The Villa of Mysteries nc-2

by David Hewson

  She snatched his hand away. “I didn’t colour it, you moron. This is what it’s meant to be like. And don’t touch me, Mickey. Not without my say-so.”

  He tried to think back over the years. She was right. She did used to be blonde. It just didn’t last too long for some reason. “Why not?”

  The green eyes were so hard now, full of something not far from hate. “You need to learn what ”no“ means. You might as well start now.”

  She hesitated. She looked a little nervous just then and he couldn’t work out whether this was good or bad.

  “Do you remember what I told you?” she asked. “Can I rely on you, Mickey?”

  “Yeah. Just don’t fuck around with me afterwards.”

  Her skinny hand came up and touched his cheek. “No,” she said, smiling.

  “Adele?” She was walking out of the room, without another word. “Adele?”

  She stopped in the shadow of the open door and blew him a kiss.

  “You’ve got to cope with this on your own now, Mickey,” she said. “I’ve got other things to do.”

  TERESA LUPO WENT BACK to her office with Gianni Peroni’s words ringing happily in her head. A little praise went a long way. Her thoughts were beginning to clear a little too. The vicious flu virus in her head was in retreat from a bombardment of aspirin, and with its abatement came some clarity. She’d found the change of clothing she kept in the office, showered, and now felt fresh and clean. Her hair was combed and back in the businesslike crop. If she peered in the mirror—which she didn’t plan to do—she guessed her eyes wouldn’t even be that bloodshot anymore. The mood was a touch infectious. Monkboy had recovered some of his composure too when the report from the lab came through. It had confirmed what Teresa, in her heart, already knew. The paternity of the tiny preserved foetus she’d recovered from Eleanor Jamieson’s corpse may have been more about morale than closure. No one had any idea where the Neris had fled overnight. But morale mattered. Maybe everyone was still walking in the dark but at least they had a spring in their step.

  One thing continued to bug her. She would have saved everyone so much grief if only she’d carried out a conventional autopsy when the body from the bog arrived. They’d have known it was not this for a while now… This was a lapse in judgement and it bothered her. If she could fail once, she could fail again. How many other oversights lay around her now in this overcrowded haven for the dead? Gianni Peroni’s point, brought home with that sudden, unexpected kiss, was a good one. In times like these it was all about priorities, looking closely under a handful of promising stones, not trying to steal a quick glance at everything. She hadn’t focused enough. Most of all, she hadn’t focused on Professor Randolph Kirk, which was odd given that he represented the sole customer in her career who had fallen into her care, so to speak, within earshot. Everything was about connections. It had been all along. If she could just find the right one it would all fall into place.

  Silvio Di Capua wandered in from the corridor. He looked into her smiling face with a frightened devotion that threatened to bring the black clouds of depression straight back.

  “Silvio, my man,” she said, her voice still husky from the cold. “Tell me about the good professor. What news of him?”

  “News?” he replied, bemused. “He got shot. What news do you want?”

  “Oh, how he feels about the whole thing. Who he wants to call.”

  He did call someone. The memory, which was less than two days old, now seemed shockingly distant. Randolph Kirk called someone and all hell started to break loose straight afterwards. The conventional thinking around this place, she reminded herself, was that Eleanor Jamieson was the Pandora du jour. It was her ossified corpse that summoned the four riders from wherever else in the world they’d been, whipping up a little apocalypse for tea.

  “Up to a point,” she said to herself.

  Monkboy looked a little scared again. “What?”

  “It was Randolph Kirk.” She recalled that disgusting habit he had with his nose. “Booger Bill. He started this crap off. With a little help from me, of course. Bog girl had been out of the ground for two weeks up till then, and nothing whatsoever had happened.”

  Silvio Di Capua blinked then performed a polished impersonation of a terrified rabbit. “Lots of work to do, Teresa. Nice routine stuff. You’ve already given the boys next door a present to get along with. From what I hear there’s plenty more to occupy them besides.”

  Her ears pricked up at the scent of gossip. “Plenty more what?”

  He didn’t say a word.

  She picked up a pair of scissors and snapped them open and shut a couple of times. “Speak, Silvio, before I am filled with the urge to snip a testicular sac or two.”

  He gulped. “I heard one of the guys talking down the way. He says this mobster’s son’s straight in the frame now, even without the paternity stuff. Seems he’s trying to get himself a little holiday money by holding them to ransom.”

  “Them?” She didn’t understand. “He’s only got Suzi Julius.”

  He swallowed hard. “Not anymore. Seems he’s got the mother too.” He hesitated and dropped his voice to a whisper. “And a cop.”

  Something black turned in her head. She advanced on Di Capua still holding the scissors. “What cop?” she demanded.

  “That guy you like,” he said feebly. “Costa. God knows how. Or where. But they’ve got a picture of him and the mother tied up somewhere.”

  “Nic?” she screeched. “Oh shit. What are we doing—?” She was looking round the morgue, mentally counting all their options. “Let’s think this through.”

  Silvio Di Capua drew himself up to his full height, which was still a good measure below hers, and yelled, “No! Don’t you get it? I don’t want to fucking think this through! It’s not why we’re here!”

  She’d never made him this mad before. Perhaps that was a failing on her part. This newly assertive Silvio Di Capua seemed a little more human somehow.

  “And for God’s sake, Teresa, stop saying ”we.“ ” He calmed down a little now. “They are cops. We are pathologists. Different jobs. Different buildings. Why don’t you get that?”

  “Because Nic Costa’s my friend.”

  “Good for you. He’s their friend too, isn’t he? Don’t they get the chance to be heroes sometimes? While we settle down to a nice routine of cut and stitch and let things run their natural course?”

  “Natural course?” Her voice was a touch too loud. She was aware of this but it didn’t help somehow. “Have you been following the events of the last couple of days, Silvio? What the fuck is natural about any of this? Also—”

  “No, no, no…” His head was down, bald scalp shining under the harsh morgue lights, long hair, even more lank than normal, unwashed for days, revolving around his podgy little shoulders.

  Monkboy’s miserable face rose to greet hers. “Promise me, Teresa. Promise me you won’t go anywhere this time. Promise me you won’t set foot outside this place. Falcone’s handling this kidnapping crap himself. It involves ransoms and money and surveillance and all those things we know nothing about. Let’s stick to what we do for a living, huh? Just for a change. You shouldn’t be involved in these things. If you’d been here more we wouldn’t be in this shit in the first place.”

  “You sound like one of them,” she said.

  His flabby cheeks sagged as if they’d been slapped. “Maybe. But it’s true.”

  “I know that. It’s just—” How did she explain this? There was something irredeemably personal about what had happened two days before. It wasn’t just her own near-death. The memory of Randolph Kirk, Booger Bill, nagged at her. He’d died in her presence, his rustling shade had somehow whistled past her, too busy to say goodbye.

  After he called someone.

  Booger Bill. Mister No-Friends, whose personal habits surely precluded closeness of any kind, except when wearing a mask and dealing with doped-up juveniles.

  She looked at Mo
nkboy. “Didn’t you find anything useful in Kirk’s pockets? An address book or something? A note with some numbers on it?”

  “No,” he said sulkily. “And before you ask—yes, I looked.”

  She bunched up her sizeable arms, folded them on her chest and began to walk. “Everyone’s got to write things down from time to time,” she said, moving briskly across the morgue, towards the storage drawers, Monkboy in her wake, whining every inch of the way.

  Teresa Lupo found the one with Kirk’s name on it and pulled the handle, listening to the familiar sliding noise, steeling her nose for the inevitable rush of chemical odour that always followed.

  “What are you doing?” Monkboy moaned. “We’ve finished with him. We got a whole load of others standing in line.”

  “Well, tell them they can wait.”

  Randolph Kirk looked pretty much like any other dead person post-autopsy. Stiff, pale and somewhat messed around. Monkboy never was any good with a needle and thread.

  She took a long, professional look at the cadaver in front of them, and picked up each dead wrist in turn. “Has he been washed?”

  “Sure!” Monkboy answered. “And I gave him a manicure and dental floss too. What do you think?”

  “Just wondered.”

  “Wondered what?”

  She was starting to get annoyed with him now and didn’t mind if it showed. “Wondered, as it happened, whether he’d got around to scribbling something on his hands or his wrists. Something like a phone number. Disorganized people do that kind of thing. Or am I not supposed to know that? Doesn’t it fit the fucking job description?”

  “Yes,” he answered mutely. “Sorry.”

  She went back to the desk, retrieved her notes from the previous day and called Regina Morrison, heard the surprise at the end of the line.

  “You have the time to call me?” said the dry Edinburgh voice. “I’m amazed. Things can’t be as busy as the newspapers say.”

  “Oh, but they are,” she snapped. “Busier, actually. Now can you tell me please, Regina? Did Randolph Kirk keep some kind of personal address book at the college? Did you pick that up on your rounds?”

  There was a pause on the end of the line. Teresa had remembered enough to pronounce the woman’s name correctly. That wasn’t enough, though. She wanted some deference, and right then there just wasn’t the time. “No. So this isn’t a social call?”

  “What about a pocket diary? Did you see him use something like that? One of those electronic organizers perhaps?”

  A long sigh made its way out of the earpiece. “Clearly you didn’t spend enough time in Randolph’s company to gain a true picture of the man. That was the most messed-up technologically challenged disaster of a human being I ever met. I wouldn’t trust him in the company of a toaster.”

  “Damn. So you’re saying he just kept it all in his head?”

  “All what? He didn’t know anyone.”

  But he did. He had to. He made a call and then the crap hit the fan. Except it couldn’t be like that. The crap had to be on its way already. All she’d done was accelerate it a touch, speed up the machine a little. Nevertheless, he made a call.

  She slammed down the phone, aware that Regina Morrison was, to her astonishment, uttering noises that sounded very like an offer of dinner.

  “What is wrong with these people?” she wondered out loud.

  She walked back over and stared at the corpse of Randolph Kirk, wishing she could wake him up for one minute and ask a few simple questions.

  Her head was back in Kirk’s office now, watching him work at his nose with that disgusting piece of cloth.

  “Booger Bill, Booger Bill,” she whispered to herself, aware that Monkboy looked ready to call in the men from the funny farm at any moment. “Never in my life have I seen a handkerchief in that condition, not even in the middle of a flu epidemic. ”Not even—“

  Monkboy watched her, petrified. “You’re not leaving this room,” he warned. “I will lock that door, I will swaddle you in bandages, I swear—”

  “Oh my God,” she gasped, then foxed him altogether. She was smiling beatifically.

  “Please—” he whined.

  “His clothes, Silvio. I want them. Now.”

  THEY ARE DRESSED, moving, through the door, out into the cold and the caves, his legs as heavy as lead, detached from his control. She has to help him round this baffling labyrinth of tunnels, stumbling in and out of the yellow pools of light cast by the random bulbs that hang from the ceiling.

  Stay in the shadows, he says. Until I tell you.

  They enter another room and she holds him, keeping them both close to the wall, in the darkness. It’s a large chamber, one he remembers, well lit in the centre. He notices now that there is a table at its centre, dusty, with rickety chairs, maybe as many as twelve. An ancient wand—his head searches for the name Teresa Lupo gave it, thyrsus—lies at one end, in front of a chair that is high-backed and grander than the rest. A theatrical mask, with the familiar gaping mouth and dreadlocks, sits next to it, black-eyed, a dead totem, waiting to be reanimated.

  The walls are what he recollects best from the night before. Picture upon picture, blonde on blonde, the same shining colour as Miranda’s hair now. Suzi Julius and Eleanor Jamieson, young and innocent, laughing for the camera, thinking they’d live forever. They haunt the room like ghostly, incandescent twins, their glittering eyes following everything.

  Miranda Julius darts into the light and picks up the thyrsus, waves it in the air. Specks of dust dance in the yellow light. The smell of ancient fennel, faintly sweet, reaches his nostrils.

  She replaces the wand, returns and looks at him. There are voices, distant ones. This curling, twisting tangle of caverns could encompass scores of chambers. He tries to think for both of them.

  Her hand is on his arm. Her eyes are bright orbs alight in his face.

  There is a dark alcove set back from the table. He pulls her further into the shadows and the effort makes his head hurt, his breath comes in snatched pants.

  He takes her face in his hands. His head’s starting to clear now. He can hear his own voice and it’s real.

  “Miranda. The best thing we can do is find a way out of here. Find some help and come back for Suzi.”

  There’s such fear in her face. She embraces him, her hands reach behind his back for something unseen, her head moves to the back of his neck, lips bite hard on the skin there. She’s moving, pressing herself now to his lips. She lunges forward, kisses him, thrusts herself into his mouth, probing, probing, feeling the softness. And this time he is certain. A tiny object rides the tip of her long, strong tongue until it reaches the back of his throat. He gags, begins to fall, and a voice somewhere in his head sings, one pill makes you bigger.

  He opens his eyes and sees her lips moving to the words as she holds him, blocking his mouth with his fingers until he swallows.

  SILVIO DI CAPUA LOOKED at the object on the table, shivered then let out a long, pained groan. It was Randolph Kirk’s handkerchief, a piece of once-white pristine fabric now crumpled into a compact ball held tightly together by a random collection of solidified green and grey gloops.

  “Don’t turn squeamish on me, Silvio,” she said. “Scalpel?”

  “Oh come on,” he complained. “You want me to find you a surgical mask too?”

  Teresa Lupo gave him the extra cold look, the one she saved for special occasions. “Wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it?”

  He grumbled and passed her the instrument. “This is insane. This is the most insane thing I have seen in these recent insane times.”

  “Booger Bill wrote those numbers down somewhere,” she insisted. “It wasn’t on the back of his hand. It wasn’t on the cuffs of his shirt. And there was more stuff on this damn hankie than mere snotballs. It was only my natural reticence that stopped me remembering this before.”

  She could swear he stamped his little feet on the tiles at that. “Teresa! There’s something creepy abo
ut this need of yours to please. Even if you’re right we shouldn’t be doing this. We should be handing it over to forensic.”

  “This is human snot, Silvio. Our territory.”

  “Excuse my pointing this out but we are not looking for snot. Snot we have by the bucket. We are looking for some phone number this weird, dead bastard has thoughtfully written down, hopefully in indelible ink, in between the snot. Which, all things taken into consideration, is both a very strange thing to do and indubitably a job for forensic.”

  She found a point of entry and began to ease the fabric, holding down one end with the gloved fingers of her left hand. “If you’d met Professor Randolph Kirk in the flesh you wouldn’t be saying that. You’d think it the most normal thing in the world, as normal as—”

  An entire corner of the fabric fell over under the pressure of the blunt side of the blade.

  “I did surgery once, Silvio,” she said proudly.

  “On a hankie?”

  “Adaptability, my man. We live in modern times. Adaptability is everything. Behold…”

  There were numbers there. Six of them, written in a tiny, cramped hand, mostly so old the ink was blurring into the fabric. One she recognized straightaway. It was Regina Morrison’s. This really was his address book. She hated to think what the rest were. A dry cleaners? Did Randolph Kirk even grace such an establishment?

  But one was more promising. The ink was fresh, the strokes of his spidery hand unblemished. This number had never gone through the wash like the others. Maybe, she thought, written just a day or two before he died.

  “Gimme that report,” she ordered.

  He clutched the thing to his chest. “This is not right. Not right at all. We should just pass this information on to the people who need it and let them decide what it’s worth. It isn’t our job—”

  The ferocity of her gaze stopped him dead.

  “Silvio, if you tell me one more time what my job is I will, I swear, fire you and fire you good. In case you hadn’t noticed, those lovely policemen out there are busy chasing all the big things they like to think of as their prey. People who plant bombs. People who kill and kidnap other people. Were I to walk into their midst bearing a hankie, albeit one of more than minor interest, I would be inviting their ridicule. Who knows? They might even invent a name for me. What do you think? Crazy Teresa? How does that sound, huh?”