The Lost Relic

Chapter Sixty-One

Sandro Pertini Hospital, Rome

Two days later

It was almost a relief for Ben when the doctors came into his tiny private room early that morning and told him he was going to be moved to the prison pending his first hearing. Two days spent lying in a narrow steel-framed bed hooked up to a drip, with nothing to count the hours go by except for the changing of the guard outside his door, had felt like twenty. Other than the grim-faced police officials who’d come to formally arrest him and read him a long list of charges and rights, two doctors and four different nurses had been his only visitors. The youngest of the nurses, a waiflike thing from the deep south of Italy, seemed mortally terrified of him; while one of the older ones, a steel-haired matron with the heft of a Cape buffalo, gave him looks of such intense hatred that he was worried about being left alone with her in case she tried to inject him with some lethal drug.

So far, he’d managed to stay alive, despite the tasteless boiled vegetables they were feeding him, and some kind of pulpy grey matter that passed for meat. It was like being in the army again.

The whole time, they’d kept him strictly as far away from newspapers and TV as a person could be. He could only imagine the fun the media were having with the arrest of Urbano Tassoni’s murderer. His favourite Italian reporter, Silvana Lucenzi, would be right in the thick of it, playing to the gallery and watching her ratings climb.

‘How are you feeling?’ the doctor asked.

‘Like an innocent man about to go to jail,’ Ben said. ‘How are you?’

The murderous-looking nurse came into the room carrying a bulky paper bag, which she laid on a chair before stomping over to Ben’s bedside and unhooking him from his drip with all the delicacy of a person ripping tail feathers out of a dead turkey. Ben gave her his sweetest smile as she left, then climbed out of bed and picked up the paper bag. Inside were his clothes, cleaned and pressed, and his shoes with the laces removed.

‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Foiled again. I was planning to use those laces to throttle everyone on the ward and then escape out of the window.’

The doctor just stared blankly. Ben walked through to his little bathroom, changed out of the hospital gown and dressed. His arm was still a little stiff, but healing up fine now. When he came out again, four armed Carabinieri guards were waiting for him with handcuffs. Ben put out his wrists for the bracelets, and was escorted from the room. More police were outside in the corridor with shotguns. Among their faces was one Ben recognised. Roberto Lario avoided his eye, looked pensive and said nothing.

The guards ushered Ben out of the ward and down a short corridor to a lift. The door whooshed open, and they all piled inside. Ben faced the door, conscious of the loaded and cocked weapons just inches away. His knees were trembling with the thought of what was happening to him, but he was damned if he’d let them see him nervous. As the lift descended towards the ground floor, he turned to the silent Lario.

‘I have to say, I’m disappointed,’ he said. ‘I’d expected Darcey Kane to make an appearance. To thank me in person for letting myself get caught. That’s gratitude.’

Lario looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ he replied softly, as if even that was saying too much. Ben wanted to ask him what he meant; but then the lift bell pinged and the doors slid open. The guards shoved him forwards, and moments later he was being walked out into the pale morning sunlight.

A group of plainclothes police agents and armed Carabinieri were waiting by a pair of police Alfa Romeos and a bulky white prison van staffed by uniformed security staff. The van’s rear doors were open, revealing a stark interior that consisted of two facing steel benches, sheet metal walls and ceiling. No seatbelts. Ben guessed the Italian prison service were concerned about inmates strangling themselves, or each other, in transit. Or maybe they just didn’t care about them getting pulped in an accident. The windows were barred with high-tensile mesh on the inside, black-smoked glass on the outside.

As Ben was marched towards the back of the van he saw there was another cuffed prisoner waiting to be loaded on board with him. It seemed he wasn’t the only bad boy being transported from the hospital. The second prisoner was a stocky, dark-haired guy of about thirty. He didn’t have the look of a hard-boiled criminal. Ben wondered what the guy must have done to deserve being locked up in the back of a mobile cell with a notorious psychopathic killer.

Ben’s travel companion remained sullen and silent as the two prisoners were steered into the back of the van and the doors slammed behind them. It was dark in the back. The steel shell resonated with the growl of the diesel starting up, and then the van pulled away with a lurch. After a moment’s pause at the gates, they drove out into the streets of Rome.