by Jon Tracy
‘Really?’ Valentina works her way around so she can see over Suzie’s shoulder. ‘That’s really good. What is it?’
Suzie moves her hands to reveal a large crayoned drawing. ‘Romans. Do you like Romans?’
‘Some of them.’ Valentina leans closer. The crayoning is good. She can easily identify Roman soldiers, a crowd, senators in togas and – she has to look twice – a woman with her hand in the mouth of a giant white disc.
The Bocca della Verita.
‘That’s blood!’ says Suzie, jabbing excitedly at a smear of red. ‘It’s from Cassandra.’
The background of the drawing is filled with strange shapes: a sun, maybe a moon, and some badly drawn stars, so bad they’re more triangular and lopsided than star-shaped.
‘Cassandra is having her hand cut off,’ explains Suzie, almost as though she were recalling a favourite fairy tale. ‘It’s because she won’t tell them about the secret.’
‘Oooh, it looks nasty.’ Valentina rubs her own wrist. ‘What secret is that?’
Suzie frowns. ‘I don’t know. It’s Cassandra’s secret and she never tells. No matter what.’
There are sounds outside the door. A trolley being wheeled into an adjacent room. A woman’s voice talking loudly.
Suzie looks scared. ‘You should go now.’ She glances nervously towards the door. ‘If you don’t go, Momma will find you – then you’ll be sorry.’
Valentina gives her a reassuring smile. ‘I’m a police-woman, Suzie; nothing bad is going to happen while I’m here. I promise you.’
Fear takes Suzie’s voice up another ten decibels. ‘Please go! I don’t want you in here. If you don’t go, Momma will take it out on me and she won’t let Daddy come.’
The trolley is on the move again. They can hear its wheels squeaking. The door to the room next to them is opening. Valentina is desperate to ask more about Cassandra – about the secret – but she can see it would be pointless.
The poor girl is petrified.
She’ll come back and do it when she’s had time to gather her thoughts and think the whole crazy thing through a little more.
She gives Suzie a smile and moves away to open the door. ‘Don’t worry, no one will hurt you. I’ll come back tomorrow and make sure you’re all right.’
Suzie doesn’t reply.
She’s already pulled the bed sheet above her head and curled herself into a tight ball.
25
There is whispering in the womb.
Hushed voices.
Confidential tones.
But I hear them.
I lie curled up, pretending to be asleep, but I hear all their secrets and their laughter.
Mother and the special one – the favoured one – are together. They are out of sight, hidden in the darkness, but their sentences fly like birds and nest in my ears.
It is easy for me to picture them there.
Easy but painful.
They sit side by side and Mother has her arm fondly around her. She strokes my sister’s hair and tells her how beautiful she is.
The most beautiful of all of us.
She tells her how clever she is.
By far the cleverest among us.
And She tells her how like Her she is.
And how She likes her the most.
The others want me to run away.
Escape.
They say they know how and can set me free.
They tell me they have done it before – in Phrygia, in Crete, in Anatolia, in Etruria, Hellas and Rome.
They can do it again.
But I know Mother will stop them. She will stop them and She will stop me.
And deep inside I feel that I don’t want to escape.
I want to belong.
I want to be the one to sit beneath Mother’s outstretched arm and be cherished and confided in.
I strain to listen.
I wait patiently for the word birds to nest again in my ears. They are coming now, their beaks heavy with secrets carried from centuries long ago.
They drop them gently and I pick through them.
Precious stories about the kings of Rome, the Seven Hills of the Eternal City, the Prophecies.
And more.
The Tenth Book.
The secrets of the Tenth Book.
These are the scraps I am left as the voices fade in the darkness of the womb.
Now there is only silence, darkness and one thing else.
The silent screaming of my mind.
PART TWO
26
Monday morning isn’t Louisa Verdetti’s favourite time of the week. Especially, if she’s already worked Saturday and Sunday.
To make matters worse, the first part of her least favourite day is being spent with the man who tops her list of least favourite people.
Hospital administrator Sylvio Valducci is mid-fifties. He has white hair and is one of those bosses who one minute manages from a distance of six miles and the next from six inches. He’s the kind that conveniently ignores you when you’re in the middle of a crisis but is all over you about the cost of paper clips when it’s annual budget time. He and Louisa only have one thing in common – a mutual loathing of each other.
Valducci doesn’t knock on her office door or even manage a good morning as he bursts in. ‘I’m told you have something of a cause celebre.’ He tosses a manila file on her desk and enjoys watching it slide. ‘I’d very much like to hear about it. In person. From you. I prefer it that way – it’s much better than getting it second-hand from the animals who gather around the water cooler.’
Louisa takes off her glasses. She slowly spins her desk chair and vows not to lose her temper. ‘I’m not sure I would call it a cause celebre, but the patient is certainly interesting.’ She opens the file he dropped and sees inside a copy of medical notes she’s made. ‘As it says in here: our admission is an Italian woman, identity so far unknown, mid to late twenties, well nourished.’
‘This I know.’ He pats his mouth to stifle a fake yawn and settles into a seat opposite her.
‘And as you are also apparently aware, she’s exhibiting as DID. Dissociative identity-’
‘I know what DID is,’ he snaps. ‘Or to be more specific, what it isn’t.’ He shows his teeth, in what he mistakenly believes is an enigmatic smile. ‘Better doctors than you have made fools of themselves with this little acronym.’ He melodramatically puts his hand to his forehead. ‘And my, isn’t it strange that patients with DID are so often involved in criminal activity? Crimes they conveniently blame on one of their many other personalities. Stranger still if you ask me that none of those other personalities turn up at the police station and confess, or rat on the offending alter, as you so ridiculously call them.’
Louisa tries to ignore his goading. ‘Our patient is presenting classic symptoms. She’s writing and drawing in different personalities. Speaking in multiple voices and tones, as though she were different people of different ages. Her mood swings are extreme – from timid to violent.’
He waves a hand dismissively. ‘Fakery! This is all rubbish and you know it. Have you run diagnostic tests for borderline personality disorder?’
‘Of course we’ve run tests – and we’re running more. You don’t need to tell me how to do my job. We’ve taken more blood and urine samples than an Olympic doping committee, and before you ask, no, there is no chance of amphetamine-induced psychoses, if that’s what you’re fishing for.’
He’s amused by her anger.
Pleased that he has roused it so fully.
‘There’s nothing wrong with fishing, Louisa. When you have but a small crack in the ice of the mind, fishing is the best thing you can do.’
She is bursting to tell him not to be so stupid and so pompous.
He stands and folds his arms autocratically. ‘And while we’re angling away, we should make sure we also run endocrine function tests to rule out hyperadrenalism, pernicious anaemia and thyroid disorders.’ He takes her si
lence as a sign of his intellectual victory. ‘Given the delusionary symptoms, don’t dismiss the possibility of schizophrenia. It’s tricky to diagnose-’
Louisa’s out of her chair before he can finish. ‘ Schizophrenia? She’s no more schizophrenic than you or I. With all respect, can I remind you that I am a qualified neuropsychiatrist? At least credit me with some expert judgement.’
Snapping point. He just loves it when he gets people here. ‘Not in this country.’ He wags a finger at her, ‘Your qualification is an American one, and as you know, we don’t follow the outdated bible of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders quite as slavishly as your American mentors do.’
Louisa shakes her head at him. Boss or no boss, he’s a sentence away from getting a slapped face. She worked damned hard to get qualified, and even in Rome, ten years at Johns Hopkins should stand for something.
The administrator picks his file up off her desk. ‘Blood tests, urine tests, tox tests: I want more doing – and all of them completed – before you even mention DID again. Do I make myself clear?’
If looks could kill, he’d be no more than a plasma stain up Louisa’s office wall. ‘Perfectly.’
‘These beds are expensive. If she’s fit, I want her out on the street and off my budget as quick as possible. Let the police work out what to do with her.’
Before Louisa can explode, her door bangs shut and he’s gone.
27
Valentina Morassi’s start to the day isn’t going much better than Louisa’s.
She planned to take this week off as holiday, but the incident in Cosmedin has scuppered any hopes of spending much time with Tom.
She forces herself to leave him naked in bed, sleeping off the wonderfully numbing effects of another night of excessive sex and the great bottle of Barolo they shared after getting home from a local restaurant.
Dozens of doubts and hundreds of hopes jangle like wind chimes in her mind as she drives from the apartment to the office.
Federico is already at his desk, and he looks even worse than she feels. Wife problems, he calls it, solved by half a bottle of brandy and a night on the couch. It’s not something Valentina wants to discuss.
Love is meant to bloom, not wither and die.
He gets his act together after several long slugs of tar-black espresso and a sneaky cigarette in a toilet cubicle. ‘I’m going to the labs to see what they’ve done with that bloodstained robe we got from the crazy woman. You want to come?’
Valentina certainly does.
It’s not long before Federico soon regrets asking her. All the way to the offices of the Raggruppamento Carabinieri per la Investigazioni Scientifiche, she pushes him for progress reports on every aspect of the inquiry.
‘Please stop busting my balls,’ he pleads as they’re ushered through reception and climb some stairs. ‘It all takes time. You need to learn that in Rome things move at a certain pace.’
‘Snail’s pace – and it’s not fast enough,’ says Valentina. ‘I want to bury this case quickly. I’ve got a feeling that if it hangs around, it’s going to cause us all kinds of problems.’
Federico doesn’t fight her.
He leads the way down corridors with walls as brown as tobacco. They finally reach a door to a small office filled by a very fat middle-aged man in a white coat. He’s sitting on a swivel chair that’s way too small for him. Valentina notices that he has a telephone tucked between his left shoulder and ear and a dried waterfall of croissant crumbs down the front of the black T-shirt he’s ill-advisedly wearing beneath his lab coat.
Federico does the introductions with a wave of his hand. ‘Professore Enrico Ferrari, this is my boss, Capitano Valentina Morassi.’
‘ Buongiorno. I am charmed to meet you, Capitano.’ He looks at his friend. ‘And I must confess, I am somewhat surprised. I have never known Federico to venture out this early in the day.’
Valentina shakes his hand and resists obvious remarks about him not looking like any Ferrari she’s ever seen. ‘I believe you have the clothing and weapon recovered from the case in Cosmedin?’
‘I have.’ He struggles off his chair and brushes some of the crumbs from his chest. ‘The sword is actually in this locked cabinet over here. We are going to take some more photographs of it this morning. An amazing object.’
He opens the top drawer of a three-box cabinet and lifts out a heavy chunk of metal wrapped in brown paper. ‘It’s been fingerprinted already and there are several latents on it, but we don’t have any direct matches as yet.’ He places it on his desk and moves papers, a stapler and laptop to one side so he can unwrap it. ‘It’s very old.’
‘Bravo!’ mocks Federico. ‘All your training and very old is the best you can come up with?’
‘Okay. Then it’s very, very old.’ Ferrari smiles at his friend. ‘I know you want facts, but until we’ve X-rayed and carbon-tested it, I’m not even going to guess at a date. What I will say is this is not a replica. It is an ancient Roman weapon forged several centuries ago.’
Valentina struggles to picture Suzanna with it. A frail Italian woman in the twenty-first century wielding a heavy Roman sword in a church is an insane image. Almost as crazy as the thought of how it could have come into her possession. Family heirloom? Stolen from her husband, boyfriend or lover? ‘And this thing could actually cut a hand off?’
‘I believe it could.’ Ferrari lifts it so the blade is close to Valentina’s eyeline. ‘I haven’t chopped anything with it, but the metal has probably been tempered. That would make it sharper, stronger, even deadlier, but ironically a little more brittle. Against a heavier weapon it might shatter, but it would slice through flesh like a hot knife through butter and, with several hacks, would go through bone.’
Despite Suzanna’s mental problems, Valentina really can’t envisage her cutting off another woman’s hand.
Maybe Tom’s right.
Perhaps there’s more to this than she first imagined.
Ferrari dispassionately continues his run-down. ‘The clothing is in the evidence store at the end of the corridor. Let me call through to my assistant and she’ll have someone find it for us.’ He opens a door and jabbers a message to his secretary.
‘Rome is full of artefacts,’ says Federico to Valentina, ‘but one as well preserved as this is extremely rare. It must have been stolen from somewhere, a museum or private collector. It should be easy for us to trace.’
Ferrari returns to the desk, wraps up the weapon and carefully replaces it under lock and key in his cabinet. ‘Shall we go to the store?’
‘Please,’ says Valentina.
The scientist can’t help but stare at her.
‘I’m sorry. Forgive me gawking at you. I was just thinking that you’re remarkably young – and pretty – for a female captain.’
Federico barks out an embarrassed cough.
Valentina treats Ferrari to a well-practised look of indifference.
Ferrari tries vainly to dig himself out of his hole. ‘They’re unusual – female captains; in fact, the only other one I’ve met must be twice your age, and come to think of it, I actually suspect she’s a he.’ He laughs nervously and turns to Federico. ‘What do you think, is Giovanna Ponti a man or a woman?’
‘Neither,’ interrupts Valentina coldly. ‘She’s a senior Carabinieri officer and you’d do well to afford her the respect she deserves.’
‘Quite.’ Ferrari frowns at his faux pas, then moves slowly ahead of them. ‘I didn’t mean to be sexist, Capitano. Federico will tell you, I have a sad knack of saying the wrong things when it comes to ladies. I’m sorry if I upset you.’
They make the rest of the short walk in silence and enter a cool storage room full of freezers, shelves, drawers and wall cupboards.
‘We’re still compiling the DNA profiles,’ explains the scientist, grateful to change the subject and get back on a professional footing, ‘but I can already tell you something interesting about the blood samples taken from th
e dismembered hand, the weapon you recovered and the clothing that your prisoner was wearing.’
Valentina’s patience is short. ‘And that is?’
‘They don’t match.’
He watches their faces as they struggle to absorb the significance.
‘ None of them?’ queries Federico.
‘None of them,’ he confirms. ‘The blood from the victim’s hand is different to that found on the weapon – and from the blood on the clothes of the woman you arrested.’
Valentina feels like she’s doing Sudoku.
A young female lab assistant arrives on cue, holding a hooded white gown covered in a transparent evidence sheet.
Ferrari takes it from her and turns it round so they can see the stains and spatters on the front. ‘Just so you’re really clear, the blood on this garment is not from the severed hand and not from your suspect.’ He pauses, then explains: ‘The blood on this gown is AB. The blood on the sword taken from your prisoner is Rhesus positive and the blood on the severed hand is Rhesus negative.’ He gives them something to grab on to. ‘Rhesus neg is present in only about fifteen per cent of the population.’
Valentina lets out a long sigh and realises she’s been holding her breath. ‘That at least is helpful. We have a victim with unusual blood. If she got a transfusion, we should be able to trace it.’
‘Let’s hope she did,’ says Federico ruefully.
Valentina picks up the transparent bag. ‘If this blood isn’t from the victim with the severed hand, and it isn’t from our prisoner, then who the hell is it from?’
No one answers.
They don’t have to.
They all know that it’s only a matter of time before another victim turns up.
At least one more.
28
Mother tells us Her story.
The one about how the old King could have had all nine books. If only he hadn’t been such a fool.
If only he had realised that what Mother was offering him was the greatest prize on earth.
