The Rome Prophecy

111

Lorenzo Silvestri sits in his office, staring at Federico Assante and Louisa Verdetti.

His chair creaks under his two hundred pounds of battle-trained muscle, as he rocks on the back two legs and sizes the pair of them up.

They don’t seem hysterical and they don’t seem jerk-offs. But the story they’ve been telling is incredible.

His number two, Captain Pasquale Conti, has a reputation for double-checking everything, and so he’s far from done with them. ‘Doctor Verdetti, please tell me again, are you sure that the place these people held you was further below ground than just a basement or old wine cellar?’

Louisa’s hands are still trembling, but that doesn’t stop her being annoyed. ‘They scared me, not turned me stupid. I know where they held me. I took as much notice as I could, and it was way below ground level. They had some kind of cells there.’

‘And they did this because they wanted to kidnap this patient of yours, Anna?’

‘Anna Fratelli.’

‘And Anna’s now dead, but they don’t know it?’

Her temper is close to snapping. ‘Correct.’

‘And you have no rough idea of the location of the place where they held you?’

Louisa knows this is the biggest clue she can give them, but she has nothing. ‘I’m afraid not. I was drugged going into my apartment and the next thing I remember was waking up in the cell they kept me in. It was small and made me panic, I have some claustrophobia problems from my childhood.’

Lorenzo can see she’s distressed. ‘Are you okay, Doctor? Would you like to take a short break?’

Louisa shakes her head. ‘No. I want to get on with it.’ She just wishes this nightmare was over and she could start trying to make her life normal again.

She shuts her eyes and pictures the dark hole they held her in. ‘The place had iron bars, like you’d expect a police cell to have, but they were very old and rusty. There were no windows. No daylight. In fact, no light at all.’ She feels her heart start to race. ‘Everything was pitch black until they came along with their torches. Not the battery kind; rag torches like you see in those old cave-man movies.’

‘Primitive torches?’ queries Lorenzo.

Louisa sees them clearly. ‘Yes. I could smell the stuff, flaming rags soaked in oil or paraffin.’

Lorenzo takes it all in. These days it’s so easy to run miles of electric cable to almost anywhere you want, so there has to be a more sinister reason behind the use of old-fashioned torches.

Then there’s the location.

Either someone has made use of some old and now disused jail facility, or else they’ve gone to great lengths to create one because they regularly hold people against their will.

Pasquale resumes his questioning. ‘Doctor, do you think you were the only one who had been held there?’

Louisa hasn’t thought about that. ‘I don’t know. At one point I thought I heard voices, maybe a young woman, but I never saw her or anyone else.’ She looks flustered and is struggling to breathe normally. ‘I’m sorry, just talking about it is making me edgy. I really don’t know. It all seems like one big unbelievable nightmare to me.’

‘It’s fine. Don’t stress yourself.’ The major gives the nod to his number two to carry on with the questioning.

Pasquale continues as carefully as he can. ‘Doctor, when they moved you, you said the place you woke up in looked like it had just been decorated. Can you explain what you mean?’

Louisa takes a deep breath and slowly exhales. ‘It was more like it was in the process of being decorated. The walls had only just been plastered and smelled wet. There were dust sheets on the floor, cans of paint, and I think some kind of small machine in the middle of the room.’

Pasquale turns to Lorenzo. ‘Maybe a generator or a heater to dry out the plaster?’

‘Could be. Have someone check tool-hire shops.’

The captain presses on. ‘That’s good, that’s helpful. Did you see anything else?’

‘No. They covered my eyes and walked me out of there to a car park.’

‘How far? How far from the newly plastered place to the car?’

Louisa’s hands start to shake again. ‘Not far. They took me up a staircase, a spiral one, I think. I seemed to be doubling back on myself and I was dizzy when it levelled out. Then they walked me a few paces… to the left.’ She swallows her fear and tries hard to get the sequence right in her head. ‘I remember that as we came out into the cold, someone pulled me over to one side. We were standing on a gravel surface, or something like gravel. We didn’t go far, maybe eight, ten steps, and then they pushed me into a car.’ She corrects herself. ‘No, not a car, one of those big things. A Land Rover. I saw it when I jumped out near the church.’

Lorenzo’s impressed. ‘You’ve got good recall. A good memory.’

She smiles for the first time for a long while. ‘ Grazie. It’s the medical training. If you forget little details, you end up killing someone.’

Lorenzo has to stop himself from adding that it’s the same in his job. He looks towards his colleague. ‘Get the analysts to identify all possible sites in Rome with private drive-in areas that have applied for major building permits. Have the list cross-checked with recent tool-hire sales, deliveries of plasterboard and rental of other building equipment. Check particularly to see if any of them are linked to excavation sites, old ruins, converted churches, any structures that may be attached to public buildings.’

Pasquale finishes jotting down his exhaustive list and leaves.

Lorenzo turns back to Louisa. ‘We’re going to need to ask you some more questions, but not for a while. I’ll arrange for a protection team to take you home and watch your apartment while you get changed and get some rest.’

Louisa looks drained. ‘ Grazie. I’d also like to call some people, if that’s okay?’

‘Of course it is, but you mustn’t talk about what’s happened to you. This is an active operation, and our best chance of catching your kidnappers is in the next twenty-four hours. They’ll be panicking right now, covering their tracks and making mistakes, but they’ll get over that within a day or so and go back to being professional, so we have to take our chance. Do you understand?’

Louisa nods.

As she gets up to go, she catches herself looking at his hand for a wedding ring.

There’s a thick gold band around his finger.

Why is it the best ones are always taken?