by David Hewson
‘He still found himself arguing for his life,’ Peroni replied.
‘He did. Which was wrong. This brotherhood was founded to defend him, to let him know he wasn’t alone. We do not forget what our cousin from Pisa did for us. Every work that appears under the name of the Confraternita delle Civette must, by order of our constitution, make some reference to him also, however slight. It’s one of the few rules we have. My own paper, the one that Malise found somewhat obnoxious, is entitled “E pur si muove”, a phrase that . . .’
Santacroce stopped in mid-sentence, smiled awkwardly. The attention this comment had raised in the two police officers had brought the slightest rush of colour in his face.
‘It’s a technical term,’ he added quickly. ‘You wouldn’t know what it means.’
‘No,’ Peroni agreed. ‘But my friend might. Please.’ He pulled out his notebook and pen and handed it over. ‘Write it down for me. I’d like to look it up. I’d like to learn.’
Bernard Santacroce passed the notebook back, the page blank.
‘As I have already indicated, I will ask Cecilia to give you a copy,’ he said, then gestured towards the door.
SIX
Costa followed Mina’s instructions as they wound down the hill from Montorio, back into the centro storico. After a while he began to understand where they were going, and the knowledge left a cold feeling in his stomach.
The Museo Criminologico was an outpost of the Ministry of Justice in the Via del Gonfalone, a cul-de-sac between the Via Giulia and the Lungotevere. This was the Italian state’s official black museum, a place he had visited as a cadet, one that had filled him with horror, with nausea. He could still recall dashing out into the street, taking deep breaths, staring at a chilly winter sky, the first time he’d been forced to visit. The next, a kind of punishment for his perceived weakness, went more easily. He’d been a police officer for a few months by then, and had become . . . desensitized was the word the college instructor had uttered. It still amazed Costa that the term had been used as if it were praise. As if that was the point of the process of becoming a police officer. To feel less yet somehow see more. If anyone else noticed the contradiction they never mentioned it.
‘Are you all right?’ Mina asked as he leaned on the parked scooter for a moment.
‘Just remembering something,’ he said, and walked up to the door, flashed his ID and walked in.
‘You don’t have to pay for much, do you?’ she said as she joined him.
Costa tried to smile when he told her, ‘I wouldn’t pay for this.’ It was late afternoon, a little early, but right then a beer would have been wonderful. ‘Afterwards I’ll buy us some ice cream.’
The tears were gone. The pretty, somewhat overactive yet cerebral teenager was back.
‘Or even a lollipop,’ she replied, her head cocked to one side. Then she stepped inside, ahead of him.
SEVEN
Silvio Di Capua frowned at the corpse on the table. The day had not gone the way it was supposed to. When he finally started on the preliminary autopsy he had begun under the impression he possessed two firm findings. Now their certainty seemed to be drowned in a sea of doubts, with insufficient time to dispel or clarify even a handful. He needed additional advice before he could proceed with the full autopsy. An expert. Nor was it proving easy to extract information from the dead man’s medical records.
The young pathologist muttered a quiet curse, swallowed his pride and called her. Teresa was still in the apartment in the Via Beatrice Cenci. She’d been there for the best part of six hours and now sounded harassed and a little cross.
‘Find anything?’ Di Capua asked.
‘Ever tried looking for evidence on a building site? The muck and dust these people leave behind them . . .’
‘I have, actually. Several times. You just need to be patient and a little creative. It can be quite rewarding.’
‘Thank you for that comforting advice. I’ll bear it in mind. We’re not having any luck tracking down the stuff that got cleared out of here either. It sounds as if a lot went to some dump out in the hills.’
‘That was quick,’ he said. ‘I never realized the construction industry’s waste-disposal people were so efficient.’
‘Well, since you’re so expert in these things, Silvio, I’ll let you go down there to see if we can extract something out of it.’
He liked that idea and said so.
‘But you did find something?’ he asked.
‘We’ve found very little really. About half an hour ago, underneath a thick layer of dust, we picked up a blood stain on the side of a radiator in the girl’s room. Near the windows. I’ve sent someone back with a sample.’
‘You won’t get an answer till the morning. August, remember. It’s like . . . like a morgue here!’
‘If you crack that joke one more time I will, I swear, eviscerate you. With a teaspoon.’
It was an old one, he realized.
‘Boring blood or promising blood?’ he asked.
‘It’s just possible it’s evidence of a struggle,’ she said with an audible sigh. ‘I don’t know. There’s no hair. No tissue. What about you? What about the photograph?’
Falcone had called from the Casina delle Civette asking them to examine urgently the picture of the unidentified naked girl and work out how old the initial photo might have been. The print the two cops took with them wasn’t the original. Before they left that morning Di Capua had scanned the photograph found in the apartment and run off a two-sided copy, one side picture, the other the handwritten message. Being the showman he was, Falcone wanted something that looked genuine to push into people’s faces should the mood take him. The original itself had been scanned into the lab system, at very high resolution. Di Capua managed to peer at it briefly that morning, trying to interpret the mass of pixels before turning to Malise Gabriel. The first task had taken rather longer than planned.
‘On the surface it looks like an image taken from silver halide film,’ he told her. ‘From an old-fashioned camera. A digital copy of a conventional print.’
‘So it could be twenty years old, then?’
‘A lot more than that for all I know. It’s just a partial image of the torso of some young nude girl lying on crumpled sheets next to what appears to be a semen stain. Nothing to date it at all. There’s visible film grain in the image. The photo came from a Japanese dye sub printer, really common. You can buy them down the shops for a hundred euros or less. Slip in your memory card or an image from a scanner, press a button, the picture pops out in a minute or less. I’ve got something similar in the lab. That’s what I used to give Falcone his prop. Don’t get excited. It isn’t like a typewriter. Even if you find me a printer to look at I’ve no idea how we could say with any great certainty the picture came from that. You’d need the print material – the disposable paper it uses, which usually gets thrown away pretty quickly. I can give you the brand though and a range of models. Since we’re going down the dump, we can look.’
‘And?’
Teresa always knew when there was a caveat coming.
‘It could be a fake. A good one. If you’re handy with photo software it’s very easy to make a digital original look as if it was shot on film years ago. You just turn the picture black and white, add some noise then soften it with some Gaussian blur. No easy way of saying if that’s what’s happened here. It could be twenty years old. Fifty even. It could be from last week. We’ve got a photo expert on call. I can get him in if you—’
‘I’ll think on it. What about you?’
He took a deep breath, knowing she wouldn’t like this.
‘Here’s the bad news. What with photos of nude teenagers and some other things I’m way behind. After what you said this morning I wanted to get Gabriel’s medical records first. I thought that would make things easier. I was wrong. The surgeon at the university hospital won’t release them and won’t tell me why.’
‘Doctors don’t have to ro
ll over and give us everything we want.’
‘I know, but they usually do. And why not? The man’s dead.’
‘The university hospital?’
‘That’s what I said. I suspect Gabriel was being treated for cancer. I tried the head man in oncology—’
‘Adriano Negri?’
‘Friend of yours? It didn’t show. He won’t co-operate. Won’t show me a thing.’
‘You leave him to me. Is that it?’
‘Not at all,’ he said patiently. It was always best to get the worst out of the way first. Teresa worked better when she finished on a rising note. ‘I’ve got two things for you. Scratch marks. Some on his hands that could be evidence of a struggle. There are similar parallel marks on his lower back too. Fingernails. Three. Recent. Someone defending themselves. Someone having fun. Could be either. If you could locate a suspect and get a good look at their hands it’s possible we might still find some tissue underneath the nails.’
‘Fun?’
‘Fun. Don’t ask me to put a time on it but shortly before he died, anywhere between a few minutes and a few hours, Malise Gabriel had sex. No question about it.’
He paused, aware that her practical medical knowledge was immeasurably greater than his, since Teresa Lupo had worked as a doctor before becoming a pathologist.
‘Are people with cancer much interested in . . . you know? Intercourse,’ he asked.
‘If they can!’ she snapped. ‘They’re still human beings. Good God, Silvio. Depends on the condition. Treatment or the disease can affect the sex drive. It doesn’t mean the desire disappears. They’re just sick people. For pity’s sake . . .’
Di Capua added quickly, ‘There’s trace evidence of a condom, which is one more reason why I’m a little behind here. I don’t know the brand yet. There’s nonoxynol-9 spermicide residue which could help there. I’ve also got traces of water-based lubricant. Maybe intercourse was difficult for some reason. Or it was just something he . . . they liked. No way of knowing. But again, there could still be something on the partner if you can get her or him into an examination room.’
He heard her begin yelling at someone to examine the toilets for condoms, then issuing another string of orders: checks for tissues, toilet paper, all the usual means by which semen might, with luck, be found. Di Capua knew what they really needed, though: bedding. If that was nothing more than ashes out at some dump in the hills this was not going to be easy.
‘Who the hell examined this man when he came in?’ she demanded.
He knew what was coming.
‘Maria. One of the university interns on work experience. It was Saturday. In August. He was an accident victim. Do you remember being young and naive and way too scared to cause trouble? I do.’
A florid curse lit up the line.
‘You want me to fire her?’ he asked.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not her fault it took us two days to realize we had a murder on our hands. I’m the head of the department. If you want to blame someone, blame me.’
Typical, he thought. Their omissions were regrettable but scarcely case-threatening.
‘Praiseworthy but unjustified,’ he told her. ‘We rely on the police to alert us to these things. They were asleep at the wheel. It’s not our fault they didn’t wake us as a result.’
‘That’s the most pathetic excuse I’ve ever heard,’ she grumbled. ‘I’m calling Falcone. Then I’m coming back to take a look at this myself.’
EIGHT
The black museum was one more place she appeared to know by heart. Mina Gabriel walked straight through the winding corridors of the ground floor, past models of men being torn limb from limb by horses, display cases full of knives and mallets and cruel instruments of torture. It was like reliving a nightmare. An executioner’s blade with a lion’s head handle, used to gouge out eyes, to cut off ears and noses and fingers. The Milazzo cage, an iron shell containing a human skeleton, a victim for once of another nation’s cruelty, in this case the British who had executed a deserter in Sicily by first mutilating the man then letting him starve to death locked inside the contraption. A spiked collar, a gossip’s bridle, pillories, stocks, whipping blocks. The ghoulish red cape of Mastro Titta, Rome’s most famous executioner, a celebrity of death, his uniform now hanging next to the axe he used to decapitate criminals in front of crowds of thousands.
Costa stared at the guillotine used by the Papal States and wondered how many lives had ended on this crude contraption of wood and metal. This place appalled him, made him ashamed of his inherited past, which was, perhaps, its purpose. Perhaps . . . There was always a morbid curiosity in people too. He knew that. It burned inside Mina Gabriel, with an urgency she appeared almost to relish. He was curious to know why.
She grabbed his arm and rushed him round one more corner, stopping in front of a long glass exhibit case. He gazed at a nest of hangman’s nooses, each neatly tied. Next to the snarls of fading hemp was a note with the names and crimes of the men and women whose necks had once felt the rope’s deadly embrace. By the side stood a grey hooded tunic in coarse fabric, loosely hung on the wall in the shape of a human being so that it resembled nothing less than the cast-off skin of a ghost.
‘The Confraternita of San Giovanni Decollato,’ Mina said, not that he needed to be told. The Brotherhood of the Beheaded John the Baptist.
‘They have their own church,’ she went on in a low, earnest voice. ‘Near Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Do you think you could get me in? It’s closed usually.’
‘Why do you want to go?’
She seemed transfixed by the dusty cloak.
‘Those monks looked after people before they were executed. They probably cut Beatrice’s hair to make it easier for the executioner. These . . .’ There was a zinc alms box bearing a decapitated head and next to it a set of small images of the Virgin and Christ. ‘They’d beg money from the crowd for her funeral, shove those stupid little pictures in her face to . . .’ Her pretty features distorted with anger. ‘. . . comfort her.’
He thought he’d lost the dreadful image those final few moments had once devised in his imagination. Now he realized the memory of Beatrice was not so easily obliterated, that it was a phantasm that would return to haunt him at the least prompting. A single visual remembrance stood out more than any other, and it was not the obvious, the harsh, bloody violence of that final moment, but the grey, hooded figures dressed like this, charity from the same source that signed her death warrant, gathering around like demons as the executioner approached. One more indignity at the end.
‘They keep things in that locked-up church of theirs,’ she murmured, gazing at the faded grey robe in front of them. ‘The basket her head fell into when she died. The hood of Giordano Bruno when they burned him at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori. Ropes and locks of hair . . .’
‘Mina, Mina,’ he said quickly, loudly too, against his own wishes. ‘Enough. Let’s get out of here.’
‘Not yet,’ she insisted, and dragged him back towards the exit, towards the thing that had stolen the breath from him a decade or more before.
It was about a metre long, a specialist weapon, unsuited for warfare or any conventional purpose. Behind the glittering steel stood a black and white photograph of Reni’s portrait of Beatrice, eyes turned to the beholder, even in this tiny print. By its side was an old book, the page open at the story of the weapon – the ‘Sword of Justice’ – that historians were convinced was used to behead Beatrice Cenci and her stepmother Lucrezia on that September day in 1599.
Mina stood stiff and upright in front of the display case, neither girl nor woman at that moment, her dark eyes full of outrage, fixed on the weapon, her breath shallow and irregular.
‘Let’s go outside,’ Costa said. ‘I promised you ice cream.’
‘Ice cream!’ she spat at him.
‘Mina . . .’
‘“The Sword of Justice”?’ she asked, her voice full of heat. She was a child again at that moment
. Full of the simple outrage that children possessed, the rudimentary innocence that classified all cruelty and hurt and neglect as wrong, never seeking to understand the reasons behind them.
‘They may have meant that in the sixteenth century,’ he said. ‘Not today. If anything it’s ironic.’
‘Because we’re so much more civilized now? More reasonable? More kind?’
‘Next to this,’ he said, nodding at the shaft of old stained steel behind the glass. ‘Yes. We shouldn’t bury our horrors. We should find the courage to face them.’
‘That depends on the horrors, doesn’t it? If Beatrice was alive now . . . if all this happened today?’
He found his mind wouldn’t think straight for a moment. She was looking directly at him, demanding an answer.
‘How would you torture a confession out of her, Nic?’ she persisted.
‘I wouldn’t,’ he said immediately. ‘Nor would anyone. We’re not perfect but we’re better than we were.’
There was an expression on her pretty, pale face that could have been the pout of a ten-year-old. He placed a hand gently on her arm and guided her to the door. It was almost six. The place would close soon anyway.
Outside the fierceness of the day was beginning to abate. The Via Giulia looked as quiet and as beautiful as ever.
‘I promised you a gelato . . .’
‘Don’t patronize me,’ she interrupted without looking at him. ‘I want to go home.’
NINE
Cecilia Gabriel printed out a copy of Bernard Santacroce’s academic paper then left Falcone and Peroni alone to poke around her husband’s gloomy office on the ground floor of the Casina delle Civette.
