The Seventh Sacrament

Book 3 Flesh and Bone

Giorgio Bramante had been a model prisoner. Commissario Messina had removed the man’s full prison records from his large black briefcase that morning, reading carefully through them as the control van navigated the traffic from Monti to the Aventino. Bramante had spent fourteen unremarkable years in jail after being found guilty of murder in a trial that had triggered many conflicting emotions at the time. No one liked unfinished stories about missing children. No one was happy when an investigation went bad because the police fouled up, and on this occasion in the most unexpected of ways, one in which the wronged party — Bramante — went to prison while the guilty — the students who had apparently kidnapped his son and refused to disclose his fate — went free.

Five of them, anyway.

As Costa listened to Bruno Messina, watching Falcone’s attentive face as he did so, he began to realise the Bramante case was still alive, for both of these men. At the time, Falcone had been on the brink of promotion to inspector, a promising sovrintendente underneath Messina’s commissario father, who had retired from the force in disgrace not long after the case against Bramante’s students had collapsed. Messina senior had seen his career torn apart by what happened in the wake of seven-year-old Alessio Bramante’s disappearance. That fact clearly caused his son pain to this day. The Messinas were, as the entire Questura knew, a police family going back several generations. The uniform ran in the blood. There were professional reasons for Messina, and his father, to be dissatisfied, too, ones Falcone surely shared. Cases that involved missing children demanded resolution more than most. For both parents. Beatrice Bramante, although she had divorced her husband while he was in jail, was still alive and living in Rome. And for the officers involved.

Peroni, always one to come straight to the point, waited for the control van to circumnavigate the round of traffic at the Colosseum, then asked, “Remind me again. Why exactly didn’t these scum go to jail?”

“Because of the lawyers,” Messina replied scornfully. “They said it wasn’t possible.”

Falcone stroked his silver goatee, then emitted a long, pained sigh.

“It’s important we have this conversation, Commissario, so that both of us are sure where we stand. Unlike you, I was there—”

“And don’t I know it?” Messina interupted, scowling.

Falcone didn’t bat an eyelid. Costa had seen him deal with much worse than this young, overambitious commissario with just a few months in the job.

“Good,” the inspector commented placidly. “Then let me explain. There are two reasons why no charges were pursued against any of Bramante’s students. First, we had no evidence. They provided none. Forensic provided none. We had no body. No clue as to where the child had gone or what had happened to him. Only suspicions, created principally by the unwillingness of the students to do much to help themselves. There was absolutely nothing there on which we could base a prosecution….”

Bruno Messina was a thickset man, with a head of fulsome black hair and an expression that could turn from polite to malevolent in an instant.

“I could have got it out of them,” he said with no small hint of menace.

“That’s what your father believed. But he failed. Then he left the ringleader alone with Giorgio Bramante for an hour in a quiet little cell at the far end of the holding block in the basement we all know so well. Which brings me to the second reason why no one ever faced any charges over Alessio Bramante’s disappearance. I hate to remind you of this, but during that hour Bramante beat the unfortunate youth senseless. Ludo Torchia died in the ambulance, while I watched, on the way to hospital. After that, we were knee-deep in lawyers who made sure that the other suspects could get away without saying a damn thing to anyone because we’d already allowed one of their number to be, in all but name, murdered before our very eyes.”

Falcone gave Messina the kind of look he normally reserved for impudent, uncomprehending juniors.

“Case closed,” the inspector concluded without emotion.

Peroni glowered at him. “I’ve got to say, I remember what was in the newspapers back then. It wasn’t quite that clear-cut. You don’t have kids. I do. If I thought one of mine might be alive, if there was the slightest chance of that, I’d have beaten the living daylights out of those students, too.”

Falcone shrugged. “The significance of that being what exactly?”

Peroni tautened, taken aback by the nonchalant tone in Falcone’s voice. Costa watched Bruno Messina recoil from Peroni’s visible anger, and reminded himself that those relatively new to the Questura still found his partner’s physical presence — the lumpy, scarred face, the corpulent, powerful thug’s body — intimidating.

“That what Bramante did was understandable!” Peroni insisted stubbornly.

“I hate having to repeat myself, but I was there. I walked into that cell because I was sick of hearing the screaming, over and over again. I was the one” — Falcone glowered at Messina — “who made sure it went to a higher authority than your father, Commissario. This wasn’t difficult, since he had, as I recall, decided to attend a management meeting the moment he left Bramante alone with the youth.”

“He was a commissario,” Messina objected. “He was desperate.”

“And I was just the sovrintendente, the junior meant to clean up afterwards. It was quite a mess, too. Look up the photographs. They’ll still be in the records. That cell was covered in blood. I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since. Giorgio Bramante took that student apart. Torchia was barely breathing when I got in there. An hour later he was gone.”

Peroni said again, “Messina thought Bramante’s kid was alive, Leo!”

“It was more than that,” Messina continued. “My father thought that, if you’d not burst in there stopping Bramante when you did, he could have beaten the truth out of that bastard. Perhaps he was right and we could have found the boy. Who knows?”

“No one!” Falcone replied. “Not you. Not me. In situations like that, we deal with certainties, not guesswork. Ludo Torchia was brutally assaulted, in a cell in our own Questura, and he died of that assault. How are we supposed to ignore that? The law’s the law. We don’t pick and choose to whom it applies or when.”

Teresa Lupo raised her large hand in objection. “But if Bramante thought…”

“None of us knows what he was thinking!” Falcone insisted. “I was there when he was interviewed afterwards. I was the one who told him Ludo Torchia was dead. I told him that the doctor in the ambulance said he’d several broken ribs, a punctured lung. It was as bad a beating as I’ve seen in my life, and it was done slowly, deliberately. And Giorgio Bramante? When I told him, he acted as if beating a man to death was just an everyday event. I have no idea what he thought. He scarcely said a word afterwards. Not to us. Not to his wife. To the press. To anyone. Yes, yes, I know what you’re about to say. It was grief. Perhaps. But we still don’t understand what happened, and that’s a fact.”

Messina leaned forward and tapped Falcone on the knee. “I’ll tell you what happened. You made inspector. My father got kicked out of the force. After thirty years. But we’ll leave that to one side for now. Just don’t fool yourself. Those morons were responsible for that boy’s death somehow. Not my father. Not Giorgio Bramante. Ludo Torchia apart, they walked away scot-free. Changed their names, most of them. Grew up and found themselves different lives, mostly in places where no one knew who they were. They thought it was over, like a bad dream that scares the shit out of you at night and just fades away the next morning.”

“As far as they are concerned, it is over,” Falcone replied. “That’s the law.”

Messina pulled a set of folders out of his capacious briefcase.

“Not for Giorgio Bramante it isn’t.”

Bruno Messina seemed to know Bramante’s entire history from the moment he went to jail.

“He helped other prisoners with their work. He taught them to read and write. Counselled them on giving up drugs. The perfect prisoner. After three years he was getting early day release and he didn’t ever go running to the press. There was nothing to suggest he was anything else but an unfortunate man who lost his temper under stress and paid a heavy price for it, in circumstances where most people would feel sympathetic.”

“And?” Falcone asked, interested now.

“There were six students in those caves when Alessio went missing. Torchia died that day. Another, Sandro Vignola, moved to Puglia, then, three years after the case, came back to Rome for the day. We don’t know why. Vignola was never seen again. Of the remaining four…”

He spread out the papers from the files.

“Andrea Guerino. Farmer’s son. Changed his name. Moved to near Verona, where he ran a small fruit farm. Found dead of shotgun wounds out in the fields, June three years ago. The local police say his wife went missing the day before. She turns up alive. Guerino gets half his head blown off, and his wife’s too scared to say a word about where she’s been, who with, anything. The local force put it down to some kind of affair gone wrong and never charge a soul with his death. Raul Bellucci. Fifteen months ago, he was working as a cab driver in Florence, also under an assumed name. He gets a call at home. Someone’s kidnapped his daughter and wants a ransom or the girl’s gone. The idiot doesn’t go to us, of course. I imagine he’s worried we’d find out who he really is. The following day Raul Bellucci’s dead in some industrial park used by hookers on the edge of town. The police” — the venom in Messina’s voice was unmistakable — “decide that, since Bellucci’s throat’s been cut from ear to ear and his genitals have been removed, this is the work of some African gang. Most of the hookers thereabouts are Nigerian.”

“And today?” Teresa looked interested. She’d been complaining about the lack of challenging work.

“Today, or rather last night, was the turn of Toni LaMarca, the only student who stayed in Rome. He was some hoodlum’s kid from Naples. Perhaps he thought that would protect him. Bad piece of work. Involved in dope and prostitution rings around Termini. Not a man to mourn. It was the same story as the others. Well, similar. LaMarca’s teenage boyfriend got kidnapped on the way home from the cinema. He managed to claw his way out of some lockup near Clodio this morning and went straight to us. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what happened. Someone called LaMarca. A ransom perhaps. He went out—”

“Commissario,” Peroni cut in. “I thought you said Bramante was in jail until three months ago. Maybe he could have kidnapped this kid and killed LaMarca. But the others?”

Messina pulled out a prison file and thrust it in front of them.

“Pay attention. I told you Giorgio Bramante was a model prisoner. He had all the parole he wanted. They even let him out from time to time to do odd jobs for people. Nothing illegal in that. Nothing that wasn’t by the book. When Vignola disappeared, Bramante was on emotional leave to visit his sick mother. Here in Rome. When Guerino died, he was on a free weekend. Plenty of time to do what he did. Same with Raul Bellucci.”

“These people had changed their names,” Teresa pointed out. “How the hell would he know how to find them?”

“That’s for you to discover,” Messina answered, then stuffed the pages back into the briefcase. “One more thing. The boy’s mother gave a T-shirt to some weird little church in Prati. They have a collection of memorabilia that appeals to psychics. She told them that soon after Alessio went missing, and Ludo Torchia was pronounced dead, she found it at home. With a fresh bloodstain on it. As if the two events were connected. The church collects that kind of thing apparently.”

Teresa scowled. “Leave me out of this. I’m a scientist. I don’t do witchcraft. Maybe someone had a nosebleed?”

“They didn’t,” Messina said flatly. “This T-shirt has gained a few more bloodstains over the years, not that we found that out until this morning. The church warden tried to keep it all quiet. But he’s a precise man. He made a note of the date each fresh bloodstain appeared. Any guesses?”

They looked at one another and stayed silent.

“The first happened just after Sandro Vignola went missing. Then, following each death, a day, two at the most, the warden finds another stain on Alessio Bramante’s shirt. It’s no big deal. The place scarcely has any security. Anyone could get in there, open the case, and pour something on the shirt. It doesn’t take magic. This morning…”

He paused to look out the window. They were moving into the Viale Aventino at last. It couldn’t be far away.

“…the church had a visitor. A man on his own, with a physical description that matches Bramante. This was around seven-thirty. Afterwards there were several fresh stains. Big stains this time, ones they couldn’t keep quiet. And some writing. That’s what brings us here. Not, unfortunately, before the caretaker had got in there first. Rosa Prabakaran is talking to her.”

Peroni’s face lit up with fury. “You’ve got a junior officer straight out of school on something like this? Aren’t there any grown-ups around?”

Messina gave him a cold managerial stare. He didn’t appreciate the interruption.

“She’s got nothing to worry about. You people, however…”

Even Falcone looked lost for a clue at that moment.

“He’s got two left on his list,” Messina continued implacably. “Dino Abati. God knows what he calls himself these days or where he’s living. And the police officer Bramante blames for stopping him beating the truth out of Ludo Torchia fourteen years ago. I hope you like the emergency quarters in the Questura, by the way, Leo. You’ll be staying there, all four of you, until this is over.”

“Oh no,” Peroni declared, waving his hand. “I’m just a man on the street these days. Don’t lay this at my door.”

“It’s already there,” Messina snapped. “Don’t you get it? Bramante isn’t just killing these people one by one to get his revenge. He’s taking someone they’re close to beforehand, holding them ransom, trying to…”

The commissario struggled for the words.

“He wants to put them through exactly the same nightmare he experienced,” Falcone filled in calmly. “But what makes you think he wants me?”

“After we worked out what was going on here, I sent a team round to the apartment Bramante has been using since he got out of prison. He was long gone. But he’s been busy. Too busy to take everything with him. Take a look at these.”

He withdrew three packs of photographic prints out of the briefcase, checked the labels, and passed one to each man. They sifted through the contents in silence.

Nic Costa was halfway through his own when he stopped, bewildered.

He was looking at a photograph of himself and Emily, walking out of the Palazzo Ruspoli, happy, smiling, arm in arm. He recognised the new red coat she was wearing. The picture had been taken two days before. They’d seen the doctor that morning, had the standard talk about what to do, what to expect, during the coming months of impending parenthood.

“What’s this lunatic doing taking photographs of me?” Teresa demanded, pointing at the pack in Peroni’s hand.

Costa glanced at them, then at Falcone’s set. In the photograph in the inspector’s hand was Raffaella, shopping in the Via degli Zingari. Something didn’t ring true.

“He didn’t try and seize any of us today,” Costa said, his eyes returning to Emily’s tired, strained face, still trying to work out what to make of the photo of them together. “He went straight for Leo.”

Messina scowled at the familiarity. “Yes, he went for the inspector. Perhaps he just saw an opportunity. He’s intelligent enough to improvise, isn’t he?”

“He’s intelligent enough to get what he wants first time round,” Falcone answered, giving Costa an interested look.

The commissario looked pleased by this response.

“I’m glad you find this worthy of your attention, Leo. It’s your case now. As I said, sick leave ends today. Peroni’s off the beat. Costa here is done playing museum curator. Head this up or sit inside the Questura trying to remember how to play chess. It’s up to you.”

Some choice, Costa thought. The avid look in Falcone’s eyes told him it was already made. A part of him was glad to see the old inspector fired up by something outside himself for a change. Another part wanted, more than anything, to see Emily, to take her away from this new threat, let her sit down, rest, recover some of the strength she seemed to have lost, without his noticing, in recent weeks.

“And the ladies?” Peroni asked.

Messina smiled. “Yes. The ladies. We have a villa near Orvieto. Big, secluded, and hard to find. A car will take them straight from the Questura. My father’s there. Giorgio Bramante isn’t looking for him. So they’ll be safe. Call it a surprise vacation. I don’t want the complication of having them around in Rome.”

“That’s their decision,” Costa complained.

“No,” Messina replied. “It’s not.”

Teresa Lupo leaned forward and tapped the commissario hard on the knee.

“Excuse me for pointing this out, but I’m a lady too. Maybe I could use that vacation.”

“You’re a pathologist,” he retorted. “And I want to introduce you to Toni LaMarca. What’s left of him.”

“Basic caving technique,” Abati said, and pushed LaMarca back into the centre of the room. “Know the place you’re in and what’s around it. This wasn’t always a temple. I told you. These were tufa workings. Someone put the temple in here later, after they were finished digging out the stone. This is an underground quarry. Half those things you think of as corridors either lead nowhere. Or they just meet up with some fissure or fault in the rock.”

“I heard water,” Vignola said, puzzled.

“This is Rome!” Abati declared. “There are springs. Fault lines. Unfinished tunnels that lead nowhere. There must be channels that go all the way down to the river. It could link up with the Cloaca Maxima itself somehow. If I had the equipment and the people…” He gave them that condescending look Torchia was beginning to resent. “I could find out. But I don’t think any of you quite fits the bill. So don’t walk anywhere I can’t see you. I really don’t feel in the mood for rescue work.”

In his head, Ludo Torchia had allotted each of them a role. Abati was Heliodronus, protector of the leader. Vignola was Perses, clever, quick, and not always willing to reveal what he knew. Big, stupid Andrea Guerino made a good foot soldier as Miles. Raul Bellucci, an underling who always did what he was told, could pass as Leo, the mechanism for the sacrifice. And for Nymphus, the bridegroom, some kind of creature who was both male and female in the same body, the slim, annoying creep who was Toni LaMarca.

There could be only one Pater. Torchia understood exactly what that meant. Pater involved leadership, not blood relationship, certainly not love. He’d watched the way his own father had behaved, the simple, blunt dictatorial attitude that said Here in my own house I am a kind of god too. From obedience came knowledge and security. It had been that way for Ludo Torchia right up to the age of nine, when his father went down to work at the docks in Genoa one day and never came back. A year later, when his weak, incapable mother thought he was over everything, Torchia had stolen into the jetty where the accident occurred. He’d stared at the giant black crane, its head like that of some stupid crow, trying to imagine what had happened, how it would feel to have that mass of evil steel tumble over towards you, ravenous for something to destroy.

Ludo loathed the Church from that moment forward, watching his mother cling to the Bible each night, trying to find some solace in a religion that, the young Ludo Torchia knew, had failed them by allowing the crane to topple in the first place.

When he came to La Sapienza and began, under the careful tutelage of the brilliant Giorgio Bramante, to study Mithraism, Ludo understood finally what his life had lacked, and how that gaping hole could be filled. By duty, responsibility, leadership. Some clear declaration of his own identity, one that set him apart from the drones. He would be Pater one day, part of the old religion, one that kept its secrets beneath ground, didn’t share them foolishly with the masses in vast golden palaces. Here, in the temple that Bramante had uncovered, all the pieces should have been in place, and Ludo could begin by finishing the task those long-dead soldiers had begun almost eighteen centuries before.

Except one detail was missing. The cowardly Vincenzo had failed them, failed his destiny, to be Corax, the initiate, the beginner, a child even, if the old books had it right.

“Also…” Abati added quickly, marching towards the altar again, intent on something Torchia couldn’t predict, “I am not countenancing any of this nonsense.”

To Torchia’s astonishment, Abati now had the bird’s cage in his hands, was lifting it high. The shining black cockerel flapped its wings and made a low, aggressive crowing noise.

“Don’t touch that,” Torchia ordered. “I said…”

Dino Abati was working on the cage lid.

“Ludo. Think about it. We’re in trouble enough without these stupid games.”

“Andrea,” Torchia yelled. “Stop him.”

“What…?” Guerino mumbled. The big farmer’s son looked half stoned already.

None of them understood, Torchia realized. Bramante’s words kept ringing in his ears. How terrible must it have been to have lost your religion? To have seen it snatched from your hands, just before death, to be denied the final sacrament, the last opportunity you would have on this earth to make peace with your god?

Abati had the cage open, was turning it sideways, trying to shake the cockerel out into the damp dark air.

“Don’t do that,” Torchia said, walking over towards the red-suited figure.

Heliodronus always wore red, Torchia remembered. He always coveted the position of Pater. Had to. Until Pater died, there was nowhere for him to go.

Ludo Torchia surreptitiously retrieved a fist-sized rock from one of the stone benches as he moved, gripped it low and hidden in his right hand.

“I said…” he began to murmur, then stopped, found he was waving away a cloud of stinking black feathers, flapping furiously around his face.

Maybe he screamed. He wasn’t sure. Someone laughed. Toni LaMarca, by the sound of it. Terrified, screeching with fear and rage, the cockerel dug its claws into Ludo Torchia’s scalp, then launched itself over him, towards the exit, flapping manically, its cawing metallic voice echoing around the stone chamber that enclosed them like a tomb.

He didn’t know why he’d picked a bird that was black. Like a crow, its wings and limbs extended. Like some miniature mocking imitation of a crane.

Sometimes Ludo Torchia didn’t know why he did things at all. When he’d caught his breath again, he found he was on his knees, looking at the bloodied head of Dino Abati, pinning the figure in the red caving suit to the ground.

Not that it was necessary. Abati’s eyes were glassy. His mouth flapped open, slack-jawed. Torchia didn’t actually remember hitting Abati, which meant, he realised, he could have smashed the big, jagged rock that was still in his hand deep into his skull time and time again.

The rest were crowded round the two of them now. No one spoke. The chamber stank. Of dope and the bird and blood and of sweat and fear, too.

“Oh Christ, Ludo,” Toni LaMarca — it had to be Toni LaMarca — whispered. “I think you killed him….”

Torchia looked down at Abati. There was blood seeping from his nostrils. It bubbled, then subsided as he watched. Abati was breathing. He was probably just unconscious. That was all. Still, he’d made his point. He’d established himself, the way the Pater had to.

Torchia turned, gripping the rock, and looked up at the four of them. The Pater must rule. That was how it worked.

“Listen. All of you.”

He realised he was speaking in a different kind of voice already. Older. A voice with an authority he hadn’t quite found inside himself before.

“If you try and say this was just me, no one will believe you. I’ll tell them we did this between us. Everything.”

“Ludo,” Guerino moaned in his stupid, country-boy whine. “That’s not fair.”

“Just do what I tell you,” Torchia ordered, voice rising, with a commanding tone inside it he hoped was copied from Giorgio Bramante. “Is that so hard? If you stick with me, everything works out fine. If you don’t…”

This was the moment on which everything turned. They outnumbered him. They could walk out, go bleating to the college people. To Giorgio Bramante. And that thought sparked both fear and some deep, interior delight of anticipation in Ludo Torchia’s head.

Dino Abati groaned beneath him, his eyes flickering open.

Torchia held up the rock again, noting the blood on its surface, and raised his arm, as if to strike Abati’s head once more.

“It’s your choice,” he said calmly.

They looked at one another. Then Sandro Vignola plucked up the courage to speak.

“Let’s just keep this among ourselves, Ludo. We can clean Dino up. It was an accident, really. Let’s do what has to be done, then get out of here.”

Vignola was always the smart one. Perses. Number three behind himself and Abati.

Torchia looked at Andrea Guerino.

“Hey. Farm boy. Fetch the bird.”

Then, audible to each of them, came a brief high sound, unintelligible, half terrified, half excited.

It could have been a child, trying to say something that was lost in the shadows.

“Fetch me that, too,” someone ordered, and Ludo Torchia was surprised to find it was him.

None of them wanted to stay long in the old crypt beneath the abandoned church of Santa Maria dell’Assunta, not when they saw what was down there. They left that to Teresa Lupo and her assistant, Silvio Di Capua, who worked away under the arc lights they’d brought, aided by a team of goggle-eyed morgue monkeys. This was an unusual one, even for them.

Having handed off his responsibility, Bruno Messina went back to the Questura. Falcone began to assemble his team, slowly at first, but with a rapidly growing confidence. Officers were despatched to bring in the latest news on the hunt for Dino Abati. Two more were sent back to the old church in Prati to take a look at the bloodstained T-shirt. Falcone insisted it stay on the wall there so that a surveillance officer could be placed on stakeout duty day and night to see if Bramante returned. Whatever forensic the shirt contained seemed, to Falcone, irrelevant. They already knew the man they were seeking. The abandoned church on the Aventino would provide enough for Teresa Lupo’s team to work on for the foreseeable future. Once that team had gone, Costa, Falcone, and Peroni sat down in the control van and listened to Rosa Prabakaran’s description of her interview with the woman who’d found the body in the crypt.

Costa had seen Rosa in the Questura. The junior officer was a quiet individual in her early twenties who kept herself apart, and not just because of her background. Rosa had ambition written all over her, that careful, reticent attitude Costa had come to recognise among those who kept looking for the way to the up escalator the moment they arrived. She’d been in the force just six months, joining after completing a master’s degree in philosophy in Milan the previous summer. Young, educated, smart, keen, and with an ethnic background… she had just about every qualification the force was looking for in its next generation of officers.

Except, perhaps, some harsh collision with the real world. He’d spoken to Peroni about this briefly, as he accompanied the big man out of the crime scene deep beneath the earth, making sure his partner didn’t go round the corner and buy a pack of cigarettes, falling back into bad habits. Rosa’s experience on the force had been routine and perhaps even a little privileged. But now she was on the Bramante case, and had been for a good half day before it engulfed them. She was the one who had gone to the church in Prati, and deciphered where the message on the wall was pointing them. Early that morning, while they were preparing for a sociable lunch and the news of a wedding to come, a pleasurable moment that already seemed long distant, she’d walked into the crypt, seen the fresh new corpse there. Then, after interviewing the woman caretaker, she’d set about assembling all the data available on Giorgio Bramante, which she had requested after Pino Gabrielli’s identification of the intruder in his little church. It was she who’d managed to link the dates of the attacks with the bloodstains in Sacro Cuore del Suffragio, more rapidly than most old hands on the force could have hoped for. It was clear to Costa from listening to the fluent, concise way she managed to sum up what they already knew about Bramante and his movements after leaving prison that Rosa Prabakaran could, one day, make a formidable officer. Only one thing bothered him. It all seemed to be a touch unreal to her, a cerebral puzzle, like the arguments she might juggle in an academic dissertation. That sort of self-detachment could, in his view, be dangerous, both for her and the outcome of any investigation. If there was one thing he’d learned in his short career it was this: results came from engagement, however painful that sometimes proved to be.

Costa forced himself to put aside his concerns about Rosa Prabakaran, which probably stemmed from nothing more than her inexperience, and got back into the conversation.

“They offered him his old job back?” Peroni asked, amazed.

“Academics…” Falcone said, with a grimace.

According to Rosa, Bramante had walked out of jail after serving fourteen years of a life sentence for murder and found himself immediately faced with the gift of a professorship back at La Sapienza, with university tenure, effectively a job for life. And he’d turned it down.

“Why the hell would he say no?” Peroni demanded.

To Costa it was obvious. “Because he had a job to do, Gianni. He’d already started on it while he was in jail. Bramante felt he had a…”

“Higher calling?” Falcone suggested wryly.

“Exactly. He wasn’t going to be deflected from that for anything. Besides…”

A man who spent years in jail, carefully plotting the elaborate deaths of those he blamed for the loss of his son, was someone capable of powerful emotions.

“Perhaps he’d feel guilty too,” Costa went on. “If he got his old life back, and nothing had changed.”

Falcone stared at Rosa. “Do you agree?”

She shrugged, with the dismissive confidence of the young. “Why complicate matters by trying to think yourself into his head? What does it matter?”

Costa couldn’t stop himself flashing a look of disappointment in her direction. He’d felt much the same way at her age, believing that cases came down to facts and procedures. It was only with age and practice that a more subtle truth emerged: motivation and personality were important issues too. In the absence of hard evidence, they were often the only trails an investigation team could follow.

“I’m sorry,” Rosa said testily. “It seems obvious. Bramante knew exactly what he was planning to do. He wasn’t going to let anything get in the way. Why else would he have taken the job he did?”

“Which was?” Peroni asked.

“The one he had part-time in jail,” she replied. “Working in a slaughterhouse. For one of the butchers in the market here.”

She let that sink in.

“A horse butcher,” she added. “I’d sort of forgotten they even existed.”

But this was Testaccio, Costa thought. One of the oldest working-class communities in Rome. Less than a kilometre away from where they were stood the old slaughterhouse, a vast complex now being turned over to the arts, after years of dereliction. The killing had moved elsewhere, out to the hidden suburbs. The shops still remained, though, in the quarter’s narrow streets, and the busy market where Rosa Prabakaran had found the caretaker of Santa Maria dell’Assunta that morning. Bramante’s cheap little apartment had been close by. It was now being swept clean for less obvious clues than a set of photographs of men and women who could lead him to Leo Falcone. Not, it seemed to Costa, that there would be much there to help. Bramante was gone, to a hiding place he’d doubtless prepared in advance. He was a brilliant, organised, careful individual. That much was clear already. The kind of man who was unlikely to betray himself easily.

“Where does the wife live?” Costa asked.

Rosa looked nervous for a moment. “Three blocks away,” she said. “And that’s ex-wife. They divorced not long after he went to jail.”

“Clever as Bramante is,” Costa pointed out, “it’s still hard to believe he could do all of this on his own. When he’s out of jail, maybe. But to kill those people while he was on parole, he’d need transport, money, information.”

“It wasn’t his wife,” Rosa insisted. “I talked to Beatrice Bramante this morning. After I saw the old lady home.”

Falcone’s grey eyebrows rose. He said nothing.

“She saw Giorgio once in the street about two months ago, after he was released. She followed him home to his apartment and tried to talk to him. He wouldn’t talk to her. The woman’s lost everything. Her husband. Her child. Her money. She’s living in a one-room dump in a public housing block, not much better than his. There’s nothing for us there.”

“Agente,” Falcone said quietly. “When you interview potential suspects, you don’t do so alone. You go with an experienced officer. And at my command. Is that understood?”

Rosa Prabakaran’s brown eyes widened with anger. Her ambition was, Costa thought, getting the better of her. She said, “You weren’t even on the case when I saw Beatrice Bramante.”

“I am now,” Falcone snapped. “Interview rules are interview rules. If the mother had told you anything incriminating, it would have been inadmissible as evidence. Do you understand that?”

“I’d just seen what happened in there!” She pointed towards the yellow barriers outside the church. “I was trying to help.” Her brown eyes looked glassy, misting over with the sudden hint of tears.

“When you work for me, you work as part of a team. Either that or you don’t work at all.”

She didn’t burst into tears. Not quite. Then Peroni’s broad, ugly smile broke the chill.

“Youthful enthusiasm, Inspector,” he declared. “We all had it once. Even you.”

Falcone glowered at him. “Someone’s going to have to go back and see her,” the inspector said. “Properly this time. And find out what Bramante was up to when he wasn’t working.”

“Caving,” Rosa said. “He wouldn’t let Beatrice into his apartment because it was full of things he needed. She saw lots of equipment through the door. Ropes. Torches. Clothing.”

“So she did tell you something!” Falcone declared. “Let’s hope to God I don’t have to try to introduce that into court sometime soon.”

Rosa Prabakaran fell silent, mute with fury and perhaps a little shame. Falcone was busy flicking through Bruno Messina’s papers again, engrossed.

“Your shift ends in two hours,” he said to her, staring at a photo of Raffaella Arcangelo lugging shopping back to their apartment in Monti. “It’s been an eventful day. Go home now. I’ll get you reassigned to something more suitable in the morning.”

“Reassigned?”

“You heard me.”

“I figured out what that message on the wall meant. I found that body. I tracked down the woman who discovered it. I—”

“You did what you were paid to do,” Falcone interrupted. “Now leave us, Officer.”

“Sir,” she hissed, then snatched her bag and stormed out the door.

Incandescent breath coming in short gasps, aware that their attention had gone elsewhere the moment she’d stalked out of the van, Rosa Prabakaran stood between the vehicle and the old abandoned church, wondering what to do next. The three of them made her feel like an intruder, someone who had walked in on a private gathering. She had been on the force long enough to understand there was a strong, unusual relationship among these men, a relationship other officers talked about with more than a little suspicion.

She was, Rosa suddenly realised, more than a little jealous.

The woman pathologist was outside, standing by the yellow lines, gazing up at the weak winter sun, a large, amiable figure whose bright, intelligent eyes never seemed to be still. She ambled over, smiled, and held out a hand.

“Rosa?” she said.

Another searching glance from an intimate on Falcone’s team.

“Did I hear,” the woman asked, “the much-missed sound of our beloved inspector losing his cool?”

“Is it that common?”

“It used to be. I haven’t experienced it in a while. You’ll find this strange, but it’s rather heartening to hear him bawling someone out again. It means we stand a chance of getting the old Leo back.” She paused. “He nearly died last year. Remember that.”

“I know. Still, it doesn’t give him the right to be downright rude.”

Teresa Lupo frowned. “I’ve known Leo for a long time. He’s… obsessive. It’s nothing personal.”

“It sounded personal.”

“That’s one of Leo’s habits, I’m afraid. It always does. Did you, um…” — she smiled slyly — “…deserve it by any chance?”

Rosa Prabakaran didn’t answer that.

“Ah.”

Teresa Lupo studied the blue van and the three heads visible through the still-open door.

“Being right is another of Leo’s annoying traits. You’d best live with it. You could learn a lot from him. Besides, there are plenty of mediocrities around who’ll bawl you out, too. Best get the treatment from one who can teach you something. You, of all people, should bear that in mind. There are still some… old-fashioned ideas around in corners of the Questura.”

They’d covered the colour question once before, got it out of the way in the little café around the block from the Questura a few months back after Teresa had taken her to one side and quietly passed on a few tips about how to handle Gianni Peroni. Rosa Prabakaran never once felt the issue of her skin posed much of a problem for the people she worked with. Rome was a multicultural, multicoloured society. It wasn’t a big deal. She was more likely to feel out of place because of her sex.

“I won’t screw up again,” Rosa said with feeling.

“Of course you will. We all do. Tell me again. What did this man we’re looking for actually do?”

“He was a university professor. An archaeologist.”

Teresa Lupo’s pale, flabby face screwed up with dissatisfaction. The pathologist was, Rosa thought, remarkably like Peroni in some ways.

“That was years ago.”

Rosa sighed. Another dissatisfied customer. “That’s what he did. OK?”

“No, what did Giorgio Bramante do?” Teresa insisted. “In prison. After prison. When he wasn’t being a university professor. Forget about the way you want to think of him. As some nice, middle-class individual gone wrong. Give me what you know about him after he lost his son.”

“In prison he worked in a slaughterhouse. When he got out, he went and did the same job. In some Testaccio butcher’s shop that had a slaughterhouse somewhere else. A horse butcher, would you believe?”

The pathologist thought about this, then smiled again, a broad, confident, happy smile. “Odd, don’t you think? A smart man could have got a better job, surely.”

“I’ve just been through that with Falcone. Bramante had other things on his mind.” She’d hoped the picture of what she’d seen in the crypt wouldn’t come back. The presence of this inquisitive, infuriating pathologist, who understood so much more than she was going to say, made that impossible. With the memory came the inevitable question.

“What kind of gun does that?” she asked. “I’ve seen photos of wounds before. None of them…” The sight of the man remained in her head, a lurid spectacle lit by her bright police flashlight. And the smell was still there too. The stench of meat and the iron tang of blood.

“What did you see?”

“You know what I saw!”

“Of course I don’t. Tell me. This is important.”

She wanted to go home. Her real home, not the plain little apartment she’d insisted on renting in order to make a point. She wanted to talk to her father, sit down with him and have a quiet meal, watch TV, look at her old law books, and wonder why she didn’t take his advice and go for a comfy, well-paid job convicting criminals instead of a difficult, poorly paid one trying to sort them out from the rest of society.

“I saw a naked man, quite deliberately placed on the ground, as if he were a corpse in some kind of ritual. He was in a crypt full of skeletons. Old ones, all in a line. The odd one out. All to himself. At the front.”

“Good. And?”

“Something… a shotgun, I don’t know, had blown a hole in his chest. I could see…” She shook her head. “What’s the point?”

“The point,” Teresa Lupo said severely, “is that you’re supposed to be a police officer. Either look or don’t look. Just don’t half look.”

Rosa could feel her temper rising again, ready to snap. “I did look.”

“No, you didn’t. Was he killed in that room?”

“I don’t know…. No. I don’t remember seeing much blood. I would have thought there’d be lots. When you shoot someone.”

“There is when you shoot someone, at least with something that could cause a wound that big. But he wasn’t shot.”

“I saw!”

“You saw a wound on his chest. Then you jumped to easy, quick conclusions. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Most people would have done the same. But if you want to work around Leo Falcone, you need to drag yourself out of the category of ‘most people.’”

“I saw…” Rosa tried to summon the scene again, painful as it was. The man’s chest had been a mess, worse than anything she’d seen in any photos of a car accident or a murder.

Teresa Lupo was waiting.

Finally, Rosa said, “I saw bone. Not broken bone. Part of a rib cage. It wasn’t damaged. It looked like all those other skeletons in there. Except it was white. Very white.”

The pathologist nodded. “Good. Next time I’d prefer not to have to drag it out of you. Now let me tell you something I saw when I took a close look at him. On his back, beneath the scapula — the shoulder blade — was another wound. It was made by some sharp, spiked metallic object, one that had gone through the flesh and under the bone, causing some very extensive bruising. As if whatever caused the wound had carried the dead man’s weight, too, for a while anyway.”

“So he was stabbed in the back? With a spike?”

“You’re being literal again, Rosa. What if the spike was stationary and he was put on it?”

She wanted to scream. This wasn’t how they’d told her to work at the training college. This was imagination, not the slow, methodical technique she’d believed was the way to proceed with criminal investigations.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said finally, exasperated. “It doesn’t make sense.”

The expression of amused exasperation on Teresa Lupo’s face worried her. Rosa Prabakaran was suddenly aware that she was developing a Force 10 headache.

“Oh my God,” she blurted out, shocked, baffled by not knowing what thought process had tied those two disparate threads of knowledge together. “He worked in a slaughterhouse.”

“Great place to kill people, if you think about it,” Teresa said with a grin. “And full of hooks. Now, by way of thanks, do you want me to talk you back into this case or not?”

Rosa found herself staring hungrily at the control van. The three of them were still deep in conversation.

“You think you can do that?” she asked hesitantly.

“Watch…” Teresa Lupo declared, marching for the door already, “…and learn.”

Twenty minutes later a plain blue Fiat was speeding past the ageing concrete façade of the film studios at Cinecittà, out to the nondescript modern suburb of Anagnina. Peroni was driving. Teresa and her right-hand man, Silvio Di Capua, were in the back looking like five-year-olds on their way to a party, though one to which they had, for the moment, no invitation. There were no papers to guarantee entry to the slaughterhouse where Giorgio Bramante worked. Papers took time, and preparation. They were hoping to circumvent both. Somehow…

Costa glanced out the window. Little more than a kilometre away was his home. When he and Emily had left the farmhouse that morning, it was to spend a pleasant, lazy day in the city with friends. The old job had intervened without warning. He’d no idea when he’d be back, or see Emily again. There’d been time only to make a brief call to her before they left. She’d been in the car to Orvieto, as the commissario had promised, just a few minutes from the villa owned by Messina’s father. She’d sounded a little puzzled, resigned to being out of the city for a while, accepting that there wasn’t much alternative. Raffaella Arcangelo felt the same way, she’d said. Costa wondered whether Falcone had found the time to speak to her yet.

He watched the flat, dead lands of the modern suburbs flash past the window. He hadn’t raised the subject of Emily’s health. He didn’t know how. Not on a phone call from a police van outside a former church overrun with scene-of-crime officers trying to piece together a picture of a murder. That would have to wait.

A hand came over from the back seat and tapped his shoulder.

“They kill horses on your doorstep,” Di Capua declared, with his customary tact. “I bet you didn’t know that.”

“Being a vegetarian,” Costa observed, “I’m not sure it’s any of my business. How do you carnivores feel?”

“About horse-eating?” Peroni waved a massive, pale hand at the passing landscape. “Barbaric. Cows. Pigs. Lambs. That’s what they’re bred for. Horses… it just doesn’t feel right.”

“Exactly,” Teresa agreed.

Silvio Di Capua said nothing, until a jab in the ribs from his companion prompted him to complain, “I haven’t eaten horse in ages. You hardly find it anywhere these days. Besides, it’s dead already, isn’t it?”

Teresa’s hand swatted his shoulder. “If you didn’t buy it, they wouldn’t kill horses for you to eat in the first place, idiot.”

“In which case they wouldn’t breed the things, would they?

Except as ponies for rich kids, and…” — he waved at the housing tracts flashing past outside — “…I don’t see much of a market for them around here. So instead of being dead, they’d just be unalive. You’re arguing that’s an improvement?”

No one said anything for a while after that, until Peroni simply muttered “Barbaric” again, then turned the car onto a small industrial park, cruised slowly along until he got the right number, and pulled up by a large iron security gate behind which lurked an anonymous low building, much like a factory unit anywhere. A sign on the gate said, simply, Calvi. Just the owner’s name. Not a hint of what went on inside. Horse butchers didn’t advertise their presence too loudly.

They got out, Peroni pressed the bell, and the five of them waited. A truck was just visible on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. It was an animal transporter. Dark, glittering eyes moved behind the slats on the rear door. They could hear the occasional sound of hooves tramping on wood and a low, nervous neighing.

“What kind of hours do you think a slaughterhouse works?” Teresa asked. “I mean… I’ve no idea. I never met anyone who worked in one. I never thought about it….”

She fell silent. A short, elderly man with a pained gait, the kind that spoke of hip trouble, had left by a side door and was now hobbling towards them.

When he arrived and stared suspiciously through the iron bars of the gate, Costa flashed his ID card and asked, “Calvi?”

He had a thick walrus moustache and was wearing a heavy lumberjack shirt. Stained.

“The only one. This is about Giorgio, I guess.”

“What makes you say that?”

He sighed and unlocked the gate. It was a heavy mechanism. It wouldn’t be easy to get inside without a key. Certainly not if you had a reluctant companion with you.

“The probation people phoned this morning. Said he hadn’t called in or something. I don’t get it. Either he’s free or he’s not. You tell me. Which is it?”

“You haven’t been listening to the news?” Costa asked.

The lurid circumstances surrounding Toni LaMarca’s murder had already made it onto the hourly broadcasts. Costa didn’t want to think what overimaginative junk would fill the papers tomorrow. Somehow Giorgio Bramante’s name had been mentioned as prime suspect. Given the number of memories that were still fresh about the original case, this had the makings of a story the media would love. He couldn’t help but wonder whether Bruno Messina had realised that and called a few TV and newspaper friends himself, just to stir things a little. Fourteen years before, all the sympathy had run one way. For Bramante and, by implication, Messina’s fired father. If the story was to get big — and that seemed inevitable — well, Messina was a political animal. He’d make sure it came complete with the spin he wanted.

“Something’s happened to Giorgio?” Calvi asked, with a sudden concern. “Don’t tell me that. The poor guy’s been through enough as it is. Going to jail for what he did. Unbelievable.”

“We need to know where he is,” Costa replied carefully. “Do you have any idea? When did you last see him?”

“He was on the morning shift here yesterday. Till three in the afternoon. Then he went home. Never came back. I don’t know where else he spends his time. Ask Enzo Uccello. They were in jail together. Got released around the same time. No — Enzo was a couple of months before Giorgio. Good men. Good workers. I don’t mind giving them a break.”

Teresa caught Costa’s eye. Here was the opening they sought.

“Where do we find Enzo?” Costa asked nonchalantly.

Calvi nodded at the building. “Working.”

“Do you mind if we come in?”

“It’s a slaughterhouse,” Calvi reminded them. “Just so you know. It’s clean, as hygienic as the city people say it should be. We don’t break the law. We do a good job, as kindly as we can. But I’m warning you…”

“Thanks,” Teresa said, smiling. “After you.”

Calvi led the way.

Teresa had told them the problem in the car. At first examination — and Teresa’s preliminary opinions were rarely wrong — Toni LaMarca had suffered two significant injuries. The spike through the back, beneath the shoulder blade, which would have been extraordinarily painful, but not fatal. She had an idea about that already. Then — and this must have occurred afterwards — some massive, so far unexplained, trauma to his chest, directly over his heart. A trauma that had removed a substantial amount of tissue, in a circular pattern some forty centimetres wide, clean down to the ribs, then continued on to penetrate to the heart beneath. Rosa Prabakaran could have been forgiven for thinking some close-up shotgun was to blame. But for the absence of powder and shot — and those bright, clean, unmarked ribs staring at her in the crypt — Teresa said she’d have thought the same thing. But what killed LaMarca was no ordinary weapon. Somehow, she said, her instinct told her it had to do with the work Bramante had done in the slaughterhouse. A knife. An implement. Something that lived in the bloody arena behind these closed doors, and didn’t get mentioned much in the outside world.

The slaughterhouse owner opened the door and instantly the smell and the light hit them. The place reeked of meat and blood and the overwhelming stench of urine. Rows and rows of bright spotlights, like batteries of miniature suns, ran across the ceiling. Once his eyes had adjusted, Costa found the hall was empty, save for one lone individual at the far end, sweeping what looked like a grubby tide of brown water into a central lowered drainage channel.

“You’re lucky,” Calvi told them. “We’re between consignments. But…” — he made a deliberate show of staring at his watch — “there’s a truckload outside that has to come through in thirty minutes. I’m warning you. Now I have to do paperwork. You talk to Enzo on his own. These cons don’t like it if the rest of us are around when they get reminded of things.”

Somewhere outside, there was the sound of a horse, whinnying. It was a scared sound, high and loud, the cry of a creature pleading for comfort. Then a rattle of angry hooves on wood.

They all went quiet.

“You get used to it after a while,” Calvi added, then limped away, leaving them on their own.

The four of them watched as Calvi went into a small office next to the entrance. It had one window looking out directly onto what Costa took to be the production line of the slaughtering floor: live animals came in at the far end, were stunned, killed, then hung on a moving chain and progressively butchered as the corpses travelled down the hall.

Teresa shaded her eyes against the burning lamps in the ceiling, looked up at the mechanism that moved the carcasses along, took hold of one of the big hooks and said, “Exhibit number one, gentlemen. It was one of these that put that hole in Toni LaMarca’s back.”

Peroni blinked at the long hallway. “There’s got to be a hundred of them at least. And…”

A series of smaller adjoining rooms, with the same white clinical look and blazing lighting, ran off from the opposite wall. Sides of red and fatty marbled meat hung on them.

“…the rest. It’s so bright in here.”

“When you’re dealing with dead things, you need to see what you’re doing,” Di Capua muttered. “I’m looking,” Teresa’s assistant added, then walked across the hall, surreptitiously pulling on a pair of white plastic gloves as he did so.

The figure under the last set of lights stopped pushing the huge broom and glanced back at them, uncertain at their approach. The tide of grubby water at his feet swelled slowly round his boots then continued down to the channel at the centre of the hall.

“Enzo!” Peroni shouted. The other man nodded. They walked over. Costa showed his badge.

“First-name terms,” the man muttered. “This must be bad.”

Enzo Uccello was a short, skinny man with a gaunt face, prominent teeth, and thoughtful eyes. He looked in his mid-thirties, and a little worn down by life.

“We need help,” Costa told him. “When did you last see Giorgio Bramante? And where were you last night?”

Uccello muttered something under his breath. Then…

“Giorgio went off shift here yesterday at three. I haven’t seen him since. Last night I stayed in, drank my one regulation beer — which is as much as I can afford — and watched TV. On my own, before you ask.”

He had that easy, glib way of answering questions any cop recognised. He’d been through this before.

Costa was getting interested. “Where do you live, Enzo?”

“Testaccio. The same block as Giorgio. The prison people have some kind of deal.”

Teresa stared at him. “And you didn’t see him?”

“Signora,” Uccello sighed. “Giorgio and I shared a cell the size of a dog kennel for the best part of eight years. I respect the man. He should never have been in jail. He never would have been, if you people knew what you were doing. But after all that time together it’s nice to spend a little while apart. Trust me.”

“I can see that,” Peroni agreed genially. “Did he tell you he was still angry? Was he looking for some kind of payback?”

“What?”

“Giorgio killed someone last night. One of the students who was under suspicion for his son.”

“Oh no…” Uccello murmured. He had been working all day, Costa guessed. He hadn’t heard.

“This wasn’t the first either,” Peroni went on. “Are you sure he didn’t mention anything?”

The ex-con threw down the broom. The grubby water spattered them all.

“No! Listen. I’m on conditional release. If I just fart at the wrong time, they put me back in that stinking place. I know nothing about what Giorgio’s been doing. That’s his business. And yours, if you say so. Nothing to do with me. Nothing.”

They didn’t press it. Uccello was sweating. Peroni had that look on his face Costa recognised; the big cop didn’t like pushing people, not unless there was a good reason. And if this was an act, it was a good one. Uccello seemed like someone who seriously wanted to avoid going back to prison.

“What did you do?” Peroni asked. “We can find out easily enough. I’d just like to hear it from you.”

The younger man spat on the floor, then picked up the broom and moved it around aimlessly. He didn’t look at them.

“I came home and found the neighbourhood loan shark screwing my wife. So I shot him.”

Peroni grimaced. “Bad…”

“Yeah. Got worse when you people came round and found out I was also the neighbourhood dope dealer, too. So don’t go feeling too sorry for me. But Giorgio… he’s different. He never belonged in that place. I was heading there all along. Now I’m out and staying out. Even if it means sweeping up blood and shit in here for the rest of my life. Any more questions? We’ve another bunch of animals to deal with soon.”

“There’s just the two of you here? And Calvi?” Teresa asked.

“It’s a small business these days. We’ve got two more men on shift when it comes down to the butchering. But first…”

He didn’t need to say it. She cast a long, quizzical glance down the room.

“How do you kill them?”

“Same way you kill most big animals.” He put a finger to his forehead. “Captive bolt to the forehead. Bang…”

She looked unsure of his answer. “What does that do?”

“Makes a hole through the skull into the brain.”

“And then it’s dead?”

“No. Then it’s unconscious. I have to stick it. Open a vein in its neck. Five minutes or so, then it’s dead.”

“The bolt goes through the skull?” Teresa asked.

“Correct.”

She scanned the room again, unhappy.

“And the rest,” she persisted, “you just do with knives?”

“And saws. It’s a process. Most people don’t want to know about it. Is there something in particular you’re looking for?”

Teresa Lupo shook her head. “Just a way of tearing a hole in a man’s heart without doing the slightest damage to his rib cage. There has to be something else.”

Costa had watched Silvio Di Capua work his way through the three adjoining smaller halls, looking progressively more miserable as he passed through each.

“What happens in there, Enzo?” he asked.

“You start off with a live horse,” Uccello explained with mock patience. “Then you get a dead one. Once it’s hung for a while, it moves down the line, and the further it goes, the smaller it gets. Over there we start packing it. Making it the kind of shape people can buy without thinking about what it used to be. Is this useful?”

Costa tried to focus on something that was hovering at the edges of his memory. “And the bones? What do you do with the bones?”

Uccello shrugged. “Not our job. They just go. Someone takes them away. After…”

Something occurred to Costa. “After what?” he prodded.

Uccello walked into the third room, the one Di Capua had just vacated. They followed. It seemed cleaner than the rest, washed down more recently. There was a small line of hooks in the ceiling, but this time they were fixed, not attached to some kind of production line.

“Have you ever heard of ‘mechanically recovered meat’?” Uccello asked.

“You know,” Peroni grumbled, “if I hear much more of this, I’m going vegetarian too.”

Uccello almost laughed. “Don’t worry. It doesn’t go into humans. Not anymore. It’s for dog food, cat food. Animal meal. That kind of thing.”

“‘Mechanically recovered meat’?” Teresa asked.

“We butcher them by hand, as much as we can. When that’s done, you’d think there wasn’t much left on the carcass. There is. Sinew. Gristle. A little meat even. You can’t get it off with a knife. You need something more powerful.”

Silvio Di Capua was one step ahead of Costa. There were three long lances on the wall, each with an accompanying pair of stained gloves, face mask, and goggles. He took down the nearest lance and played with the trigger.

“Don’t mess with that….” Uccello was saying.

Some kind of device kicked in from outside, making a loud mechanical whirring noise. The lance leapt violently in Di Capua’s hand. A hard, thin stream of water shot out of the end of the device and flew straight to the opposite wall, a good eight metres away, with sufficient force to cover them all in a fine, cold spray.

“Water,” Teresa exclaimed, laughing. “Water!”

“Yeah,” Uccello agreed. “Water. We couldn’t use this room this morning for some reason. The drain was blocked. It wasn’t running away properly.”

Teresa cackled again. Then, before Costa could say a thing, she’d walked along the channel, found the sump where it ended, and was down on her knees, right sleeve rolled up, reaching down with her hand, deep into the gulley.

“As the man who shares your bed, I would really prefer it if you wore gloves for that,” Peroni said quietly. He looked as white as a sheet.

So did Uccello when his boss stormed into the room. Calvi was incandescent with rage.

“What the hell is this?” he yelled. “I let you in to talk to one of my employees. Next thing I know you’re messing around with the equipment. Get out of here! Enzo! What are you doing, man?”

“I just…”

There was fear on Uccello’s face. Fear of Calvi. Fear of doing something that could end his fragile freedom.

“I want you people gone,” Calvi bellowed. “You have no right. Out of here. Now!”

Teresa got up from the floor and came back to them, standing close to the slaughterhouse owner, so close he flinched. She had something in her hand. Now Costa flinched. Grey flesh. White tissue. Unmistakable hanks of dark, wet hide.

“What kind of horses do you kill here?” Teresa asked.

Calvi glowered at her. “Whatever I get sent! Whatever you people feel like eating tomorrow.”

“Nobody’s going to be eating anything that comes through here for a very long time,” she said. “This is a murder scene. Silvio. Call in. Seal everything. I don’t want any civilians in here until I’m done. No horses either.”

“What?” Calvi yelled. “I’m struggling to make a living as it is! You can’t do this! Why?”

She pulled a piece of tissue out from the mess in her fist, something white, very white, washed clean, as if it had been sitting in water for hours. It was a segment of skin, just big enough to fit in the palm of a hand. In the centre was the unmistakable brown circular shape of a human nipple.

“Because,” she went on calmly, “sometime last night Giorgio Bramante came back here with a man who’d rather have been anywhere else in the world. He beat him. He put him on one of those hooks up there, then hoisted him off the floor. And after that, while he was still alive, he hosed his heart out.”

Calvi had turned the same colour as Peroni. Both of them looked ready to vomit.

“That,” Teresa added, “is why.”

It was getting dark by the time Falcone finished at Santa Maria dell’Assunta. Perhaps it was age or his convalescent state. Whatever the reason, Falcone found he had, for the first time, to make a conscious effort to list on a notepad what had to be done in order to make sure all the threads stayed in the head. There were many — some from the present, some from the past. And practical considerations, too. Falcone had sent an officer to his apartment to fetch some personal things for the enforced stay inside the Questura. Then he’d ordered copies of the most important Bramante files to be e-mailed to the Orvieto Questura, printed out, with a covering note he’d dictated, and sent to await the arrival of Emily Deacon at the house of Bruno Messina’s father. Cold cases — and too many aspects of this were cold — required an outside eye. Emily had the analytical mind of a former FBI agent. She also had no personal ties to what had happened fifteen years before.

The one person who wouldn’t be pleased was Nic Costa. Falcone felt he could live with that.

After despatching those commands, he’d made several careful walks around the crypt, thinking about Giorgio Bramante, trying to remember the man, trying to begin to understand why he would return to this place, so close to his family home, to perform such a barbaric act.

Remembering wasn’t easy. What he’d told Messina was true. Bramante had offered them nothing after his arrest, nothing except an immediate admission of guilt and a pair of hands held out for the cuffs. The man never tried to find excuses, never sought some legal loophole to escape the charges.

It was almost as if he were in control throughout. Bramante was the one who’d called the police to the dig on the Aventino when his son went missing. He had readily acceded when Bruno Messina’s father had allowed him the chance to talk to Ludo Torchia alone.

Falcone remembered the aftermath of that decision: the student’s screams, getting louder and more desperate with every passing minute, as Bramante punched and kicked him around the little temporary cell, in a dark, deserted subterranean corner of the Questura, a place where only a man told to sit directly outside would hear. Those sounds would stay with Leo Falcone always, but the memory offered him nothing, no insight, no glimpse into Giorgio Bramante’s head whatsoever.

The man was an intelligent, cultured academic, someone respected internationally, as the support Bramante gained when he came to court demonstrated. Without an apparent second thought he had turned into a brutal animal, ready to bludgeon a fellow human being to death. Why?

Because he believed Ludo Torchia had killed his son. Or, more accurately, that Torchia knew where the seven-year-old Alessio was, possibly still alive, and refused, in spite of the beating, to tell.

Falcone thought of what Peroni said. Any father would have felt that way.

Falcone had listened to those screams for the best part of an hour. If he’d not intervened, they would have gone on until Torchia died in the cell. It hadn’t been a desperate outburst of fury. Bramante had methodically pummelled Ludo Torchia into oblivion, with a deliberate, savage precision that defied comprehension.

A memory surfaced. After Torchia was pronounced dead, when the Questura was in an almighty panic wondering how to cope, Falcone had found the presence to think about Giorgio Bramante’s physical condition and asked to see his hands. His knuckles were bleeding, the flesh torn off by the force of the blows he’d rained down on Torchia. On a couple of fingers, bone was visible. He’d needed stitches, serious and immediate treatment. Weeks later his lawyers had quite deliberately removed the bandages from his hands for each court appearance, replacing them with skin-coloured plasters, trying to make sure the public never saw another side to the man the papers were lauding, day in day out. The father who did what any father would have done…

“I don’t think so,” Falcone murmured.

“Sir?”

He’d forgotten the woman was still around, seated in a dark corner of the van, awaiting instructions. Rosa Prabakaran had, somewhat to Falcone’s surprise, earned his approval after Teresa Lupo talked her back onto the case. The girl was quick, had a good memory, and didn’t ask stupid questions. In the space of a couple of hours, she’d touched base on several important points, most importantly in liaising with intelligence to see what else could be gleaned from existing records. There was little there. Dino Abati had left Italy a month after Bramante went to jail, abandoning what had been a promising academic career. Perhaps Giorgio Bramante had tracked him down somewhere already, found him in the dark, done what he felt was right in the circumstances. Falcone wondered if they’d ever know.

Focus.

He’d lost count of how many times he’d said that word to a young officer struggling to come to terms with an overload of information, a succession of half-possibilities just visible in the shadows. Now Leo Falcone knew he needed to heed his own advice. He was out of practice. His brain hadn’t worked right since he’d been shot. Everything took time. The delightful presence of Raffaella Arcangelo had clouded his judgement, made him forget what kind of man he was, how much he’d been missing work all along. It was time to put matters right.

He looked at Rosa Prabakaran. “Make sure intelligence keeps looking. They’ve got to have more than this.”

She nodded. “How do we find him?”

It was such an obvious question. The kind you got from beginners. Falcone felt oddly pleased to hear it.

“Probably we don’t. He finds us. Giorgio Bramante is looking for something or someone. That’s the only thing that will make him visible. When he’s not looking, he’s probably untouchable. He’s too clever to have left any obvious tracks. To stay with people he knows.”

He thought about what she’d said earlier.

“If he’s got all that equipment, I rather imagine he’s in a cave somewhere. Bramante knows subterranean Rome better than just about anyone in the city. He could be somewhere different every night and we wouldn’t have a clue.”

“You mean there’s nothing we can do? Except wait?”

“Not at all! We work harder to understand the information we have. We see what else we can find out there. We cover all the proper bases. But to be honest, I don’t see routine trapping a man like that. Routine works for ordinary criminals. Giorgio Bramante is anything but ordinary. The one consolation is that, as far as we know, there’s no one else in the city on his hit list.”

“Except you,” she said, then remembered to add, “sir.”

“So it would seem,” he agreed with a polite nod of the head.

Dino Abati was conscious again, leaning against the altarpiece, looking a little woozy. He pressed a handkerchief to his head. There wasn’t too much blood there, just a couple of trickles working down from his scalp, matting his red hair against the pale skin of his forehead. He’d survive. Maybe, Torchia thought, he’d learn. That’s what it was all about. The cult. The rituals that happened here. Men learned what it took to make them good in the eyes of their peers, to prepare them for the rigours of life. Obedience. Duty. Self-sacrifice. But obedience above all. That came easy to some people. No one else in the temple had dared challenge him when he attacked Abati. No one questioned anymore why they were here.

Not after he had told them, quite simply, but with a firmness that couldn’t be misinterpreted, “We find the bird. We kill it. We swear on its blood we never tell anyone else about what happened. Then it’s done. We don’t mention this again to anyone. Ever. Understood?”

Andrea Guerino and Raul Bellucci were still out there, somewhere in the warren of corridors, trying to do his bidding. Abati would cause no more trouble. Sandro Vignola was back on his knees peering at the inscriptions on the stonework, openmouthed, looking idiotic, still aghast at what they’d found: an underground shrine to a long-lost god, one despoiled by Constantine’s Christians at the moment of their victory.

And then there was that other voice.

“How are you going to kill the bird?” LaMarca asked.

Torchia had researched that, just to make sure. This was a ritual, for him, even if the rest were just going along with what he wanted, out of fear, out of survival. Rituals had to be enacted correctly, with precision. Otherwise they could rebound on those who performed them. Make the god angry, not satisfied.

“I hold it over the altar and cut its throat.” He pulled out the penknife from his pocket. “With this.”

LaMarca’s eyes glistened under the light of the big lantern Abati had brought and placed on the ground, scattering its weak rays in all directions.

“We visited this farm in Sicily once. Out in the middle of nowhere. And one day I see this kid in the farmyard. No more than six or seven. They sent him out to get a chicken. He just chases one, picks it up by the legs” — LaMarca was mimicking the actions now, stooping and waving his arm — “and he’s swinging it like this. Around and around. Like it’s a toy. And you know what happens in the end?”

“Tell me.”

“The fucking head comes clean off! I’m not kidding you…. He swung it so hard.”

Toni LaMarca couldn’t handle drink or dope. He was utterly stoned, a fact Torchia registered in case it came in useful.

“One moment the chicken’s going round and round, squawking like it’s furious or something. Next, the head flies straight off and there’s nothing there but a neck and it’s…” Something clouded over his face for a moment, some forgotten image that had been prodded out of its slumber by the drug. “…pumping blood. Like a little fountain. Pumping away. Not for long. We had it for supper. They had it. I didn’t feel so hungry.”

Dino Abati took away the cloth from his head and said, “These caves are dangerous. We shouldn’t be here.”

“When… the… chicken’s… dead…” Toni LaMarca said with the slow, difficult precision of the stoned, prodding Abati with his foot, then he began to giggle stupidly.

“Don’t touch me, Toni,” Abati said calmly.

LaMarca backed away.

“We’ll go,” Torchia repeated, “when we’re done.”

Abati shook his head and went back to dabbing it with the handkerchief. “If Giorgio hears of this…”

“Leave Giorgio out of it,” Torchia snapped.

He thought he could hear footsteps coming down the corridor outside now, approaching. Something about the nature of the sound made him uneasy. The others fell quiet too.

“Ludo…” Abati was beginning to say.

Then Bellucci marched in, grinning like a moron. He had the black cockerel in his arms, cuddling it like a pet. The bird turned its neck with a mechanical precision and let out a low, puzzled complaint.

Andrea Guerino was behind Bellucci, pushing a small child, a young boy Ludo Torchia recognised, though it took him a moment to remember how. It was the party the previous Christmas, when students were invited to meet staff and their families, in a garishly decorated room — he didn’t believe Giorgio could be part of such crass Christian foolishness — in the building in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta.

The young Alessio Bramante had been there, staring at them all resentfully, as if there were something in their age he envied.

“Jesus Christ,” Abati murmured, and clawed his way to his feet. “That’s it, Ludo. Time to go and meet the man.”

“What are you doing here?” the boy yelled at them angrily, struggling to get out of the strong arms that held him tight. “This is a secret. When my father finds out—”

Guerino seized his long hair and pulled it until he stopped yammering.

“Where’s your father, Alessio?” Torchia asked the boy.

“Here.” An odd expression crossed his face. Furtive. Some memory had stirred, some idea in the child’s head had brought the blood to his cheeks. “Somewhere. Don’t you know that?”

He was angry and confused, uncertain of himself, disturbed at being lost in these caves. But he wasn’t frightened.

“I know what this is,” he added. “It’s a… game.”

Then he jerked his hands out of his pockets. An object fell to the floor. Ludo Torchia reached down and picked up a pair of toy glasses. The kid didn’t complain. Torchia looked through them for a moment, saw the room, the people in it, multiplied many times over. There was something unnerving about the sight. He stuffed the glasses into his pocket.

“It’s just a game,” Torchia agreed. “But a very important one.”

They were all quiet, even Dino Abati. The scent of opportunity was in the air, and even the most stupid of them surely understood that. Each knew what would happen if Bramante found them there. Suspension. Expulsion. Disgrace. The end of their time at university.

“So what do we do now?” Dino Abati demanded.

Torchia picked up one of the flashlights and walked to the door. To the left the corridor ran slightly downhill, working its way further into the rock, further beneath the earth. A labyrinth lay ahead of them, a spidery maze of possibilities among the narrow channels cut into the soft stone. Very few of them, it occurred to Torchia, explored.

Alessio Bramante was by his side for some reason.

“Now we play,” Torchia answered.

He grasped the boy’s hand and tugged him down the corridor, down towards the darkness.

Falcone told Rosa Prabakaran to find a driver.

“I don’t know drivers,” she confessed.

“See that big sovrintendente from uniform? The one looking as if he’s ready to sneak off for a cigarette?”

“Taccone,” she said. “I think.”

“Taccone. You’re right. I thought you didn’t know any drivers.”

“Sometimes I seem to know more than I remember at first.”

“I sympathise,” he said dryly.

“Sorry. You’ve got more reason. They said you nearly died.”

“They say all kinds of things about me. Tell Taccone to bring the car round. We’re paying someone a visit.”

“Who?”

“Someone you’ve met already. Someone I last met years ago. Beatrice Bramante.”

He saw the expression of concern on Rosa’s face.

“Don’t worry,” Falcone told her. “I’ll try to be gentle.”

Beatrice Bramante lived in one of the big tenement blocks in Mastro Giorgio, five minutes away. These apartments were part of the area’s history, built about a century before, tiny homes set around central courtyards joined by hanging walkways, several hundred little boxes in which the population of an urban hamlet lived cheek by jowl. In the old days, when Testaccio was one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Rome, the homes were so crowded some people slept permanently on the walkways. The area had come up in the world over the years, a little anyway. There were no bodies on makeshift mattresses anymore. Some of the properties were even in private ownership, and fetching rising prices on the extortionate Roman housing market. But most remained rented, home to a mixed population of locals, immigrants, and students, all looking for a cheap place to stay.

Falcone tried to recall the Bramantes’ house on the Aventino. It was a substantial family villa, a little worn at the edges. But the property must have been worth a fortune even then, with its position on the hill, looking back towards the Circus Maximus, a sizable garden, and an isolated aspect, a good fifty metres away from adjoining houses on both sides.

As his finger hovered over the bell on the door of the tiny apartment, he realised how much Beatrice Bramante had come down in the world. Her son’s disappearance — the logical, police inspector’s part of Falcone’s mind refused to use the label “death” without firm proof — was like every case involving a lost child he’d ever dealt with. The ripples, the effects, the subsidiary tragedies, took years to become wholly visible. Entire lifetimes, perhaps. Sometimes, Falcone thought, perhaps even years weren’t long enough to reveal the whole story, the full catalogue of pain and darkness.

The door opened. For a moment, he didn’t recognise the face there. She’d aged considerably. Beatrice Bramante’s hair was as long as ever, but it was no longer dark and glossy. Entirely grey, it hung lank and loose around her shoulders. She wore a threadbare blue cardigan pulled tight around her skinny frame, with long sleeves clutched into her palms. The long, intelligent, attractive face he remembered was now lined. Bitterness had taken the place of the grief-stricken bewilderment he remembered from a decade ago.

It took her a moment to realise who he was. Then an unmistakable flame of hatred sparked in her dark eyes.

“What do you want?” she asked through gritted teeth. Her eyes flicked over Rosa and Taccone. “I have nothing to say to you, Falcone. Nothing at all.”

“Your husband—”

“My former husband!”

He nodded. “Your former husband killed someone yesterday. We’re coming to believe he’s killed before. This morning I think he may have made an attempt to murder me.”

“None of this is my business. None…”

“Signora,” Rosa Prabakaran said suddenly, “I’m sorry. This is all my fault. I should never have come here on my own this morning. It was wrong of me. Please. You must say what you have to say in the presence of these officers. Then we will go, I promise you.”

The woman didn’t move. She stood there, a stiff, furious figure. Leo Falcone glanced behind her. The little room seemed full of canvases, large and small, on the walls, parked against cupboards, everywhere.

“You still paint?” he observed. “I should have expected that.”

There was just one subject on every canvas he could see. A pretty young face with bright, shining eyes staring out from the painting, challenging everything he saw, asking some question the viewer could only guess at.

“I have to find Giorgio before he can do more harm,” Falcone added. “I would like to put Alessio’s case to rest for good too. We couldn’t do that before. There was too much…” — he hunted for the word — “…noise. Much of it regrettable. Now I’d like to find out what happened to him, once and for all. With your permission…”

She said something Falcone couldn’t catch, though perhaps it was simply a mumbled curse. Then she swung the door wide, with what seemed to him a marked unwillingness.

“Thank you,” Falcone said, and beckoned Rosa Prabakaran to go in first.

Beatrice Bramante excused herself and went to the bathroom. Falcone, Rosa Prabakaran, and Taccone sat tightly together on the small, hard sofa next to a tiny dining table. They could see into the adjoining bedroom and the dark open courtyard beyond. The entire apartment was smaller than the living room Falcone recalled from the Bramante house on the Aventino.

“You never mentioned the paintings, Agente,” he said quietly, trying to stifle the note of reproach in his voice.

“They weren’t here,” Rosa replied, unable to take her eyes off the single face in front of them, multiplied over and over again, always with that same querulous expression.

“No,” she corrected herself. “They were here. I saw some things piled up in the corner. But they weren’t out like this. I guess my visit brought back some memories.”

Falcone sighed, exasperated at the way the young were so anxious to make up their minds. Then Beatrice Bramante returned. Carefully, with more tact than he would have possessed a decade before, he led her through all the points she’d covered that morning with the overzealous Rosa. The woman answered each question without hesitation, unemotionally, with the same kind of matter-of-fact attitude her husband had adopted after Alessio’s disappearance. Falcone reminded himself that at the time they had appeared to be a close couple.

“What do you do these days?” he asked.

“I work part-time at a kindergarten. I paint a little. Just for me. Not for anyone else.”

He looked around the apartment. “I’m sorry. I have to ask. Why are you living here? Why not the Aventino?”

“Lawyers cost,” she replied flatly.

“But Giorgio pleaded guilty. There was no trial.”

“That was his choice. I tried to persuade him to argue. I spent most of the money I had on lawyers who thought they could change his mind. We had a lot of debt on that place anyway. Besides, with him gone, with Alessio gone…” — the dark eyes shone accusingly at him from underneath the silver mess of hair — “it wasn’t a home for a single woman.”

Falcone nodded. “And you divorced. Do you mind my asking… was that Giorgio’s idea or yours?”

“I mind, but if it’ll get you out of here more quickly, you can have your answer. It was Giorgio’s. I used to visit him in prison, once a week, every Friday. It didn’t seem to make much difference to him. One day, after a year or so, he told me he wanted a divorce.”

“And you agreed?” Rosa asked, leaning forward a little.

“You don’t know Giorgio,” Beatrice answered, gripping the sleeves of her cardigan tightly. “When his mind’s made up…”

Falcone’s eyes were fixed on the paintings that crowded the room. Some, it seemed to him, were recent. One, of the boy in his school uniform, seemed to be painted from life. Unlike the rest, it had no tragedy welling up beneath a sea of frozen, frenzied oils.

“You have some more paintings of Alessio,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

Her face tightened with anxiety. “I do?”

“Well, you seem to prefer the one subject. Do you mind…?”

He walked into the tiny bedroom. It was a shambles. More canvases were propped beneath the window, face to the wall. He turned over the first three, then stopped. The first few were of Alessio. But as he would have been. When he was ten or twelve. But this one was different. In this painting, he was almost a man, with an expression on his face that was serious, almost cold. The same look Falcone had seen in his father.

One curious point struck him. In all of the works, including the adult one, Alessio was wearing a T-shirt like the kind found in the Piccolo Museo, one bearing the same logo: a seven-pointed star.

Falcone returned to the sofa. Beatrice hadn’t moved.

“I never had children, never even thought about it, to be honest,” he admitted. “It’s only natural in the circumstances to want to imagine how they would grow up.”

“Natural?” She echoed his words with a hard, sarcastic edge.

“What’s that symbol? The one with the stars. It seems important to you.”

She shrugged. “Not really. Giorgio had me design it for the school. The stars come from Mithraism. Giorgio was a little… obsessed with his work sometimes. It spilled over into the rest of our lives.”

“Was he unfaithful?” Falcone asked abruptly, aware of the young policewoman’s sharp intake of breath next to him.

Beatrice Bramante stared at her hands. Then she shook her head, saying nothing.

“Were you?” Falcone pressed.

Again, she was silent.

“I’m sorry,” Falcone said, after a moment. “These are standard questions. We should have asked them years ago, but somehow the occasion never arose.”

She stared up at him, her face creased with hate. “So why ask them now? Do you enjoy torturing me?”

“I’m just trying to understand.”

“We were an ordinary family until that day. No affairs. No secrets.”

“And yet Giorgio took Alessio down into that place,” he replied. “You didn’t know he’d done that. I know you never said that to us at the time. And I didn’t pursue it. You had enough to deal with. But you didn’t know. It was obvious you didn’t understand either. At least, that’s what I thought.”

“What is it you want from me? I ask myself that question every day. Every morning. Every night. What if I’d taken him to school instead? What if he’d been sick? Or gone in a different direction? When you lose a child, Falcone, a part of you never stops playing that awful game.”

The big sovrintendente shuffled next to Rosa, glanced at Falcone as if wondering whether he was allowed to intervene, then spoke anyway.

“And what if they’d turned the wrong corner and found some idiot drunk coming up the street, with his car on the wrong side of the road?” Taccone asked. “We’re police, signora. We hear people going through that kind of agony every day. It’s understandable. But it’s pointless too.”

Falcone wished he had Costa and Peroni by his side, not this well-meaning pair, one raw and unobservant, one decent and unimaginative.

“No,” the inspector said quietly, “it’s not pointless at all. Alessio didn’t disappear because of some drunk driver. His father took him to that place for some purpose. Perhaps what followed was an accident, but the reason he was there to begin with is something I can’t begin to comprehend. Can you?”

Police drivers possessed the same contempt for speed limits as the average civilian. So, to Emily Deacon’s surprise, it took less than two hours to get from the centre of Rome to Arturo Messina’s isolated villa on the outskirts of Orvieto. Her bedroom, which was next to Raffaella’s on the third floor of the palatial home, had an extraordinary view, out over the rolling countryside of Umbria towards the rock face fronting the small, castellated city which gave the region its name. The Duomo, Orvieto’s grandly elegant cathedral, stood proudly over the città, its single rose window staring out like a monocular eye, watching over everything in its care. But this was February. The light was gone too soon for them to enjoy much of the tour of the premises offered by Messina senior, a man of far more prepossessing character than his son. If Arturo felt any embarrassment about the circumstances of their visit and the fact that it stemmed from the case that had cost him his career, he didn’t show it. The old commissario must have been in his early sixties but looked a decade younger, of medium height and stocky build, with a dark, handsome face, a small, neat moustache, and bright, twinkling brown eyes.

The house was far too large for one man. Messina, who had lost his wife to illness some five years before, told, without hesitation, how it had been handed down from generation to generation after his great-grandfather had acquired it some eighty years before. From the ornate entrance hall on the ground floor to the guest quarters and the small but impeccable garden at the rear, with its view to the Duomo, it was a perfect little palace. When Emily asked what he did with his time, Arturo regaled them both with stories of trips into the wild hills to hunt game, fishing on the local rivers, and long outings to distant restaurants with his friends from the Questura. Orvieto appeared to be a retirement ground for old cops. Two had called by that afternoon, one for coffee and, Emily thought, a look at Arturo’s visitors, the second with a couple of pheasants for supper. Arturo Messina wasn’t lonely. This idyllic break from Rome seemed a little too good to be true, until he took her to one side and showed her the package Falcone had sent that afternoon.

She’d stared warily at the crest of the Rome Questura on the covering message. When she opened it, Messina stole one good look at the cover page, then went to a cupboard to find something which he retrieved and placed on the table. It took her straight back to her days in the FBI school in Langley, with an alacrity that was scary.

“That, Arturo,” Emily declared, “is a conference phone.”

“Even an old man like me knows what century this is,” he replied cheerfully. “I like to keep up with the times. Besides, if Leo Falcone is going to rope you into this case, I can surely come too. It was mine once, remember?”

“But…”

“But what?” The brown eyes gleamed at her. “Oh, come. There’s nothing personal here. Do I look like a man eaten up by resentment? Even if I was, isn’t the case more important?”

“That’s not really my decision, is it?”

“I’ll talk to Leo when we’re ready. Agreed?”

She said nothing.

“You are prepared for this, aren’t you?” the old man asked kindly.

She didn’t look ill. She didn’t even look pregnant. It was just tiredness. Mainly. The physical symptoms were just tiny, nothing. They would go away soon and she’d get that rosy bloom she expected to see on all pregnant women.

So the two of them sat down and began to pore over the documents Falcone had despatched to await her arrival. The Bramante case, Emily soon realised, raised many intriguing questions, some of which, as Arturo Messina readily acknowledged, had never been addressed at the time. This was common in all complex investigations, and one reason why cold-case analysis existed. A fresh eye didn’t just see new opportunities. It saw old ones that had been un-exploited or simply unobserved. And sometimes they were the most promising of all.

Beatrice Bramante got up and went to the small sink next to the hot plate. She took down a bottle of what looked like cheap brandy from the cabinet above and poured herself a large glass. Then she came back, sat down in front of them, and took a long, slow drink.

“It took me a year to find the courage to ask him,” she said. “Giorgio is not the kind of man you can interrogate. But I imagine you know that.”

“And he said?”

Beatrice Bramante was crying now, in spite of herself, in spite of the obvious shame she felt as they watched her try, and fail, to choke back the tears.

“He told me… there was a time in everyone’s life when they had to start growing up. That was all he had to say on the matter. Then he told me he wanted a divorce. Quick. Unchallenged. That was my reward for asking. There was nothing more to say. Nor is there now. This is enough for me, Falcone. Please go.”

Taccone was trying to read the old grubby carpet. Rosa Prabakaran was tidying her notepad into her bag, anxious to get out of there.

Falcone reached over, took the pad out of her bag, and put it back in her hands, then stabbed the pen that was still in her fingers onto the page.

“What did that mean, do you think, Beatrice?” he persisted. “That it was time for Alessio to start ‘growing up’ somehow?”

“He was a child! A beautiful, awkward, spoilt, bloody-minded, mischievous little boy. And…” She threw back her head, as if that could stop the tears. “And Giorgio loved him more than anything. More than me. More than himself. I don’t know what he meant. All I know…” — there was a pause as she wiped her face with the sleeve of the grubby blue cardigan — “…is that it wasn’t just my son who died that day. I didn’t know the man in that cell. I didn’t know him when I went to his apartment round the corner. He just looks like Giorgio Bramante. There’s someone else inside the skin. Not the man I loved… love. You pick the words. You make them up. You tell the whole stinking world if you want. After all…” — the lined, bitter face was glowering at him from across the narrow room again — “…that’s what you do, isn’t it?”

“When someone’s been beaten to death while I sit outside listening, twiddling my thumbs?” Falcone asked. “Of course. I also try to catch criminals before they can do more harm than they have already. I hope to lessen the hurt that people wish to do to one another, even if they have little desire to do that themselves. It’s a foolish idea, perhaps.”

He struggled to his feet, then bent and took Beatrice Bramante’s hands. She stiffened at his touch. His fingers fell on the old blue cardigan, gripped tightly around her palms.

“May I?” he asked.

Gently, he pulled back the cheap fabric. He knew what he’d see there, why a woman like Beatrice Bramante would hide herself inside those long, baggy sleeves.

The marks on her wrists were fresh, dark red weals, not deep, not the kind of wound inflicted by someone looking to end their own life. She was harming herself, regularly he guessed. And perhaps…

He thought about something that had been nagging since the moment he first heard it.

“The T-shirt you gave to the church. The blood on it was yours, wasn’t it?”

She snatched her hands from him and dragged the blue sleeves over them again.

“What a clever man you are, Falcone! If only you’d been this perceptive fourteen years ago.”

“I wish that had been the case too,” he replied, and returned to the sofa. “The blood was yours. To begin with anyway. Did you go back to the church again after that?”

“Never. Why?”

“I have my reasons. Why that church in the first place?”

“Where else would I take it? Giorgio worked with Gabrielli. He was a part-time warden there. I didn’t know anyone else. I read about that little museum of theirs in the paper. I…” She sniffed and wiped her nose with the sleeve over her right hand. “I wasn’t myself at the time.”

“When did you tell Giorgio?”

She shook her head. “I can’t remember. In prison. Not long before he asked for the divorce. He thought I was crazy. Perhaps he was right.”

There was another question. It had to be asked.

“Were you harming yourself before Alessio disappeared? Or did it begin then?”

“This is none of your business! None of your business…”

“No,” Falcone agreed, and felt he had his answer. “You’re right. All the same I think it would be advisable if I asked someone to come round to talk to you from time to time. The social people…”

The woman’s face contorted in a fit of abrupt fury. “Keep out of my life, you bastard!” she screeched, stabbing a finger at him, not minding that her sleeves fell back as she did this, revealing the crisscross pattern of marks on both her wrists, rising almost to the elbow. “I will not allow you in here again.”

“As you see fit, signora,” he replied simply.

It was dark outside. Thick black clouds were rolling in from the Mediterranean, obscuring the moon. Soon there would be rain. Perhaps a roll of thunder.

Falcone waited until they were in the car before giving his orders.

“How much experience do you have of surveillance, Prabakaran?”

“I’ve done the course, sir. Nothing… practical.”

“Tomorrow, and until I say otherwise, you will begin surveillance of Signora Bramante. I want to know where she goes. When. Who she sees. Everything.”

“But…?” She fell silent.

“But what? It’s important you tell me if an order is unclear. I abhor being misunderstood.”

“Beatrice Bramante has met me twice now. However hard I try, she’s bound to see me. She’ll know she’s under surveillance.”

The car wound past the market, which was now closed. Falcone peered at the shuttered stalls, the piles of discarded vegetables littering the pavement. As he watched, a burst of squally wind picked up some of the empty boxes, whirling the rubbish in a spiral, depositing the trash everywhere. A flash of thick greasy rain dashed against the windscreen. The weather was breaking.

“I would be very disappointed if she didn’t see you. If the woman has been assisting her husband in this, she’s a party to murder already. For her own sake, I do not wish her to become further involved.”

“But…?”

“Officer,” he said, a little impatiently. “I owe Giorgio Bramante nothing. He is, as far as any of us can determine, the one proven murderer in this whole sorry saga. Beatrice Bramante is different. All the same, it may well be that we have to arrest her before long. Nevertheless, we owe her the benefit of doubt and what charity I can provide. You will follow her. You will ensure you are seen. And at the end of each day, you will report back directly to me. Do I make myself clear?”

Rosa nodded and said nothing. Falcone scarcely noticed. His memories of what had happened fourteen years ago were getting clearer all the time. Now that he could look back with some perspective on what had happened, he was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy about several important aspects of the investigation.

“We also owe that woman truth of what happened to her son,” he added. “I want Giorgio Bramante. And I want truth.”

After just an hour of work — reading through Falcone’s documents and throwing questions at Arturo, whose replies proved he had a clear and capacious memory — it was clear to Emily Deacon that Falcone’s papers covered only a part of the story. When Bramante had been arrested for Ludo Torchia’s death, a grim case of child abduction had turned, instead, into a circus. The police and rescue services were out in force poring over the Aventino and through the labyrinth of tunnels and caves of Bramante’s excavation, looking for the missing boy. Hundreds of civilians had abandoned their jobs to join in the hunt. Swiftly, the investigation became swamped by controversy as the implications of Bramante’s arrest sank in, and it became apparent that the authorities had little idea how to find Alessio Bramante. Emily recognised the symptoms of a full-scale media onslaught: the blind, irrational fury of the public, the angry impotence of a police force driven by legal and public necessities, not what it believed was correct in the circumstances. Then it all petered out in the unsatisfactory way that was all too familiar in cases involving missing children. Alessio was never found. His father held out his hands and went willingly to jail. Five teenagers walked free, then vanished because every lawyer who looked at the case declared, very publicly, that it was impossible to bring anyone to trial after the prime suspect had been beaten to death in police custody. The rules of procedure and evidence had been torn to shreds when Giorgio Bramante had resorted to his fists to bludgeon some information out of the miserable Ludo Torchia. There was no going back.

It was, she thought, a particularly Roman mess, and if they were to stand the slightest chance of peering into this fading mist, it was vital, after so long an interval, for more insight than lay inside Falcone’s hastily assembled documentation.

She pushed the papers aside and looked at Arturo. She didn’t need to say anything. A good police officer still lurked there, she was certain of it, probably itching for a little action. He excused himself and made a phone call. When he returned, he led her to a small and elegant study at the front of the villa, then parked himself at a very new notebook computer on the mahogany desk there and began typing. The emblem of the Polizia di Stato flashed up on the screen, followed by an authentication login. Arturo glanced at a slip of paper with what looked like a username and password scribbled in ballpoint, hammered in a few quick characters, and they were in.

“Are we hacking into the central police network now?” she asked, pulling up a chair.

“No! I’m just… deputising for a friend.” He licked his lips and looked worried for a moment. “I try to stay up-to-date, you know. Up to a point. There’s a generation of police out there who are more at risk from repetitive stress injury than getting a punch in the face. This is not progress. You have to use the tools at your disposal.”

“I’d go along with that.”

“Good. You won’t tell my son about this little escapade, though, will you? He can be a stuck-up prick at times. The poor soul was born fifty years old and he’ll stay that way till he dies. Are we one on that?”

“He’s your son,” she said. “Now…”

It was all there. All the original reports. All the interviews. Photos. Maps. Even an independent archaeological assessment of Bramante’s secret find. Arturo printed out what she asked for. He searched every last digital nook and cranny of the Questura’s system, trying to see if there was something they’d missed. Arturo Messina had hung on to his job for as long as he could during the Bramante investigation. He only got suspended when the hunt for Alessio was “scaled down,” a euphemism for giving up, he claimed, with an abrupt and unexpected bitterness. When there seemed to be no fresh information to uncover, he finally logged off, then they shuffled the stack of papers together and headed for the living room.

Raffaella was there with Arturo’s friend. He was an equally lively-looking pensioner, tall and slim, tanned, with a pleasant, aristocratic face.

“Did Pietro here lead you astray?” Arturo asked Raffaela. “I’m widowed. He’s divorced. Draw your own conclusions.”

She laughed. “I saw the Duomo. Such wonderful paintings.”

“Paintings!” Pietro declared. “Luca Signorelli. My favourite’s The Elect and the Condemned.” He nodded towards them. “That’s me and him. You just have to work out which is which.”

“Tonight,” Arturo said, “you’re the cook. Pheasant for four, please.”

Raffaella was beaming, keen to help. She disappeared with Pietro, into the kitchen, a different woman, Emily thought. Her relationship with Leo Falcone was odd, a little forced, a little subservient. She’d moved in after he’d been shot, cared for him during the long difficult months of convalescence. There was something that puzzled Emily about the bond between them. It was almost as if Raffaella had decided to look after Leo out of a sense of guilt, of responsibility for the tragedy in Venice involving her family which had also almost cost him his life. Free of her old home in Murano, of Rome, and, it seemed, of Leo, she seemed more relaxed, more independent.

Arturo was at the table with the papers again.

“There’s very little here I haven’t seen before,” he muttered. “This case was beyond me then and it’s beyond me now. Perhaps I should just go and peel potatoes with Pietro in the kitchen and let you women have some time together.”

They heard the pop of a bottle from the back of the house then the sound of laughter. Pietro marched back in, followed by Raffaella. He was bearing a bottle of prosecco; she had glasses and plates of supermarket crostini. They looked like a couple about to throw a dinner party, which was, Emily realised, quite close to the mark. She and Nic had never, it now occurred to her, been round to Falcone’s apartment in the evening. Leo and Raffaella weren’t that kind.

“Not for me,” Emily said, turning away the glass with her hand. “I need a clear head.”

“And I work best with a fuzzy one,” Arturo declared. “So serve, then back to the chopping board. Some of us have work to do.”

“More fool you,” Raffaella murmured, on her way out.

Arturo Messina’s face fell. “Perhaps she’s right,” he said with a sigh, after gulping at the brimming glass, an act Emily envied deeply. “What on earth can I do?”

“What you said. Go and peel the potatoes.” She reached for the phone. “I, on the other hand, need to talk to the man who sent us all this in the first place.”

“Not on your own,” he declared, dashing to plug in the conference phone. “Leo and I haven’t spoken for fourteen years. It’ll be a pleasure to hear his miserable voice again, just to hear the shock in it.”

But she wasn’t listening. She found herself staring once more at the photos of Alessio Bramante. He was an unusual-looking boy. Beautiful, a little effeminate, perhaps, with his long hair and round, open eyes. It was easy to see how the papers would love a story featuring a kid like this: pretty, smart, middle-class, with a father who’d killed someone on his behalf. She knew from her time in the FBI that photogenic victims always got the best coverage.

“Do you know what puzzles me most?”

“No,” Arturo admitted. “What did they do to the kid? Was he still alive when Giorgio was trying to beat the truth out of that evil bastard? And why? Why were those students there in the first place? Why Giorgio and his son? There’s so much…”

She agreed. There was. But the Bramante case had changed in nature once the father had been charged with murder. It had ceased to be a simple mystery about supposed child abduction. Instead, it had turned into a public debate about how far a parent should be allowed to go to protect his child. It had become as much the story of Giorgio Bramante as of his son. More, in a way, because Giorgio had been there on every front page, his picture on every news programme. He was an emblem for every last parent who’d ever looked down a dark street and wondered where a son or daughter had gone.

“What puzzles me is simple,” she said. “You had teams and teams of men. You had mechanical diggers. It says here you virtually destroyed Bramante’s archaeological site looking for his son. And still you never found him. Not a single trace of him.”

Arturo Messina licked his lips and, for a moment, looked his age. “He’s dead, Emily,” he said miserably. “Somewhere inside that hill. Somewhere we didn’t find or the cavers didn’t dare go.”

In her heart, she knew she ought to believe that too. So why didn’t she?

“What else,” Arturo Messina asked, “could possibly have happened?”

It felt like the old times. Ahead of them, past the long window of Falcone’s office, now vacated by the temporary inspector despatched elsewhere that afternoon by Bruno Messina, a team of fifteen men and women were working the phones and computers, sifting records, chasing leads, trying to find a simple answer to a complicated question: Where would a university professor turned murderer go to ground in his native city? They weren’t finding any easy answers. The scooter Bramante had used to flee the scene in Monti had been found abandoned in a back street near Termini station. From where he’d dumped the bike, he could catch the subway, the tram lines, the buses, the trains…

Or, Costa thought, he could do what any Roman probably would in the circumstances. Walk. It wasn’t that large a city really. From Termini, Bramante — a fit and active man by all accounts — could be in any one of a number of suburbs on foot within the hour. And from there? Giorgio Bramante was no fool. He’d know, surely, that it was always simplest to be anonymous in a crowd. With time, the police could work the areas where the vagrant populations lived, shiftless, nameless people among whom any fugitive could easily disappear. Bramante may even have known such men in jail. He could be renewing an old friendship, or calling in favours from the past. For a man willing to sleep rough, able to find the thousands of underground caves hidden beneath the back streets and small parks throughout the city, Rome was an easy place in which to hide. Falcone had his officers running through the usual techniques. But the customary tools — video surveillance cameras most of all — were useless. The scope was too wide, the data too large to absorb. Bramante was a man playing by rules of his own making. That effectively made him invisible.

The TV was running stock photos. The morning papers would repeat the exercise, all with pleas for help and a phone number set up to handle sightings. Costa had no good, clear recollection of Bramante’s appearance from their brief encounter that morning. He’d been too focused on Leo Falcone, too worried that the inspector was in grave danger, to think ahead that much.

Still, the figure he remembered — dressed entirely in black, hat low, scarf around his mouth, scarcely anything visible of his face — provided enough for him to realise that the photos of Giorgio Bramante they had were hopelessly out of date. Fourteen years ago he’d been good-looking, clean-shaven, and sported long dark hair. Most of the photos taken before his arrest made him look like what he was: an intelligent, probably slightly arrogant academic. From what little Costa had glimpsed that morning, he now understood, very clearly, that Bramante didn’t fit that image anymore. Nothing could be taken for granted. They were locked inside a sequence of events Giorgio Bramante could have been planning for years. Unlike them, he was prepared, working on the basis of prior knowledge. It was possible, they all knew, that Bramante had managed to track down the elusive Dino Abati under whatever name he now bore. Abati would be thirty-three now. His parents hadn’t heard from him in years. But eighteen months before, he had been recorded reentering the country from Thailand. Since then there was no record of him departing through any international airport. Given the freedom of movement within Europe available to anyone with an Italian ID card, that could still put him anywhere from Great Britain to the Czech Republic. Costa wasn’t alone in wishing the man were anywhere else on the planet but Rome.

There was a commotion on the far side of the office. Both he and Falcone turned their attention away from the pile of reports on the inspector’s desk and looked out into the pool of busy officers at their desks. Gianni Peroni and Teresa Lupo were marching through the aisles throwing out bags of panini and cans of soft drinks like a couple of Santas turning up at a child’s party.

Leo Falcone laughed. It was an open, honest sound Costa hadn’t heard in a while. That of a man who was back in his element.

“I don’t know why they’re feeding them,” Falcone complained cheerfully. “You’d think we were under siege. Being forced to stay here. It’s ridiculous.”

“Not for you…”

The grey eyebrows rose.

“He could have killed you this morning,” Nic said.

“He could have killed me this morning,” Falcone agreed evenly. “So why didn’t he?”

“Perhaps he thinks this is some kind of a ritual, too. Everything has to be done in the proper way. None of the men he did kill went easily. A water jet through the chest…”

“He hated them more than he hates me.” Falcone said it firmly. “Don’t ask me how I know that. I just do. In fact…” He shook his head, disappointed with his own abilities at that moment. “God. I wish I could think straight. Be honest. How am I doing, Nic? I may be a touch paranoid, but Bruno Messina could have more than one motive for giving me this job. Yes, you could say it’s my responsibility. But if I screw up the way his father screwed up, it won’t take much to put my head on the block, too, will it?”

“I think we’re doing everything we can. You have the manpower. We’ve followed practice. If someone’s seen Bramante…”

“No one really knows what Bramante looks like anymore. Except whoever it is that’s helping him. We have to go through the motions, but I’m not holding out much hope. So how?”

It was the old truism, one that most police officers tried to forget, because it tended to demean all the routine that went with a normal investigation.

“Statistically I’d say… out in the street. When his mind’s on something else. His work. Or…” — he had to add this — “…on the way back.”

Falcone nodded vigorously. His large bald head had lost its customary tan over the winter. He would turn fifty before the year was out, Costa remembered.

“Quite right. But here’s another statistic for you, Nic. Although you’d rarely understand this from reading a newspaper today, a child is many times more likely to be at risk from his immediate family or friends than from a stranger. It’s not someone around the corner they need fear, usually. Or some Internet stalker. It’s those who are close to them.”

Costa nodded. Of course he knew. The assumption, from the outset, was that the Bramantes were a perfect middle-class family, a photogenic one which, in the eyes of some, meant they felt the tragedy more than most.

“There’s never been a suggestion that Bramante or his wife abused the child. Has there?”

“No,” Falcone agreed with a shrug. “The middle classes don’t do that kind of thing, do they? At least, not so others get to know about it.”

He motioned to some folders on his desk, blue ones, a colour the Questura didn’t use.

“I called in the social service reports before you got here. Nothing, of course. We should still have looked more closely than we did. We allowed ourselves to be distracted by the media. The course of action we took was formed by public opinion, not what we should have been pursuing as police officers. Instead of justice, we sought vengeance, which is an ugly thing that respects no one, guilty or innocent. The curious part of all this is that I rather had the impression Giorgio Bramante didn’t mind. He already knew what he was going to do, even before we put him in court.”

He peered out at the room full of officers, a few laughing with Peroni and Teresa, most head down over their computers.

“And here we are almost fifteen years on, hoping that this time round we can pull some answers out of a machine. Progress… What do you think, Nic? How do we break this one?”

Costa had formed firm opinions on that subject already.

“Bramante isn’t an ordinary killer. He probably doesn’t expect to escape us in the end. Perhaps he thinks he’ll become the hero again. The wronged father who came back for justice on the louts who got away in the first place.”

Falcone nodded. “And the police officer he holds responsible too. Don’t forget me.”

“Perhaps,” Costa replied.

“Perhaps?” Falcone asked.

“You said it yourself. I don’t think this is about you. Or Toni LaMarca. Or Dino Abati, or whatever he calls himself these days. Not really. It’s about Giorgio Bramante and what happened to his son. If we could only understand that…”

Leo Falcone laughed again and relaxed in his big black chair, putting his hands behind his head. “You’ve progressed under my tutelage, you know. Where’s that innocent young man I nearly fired a couple of years ago?”

“I’ve no idea,” Costa replied without hesitation. “He probably went the same way as that cynical old bastard of an inspector who had this office before you turned up. Sir.”

“A little less of that, Agente. I’ve got five more years in this job. I’d like to think that, when I go, you are on the way to filling my shoes.”

Nic Costa found his cheeks going red. Promotion was the last thing on his mind. It was also the last thing an officer like Leo Falcone, who’d had more than a few troubled years of late, was in much of a position to offer.

“Commissario Messina has reminded you the sovrintendente exams come up in the summer. You should be studying now. That way you could be getting a pay rise in time for the wedding.”

“Sir…”

Costa was grateful that Peroni and Teresa bustled in at that moment. The big man had the remains of what looked like a gigantic cheese and tomato sandwich in one hand and a bag full of canned drinks in the other.

“Rations for the duration,” he declared. “Teresa and I have checked out the accommodation. The Gulag suite is ours. You two can take the Abu Ghraib wing. We have installed fresh soap and towels because the ones that were in there were quite…”

When he stopped, lost for words, Teresa filled the gap.

“Let’s put it this way, gentlemen. I wouldn’t have touched them. Not even with gloves on.”

“Ugh.” Peroni shuddered. “Quite why we can’t just go home beats me—”

“Gianni!” she yelled. “There’s a man out there who swished someone’s heart out with a high-pressure hose last night. He has our photographs.”

“We joined up for this nonsense to be popular?” Peroni asked.

Falcone harrumphed. “If Commissario Messina says we’re confined to barracks outside of normal working hours, then that’s how it’s going to be. I don’t want anyone going walkabout.”

Peroni heaved his big shoulders in a noncommittal hug.

“I’m serious about that, Gianni,” Falcone said severely. “He took those pictures for a reason.”

“I know, I know. So what news?”

Falcone and Costa were silent.

“Oh,” Teresa said with a sigh. “This isn’t going to be a protracted stay, is it? I mean, I still don’t understand why I couldn’t go to Orvieto with the other ‘ladies.’”

Falcone raised a long index finger, a man remembering something he should never have forgotten. Teresa responded straightaway.

“Orvieto,” she said with a quick and somewhat condescending smile. “He wants to call the girlfriend, Gianni. Isn’t that sweet? I don’t remember Leo being so sweet before. In fact I don’t remember him being sweet at all. Nic and Emily getting engaged — and expecting a baby too. Leo being sweet. You giving up meat. The fact that there’s some lunatic out there with our pictures and a penchant for swishing hearts out. The world’s a lovely place now, don’t you think?”

Costa didn’t like the way Falcone’s eye caught his. The expression there wasn’t sweet. It was distinctly guilty.

“Actually,” the inspector said quietly, “it’s Emily I need to talk to. A little advice.”

He reached for the phone, then pushed the conference voice box forward on the desk.

“Of course,” he added, “you’re all welcome to listen.”

Four hours later, at just after midnight, the office was empty except for Nic Costa and a lone cleaner, faceless in the shadows, working away with duster and broom at the far end of the long line of desks. Costa sat by the window, taking breaks from hunting idly through yet more files on the computer to stare out at the bright, handsome moon, high over the rooftops of the centro storico, shining down on empty streets and the dead eyelids of closed shops and bars. It was a good time for a man who couldn’t sleep to try to think. In February the city didn’t stay up late. Come June there’d be people still walking the alleyways outside, happy after dinner, munching on ice creams from the places that stayed open into the small hours, part of the restless summer life of the metropolis. Come summer, too, there’d be a wedding. And a child. Just the thought of those two events dashed Giorgio Bramante from Nic’s mind entirely.

What mattered in the end was family, that undefined and indefinable bond that required no explanation because, to those it embraced, it was as natural as taking a breath, as easy as going to sleep next to the person you loved. As simple as the sense of duty you felt to any child who grew out of that loving relationship.

That, he knew, was what had changed between him and Emily over the previous year. Without Leo Falcone’s influence, and the way the crafty old inspector had opened his eyes, Nic would never have been able to commit to their relationship in the way it deserved. Leo had taught him to relax, to live with his emotions, to take a break from trying to solve the problems of the world for a while. And then to get back into the fray. It was a gift he’d never forget.

They’d all spent an hour and a half on the conference call that evening, sharing ideas, Falcone and Arturo Messina talking together as if nothing had happened all those years before, Teresa trying to make the most of the scant forensic she’d assembled from Toni LaMarca’s corpse and from Calvi’s slaughterhouse. Costa and Peroni had kept quiet mostly, thinking, listening, exchanging that glance they both knew well, a kind of invisible shrug that said Maybe it gets better tomorrow.

Costa looked at his watch, felt guilty for an instant, then picked up the phone. Emily answered, sounding very, very sleepy.

“If you’re too tired,” he insisted quickly, “just say so and I’ll ring off. I never got the chance to ask how you were on the conference call. It didn’t seem right.”

She sighed. There was the impatient rustling of sheets. “It’s nearly one o’clock!”

“I know. I’m wide awake. There’s a bright moon. I can’t stop thinking about you. What more is a man supposed to say?”

There was the distant sound of her laughter. He wished he could reach out and touch her, just for a moment.

“Flowers would be in order when you have the time. And champagne when I’m allowed to drink it.”

“How do you feel?”

“Fine. Up and down, to be honest. Don’t sound so worried. The doctor said it would be like this. It’s not unusual, Nic. Men always seem to think their first child is the only one there’s ever been in the entire history of the planet. Women know better.”

“Don’t shatter my illusions. Please.”

She laughed again. He could almost imagine himself lying next to her on the bed, such were the tight, unspoken ties between them now.

“Something’s bothering you,” she said, becoming serious. “And it’s not the bright moon. Tell me, Nic.”

He’d worked just one cold case in his entire career. It too had been a murder, though less complex. A man of almost seventy beaten to death in his home in a quiet suburban street out in the suburb of EUR. They’d gone back to the investigation eight years later and discovered that, by then, the neighbours were ready to admit what they’d kept secret before. The victim’s son had been involved in low-level drug running. He’d gone missing two years after his father died and was never seen again. It took three months, but eventually they were able to charge a gang enforcer with the old man’s murder and that of his son. All over a measly three thousand euros owed for cocaine. Time did change the perspective with which one approached a crime. But time hadn’t done them any favours in the Bramante case.

“You said you didn’t understand why no one ever found Alessio’s body,” he answered. “Is it that unusual?”

He thought he heard a yawn getting stifled at the other end of the line.

“Maybe. Maybe not. It just makes me uneasy. They brought in all that heavy equipment. Even thermal-imaging gear. All the reports say those caves go deep. That they get too narrow and dangerous to be explored…. I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t find his body. But if he’s not there, where is he?”

Costa glanced at the computer screen.

“Anywhere,” he answered. “If he’s still alive.”

The labyrinth enveloped them, held them captive in the stone belly of the hill. Ludo Torchia led the way, tugging Alessio’s slender arm. The others followed, stumbling, getting more and more confused and scared with each lurching step.

After a few minutes Guerino had tripped and fallen, cutting his hands, letting the cockerel loose into the gloom, where it flew, screeching, taunting them. Abati was glad of that, though it made Ludo Torchia furious. There were bigger issues to worry about than sacrificing some bird. They were lost, deep underground. And the one man who might save them, Giorgio Bramante, would surely be as furious as Ludo Torchia if he discovered what had happened.

Alessio. Alessio. Where are you?

By Alessio’s own account, it was now perhaps thirty minutes since his father had left him alone in the main vestibule at the entrance to the caves. What was Giorgio doing all this time? And why did it need to involve Alessio?

These weren’t questions Dino Abati had time to consider. He didn’t feel good. His head was throbbing where Torchia had struck him with the rock. There were lights, coloured lights, chafing at the edge of his vision. The seven of them were now fleeing into a deep, Stygian chasm, trying to illuminate it with their flashlights, hoping that somewhere, in this unknown skein of corridors, there lay some other way out to the world above, one that would help them all — perhaps Alessio too — escape Giorgio Bramante’s inevitable wrath.

They turned another blind corner, ran, half fell forwards, tumbling down a steep incline. A sudden rock face loomed up to greet them. Near the Mithraeum they’d been in relatively well managed territory, tunnels and small chambers carefully hewn out of the tufa. Here they were back in the original workings, so deep inside the hill Abati didn’t even want to think about it. The rough walls, the rocks strewn on the floor, the cramped, winding tunnels barely high enough for a man to stand upright… everything spoke of a crude, ancient mining operation, not the fabric of a subterranean temple for some cult that liked a little privacy. They were, surely, at the very periphery of the incisions that men had made into the heart of the Aventino. What lay around them was as uncertain, as unknown now, as it must have been to the slaves who had laboured here two millennia before, wondering whether the next tunnel would hold or collapse on them in a sudden, deadly torrent of stone. Or if a natural fault — there was water hereabouts, and that meant the hill itself was far from solid, even before the miners arrived with their pickaxes and shovels — lay in deadly wait around the corner.

The boy stumbled. A falsetto cry — young, uncomprehending — rang through the narrow corridors, fading, disappearing, rising, Abati hoped, to break into the open light of day and tell someone out there to look beyond that old, rusted gate by the Orange Garden and try to find what was happening within.

“You’re not hurt,” Torchia spat at the child, dragging him to his feet, scrabbling for the flashlight.

Alessio Bramante hung his head and swore, using the kind of word most of his age scarcely knew. Giorgio was an unusual father, Abati guessed.

“It’s a game, a game, a game, you miserable spoilt little bastard!” Torchia snarled.

The boy stood still and was silent, just stared at them all with his wide, round, intelligent eyes, the kind of stare that said I know you, I’ll remember you, there’ll be a price to pay for this.

“Ludo,” Abati said quietly, as calmly as he could. “This is not a good idea. We don’t know where we are. We don’t know how safe these caves might be. I understand places like this better than you, and I don’t feel safe down here, not without the proper equipment.” The flashing lights, the pounding in his head, were getting worse.

There was an exit to the left. They’d come past it in their rush. Another black hole to dive down. Another vain hope of avoiding discovery.

“No,” Torchia said bluntly.

“Giorgio is going to find out we’re here! Please!” Vignola objected. His fat face was wreathed in sweat. He didn’t look well at all.

“Let’s just go back now,” Abati said firmly. “If we meet Giorgio, at least we’re bringing him the kid. Let’s not make this any worse than it is.”

Torchia lunged at him, hands scrabbling at his throat, face in his, scary in the way that lunatics were scary, because they didn’t care what happened to them, or to anyone. Abati remembered the rock thudding into his head. That blow could have killed him. Just the memory of it made him dizzy.

“I got you ungrateful shits in here,” Torchia hissed. “I’ll get you out. That’s who I am.”

“Who you are?” Abati asked, lurching away from him, realising with some relief that he didn’t much care what happened to Ludo Torchia, or any of them, himself included, anymore. It had all gone too far for that. “Pater? Are you so screwed up that you believe all that nonsense? That all you need to do is get seven people down here, kill some stupid bird, and everything gets made right somehow?”

“You agreed!”

“I agreed to make sure you idiots didn’t come to any harm,” Abati retorted quietly, turning to go. “Now I want to see daylight again.”

Vignola’s hand touched his sleeve.

“Dino,” he pleaded softly. “Don’t leave us here.”

“Don’t leave us here, don’t leave us here…” Torchia was out of control, spittle flying from his mouth as he mocked Vignola’s words. “Of course he’s not leaving, are you, Dino? A soldier never leaves his battalion. You don’t let your comrades down.”

Abati shook his head. “You’re crazy,” he murmured. “This is real, Ludo. Not some playground adventure. We’re in trouble enough as it is.”

“Wrong. Even if Giorgio’s guessed someone’s here,” Torchia insisted, “how could he know it’s us? Answer me that.”

The flaw in his argument was so obvious. Dino Abati knew straightaway he wasn’t going to mention it, because that could only make things so much worse.

Then Vignola piped up again and Dino Abati wished he’d had the time to grab him by the scruff of his neck and force him to keep his overactive mouth shut.

“Even if he doesn’t know, the kid’s going to tell him, Ludo. Isn’t he?”

Costa had taken a good look at what else was going on in Rome the week Alessio Bramante vanished. It had not been an ordinary time.

“It all happened when NATO was in another terrible mess in Serbia, remember? That was one reason why the authorities told Bramante he couldn’t go public. There were enough contemporary ethnic massacres to deal with without bringing in the TV cameras to see some grisly Christian episode from the past.”

“I still don’t get it,” Emily said. “Would people really get that touchy about something that happened almost two thousand years ago?”

“What we like to call ‘the former Yugoslavia’ is one hour by plane from Italy. There were boatloads of refugees crossing the Adriatic, turning up on our beaches. This was local for us, not distant pictures from a distant land. There was a peace camp on the Circus Maximus at the time. Three, four thousand people from all over Europe. All kinds of people. Hippies. Protesters. The far left. Just ordinary people, too. And quite a few refugees who’d got nowhere else to go.”

“So what are you saying, Nic? That Alessio was kidnapped by one of them?”

“I’m just raising possibilities. What if Alessio escaped the caves? Some of them exit not far from where the camp was. Imagine he ran in among the tents there, distraught, frightened for some reason. He didn’t want to go home. Maybe he didn’t know what he wanted.”

“They’d have called the police, Nic. It’s what you do with lost kids. And what could have scared him so much he wouldn’t want his own parents?”

“I don’t know. But you can’t assume the people there would have gone to us in those circumstances. Some would. Some of them wouldn’t speak to the police about anything. We’re the fascists, remember? Maybe they didn’t have access to the news. They wouldn’t know a child was missing, being hunted by hundreds of people.”

The silence down the line told him she wasn’t convinced.

“If I’m right, Alessio Bramante could be anywhere now, living under an entirely different name,” he persisted.

“He’d be twenty-one or so,” she objected. “You’re telling me he wouldn’t have remembered who he was? That he would have stayed hidden all these years, with his father in jail?”

“His father would have stayed in jail whether Alessio turned out to be alive or not. Besides, that’s your instinct talking, not fact. It’s not uncommon for kids taken at that age to become absorbed by the unnatural family they enter. Children try to adapt to the situation around them. Look at your own country. White children who were abducted by Native Americans in the nineteenth century became Native Americans. They weren’t looking to go back home. They often rebelled if someone tried to force white society on them. They didn’t think the situation they found themselves in was primitive, they thought it was how the world was supposed to be. If Alessio was somewhere else altogether… Out of Rome. Out of Italy perhaps…”

The pause on the line told him she still didn’t think much of this at all.

“You always look for the bright side, don’t you?” she asked gently.

“You were the one who said it was odd there wasn’t a body.”

“And it is. And I’d love to believe Alessio Bramante’s alive and well out there somewhere. I just don’t think it’s possible. Sorry.”

“Fine. Your turn for a stab in the dark,” he challenged, stung.

There was a quick intake of breath on the line. “How about this? Giorgio Bramante made the discovery of a lifetime in that excavation of his. Yet, because of the awkward politics at the time, no one would give him the money to make the most of it. No one would even let him tell the world what was down there. Which, for the arrogant bastard I suspect he is, must have been even worse.”

“Go on.”

“What if he tried to lose Alessio in those caves deliberately? So that he could run out into the street, yelling for help? The rescue service would turn up. The media too. His big secret would be out in the open and there’d be nothing anyone could do about it.”

“You really think a father would sacrifice his son just for professional pride?” It was an extraordinary idea, one none of them had even come near when they’d been throwing the case around that evening.

“No! Because this isn’t professional. From what I’ve read about Giorgio, it was personal. His work was his life. And he figured Alessio would be safe, in the end. There’d be a big tearful reunion. No one would ever ask how the kid got lost down there in the first place, because no one ever does. We’re just grateful they come out alive.”

“I’m not sure…”

“Nic. I know you’re big on family, and so am I. But there are some tough truths you have to face up to. We’ve all seen what happens. When things like this happen, the focus of all that public sympathy turns on the parents as much as it does on the kid. That’s the way it works. The parents are the ones on TV. If they’re lucky enough to find the kid, no one asks any hard questions. How the hell did they get there in the first place? We’re just glad it ended cleanly, keep our doubts to ourselves, and hope someone goes round and quietly tells those people never to get themselves in a mess like that again.”

He couldn’t argue with that.

“Think it through,” she went on. “Follow the logic. Chase down the flaws. Please.”

“There aren’t any. But it’s still more far-fetched than my theory.”

“Really?” He was starting to recognise that tone in her voice. It demanded attention. “There were six stupid students down there, trying to raise the Devil or something. Like it or not, something extremely weird did go on. You know that. So does Leo. He wouldn’t be asking me to cold-case these files if he wasn’t desperate, would he?”

No, Costa knew. Falcone wouldn’t. The old Leo would never have released a single page of a criminal investigation outside the Questura. But the old Leo was gone.

“Giorgio Bramante beat one of them to death,” Costa murmured. “What the hell was that about?”

“It was about his son,” she answered. “Wouldn’t you feel the same way?”

“I’d feel the same way. That doesn’t mean I’d do what he did.”

He heard a long pause on the line, then she asked, “How do you know, Nic? How would anyone know the way they’d respond in a situation like that? Can you be so sure?”

He struggled for an answer.

“I think so,” he said. “I hope so. Look, it’s late. Let me pass all this on to Leo in the morning and see where we get. If you need access to any files…”

“Um…” she said cautiously, “I think we’re fine on that, thanks.” Then she hesitated. “Is Leo all right?” she asked, a little nervously. “He’s still convalescent. He could have said no.”

“Leo’s looking better than I’ve seen him in months,” he answered honestly. “He needed to get back to work.”

“Tell him to call Raffaella from time to time. She hasn’t been out much since Venice.”

“I’m sure with you around she’ll get over the shyness….”

Emily laughed again, and the sound brought out in him the same physical pang he’d experienced ever since they’d met. There was a note of concern in her voice all the same.

“Raffaella’s over it now. She and Arturo are still downstairs with his best friend, working their way through the household grappa cellar. If Leo cares…”

Costa thought of Falcone’s hungry, intense look as he eased his injured body back behind that familiar desk. It was a big if…

“I’ll tell him. But… Bear with me.”

The light was flashing on the handset: an internal call. He put Emily on hold and hit the answer button.

It was the duty officer. Costa listened, then cut the line and went back to her.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. “You sound worried.”

“Front desk says someone claiming to be Dino Abati has turned up looking like a street bum, asking to talk to Leo. No one else would do.”

“That sounds like good news.”

“Maybe…”

He looked around the office. The cleaner was gone. The place was empty. This was an operational floor, staffed only during daytime and outright emergencies. As far as he knew, no one else was there apart from him and the three individuals asleep in the rudimentary quarters along the corridor.

“That was half an hour ago,” he continued. “The desk’s heard nothing since they sent him up here with some rookie agente—”

“Nic?”

The light in the corridor outside failed, followed by those in the office, throwing most of the floor ahead of him into the dark. Only the bright silver rays of the moon, visible through scudding rain clouds, remained. He turned to face what should have been the doorway, blinked, trying to adapt to the sudden gloom. It could just be coincidence. Not that he believed in them much.

“Call the switchboard back,” he told Emily quietly. “Tell them we may have an intruder. Old wing. Third floor.”

She broke the connection without saying a word.

He could just see the extensions printed in the list by the phone. Costa called the first one. A sleepy Teresa answered.

“Don’t ask questions,” he ordered. “Just lock the door and keep it locked until someone arrives. Yell at Leo through the wall and tell him to do the same.”

Then, just to make sure, he dialled the room he’d been sharing with Falcone.

No one answered.

He swore quietly. At least he’d seen fit to check out a handgun from the armoury that afternoon. It sat in its regulation holster on the desk in front of him. Costa hated wearing the thing. He picked it up, checked the safety was on, then, grasping it low in his right hand, walked towards the pool of inky black spreading out ahead of him.

He could picture the corridor in his head, with its glaring white paint and bare bulbs. The emergency quarters were just ten metres or so on from the doorway.

Costa tried to hurry. Desks bumped into him, from all the wrong places. He blinked, trying to force his eyes to adapt, opened them and thought he could just make out the shape of the area ahead.

A car swept past outside. The bright stray flash of its headlights shot through the office, briefly illuminating the area like a flash of lightning. Then it was gone, leaving its visual imprint in his brain. Ahead, Nic Costa saw the single outstretched silhouette of a figure in a familiar pose, one he’d learned to loathe over the years: arm outstretched, weapon ready, moving purposefully, with intent. As the car moved on, he could see the pencil-thin beam of a caver’s helmet lamp running in a distinct yellow line from the figure’s head, slicing through the gloom, aiming towards the rooms where Falcone, Peroni, and Teresa Lupo had been sleeping.

“Wonderful,” he muttered, then took a first, tentative step towards the invisible corridor ahead.

“This is enough,” Abati began to say, then took one step forward and found himself falling, spinning, arms flailing, hands grasping in desperation at little Sandro Vignola’s shoulders just to stay upright. He needed a doctor. He couldn’t take on anyone like this, particularly not Ludo Torchia, who had now, to Abati’s dismay, grabbed Alessio round the throat, and was clutching the child, like a shield, like a weapon, his knife tight to his scalp. Dino Abati looked into the boy’s eyes and wondered whether he could really understand what he was trying to say to him, just with a desperate expression, surely only half visible in the dark.

This isn’t my doing, Alessio. Forgive me. I’ll try and make it right.

“I don’t wanna go to jail, Ludo,” Toni LaMarca pleaded. “Getting kicked out of college I can handle. But this—”

“No one’s going to jail. You won’t tell a soul, will you, kid?”

Alessio Bramante stayed there, tight in his grip, unmoving and not saying a word.

“He won’t say a word,” Torchia said defiantly.

“So…” Abati murmured, trying to force some clarity back into his head. “Tell us all, Ludo. Where now?”

A new sound came to them. It was the tentative clucking of the cockerel, fear covered by some small bravado, filtering out from the tiny, narrow tunnel they’d already passed.

“There,” Torchia answered Abati, lifting his arm from Alessio Bramante’s throat to point at the black chasm behind them. Abati could detect a breath of foul, miasmic air emerging from its mouth. It stank of decay. The very existence of a current of air, however meagre, filled him with the faintest trace of hope. It meant the channel went somewhere.

“Which goes where… exactly?” Abati asked.

Torchia’s foot came out and stabbed him painfully in the shin. The movement released Alessio. The child could have run then. He didn’t move.

Abati staggered to the tunnel, so crudely hacked out of the raw rock it looked unfinished. He could taste the dank, stagnant vapour in the air. Somewhere there was a stream, a fissure in the hill, perhaps, one that led into some unknown natural waterway running beneath the people and the cars on the Lungotevere, back into the real world, straight down to the Tiber. He’d stamped, waist-deep, freezing cold, through subterranean torrents like this before. He’d do it again, with a child in his arms if necessary.

“You tell me, Dino.”

“Ludo…”

“You tell me!”

Torchia’s voice was so loud it felt as if he had entered Abati’s head, and would stay there, spreading his infection wherever he could.

Then another noise. It was the bird again. The black cockerel strutted confidently into view from the hidden crevice ahead, small head bobbing, as if it were trying to force from its tiny mind the idea that there might be something worse ahead, worse even than the crazy Ludo Torchia, who now watched it hungrily.

“Mine,” Torchia barked, grabbing at the bird’s flapping wings and the flailing claws.

When he had hold of the creature, when it became obvious what would happen, Dino Abati took the boy by the shoulders and tried to turn him away. He didn’t want to watch himself. Only Toni LaMarca’s eyes glittered in Ludo Torchia’s direction.

“I thought you needed an altar,” Abati said quietly.

Torchia made an animal grunt, then flung a string of foul epithets in his face.

I thought, Abati wanted to add, but didn’t dare, a bungled sacrifice, rushed, out of place, out of time, was worse than no sacrifice at all.

There was the sound of wild, frightened cawing, one high-pitched screech, then nothing. An odour — fresh, harsh, and familiar — reached them. Blood smelled much the same, whatever the source.

The boy clung to him now, trembling, tight and nervous as a taut wire. Abati gripped him, hoping to keep his small, fragile body hidden. Torchia recognised fear. It stoked his craziness.

Torchia took the feathered corpse and walked round each of them, smearing its blood on their hands, and on Abati, on his face.

He reached Alessio. What Dino Abati thought he saw made no sense. For without warning the boy thrust out his fists, worked them deep into the shiny feathers, washing his hands with quick, eager movements.

“Brothers,” Torchia said, watching him. “See? He understands. Why don’t you?”

But he’s a child, Dino Abati thought. An innocent. He still believes this is a game.

“Where do we go now?” Vignola asked.

“Where this dead thing came from.”

Dino Abati looked at the crude, gaping hole of the tunnel.

“Sure,” he said.

Discreetly, he reached down and gripped the child’s tiny hand, sticky now with blood, then ducked beneath the sharp stony overhanging teeth, bent the beam of the flashlight forwards, and stepped carefully along the ground it revealed, hearing the shuffle of feet behind him, trying to force his aching head to think.

Costa found the corridor, found the light switch, dashed it up and down, knowing it was futile. Giorgio Bramante had worked some trick with the central fuse box, blacking out the entire floor somehow. If Costa were to believe the front desk, Bramante had been in the building little more than thirty minutes, accompanied only by an inexperienced cadet. Not long. It was as if he knew the place already.

Then he remembered what Falcone had said. Bramante was an intelligent, capable man, one used to being underground in the dark, at home in a foreign world where most would be lost, happy inventing a strategy as he went along. One who stored what he saw and held it for use later.

There were interview rooms on this floor, just a two-minute walk from where Falcone, Peroni, and Teresa were now sleeping, down through the Questura’s old narrow corridors to the cell in the basement where Ludo Torchia had been beaten to a pulp. Bramante could be working from memory, with a set plan in mind, one that had been developed and honed over the years he’d spent in jail.

He played his hand in the least expected places, always. And when it came to Leo Falcone, he could simply pretend to be someone else, someone who was threatened, not a threat. Someone who could talk their way inside the Questura after midnight, when everyone was a little sleepy, and too tired to ask good questions, because all of Rome, if not Italy, had watched TV, read the newspapers, knew full well that Leo Falcone was searching for a man of that name.

Then Bramante could wait for the moment he found himself alone with a rookie cop, one he could pull into a corner, beat the truth out of, quickly, before anyone else in the slumbering Questura woke up to what was happening.

That truth being: Leo Falcone was still in the building, fast asleep somewhere upstairs, believing that here, of all places, he was safe from everything.

The plan had a bleak simplicity that made Costa feel stupid for not having anticipated it.

Sorting through the possibilities as he carefully made his way through the unfamiliar darkness, Costa was aware how obvious the situation now was.

He stepped out into the centre of the corridor — as much as he could guess its location — and began to make his silent way behind the figure he’d seen slipping past the doorway, bound for the rooms that lay somewhere ahead in the dark. The gun lay loose in his fingers. Teresa and Peroni would be safe, but a part of his head was already beginning to calculate what Leo Falcone’s unanswered phone line signified.

A sound came to him through the pitch-black space ahead; someone walking, slowly, with more noise than Costa could have hoped for. Then the movement shifted direction, position too, flitting through the blackness with an infuriating uncertainty, not left, not right, somewhere Nic couldn’t quite pinpoint before there was silence again.

Costa was trying to analyse what had happened when something made him jump, the sweat running electric on his fingers as they gripped the weapon in his hand.

A man was breathing, heavily, the awkward, arrhythmic wheezings of an individual in stress, no more than a metre or two from where he stood.

Giorgio Bramante was only human, Costa reminded himself. A killer. A father who’d lost his only son. Criminal and victim in the same skin.

“Give it up, Giorgio,” he said in a loud, clear voice, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound, wondering if he was close enough to reach out and touch the man, incapacitate him with a sudden burst of violence that just might stay him until help arrived. “Don’t move. Don’t even think you’ve got somewhere to go.”

That uncanny sense of confusion returned through the silent gloom, and with it the realisation that this unreadable world was not a place where anything possessed solidity or certainty. Finally, he caught the tail end of some low, throaty laughter, and the sense that Bramante had changed position, with an astonishing speed, in absolute silence, the moment he’d realised how close they were.

“You’re up late for one so young, Mr. Costa. Are you feeling tired? I’m not. I like this time of night.”

Hearing his own name sent a chill up Nic Costa’s spine.

There was a commotion from somewhere beyond where Bramante had to be. It was Peroni, bellowing in a loud, threatening voice. Costa waited for the fury to subside, then shouted, “Stay inside, Gianni! I’ve got a gun. This is covered. There’s backup on the way.”

Somewhere.

There were angry noises still from the distant door, Peroni’s and Teresa’s voices in conflict. He could imagine that argument: common sense clashing with instinct. He didn’t need that distraction right now.

“That’s a pretty girlfriend you have. Nice house, too, out there on the Appian Way. Does a police salary really pay for that?”

“No.” The more Bramante talked, the easier it was to find his position, to keep him stalled. “It was my father’s.”

Bramante didn’t answer straightaway. When the voice came back again, it was different in tone. Less amused. Less human, somehow.

“I wanted Alessio to have that house of ours on the Aventino,” Bramante said without a trace of emotion. “By that time I’d probably have paid it off.”

“I’m sorry. What happened was a tragedy.” There were men outside on the staircase. Costa could hear the babble of their confused voices, and the low, mutual tremor of indecision. “We’ll find out what happened. I promise you.”

“What use is that, in God’s name?”

“I thought it’s what you’d want.”

“I wanted that girlfriend of yours,” the voice said, floating casually out of the dark, almost relaxed again. He’d moved again. “She’d have been good for bargaining.” Another dry, soulless laugh. “And the rest.”

Costa didn’t rise to the bait. He wondered what exactly Bramante hoped to achieve by taunting him like this. “Is that what prison does to you?”

That brittle sound of amusement again. This time more distant.

“Oh yes. It brings out the man inside.”

Bramante was moving to where the corridor opened up to a larger area outside the emergency quarters, a place used for briefings and meetings during training sessions. The bunk rooms were on one side, high blacked-out windows on the other. Costa followed, trying to picture this part of the Questura more accurately in his head. The station was so familiar he thought he knew every last corner. But memory meant nothing without some visual prompts. He’d never expected to have to feel his way around like a blind man, struggling to draw a map out of senses that had nothing to do with vision — hearing, touch, smell. Talents Bramante had surely perfected, in all that time underground.

There were a few desks here. A collection of foldaway chairs. Four, five doors, perhaps six, two to the accommodation rooms, the rest for smaller meeting places.

Try as he might, he couldn’t remember which door was which, or how the seats and tables had been left that evening. Bramante could have walked through in the light, checking out everything before returning to the stairwell, where, Costa assumed, the fuse boxes were situated, and pitching the entire floor into darkness.

Then, from behind, he heard a burst of noise: men’s voices, angry shouts, the clash of metal on metal. Backup wasn’t going to be as easy, he realised. Costa could picture the fire door more clearly than anything else on the floor. It stood, a huge green hunk of iron, atop the staircase, rarely used except in drills. Once someone closed it and threw down the huge clasp, the entire floor was sealed. Bramante had found the time to do that somehow, and now the backup men were hammering away against solid steel, screaming at each other to come up with a solution. The building that housed the Questura was, in parts, three hundred years old. They’d never got around to installing an elevator in this section. It had never seemed necessary.

“How long do you think I have, Agente Costa?” the voice asked him, amused, coming from the darkness. “All I want is a little time with my old friend Leo.”

There was a tense, brittle catch in his voice when he said Falcone’s name.

“You hear that?” Bramante shouted without waiting for Nic’s reply. “A minute or two of your time? That’s all I need. It didn’t used to be so precious. I don’t remember you hiding away in the dark back then.”

He was moving again. Then the men at the doorway broke through, hammering down the old iron, screaming at each other to fight their way inside, their cries echoing down the long, long corridor.

Costa heard a door creak open ahead of him and then a familiar sound: Leo Falcone’s pained shuffle, the unsteady gait of a man struggling to be himself once more.

A small flicker of flame fluttered in the shadows on the far side of the room. It illuminated Falcone’s aquiline face and the upper part of his body: the bald head, the large, crooked nose, the jut of his silver goatee, and the lighter he held raised in his hand.

Costa gripped the gun more tightly, felt how the icy sweat made it slip in his palm, and edged towards the man by the puny flame, knowing that Bramante must be doing the same.

“Fourteen years ago,” the old inspector said nonchalantly, “I was busy putting you in jail for murder, Giorgio. It seems unfortunate I have to repeat that exercise now.”

Falcone held the flame aloft.

“If you have something you wish to say to me…” he continued, in a firm, untroubled voice.

The backup men were almost in but they were still a long way behind. Costa began to move, feeling the gun in his grip, wondering what use it might be, and how dangerous, with so many unseen figures filling the shadows around them.

Then Falcone cried out. The flame vanished. One muffled moan, perhaps two, broke through the darkness which enveloped everything again, disorienting Costa, making him wonder which way was forward, which back.

The iron door fell onto the Questura’s old tiles with a crash that roared through the building. A team of officers, angry, frustrated, were now fumbling in the direction of the small anteroom where Leo Falcone had been engulfed by the night, and something else.

“He’s got Leo!” Costa yelled at them. “Don’t shoot—”

The warning froze in his throat. Another light had come on now. The pencil beam was lit again, attached to the black helmeted head of a figure who was struggling manically against the far wall, wrestling with Leo Falcone, arms around his white shirt, doing something Costa could only imagine.

He remembered the slaughterhouse, the knives, and the sight of Toni LaMarca, his heart ripped apart while he hung alive from a meat hook, staring down at the face of the man who was murdering him.

The gun hung clammy in his fingers. He could hear men racing down the corridor now, men who’d no idea what they were facing, no clue about how it might be tackled.

Nic Costa recalled the layout of this hidden chamber very carefully, then pointed the weapon sideways, away from the oncoming team, out towards the dusty glass of the blacked-out windows. He pulled the trigger.

The resulting sound was so loud it seemed to take on a hard, physical dimension, reverberating around him as if multiple firearms had spent their ammunition in multiple dimensions, pummeling his head until he couldn’t think straight, couldn’t sort out what was happening around him in a sea of bodies, surging towards the white shirt on the floor, dimly visible in the flashlight beam which was now at the same level as Leo Falcone’s body.

There was something on the white fabric. A stain, dark and fluid.

Costa threw the gun aside, fought his way through the bodies, shoved forward until he saw Falcone.

A flashlight came on behind him: its beam broad and yellow, all-revealing.

The sight wasn’t what he expected. Leo Falcone was glaring at them all, eyes as bright as the bloodstained shirt that stuck to his chest. The figure of a man still clung to him, unmoving, clad in black, with a woollen helmet of the same colour tight around his head.

“Are you….” Costa feared to ask.

“Yes!” Falcone spat back. “Now get him off me.”

Costa took hold of the man’s body.

“You’ll need a knife,” Falcone said, inexplicably.

“What…?”

The rest of them crowded in. Costa could hear Teresa Lupo yelling to be allowed through. They needed a doctor. They all knew that.

Then, finally, someone found the fuses, flipped whatever switches Giorgio Bramante had manipulated to send this entire section of the Questura into the darkness the killer thought of as his own.

The lights blazed on in a sudden, cruel flood. Costa blinked, unable to make sense of what he now saw.

In Leo Falcone’s arms was the same man he’d seen in the beam of the flashlight. The caver’s helmet was shattered along one side, revealing a wet and shiny scalp, damp with blood. Something else, bone, maybe, some kind of matter, was visible beneath.

A heavy rope bound Leo Falcone and the figure in black tightly at the waist. It was tied with a serious knot and held with the kind of metal clamp that Costa remembered from his climbing days. One called a krab.

“I didn’t shoot him,” Costa said quietly, almost to himself, as he watched Peroni kneel and start to work on the rope with a penknife, Falcone struggling impatiently all the time. “I didn’t shoot him. I pointed the gun over…”

He paused and looked around him. Now that it was lit, the room looked nothing like the place he’d pictured in his head. In truth, Costa had no idea where he’d pointed the weapon. It was stupid to have discharged it in the dark. Had it not been for the sight of Falcone, struggling with the man who’d butchered another human being not long before, he’d never have considered it.

Peroni finally worked his way through the rope, then helped Falcone struggle to his feet. The big man wasn’t even glancing in Costa’s direction. He was looking at Teresa Lupo, who was kneeling by the stricken man, feeling for a pulse, starting to work the helmet off his damaged head.

“I didn’t shoot him, for God’s sake,” Costa said loudly, aware of the chill around him, in the team of men, more than a dozen now, who’d arrived to witness the spectacle.

“What does it matter?” one of them grunted. “How many people did he kill anyway? He—”

The officer went quiet. Falcone was glowering at him, livid, looking his old self, for all the grey, sallow pain in his face.

“None,” Falcone said with a scowl. “Absolutely…”

He bent down, reached in front of Teresa Lupo and dragged the remains of the helmet off the dead man’s head.

“…none.”

The face was older than Nic Costa remembered from the files. But he still had a full head of bright red hair, now matted with blood. All the same, Dino Abati’s features seemed more lined and worn than was right for a man of his age, even in death.

Costa thought again of the cleaner at the back of the incident room, someone who’d been in the Questura all evening, unquestioned, unseen.

“I didn’t kill him,” Costa repeated quietly.

Falcone peered down at the body that lay on the floor, bent in an awkward, prenatal crouch.

“No, you didn’t. Giorgio Bramante shot the poor bastard, while you people were running around like idiots. Now he’s… where? I don’t suppose there’s someone with half a brain on the door.”

It was Prinzivalli, the gruff old uniform sovrintendente from Milan, who finally found the courage to speak.

“We thought you were in trouble, sir,” he answered. “And I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say we’re delighted to see we were mistaken.”