, no more. If he’s gone any distance we’re talking a week, if we’re lucky.”

  Falcone scowled and scanned the office again. “Give it a day. Maybe he didn’t go far.”

  “Sure,” Bianchi said.

  “And get a couple of pictures out to the media. Keep it low key enough not to start a panic. Just say she’s a missing girl and we’re looking for information. Say there’s no reason for concern just now but we’d like to hear from her, or someone who’s seen her, all the same.”