by David Hewson
“Occasionally,” she answered, still laughing. “There. That’s something else we share in common along with poor Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. You see me in my prison. And I see you in yours.”
One
IT WAS A SHORT WALK FROM THE STUDIO TO THE VICOLO del Divino Amore, a brief journey blighted by memories of that final pursuit of the figure in the black hood, with the shotgun hidden beneath his khaki jacket. Snatches of that last dark day assaulted him with a cruel swiftness that had in no way diminished with time. The conversation with Agata Graziano, which was both amusing and, when it fell to the subject of the painting, a little disturbing, had proved a distracting interlude. But Emily still lay there always in his imagination, waiting. In spite of her sheltered background, Agata had seen through him from the outset. This was not entirely business. This was personal. It would be impossible to feel quiescent about the end of his life together with Emily until a resolution was reached.
The section of the street outside the studio’s green door was still cordoned off, with three bored-looking uniformed officers stationed outside. In front of them stood a small crowd of the curious: men and women in winter coats, looking disappointed to discover that the scene of the most infamous crime to have occurred in the city in years appeared so mundane from the outside. Costa could see at least two press photographers he knew and ducked through the huddle of bodies hastily in order to avoid them. There was, he thought, precious little in the narrow alley for the prurient. Short of more discoveries, the Vicolo del Divino Amore would surely soon return to some kind of normality.
He showed his pass and went in, preparing himself for Teresa Lupo’s performance. She usually had a theatrical touch to her revelations. Even so, she must have asked them back to this place for a reason. The studio was not as he remembered it, resembling more an archaeological dig than a crime scene. Forensic officers were still busily working there. They had set out a secure walk-through area, outlined by tape, across the worn flagstones. Beyond the yellow markers a small unit of specialists in identical white bunny suits—the same now worn by Falcone’s team—were bent over an array of careful excavations in the floor, each marked out by more tape, some carrying spades and pickaxes, others with evidence and body bags and scientific equipment.
Teresa herself stepped out from behind the barriers the moment Costa walked in, followed by her assistant, Silvio Di Capua. Falcone led the way, followed by Peroni, Costa, and, a little behind everyone else, a woman officer, Inspector Susanna Placidi, who was introduced as the head of the sexual crimes unit. Accompanying her was the last person Costa expected to see: Rosa Prabakaran, the young Indian detective who had been attacked and injured during an investigation the previous spring. After which, Costa had come to believe, she had disappeared from the Questura altogether.
The smell still lingered, pervasive and disgusting, a cloying foul stink.
Teresa Lupo glanced at him with a sad, sideways look, then said to them all, in a calm, formal manner, “Thank you for coming. I asked you here so that you might appreciate a little of the magnitude of the task ahead of us. We are not one-tenth of the way into it. What I will tell you today are simply a few initial findings. I hope for much more in the way of answers, but I can’t give you any timescale about when or how they will come. This place defies conventional analysis in many ways. It was, I think, a real art studio once. It was also . . . something else.” She glanced round the cold interior. “Something I don’t quite understand yet.”
“So long as we have a start,” Falcone observed impassively. “Some facts, please?” He eyed the excavations.
“Facts,” Teresa grumbled, and cast her round, glassy eyes over the excavations in the stone floor “They were all women, all black. All battered to death, from what I can determine. Nor are they all accounted for. There is female DNA here that doesn’t match that of any of the victims. Blood mainly, which means either these women got killed and taken somewhere else, or they escaped or were allowed to leave for some reason. The most recent corpse dates from less than a month ago. The oldest, maybe twelve or fourteen weeks. Beyond that . . . we have a wealth of potential forensic material, but nothing that is linked to any existing criminal records, or . . .” Here, she allowed herself a somewhat caustic glance at Susanna Placidi. “. . . anyone fresh to try them out against.”
Costa was beginning to appreciate Falcone’s despair. “Wouldn’t it have been obvious there were corpses here?” he asked. “Surely someone would have noticed? The smell . . .”
Falcone intervened, as he’d promised. “Sovrintendente Costa is here out of courtesy,” the inspector announced. “We all share in his grief, though none of us can conceive of its depth, of course. I asked him to attend this one meeting so that he could appreciate that fact, and see how hard we are working to find those responsible for these crimes, and for the murder of his wife. After which he will return to compassionate leave.”
“Thank you,” Costa muttered, embarrassed. “The smell . . .” he insisted.
“Normally you’d be right, Nic,” Teresa replied, and seemed relieved that the conversation had moved on to practical matters. “But our friend—or friends, more likely—had a plan. A little scientific or industrial knowledge, too. You recall how the first victim we found looked?”
Costa thought it would be a long time before he forgot. The corpse had seemed to emerge from some kind of semi-transparent plastic cocoon.
“The bodies were stored in some way?” he asked.
“Out back the killer had a machine,” Teresa explained. “It’s exactly the same kind of device they use in industrial locations or packing plants. Anywhere you need to shrink-wrap something so that it’s airtight. It wasn’t going to keep that way forever. But it did a damned good job in the time they had.”
“He’s clever. He had everything covered in advance,” Susanna Placidi added. She was a neurotic-looking individual in civilian clothes—an ugly tweed wool jacket and a heavy green skirt—with a broad, miserable pale face that looked as if some unseen disappointment lurked around every corner.
“We found a stolen van around the corner,” Rosa Prabakaran added. “Not a large one. Just big enough for a corpse. There was a very expensive bouquet of lilies in it. And a coffin. Plain wood.”
“It was for the Frenchwoman,” Teresa said immediately. “What other reason would there be?”
“The French Embassy is more than anxious for news,” Falcone said. “What am I supposed to tell them?”
“What about Aldo Caviglia’s family?” Rosa snapped. “Don’t they feel the same way? Do you need to be white and middle-class to get attention around here?”
Peroni whistled and looked at the ceiling. Teresa gave the young woman detective a filthy look.
“Everyone gets dealt with around here,” she said patiently. “Caviglia was murdered. Until you people find the man who did it, there’s not much more to say. But the Frenchwoman’s different. Silvio?”
Di Capua shuffled over, a short stocky figure in his bunny suit, bald-headed, with a circlet of long, lank hair dangling over the collar of his top. He carried a set of papers and a very small laptop computer.
Teresa took some of the documents from her colleague and glanced at them. “You can tell the French Embassy she died of natural causes. If it’s any comfort, I don’t imagine we will be using those words about anyone else who’s expired hereabouts. The French won’t argue. I spoke to her doctor in Paris. He’s amazed she lived as long as she did, and frankly so am I. Congenital, incurable heart disease. Plus she had full-blown AIDS, which was unresponsive to any of the extremely expensive private treatments she’d been receiving for the past nine months. They kept away the big day for a while but not for much longer. She saw her physician the week before she died. He told her it was a matter of weeks. Perhaps a month at the most.”
“We’ve been through this before,” Peroni objected. “She still had a knife wound.”
“A scratch,” Di Capua said
, and called up on the computer a set of colour photographs of the dead woman’s neck and face, then her pale, skeletal torso. They all crowded round to stare at the images there, frozen moments from a death that had taken place just a few steps from where they now stood. Even Peroni looked for a short while before he turned away in disgust. Costa could scarcely believe what he was seeing. Perhaps time or the light in the studio had played tricks. Perhaps the curious painting had disturbed his powers of observation, amplifying everything—the light, the atmosphere, his own imagination. When he’d first seen the body of Véronique Gillet on the old grimy floor, he’d been convinced she, like Aldo Caviglia, was the victim of some savage, unthinking act of violence. In truth, the knife mark barely cut through her white, flawless skin. Now the thin, straight line of dried blood looked more like an unfortunate accident with a rosebush than a meeting with a sharp, deadly weapon.
“She died of heart failure when he attacked her?” Peroni suggested, coming back into the conversation, pointedly not looking at the photos. “It’s still murder, isn’t it?”
“Oh, poor sweet innocent,” Teresa said with a sigh. “Take a deep breath. It’s time for me to shatter a few illusions about our pretty little curator from the Louvre. As I told you when we first arrived here, Ms. Gillet had intercourse shortly before she died. And no, I don’t think it was rape. There’s nothing to indicate that. No bruising, no marks on her body. No skin underneath her fingernails. This was consensual. Sex on the sofa, in front of that creepy painting.
With a knife to add a little spice to the occasion.”
Peroni looked out over the stinking holes in the flagstones to the dusty window. It had started to rain: faint grey streaks coming down in a soft slanting veil onto the smoke-stained stones of the centro storico.
Susanna Placidi glowered at the two pathologists. “How the hell can you know that?”
“Evidence,” Di Capua said simply. “Here. Here and here.”
He pointed to the photos. Elsewhere on Véronique Gillet’s body, on the upper arms, on the smooth plateau of her stomach, and beneath her breasts, there were healed cut marks and a network of shallow but visible scars from some earlier encounter.
Teresa Lupo went through them, one by one, indicating each with a pencil.
“These are indicative of some form of self-inflicted wound, or ones cut by a . . . partner, I imagine that’s what we’d have to call it. Human beings are imaginative creatures sometimes. If you want specialist insight into sadomasochistic sexual practices, I can put you in touch with some people who might be able to help.”
“They could be just . . . cuts,” Placidi objected.
Falcone sighed. “No. They are not simply cuts. One perhaps. Two. But . . .”
Costa forced himself to examine the photos carefully. In places, the light scars crisscrossed one another, like a sculptor’s hatch marks on some plaster statuette. And something else, too, it occurred to him, and the thought turned his stomach.
“There are too many,” he said. “Also . . . I don’t know if there’s a connection, but Caravaggio made this kind of mark in many of his paintings. His incisions are one way people identify his work.”
He looked hard at the photographs. The small, straight cuts on the woman’s flesh, mostly healed, but a few still red and recent, were horribly similar. He tried to remember where they were on the canvas they had found: on the naked goddess’s upper arms and thighs. Just as with Véronique Gillet.
“The painting—” Costa went on.
“Is a subject for another conversation, and another officer,” Falcone interrupted, and gave him a quick, dark glance. This was not, it seemed, an appropriate moment.
“I know nothing about art,” Teresa Lupo declared. “But I can tell you one thing. She came here to die. Or, more precisely, to make sure that when she died, it happened here, which would suggest to me that she knew this place, knew the people, and certainly knew what went on.” Her bloodless face, expressive in spite of her plain, flat features, flitted to each of them in turn. “But what do I know? You’re the police. You work it out.”
“And the man?” Falcone asked.
“Six stab wounds to the chest, three of them deep enough to be fatal on their own,” Teresa replied immediately, and watched Di Capua take out a folder of large colour photographs, ones no one much wanted to look at. Blood and gore spattered Aldo Caviglia’s white, still-well-ironed shirt. “This is extreme violence I would attribute to a man. Women tend to give up around the third blow or go on a lot longer than this. A couple went into the heart.”
“Aldo was not the kind of man to get involved in nonsense like this,” Peroni protested. “Creepy sex. It’s ridiculous . . .”
“You don’t know that, Gianni,” Costa observed. “How many times did you meet him?”
“Three? Four? How many does it take? He wasn’t that type. Or a voyeur or something. Listen . . . I’ve talked to his neighbours. To his sister. She lives out in Ostia. She works in a bakery. Like he used to.” The big man didn’t like the obvious doubt on their faces. “Also, I spoke to the woman in the cafe down the street. She said someone who sounds like Aldo came in, white to the gills, desperate to find some skinny, red-haired Frenchwoman. He was trying to find her. He had her wallet. OK. It’s obvious how that came about. Perhaps . . .” Peroni struggled to find some explanation. “Perhaps he just changed his mind and wanted to give it back.”
“Pickpockets do that all the time,” Rosa suggested sarcastically.
“He was not that kind of man,” Peroni said, almost stuttering with anger.
To Costa’s astonishment, Rosa Prabakaran reached out, put her hand on Peroni’s arm, and said, “I believe you, Gianni. Caviglia was a good guy. He just couldn’t keep his hands to himself, but that’s not exactly a unique problem in Rome, is it?”
“You’re in the wrong job,” Peroni replied immediately, pointing a fat finger in the younger officer’s face. “You have something personal going on here. I’m sorry about that, Rosa, not that I imagine it helps. But you should not be on a case of this nature. It’s just plain . . . wrong.”
The forensic people were starting to look uncomfortable. So was Teresa Lupo. Her people liked to work without disruptions.
“Why is it wrong?” Rosa asked him, taking her hand away, almost smiling. “There are plenty of officers on this force who’ve been robbed sometime, or beaten up in the street. Does that mean they can’t arrest a thief or a thug? Is innocence of a crime now a prerequisite for being able to investigate it?”
“That’s just clever talk,” Peroni snapped. “Everyone here knows what I mean.”
The room was silent. Then Leo Falcone folded his arms, looked at Peroni, and said, “We do. And in normal circumstances you would be absolutely right. But these circumstances are anything but, I’m afraid.”
“You bet this isn’t normal,” Teresa agreed. “Normally I’m fighting to find material to work with. We’re positively dripping in the stuff here. I’ve got blood and semen. DNA aplenty. Silvio? Fetch, boy . . .”
Di Capua went to the rear door, where a pile of transparent plastic evidence bags had grown waist high. He came back with a swift selection. They looked at what lay inside.
“We haven’t had time to take it all away yet,” Teresa continued. “We’ve been too busy digging. There are whips. Flails. Knives. Masks. Some leather items that are a little beyond my imagination. We have a wealth of physical evidence here the likes of which I have never seen in my entire career. We could nail the bastards who killed these women with one-tenth of this evidence. Just point us at a suspect and we’ll tell you yes or no in the blink of an eye. This is the mother lode of all crime scenes. All we need from you is someone to test it against.”
The room was again silent.
“Well?” Teresa asked again, somewhat more loudly.
“Let’s take this outside,” Falcone murmured.
Two
IT WAS FREEZING COLD IN THE CONTROL VAN PARKED AT th
e head of the street, by the Piazza Borghese. The interior stank of stale tobacco smoke. The smoke came from a large middle-aged man in a brown overcoat who sat on one of the metal chairs in the van, awaiting their arrival. He introduced himself as Grimaldi from the legal department, then lit another cigarette.
Peroni was the last to sit down at the plain metal table in the centre of the cabin. He took a long, frank look at Falcone, who wasn’t meeting his gaze, then at Susanna Placidi, who’d placed a large notebook computer in front of her and was now staring at the screen, tapping the keyboard with a frantic, uncomfortable nervousness.
“Shouldn’t we have a few more people in on this conversation?” Peroni asked. “Six people murdered. The press going crazy. Is this really just down to us?”
“What you’re about to learn is strictly down to us,” Falcone replied, and cast the woman inspector a savage look. “Tell them.”
Placidi stopped typing and said, “We know who they are.”
The utter lack of enthusiasm and conviction with which she spoke made Costa’s heart sink.
“You know who killed my wife?” he asked quietly.
“We think we can narrow it down to one of four men,” Placidi replied, staring hard at the computer screen.
“And they’re just walking around out there?” Peroni asked, instantly furious, with Teresa beginning to make equally incensed noises by his side.
“For the time being,” Falcone replied, and nodded at Rosa Prabakaran.
Without a word she reached over, took the computer from the uncomplaining Placidi, and began hitting the keys. She found what she wanted, then turned the screen round for them all to see.
It was a photo taken at the Caravaggio exhibition Costa had worked the previous winter, organising security. In it, four men stood in front of the grey, sensual figure of The Sick Bacchus, which had been temporarily moved from the Villa Borghese for the event. This, too, was a self-portrait, a younger Caravaggio than that seen in the religious paintings and the Venus now undergoing scrutiny under the expert eye of Agata Graziano. Dissolute, saturnine, clutching a bunch of old grapes the same hue as his sallow skin, staring at the viewer, like a whore displaying her wares showing a naked shoulder; despite this, the only focus of hope and light in the entire canvas.
