The Immaculate Deception

15

For Flavia, not being able to get hold of Argyll was merely an irritating start to what turned into another appalling day. Around the time he was leaving for Florence, she was returning to Rome, having stayed on in Siena to tidy up a few trivial matters with the police there. She went straight to the office where she found a note summoning her to a meeting at the ministry. Urgent, it said, and the fact that the meeting had been supposed to start five minutes previously did nothing to improve her already irritable mood. She had spent a terrible night dealing with what Elena Fortini had pointed out to her. It was so blindingly and obviously true that she felt foolish for not having thought of it herself.

Her world had changed for ever. Just like that. It was going to take some time to get used to it. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how she was going to reconcile the sort of hours that her job required with the sort of hours that she knew from observation small children seemed to demand as their right. All she did note was that she was thinking of how to fit the job in. Not the other way around. She was still too much in a state of shock even to consider whether she was pleased or not.

She was also not really at her most attentive when she arrived, finally, at the meeting that she thought was going to be another, interminable discussion of staff training, or budgets or quibbles about results. It was something about bureaucracies she had noted: the more trivial the subject, the more pompous and urgent the summons. In general, anyway. She didn’t even pay enough attention to note that the two civil servants in the room – both completely unknown to her – spent a remarkable amount of time shuffling papers and looking uncomfortable.

‘I’m afraid that we have to deal with more important matters now,’ the more senior said once the small-talk had been disposed of. ‘That is the future of the department now that General Bottando has left. We feel – the minister feels – that a clear leadership line is required to ensure the maintenance of the high-profile and successful performance that has been such a marked feature of the art theft department in recent years.’

‘I quite agree,’ said Flavia, still unaware of the large manhole opening up in front of her. ‘Staff morale, I feel, is highly important for producing the productivity gains that the ministry seems to want so much.’ She was very proud of that remark; it showed she was learning the language of management that seemed to be so terribly fashionable in administrative circles these days. She knew that it was all nonsense, but accepted that when in Rome it was necessary to speak a little Latin.

The other civil servant grunted and looked even more awkward. ‘Indeed. But that is not why we have called you here today. There is no easy way to say this, so I will not try. I regret to have to tell you that it has been decided at the highest level not to appoint you as the permanent head of the art squad.’

As she did not know how to react, she scarcely reacted at all. ‘And may I ask the reasoning behind this decision?’

‘I am afraid not,’ he said. ‘As you know, all such matters are in the strictest confidence.’ There was just enough of a hint of regret in his voice to make Flavia think that at least he was not enjoying himself. ‘The good work you have done in the past year has been noted and is greatly appreciated. Please do not think that any criticism of you or your ability is intended. However, it is thought that a figure with greater seniority is required, with, perhaps, greater willingness to adhere to policy.’

‘What do you mean, “adhere to policy"?’

A faint, apologetic smile was all she got in response.

‘You don’t, of course, mean that I’m a woman, do you?’ Flavia said.

The second civil servant had the look of a man about to be taken to the European Court of Human Rights. ‘Oh, dear me, no,’ he said in a hurry. ‘That’s the last thing we mean.’

Flavia kept quiet. The two men shuffled some more in their seats and looked at each other. They’d thought of that one. It was obvious that their approach had been worked out in advance.

‘We understand that it is difficult for anybody to return to a subordinate position once they have run an organization. And we quite understand that you may consider your position untenable from now on.’

It was worse than Flavia had ever imagined, even in her most paranoid nightmare. She was now paying full attention. ‘You want me to go away?’

‘You may consider it in your own best interest and also in the best interest of the department,’ the man said. ‘I must add that to avoid any discontinuity during the transfer period, we would like the matter resolved now.’

‘You want me to go now?’ She was even more incredulous.

There was a long pause and more fiddling on the desktop. ‘We can offer you two choices. The first is a transfer to a senior administrative post …’

‘In?’

‘Ah, in Bari.’

‘Bari?’ Flavia said in disgust.

‘Of course, should this not be acceptable, you might consider taking advantage of a generous severance package …’

‘This is ridiculous,’ Flavia interrupted. ‘I have never heard of anybody being treated in such an appalling fashion. To be passed over, I suppose, is something that happens. Although, to be perfectly frank, I do not know of anyone who could do the job as well as I can. But to be ejected so unceremoniously, almost as though I had been caught with my hand in the till or something like that, is outrageous.’

‘I knew this was not going to be easy, or pleasant for any of us,’ the first civil servant replied regretfully. ‘All I can say is that you have our considerable sympathy. None the less our instructions are clear.’

‘Do I understand that I have the perfect right to accept this situation and go back to my old job as it was under General Bottando?’

‘You do. In theory.’

‘And in practice?’

In reply she received only a look. A very informative look.

‘It is rare, I think, for people to find a new regime as comfortable as the one they were used to. The new head of department may not consider you to be so very obviously his deputy in the same way that General Bottando did. Indeed, he may well bring in his own people so that you revert to your official job as a researcher. You must consider seriously whether you would find that acceptable.’

True enough. Flavia had got used to a great deal of unofficial authority in the past few years, as well as a considerable amount of independence. It would be very hard to lose that.

‘You do realize,’ Flavia said, ‘the level of compensation and publicity I would receive if I took this to court? Dismissing a senior civil servant, which I am whether you like it or not, merely because she is expecting a baby …’

This was one detail that caught them on the hop. They both looked at her as though she had announced that she was the pope’s daughter. Flavia could almost hear their strategy crumbling.

‘Oh.’

She smiled. ‘Against the law, you know. Even worse, it looks bad. It looks terrible.’

‘Well…’

‘Tiresome, isn’t it?’ she said sympathetically. ‘Damned women, eh?’

‘Naturally, we offer you our best congratulations.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And I’m sure you realize that, in the circumstances, a slight rethink of your position is necessary. Not to be crude about it, you want to ease me out quietly. Instead, what you will get is a public brawl. You might think it advisable to reconsider your offer – kind though it was.’

She smiled. Even in her state of tiredness and shock she derived some considerable pleasure from their discomfort. Not that she believed for a moment she had won. It had been a skirmish, no more, but great victories are merely an accumulation of lots of little triumphs; you have to start somewhere. She had gained a little time to fight back. Flavia left the building and walked back to her car.

But still, she had little relish for the fight. She wanted the job, had worked for it, was good at it and deserved it. It had been her life for twelve years. And yet, all of a sudden, she felt detached from it. Instead of the job being part of her, it was now something she did. With a shock of comprehension, she realized she was discontented with the routine, with her colleagues, with having to get up every morning and read reports on thefts she would never solve. She was fed up with keeping people happy and battling constantly for a mere fraction of the money she needed. She was sick to death of manoeuvring her way round people like those two characters. She had fought back out of principle, she realized, no more. She would not be treated like that. But her heart wasn’t in it.

It was not just the two civil servants, she realized, who were going to have to reconsider their position.

One phrase that did stick in her mind was the crack about adhering to policy. Whatever that meant. In fact, the only policy she had not adhered to in recent months was the order to lay off the subject of Claude Lorraine. But why would anyone get so agitated about that? All she was trying to do was tidy up loose ends, keep the lid on. She should have been thanked, surely, rather than dismissed?

First things first, and that was to summon all those who might be interested and tell them everything that had been going on. Warts and all. They wanted a fight, they were going to get one, and the best way to start was to ensure that so many people knew about the whole Claude affair that there would be no more point in squashing her to keep it quiet. A secret shared is a secret defanged; another dictum of Bottando.

She thought she would start with three people: Paolo, who wanted her job anyway and might now get it; Corrado, the trainee; and Giulia, the head researcher. No one else was around at the moment.

‘My involvement,’ she concluded after a while, ‘seems to have been the cause of the decision to uproot me. I am not meant to be looking any further into this; why not I do not know.’

‘But it’s only a picture,’ said Paolo, who always maintained the attitude that merely looking for stolen works of art, while entertaining, was a little beneath his ability. He still had a hankering after murder.

She shrugged. ‘True. But it is one connected to the powerful and influential.’

Paolo stretched himself. ‘Well, now,’ he said lazily, ‘we will need all the dossiers we can lay our hands on here. On this Sabbatini, on his illustrious and dangerously powerful brother-in-law. Ex-brother-in-law. Find Sabbatini’s partners in crime of a decade or so ago, get the dossiers on them as well. Which just goes to prove how useful it is to do people favours. I know just the man. I’ll give him a ring later on and twist an arm or two. Let’s see if we can find out what all this is about, shall we? Don’t pack your bags yet, eh?’

Flavia looked at him warmly. Considering that it would be very much in his own interests to sit tight and not lift a finger to help, she appreciated the gesture even more; a brief flicker of acknowledgement, and a slight shrug was his reply. Of course I want your job, it said, but not like this.

‘Could you try and get phone records as well? For this Bossoni man as well, if possible. I’d like to know who’s feeding him information. It might be a good idea to feed him a little more one day.’

Everyone smiled happily at the prospect. There are few things quite as satisfying as leaking confidential information and seeing it turn up in the papers the next day.

‘One more thing,’ Flavia continued. ‘There must be a report on the murder of di Lanna’s wife somewhere. Not letting the press know is one thing, but there had to be some sort of official investigation. That might be worth looking at.’

They filed out, and Flavia sat for a while and looked around at her office, the bright sunny one that she had inherited from Bottando scarcely a year before. And wondered how much longer it would be hers.

She met Ettore Bossoni in a grubby little bar way past the Olympic stadium, and they went for a walk around it when the conversation finally got serious. It was Bossoni’s idea when she’d phoned him; he disliked the idea of being close to people when talking about matters of importance. Over the years he had learned caution, he added, as well as respect for what electronic gadgetry could do. A windswept stadium would make even the most sophisticated device hard to operate, and they could guarantee being many metres away from anyone. It seemed excessively self-important to Flavia, but she was prepared to humour him.

So they walked past the grim limestone statues of Mussolini’s ideal men time and again, while Flavia tried to do business with him. There was not a great deal she could offer in return, this was the problem. Just a chance to see whatever she might find, if she considered it appropriate.

Bossoni was a fat man who somehow hadn’t realized that he was no longer young, lithe and athletic. It gave him a strangely boyish way of walking, a loping stride which made his cheeks wobble, and the sweat stand out on a neck half strangled by a collar that had ceased to fit half a decade previously.

‘So?’ he said, after they’d walked for a while. ‘Are you going to threaten me with dire consequences if I don’t reveal my sources?’

‘No.’

‘So what do you want?’

‘You knew Maurizio Sabbatini, didn’t you?’

‘That,’ he said, ‘is probably in a file somewhere. So it would be foolish to deny it.’

‘Did you have as low an opinion of him as everyone else?’

Bossoni thought, then shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t. Oddly enough, I think I had quite a high opinion of him.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he was no fool. Unlike all the others. Think about it. There we were, a couple of hundred, maybe a couple of thousand, students, earnestly discussing what we would do once we had overthrown world capitalism. Maurizio was the one at the back who would crease up with laughter and point out that perhaps, maybe, it wasn’t going to be quite that easy, and that the most we could manage – if we were lucky – would be to make it look faintly ridiculous. We strutted about discussing revolution, he played his little jokes. None of us accomplished anything, the only difference was that he didn’t expect to. He laughed at everybody.’

‘And then stopped laughing.’

Bossoni nodded. ‘Ah, yes. You know about that, do you? I suppose you would.’

‘He disappears into bohemian semi-respectability for nearly twenty years, then all of a sudden bursts into life with a grand stunt. You were meant to provide him with the publicity, weren’t you?’

Bossoni thought carefully, then nodded. ‘I think that was his idea, yes. He said he was going to cause a huge embarrassment, just as in the past. Bigger, in fact. He was going to expose the hypocrisy of the state – fa la la. I had a great affection for him, but his language had scarcely changed in two decades. He still sounded like a pamphlet; more, perhaps, than he had back then.’

‘But nothing appeared. Why not?’

‘I was waiting for some solid evidence he’d done something and it wasn’t all hot air. He told me he’d pinched a picture; I rang you up and you said you knew nothing about it. Quite a plausible liar you are, as well.’

‘Thank you. I practise.’

‘Then he rang again and said that if I would get him an audience at the Janiculum on Friday I’d have the story of my life.’

‘Did you have any idea what he meant?’

‘No. Still don’t. He wanted lots of people near that great big statue of Garibaldi’s wife. You know the one? The woman on the horse looking over the city. He didn’t specify what the audience was going to be watching. I told him of course I wasn’t going to do a damned thing for him unless he told me what he was up to. He said he couldn’t, it was too dangerous. But he had all the pieces to let off an explosion that would shake the country to its foundation. Just trust him.’

Bossoni paused and shook his head. ‘Trust him! Ha! I told him he had to be joking and I wouldn’t trust him even if my job didn’t depend on it. Then he rang off. Slammed the phone down, presumably. Except that I think it was a mobile phone. How do you slam down a mobile phone? Angrily pressing the off button isn’t as expressive, really.’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. Then what?’

Bossoni shook his head. ‘Then nothing. The next I hear, he’s found in his vat of plaster. I assumed it was all some sort of hoax that had failed, and he’d got drunk in disappointment. I must say I was heartily relieved I’d had the common sense to have nothing to do with it.’

Not much, to be sure. Hardly worth bothering about. Deliberately or not, Bossoni had told her virtually nothing of interest. And now he was pushing her to say what she knew.

Well, why not? She was no longer in the business of keeping other people’s secrets.

‘OK, then. This is the summary. Picture stolen. I hand over a ransom five days later and get it back …’

‘How?’

‘Direct exchange. With a man thought at the time to be Sabbatini, wearing a silly mask.’

‘Who was not Sabbatini.’

‘So it seems.’

‘Curious,’ Bossoni said. ‘Most curious.’

‘Do you know someone called Elena Fortini?’

Bossoni gave what seemed almost a shudder. Flavia looked at him inquiringly.

‘Do you know her?’ he asked back.

‘Yes. I met her a couple of days ago.’

‘And your impressions?’

‘I quite liked her. She seemed … sensitive, kind.’

Bossoni threw back his head and laughed. ‘No wonder so few paintings are ever recovered,’ he said, ‘if the police are so perceptive.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I have heard Elena called many things, but not sensitive or kind,’ he went on. ‘Cruel, brutal. Not sensitive.’

‘She didn’t strike me like that.’

‘She is the most violent person I have ever met,’ he went on. ‘An example. When one of her comrades was arrested on Good Friday, she suggested the appropriate response would be to bomb St Peter’s during High Mass on Easter Sunday. Someone pointed out that hundreds of people might die, and she said, how appropriate. Christian sacrifice. The more the better. She was always into symbolic gestures. The symbol of the act. Remember that phrase? She was a great advocate of nail bombs. You know, the ones that tear off people’s legs.’

‘None of this is in her file.’

‘She was wonderful at keeping in the background. And people were much too frightened of her to say anything, even when they were picked up. She was very much cleverer than anyone else. Poor old Maurizio was her puppet; she designed all his little actions for him; he was quite incapable of doing anything himself. But with her in charge everything had so many hidden messages it became surreal. She was an artist in violence. No one else could touch her. Did you ever see any of Maurizio’s art, so-called, in the last few years?’

‘Some. In his studio.’

‘Not very good, is it?’

‘No.’

‘Confused, clumsy, incoherent. It was all he could manage, poor soul.’

‘Stealing this picture was a return to form, then,’ Flavia commented. ‘Very straightforward, that.’

‘Yes, but what does it mean? What’s the interpretation, eh? That was the trouble with him. At the crucial juncture he became incoherent, meaningless. No intellectual depth, and what there was was supplied by Elena Fortini; she was much better educated, much smarter.’

Unlike Bossoni, Flavia did not find the atmosphere of the Olympic stadium agreeable, or conducive to thought. Instead she went for a long walk.

Normally she did this with Argyll; they had spent years pounding the streets and hills of Rome together, amiably and in companionable harmony. Such jaunts were infinitely refreshing, but not the sort of thing that aids concentration. Argyll’s boundless enthusiasm for bits of ancient Roman masonry sticking out from walls, or crumbling statues or patterns in cobblestones, was too distracting for that. He was forever shooting off with a gurgle of pleasure to look more closely at something or other, coming back when his curiosity was sated to pick up the conversation where it had been abruptly abandoned. ‘Oh, look, isn’t that lovely,’ he was always saying, pointing out to Flavia something she might have passed a dozen times before without noticing.

But this day she had no appetite for architecture or sculpture or the oddities of town planning. She paced the streets, hands in the pockets of her jacket, frown on her face, eyes down, walking quickly across the town, over the river and up the hill called the Janiculum to the statue of Garibaldi’s wife on her horse in all her grandeur. To where the body of Maria di Lanna had been found two decades ago, and where Sabbatini had wanted to stage his coup that would shake – what, exactly? There she sat for an hour thinking about the symbolism of the act. The phrase so enthusiastically taken up and put into action by the likes of Sabbatini. Odd how it had such an old-fashioned sound to it now, like some dead and buried artistic fad.

She began by trying to fit all the events into some pattern, but when that didn’t work she tried it the other way round, constructing a pattern and seeing what events might fit in.

Some bits were easy; the date, in particular. Sabbatini had stolen the picture on the Monday, then done nothing. Now she knew he had something planned for the Friday, the 25th of May. On 25 May 1981, his sister had been killed. Her body had been dumped close to where Flavia was now sitting, and that was where Sabbatini had wanted the cameras and audience to assemble, prompted by a reluctant Bossoni.

So far, so good. But why that picture? Any reason, or was it where Sabbatini’s limited intellect let him down, as Bossoni had hinted? It was hard to see how a landscape by Claude could possibly have any hidden significance. Cephalus and Procris. The story even had a happy ending. Maybe he simply wanted a high-profile picture, stolen in a way that advertised what he was doing. Perhaps that was all there was to it.

But what was the point? A grand gesture to show to a bunch of old terrorists that he had not forgotten? How did that fit in with his claim to Bossoni that he would shake the country to its foundations? Then there was the ransom demand. How did that fit in? Were there two messages? Or maybe whatever Sabbatini intended was abandoned when he died and his associate – and Flavia had not ruled out the possibility that Bossoni was three million dollars richer now than he had been last week – decided to cut his losses and collect the money.

Flavia sat on the bench next to Mrs Garibaldi, reached for a cigarette, lit it, then pulled it out of her mouth and trampled on it. Oh, God, she thought. Can’t even do that any more. And, she suddenly realized, she was deliriously happy, and burst into tears.

All the tourists – not that there were many – looked on sympathetically.

‘I tried to find that report on the di Lanna kidnapping you asked for,’ Paolo said later when the four met in a restaurant to have dinner and discuss progress so far. He had begun by handing over a file of phone records, together with the apologetic remark that he hadn’t had time to go through them. Not surprising. No one liked doing that. ‘No luck, alas. A curious story, though. With a recent end.’

‘Yes?’

‘As you said, it was all hushed up. Or, rather, it seems to have become one of those stories that everybody knew, but no one ever mentioned in public. Nevertheless, some aspiring and trouble-making magistrate did decide to investigate, and began working on the case. Unfortunately, it was for the wrong reasons; he seems to have had leftish sympathies and was more intent on causing trouble than establishing what happened. He was told to lay off and was then investigated himself; turns out he was as corrupt as you can get and still have only two legs. Eventually, to avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging dirty dealings in the judiciary, they cut him a deal. He resigns and is left in peace. End of story.’

Flavia smiled. ‘Thank you. What’s the recent end?’

‘A few months ago, the magistrate dies.’

‘Suddenly?’

Paolo shook his head. ‘No. He’d been ill for some time, I think. Kidney gave up some time ago, had a transplant a year ago and it didn’t work. No surprise at all. Nothing suspicious, if that’s what you were thinking.’

She frowned. ‘I still can’t figure any of this out,’ she said eventually. ‘Let us assume this Bossoni is right, and this is Elena Fortini and the symbolism of the act all over again. Let us assume that there is a connection between the Claude and the death of Maria di Lanna. What’s the symbol? What was he trying to prove? And why now? Was it because di Lanna came into the government a few months ago?’

She looked around the table. Blank faces. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Suggestions?’

Still silence.

‘Anything?’ She prompted.

Another silence.

Flavia sighed. ‘Well, thank you, anyway. That’s very helpful. Nice to know you’re all on form.’

They finished their meal, talking of more tractable office problems. Paolo walked her home, which was kind of him, although he really wanted a private talk with her.

‘We had a visit this afternoon,’ he said. ‘While you were out. Dour little fellow, from intelligence, he said. He walked straight in, straight into your office, and spent an hour going through your papers and files. I kept an eye on him as much as possible, and he didn’t seem to find anything that he wanted.’

Flavia couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘You seem to have upset some important people in some way,’ he continued thoughtfully. ‘If they want to send the spooks in, it might be reasonable to assume they haven’t finished with you yet.’

‘Nothing I can do about it.’

‘Probably not. But if you are determined to continue with this business, you should at least take sensible precautions.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as not going home,’ he said, as they turned the corner into the little square in front of Flavia’s block and he gently pulled her back into the shadows. ‘After all, there’s a spook car outside your door.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Colour, make, numberplate and little aerial sticking out the back. I have studied these things, you know. I once toyed with the idea of applying to be transferred there.’

‘And you didn’t?’

‘No. I did an interview. I’ve never come across such half-wits in my life. They wouldn’t survive a week in the police. The point is, there they are, watching you.’

‘And I have to go home to find Jonathan.’

‘Ring.’ He pulled out his phone, dialled and handed it to her. She listened to it chirrup away, and could faintly hear the telephone on the table in her bedroom also ringing in response. Just to the right of the little message Argyll had left her to say he was going to Tuscany for a day or so. The phone rang and rang, but no light was switched on, no friendly voice at the other end. Flavia didn’t know whether to be irritated or glad.

‘He doesn’t have a phone, I suppose?’ Paolo asked.

Flavia snorted. ‘If he had, you could be certain the batteries would be flat.’

She scratched her head, and thought. ‘No, you’re right. I’ll go and find a hotel for the night.’

Paolo offered to put her up, an offer Flavia refused, having met his children on too many occasions and knowing full well how little sleep she would get in a small apartment with screaming infants. She had, it seemed, only a few months of peace left to her. She did not want to waste a single night of them.

Half an hour later, rather than fretting about the security services or Maurizio Sabbatini, she drifted off to sleep in a little room on the Piazza Farnese worrying about the general smallness of Roman living space.

She had reasoned that, if anyone was looking for her, wanting to keep an eye on her movements, the last place they would think of looking would be a nunnery, and so, to a nunnery she had gone. The order of St Bridget of Sweden has a very agreeable convent on the Piazza Farnese, part of it converted into a bed and breakfast hostel after their numbers went down. For the price it is exemplary, the nuns sweet, the location near perfect, and they already knew Flavia quite well; on a couple of occasions in the past she had put witnesses there where they would not be noticed. Several had come back for holidays when their troubles were over, while one went completely overboard, joined the order and was last heard of doing good works in Burkina Faso.

As she ate her breakfast, simple but fresh, she worked her way through the files and press cuttings that Paolo had provided the previous evening, then distracted herself from the ever-present craving for a cigarette by writing down notes and thinking.

After a long period of staring into space, she realized why she was finding the whole business frustrating. She had concentrated on the symbolism of the act until it became clear that it consisted of two parts, incompatible with each other.

Sabbatini steals the picture, then makes some sort of dramatic gesture in the Janiculum on Friday, 25th May to draw attention to the matter of his murdered sister. All clear and straightforward.

The second part, however, was the ransom. This would have been a better parallel, in fact. He could have contrasted the way pictures are rescued, but human beings not. But Sabbatini had not demanded the ransom.

Let us concentrate on the Janiculum, she thought, buttering another roll. Friday; the television cameras arrive, a little bit of an audience, then Sabbatini makes his entrance. What then? Presumably some outrageous gesture. But, so what? Everybody says, how shocking; or how funny, depending on what he does. Sabbatini is arrested and bundled off. What good does that do?

So, there must be something else. Elena Fortini, perhaps. Here she frowned, puzzled by the enormous difference between her own impression of the woman, and what the fat journalist had said. Could she be that far out? She had known some charming crooks in her time, that was certain. But Bossoni described her as being gratuitously cruel and violent. Did that really fit with the air of domesticity she had felt so strongly? Do cruel people make bread? Vicious ones iron their children’s clothes?

And then there was Bossoni, who had intruded himself into this business quite uninvited. An old radical who had gone into journalism, like so many others, and put his past behind him. An effortless switch in direction. Why not? Nothing suspicious there, even sensible to keep up old acquaintances, just in case they become interesting again. But there was no file on him. Why not? The Italian state kept files on everybody from those days, and most were perfectly easy to get at if you asked the right people. Paolo had drawn information on Sabbatini, on Fortini, even on di Lanna, with no one raising an eyebrow. Yet there was no information on Bossoni. That was curious.

Ordinarily, the next step would have been simple; she would have picked up the phone and asked questions. Now she was reluctant to advertise her interest. It was bad enough that Paolo had done so the evening before. So she had to fall back on other sources, and had to think hard before she came up with one that might work. Then she finished her coffee – was she even allowed coffee any more? She’d have to check. And come to think of it, weren’t her feet a little swollen? – told the nuns she would stay another night if they had room, and walked out into the bright morning sunlight to head for the Vatican.

It took a long time to get in; even had she been willing to advertise herself by using her police identity card, the Vatican is normally quite sniffy about admitting Italian officials. It does so eventually, of course, but it is an independent state and goes through the motions of guarding its privileges jealously. So Flavia had to present herself at the main door as a private visitor, then wait in a run-down and dingy room for nearly forty minutes before Aldo Morante bounced in and gave her a most unpriestly kiss.

She had never quite mastered the ability to keep a straight face whenever she thought of Father Aldo Morante. Even after a decade or more, he still looked like an actor pretending to be a priest, and not succeeding very well. He was just too big for the part, too exuberant, too noisy, and too obviously had trouble with the vows of chastity to be entirely convincing. A priest he was none the less, having converted straight from communism to Catholicism some fifteen years back without the usual progression through disenchantment, scepticism and convention. Why waste time? he’d once said to her. We’ll all end up on our knees again one day. Might as well get on with it now, keep ahead of the field.

Once upon a time, however, he’d been a firebrand of radicalism, no meeting left unattended, no pamphlet left unread, and all speeches delivered at the top of his voice, preferably with a megaphone. Even though he was a decade older than she was, Flavia knew him because their mothers were friends and he had always had a benevolent affection for her which even survived her entering the police. Her total lack of interest in politics was forgiven her, as family and connections have always, quite rightly, been considered of far more importance than transitory ideologies. So Flavia had watched Aldo metamorphose over the years from youthful choirboy, through political revolutionary, and round again to earnest churchgoer. She had kept a distant eye on him as he started life in a parish, found the work tedious, then worked his way into a job at the Vatican where he was now an ambitious undersecretary of some small importance in the church’s equivalent of the foreign ministry.

Slight ostentation had always been his trademark, so Flavia knew perfectly well that when he escorted her to his office by putting his arm around her waist it was purely and simply so that the people in the corridors who passed them would notice. For all the play-acting, however, he was someone who had never wasted time with chatter.

‘What do you want, then?’ he said, the moment the door of the little office was closed.

‘Help. Urgently,’ she replied. There is nothing like childhood to relieve you of the necessity for diplomacy.

‘Go on, then. Let’s have it.’

So he got it; from the theft of the Claude, right through to the security men camped outside her door.

‘Now,’ he said, when she’d finished, ‘if I read you correctly, you suspect Ettore Bossoni of horrendous duplicity simply because this other woman spotted you were going to have a baby before you knew yourself.’

Flavia opened her mouth to make a sharp reply, then considered. ‘That’s partly right,’ she said after a brief hesitation. ‘I suppose. Also because he said that he talked to Sabbatini on the phone and none of Sabbatini’s phone records show any signs of it. I checked this morning. Not that that is proof, of course.’

‘Congratulations, by the way,’ Aldo went on. ‘You’ll be a very good mother. I trust it will be the first of at least half a dozen. I will baptize them all myself. I need a bit of practice. Now, Bossoni. I remember him. There was always a bit of a smell about him, if you see what I mean.’

‘There still is.’

‘I don’t mean his hygiene; that was fashionable. Everybody smelled. You were just too naïve to realize that deodorant was a capitalist plot. I mean, there was always a whiff of something slightly unsavoury about him. Everybody had their doubts about him.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Now, you’re expecting me to speak ill of people. Which I cannot do, being a priest, and having to think worthy thoughts all the time. So, I’ll get the book on him.’

‘What book?’

‘This is the Vatican, child. We know everything. You must remember, the church was in cahoots with the government back then, and our foreign intelligence was second to none. We swapped what we knew about foreign lands with what the Italian government knew about goings on here. There, I should say. And annotated what we were given with our own sources.’

‘Can you get hold of this stuff?’

‘I am a senior official, you know. Should be monsignor by next year.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Hmm. Fancy a red hat, though. Crimson has always suited me. Now, I can’t of course show you the files themselves; they are terribly confidential. What I will do is read them and answer questions about them. Silly, I know, but there we are. Rules are rules. Why don’t you look at some pictures while you wait. It might take some time.’

‘I’ve seen them,’ Flavia said crossly. ‘Many times.’

Aldo waved a hand. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘not those pictures; I didn’t mean the museum. I mean the good ones; the ones the public doesn’t see.’

And to keep her occupied while he hunted, Aldo led Flavia through back corridors into rooms which looked older and older, until he came to a door. ‘Through there,’ he said. ‘Off you go. I’ll come and get you when I’m done.’

He wafted off and Flavia thought idly how curious it would be to see Aldo as a cardinal. And why stop there? How would he look in white? Then she opened the door and forgot such trivia. She spent the next hour looking open-mouthed at a collection of paintings that made the Vatican museum itself look second-rate.

It is amazing how fast time passes when you are astonished; the only conscious thought Flavia had in the entire period was that she wished Argyll had been there, although he would have been in such a delirium it might have been days before she got a coherent remark from him.

And she especially wanted Argyll there when she came to one particular picture. It was a Dormition, the last sleep of the Virgin. She wasn’t as good as Argyll, nowhere near, but she knew the picture; or rather, she knew a face. It was the same face as the one possessed by the Madonna above Bottando’s fireplace. Same size panel, more or less, same reds in the clothing. She was no expert, couldn’t swear to anything, but under Argyll’s tutelage she had spent a long time looking at pictures as well as looking for them. And this one was just too similar. Must have been part of a triptych, the only difference being this one still had a proper frame, complete with the little iron hinges which would have linked it to the bigger, central panel. That, presumably, would have been another scene from the life of the Virgin. But what was it? She looked, but there was no notice, no useful little plaque. Damnation. She began to understand how Argyll felt.

‘Enjoy it?’ Aldo remarked as he breezed back in, although whether it was an hour or two later Flavia could not tell. ‘I thought you might.’

‘What’s this?’ she asked, pointing at the little panel.

He shrugged. ‘No idea. Not my area. I do foreign policy, not pictures.’

‘Who does know?’

He shrugged without any interest at all.

‘Where did these come from?’ she asked.

He shrugged once more. ‘Oh, here and there. And most should not, strictly speaking, be here. That’s why they’re kept hidden.’

‘What does that mean?’

Aldo began to look embarrassed. ‘I’m beginning to regret showing you these. In fact, I shouldn’t have. So don’t ask any more. Now, business,’ he said briskly, dismissing the matter and refusing to let Flavia interrupt. ‘Here we are. Now you can ask away and I will answer with all the omniscience of someone who has read the files while you have not.’

Flavia tried to remember why she had come in the first place, and dragged her eyes away from the little panel. ‘Bossoni?’ she asked, giving way reluctantly.

‘I now remember him very well. He was a nark.’

‘Really?’

‘Yup. Two-faced, double-dealing police informer, if he wasn’t worse. He knew far too many of the wrong sort of people and probably still does.’

Flavia shook her head, and thought about this while Aldo paced up and down and looked with bored indifference at a painting or two. He’d always been a bit of a philistine in this department, Flavia thought.

‘And all this would have been in the file my colleague couldn’t get hold of? No wonder it was restricted. What about the di Lanna kidnapping itself? Was there a file on that?’

‘A very big one. Most of it you will know; there seems to have been little new, except for noting the fact that di Lanna, when he got control of the money, poured funds into the Christian Democrats, and used it to try and wrest control of Bologna from the communists. And, I assume, feathered the nests of many politicians at the same time. Our beloved prime minister grew surprisingly rich in those years, but then gratitude is a wonderful thing, and he does genuinely seem to have done his best.’

‘What about this magistrate and his report?’

‘Very little. We don’t have much on that at all. Only newspaper cuttings.’

‘Anything else?’

‘That’s it. What’s the matter? You look disappointed.’

‘I was hoping for something a bit more substantial.’

The future monsignor looked disapproving. ‘I’ve done the best I can. What do you expect? Miracles? The Vatican isn’t really the place to come to for that sort of thing, you know.’

And where was Jonathan Argyll? she thought to herself as she lumbered slowly on a bus full of excited tourists into the centre of the city. How on earth could he disappear just when he was needed? She relied on him at moments such as these to sit and listen and make remarks, some useless, some perceptive, but always making her think and explain and work through whatever was going on in her mind. Without him around she felt she wasn’t as clear-headed as she needed to be, and no one else she knew came even remotely close to being able to stimulate her powers of reason. The nearest, perhaps, was Bottando, but he came a distant second.

But there it was. The phone at home still went unanswered; she even tried Bottando but he had also vanished off the face of the earth. She had been, in effect, abandoned at one of the most important moments of her life by the two people she really relied on. It was enough to make the most sensible person feel resentful. And after five minutes thinking about it, Flavia did feel resentful, so she picked on a spotty adolescent sitting down minding his own business and harming no one.

‘No one ever tell you to get up for pregnant women?’ she barked in a motherly tone.

He looked up at her in alarm.

‘Go on,’ she said, ‘up you get,’ and watched with mild satisfaction as he blushed shamefacedly and reluctantly moved away, muttering darkly.

‘Thank you, young man,’ she said brightly, and sat down herself. That was the good thing about Italy, she thought. Maternal authority still had a bit of bite in it.

Now then, she thought as she settled down and slipped a shoe off so she could massage her toes, Bossoni. Radical cum informer cum journalist. Which presumably Maurizio Sabbatini did not know, otherwise he would not have involved him …

But Aldo had said everyone knew, and despite his manner he chose his words carefully. The implications of this sank in slowly as she worked on her big toe. Would Sabbatini be so stupid as to bring in someone he thought might well be a police informer, if not worse? Surely not. Therefore Bossoni’s source of information on the theft could not have been Sabbatini. And it wasn’t her. And she doubted that it was the director of the museum. And there was only one other place it could have come from.

And any further thoughts stopped dead. The bus had arrived at her stop, and she found for some reason that she couldn’t get her shoe back on. At least the sight of her hopping to the door gave the pimply youth some small satisfaction.