The Garden of Evil

One

It was a short walk from the studio to the Vicolo del Divino Amore, a brief journey blighted by memories of that final pursuit of the figure in the black hood, with the shotgun hidden beneath his khaki jacket. Snatches of that last dark day assaulted him with a cruel swiftness that had in no way diminished with time. The conversation with Agata Graziano, which was both amusing and, when it fell to the subject of the painting, a little disturbing, had proved a distracting interlude. But Emily still lay there always in his imagination, waiting. In spite of her sheltered background, Agata had seen through him from the outset. This was not entirely business. This was personal. It would be impossible to feel quiescent about the end of his life together with Emily until a resolution was reached.

The section of the street outside the studio’s green door was still cordoned off, with three bored-looking uniformed officers stationed outside. In front of them stood a small crowd of the curious: men and women in winter coats, looking disappointed to discover that the scene of the most infamous crime to have occurred in the city in years appeared so mundane from the outside. Costa could see at least two press photographers he knew and ducked through the huddle of bodies hastily in order to avoid them. There was, he thought, precious little in the narrow alley for the prurient. Short of more discoveries, the Vicolo del Divino Amore would surely soon return to some kind of normality.

He showed his pass and went in, preparing himself for Teresa Lupo’s performance. She usually had a theatrical touch to her revelations. Even so, she must have asked them back to this place for a reason. The studio was not as he remembered it, resembling more an archaeological dig than a crime scene. Forensic officers were still busily working there. They had set out a secure walk-through area, outlined by tape, across the worn flagstones. Beyond the yellow markers a small unit of specialists in identical white bunny suits — the same now worn by Falcone’s team — were bent over an array of careful excavations in the floor, each marked out by more tape, some carrying spades and pickaxes, others with evidence and body bags and scientific equipment.

Teresa herself stepped out from behind the barriers the moment Costa walked in, followed by her assistant, Silvio Di Capua. Falcone led the way, followed by Peroni, Costa, and, a little behind everyone else, a woman officer, Inspector Susanna Placidi, who was introduced as the head of the sexual crimes unit. Accompanying her was the last person Costa expected to see: Rosa Prabakaran, the young Indian detective who had been attacked and injured during an investigation the previous spring. After which, Costa had come to believe, she had disappeared from the Questura altogether.

The smell still lingered, pervasive and disgusting, a cloying foul stink.

Teresa Lupo glanced at him with a sad, sideways look, then said to them all, in a calm, formal manner, “Thank you for coming. I asked you here so that you might appreciate a little of the magnitude of the task ahead of us. We are not one-tenth of the way into it. What I will tell you today are simply a few initial findings. I hope for much more in the way of answers, but I can’t give you any timescale about when or how they will come. This place defies conventional analysis in many ways. It was, I think, a real art studio once. It was also… something else.” She glanced round the cold interior. “Something I don’t quite understand yet.”

“So long as we have a start,” Falcone observed impassively. “Some facts, please?” He eyed the excavations.

“Facts,” Teresa grumbled, and cast her round, glassy eyes over the excavations in the stone floor “They were all women, all black. All battered to death, from what I can determine. Nor are they all accounted for. There is female DNA here that doesn’t match that of any of the victims. Blood mainly, which means either these women got killed and taken somewhere else, or they escaped or were allowed to leave for some reason. The most recent corpse dates from less than a month ago. The oldest, maybe twelve or fourteen weeks. Beyond that… we have a wealth of potential forensic material, but nothing that is linked to any existing criminal records, or…” Here, she allowed herself a somewhat caustic glance at Susanna Placidi. “.…anyone fresh to try them out against.”

Costa was beginning to appreciate Falcone’s despair. “Wouldn’t it have been obvious there were corpses here?” he asked. “Surely someone would have noticed? The smell…”

Falcone intervened, as he’d promised. “Sovrintendente Costa is here out of courtesy,” the inspector announced. “We all share in his grief, though none of us can conceive of its depth, of course. I asked him to attend this one meeting so that he could appreciate that fact, and see how hard we are working to find those responsible for these crimes, and for the murder of his wife. After which he will return to compassionate leave.”

“Thank you,” Costa muttered, embarrassed. “The smell…” he insisted.

“Normally you’d be right, Nic,” Teresa replied, and seemed relieved that the conversation had moved on to practical matters. “But our friend — or friends, more likely — had a plan. A little scientific or industrial knowledge, too. You recall how the first victim we found looked?”

Costa thought it would be a long time before he forgot. The corpse had seemed to emerge from some kind of semi-transparent plastic cocoon.

“The bodies were stored in some way?” he asked.

“Out back the killer had a machine,” Teresa explained. “It’s exactly the same kind of device they use in industrial locations or packing plants. Anywhere you need to shrink-wrap something so that it’s airtight. It wasn’t going to keep that way forever. But it did a damned good job in the time they had.”

“He’s clever. He had everything covered in advance,” Susanna Placidi added. She was a neurotic-looking individual in civilian clothes — an ugly tweed wool jacket and a heavy green skirt — with a broad, miserable pale face that looked as if some unseen disappointment lurked around every corner.

“We found a stolen van around the corner,” Rosa Prabakaran added. “Not a large one. Just big enough for a corpse. There was a very expensive bouquet of lilies in it. And a coffin. Plain wood.”

“It was for the Frenchwoman,” Teresa said immediately. “What other reason would there be?”

“The French Embassy is more than anxious for news,” Falcone said. “What am I supposed to tell them?”

“What about Aldo Caviglia’s family?” Rosa snapped. “Don’t they feel the same way? Do you need to be white and middle-class to get attention around here?”

Peroni whistled and looked at the ceiling. Teresa gave the young woman detective a filthy look.

“Everyone gets dealt with around here,” she said patiently. “Caviglia was murdered. Until you people find the man who did it, there’s not much more to say. But the Frenchwoman’s different. Silvio?”

Di Capua shuffled over, a short stocky figure in his bunny suit, bald-headed, with a circlet of long, lank hair dangling over the collar of his top. He carried a set of papers and a very small laptop computer.

Teresa took some of the documents from her colleague and glanced at them. “You can tell the French Embassy she died of natural causes. If it’s any comfort, I don’t imagine we will be using those words about anyone else who’s expired hereabouts. The French won’t argue. I spoke to her doctor in Paris. He’s amazed she lived as long as she did, and frankly so am I. Congenital, incurable heart disease. Plus she had full-blown AIDS, which was unresponsive to any of the extremely expensive private treatments she’d been receiving for the past nine months. They kept away the big day for a while but not for much longer. She saw her physician the week before she died. He told her it was a matter of weeks. Perhaps a month at the most.”

“We’ve been through this before,” Peroni objected. “She still had a knife wound.”

“A scratch,” Di Capua said, and called up on the computer a set of colour photographs of the dead woman’s neck and face, then her pale, skeletal torso. They all crowded round to stare at the images there, frozen moments from a death that had taken place just a few steps from where they now stood. Even Peroni looked for a short while before he turned away in disgust. Costa could scarcely believe what he was seeing. Perhaps time or the light in the studio had played tricks. Perhaps the curious painting had disturbed his powers of observation, amplifying everything — the light, the atmosphere, his own imagination. When he’d first seen the body of Véronique Gillet on the old grimy floor, he’d been convinced she, like Aldo Caviglia, was the victim of some savage, unthinking act of violence. In truth, the knife mark barely cut through her white, flawless skin. Now the thin, straight line of dried blood looked more like an unfortunate accident with a rosebush than a meeting with a sharp, deadly weapon.

“She died of heart failure when he attacked her?” Peroni suggested, coming back into the conversation, pointedly not looking at the photos. “It’s still murder, isn’t it?”

“Oh, poor sweet innocent,” Teresa said with a sigh. “Take a deep breath. It’s time for me to shatter a few illusions about our pretty little curator from the Louvre. As I told you when we first arrived here, Ms. Gillet had intercourse shortly before she died. And no, I don’t think it was rape. There’s nothing to indicate that. No bruising, no marks on her body. No skin underneath her fingernails. This was consensual. Sex on the sofa, in front of that creepy painting.

With a knife to add a little spice to the occasion.”

Peroni looked out over the stinking holes in the flagstones to the dusty window. It had started to rain: faint grey streaks coming down in a soft slanting veil onto the smoke-stained stones of the centro storico.

Susanna Placidi glowered at the two pathologists. “How the hell can you know that?”

“Evidence,” Di Capua said simply. “Here. Here and here.”

He pointed to the photos. Elsewhere on Véronique Gillet’s body, on the upper arms, on the smooth plateau of her stomach, and beneath her breasts, there were healed cut marks and a network of shallow but visible scars from some earlier encounter.

Teresa Lupo went through them, one by one, indicating each with a pencil.

“These are indicative of some form of self-inflicted wound, or ones cut by a… partner, I imagine that’s what we’d have to call it. Human beings are imaginative creatures sometimes. If you want specialist insight into sadomasochistic sexual practices, I can put you in touch with some people who might be able to help.”

“They could be just… cuts,” Placidi objected.

Falcone sighed. “No. They are not simply cuts. One perhaps. Two. But…”

Costa forced himself to examine the photos carefully. In places, the light scars crisscrossed one another, like a sculptor’s hatch marks on some plaster statuette. And something else, too, it occurred to him, and the thought turned his stomach.

“There are too many,” he said. “Also… I don’t know if there’s a connection, but Caravaggio made this kind of mark in many of his paintings. His incisions are one way people identify his work.”

He looked hard at the photographs. The small, straight cuts on the woman’s flesh, mostly healed, but a few still red and recent, were horribly similar. He tried to remember where they were on the canvas they had found: on the naked goddess’s upper arms and thighs. Just as with Véronique Gillet.

“The painting—” Costa went on.

“Is a subject for another conversation, and another officer,” Falcone interrupted, and gave him a quick, dark glance. This was not, it seemed, an appropriate moment.

“I know nothing about art,” Teresa Lupo declared. “But I can tell you one thing. She came here to die. Or, more precisely, to make sure that when she died, it happened here, which would suggest to me that she knew this place, knew the people, and certainly knew what went on.” Her bloodless face, expressive in spite of her plain, flat features, flitted to each of them in turn. “But what do I know? You’re the police. You work it out.”

“And the man?” Falcone asked.

“Six stab wounds to the chest, three of them deep enough to be fatal on their own,” Teresa replied immediately, and watched Di Capua take out a folder of large colour photographs, ones no one much wanted to look at. Blood and gore spattered Aldo Caviglia’s white, still-well-ironed shirt. “This is extreme violence I would attribute to a man. Women tend to give up around the third blow or go on a lot longer than this. A couple went into the heart.”

“Aldo was not the kind of man to get involved in nonsense like this,” Peroni protested. “Creepy sex. It’s ridiculous…”

“You don’t know that, Gianni,” Costa observed. “How many times did you meet him?”

“Three? Four? How many does it take? He wasn’t that type. Or a voyeur or something. Listen… I’ve talked to his neighbours. To his sister. She lives out in Ostia. She works in a bakery. Like he used to.” The big man didn’t like the obvious doubt on their faces. “Also, I spoke to the woman in the cafe down the street. She said someone who sounds like Aldo came in, white to the gills, desperate to find some skinny, red-haired Frenchwoman. He was trying to find her. He had her wallet. OK. It’s obvious how that came about. Perhaps…” Peroni struggled to find some explanation. “Perhaps he just changed his mind and wanted to give it back.”

“Pickpockets do that all the time,” Rosa suggested sarcastically.

“He was not that kind of man,” Peroni said, almost stuttering with anger.

To Costa’s astonishment, Rosa Prabakaran reached out, put her hand on Peroni’s arm, and said, “I believe you, Gianni. Caviglia was a good guy. He just couldn’t keep his hands to himself, but that’s not exactly a unique problem in Rome, is it?”

“You’re in the wrong job,” Peroni replied immediately, pointing a fat finger in the younger officer’s face. “You have something personal going on here. I’m sorry about that, Rosa, not that I imagine it helps. But you should not be on a case of this nature. It’s just plain… wrong.”

The forensic people were starting to look uncomfortable. So was Teresa Lupo. Her people liked to work without disruptions.

“Why is it wrong?” Rosa asked him, taking her hand away, almost smiling. “There are plenty of officers on this force who’ve been robbed sometime, or beaten up in the street. Does that mean they can’t arrest a thief or a thug? Is innocence of a crime now a prerequisite for being able to investigate it?”

“That’s just clever talk,” Peroni snapped. “Everyone here knows what I mean.”

The room was silent. Then Leo Falcone folded his arms, looked at Peroni, and said, “We do. And in normal circumstances you would be absolutely right. But these circumstances are anything but, I’m afraid.”

“You bet this isn’t normal,” Teresa agreed. “Normally I’m fighting to find material to work with. We’re positively dripping in the stuff here. I’ve got blood and semen. DNA aplenty. Silvio? Fetch, boy…”

Di Capua went to the rear door, where a pile of transparent plastic evidence bags had grown waist high. He came back with a swift selection. They looked at what lay inside.

“We haven’t had time to take it all away yet,” Teresa continued. “We’ve been too busy digging. There are whips. Flails. Knives. Masks. Some leather items that are a little beyond my imagination. We have a wealth of physical evidence here the likes of which I have never seen in my entire career. We could nail the bastards who killed these women with one-tenth of this evidence. Just point us at a suspect and we’ll tell you yes or no in the blink of an eye. This is the mother lode of all crime scenes. All we need from you is someone to test it against.”

The room was again silent.

“Well?” Teresa asked again, somewhat more loudly.

“Let’s take this outside,” Falcone murmured.

Two

It was freezing cold in the control van parked at the head of the street, by the Piazza Borghese. The interior stank of stale tobacco smoke. The smoke came from a large middle-aged man in a brown overcoat who sat on one of the metal chairs in the van, awaiting their arrival. He introduced himself as Grimaldi from the legal department, then lit another cigarette.

Peroni was the last to sit down at the plain metal table in the centre of the cabin. He took a long, frank look at Falcone, who wasn’t meeting his gaze, then at Susanna Placidi, who’d placed a large notebook computer in front of her and was now staring at the screen, tapping the keyboard with a frantic, uncomfortable nervousness.

“Shouldn’t we have a few more people in on this conversation?” Peroni asked. “Six people murdered. The press going crazy. Is this really just down to us?”

“What you’re about to learn is strictly down to us,” Falcone replied, and cast the woman inspector a savage look. “Tell them.”

Placidi stopped typing and said, “We know who they are.”

The utter lack of enthusiasm and conviction with which she spoke made Costa’s heart sink.

“You know who killed my wife?” he asked quietly.

“We think we can narrow it down to one of four men,” Placidi replied, staring hard at the computer screen.

“And they’re just walking around out there?” Peroni asked, instantly furious, with Teresa beginning to make equally incensed noises by his side.

“For the time being,” Falcone replied, and nodded at Rosa Prabakaran.

Without a word she reached over, took the computer from the uncomplaining Placidi, and began hitting the keys. She found what she wanted, then turned the screen round for them all to see.

It was a photo taken at the Caravaggio exhibition Costa had worked the previous winter, organising security. In it, four men stood in front of the grey, sensual figure of The Sick Bacchus, which had been temporarily moved from the Villa Borghese for the event. This, too, was a self-portrait, a younger Caravaggio than that seen in the religious paintings and the Venus now undergoing scrutiny under the expert eye of Agata Graziano. Dissolute, saturnine, clutching a bunch of old grapes the same hue as his sallow skin, staring at the viewer, like a whore displaying her wares showing a naked shoulder; despite this, the only focus of hope and light in the entire canvas.

The men in front of the painting looked equally debauched. One, vaguely familiar, seemed more than a little drunk. He stood on the left of the line, with his arm around the shoulders of the man next to him in a tight proprietorial fashion. The other two stood slightly apart, looking like friends in the process of turning into enemies for some reason.

“They call themselves the Ekstasists.”

Costa couldn’t take his eyes off them. He gazed at the blank, cruel masculine faces on the screen, trying to imagine what each would look like inside a black military hood.

“Him,” Costa said eventually, indicating the one on the far left, the man with his arm around the shoulders of his companion.

The two women officers exchanged glances and said nothing.

Grimaldi, the lawyer, finally shuffled his chair up to the table and took some interest.

“The man wore a mask,” he pointed out. “How can you be sure?”

“I’m not. I’m guessing. You can still bring him in on that.”

Grimaldi sighed and said, “Ah. Guesses.”

“He has the same build,” Costa insisted. “The same stiff posture. As if he used to be a soldier. This—”

“This,” Grimaldi cut in, “is Count Franco Malaspina. Who was a soldier once, an officer during military service, for which he was decorated several times. He is also one of the richest and most powerful individuals in Rome, a patron of the arts and of charity, an eligible bachelor, a face from the social magazines, a fine man, or so a casual scan of the press cuttings might have one think.” Grimaldi hesitated and cast his sharp dark eyes at each of them.

Costa knew the name. As far as he was aware, Malaspina continued to own the vast private palace which bore his family name, which sprawled through Ortaccio, embracing both the Vicolo del Divino Amore and the Barberini’s studio. He’d surely seen the man’s picture in the newspapers. Could it be simple chance recognition that made him point the finger of blame?

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Perhaps I was just remembering the wrong thing.”

“Perhaps,” Grimaldi agreed. “All the same, let me tell you a little about Franco Malaspina.”

The lawyer didn’t even need to refer to notes. He simply spoke from memory as Costa stared at the photo on Rosa’s screen, an image of a tall, athletic twenty-eight-year-old merchant banker with an eponymous family palace in Rome, homes in Milan and New York, and, said Grimaldi, enough files in the Questura to fill an entire lifetime for most criminals, every last one still open. Malaspina was heir to a fortune that had been built up by his clan over more than three centuries, one that began with the bankrolling of a Pope. He was a true Roman aristocrat of a dying breed, and came from a family with unusual antecedents. Unlike most of the city’s nobility, the Malaspinas had embraced the era of Mussolini, seeing in the dictator opportunity, and not the coarse, proletarian Fascism most other ancient families detected and instantly despised. His grandfather had served as a minister for Il Duce. His own father had been a rabble-rouser on the fringes of right-wing politics, and consequently had been loathed in Rome, a city that was temperamentally left-leaning, until his death in a plane crash five years ago.

Costa had no recollection of Franco Malaspina being involved in machinations around the parties that formed the continuing, argumentative coalitions at the heart of the Italian state; only the vague memory that he was a notorious player in the money world, one who sailed so close to the wind that the financial authorities had investigated him more than once. Not that these probes had resulted in any form of action, which meant that Malaspina was either innocent or so deeply powerful no one dared yet take him on. There were good reasons for caution. Men of his sort liked to build up fortunes before turning to the Senate and Parliament to lay wider, deeper foundations for their power.

Rosa identified the others in the photograph; all the men were strangers to Costa, though two names were familiar. Giorgio Castagna was the son of the head of a notorious porn empire, a Roman playboy rarely out of the showbiz magazines. Emilio Buccafusca was the owner of an art gallery that specialised in some of the more controversial areas of sculpture and painting. He had frequently clashed with the law over the public display of work that bordered on the extreme. The previous winter his gallery had provoked public outrage for exhibiting several “death sculptures” by a Scandinavian artist supposedly consisting of genuine human body parts encased in clear plastic.

After a field day in the media, a worried Questura commissario had dispatched Teresa Lupo to the gallery to investigate. She’d denounced the organs as demonstrably animal in origin, probably from slaughtered pigs. Buccafusca had laughed out loud at the time; now he didn’t seem in the mood. Both men appeared somewhat inconsequential next to the aristocratic Malaspina, though they were all of similar stature, dressed in black, Castagna and Buccafusca with similar pinched and bitter faces.

There were more photographs, too, from other arts events. Malaspina’s expression — self-satisfied, confident, powerful — was constant throughout. In the early photos the others looked much the same way. Something had happened over the previous few months to change that. There, Costa knew, Falcone would see his opportunity.

The fourth figure, a man completely unknown to Costa, usually skulked close to the background, and seemed somewhat out of place in such company. He was short, sandy-haired, and chubby, about thirty, with a florid, slack face and an expression that veered, in these photos, from boredom to a visible, subservient fear.

“Being an avid reader of junk magazines,” Teresa Lupo said, staring at the same image, “I feel I’ve met most of this Eurotrash already. But who’s fat boy?”

“Nino Tomassoni,” Rosa Prabakaran answered. “He’s the only one here who doesn’t have much money, as far as we can figure out.

He’s an assistant curator at the Villa Borghese.”

Tomassoni. The name sparked a memory for Costa, one he couldn’t place.

“The man is probably on the periphery of all this,” Placidi added. “Perhaps he’s barely involved at all.”

Falcone scowled at her. It was exactly this kind of imprecision in detail that he despised in an officer.

“His name is on the list,” Falcone pointed out. “If that means nothing, it means nothing for the rest of them.”

“The list?” Peroni wondered. “You’re accusing these men of some pretty nasty stuff. They are people who like to wear nice suits. And all you have against them is a list?”

Placidi sighed, then pulled a sheaf of printed papers out of the folder in front of her and stacked them on the table. “They’re more… messages really,” she said. “We got another this morning.”

“You did?” Falcone was clearly unaware of this latest missive and displeased by that fact.

“It arrived just before I left for this meeting,” she answered with a sudden burst of temper. “I can’t be held responsible for keeping everyone informed about every damned thing. This is the same as the others. An untraceable email from a fake address. Nothing the computer people can work with.”

She placed the sheet of paper on the table in front of them, not looking at the words. It was a standard office printout.

“That’s it?” Costa asked. “That’s your case?”

“No!” It was Rosa Prabakaran, angry. “That’s not it. We have messages just like this one detailing a string of vicious attacks on black prostitutes, throughout the city, covering a period of almost four months. Where and when and how. We’ve tracked down some of the victims. The poor women are so terrified they won’t tell us a thing. And now” — she nodded back down the alley, towards the studio — “we know why. Those women are the ones who survived.”

“Let me get this straight,” Peroni cut in. “You have a string of sexual attacks? And not one of these women will sign a witness statement?”

“I had one,” Rosa answered. “She described everything. The men. Four of them. What they did.” She paused. “They took turns. The point…” She stopped again, embarrassed. “They wanted to see her in the throes of an orgasm. Not faked, the way hookers do. The real thing.”

Costa thought about the photographs they had found in the studio: shots of women in the throes of either agony or ecstasy.

“And if they didn’t get what they wanted?” he asked quietly.

“Then things turned violent. Very violent. These people weren’t paying for sex. Not in the way we know it. They wanted to see something on the faces of these women. They wanted to know they put it there, and capture the moment somehow.” She paused. This was difficult. “The one woman who would talk to us said the men had a camera. That they filmed everything. Her cries most of all. When they felt she was faking… they beat her.”

“All hookers fake it,” Peroni pointed out with vehemence. “What kind of lunatics would do something like that? What do they expect?”

Costa looked at his friend. Peroni had spent years in vice. In that time, he must have seen some dreadful cases. The expression of shock and distaste on his battered face now told Costa he’d never heard of anything quite like this.

“Obviously they don’t know hookers,” Costa suggested.

“They’ve known plenty of late,” Rosa continued. “These are sick bastards. Clever bastards too. I thought I had that girl. Two days later, she walked out of the hospital and vanished. Maybe back home with money. Maybe dead. There’s no way of telling.”

Falcone couldn’t take his eyes off Susanna Placidi. Costa knew why. A witness in a case like that should never have been allowed to flee, whatever the circumstances.

“Who do you think the messages are from?” Teresa asked.

The two female officers glanced at each other. The lawyer, Grimaldi, was silent, staring at the photos on the screen.

“We don’t know,” Placidi admitted. “Probably someone we don’t know about. Someone on the periphery who thinks it’s gone too far. Or Tomassoni…”

“It sounds like a woman, don’t you think?” Teresa asked. “Listen to the words: ‘Placidi, you cow!’ I’ve been called a bitch a million times by some jerk male. But never a cow. They don’t talk to you like that.”

“A woman, then!” Placidi screamed back. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

Teresa leaned over, impatient, close to anger. “I said it sounds like a woman. Perhaps it’s meant to. In which case they are clearly overestimating our abilities somewhat. What does it matter? We’ve got DNA. We’ve got forensic coming out of our ears from that mucky room of theirs. Just go and arrest them and leave the rest to me.”

Falcone sat back, folded his arms, and waited for Placidi to respond. Grimaldi had adopted precisely the same position.

“We’ve tried to arrest them,” the woman inspector admitted. “We’ve been to the lawyers more than once. The trouble is…” She scattered the emails over the table. “This is all we have. The women won’t talk. We can’t… The evidence we have is all so vague.”

Her miserable eyes fell to the table again.

Teresa turned her attention to Falcone. “Leo, give me an hour with these creeps and a bag of cotton swabs and I’ll put them in a cell before bedtime. There’s a bunch of dead bodies here and they’re itching to talk.”

He looked at her, then shook his bald, aquiline head.

“Why not?” asked Peroni.

Falcone picked up the sheets of messages on the table. “Inspector Placidi told you. These are all we have,” he said. “If they are what they appear, they clearly come from someone inside the group, someone who’s apparently frightened about what his friends are doing. Someone whose name does not appear on these lists, though I wouldn’t wish to rule that out.”

“So what?” Costa wondered.

“So alternatively they may be some kind of practical joke,” Falcone went on. “Tomassoni apart, these men are often in the public eye. Publicity attracts cranks. We all know that. They could be innocent.”

Susanna Placidi banged the table with her fists. “They are not innocent, Leo! These sons of bitches are laughing at us.”

“She’s right,” Rosa said quietly, confidently. “Taunting us is part of their fun, I swear.”

“That’s hardly going to get anyone in court, is it?” Falcone observed severely. “A look in their eye. A policewoman’s instinct.”

“Whoever wrote these emails knows the places!” Rosa screeched.

“They know the victims, unless you think these women have been making it up and putting themselves in hospital too.”

“I am aware of all this,” the old inspector replied coldly. “I don’t think for one moment that these are crank messages. From the point of view of Malaspina and his friends, though…”

“It’s a good defence,” Costa agreed. “They do attract cranks.”

Falcone nodded, grateful for his support. “Furthermore—”

“No!” It was Teresa Lupo, livid. “I do not wish to hear any more of this. I’ve told you we have the evidence. You’ve told me you have the suspects. Bring these jerks in and leave it to me.”

She watched their faces. No one spoke until Grimaldi, the lawyer, took a deep breath, then said, “If only it were that easy.”

“I am here to tell you a simple truth,” he went on. “Inspector Placidi and her team have attempted to do this very thing and failed. Unknown to me or anyone in my department, they arrested all four men named in these messages, without sufficient evidence or adequate preparation. Then they threw these anonymous, unconfirmed allegations at them in the absence of the slightest evidential corroboration, and…”

Placidi’s face was reddening.

“And now we have to live with the consequences, which are damaging in the extreme,” Grimaldi concluded.

“I had to do something!” Placidi objected. “I had to take the risk. The women wouldn’t talk when it happened, and two weeks later they had disappeared. We had nothing but these emails. Did you expect me to sit on my hands until some smart-ass from elsewhere came up with something better?”

Falcone cast a fleeting sideways look in her direction, one Costa had seen in the past. He wondered if Placidi understood how dangerous was the ground beneath her.

“These are intelligent, important, well-connected men,” he pointed out. “Did it not occur to you that perhaps that was part of their enjoyment too? Feeling untouchable, beyond the pathetic efforts of the law?”

She said nothing.

“These men were never going to throw their hands up in the air and offer you a confession, Susanna. Had you thought about it for one moment, you would surely have known that.”

“There were women getting raped!” Placidi pressed.

“It now transpires there were women getting murdered,” Grimaldi declared. “Which is all the more reason to do your job properly. Instead, you offended some extremely influential people.”

Teresa Lupo’s eyes started to dilate with a sudden, growing fury.

“You also forewarned them of the police investigation,” Falcone continued, “without sufficient evidence even to substantiate a temporary arrest. They now understand fully what we will look for in the way of concrete evidence. They can prepare for that eventuality.”

Placidi was close to tears. “I didn’t know…”

Falcone looked at the rest of them and then Grimaldi. “You’d best tell them,” he suggested.

The lawyer took out a notebook from his jacket and consulted it. “Two weeks ago, after being approached by Inspector Placidi’s team, a team of lawyers representing all four of these men went before a magistrate, in camera,” he said. “We had insufficient notice. Malaspina knows the legal system. He winds it round his little finger. He has the advantage of being extraordinarily rich and in league with some important figures in the organised crime world too. It is a deadly combination.”

“And?” Teresa demanded.

“By the time we were able to assemble a competent team, he was already challenging the legal rules through which we may and may not demand any physical evidence, both fingerprints and DNA specimens, from people who refuse to give them willingly.”

The pathologist’s large face turned a shade paler. “Rules? Rules? We know what the rules are. Either they give us a sample willingly or I get a piece of paper and force it out of them.”

It was that straightforward. All Costa needed if any subject refused a DNA sample was the approval of a senior officer in the Questura to take one by force if necessary. Most suspects ceased to resist once they realised they’d be compelled to provide a sample within a matter of minutes.

Grimaldi’s scowl was that of a man denied something he dearly craved. “Thanks to Malaspina’s lawyers, and our own incompetence, the rules have changed,” he told them. “From now on we may obtain physical material against the will of a suspect only on the basis of a judicial order. So if they object strongly enough, we have to go before a magistrate, where we must make our case. We are, in a nutshell, screwed.”

The pathologist let loose a stream of Roman epithets.

Grimaldi waited for her to draw breath, then continued. “The standard routine you have all grown accustomed to using in these situations is now out of the question should any suspect refuse. Unless you can find sufficient firm and incontrovertible evidence to put to a magistrate.” Grimaldi picked up the papers, then dropped them on the table. “Which, having spent the last hour going through what you have here, I must say you do not possess.”

Teresa’s mouth hung open in astonishment. “You mean I can pick up any amount of beautiful physical evidence I like and we can’t match it to a suspect unless he or she deigns to cooperate? These people are criminals, for God’s sake! Why should they do us any favours?”

“They won’t,” the lawyer agreed. “Unless they know they’re innocent. We’re trying to appeal the ruling, but to be honest…” He frowned. “.…the question of human rights is rather fashionable at the moment.”

“What the hell about the rights of these women?” Teresa demanded.

Grimaldi’s eyes widened with despair. “Why are you arguing with me? It is useless. This is now the law. I wish it were otherwise, but…”

“I could always arrange for one of these nice gentlemen to bleed on me a little,” Peroni suggested. “Or steal one of his coffee cups.”

The lawyer shook his head. “Anything gathered by subterfuge will not only be inadmissible but may well damage our chances of a successful prosecution should we be able to gather sufficient evidence by other means. This is a general observation, by the way, one we must now apply to every case from this point forward, not simply to these four charming gentlemen who call themselves the Ekstasists.”

A bitter, almost despondent look appeared on Falcone’s lean face. “Welcome to modern policing,” he said. “What Grimaldi has explained to you will be standard practice in all cases from this point on until we can successfully challenge it. Other officers are having this change in policy explained to them privately over the next few days, though not the reasons for it. We would like to keep those to ourselves.” He grimaced. “At least for a little while.”

Teresa Lupo glowered at the female inspector across the table. “You did this? Your cack-handed blundering has put the onus on us to prove bastards like these need to show us they’re innocent? That’s half our working practices dumped straight out the window. Just because you barged in there without doing your homework first.”

“No!” Susanna Placidi screeched back at her. She pointed at the photos on the screen. “I did my best. Malaspina is responsible for this. That man—”

“Not good enough,” the pathologist yelled. “You’re incompetent, Placidi. This is—”

“Ladies. Ladies!”

Grimaldi had a loud and commanding voice. It silenced them, for a little while at least.

Costa waited for the temperature to fall a little, then said, “In that case, you’d better start looking for some proof.”

“Where?” Susanna Placidi demanded.

Grimaldi stared at Falcone and raised an interested eyebrow.

“That,” the inspector announced, “is something you no longer need worry about.” He shook his head, stared at the desk, then at her. “This case… appalls me, Placidi. We have lost a dear friend. There are women who have been attacked — and worse — in this city of ours, while it was your responsibility to protect them. Your laxness and incompetence have cost innocent people their lives. You have damaged our ability to unravel the dreadful mess you have left behind. And all you can say is… you did your best. If that was the case, your best was sorely lacking. You can go home now. This case no longer concerns you.” He reached over and dragged the computer to his side of the table. “Nor any in the future, if I can help it. Breathe one word to a soul about what we have discussed here and I will, I swear, drag you in front of a disciplinary tribunal and finish what’s left of your career for good.”

Grimaldi took an envelope out of his pocket and placed it in front of her. “These are formal suspension papers, Inspector. I will confirm the notice was properly delivered.”

Placidi was speechless, red with rage, her eyes brimming with tears.

“I will give you a lift home, signora,” Grimaldi offered.

“I have a driver and a car!”

“Not anymore,” the lawyer replied.

Three

Falcone waited for them to leave. Then he got up and checked the door. There was no one else in earshot.

“This is my city,” he told them. “Our city. It’s got its problems, God knows. But I always thought a woman could walk safely on these streets. Any woman. Black or white. Legal or illegal. I don’t care. I will not allow that to change. Not under any circumstances. Whatever the cost.”

It was Peroni who broke the silence. He was laughing, just for a moment, and with precious little mirth.

Falcone’s grey eyebrows rose. “Well?”

“I love it when the word ‘cost’ comes into your conversation, Leo,” Peroni observed pleasantly. “It always suggests life is about to turn interesting.”

Falcone ignored the taunt. He looked relaxed. Determined, too. Costa knew this mood. It meant someone was about to wander outside the usual rules.

“Look at us.” Falcone smiled, opening his hands in a wide, expansive gesture. “Two careers in autumn. Two careers in spring. And the best criminal pathologist in Italy.”

“No praise, please,” Teresa protested. “You know how uncomfortable that makes me.”

“It’s true! What better time for you to test your skills?” Then, more grimly, “What better time for us?”

His eyes drifted to the computer screen. The image of Franco Malaspina was caught there, frozen by some paparazzo’s camera. The millionaire had frizzy dark hair and the features of a Sicilian, an angular, handsome face almost North African in its dusky hue. His bleak black eyes glittered back at the photographer, staring at the lens intently, full of the easy willful arrogance of a certain kind of Roman aristocrat.

“This man thinks he and his friends are unassailable,” Falcone said. “I have close to one hundred officers in the Questura on this case, two in Africa seeking earlier victims as potential witnesses, and I have put out every appeal I can think of to our friends in the Carabinieri. This is not a time for internecine rivalries and they know it. These are the kinds of crimes none of us ever expected to see in Rome, and we must do all in our power to bring these men to face justice. Yet…” He wrestled his slender hands together in frustration. “I cannot tell any of them the names we have here. If I did that, these four men would know. Their lawyers would return to court again, screaming harassment of the innocent. Tame politicians would be dragged out of their beds to hear their complaints. We all know how these things work. We would lose what little we have, perhaps forever. There is an army of officers, good men and women, who will do everything they can to find some conventional — some might say old-fashioned — evidence that might break this case. Yet they must work in the dark, since I daren’t share with them a word of the information you have heard here. They will fail, with dignity and professionalism, but it will be failure all the same.”

“Leo—” Costa began.

“No,” the inspector protested. “Hear me out. Unless they have left some obvious and stupid form of identification in this hellhole of theirs, Inspector Placidi’s incompetence means these four have every right to feel untouchable.” He glanced at Teresa Lupo. “Am I mistaken, Doctor?”

“I told you, Leo. We are swimming in forensic. In proof.”

“What? A business card? A letter? A driving licence?”

“Proof!”

“By which you mean scientific proof. DNA and prints. The two primary pillars of our investigative process today. You heard Grimaldi. They are useless. Proof means nothing if I can’t take it before a judge. They have us gagged and bound, don’t you see? Without some miracle I cannot foresee, the only ones who can establish their guilt are these men themselves. All our conventional means of attack are worthless. I can do… nothing.”

He placed his long forefinger on the photograph of Franco Malaspina and stared at Costa. “And I want them, this creature most of all. He is not some Renaissance prince who can flaunt himself on these streets regardless of the law.”

Falcone glanced at his watch. “At twelve-thirty the four of you will meet in the Piazza Navona, outside the Brazilian Embassy. I will arrange for lunch to be brought round to my apartment at one.” He glanced at Costa and Peroni in turn. “The place has only two bedrooms, I’m afraid, so you two can fight over the sofa between yourselves.”

“I’m staying in your apartment?” Rosa Prabakaran asked, astonished.

“Until further notice,” Falcone declared.

Teresa Lupo’s arms flailed in the air in protest. “And I’m supposed to walk out of the biggest murder case we’ve had in years and throw in my lot with some private underhand snooping of yours?”

“If there is one thing I have learned about you in recent times,” Falcone replied, “it is that you will do what you feel like regardless of anything I say. I invite you along to listen and then decide. Given that no one, not God himself, seems privy to either your working methods or your diary, I doubt you will have much difficulty being engaged simultaneously in both your conventional work and a task that is a little… different, and something else besides for all I know.”

Teresa was momentarily speechless, then muttered, “Was that a compliment or not?”

“I will not rest until these bastards are in jail, and neither will you,” Falcone continued, ignoring her question. “I have gone through what passes as Placidi’s investigation log on this case. There is a strand of evidence no one here knows about, an odd, possibly worthless thread. Susanna Placidi certainly thought so. Which was why she buried it at the bottom of the pile.”

The grey eyes travelled over them all and fell on Rosa Prabakaran.

“We have an appointment with a statue,” Falcone said cryptically. “After that you are on your own.”