The Garden of Evil

One

Gianni Peroni didn’t fit in a bunny suit. He wandered round the overcrowded storeroom looking faintly obscene, the white plastic overall clinging tightly to his large frame, its colour almost the same shade as his face. He was angry, too, and willing to make this plain to anyone who came in proximity, from Inspector Leo Falcone on down.

It was now mid-afternoon, two hours since the Questura got the call about suspicious cries coming from the address in the Vicolo del Divino Amore. A routine visit by a uniformed officer had rapidly escalated into a full-blown murder inquiry, with Inspector Falcone deputed to lead the team. It was, Nic Costa felt, a little like old times. Teresa Lupo and her chief morgue monkey, Silvio Di Capua, were poring over two bodies, both the apparent victims of violent attacks. Scene-of-crime officers were starting to pick their way around a room that looked like a forensic team’s nightmare: spatters of wild colour, and blood and dirt and dust, were everywhere — on the floor, on the walls, on the grubby tables and chairs. It seemed much like an artist’s studio. There were easels and used pots of paint, some commercial household brands, some artistic. There was also what appeared to be a substantial canvas some way behind the two corpses on the floor, now outlined by white chalk and tended by Teresa and her team of acolytes. Costa knew that he would have to see that before he left, but for now he would leave it as it was, hidden under a green velvet coverlet so large it draped down both back and front, obscuring it from view entirely.

Some things had changed, though.

“Sovrintendente.”

Falcone’s voice echoed clear and commanding in the cold empty space. Costa daydreamed. He’d spoken to Emily on the journey over. She was in a class at the architectural school in the Piazza Borghese, no more than two minutes’ walk away. Costa had mentioned his destination, though not the purpose. From the warm, inquisitive tone of her voice, he knew what she’d do: walk down into the narrow, dark lane and try to take a look for herself. Emily still yearned to be in law enforcement, even though her architectural career seemed about to blossom, thanks to an internship with one of the city’s largest partnerships.

“Sovrintendente,” Falcone repeated, more loudly. The old inspector was now almost fully recovered from a recent gunshot wound. He had a slight limp, nothing more. Inside the Questura, Falcone was once more, if not the top dog, a substantial intellectual force, the officer to whom the awkward cases were assigned. He was also a man at peace with himself again, apparently happily alone after a short, odd romantic entanglement. And, like Peroni and Teresa, utterly delighted to have attended the brief civil marriage ceremony at which Costa and Emily Deacon had become man and wife three months ago to this day.

The senior officer leaned over and whispered into Costa’s ear, “Nic!”

“I’m sorry,” Costa found himself stuttering. It had been a remarkable year. The tragedy of a child lost in a miscarriage, a wedding, and then, returning to the Questura the previous Monday, discovering his promotion had come through while he and Emily were on a too-brief weekend break in Sicily. “Sir,” he added.

“And so you should be,” Falcone complained. “Your honeymoon is over, Officer. Pay attention, please.”

While he spoke, Falcone was watching Gianni Peroni fulminate by the side of the two bodies, spitting complaints in the direction of anyone within earshot. The inspector was wondering perhaps what the big man, once an inspector himself, thought of his partner’s rise through the ranks. It was certainly a subject that had occupied Costa’s thoughts since he returned to work, and one he had to discuss with Peroni, soon.

“What would you do in my shoes?” Falcone asked, eyes sparking with interest, hand on his trim silver beard.

“Seal the room and keep it sealed,” Costa answered instantly.

Falcone nodded. “Why?” he asked.

“It’s going to take days before forensic manage to sweep this place properly. It’s a mess. We’ll need to bring in experts, and if that’s to mean anything we must make sure there is no unnecessary disturbance. Also…”

He glanced at the manpower crammed into the cramped and jumbled space around them. There were thirteen people there, including two photographers and three civilians from the media department, two of them trainees, who were preparing what to say to the press and TV. Only seven people were serving police officers. This seemed to be the way of things lately. The investigative process was becoming muddied, mired in procedure, dictated more by lawyers than the need for the swift, clear discovery of facts and culpability.

“I think we need to keep the numbers down as much as possible. There’s a lot of material in here. I know everyone’s careful. But all the same…”

The inspector grimaced. “We do these things by rote these days, Sovrintendente. The first act, always, is to pick up the manual and read what it says. You’re right…”

Having little patience with politeness, the inspector brusquely ordered the media team to get out and watched them slink towards the door, casting mute and furious glances in their wake. Then he folded his long arms and glanced towards the two corpses in front of him, a thoughtful finger momentarily stroking his silver goatee, a familiar expression of wry amusement in his angular, tanned face.

“On the other hand,” he added with nonchalant ease, “it would appear to be a relatively straightforward matter.”

A man of late middle age, wearing a smart suit and an expression frozen halfway between horror and simple mute fury, lay curled on his side, clutching his stomach, gripping himself in the taut, terrified agony of a vicious death. The black wooden shaft of what Costa suspected would turn out to be a large kitchen knife protruded from beneath his rib cage, staining his white shirt with a ragged patch of dark, congealing blood. Next to him was the naked corpse of a much younger woman, so thin her rib cage was showing.

The contrast between the two was marked. The woman’s face, which had a still, bloodless beauty that transcended life, was almost peaceful. She lay on her back, legs slightly raised and akimbo, in a position that could, possibly, have been post-coital. She had short fiery red hair, which was disarrayed, as if by some kind of violence, and somewhat greasy, maybe from sweat. There was a wound in her throat, perhaps a hand’s span long and probably from a knife, logically the same one that killed the man. The cut ran down towards her breastbone, though it was not deep, it seemed to Costa, since there was much less blood than appeared on the shirt of the other victim. Her pale grey eyes, like those of her apparent attacker, were wide open, though much more distended, as if through some kind of medical condition. They stared fixedly at the ceiling in an unwavering gaze.

Her lips were a cold shade of blue, starting to resemble the same dull tone he could see in her dead eyes.

“He didn’t do it,” Peroni insisted.

“He?” Falcone asked.

“He,” the big man responded, stabbing a fat finger in the air. “Aldo Caviglia. I arrested him once for stealing on the buses. I’ve warned him twice too. He’s a petty thief. A sad, confused little guy. He steals…” Peroni looked pale. He was never happy around death. “He stole wallets for a living, for God’s sake. The last time I caught him he promised he’d stop.”

Costa noticed something about the dead man’s appearance: a bulge in his jacket. He knelt down beside Teresa Lupo, receiving a warning glance from the pathologist as he did so.

“Touch nothing without my permission,” the pathologist warned.

“The pocket?”

Teresa looked, saw what he was getting at, then reached into the man’s jacket and withdrew, in her gloved fingers, a woman’s expensive leather wallet.

Peroni swore.

“Sometimes people lie, Gianni,” Teresa told him. “It’s shocking, I know. But at least…”

She was sifting through the contents and dropping each item one by one into an evidence bag.

“.…He’s given you some ID for her.”

Teresa straightened up and showed them the card. The three police officers read it.

“French,” she said. “Might have known.”

“Why?” Falcone asked immediately.

“You really don’t notice much about women, do you, Leo? Alive or dead. She’s wearing mascara, so beautifully applied I can’t quite believe it. She still has perfect makeup, despite all that’s happened here. The only other thing she has on are a couple of diamond earrings too beautiful for most of us to contemplate. Also…”

The pathologist nodded towards some large white bags beneath the paint-stained window.

“She was wearing a winter outfit that must have cost a fortune. And the shoes. In this weather. This was not someone out for a day’s sightseeing, I can tell you that. She was dressed up for something. A business meeting. A date.”

“Were the clothes torn?” Costa asked.

“Not in the slightest,” Teresa said. “They were folded up nice and neatly, the way you do before you go to bed.” She glanced again at the card. “Perhaps she was doing business on behalf of the Louvre.”

Falcone coughed into his fist.

“Sorry, sorry,” she added. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”

“Very much so,” Falcone agreed. “Did they have sex?”

Teresa dropped the card in the evidence bag, passed it to Di Capua, and frowned down at the dead Caviglia on the floor.

“These two? No. I am guessing here. I’ll tell you more later, once we have them back in the morgue. But some sneaking feminine intuition tells me that couples who expire post-copulation rarely do so with one partner naked and the other fully dressed and looking like he’s going to an interview with his bank manager. Even his zip’s done up, Leo. Think it through for yourself.”

“She is naked,” Costa pointed out.

“I said ‘they’ didn’t do it. She did. And rough sex, too, though not necessarily rape. There’s minimal bruising. Unprotected, though. I’ll have your DNA sample ready first thing in the morning. A good dinner says it isn’t that of our light-fingered friend here. Nor,” she added quickly, “do I think she killed him. It’s just meant to look that way, and not well orchestrated either. Someone was in a hurry. Look at the details. She’s on the floor. And there’s a perfectly good chaise longue over there. Why would they get down to it here? We would also have to assume that she killed him first, then expired herself. Remarkable in itself, and even more so if she then managed to lie down flat, quite unclothed, on a cold stone floor, all ready for the grave. No—”

Falcone held up a lean, tanned hand, demanding silence. “Enough,” he said quietly. “Leave us something to do. Please. Clearly we are meant to believe something here.”

“Aldo Caviglia couldn’t hurt a fly,” Peroni insisted. “Why would someone pick on a poor old soul like him?”

“That’s what we’re supposed to find out,” Costa said automatically, and was shocked that it sounded like an admonition.

“Thank you,” Peroni said quietly. “Sir.”

“Blue lips,” Costa murmured, ignoring him.

Teresa was staring at the dead woman’s face, interested, but worried also, it seemed to Costa, by the distance there had to be between a sovrintendente and an agente who was more than twenty years his senior.

“Quite,” she said. “Do you notice the smell?”

“I thought this whole place smelled bad,” Costa said. “Drains.”

She grimaced, as if she’d missed something important. “It does stink, you’re right. But she has a particular smell. A little like sweaty socks, in case you’re too polite to say.”

“Is it unusual?” he asked.

“Not around any cops I know,” she answered. “But on a woman like this?”

Watched by Falcone, Costa knelt down and leaned over the corpse. The smell was obvious: direct and pungent.

“It takes an hour or so to degrade that much,” Teresa remarked.

“What does?” Falcone demanded.

“Amyl nitrate.”

“A sex drug?” Costa asked, astonished.

“Hold on there,” the pathologist cautioned. “Amyl nitrate is a very useful pharmaceutical in the right circumstances.” She was staring directly at Costa, challenging him to think. “It’s relief for angina. And emergency revival in heart cases.”

“Blue lips,” he said again.

“Quite.” She was grinning. “No wonder you promoted him, Leo.”

Falcone sighed. “So this woman died of a heart attack. During sex? And the drug was there either for stimulation or to revive her?”

“I am merely a pathologist,” Teresa replied. She held out a hand. Peroni took it and helped her to her feet. “If I’m to help you with the rest, I need to get these two out of here and safe and warm to my lair. We have everything we’re going to get in situ. Silvio can stay behind and supervise the rest. I’ll need her medical history from Paris. You don’t mind if we handle that?”

“No,” the inspector said, nodding. “Just the medical side. You agree?”

“Of course,” she concurred, smiling pleasantly.

“I told you Caviglia didn’t do it!” Peroni pointed out.

She smiled and patted his arm. “So you did. Good for you.”

“He stole her wallet, though,” Falcone added. “He came here for some reason. He saw something…”

The room had gone quiet. The other officers who’d been working alongside the forensic team waited, except for the pair who seemed to be lifting some loose masonry close to the rotting iron window.

“Perhaps he saw this,” Costa suggested. He walked over to the large easel behind the corpses and, very carefully, removed the green velvet drape, exposing the canvas.

Not a word was uttered for a good half a minute. Not a breath even, it seemed.

“Perhaps he did,” Tereasa whispered, breaking the silence.

No one could take their eyes off the painting. Even the presence of two corpses, one clearly murdered, the other dead through strange and suspicious circumstances, did nothing to distract their attention from the canvas at that moment.

Falcone walked over to join Costa, his gaze fixed on the shining naked form, three-quarters life-size, in front of them.

“I need to know who owns this property,” the inspector ordered. “I want Caviglia checked with the rape unit just in case. Sovrintendente?”

Costa was lost in the swirl of the painted flesh, the extraordinary expression on the subject’s face, and the entire artfulness of the work, with its stylistic flourishes, the names of which came back to him from the lost years when he’d spent most of his endless, empty free time in the city’s art galleries. Sfumato, chiaroscuro, tenebrismo…

“Sovrintendente!” Falcone repeated, unamused this time.

“We need to find an art specialist,” Costa replied eventually, finally able to turn his attention away from the painting. “And good security.”

“This is a murder scene,” Falcone snapped. “Of course we need good security.”

“I’m not an expert. But this is either a genuine and unknown Caravaggio, or an excellent attempt to forge one. Either way, I think…”

Falcone glowered at the canvas. Since Costa had unveiled it, there hadn’t been a moment’s activity in the room.

“The painting can wait,” the inspector grumbled, then strode over to the easel and roughly dragged the green velvet drape back across the frame and the tantalising figure of the woman.

“Sir?”

It was one of the pair who had been working by the window. The cop looked shocked and a little pale. The three men went over to look.

The uniformed officers had laid out what they’d found. It was a collection of photographs. Costa picked up a couple of them.

“These didn’t get printed in any lab,” he said. “This is cheap, thin paper. The kind you use at home on a printer.”

Peroni leaned over his shoulder. “No lab is going to develop those, now, are they?” he observed.

“Where did you find them?” Falcone asked.

“There was a loose flagstone beneath the window,” one of the officers replied. “We just looked. These are just a few. There must be fifty or more in there.”

“Keep looking,” Falcone ordered, then took the photos and spread them out on a dusty chair.

Costa stared at the images on the flimsy homemade prints. It was clear that they had been taken in this very room. There was the same stone floor. In places he could see splashes of paint, and even a pot and a brush. In one photograph there was the corner of the green drape used for the canvas they’d uncovered too.

There was the link. Every photo portrayed the head and torso of a naked woman. Most of them looked foreign. Some were black, with the overblown hair and excessive makeup of the African hookers who worked the suburbs.

It was impossible to judge the expressions on their faces. It could have been rapture, sexual or spiritual. Or pain in the final moments of life.

He turned to Peroni.

“Do you know any of them, Gianni?” Costa asked.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Peroni roared.

Costa cursed his own stupidity. The big man had once been one of the most effective officers working the illicit sex scene in Rome. His career had collapsed because once — just once — he’d slept with a vice girl himself.

“I’m sorry. I phrased that very badly. You worked vice for many years, and very well indeed,” Costa explained patiently. “I think these women look like hookers. But if you thought so, too, it would mean a lot more.”

Peroni sighed, then shrugged apologetically. “They look like hookers.” He glanced back at the corpse of the Frenchwoman, now surrounded by attendants making the body bag ready. “She doesn’t, though. She…”

Peroni stared at the photos again. Then he picked one up in his gloved hand.

It was a muscular black woman with a head of long hair, artificially straightened and glossy. She seemed to be trying very hard to look as if she were in the throes of ecstasy. All the women in the photographs did.

“I’ve booked her,” Peroni said. “Nigerian. Quite a nice kid.” He stared out of the grimy window for a moment. Then he spoke again. “She’s on the missing persons list. Has been for a few weeks. I saw it on the board. I recognised…”

Falcone was cursing under his breath again, and this time Costa was sure there was something specific behind his reaction.

Then, before he could ask, there was a brief pained scream from the team raising the flagstones. Costa looked at the men. They were standing back from the area on which they’d been working. The blood had drained from their faces. One of them looked ready to throw up.

Falcone was there first, even with the limp. He took one look at what was emerging from beneath the damp, algaed stone.

“Doctor,” he said, just loudly enough to bring Teresa Lupo to his side. Costa and Peroni moved forward to look. Then the big man swore and walked away.

Something wrapped tightly in semitransparent plastic, like a gigantic artificial cocoon, was emerging from the grey, damp earth beneath the solid floor of the studio. Costa glanced at it and started to walk, rapidly, around the room. There were several areas where the grey flagstones appeared to have been moved recently, sometimes hidden by paint pots, sometimes by empty easels or furniture.

When he got back to Falcone, Teresa Lupo was hovering over the discovery with a scalpel in her hand.

“I don’t think this will be pretty, I’m afraid,” she said firmly. “Those of a delicate nature should leave now.”

Costa stayed and watched. He and Falcone were the only police officers who did. The face beneath the plastic was grey and dirty and, in spite of the substantial period that must have passed since she was killed, undoubtedly that of the Nigerian woman Peroni had recognised. The stench that rose the moment Teresa made the incision would, he thought, live with him for a long time.

“I don’t think she’s alone,” Costa said, catching Falcone’s eye, realising, to his dismay, that the old inspector did not, for some reason, appear to be surprised. “We have to—”

There was a sound from outside. Not in the alley, somewhere else. Costa glanced behind the painting. There was a dusty door there, beyond an ancient dining table covered in paint stains, half hidden behind some old sackcloth drapes. It was ajar.

“He’s still here,” Costa muttered, then leapt the table and headed for whatever lay beyond, out in the cold grey day.

Two

It was a courtyard of a kind, a messy place of junk: old wooden cases, discarded furniture, a couple of tall metal filing cabinets rusting to nothing on the green cobblestones. A man could easily hide here. A single narrow corridor, dank with moss and decay, led off from the far corner, inwards, through the heart of whatever greater building — the Palazzo Malaspina, Costa’s memory wanted to tell him — sprawled across this hidden enclave of the city, then, he assumed, onto the street. And freedom.

Falcone was barking orders into his radio, demanding immediate action from the officers outside in the vicolo. Costa wanted to tell him this narrow malodorous alley didn’t run that way. It burrowed deep into the labyrinthine palace itself. Stumbling out into the grey daylight of the yard, he could hear the crush of bodies behind him, Peroni’s voice in the lead, above the tense chatter of men working themselves into the state of mind that went with a pursuit.

Costa stopped and took his bearings, thinking. Why would a murderer wait so close to the scene?

Some did. Some couldn’t resist it.

One of the officers who’d found the buried corpse appeared at his side. With the automatic instinct that seemed to come with the job for some, he’d taken out his gun and was now holding it in front, uncertainly, wavering between the high filing cabinets, an obvious place for someone to hide, and a pile of old furniture near the wall.

Costa pushed down the barrel of the weapon. “No guns,” he insisted. “It could just be a kid.”

And that was a stupid thing to say, he thought. Kids wouldn’t mess around places like this. It was all too dark and dank and scary, particularly if you peeked in the windows and saw what was going on inside, beneath the placid gaze of that naked woman on the canvas.

The grimy yard was at least ten metres on each side, and half of it crammed with junk, some of it looking as if it had been thrown there years ago. The surrounding building rose six storeys high, past grimy barred windows, a line of scarred black brick leading to the leaden December sky, filled, at that moment, by a flock of swirling starlings.

Costa looked up. He didn’t see a single face at any of the rainstreaked panes of near-opaque glass in the storeys above. Then he stared down the long narrow corridor leading to God knew what. It was empty, and towards the end turned into a tunnel, a pool of darkness formed by the overhanging building above. A tiny square of dim daylight was just visible at the end. There wasn’t time for a man to escape them so quickly, surely. Nor could he have got there without making a sound.

“Assume he’s here,” he told the officer quietly. “We’ll go through the junk piece by piece until we find something or he moves. Assume—”

There was a voice. Peroni was bellowing. Behind a rotting wooden desk, its metal legs like skeletal limbs made of rust, was the shadow of a figure, crouching, only the shoulders, torso, and legs visible.

Something struck Costa the moment he saw it. The man wasn’t trembling. He was as still and calm as a statue.

“You have to come out of there,” Costa said calmly, walking forward, signalling to the officer with the revolver to keep it trained down towards the stones just in case.

“Sovrintendente!” Falcone yelled.

Costa ignored him and continued walking forward. “You need to come out now, sir.” He spoke in a voice he hoped was low on threat but brooked no argument. “This is a crime scene and we have to talk to you.”

The figure was no more than three or four strides away. He didn’t move.

“Start moving!” Peroni bellowed.

Costa glanced back at the men behind him. Falcone was silent now. It wasn’t like the old inspector.

“Out!” Peroni roared, and that did it. The long dark form — the intruder was dressed in dark khaki, some kind of military-style top and trousers, with black boots tied tight around the ankle, just like a soldier — was starting to move.

“Stand by the wall,” Costa ordered. “Hands above you. This is just a routine matter. Just a…”

He didn’t go on. The figure had worked its way free, with an agile athleticism that gave Costa pause for thought. He still couldn’t see a face. Just a long, lithe body, muscular and fit, at ease in the anonymous military clothing.

“Dammit!” Falcone shouted, pushing his way through the crowd of officers jamming the free space in the courtyard. “This is my investigation, Costa. You do what I tell you.”

“Sir…” he said, and watched the figure in khaki emerge from behind the rotting carcass of a mattress, pink and grey stripes hanging down in ragged tatters from the burst mouldy body.

The man wore a black full-face gas mask with a glass eye shield that revealed nothing at all. He had a repeating shotgun in his right hand, held tight with a professional deliberation, and, in his left, some kind of canister that was already beginning to smoke at the handle.

“Weapons!” Falcone cried.

Costa wasn’t really listening. Sometimes these things came too late. The smoking canister was already spinning in their direction, turning in the air, releasing a curling line of pale fumes that carried before it the noxious smell Costa knew from the last riot he’d had the privilege to attend.

The thing burst with a soft explosion, and a dense white cloud instantly enveloped them. Coughing, eyes streaming, he instinctively stumbled clear, down towards where he expected the exit corridor to be, eyes tight shut, a handkerchief clutched across his mouth and nose.

Gasping for clean air, aware of the curses and screeches of the men behind him, trapped in the noxious fumes, Costa was sure of one thing: Falcone would haul him over the coals for the way he had handled this particular encounter. Perhaps with good cause.

Then, as he half knelt, half fell against the grubby courtyard wall, something brushed his shoulder.

He looked up. The khaki figure was standing there, still in his mask, which hid, Costa guessed, a broad, self-satisfied smile.

The shotgun was pointed directly into Costa’s face, the barrel no more than a hand’s length away.

Costa coughed, tried to look the man in the eye, and said, “You’re under arrest.”

Then he watched, feeling a little baffled and not, for a single moment, frightened.

Nothing happened. Costa looked again. Somehow the fabric of his would-be killer’s military gloves had gotten tangled in the gap between the trigger and the metal guard, preventing the firing of the weapon through nothing more than a shred of fabric and luck. It was a small and temporary thing to keep a man alive, but Costa wasn’t much minded to think on it. Instead, he kicked out hard with his right leg and hit the gunman painfully on the shin. The shotgun tilted up towards the sky and fired, with an explosive screech that re-bounded round the black brick and sprayed hot pellets through the air. A soft lead rain dappled the ground around Costa.

Then the gas returned, and this time it was in his eyes, stinging like wounds from a million crazed bees, sending tears streaming down his cheeks, bile surging in his throat.

Costa swore. Behind him men were screaming. He rolled out of the drifting smoke haze and saw the brown-clad figure disappearing down the corridor, into the dark pool of shadow, towards the grey patch of light at the end.

With an aching reluctance, he lurched down the slippery cobblestones, coughing, choking, realising there was no one from the team behind in much of a state to help him.

The memory of the shotgun barrel poking in his face burned as badly as the tear gas. He took one more look down the alley. Whoever it was had got a good head start on them all.

Costa watched as the military form emerged from the shadows and fell into the bright light at the distant wall, then stopped, turned, ripped off the gas mask, hitched the shotgun up to his shoulder, and stared back at him.

He wore a black military hood beneath, the kind the antiterrorist people wore, tight black cotton with two tiny slits for eyeholes. It was too far to take a worthwhile shot from this distance. The man was, surely, making some kind of point.

Costa watched as the hood contorted around the mouth, the lips closed, then formed a perfect O, and those distant hands closed round the trigger.

Somehow he could hear the single word the figure was mouthing, even though that was impossible.

Boom, the man said, and then laughed.

What happened next came so naturally Costa didn’t even have to think about it. He ripped the service pistol out of his shoulder holster, took some vague aim down the brick corridor ahead, and let loose four rounds in rapid succession.

The figure in khaki had fallen back against the wall, twitching and shrieking in a way that Costa, against his own instincts, found satisfying.

But it wasn’t a wound. It was shock and fear and some kind of outrage that he should be a target in the first place. The man hauled himself to his feet and dashed a vicious glance back down the alley before he stumbled to the right and out of sight. But at least the brief moment of fear Costa had instilled in him redressed the balance a little.

Without waiting to see what condition the others were in, he dashed towards the brick tunnel ahead, lurching like a sick man, holding the weapon loose and impotent by his side, dimly aware he had only a couple of rounds left in it now, against a furious, murderous individual with a repeating shotgun who was surely about to try to bury himself inside the heart of Rome on a busy holiday afternoon.

There was no time to radio for assistance. He wasn’t sure he had the voice to make the call anyway. All Costa could do was run, and, with the old skills he still retained from his marathon days, he found that rhythm almost instantly.

When he emerged from the cold black overhang of the building at the end of the passageway, he blinked at the sunlight, and the location. He was now just round the corner from the Piazza Borghese. As he squinted his stinging eyes against the sudden sun, he saw a khaki figure limping towards the square.

Inside his jacket his phone was ringing. He recognised the special tone. It was Emily calling. She’d have to wait.

Three

The rain had left the cobblestones of the Piazza Borghese greasy and black. This was one of the few open spaces between the Corso and the river. Every day hundreds came here to park, strewing vehicles everywhere: cars and vans, motorbikes and scooters. Students from the nearby colleges were gathered in one corner, arms full of books and work folders, laughing, getting ready for lunch. Costa couldn’t see anyone of interest, no athletic, brownclad figure with a shotgun anywhere. Just a few shoppers and office workers walking the damp pavement.

Costa scanned the square, wondering where a fugitive might run in this part of Rome. There were so many places. South towards the Pantheon and the Piazza Navona was a labyrinth of alleys that could hide a hundred fleeing killers. West lay the bridge over the river, the Ponte Cavour, and escape into the plain business streets beyond the Palace of Justice. And both north and east… street after street of shops, apartment blocks, and anonymous offices. He didn’t know where to begin.

Backup would arrive soon. The officers from the studio, Gianni Peroni, a furious Falcone.

Costa took one last good look around him and sighed. Then the phone rang again. That familiar tone again. This time he answered it.

“May I take it you’re hunting for a gentleman wearing a Rambo outfit, a very suspicious-looking expression, and trying, rather poorly, to hide the fact he’s got a rifle or something on his person?” she asked.

Once an FBI agent, always an FBI agent.

“Just tell me where,” Costa ordered his wife quietly, grimly.

“I’ve followed him to the Mausoleum of Augustus. I could be wrong but I think he may be headed down into it. Good place to hide, among all those bums.”

Costa knew the monument, though not well. Roman emperors got mixed deals when it came to their heritage. Hadrian’s mausoleum turned into the Castel Sant’Angelo. Augustus, one of the most powerful emperors Rome had ever known, came off much worse. Over the centuries, his burial site had been everything from a pleasure garden to an opera house. Now, after Mussolini laid waste to it in preparation for his own tomb, one he never came to occupy, it was a sad wreck of stone set in its own rough green moat of grass, half hidden between the 1930s Fascist offices set behind the Corso and the high embankment by the Tiber. The scrubby city grass was a favourite sleeping place for local tramps. The interior was a warren of dank, crumbling tunnels. It was so unsafe the public had been barred years ago.

“Thanks,” he told Emily. “Now go get a coffee. Somewhere a long way from here.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He started running north, towards the river. There was construction work everywhere. The authorities were creating a new home for the Ara Pacis, the Altar of Peace, one of the great legacies of Augustus, and a sight that had been withheld from Rome and the world for too long. But for now the area was a mess of cranes and closed roads, angry traffic and baffled pedestrians wondering where the pavement had gone.

He rounded a vast hoarding advertising the new Ara Pacis building and found himself facing the southern side of the mausoleum, with its locked entrance and steps leading down to the interior. It looked more dismal and decrepit than he remembered: a rotting circle of once golden stone falling into stumps at the summit, crowned by grass and weeds and ragged shrubbery. A couple of tourists hovered near the padlocked gate, wondering whether to take photos. Beyond the railing, Costa could see a bunch of itinerants huddled around the familiar objects that went with homeless life in the city: bottles of wine, mounds of old clothing, and a vast collection of supermarket bags bulging with belongings.

Then, as he was about to dial in for assistance, his eyes came upon something worryingly familiar: a blonde woman in a long black winter coat. Emily was beyond the railings, just inside the mausoleum grounds. Costa briefly closed his eyes and murmured, “Wonderful.”

His wife was sitting on the wall of a weed-riddled flower bed just the other side of the tourists, trying to look like a visitor who’d plucked up the courage to vault the fence. And, to his eyes, doing a very bad job of it. She was too animated, too interested, to be genuinely absorbed by the miserable sight in front of her. As he was realising this, she turned, caught sight of him, nodded down towards the green ditch in front of her, and mouthed a single word: Here.

At that moment a vast lorry bearing construction equipment roared in front of him and stopped with a sudden deliberation that meant, Costa knew instantly, it wasn’t moving any farther. He dashed round the rear, a long way, heart thudding, found the temporary barrier for the works by the very side of the Ara Pacis, taking out his gun again, reminding himself there were now just two shots in the magazine, and probably no time to hope to reload as he ran.

When he rounded the timber hoardings, the tourists were still there. Emily was gone. His breathing halted for a moment. The police phone shook in his pocket. He took it out with trembling hands. It was Falcone.

“Where are you?” demanded the inspector.

“Augustus’s mausoleum. He’s inside. There are people around. We need to approach this carefully.”

“That goes without saying,” Falcone answered abruptly, and the line went dead.

“Indeed it does…” Costa murmured to himself.

He walked over to the tourists and told them to go somewhere else. They gaped at his face and his weapon, then fled. After that he climbed over the railings and scanned the area. The tramps were getting interested. One of them wandered over and demanded money. Costa brushed him aside. He came back.

“There’s a woman here. And a man in brown. Where?” Costa asked.

One of the seated figures, huddled in an ancient black overcoat, nodded round the corner, past some green and dingy buttress that looked ready to collapse.

“Thanks,” Costa said, nodding, and walked on, knowing, somehow, exactly what he’d see.

All the same, his heart froze the moment he found them.

They were no more than twenty metres away. The figure in khaki had met her — lured her? — into some dark dead end up against the deepest part of the moat, a place with no easy exit. He had his arm round Emily’s neck. She was struggling as he dragged her backwards. The gun dangled over her chest, its dull barrel pressing against the black fabric of her coat. He was dragging on the hood as he fought to restrain her.

Costa let his weapon fall to his side, walked forward, and tried to count his options. A thought occurred to him.

Emily knows you now.

The khaki figure dragged Emily all the way to the mausoleum’s stone wall. There was nowhere else to go. Costa walked forward until he was no more than five paces from them. His wife’s face was livid with rage. She never responded lightly to violence. The shotgun had been hard at her throat for at least part of their journey into this dark, shadowy alcove in the masonry. She looked mad and ready to act. The figure in khaki had no idea the woman in his grasp was a trained law enforcement officer, a woman who’d learned how to deal with hostage situations, skilled in self-defence, one who possessed, in all probability, more knowledge and experience in dealing with this kind of problem than Costa himself.

“Half the police in Rome will be here any minute.” Costa said it quietly. “So how bad do you want this to be?”

“I really don’t mind.”

The voice behind the black hood was interesting. Cultured. Haughty. Local.

“Everyone minds in jail,” Costa said. “Ten years or twenty. It’s a big difference.”

The figure laughed and Costa got the feeling, again, that this was someone outside the normal criminal mould.

“I’m not going to jail,” the man responded, without a trace of doubt in his voice. “Not ever.”

The gun was still tight across Emily’s chest. There was fury in her eyes, and a part of it, Nic knew, was aimed in his direction for taking this gentle, firm approach, for not trying to nail everything down with force and unbending iron will. Officers possessed different styles, Costa suddenly realised. This hoodlum had his wife, and a shotgun at her throat. All the training in the world meant nothing, sometimes, out in the cold light of day.

“Please…” Costa said, and held out his empty left hand in a gesture of pleading.

“Don’t beg, Nic,” Emily spat at him. “You never beg. It’s the worst thing. You can do. The worst…”

He should have expected it. In one swift movement, Emily lifted her right leg and twisted it behind her, raking the man’s shin with her sharp, hard heel. Then she arced her elbow back and jabbed it fiercely into his left shoulder, finding the most tender patch there as she fought free.

Costa took one step forward, raised the pistol in his right hand, and aimed it straight at the black hood, straight into those dark unseeable eyes.

Emily had hurt him. The man was crying with pain from the vicious scrape to his leg, hugging the shotgun to himself the way a child clung onto a toy.

“Let go of the gun,” Costa said softly, “or I will, I swear, shoot you.”

He stole a glance at his wife. Emily was to his right, just a step away, not close enough for the man to seize her again, not with the gun trained on him.

“Emily,” Costa said firmly. “You don’t belong here. Go back to the entrance. Now. Everybody will be here in a moment.”

He could feel the heat in her gaze. This wasn’t the way she thought things ought to be done.

“I’m fine. There’s nobody else here, Nic. Can’t you see?”

The man wasn’t whining anymore. He was watching the two of them from behind the hood, his head cocked slightly to one side, listening, taking this all in. Taking in the fact they were more than mere acquaintances. Costa was certain of that.

He hadn’t moved the shotgun an inch. It still lay in his arms like some evil infant. Then he mumbled something.

“What?” Costa asked.

“Pretty white girl,” the man in brown said.

He laughed, and it was more like a giggle.

He leaned forward, looking conspiratorial.

“You know her.”

“The gun,” Costa emphasised.

The hood nodded.

Slowly, he held it out with both hands, one on the barrel, one on the stock, parallel to his body. He didn’t do anything else.

“Drop the damned gun!” Costa yelled, and found his own weapon stiff in his outstretched hand.

What came next was a shrug. A gesture so Roman Costa had seen it a million times. When a street seller didn’t have the change.

When an errant motorist got caught for speeding. On all those small occasions when a tiny tear appeared in the fabric of an ordered life, and everyone — the culprit, the victim, the witness — just wished above all else they could pretend it had never happened, had never been seen.

“Pretty white girl,” the hooded figure murmured again, in a different voice, one lower, one more serious, a voice that made Costa feel a chill run down his backbone.

He could see it now. The gun was horizontal in his hands, of no threat to anyone ahead, apparently unusable. But the thumb of the man’s right hand — a thumb enclosed in the black cotton of a soldier’s glove — was hooked through the trigger piece, ready, poised.

And the barrel had a certain, intent direction.

“Em—” Costa whispered, and was immediately aware that something — some bellowing, inhuman roar — wiped out the final syllables of her name.