The Garden of Evil

One

Within fifteen minutes the entire area around the Barberini studio was flooded with a tangle of police vehicles and officers stretching as far back as the Piazza Borghese. A city-wide alert had been issued for Falcone’s stolen vehicle, so far without results. Costa had been seen by the duty medical officer and dispatched, with Agata insistently by his side, to the hospital for treatment for his wounded shoulder. Scene-of-crime were preparing to seal off the studio and start work on the body of Emilio Buccafusca, under the supervision of Teresa Lupo, who had found her own way to the scene, and taken control of her team without a single order from anyone. There was an excess of activity and resources, one suspect dead, one missing, both with clear links to the earlier cases in the Vicolo del Divino Amore.

Falcone should have felt happier than he did. It was Franco Malaspina behind the mask. He was sure of that. But Agata’s identification under pressure from Costa was so vague, and came about from crude prompting. Even in a mess like this, with evidence available everywhere, a rich, powerful Roman aristocrat would retain some friends, and — possibly — sufficient influence to disrupt the momentum of the case at the very point at which it appeared to be about to break.

There were still too many unknowns, and one of them was striding through the rain towards him at that moment, a tall skinny figure about his own build, but with a full head of wavy black hair damp from the weather, not that the man cared much. Falcone had spent little time with Vincenzo Esposito since the man arrived from Milan to take up the position of commissario in the Questura. He had no idea what to make of him, and nor had anyone else, since he was utterly unlike any of the officers — all Roman, all risen through the local ranks — who had preceded him. A few years short of Falcone’s own age, quietly spoken, sharply intelligent, and — to the dismay of active officers — keenly interested in the minutiae of the investigative process, Esposito was a mystery to those he commanded, and seemed happy to keep it that way.

Falcone had looked through newspaper cuttings after his appointment. There was nothing there except an illustrious though quiet career, one that had included busting a clan of the ’Ndrangheta crime organisation while working in Reggio di Calabria, and bringing about the successful prosecution of several state officials for bribery in connection with public-works contracts in his native city. These were the actions of an ambitious officer. One, Falcone hoped, who had limited time for authority when a little leeway was called for. It was possible he would find himself suspended, alongside those he had inveigled into the illicit surveillance operation against the Ekstasists, once the dust of this night had cleared. It was also possible he could talk his way out of things, for a while anyway.

Only the morning before, he had met Esposito in a corridor in the Questura, between a conference with the primary team working on the bodies in the Vicolo del Divino Amore and the visit to his own apartment to brief Peroni, Costa, Teresa Lupo, and Rosa Prabakaran. There had been a brief exchange of words — the kind of sentiments that officers expressed in the middle of difficult cases.

And Falcone had let something slip, quite deliberately, knowing that Esposito was aware of the interest in Malaspina, and the difficulties that caused.

The man had listened and said simply, “The rich are with us always, too. Sadly.”

After which he had excused himself, then, with a backwards glance, headed off down the corridor to one of the endless management meetings that always reminded Falcone why he didn’t want to be a commissario.

Esposito didn’t look displeased at being dragged out of bed. He seemed energised, interested, even a little amused.

“You do spring surprises on me,” the man observed cheerfully. “I’ve just been chatting with that young Indian officer of yours. I thought we had one investigation. Now it transpires we had two.”

“I had intended, sir—”

“No need,” the commissario interrupted. “I don’t expect to be told everything. Unless it’s absolutely necessary.” He stomped his feet and clapped his hands together. It was an act. The night wasn’t that cold. “Well. Is it?”

“I don’t believe so at the moment.”

“Good. No one has seen your car. Don’t you find that odd?”

“Very,” Falcone grumbled. There had been a single sighting of the vehicle, on the Lungotevere by the new museum for the Ara Pacis. The police car which made the identification was blocked behind another vehicle on a red light in a side street. By the time it reached the main road, the stolen car was nowhere to be seen.

“Unless it’s in that damned palace round the corner, eh?”

“It’s big enough,” Falcone admitted. “That would seem rash, surely. An underground car park would be the obvious place. If he was a criminal, I would suggest he might have easy access to some truck used for car theft. Someone could simply drive up a ramp and it’s out of sight.”

Esposito seemed amused by this idea. “If he’s a criminal? I read the file. These animals have murdered at least seven women and attacked God knows how many more, just to get their dirty pictures…”

“I’m not sure it’s quite as simple as that.”

“I am. Malaspina murdered the wife of one of our own officers. And one of his brothers-in-arms tonight, in front of you. If.”

“I meant if he were a career criminal. Part of some organisation.”

“A criminal’s a criminal,” the commissario noted cryptically. “So your suspect is gone. And that painting he loves too.”

“I will find this man,” Falcone insisted.

“I should hope so. And this young officer of yours? Costa? Is he badly hurt?”

“They will be picking shot out of his shoulder for a few hours. It won’t be pleasant. It won’t be fatal either. He is a very… persistent individual. Rather too much for his own good sometimes.”

“So I’d heard. Then he should rest. He never took sufficient compassionate leave in the first place.”

“I know.”

Esposito watched him keenly. “You have ideas, Ispettore?”

“A few. For later. They are insufficiently developed.”

“And now? Think about this. It’s important. Are you sure it was Franco Malaspina? Absolutely? We can’t play fast and loose with a man like that. One more screwup and he’s probably free for good.”

“We have a positive identification from Sister Agata Graziano, a woman of the Church.”

Falcone was aware of the hesitation in his own voice. So was Esposito.

“Of a hooded man who said very little indeed, from what Prabakaran tells me,” the commissario observed.

“It will put no one behind bars. But perhaps it will unlock enough doors for us to find the evidence that will. Though I hope to have something better before long.”

Esposito looked at the sea of bodies and vehicles around him, the forensic team climbing into their white bunny suits, the organised mayhem that followed any major crime incident, a necessary flow of procedures and bureaucracy set down so firmly on paper that every senior officer knew it now by heart. He didn’t seem much interested.

“I’d be a damned sight happier if we simply picked up this creature behind the wheel of your car,” he complained. “That would make everything so simple, which is doubtless why it won’t happen. Do we really need all these men and women earning expensive overtime at this hour of the night?”

“Those who are not involved in the crime scene are waiting, sir.”

“For some magistrate who’s been dragged out of bed to give you carte blanche to charge through the Palazzo Malaspina?”

“Good God, no,” Falcone answered, aghast. “That’s what he’d expect. If Malaspina’s there, it means he’s fixed some alibi already. If not… it’s irrelevant. His lawyers have us wrapped in cotton wool. We can’t apply for a warrant without notifying them first, and that would extend any hearing until the daylight hours at the earliest.”

The commissario beamed. For the first time in a while, Leo Falcone felt quite cheered. Something told him he wouldn’t necessarily be fired. Yet.

“So?” Esposito wondered.

“So I have applied for warrants to enter the homes of Giorgio Castagna and Nino Tomassoni. Castagna lives in the Via Metastasio, two minutes to the south from here. Tomassoni has a house in the Piazza San Lorenzo in Lucina. It’s just as close.”

Esposito looked pleased. “I know Rome. No need for directions. We could walk there. But we won’t, of course. I want this done properly.”

“Sir…”

“In fact…”

He put a gloved finger to his lips, thinking. Vincenzo Esposito had a pale, softly contoured, and elongated face, that of one of the Piemontese peasant farmers Falcone used to see as a child when he was on holiday in the mountains, or in the bloodless, idealised paintings so popular in the north. It was difficult to imagine the man in the flush of anger or engagement.

“You take Tomassoni,” he ordered. “I shall visit Castagna. With Agente Peroni by my side. Is that agreeable to you?”

“Well… as you wish,” Falcone replied, a little staggered by the directness of this intervention. “Peroni?”

“An interesting man. I have read his file. I have read all your files.”

Falcone said not a word.

“I like this city of yours,” Esposito declared. “Now, may we go and arrest some criminals, do you think?”

Two

Their destination was in another dark, narrow alley in a part of Rome that Gianni Peroni was beginning to dislike. He felt tired and worried. He was concerned, too, about this new commissario who seemed so friendly and had picked him out by name, even going so far as to pat him on the shoulder as they rode to the address that was registered for Giorgio Castagna.

Commissario Esposito took one look at the dingy street and the shiny door, that of a single house, not the apartments one would normally expect.

There were ten other men with them, one of them a sovrintendente, Alfieri, who was less than pleased to discover Esposito didn’t appear to regard him as his most senior officer around.

“Why are you an agente?” the commissario asked idly as they looked at the door from down the lane, thinking of their mode of entrance.

“Because the people in charge at the time got sentimental,” Peroni replied immediately. “I should have been fired. I was an inspector. They found me in a cathouse when it got raided. My life was a little… strange at the time.”

Esposito said nothing.

“Why are you asking this?” Peroni demanded. “Since you clearly know it already if you’ve read the papers.”

“Sometimes it’s better to hear things than read them. Don’t you agree?”

“Of course…”

“And also because…” Esposito shrugged. “I have to make a decision when the dust has settled. Do I throw the book at you all for running this little show outside the rules? Or…”

The commissario looked at Alfieri, who was shuffling on his big feet and standing in front of some muscular agente Peroni didn’t know, one who was passing a large, nasty-looking implement from hand to hand, somewhat impatiently.

“We are talking, Officer,” he pointed out. “A private conversation.”

“S-sir,” the man stuttered, “we have someone here who has done the new entry course.”

Esposito raised an eyebrow at the large metallic implement in the hulking agente’s grip.

“No more mallets, eh? Isn’t progress wonderful?” He turned to Peroni. “What would you advise?”

“Nic and Rosa had nothing to do with this. He’s still in mourning. She was just obeying orders.”

“I meant what would you do here?”

It was obvious. Anyone who’d worked Rome for a couple of decades would have known the answer from the outset. But the new generation, men like Alfieri, were formed by the courses they went on, not by what they saw about them on the street.

“The house is terraced,” Peroni pointed out. “I know this area well enough to understand there is no rear exit. It simply backs onto whatever lies behind. They didn’t build passageways out the back in those days.”

“So?” Esposito asked.

“If it was me, I’d ring the doorbell,” he answered.

Esposito nodded across the street and ordered, “Do it.”

Grumbling low curses, aware he was exhausted and his temper on a short fuse, Peroni wandered down the alley, stood in front of the house, and looked at the bell and the upright letter box built into the centre of the old wooden door.

He pressed the buzzer, then popped a fat finger through the letter box and lowered his head down to its level as best he could, trying to peer through. To his surprise there was a light burning brightly on the other side.

After that he went back across the street and looked at Alfieri.

“I’d use your toy instead.”

“Sir!” the man answered, with a burst of bitter sarcasm.

But he went eagerly all the same, ordering the heavily built young agente in front of him, taking obvious satisfaction as the metal ram began to work on the door.

Peroni stayed with Esposito, who wasn’t moving.

“That was decisive of you,” the commissario noted.

“It was indeed. Were you listening? When I said all that about Nic and Rosa not really being a part of Leo’s little freelance venture? One’s still in mourning, the other’s still green.”

Esposito stared at him, puzzled. “I always listen, Agente.”

The metal toy was starting to do its work. The ancient wooden door, which might have sat there for a century or more for all Peroni knew, was trembling on its strong hinges like a tree falling under the axe of some relentless, vindictive forester. Dust — clouds of it — was starting to hang around the entrance as the frame began to come away from the plaster and brickwork that held it in place.

“There’s no rush,” Peroni said, putting a hand on this odd new commissario’s arm as they crossed the street, successfully slowing their progress.

“Why?” Esposito asked immediately.

They were nearly through and Peroni was beginning to feel guilty. He could see what would happen. The heavy planked wood would fall backwards, as if there were a hinge on its base, straight down onto the stone floor he suspected must lie behind.

The two of them were no more than a couple of strides away when it finally began to go. Esposito was free of him, walking quickly towards the action. Some bosses always had to be there first, Peroni reminded himself.

It came loose with a whip-like crack. Peroni watched it go over, trying to calculate, as best he could, the effect it might have on what he believed he had seen through the letter box.

Gravity wasn’t his fault. Nor the overenthusiasm of a bunch of officers newly returned from a course on how to smash their way into private homes.

“Why?” Esposito turned to ask again as he marched to join the others.

Peroni stopped. The massive wooden slab tumbled backwards. Plumes of plaster and brick dust rose from around its frame as the old and once solid structure that held it in place collapsed under the blows it had received from Alfieri’s strongman. Whatever lay behind the door…

This wasn’t a conversation Esposito had allowed to develop.

Led by the commissario in his black raincoat, the team pushed into the brightly lit space that now appeared before them, making the grunt-like noises of enthusiasm men tended to produce on occasions like this.

It didn’t last long. Someone — Alfieri, Peroni suspected — screamed. Then the entire pack of them retreated in haste, waving their hands in distress that, on the part of a couple — though not Vincenzo Esposito — appeared to border on horror.

A pair of naked legs — a man’s, and he was pretty sure of the identity — flapped down onto them, pivoting from some unseen point above, pushing gently against their faces and hands. The body had been given some brief renewed life by the force of the door as it came off its hinges and fell backwards, piling into the corpse somewhere above the knee.

Peroni walked forward, cocked his head through the doorway, looked up, and saw what he’d expected all along, ever since he got a glimpse of those white, dead legs through the narrow slit of the letter box. The pale, misshapen naked body of a man was suspended there, hanging from a noose which appeared to be thrown across an ancient black beam that ran, open and horizontal, across the entrance space at the first floor.

“Because of that,” he said.

Three

Falcone knew the Piazza Di San Lorenzo in Lucina well. It was a small, very old cobbled square by the side of the Palazzo Ruspoli in the bustling shopping street of the Corso, with a porticoed church that looked more like an Imperial temple than a home for Catholics, and a handful of houses that must have gone back centuries.

It was an expensive location for a lowly official of a state art institution. As he stood with his men at the edge of the cobbled square, their flashing lights reflecting on the damp stone, the racket of their engines bringing activity to the windows of the surrounding apartments, Falcone found himself thinking, not for the first time, of Costa’s insistence that the key to this case somehow lay in the past. A past that might, perhaps, be unreachable through any conventional means. More and more, Falcone felt himself to be a player in a drama that was taking place in another era, another century altogether, one in which he lacked sufficient understanding to follow the rules, or even begin to comprehend them.

This had to change. They owed that to all those dead women, Emily included. Yet for all the progress he felt sure they ought to make over the next few hours, Falcone felt unsure of himself. Out of caution, he had placed a call to the Palazzo Malaspina, enquiring whether the count was at home, only to be told that he had left the palace after the party for “private business” and had yet to return. Even without Agata’s questionable identification, this was sufficient to make it possible for Malaspina to have been at the scene in the Barberini studio. Still, it was too soon, Falcone felt, to exert any pressure on the man. If it was him behind the black, all-covering hood, he was surely closeted with his lawyers now, concocting some alibi. Or else he had fled the city altogether.

In the absence of usable physical evidence, could one man possess sufficient money and influence to bury his direct involvement in several bizarre murders forever? This question had nagged Falcone ever since he became aware of Malaspina’s background. He loathed to think that it could be true. Yet he knew enough of the ways of those who lived at the summit of society to understand that they did, from time to time, abide by rules and mores which would never be allowed to the masses living further down the ladder. Bribery, corruption, casual acquaintance with criminals… These failings occurred in all walks of life, in business, in local and national government, and, on occasion, in the law enforcement agencies too. Could they extend to turning a blind eye to the vicious deaths of a series of unfortunate women?

Only in the minds of a privileged few, such as Franco Malaspina and those he had assembled around him. Men like Nino Tomassoni, who was now, perhaps, in bed in his home, an ancient building, decrepit and untouched by recent paint, just a few short metres from the neon lights of the Corso, with its ribbon of stores, some with the Christmas lights still winking, even in the dead of night.

What was it Susanna Placidi had said? Tomassoni was the weak one, perhaps the original source of the emails themselves, a peripheral player at the very edges of this drama. If so, he was there for a reason, and it was one Falcone felt determined to discover.

He turned to look at the team he had assembled: four armed men, one with the necessary equipment for taking down the door to the house should that be needed.

“Follow me,” he ordered, then walked directly to Nino Tomassoni’s front entrance, put his thumb on the bell push, and held it there. After ten seconds, no more, he nodded at the entry man to begin taking down the door.

There was no time for niceties. Besides, Tomassoni, if Susanna Placidi had got just one thing right, was a small man who might possibly be cowed by a show of force.

“When you’re in,” Falcone commanded the men around him, “I want you to make the noise from hell. I’ll deal with the neighbours.”

That seemed to go down well. He watched the door fly off its hinges in a cloud of dust.

“Everyone goes inside,” he ordered. “The man may be armed and accompanied.”

He was the first to step through the cloud of dust that followed the final hammer blow. And the first to come to a halt, too, amazed by what lay beyond the threshold.

When the grey cloud cleared from the forced entry, he found himself faced with a scene that seemed to come from a different century. The interior of Nino Tomassoni’s home — the residence, Falcone already knew from intelligence, of a solitary man unknown to his neighbours, one who had inherited his expensive central address from parents who had emigrated to the United States years ago — was like nothing he had expected, more a film or theatre set than a home fit for the twenty-first century.

Though it was now past three in the morning, gaslights flickered inside glass bulbs down each of the long walls of the narrow entrance room, casting a faint orange glow over the interior. Paintings in gold frames hung alongside them. On each side stood a pair of ornate carved gilt chairs, worn antiques with tattered red velvet seats and backs, and a shaky aspect that probably made them unfit for use. The floor was dusty stone, unswept for ages. From somewhere came a dank smell, the kind Falcone associated with the illkempt homes of solitary, impoverished bachelors, places that reeked of rotting food, stale air, and solitary habits.

“This is creepy,” someone said from behind him. “Like a museum or something.”

That was right, Falcone thought. Just like a museum, and the idea gave him some encouragement, though he was not quite sure why.

“Room by room, floor by floor,” he ordered quietly. “I do not understand the layout of this place. It’s…”

From another time.

The words just slipped into his head.

“I want someone to take a look at the back to see if there’s some way out there, and that way blocked if it exists. I want—”

His phone rang. It was Vincenzo Esposito. He sounded shocked, a little out of sorts, which was probably a rare experience for the man.

Falcone listened, absorbing the news. Esposito would remain at Castagna’s home for the rest of the night, and he had ordered a permanent guard for Agata Graziano to be sent to the hospital in San Giovanni where she had gone with Costa.

“Don’t lose any more witnesses,” the new commissario ordered, his voice low and grim over the phone.

“No, sir,” Falcone replied, and cut the call.

The house had three floors and no rear entrance, simply a blank wall, without windows on any level. The gaslights seemed to be intermittent. In other areas, weak yellow bulbs, usually hanging from the ceiling by a single wire, without a fitting or shade, provided the illumination. There were no carpets and little in the way of furniture; no sign of a human presence.

Many riddles continued to nag him about the nature of the Ekstasists. The studio in the Vicolo del Divino Amore was just one of them. It was, Falcone felt sure, a place they used only occasionally, in extremis, when their games moved beyond some norm that was simply decadent and into a realm that was more dangerous, doubtless more tantalising. They were an organisation, one that needed a home. Malaspina was too intelligent and circumspect to allow it to be inside his own palace. Buccafusca and Castagna were well-known men in the city, too, likely to arouse comment and suspicion if their illicit activities took place on premises with which the public were familiar — an art gallery, or the porn studios out near Anagnina where Castagna’s father based his grubby empire. So Nino Tomassoni, a quiet, insignificant minor bureaucrat in the gallery of the Villa Borghese, who lived a solitary life in a house a short walk away from everywhere in what was once Ortaccio, offered a solution of a kind.

The ground floor was occupied by nothing more than storage space crammed with junk: old furniture, discarded boxes of papers and magazines, many pornographic, and several bags of household rubbish. On the second they found one large bedroom, with a dishevelled double bed and sheets that looked as if they hadn’t been washed in weeks, and a smaller room with a single mattress and no sign of recent use. The floor above contained a small study, with a computer that was still on when Falcone touched the keyboard, open at an email application. He called for one of the younger officers to come forward and start using the thing.

“Can you see what’s been sent from this recently?” Falcone asked.

The man flailed at the grubby keyboard.

“There are four months of old messages, in and out,” the agente replied after a couple of seconds.

“Good. Call in the forensic computer people. Tell them to take it away for analysis. But…” He stopped the man before he left the grimy seat at the table on which the machine sat. “First tell me if there are any messages to Susanna Placidi here.”

The keyboard clattered again. Several emails came up on the screen. They were familiar. Falcone smiled and patted the officer on the shoulder.

“Progress,” he said. “Now, there’s a word we haven’t heard in a while. Let’s take a look at the next floor.”

He led the way up the narrow, steep stairs and was aware, from some hidden sense, that this place was different, in a way that made him take out his weapon instinctively and hold it in front of him in the darkness.

The door was open, the entire floor beyond a space without so much as a stick of furniture from what he could see. A single skylight stood off-centre in the pitched, low roof. Through it a wan stream of weak moonlight fell, revealing nothing but bare worn planks in the centre of the room.

Falcone felt for a light switch. It took some time for him to realise there was none. But there was the smell of gas, faint yet discernible, and as his eyes adjusted they found the shapes of the same glass bulbs he had seen on the ground floor. He had no idea how to turn on gaslights, and no desire to find out.

He took a flashlight from one of the officers behind him and cast it around the pool of darkness that lay impenetrable in front of them. There were shapes, familiar ones. And from somewhere, he thought, the sound of faint movement, of someone disturbed by their presence.

“Fetch more light,” Falcone ordered in a loud, confident voice.

Two officers ran downstairs, out to the vans for gear.

Falcone strode into the centre of the room, dashing the beam of the flashlight everywhere, taking in what it revealed.

He should, perhaps, have expected this. In front of him lay an array of paintings, canvas upon canvas, each stored leaning against the next, protected by some kind of cloth covering, stacked in a fashion that was half professional, half amateur.

The corner of one piece of cloth was incomplete. Falcone lifted it and ran the beam across what lay beneath. He saw pale flesh, naked women, bodies wrapped up in one another. And a kind of style and poise that spoke of skill and artistry.

“What is it, sir?” the officer who had worked at the computer asked.

“Fetch me more light and we’ll see.”

Falcone still recalled well the time he had spent working alongside the Carabinieri art unit in Verona, with the pleasant major there, Luca Zecchini, who would spend hours showing him the vast register of missing artworks which every officer on the unit would be required to inspect from time to time. The size and richness of it amazed him, and the fact that there was a market for works which could never, in normal conditions, be shown to a single living soul because of their fame.

The brighter floods arrived. He ordered the sea of searing brightness they created to be turned towards the piles of paintings, then walked around them, throwing off the covers, hearing the low buzz of excitement grow behind him.

“I know that,” someone said after a while.

“It’s one version of The Scream by Munch,” Falcone explained. “I believe it’s been missing from Copenhagen since 2004. This…” He stared at another work, a smaller, older canvas. “.…looks like Poussin, I believe.”

There were pictures here he thought he recognised from Zecchini’s register, works perhaps by Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, and a host of earlier artists beyond his knowledge, unless they were all very good fakes.

He moved towards the farthest corner, an area where not the slightest mote of moonlight fell, and one which was still in shadow from some large canvas under wraps covering the entire diagonal of the space there.

“What we have here, gentlemen,” Falcone went on, “is a storeroom for stolen works of art, one that seems to have been sitting beneath our noses, in the centre of Rome, for years.”

Falcone stopped and kept a firm grip on his gun. “It would be fitting,” he added, “if we could match up these objects with their so called owner, don’t you think?”

In one quick movement he threw aside the sackcloth over the painting and stepped behind the frame. The man was there on the floor cowering, hands around his knees, head deep in his thighs, not saying a word.

Nino Tomassoni was wearing a grubby pair of striped pyjamas and stank of sweat and fear.

“This is a fine collection,” Falcone said drily. “Would you care to tell us where it came from?”

The figure on the floor began rocking back and forth like a child.

“I asked a question,” Falcone added.

The man mumbled something.

“Excuse me?”

“He will k-k-kill me…” the crouching man stuttered.

The expression in his bulbous eyes was more fear than insanity. Falcone wondered how long Tomassoni had been hiding here, and how he had come to know the events of the night. There was so much to ask, so many ways in which this strange little man could provide the means by which they might find a way, finally, into the depths of the Palazzo Malaspina and close the door on its owner forever.

“No one will kill you, Nino,” he said calmly. “Not if we look after you. But all these paintings…”

Falcone cast his eyes around the room. This was a miraculous find in itself. He could scarcely wait to call Vincenzo Esposito to tell him the news.

“I fear this looks very bad.”

Out of interest, he lifted the sackcloth on a small canvas to his left and found himself staring at a jumble of geometric shapes and human limbs that seemed to him, perhaps erroneously, reminiscent of Miró.

“Did he bring the painting here?” he asked.

The man said nothing and stayed on the floor, holding his knees, mute and resentful.

“The Caravaggio?” Falcone persisted. “After he stole it from the studio tonight, and killed your friend Buccafusca along the way, did he bring it here? If so, may I see it?”

“That animal was not my friend,” the figure on the floor muttered, still rocking.

“This is your decision,” Falcone observed with a shrug. “We will find out in any case. I was merely offering you an opportunity to demonstrate your willingness to cooperate. Without it…”

Tomassoni stabbed an accusing finger at him from the floor. “The Caravaggio was mine! Ours. It always has been. Since the very beginning.”

This was beyond Falcone. “I do not understand.”

“No! You don’t! It’s ours!” He glanced around the shrouded canvases mournfully. “It’s the only one that is. And now I don’t even have it. Now…”

He stopped. Falcone smiled. It was an answer of sorts. These interviews always began with a small, seemingly insignificant moment of acquiescence. It would suffice.

“Perhaps you would like to get dressed,” he suggested. “This is going to be a long day. I think pyjamas are not the best idea. You should bring some of your other things too. Whatever you want from this home of yours. I believe you will be in custody for a while. Safe and secure, I promise that.”

The man shuffled to his feet. He was short and overweight, perhaps thirty-five. Not Malaspina’s class or kind. Nino Tomassoni must have offered something different, something particular, for him to have moved in those circles.

“And thank you for those messages,” Falcone added. “The emails you sent to my colleague. They will work in your favour. As to the postings on the statues…”

He didn’t like the look on Tomassoni’s face. It was vicious and full of spite.

“What about them?” the man asked.

“Were they your work too?”

“For all the good it did me,” he replied. “I’ll get my things.”

Falcone bent down and retrieved the object he had noticed on the floor from the start. It was a specialist radio, and when he turned it on it was easy to see the unit was tuned to a police frequency. It wasn’t hard to understand how Tomassoni had worked out what had happened that evening. Buccafusca’s death had been broadcast on the network. The threat to himself must have been obvious after that.

“This is illegal too,” the inspector noted. “I hope I shall have reason to ignore it.”

The little man swore again and shuffled through the mill of bodies, then hurried downstairs a floor and walked into the bedroom, closing the door behind him.

He got there so quickly Falcone was several steps behind, and fuming at the way the officers on the landing simply let him through.

“Rossi,” he yelled at the man closest to the door, “what the hell do you think you’re doing letting a suspect slam a door in your face like that? Get in there and watch him.”

He knew what had happened the moment he heard the noise: a loud, repetitive rattle that seemed to shake the very fabric of the ancient, fragile building in which they stood.

“Get down!” Falcone yelled, and pushed the nearest man he could find to the floor, watching the rest of them follow, terrified. A storm of dislodged plaster began to descend on them. The ancient wallpaper rippled beneath the deafening force of gunfire.

The nearest officer to the door got a foot to it, then retreated back behind the wall. Falcone could see — just — what was happening beyond the threshold, and imagine in his mind’s eye how this came about.

He had left the vehicles outside unattended, needing every man he had. Now someone was standing on one of them, possibly the Jeep that was directly beneath the window, and letting loose with some kind of repeating weapon — a machine gun or pistol — directly through the glass, straight into the dancing, shaking body of Nino Tomassoni.

Flailing across the floor, intent on avoiding the hail of shells that was pouring into the building, Falcone rolled towards the staircase, found it, then, followed by two other men who had the same idea, half fell, half stumbled down the steps to the ground floor. Clinging to the damp wall, he made his way towards the entrance and the collapsed door they had brought down earlier.

“Behind me,” Falcone ordered, and watched the shining cobbles and the dim streetlights, gun in hand, wondering what this might be worth against the man outside.

The noise had stopped. By the time he felt the cold night air drifting in through the empty space at the front, another sound had replaced it: an engine at full rev, squealing across cobbles.

“Damn you,” Falcone swore.

He threw himself out into the street, men yelling at his back, screaming at them to keep cover.

The figure was no longer on the roof of the Jeep. Falcone had no idea where he’d gone to. A black slug-like Porsche coupe was wheeling across the greasy cobbles, describing a fast arc in the space in front of the old church.

As he watched, it disappeared behind the group of police vehicles, and Leo Falcone found himself running again, with men by his side, good men, angry men, weapons in their hands, heat rising in their heads.

“Behind me!” he bellowed again, and forced them to fall back behind his extended arm.

A single raking line of repeat fire raged through the night air on the far side of the convoy of blue vehicles. He fell below the window line of the van in front, aware, as he did so, that thin metal was no protection against a modern shell.

It lasted a second, no more. They were going. This was a warning, not an act of intent. Falcone raised his weapon and pointed it across the open space of the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina, back towards the Christmas lights still burning in the Corso, conscious that the men around him were doing the same.

“Do not fire,” he said firmly. “Do not fire.”

In the distance, walking down the road, struggling to get out of the way as the Porsche found the street and roared off towards the Piazza Venezia and the open roads of Rome, was a straggling group of revellers, with stupid Christmas hats on their heads, a bunch of happy young partygoers looking for the way home.

“Get the control room on this,” he ordered, barking the license plate number of the black vehicle at them as he returned towards the door. “As if they won’t know already.”

He raced up the stairs and found the bedroom. The place was beginning to stink of gas.

“Find the source of that smell,” he barked at the nearest officer. “The last thing we want in here is an explosion.”

Nino Tomassoni lay on the floor of his squalid bedroom, openmouthed, eyes staring at the ceiling, his blood-soaked, shattered body strewn with broken glass.

“There goes the witness,” Rossi observed with a degree of unhelpful frankness Falcone found quite unnecessary. “Do we have any more?”

“Just the one,” Falcone murmured. “Franco Malaspina will not touch her, I swear.”