by David Hewson
Falcone pulled his chair nearer the table and looked Torchia in the eye.
“A child is missing, Ludo,” he said. “Somewhere in a place that’s extremely treacherous. You were seen leaving it. You ran away—”
“Nobody likes the police,” Torchia said, hastily. “Why should I help you?”
“Because it can help Alessio?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“You ran away,” Falcone repeated. “All of you. There was a reason for that. We need to know what that reason was. If something bad has happened to Alessio, you can see, surely, that you will get the blame. Unless you tell us—”
“I didn’t see him.”
He was lying. As if this were all some game. Ludo Torchia was toying with them, it seemed to Falcone, merely because he felt like it.
“Who else was there?” Messina asked. “Give me the names.”
“I don’t betray my comrades,” he said, then went back to staring at his fingernails.
Messina looked to be at the end of his tether. Torchia appeared immovable. What emotion the student possessed was suppressed tightly inside his own skinny frame.
None of the standard procedures had been followed either, all thanks to Messina’s direct instructions: Put Torchia in a room and let him stew. The formalities, the words that were supposed to be read… all the prerequisites of interviewing a suspect. A good lawyer could have a field day with the holes they’d already left open. Messina had allowed himself to become obsessed with the boy, not with any possible charges that might follow. This was, in Falcone’s eyes, not only foolish, but dangerous. The Questura had lost two high-profile cases of late, cases where guilty parties had walked free simply through breaches of procedure. It could so easily occur again.
One practical job had never taken place either. A physical search.
“Turn out your pockets,” Falcone said.
A glimmer of fear flashed in his eyes. Ludo Torchia had remembered something.
“Turn out your pockets, Ludo,” Falcone repeated. “I want to see everything. Put it slowly in front of you, item by item. Don’t leave out anything.”
Torchia swore. Then he reached into his trousers and withdrew a few crumbled tissues, some lire. A set of keys. A lighter and some cigarettes.
The backs of his hands were covered in scratches. Nail marks, Falcone thought, and reflected, miserably, that, had proper procedures been followed, this would already have been noted, would already be the subject of forensic investigation.
“You’re hurt,” he observed.
Torchia looked at his hands and shrugged. “The girlfriend got a little fresh last night. You know what they’re like.”
“I didn’t think you had a girlfriend.”
Torchia laughed.
“The jacket, too,” Falcone ordered.
“Nothing in there.”
Messina was round the table and on him, big fists grabbing at the cheap cloth. Torchia squawked, a little scared, but defiant still.
“I said…” the student screeched, trying to fight off Messina’s blows.
The commissario pulled something from Ludo’s right-hand jacket pocket and tossed it on the table. Falcone stared at the object. It was a cheap pair of toy spectacles, the kind you saw at fun fairs. The lenses were semi-opaque, divided into glittering sections.
“Alessio had a pair like that when he went missing,” Falcone said quietly. “His father told us. They were a birthday present. He turned seven yesterday.”
No one spoke. Then Torchia reached forward, picked up the spectacles, put them on, pushing them back onto the bridge of his nose when they fell forward.
“Found them somewhere. That’s all. Christ. Now I can see a million of you ugly fuckers. What kind of a crappy toy is that to give a kid for his birthday?”
He was taking them off when Messina threw the first punch. It caught Torchia on the back of the neck, sent his face flying down hard into the metal table. Blood spattered from his nose.
Messina had got in five or six more blows by the time Falcone reached them. Ludo Torchia was on the floor, cowering, arms around his face. Falcone couldn’t help but notice he was laughing.
“Sir,” Falcone said quietly, to no avail. “Sir.”
Messina dashed in a last kick, then allowed himself to be pushed back towards the cold, damp brick wall of the cell.
“This is pointless,” Falcone insisted. “If Alessio’s alive, he won’t tell. If the boy’s dead and you beat it out of him, we won’t be able to take him to court. This…” — he said the words slowly — “…won’t… work.”
Torchia was still laughing. He wiped the blood away from his mouth. It looked as if a couple of teeth had been shattered by Messina’s boot.
“Kick away, you fat old bastard,” Torchia hissed. “I wouldn’t tell you shits a thing. Ever.”
Messina backed off. There was a wild look in his eyes Falcone didn’t recognise. He was lost for a way forward. And there was only one, Falcone knew that. Patient, persistent police work. Slow, relentless questioning. None of which felt good in the light of one certainty which was, he felt, now spreading inside the Questura and out: Alessio Bramante was already dead somewhere. It was just a question of recovering the body.
“Give him to the father,” Messina ordered.
Torchia’s eyes sparked with a mix of fear and interest. “What?”
“Talk to me or talk to Giorgio Bramante!” Messina bellowed.
Torchia wiped the blood from his face and mumbled, “I’ve got nothing to say to any of you. I want a lawyer. You can’t go beating people up like this. I want a lawyer. Now.”
Messina threw open the cell door. Bramante already stood there, arms folded, waiting, still as a statue, powerful arms folded over his chest.
“Ludo,” he said simply.
“No,” Falcone declared immediately. “This is not right. This is the Questura—”
“We’re getting nowhere,” Messina snapped, taking Falcone by the arm.
Falcone couldn’t believe his ears. “Sir… if anyone should hear of this—”
“I don’t care!” the commissario yelled, pushing him aside, ignoring his protests. “Not about this stinking moron. I just want that boy. You’ve an hour, Giorgio. Undisturbed. You hear me, Falcone?”
Bramante stepped round them without a word, walked into the cell, and slammed the iron door behind him.
The corridor outside had lost a fluorescent tube some nights before. It left the place in semidarkness. Falcone moved into the light. He wanted Messina to see his face.
“I disassociate myself from this decision completely,” he said quietly. “If I’m asked what happened, I’ll tell them.”
“You do that, Leo,” Messina replied. “I hope it helps you sleep at night. But if you set foot in that room before the hour’s up, I’ll have your scrawny backside across the coals first. You’ll never make inspector. I promise. You’ll never show your smug face in this Questura again.”
Then he stalked off. Giorgio Bramante and Ludo Torchia were alone together in the small cell, in the dark bowels of the Questura, the last room in a basement corridor, far from sight.
Falcone went into the empty interview room, took out one of the small metal chairs, set it by the door of the cell, and waited.
It took scarcely minutes for the first sounds to eke their way under the iron door. Not long after, the screaming began.
* * *
The racket of the traffic almost disappeared once they’d descended the steps to the Tiber. Costa had rarely been on the broad riverside pathway during the day. At night, this was a place for the homeless and the crooked, the city’s lost and forlorn, men and a few women all hoping to stay hidden. He hardly recognised the place now. The water’s edge was green and luxuriant, with a straggle of cow parsley, wild fig, and laurel bushes tumbling down towards the grey sweep of the river. Two lean black cormorants skimmed the surface, gleaming dark darts, as they sped towards Tiber Island.
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br /> Then something rat shaped but much larger scuttled from a narrow, leaking spring and crossed their path, racing to safety in the undergrowth to their left.
“What the hell was that?” Peroni almost leapt out of his skin.
“Coypu,” Judith Turnhouse told them. “They were brought in for their fur, then went native. They give the rats something to fight.”
“You must come here a lot,” the big man said, looking uncomfortable at the thought that giant, foreign rodents were thriving in the centre of his adopted city.
“We work underground,” she said caustically. “I thought you understood that.”
The outlet was so large the pathway had been extended to form a bridge over the surging waters that roared out of the ancient stone mouth. The original exit was probably three metres high, almost a perfect semicircle, three layers of old stones now set in grey mud and water. It stood inside a huge modern enclosure that must have run almost to the road above and seemed to incorporate other, more modern drain outlets, funnelling them into the same rough, thrashing gush of grubby water as it fed into the river, just above the weir.
Straggly trees fought feebly through the mud on either side of the channel. Shredded plastic trash and paper hung from their bare branches like lost Tibetan prayers, waving feebly in the renewing drizzle. The same kind of litter lay trapped in the broken and ragged wire storm guard that had once protected the lower half of the structure, and was now broken in multiple places.
Something lurked in the darkness at the back of this hidden cavern, dug deep into the underside of the road above. Costa squinted into the gloom, took out his pocket torch, and tried to see what it was.
“I really think I need that suit—” he was starting to say, when there was a splash beneath them. Judith Turnhouse was in the grubby water, furious, screeching at the makeshift building just visible in the man-made cavern ahead.
She stormed over to the old drain and clambered up onto the modern structure above it.
Peroni stared mournfully after her.
“It’s OK, Nic,” he muttered. “I’ll do it. Your clothes are so much nicer than mine.”
“You’re too kind,” Costa said, and leapt in anyway. He got there just a second or two behind the woman, while Peroni was still thrashing through the brown mud.
It was a home of kinds. Some old timber and scaffolding thrown together to make a shelter held together by industrial polythene and scraps of tarpaulin. There was a battered picnic table inside and a little folding stool. Plus the remains of some food. Recent. A few scraps of bread and meat that, to Costa’s eye, had probably been gnawed at by a rodent after some human had discarded them.
Judith Turnhouse was going a little crazy. This was, Costa supposed, her territory in a way. The stone entrance almost looked as if it belonged in a museum, the city crest now barely visible.
“How dare they?” she screeched. “How dare they?”
“They’re homeless,” Costa replied, and suddenly remembered, with a sharp twinge of guilt, how long it had been since he’d followed his father’s dictum: one gift a day to the poor, without fail.
But the poor didn’t normally leave scraps of food lying around for the rats to finish.
He walked into the shelter. It didn’t smell any worse than the drain outside. There was no effluent around here, only dank, stagnant water and the kind of refuse that stayed around forever, modern plastic and metal.
Costa kicked over the stool and ran a foot through the rubbish that lay on the floor. Newspapers, and a few sheets from an office printer. He picked them up. The crest of the archaeological department stood on the top. Beneath was a computerised map of what appeared to be a drain system somewhere in the vicinity of the Villa Borghese, across the city.
Peroni caught up with him, a little out of breath. The big cop stared at the paper, then the woman. She was poking her way into one of the side drains. It didn’t look modern at all, now Costa saw it close up.
“Signora Turnhouse!” Peroni yelled. “Do not go in there. Please.”
She didn’t take any notice.
“Damn,” Peroni muttered. “He could still be around, Nic.”
“Agreed,” Costa said, and scrambled across the slimy stone towards her, shouting to the woman to stand still.
That worked. She stopped. He reached her, hoped she understood there was a reason a gun now rested in his hand.
“This isn’t how I remember the place.” She sounded a little scared. “I can’t put my finger on it. This isn’t as old as the rest. Fifteenth, sixteenth century, maybe. We used to use it for study work. A group of us went in here with Giorgio the first year we were here. But it was different then somehow. That’s impossible.”
Costa worked his way in front of her. The entrance to the drain was under two metres high at this point. A meagre stream of thick, muddy water gripped his ankles in a bone-chilling embrace. He pointed his flashlight into the gloom and saw nothing. Not a man. Not a thing, until a large black animal shape scuttered through the grimy water into the darkness. The woman followed him, then, after a few steps, grabbed his jacket.
“There!”
Peroni yelled that he was calling in backup. Smart move, Costa guessed. If there was anyone around, it was a good idea to let them know they would soon have more to deal with than a pair of puzzled cops and one increasingly jumpy archaeologist.
“What do you see?” he asked Judith Turnhouse; then, before she could answer, found his eyes adapting, realised what was wrong.
Something obstructed the route ahead. It looked like the larva of some gigantic insect, bulging out from the rock wall of the culvert. Except it was red brick, not the dried husk of an insect’s egg. Modern red brick, weakened by something pushing from behind. The pressure of water, perhaps, since what they seemed to be looking at was, he now came to realise, the artificial cap of something that could only be a side drain running into this main channel, one that had, at some time within the last few years, been blocked, and subject to the growing pressure of whatever sporadic force of liquid built up behind it.
The mortar between the bricks was cracked and failing. A steady stream of dank water ran through the base, filtering through the rough cement before falling into the broader flow that swirled in a chilly embrace around their feet.
Costa shone his beam on the protruding brickwork. It looked weak. He stuck out his toe and pushed at the lowermost part. Soft cement crumbled as he watched. A single brick fell, then another, then the entire underside of the small, circular wall in front of him collapsed completely and fell into the grubby stream.
A mountain of trash that must have been building for decades followed: cans and rotting wood, paper, and an unidentifiable thick brown sludge.
Then a bottle with a bright red label. Followed by another object, something Costa dreaded to see. And a smell, organic, vile, fetid, that was at once both alien and all too familiar.
The woman began shrieking. The manic sound of her voice echoed around the artificial cave in which they stood, magnified by the brickwork enclosing them, drowning out the steady rush of the water at their feet.
Behind the gobbets of trash vomited into the sewer, something else dangled down over the brickwork, what lay behind it still hidden, thankfully, in the shadows.
It was the hand and upper arm of a human being. The fingers were now stiff bleached digits of bone. Tatters of pale flesh ran through taut, open tendons to the wrist, shredded in places by what looked like teeth marks.
It was a very small hand, Costa thought. Not that of a man.
* * *
Rosa Prabakaran had spent most of her life feeling prominent, feeling as if the eyes of those around her were always watching, asking: Why? There was no reason a woman of Indian extraction couldn’t join the state police. No reason she couldn’t do anything she liked. The colour of her skin was not her problem. It was theirs. All the same, Rosa didn’t like feeling as if she were something to be stared at. Falcone’s admonition �
�� I want her to see you — grated. It was unprofessional. It was unnecessary.
So, for the first time in her brief career, Rosa Prabakaran disobeyed orders. After catching up at home on the news of the overnight murder at the Questura, trying to absorb it, she took out some things she hadn’t worn in a long time. Bright, young clothes, from a time before the police, when she had felt free of responsibilities. A short pencil-thin skirt, a shiny leather jacket, red shoes. She put on makeup, raked out her business ponytail and let her long brown locks hang around her shoulders.
It was a touch sluttish, she decided, regarding herself in the mirror. But Beatrice Bramante would surely never recognise her now. She looked like one of the naturalised Indian girls, the kind who hung around the bars and clubs and shops near the Piazza di Spagna, picking up Italian boyfriends, living the modern life, all quick pleasures, and nothing to worry about afterwards. Her father would be out selling umbrellas like crazy in this rain, at twice the normal price, because that was how the street traders worked. Rosa was glad. He’d have worried more about her looks than the fact that she was walking out the door to try to crack some lead in a murder investigation, and in doing so prove some kind of point to people like Inspector Leo Falcone.
There was a handgun in the small patent leather handbag that hung over her right shoulder on a gold chain. Her father might have worried about that, too.
* * *
She took the Number 3 tram to Via Marmorata. Then she walked down to the street where Beatrice Bramante lived and parked herself in the café opposite, nibbling at a cornetto that was still hot from the oven.
After almost two hours and three coffees, she watched Beatrice leave her apartment block through the big iron gates at the front, nodding on her way out to the caretaker in his little cabin.
Rosa followed the woman to the market, where she bought some vegetables, bread, and a little cheese. She recalled Beatrice during the awkward interview with Falcone, trying to hide the scars on her wrists, grabbing for the booze bottle when the inspector pushed too hard. Beatrice hadn’t looked like a woman who coped well with today, let alone her tomorrows.