The Rome Prophecy

59

Louisa Verdetti is in a deep and peaceful sleep.

A much-craved and wonderfully healing rest that is slowly dissolving the traumas of one of the worst days of her life.

Losing her patient, getting punched in the face, arguing with her boss and being interviewed and scolded by the cops are all gradually being reduced to mere grains of sand on her beach of mental history.

Another few hours of dream time and they’ll be filed and forgotten. She’ll be fit to go again. Ready for whatever mysteries and machinations a fine new day has to throw at her.

But not yet.

Not now.

Right now she’s good for nothing, and the last thing she wants on her mind is a ringing phone.

But there it is.

For a moment – a very long and sleepy moment – she pretends that it isn’t real. The noise is part of a dream she’s having. Perhaps a call from an ex-lover, pestering her to give him another chance.

But it isn’t.

It’s real.

And it’s not going away.

Worse than that, the phone is ringing in the cold darkness on the other side of her super-soft and super-warm quilt.

She reaches out, pulls the receiver into her cosy world and manages to mutter her name. ‘ Si. Verdetti.’

What Valentina Morassi says to her banishes any last vestiges of comfort.

Louisa sits bolt upright in shock.

She listens until the Carabinieri captain is done.

The now dead phone dangles in her hand while the news sinks in.

Yesterday’s nightmare isn’t over.

In fact, it just got worse.

The psychiatrist dresses without showering or even running a comb through her hair. She’s in such a rush that she only takes time out to use the toilet and wash her hands before dashing to her car and driving to the hospital.

Suzanna – or Anna, or Cassandra, or whoever she damned well is – is in the ICU at the Policlinico, fighting for her life.

Louisa is breathless when she arrives. She stumbles into the triage area almost as frantically as a panicking relative.

She introduces herself at reception, and a nurse leads her to a long-faced man in green scrubs called Ricardo Contessi. He’s one of the luckless trauma surgeons working the graveyard shift. ‘Your girl’s okay – but only just.’ He extends his left arm, tilts it so it’s palm up and demonstrates. ‘She cut herself, something like twenty times. Most of the incisions were superficial – made horizontally across and around the wrist – though she’s damaged a tendon and we have had to stitch that. However, there was one more disturbing cut, made vertically, running a long way down the arm.’

Louisa flinches. Self-harmers know horizontal cuts are usually safe. Vertical cuts are different. They’re genuinely suicidal. A good dig into any of the major arteries running down the forearm usually proves fatal.

Contessi slowly traces his index finger down his own pale and hairy forearm. ‘Fortunately she started a few centimetres lower than the radial and ulnar intersection. Most of the damage around there was muscular. But she did nick one of the lower branches of the ulnar artery, and that means she lost a lot of blood.’

‘She’ll be okay?’

‘I think so. The paramedics did a really good job on the way over here. She’s already bandaged up and sedated.’ He nods to a ward sign on a wall. ‘She’s on an open ward. Some Carabinieri officer, a woman, is at her bedside.’

Louisa realises it must be Valentina. She scratches her head and finds there’s no longer hair up there, just a thick, muzzy nest that bats or birds have no doubt settled in.

The surgeon holds up a clipboard. ‘There’s some confusion over the patient’s name. Do you know what she’s called?’

A small laugh escapes Louisa’s exhausted body. ‘Play it safe, call her Suzanna Anna Cassandra Fratelli.’

He raises an eyebrow as he writes on his notes. ‘ Grazie. I’ll look in on her before I knock off. Ciao.’

‘Ciao.’ Louisa takes a slow breath and walks the short distance to the ward.

Valentina is pacing and talking on her cell phone right next to a sign that says they shouldn’t be used.

Tom is asleep in a low chair.

A young uniformed guard is standing by the curtains and a nurse is busy at a desk opposite – but not so busy that she can’t occasionally catch the eye of the handsome soldier.

Anna is out for the count.

Louisa approaches the bed and is saddened to see how frail her patient looks.

Valentina finishes her call and turns to the clinician. ‘We found her unconscious beneath a false floor at the bottom of a wardrobe in her apartment.’

Louisa can barely imagine how desperate the woman must have felt.

‘And Anna Fratelli is her real name?’

‘Seems so. There were no bills in the apartment. I guess you’ll be able to pull her full medical records now?’

Louisa glances at her watch. ‘Not at three a.m. But yes, in a few hours we should be able to get hold of them.’

Valentina looks towards the bed. ‘Do you have any idea what’s been going on in her mind? What’s made her like this?’

The clinician bends over the bed and clears a strand of hair off Anna’s forehead. ‘I could ask you the same thing. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that whatever is troubling her is also at the root of the crimes that you’re investigating.’

Tom stirs in the chair, then slides a little further down, his head resting on a cushion pressed against the wall.

Louisa watches Valentina watching Tom.

Valentina senses the psychiatrist’s eyes on her.

Louisa smiles. ‘As a professional observer of human behaviour, I’d say you two were more than just friends.’

Valentina doesn’t answer.

‘Okay, I’m sorry I spoke. I can take a hint: private is private.’ Louisa coughs and moves on. ‘So, work-wise, is there anything else I need to know about Anna? Anything you found at her house – drugs, that kind of thing?’

‘No drugs. At least, nothing more than the usual – headache pills, allergy tablets and such like. You need to see her bedroom, though. I’ll send over some photographs.’

‘Why? Why do I need to see it?’

‘To believe it. She’s turned the room into a religious bolt-hole. The walls, floor and ceiling are completely covered in pages torn or copied from bibles. Hundreds of rosary beads are dangling from the ceiling. It’s quite freaky.’

Louisa falls silent.

‘What is it?’

‘I was just casting my mind back. I don’t think any of the other alters expressed any Catholic beliefs or traits.’

‘Well, this is full-on Catholicism. She’s even made her bed out of bibles, as though she’s scared of sleeping without God being close to her.’

‘What an awful way to live – frightened during the day and then even more frightened of going to sleep.’ Louisa scratches at her nest of uncombed hair and looks down at her comatose patient. ‘I feel so sorry for her. I wish I could just drop a rope into that subconscious pit and pull her out of there.’

For almost a minute, both women just stare at Anna.

She looks so weak.

Her pinched white face is accentuated by eyelids the colour of raw meat. Her scarred arms are bandaged, and medical tubes tentacle their way off into hanging bags and monitoring machines.

Louisa breaks the sombre silence. ‘Look, I’m sorry we took her out, back to Cosmedin. It was a stupid thing to do. If Valducci hadn’t been tugging me along on a lead, I would have called you and asked you about it.’

‘And maybe not given my guard the slip?’

‘And not given your guard the slip. Is he in trouble?’

Valentina lightens up. ‘He’s not yet scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush, but he’s not far from it.’ She gestures to a water cooler just a metre away. ‘ Aqua?’

‘Si. Grazie.’

Valentina fills two plastic cups and hands one over. ‘There’s something else you should know. On my way over, I got a call saying more than a dozen exercise books have been discovered at Anna’s place. All filled with drawings and writing.’

‘Life logs.’

‘ Scusi? ’

‘DID sufferers are aware that the host is taken over by multiple personalities, so the alters write journals, daily diaries about what’s happening to them. That way, when the host momentarily regains control of the body, it’s possible to put some pieces of the puzzle together.’

‘Wait a minute. Are you saying that all Anna would know about what has happened to her – what’s been done with her body – is when she reads about it in a journal filled in by the alters?’

‘That’s about it.’

Valentina doesn’t say it, but she thinks it.

This could be a breakthrough.

The logs might well explain the mystery of a severed hand in a church in Cosmedin and a dead eunuch on the banks of the Tiber.