The Seventh Sacrament

Book 4 The Midnight God

Arturo Messina stood on the brow of the hill at the edge of the Orange Garden, gazing out over the river, lost in thought. Next to him, Leo Falcone waited, trying to be the dutiful sovrintendente, struggling to find the right words with which to tell the older man, a well-established commissario, one who carried respect throughout the force, that he might be wrong. Deeply, seriously wrong, in a way that could threaten the entire investigation.

“Sir?” Falcone said quietly in a gap between the loud, throaty roars of the machinery below. Two small mechanical diggers were warming up their engines, awaiting orders, much like him. It was now late afternoon. Five hours had passed since the boy had first been reported missing by his father. Four hours before Messina had put out the call for the six students after listening to Giorgio Bramante’s story. Bramante was their professor. He knew them well and had seen them exiting the underground warren of tunnels when he surfaced to see if his son had somehow escaped the caves without him. In spite of hearing his calls, they had fled down the hill in the direction of the peace camp on the Circus Maximus, trying to lose themselves among three thousand or more people living there in tents, protesting daily about the continuing horrors across the water in what had so recently been Yugoslavia.

Now every officer Messina could muster was on the case: half were hunting for the students, the remainder working with the hundreds of civilians who kept turning up to offer their help in the search for the missing seven-year-old. TV crews and packs of journalists were kept back from the excavation site by the yellow tape cordoning off the small park overlooking the Tiber. A growing crowd of mute bystanders, some of whom looked ready to turn ugly, had joined them. The story about the students had already got out somehow. Blame was already beginning to be apportioned, with a swiftness and certainty that gave Falcone a cold feeling in his stomach. There was a touch of the mob to some of the people lurking around the Aventino just then. Had any of those students happened to emerge in their midst, Falcone knew that he would have to act swiftly to protect them from the public. Rationality and a sense of justice flew out the window in cases like these, depriving a good officer of the cold, detached viewpoint that was necessary in all investigations.

While the father joined — almost led — the hunt for the child, his wife was in a police van inside the cordon, saying little, staring at the outside world with haunted eyes that held little in the way of hope.

And all they had to go on was the fact that, when Alessio went missing, the boy had been deep beneath the dark red earth of this quiet, residential hill, not far from a bunch of students who were probably up to no good. Students his father had heard, gone to track down, telling his son to stay safe where he was, only to return some considerable time later — how long? No one had actually asked — without locating the intruders, to find the boy gone.

In public, Bramante reacted exactly as an individual was expected to in such situations, which gave Falcone pause for thought. Something about the man concerned him. Giorgio Bramante seemed too perfect — distraught to a measured degree, just enough to allow him to benefit from the sympathy of others, but never, not for one moment, sufficient to allow him to lose control.

There was also the question of the wound. The professor had a bright red weal on his right temple, the result, he said, of a fall while stumbling through the caves, searching for his son. Injuries always interested Leo Falcone, and in normal circumstances he would have taken the opportunity to explore this one further. That, however, Arturo Messina expressly forbade. For the commissario, the answer lay with the students. Falcone could not believe they would remain free for long. None had police records, though one, Toni LaMarca, came from a family known for its crime connections. All six were, it seemed, average, ordinary young men who had gone down into the caves beneath the Aventino for reasons the police failed to understand. Messina seemed obsessed with finding out what they were. The same issue intrigued Falcone, too, though not as much as what he regarded as more pertinent questions. What was Giorgio Bramante doing there with his son in the first place? And why did he have a livid red gash on his forehead, one that could just as easily have come from a struggle as a simple accident?

“Say it,” the older man ordered with a barely disguised impatience. “Are you worried this will interfere with the homework for the inspector’s exams or something? I always knew you were an ambitious little bastard, but you could let it drop for now.”

“‘Little’ seems somewhat unfair, sir,” Falcone, who was somewhat taller than the portly Messina, protested dryly.

“Well? What’s on your mind? This is nothing personal, you know. I think you’re an excellent police officer. I just wish you had a spot more humanity. Cases like this… you walk around with that hangdog look of yours as if they don’t even touch you. Shame you screwed up that marriage. Kids do wonders for putting a man in his place.”

“We’re making many assumptions. I wonder if that’s wise.”

Messina’s heavy eyebrows furrowed in disbelief. “I’m stupid now, am I?”

“I didn’t say that at all, sir. I’m merely concerned that we don’t focus simply on the obvious.”

“The reason the obvious is the obvious,” Messina replied testily, “is because it’s what normally gets us results. That may not be fashionable in the inspector’s examination today, but there it is.”

“Sir,” Falcone replied quietly, “we don’t know where the boy may be. We don’t how or why any of this occurred.”

“Students!” Messina bellowed. “Students! Like all those damned anarchists in their tents, fouling up the middle of Rome, doing whatever else they like. Not that I imagine it much concerns you.”

There had been two arrests at the peace camp. They’d had more trouble at religious events. Next to a Roma versus Lazio race, it was nothing.

“I fail to see any relevance with the peace camp—” Falcone started to say.

“Peace camp. Peace camp? What did we find down in those damned caves again? Remind me.”

A dead bird, throat cut, and a few spent joints. It wasn’t pleasant. But it wasn’t a hanging offence either.

“I’m not saying they weren’t doing something wrong down there. I just think it’s a big leap from some juvenile piece of black magic and a little dope to child abduction. Or worse.”

Messina wagged his finger in Falcone’s face. “And there — there! — is exactly where you’re wrong. Remember that I said that when they make you inspector.”

“Sir,” Falcone said, temper rising, “this is not about me.”

“It begins with ‘a little dope’ and the idea you can pitch a tent in the heart of Rome and tell the rest of the world to go screw itself. It ends…” — Messina waved his big hand at the crowds behind the yellow tape — “…out there. With a bunch of people looking to us to clean up a mess we should have prevented in the first place. Good officers know you have to nip this kind of behaviour in the bud. Whatever it takes. You can’t read a bunch of textbooks while the world’s going to rack and ruin.”

“I am merely trying to suggest that there are avenues we haven’t yet explored. Giorgio Bramante—”

“Oh for God’s sake! Not that again. The man agreed to take his son to school, only to find the teachers are having one of those stupid paperwork love-ins the likes of you doubtless think pass as genuine labour. So he took him to work instead. Parents do that, Leo. I did it, and God forgive me the boy’s in the force now, too.”

“I understand that…”

“No. You don’t. You can’t.”

“Bramante didn’t take his son to work. He took him underground, into an excavation few people knew about, one that he believed was entirely empty.”

“My boy would have loved that when he was seven.”

“So why did he leave him there?”

Messina sighed. “If there’s a burglar in your house, do you invite your son along to watch you deal with him? Well?”

“We need to interview Giorgio Bramante properly. In the Questura. We need to go through what happened minute by minute. He has that injury. Also…”

Falcone paused, knowing that he was on the verge of being led by his imagination, not good reasoning. Nevertheless, this seemed important, and he was determined Arturo Messina should know. Watching Bramante join the search parties for Alessio that afternoon, Falcone felt sure that the man was looking for someone other than a minor. It was as simple as a question of posture. Children were smaller. However illogical, at close to medium quarters, one tended to adjust one’s gaze accordingly. Giorgio Bramante’s eye level was horizontal, always, as if seeking an adult, or someone on the horizon, neither of which made sense for a seven-year-old boy.

Messina’s dark eyes opened wide with astonishment as Falcone elaborated. “You expect me to pull the boy’s father in for questioning because there’s something you don’t like about the angle of his head? Are you mad? What do you think they’d make of that? Them and the media?” He beckoned towards the crowd.

“I don’t care what they think,” Falcone insisted. “Do you? There’s the question of the wound, his behaviour, and the holes in his story. Those, to my mind, are sufficient.”

“This is ridiculous. Take it from me, Leo. I’m a father too. The way he’s behaving is exactly the way any of us would in the circumstances. He couldn’t be more cooperative, for God’s sake. How the hell would we have found our way around those caves without him? When we have those students, when we know what’s happened to the kid… then you can sit down and go through your stupid procedures. Now tell me how we can find that boy.”

“The injury—”

“You’ve been in those caves! It’s a death trap down there! Are you honestly surprised a man should stumble in them? Do you think all the world is as perfect as you?”

Falcone had no good answer. “I agree,” he replied evenly, “that it is dangerous down there. That affects our efforts to find the boy too. We’ve gone as far as we dare. It’s treacherous. There are tunnels the military don’t feel happy entering. We’ve brought in some equipment they use during earthquakes to locate people who are trapped. Nothing. We need to pursue all possible options.”

Messina scowled. “He could be unconscious, Leo. I know that’s inconvenient but it’s a fact.”

“They tell me he would still show up through thermal imaging if he was unconscious. Given the short time that’s elapsed, he’d show up even if he was dead. If he’s anywhere we could hope to reach, that is.”

“Oh no,” Messina said quietly, miserably, half to himself, eyes on the ground, detached from everything at that moment, even the case ahead of them.

Falcone felt briefly embarrassed. There was something in Messina’s expression he didn’t — couldn’t — share. A man who had no experience of fatherhood could imagine the loss of a child, sympathise with it, feel anger, become determined to put the wrong right. But there was an expression in Messina’s face that Falcone could only guess at. A sentiment that seemed to say This is a part of me that’s damaged — perhaps irrevocably.

“Don’t let him be dead, Leo,” Messina moaned, and for the first time seemed, in Leo Falcone’s eyes, a man beginning to show his age.

“Like father, like son,” Falcone murmured as the three of them shuffled into Bruno Messina’s office. They were in the quarters on the sixth floor. From Messina’s corner room, there should have been a good view of the cobbled piazza below. All they saw now was a smear of brown stone. The rain was coming down in vertical stripes. The forecast was for a period of unsettled weather lasting days: sudden storms and heavy downpours broken by outbreaks of brief bright sun. Spring was arriving in Rome, and it was a time of extremes.

Messina sat in a leather chair behind his large, well-polished desk trying to look like a man in control. It was an act he needed. The Questura was teeming with officers. Local, pulled in from leave. Strangers, too, since Messina had demanded an external inquiry into the security lapses that had allowed the attack on Falcone, wisely choosing to endure the pain of outside scrutiny before it was forced upon him. No one yet seemed much minded to blame Leo Falcone or those close to him. How could they? But the low, idle chatter had begun. Scapegoats would be sought for the disaster of the night before.

The commissario had suspended the civilian security officer who had failed to spot that the ID used by Bramante to pose as a cleaner actually belonged to a woman, one whose handbag had been stolen while shopping in San Giovanni a week before and was now on vacation in Capri, a fact that would have been obvious from the personal diary that had disappeared along with the rest of her belongings. The rookie agente ambushed by Bramante when he abducted Dino Abati was now at home recovering from a bad beating, and scared witless, Costa suspected, about what would happen when the inquiry came round to him. Messina was acting with a swift, ruthless ferocity because he understood that his own position, as a commissario only nine months into the job, was damaged. That had led him to put some distance between himself and Falcone as head of the investigation, hoping perhaps to shift the blame onto his subordinate should the sky begin to fall.

The effect was not as Messina had planned. The word that was on everyone’s lips that morning was “sloppy.” The media were enjoying a field day about a murder that had happened in the heart of the centro storico’s principal Questura. Politicians, never slow to seize an opportunity to deflect criticism from their own lapses, were getting in on the act. What had occurred, rumors inside and out of the force were beginning to say, had taken place because the juniors, Messina in particular, were now in charge. They had lax standards when it came to matters of general routine. They put paperwork and procedural issues ahead of the mundane considerations of old-style policing. No one, it was whispered, had ever accused Falcone of such lapses of attention. Nor would they now throw that accusation in the direction of the fast-recovering individual who was marching around his old haunt like a man who’d rediscovered the fire in his belly.

Messina looked as if he couldn’t wait to stamp that fire into ashes. The commissario watched the three of them — Falcone, Costa, and Peroni — take their seats, then stated, “I’ve brought in someone else to run this case, Falcone. Don’t argue. We can’t have a man heading an inquiry into his own attempted murder. The same goes for you two. There’s a young inspector I want to try out. Bavetti. You’ll give him every assistance—”

“You’re making a mistake,” Falcone said without emotion.

“I’m not sure I want to hear that from you.”

“You will, nevertheless,” the inspector went on. “I kept quiet for too long when a Messina was screwing up once before. I’m not doing it twice.”

“Dammit, Falcone! I won’t be spoken to like that. You listen to me.”

“No!” the inspector yelled. “You listen. I’m the one Giorgio Bramante came looking for last night, aren’t I? These two and their women got their photos taken by that man. Doesn’t that give us some rights?”

Messina folded his arms and scowled. “No.”

“Then listen out of your own self-interest. If your old man had heard me out fourteen years ago, he’d never have left the force in disgrace. Do you want to go the same way?”

Messina closed his eyes, furious. Falcone had hit his target.

Without waiting, Falcone launched into retelling the information he’d managed to assemble overnight, speaking rapidly, fluently, without the slightest sign that he was affected by the previous year’s injuries or Giorgio Bramante’s more recent attentions. If anyone doubted whether the shooting in Venice had diminished the man’s mental faculties, Costa thought, they were unlikely to harbour those misconceptions for long in the face of the precise, logical way Falcone now painted, in a few short minutes, a picture of recent events and how he had reacted to them.

Two officers had spent the night checking with contacts in the social agencies and the hostels dealing with itinerants. It was clear Dino Abati was far from a stranger to them. He had made a polite street bum, one who never asked for much more than simple charity. Those who dealt with him regarded him as educated, honest, and more than a little lost. Abati stood out, too, with that head of red hair. Given the facts — Abati was in Italy, outside the normal system of ID checks, social security records, and tax payments — the street was an obvious place for the authorities to look for him. Bramante just happened to have been several steps ahead of them.

Abati had been due to spend the previous night in a hostel run by an order of monks near Termini. At eleven in the evening, after his free meal and an evening spent watching TV, a staff member had found an anonymous letter addressed to him, left in the hostel entrance, at the front desk, by an unseen visitor. Abati read the letter. Then, without saying a word, he’d walked out of the building.

They had recovered the document from a trash can in the communal living room. It said, simply:

“Wonderful,” Messina groaned after Falcone filled him in. “This man is three steps ahead of us all the way. What is he? Psychic or something?”

“Tell him,” Falcone told Costa icily.

Costa kept it short. That morning, he’d made this call himself, to Dino Abati’s mother, after the local force had broken the bad news. Three months before, she’d received a letter, supposedly from the missing Sandro Vignola, asking urgently for her son’s whereabouts. The letter had contained personal details that made her believe the message was genuine. They were, when Costa checked, the kind of information Bramante, as Abati’s professor, would have known: birth date, home address, student haunts.

“So…” Messina acknowledged with little grace, “you have got something.”

“More than that,” Costa went on. “We’re checking with the other families too. The Belluccis say they got a similar letter several months before their son died. It’s a reasonable bet we’ll find out the same method was used with the others. That was how Bramante tracked them down.”

“And we never found out?” the commissario asked, incredulous.

“You said it yourself,” Falcone replied. “They were different cases, handled by different forces. No one made the link. Why should they? There’s more. Early this morning we sent men round to each of the obvious hostels you’d expect a well-mannered itinerant to use.”

Costa smiled. It was a typical Falcone shot in the dark. Nine out of ten times such efforts never paid off. But…

“Four hostels close to the Questura, ones that knew Abati, received an identical letter last night,” Costa said. “Each was delivered sometime in the early evening. The one in the Campo has CCTV of the person responsible. He was wearing a cleaner’s uniform, with the insignia of the same private company we use for housekeeping. Their office reported a break-in two nights ago. Clothing and money were taken. Bramante deliberately planned to drive Abati towards the Questura. Where else would he go? And if he didn’t turn up, Bramante had Leo… Inspector Falcone. It’s called covering your options.”

Messina swore under his breath. “Good work, Agente,” he muttered unhappily.

“I just go where I’m told, sir.”

That was true too. What had occurred bore Giorgio Bramante’s style, something Leo Falcone had recognised from the outset. Everything had been planned, down to the last detail, with alternatives should the original scheme go awry.

Even so, Costa felt uneasy. Bramante could have killed both Abati and Leo at that last moment, finished his list for good. And many reading their newspapers the next day would have felt some sympathy with him.

Instead, Bramante let Leo live, and that seemed to enrage — indeed, to infuriate — the inspector more than ever. Costa had seen this steely glint in Falcone’s eye before. This case had become the entire focus of Falcone’s world. Nothing now mattered until every last unresolved detail — and that included the fate of Alessio Bramante — was brought to a satisfactory conclusion.

“Look, Leo.” Messina sounded a little conciliatory. “Put yourself in my position. You’re personally involved in this case. All three of you.”

“We were involved yesterday,” Falcone pointed out. “It didn’t seem to worry you then.”

Messina looked dejected. He wasn’t entirely his own man, Costa thought. There would be pressure from above. A young commissario’s career could hang on how he handled difficult cases like this.

“Yesterday I thought this was going to be simple. Either you brought in Bramante quickly and covered yourself in a little glory. Or you fouled up and — let’s be honest with one another — that would be an end to it. You could retire. Like my father.”

Falcone was unmoved. “I still don’t see what’s changed.”

“What’s changed? I’ll tell you! This bloodthirsty animal isn’t running from us. He’s got the damn nerve to bring his murderous habits right to our own doorstep! That’s an entirely different game. I can’t make…” He glanced away from them. “…I can’t base my decisions on personal issues. I just want this whole mess cleaned up. Now. For good. With no more bodies. Unless it’s Giorgio Bramante’s. He’s caused us enough grief for one lifetime.”

Peroni leaned forward and tapped the desk hard with his fat index finger. “You think we want otherwise?”

“No,” Messina admitted, shrinking back into his leather chair. No one liked the look of Peroni when he was getting mad. “I just don’t intend to take any more risks. How would the three of you feel about a little holiday? I’ll pick up the bill. Sicily maybe. Take your women along. The pathologist too. Two weeks. A month. I don’t mind.”

They looked at one another. It was Peroni who spoke first.

“What kind of men do you think we are?”

“Meaning?” the commissario replied warily.

“What kind of serving police officer walks away from a case like this? To sit in some out-of-season hotel swilling wine at the taxpayers’ expense just because you don’t like having us around?”

“It’s not that—” Messina began to say.

“What kind of senior officer would even contemplate offering such a thing?” Peroni persisted, interrupting him.

“The kind of officer who doesn’t like going to funerals.” Messina picked up a pen and waved it in the big man’s direction. “Is that so bad? Understand this. I don’t know if I can keep you alive. Any of you. If I can’t guarantee your safety in the Questura, where the hell am I supposed to put you? In jail? How would you run an investigation from there, Leo? Answer me that.”

Falcone thought about it for a very short moment.

“I keep this case for two more days. I give you my word I won’t put myself in the way of danger. Costa and Peroni here… it’s up to them. I think they can look after one another.”

“Correct, sir,” Costa said.

“If there’s no concrete progress,” Falcone continued, “if I don’t seem to be on the point of closing Bramante down after forty-eight hours, you give the whole show to Bavetti. That’s the deal.”

Messina laughed. It didn’t seem to be a sound he made often. “A deal? A deal? Who the hell do you think you are to come in here and offer me deals? You’re a cripple living on past gratitude. Don’t stretch my patience.”

“Those are my conditions.”

Messina made that strange dry noise again. “Conditions. And if I say go to hell?”

“Then I quit,” Falcone answered. “Then I do something I’ve never even contemplated before: I walk straight out there and tell those jackals from the newspapers why.”

“Quit,” Peroni repeated. “I love that word.”

He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his wallet, withdrew his police ID card, and placed it on the desk.

Costa did the same. Then he added the handgun he’d used to no good purpose the previous night.

Peroni looked at the weapon, then glanced at him. “You never really liked guns, did you, Nic?”

“There are a lot of things in this job you get to dislike,” Costa said. “It’s just a question of learning to live with them.”

Messina glared at them from across the polished desk.

“I’ll remember this, you bastards,” he muttered, furious. “Forty-eight hours, Falcone. After that, it’s not Giorgio Bramante you have to worry about. It’s me.”

They had breakfast in the conservatory: coffee and pastries, and a view out to the Duomo. The weather had changed. Rain clouds had thrown a grey-winged embrace around the hilltop town of Orvieto. There would be no walks today, as Arturo and Pietro had planned. Instead Emily would rest, and think about the case a little. Not too much, though. She still felt tired, a little wrong, and it wasn’t just being disturbed by Nic’s call and the frenzy that followed. She hadn’t gone to bed until three, which was how long it had taken to discover he was safe. Even then she hadn’t slept well. She couldn’t stop thinking of the missing Alessio Bramante, wondering whether Nic’s customary optimism could possibly be correct. Instinct told her the opposite. Instinct was sometimes to be avoided.

Pietro had stayed the night at the villa. He looked a little the worse for wear. So did Raffaella; Emily had retired to a corner with a coffee and a newspaper after a brief conversation with them, an exchange of pleasantries, a question about Emily’s health, a mutual sharing of observations about the predictable nature of men. In spite of the commotion in the Questura, Falcone had never phoned. Nor had he returned Raffaella’s call when, in desperation, she had attempted to reach him around two. Emily had tried to tell her he’d be busy. It hadn’t cut much ice. It hadn’t deserved to.

Then, after Arturo and Pietro had carefully tidied away the cups and plates, Emily retreated to the study, fired up the computer, spent thirty minutes reading the American papers online: the Washington Post, the New York Times. Familiar pillars she could lean on, established icons that never changed, were always there when you needed them. It wasn’t the news she sought. Emily Deacon had spent more of her life in Italy than in her native America. All the same, she knew she wasn’t fully a part of the country she was coming to regard as her home. She lacked the true Roman’s frank, open, immediate attitude to existence. She didn’t want to face the good and the bad head-on, day in, day out. Sometimes it was best to circumvent the subject, to pretend it didn’t exist. To lie a little, in the hope that sometime soon, tomorrow perhaps, next week, or maybe even never, one could hope to stare the day down without blinking.

And so she read idly, of a world of politics that was now foreign to her, of football games and movie stars, bestsellers she’d never heard of, and corporate scandals that mattered not a jot in Italy. After a while Arturo Messina came in with coffee, which she refused. He sat down in the large, comfy leather chair at the end of the desk, took a sip of his own, and said, very politely, “You’re using too much of my electricity, Emily. Unless you tell me that’s something other than Alessio Bramante you’re hunting on my computer, I will, I swear, turn the damn thing off.”

“I was reading about the New York Mets,” she said, and it was only half a lie. She’d been about to follow up on Nic’s comments about what happened to abducted children, and how they were absorbed by the alien culture in which they found themselves. “But I’m done.”

She leaned back, shut her eyes, and took a deep breath. It would be a long day, with very little to fill it.

“I talked to your Nic last night,” Arturo revealed. “He’s a little concerned about your health. I didn’t realise…” He nodded in the direction of Emily’s stomach. “Congratulations. In my day we had this antiquated habit of getting married first, then bringing the babies along a little later. But I am, of course, part dinosaur, so what do I know?

“It’s the biggest adventure a couple can take together,” he went on. “Whatever it costs. However painful it is at times, and it will be, I can promise you that. Children give you more than you can possibly imagine. They bring you back down to earth, and make you realise that’s the right place to be. When you watch them growing, day by day, you understand we’re all just small and mortal and we’d best make the most of what we have. You realise we’re all just here for a little time, and now you have someone to whom you can pass on a little of yourself before you go. So you lose a few shreds of your arrogance if you’re lucky. You’re not the same person anymore.”

“People tell me that.”

“But you don’t understand yet. None of us ever do. Not till it happens. And then…” A shadow of concern crossed his face. “Then you can’t see the world in any other way,” he continued. “This is, I suspect, a failing in a police officer. Emily, I don’t want to talk about the case if it upsets you. It’s a very serious affair. I’ve asked the local police to put an armed car on the gate here. I don’t want you to feel insecure for any reason. Or unhappy. Just read a book. I’ll fetch something from town if you like. I can probably get you a real American paper.”

She stared at the distant black and white cathedral, shining under the drenching rain. Then she said, “He wouldn’t come here, Arturo. This is about Rome. He’s playing out his final act. He wouldn’t want it anywhere else.”

He laughed. “I can see why Leo sent you the files. I wish I’d had someone like you around all those years ago.”

“You had Leo.”

“I know,” he replied, with obvious regret. “And I was very hard on him. Cruel. I don’t think that’s too strong a word. He brought that out in me. Few people do. But Leo was so damned resolute. As if none of it really touched him. To him, it was just another case. He can be so… infuriating. With that cold, detached manner of his.”

“That’s not the real Leo. He’s a considerate man at heart. He feels the need to suppress that sometimes. I don’t know why.”

Arturo raised one bushy eyebrow. “I‘ll take your word on that. All the same, I owe him an apology. I keep thinking of what happened then. The stupid, bullheaded way I handled everything. I should have listened to him more. But…”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

“But what?”

“I told you! I was a father too. Like Bramante. Leo wasn’t. He and I were two human beings looking at the same facts from very different parts of the universe. All I could think of was Alessio Bramante, somewhere inside that blasted hill. Hurt perhaps. Unconscious. Capable of being rescued, and that is what any father would hope to do in those circumstances. It’s something genetic that leaps out from under your skin. Save the child. Always save the child, and ask questions later. Everything else was just a side issue. Leo has this insufferable ability to detach himself from the emotional side of a case. I resented that.”

He dashed back the last of his coffee.

“And I envied it, to be honest,” he added. “Leo was right. I was wrong. I knew that back then but I was too stubborn to admit it. We should have been asking a lot more while we were trying to find Alessio. But Giorgio Bramante was a good man, a well-connected, middle-class university professor. And they were a bunch of grubby, dope-smoking students. It all seemed so obvious. I was a fool.”

Emily reached over and touched his hand. Something seemed to stir inside her at that moment. A warm feeling below the pit of her stomach. It was impossible to tell whether the sensation was good or bad, pleasure or pain.

“Arturo, we don’t know what happened. Perhaps those students did kill Alessio. Accidentally, maybe. Those caves were dangerous. Perhaps the child simply escaped them and fell down some hole. And they were too frightened to admit their part in it all. Or…”

Nic’s idea wouldn’t leave her, and it wasn’t just because its very substance was so typical of his character, such a telling reminder of why she loved him.

“…or perhaps he’s still alive.”

He glanced at her, then his eyes meandered to the window, but not before she detected the sadness in them.

“He’s not alive, Emily. Don’t fool yourself.”

“We don’t know,” she insisted. “We’re in the dark about so many things. Why the boy was there in the first place. Why Bramante left him. The truth is we don’t understand much of anything about that man.”

“That’s true.” Arturo admitted it miserably.

“Even now,” she went on. “Where the hell is he? He must have access to equipment. To money. To the news. But I can’t believe he’s holed up in some apartment somewhere. It would be too dangerous, and Giorgio Bramante isn’t a man who’ll take unnecessary risks. Not when he thinks he’s got unfinished business.”

He brightened immediately.

“Come, come. It’s obvious where Giorgio is.”

“It is?”

“Of course! He spent most of his life in the Rome the rest of us never see. Underground. Have you never been there?”

“Only once. I went to Nero’s Golden House. It made me claustrophobic.”

“Ha! Let an old policeman tell you something. The Domus Aurea is just one tiny fraction of what’s left. There’s an entire underground city down there, almost as big as it was in Caesar’s day. There are houses and temples, entire streets. Some of them have been excavated. Some of them were just never fully filled with earth for some reason. I talked to a couple of the cavers Leo called in. They hero-worshipped Giorgio. The man had been to places the rest of them could only dream about. Half of them unmapped. That’s where he is, Emily. Not that it does us any good now, does it? If we wanted to find Giorgio today, the best person to ask would be… Giorgio! Wonderful.”

She thought about this, and the stirring in her stomach ceased. She asked, “I imagine you never put much store in forensic evidence, did you?”

“Not unless I was really desperate,” he admitted. “That’s all they think of these days, isn’t it? Sitting around waiting for some civilian in a white coat to stare at a test tube, then point at a suspect lineup and say, ‘That one.’ Use science if you have to. But crimes are committed by people. If you want answers, ask a human being. Not a computer.”

“I have a pathologist friend you should meet. She half agrees with you.”

“She does?”

“I said ‘half.’ Now may I make a call?”

Arturo Messina passed over the handset, then, out of idle curiosity, plugged in the conference phone too.

He listened to the brief, lucid, and highly pointed conversation that followed. Then he observed, “I would like to meet this Dr. Lupo sometime, Emily. You should rest now. We men here must think about lunch.”

The prevailing wind had changed direction overnight. Now it was a strong, blustery westerly drawing moisture and a bone-chilling cold from the grey, flat waters of the Mediterranean before rolling over the airport and the flat lands of the estuarial Tiber to form a heavy black blanket of cloud which killed the light, casting the city in a monotone shade of grey.

They were standing in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, shivering, wondering where to begin. Get nosy, Falcone had said. It was, for him, an exceptionally vague command.

Peroni was crouching down, peering through the keyhole.

“I can’t see a thing,” he complained. “Are you sure about this? It’s not just one of your tricks?”

“What tricks?” Costa demanded, pushing him out of the way to look for himself.

The avenue of cypresses was there as he remembered, and the gravel path, now shiny with rain. His own father had showed him this small secret when Costa was no more than a boy. That day, the sun had been shining. He could still recall St. Peter’s standing proud and grand across the river, set perfectly at the centre of the frame made by the trees and the path under a sky the blue of a thrush’s egg. But today all he saw after the dark green lines of foliage was a shapeless mass of cloud, deep swirls of grey obscuring everything they consumed. From the corner behind them, which led off in the direction of the Circus Maximus, came a sound that reminded him of why they were there. The noise of happy young voices rose above the high wall keeping the school from the public, a vibrant clamour of life protected from the harshness of the world by Piranesi’s tall, white defences, like the ramparts of some small, fairy-tale castle.

“I’m sure,” Costa told Peroni, and took his head away from the door. The two Carabinieri who were always stationed here, for some bizarre reason deputed to guard the mansion of the Knights of Malta, were watching them, interested.

“Childhood memories are rarely reliable, Nic,” Peroni declared with a sage nod. “I spent years convinced I had an Aunt Alicia. Right up to the age of… oh, twelve or so. The poor woman was completely fictitious. Which was a shame, because she was a sight nicer than most of my family.”

One of the blue uniforms came over and gave them an evil look.

“What do you want?” the Carabiniere asked. He was about Costa’s age, taller, good-looking, but with a pinched, arrogant face.

“A little comradely help wouldn’t go amiss,” Peroni replied, pulling out his ID card and the most recent photo they had of Giorgio Bramante. “Please tell me this charming individual is fast asleep on a bench round the corner somewhere. We can deal with him after that. No problem.”

Leo Falcone knew it had to be said. Out of necessity. And to bring Arturo Messina back down to earth.

“He could be somewhere else altogether,” Falcone insisted. “Perhaps they argued. The child ran away…”

Messina’s scowl returned. “They didn’t argue. The father would have mentioned it. I do wish you’d concentrate on what’s important here, Leo. A missing boy.”

“I am,” Falcone replied sharply. “There’s very little left for us to do other than the obvious. The Army have sent in two more specialists to see how far they can get. Those caves are unmapped. From what I’ve been told, some probably run as far down as ground level, then to springs or waterways. The channels could be just large enough for a child, but too small for anyone else.”

Messina nodded at the two small excavators that had been brought there on his personal orders. “From what I’ve seen of the map, we can lift the lid off the whole thing in thirty minutes. Like taking the roof off an ants’ nest. We could see right inside.”

Falcone had been hoping it wouldn’t come to this.

“It’s not that simple. This is a protected historical site. It was even before anyone knew the full truth about what Bramante found here. Now they understand that… The city authorities would have to give permission. Bramante himself would be involved.”

“There’s a child’s life at stake here! And you’re talking about paperwork again?” Messina glowered at him.

“I’m merely reminding you of the facts.”

“Really. Go get me Giorgio Bramante. Now!”

It took fifteen minutes, during which Falcone received a phone call he’d been half expecting. Bramante was with a team of uniformed officers and civilians combing the grass verge of the rough field that fell down from the Orange Garden towards the winding road that led to the Tiber. He came without a question, without protest. He had a dark, bleak look on his face. It didn’t stop him staring at the photographers when they found him, or pausing briefly to talk to the reporters to make another plea for assistance from the public. The gash on his forehead seemed a little less livid. Soon it would look like a mere bruise.

Falcone waited until this brief interview was over, saying nothing in response to the reporters’ questions, wishing more than ever that he could get Bramante alone in a room to himself for a little while. Then they walked to join Arturo Messina, who still stood above the entrance to the excavations, staring down at the culvert with its old iron gates, now unlocked. This was a small indentation in the Aventino, almost like a bomb crater, a pocket of flat land on the hill which was reached by a little path that wound down from the park. The miniature excavators had made their way along it. Their operators now sat on the machines which rumbled in the warm late afternoon air, like iron beasts of burden resting before the exertions they knew were to come.

“There’s news?” Bramante asked the moment they joined him.

“No—” Messina began to say, then Falcone interrupted him.

“We have Ludo Torchia, sir. He was picked up in a bar the students use in Testaccio. Somewhat drunk. He’s at the Questura now.”

An unexpected grin lit Messina’s gloomy features. “See, Giorgio! I told you. We make progress.”

The man wasn’t paying much attention. He was staring down at the excavators. “So what are you doing?” he asked warily.

“Nothing,” Messina answered. “Without your permission.”

Bramante shook his head. “This is…” The digger drivers were looking up at them in anticipation. “A historic site. You can’t just destroy it…. Not again.”

Messina put a hand on his shoulder. “We can’t go any further down there without those machines. If the boy’s still inside, we could lift off the roof and see a hell of a lot more than we can now.”

“It’s irreplaceable.” Bramante shook his head again. “I suppose it’s too much to expect the likes of you to appreciate.”

Arturo Messina blinked, clearly taken aback by this vacillation. Then he said, “You’re exhausted. It’s understandable. You don’t have to be here. Go home to your wife. You’ve done everything you can. This is our job now. I’ll send someone to be with you. Falcone. Or someone less miserable.”

Bramante glanced at them and licked his lips. “You’ve got Ludo,” he said quietly. “I know him. If I speak to him, perhaps he’ll see sense. He wouldn’t want this place damaged either. Just give me some time.”

Falcone was shuffling from side to side, frantically coughing into his fist. Interviews in the Questura were for police officers, lawyers, and suspects. Not the desperate parents of missing children.

“Let me think about this,” Messina replied. “Falcone. Take Giorgio back to the Questura with you. I’ll be along very shortly. I want to see what happens here. And I begin the questioning. No one else. Well?”

Falcone didn’t move. He said, “An interview conducted in the presence of a potential witness, as Professor Bramante undoubtedly is, would be… rather unorthodox. It could cause problems with the lawyers. Immense problems.”

Messina smiled, then put his hand on Falcone’s arm and squeezed. Hard.

“Fuck the lawyers, Leo,” he said cheerfully. “Now off with you.”

Falcone caught the expression in his superior’s eye. Messina wanted the two of them out of there. The commissario wasn’t waiting for anyone.

“Sir,” Falcone replied stiffly, then led Giorgio Bramante to a squad car, closed the door on him, and ordered the driver to take the man to the Questura to await his arrival.

After which, he lit a cigarette, took two rapid draws from it, then threw the thing beneath one of the parched orange trees.

The relationship was damaged already, Falcone decided. There was no more harm to be done.

He walked back and joined Messina, who glared at him, furious.

“You’re disobeying my orders. How do you think that will look on the report sheet when it comes to the promotions board?”

“There’s something wrong here,” Falcone replied. “You know it. I know it. We have to—”

“No!” Messina barked. “That child is missing. Once those machines go in, I could turn him up at any moment. Until we do that, I don’t give a shit what you think, or what Giorgio Bramante gets up to. Understood?”

The older carabinieri officer laughed. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sound.

“You think we don’t know who Giorgio Bramante is?” he asked Costa. “We work the Aventino. We’re not strangers here.”

“So you’ve seen him?” Costa asked.

The two uniformed officers exchanged sly glances. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. They were rival forces — one civilian, one military. Not exactly at loggerheads, but rarely bosom friends either.

“Listen,” Peroni said in his best charming voice, one that was at odds with his thug-like appearance, “we can either play the game and pretend we don’t exist. Or we can have an easy, amicable chat and then go our own ways. I won’t tell if you won’t. Where’s the harm in that?”

“He came here two or three weeks ago,” the older officer said, and got a filthy look from his colleague for his pains. “He put some flowers down in the park over there. Where the kid went missing, I guess.”

“No one ever said he was a bad father,” Peroni agreed sweetly.

That got the young one going.

“He was the best kind of father you could get, wasn’t he? Some scum went and killed his kid like that! What the hell do you expect? If you’ve got kids—”

“You’ve got kids?” Costa interrupted.

“No…” the young one answered with a surly expression.

“Then—” Costa said. A painful dig in the ribs from Peroni stopped him.

“I’ve got kids,” the big man said. “If anyone touched them…”

“Quite.” The young officer nodded.

“Professor Bramante never came back?” Costa asked.

The two Carabinieri glanced at each other again.

“The wife did,” the older one replied. “We didn’t even know who she was until one of the mothers from the school pointed her out. No one gets to keep any secrets around here. It’s that kind of place.”

“What did she do?” Peroni asked.

The Carabiniere grimaced. He seemed a decent man.

“She put down some flowers, too. Then she sat in that park for hours. It got so late I wondered if I shouldn’t have gone and talked to her. It was freezing, for God’s sake. But she left, in the end.”

The officer hesitated.

“You think he might be around here?” he asked finally. “After what went on in the Questura last night? What a mess. I don’t envy you cleaning up after that.”

Peroni patted him on the arm and said, very sincerely, “Thanks.”

“Lax,” the young one declared. “Downright lax. That’s what it was.”

The older one rolled his eyes, looked at his colleague, then said, with a sad air of resignation, “You know, I wish you’d keep your mouth shut a little more often. It just leaks out crap day after day.”

“I only said…” The young man was getting red in the face.

“I don’t care what you said. These men asked for our help. If we can give it to them, we do.

“One thing,” the friendly one continued, nodding at his colleague. “He spoke to Bramante. Didn’t you? He walked right up to him, as if the man was a football star or something. Did you get an autograph, huh, Fabiano? Have you washed your hand since he shook it or what?”

Fabiano’s face got a touch redder. “I just told him what I thought. That he ought never have gone to jail for what he did.”

“You mean killed someone?” his colleague demanded. “Doesn’t look like it was that much out of character either, does it?”

“I’m just saying—”

“I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Here…”

He took some money out of his pocket, then threw it at the younger officer.

“Go down the road and buy me a coffee. The usual. One for yourself, if you want it. And two for our friends here.”

“We don’t have time,” Costa said. “But thanks anyway.”

They watched the younger Carabiniere shuffle off across the road, tail between his legs.

“You know what worries me?” the older man said, shaking his head. “If it all happened again — same situation, same people — an idiot like Fabiano there would make exactly the same mistakes. He’d still think you could fix it all with your fists.” He peered into their faces. “Let me tell you two something. Bramante was no hero. I don’t judge people on how they look. I’m not that stupid. But there was something about that one. He let that moron partner of mine suck up to him as if he was God or something. It was… bad.”

Peroni nodded. “Understood.”

“No. Listen. I’m not so good with words. Meeting him felt very creepy. Same with his wife too. I’ve seen what happens when you lose a kid. It’s not easy. But all those years later, still looking as if it happened yesterday…”

Costa hadn’t given Beatrice Bramante much thought. Rosa Prabakaran was keeping an eye on her. If she was involved, she’d surely keep away from her ex-husband from now on.

“Do you think the two of them met? The wife and the husband?” he asked.

“I didn’t see it. They came here on different days. Who’s to know?” He licked his lips. He seemed as if he needed that coffee. And something else too. As if he wanted to say what was on his mind before his colleague returned.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though. It wasn’t just the once. He came back one more time. Five days, a week or so ago. Went in that place over there.”

He pointed along the square, to a small dark door with a sign by it, unreadable from this angle.

“There being…?” Peroni prompted him.

“Where he used to work,” the officer answered, as if it were obvious. “Where all those archaeologists are doing whatever they do. He went in there and next thing we know they were shouting and yelling. We could hear them from here. I was about to go and ask whether someone needed a little help. But then Bramante came out again, face like thunder, and just walked off down the road as if nothing had happened.”

Costa stared at the sign on the wall: the archaeology department of La Sapienza had a small office here, hidden behind a wall, just like the mansion of the Knights of Malta. When he’d gotten out of prison, Giorgio Bramante had turned down his old job. Yet he’d returned to where he used to work, and he wasn’t a man who did anything without a reason.

“Are they still investigating the site?” Costa asked. “The place where Alessio went missing?”

The Carabinieri officer shook his head.

“Not if they’ve any sense. It’s all cordoned off down there. Whatever happened to it back then left the whole area a death trap. Every time it rains badly, we have a mud slide. Kids mess around in it from time to time. If we find them, they go home with boxed ears. And I mean boxed. I don’t want them coming back.”

Peroni looked at Costa, stared at his shoes, then sighed.

“What’s wrong?” the officer asked.

“I just cleaned them this morning,” the big cop moaned.

It was almost seven before Arturo Messina felt able to leave the Aventino. A lazy orange sun hung over the Tiber. Its mellowing rays turned the river below into a bright still snake of golden water, patterned on both sides by two slow-moving lines of traffic. The squad car, with its siren and blue flashing light, worked its way through them laboriously. Arturo didn’t have the heart to yell at the driver to make better progress.

He cast a final glance back towards the hill. Crowds were gathered on the Lungotevere below, and on the brow too. No one moved much. Even the jackals of the press were beginning to look bored. Messina had been a police officer all his life, worked uniform, plainclothes, everything, before joining the management ladder. The commissario understood that feeling of stasis, of wading through mud, that gripped an investigation when the first buzz of adrenaline and opportunity was lost. There were now only a few hours of light left. The machines had struggled against the patch of ground hanging precipitately beneath the Orange Garden. What initially seemed a simple task had turned into a nightmarish attempt to shift a small mountain of earth and soft stone that kept collapsing in on itself. The amateurish surveyor supplied by the company that brought in the excavators appeared hopelessly out of his depth. Not one of the archaeologists from Bramante’s team was willing to help; they were too infuriated by what was happening. With Giorgio Bramante departed to the Questura, there was no one in the vicinity who could give them an expert opinion on how best to proceed.

So they blundered on, Commissario Messina naively believing the job would become simpler as they progressed. Like scooping out the top of an ants’ nest and peering inside, he’d told Leo Falcone. He was fooling himself. The truth was much more messy. The nest was long dead. The interior was a labyrinth of tunnels and crevices, dangerous, friable, liable to collapse at any moment. One of the excavator drivers had been making noises about quitting because it was too risky to continue. The Army sappers had withdrawn and sat watching the proceedings from the grassy mound by the park, smoking, an expression on their faces that said Amateurs. The machines had already reduced to rubble what, to Messina’s untrained eye, looked like some extensive underground temple, shattering visible artefacts, ploughing the remains, and what seemed to be a plentiful scattering of broken bones back into the red earth. There would, he knew, be a price to pay.

None of which mattered. Only one thing did. Of little Alessio Bramante there wasn’t a sign. Not a shred of clothing, a footprint in the dirt, a distant cry, a faint breath or heartbeat picked up by the sensitive machines Falcone had brought to bear on the job.

Messina stared out at the traffic and told himself, A boy cannot disappear magically of his own accord. Their only hope now was to prise some truth from Ludo Torchia. And soon. Whatever it took.

He sat up front in the car as usual. He didn’t like to think of himself as a superior. He was their leader. The man who showed them the way forward. That was what troops — and police officers were troops of a kind, even if they weren’t Carabinieri — needed.

The driver was one of the uniformed men he used regularly. Taccone, an uninspired but essentially decent drone, someone who was struggling to master the sovrintendente exams. Not a bright, ambitious, questioning individual like Falcone. A commissario needed his foot soldiers, Messina thought, just as much as a good officer.

“What would you do if someone took your kid like that?” Messina asked, not much expecting an answer.

Taccone turned and stared at him. There was something in his eyes Messina had never seen before.

“Just what anyone would do,” Taccone answered quietly. “I’d take the scumbag into a small, quiet room. I’d make sure there was no one around I couldn’t trust. Then…”

Taccone was a big man. He’d probably done it before, Messina guessed.

“Those days are past, my friend,” he told his driver. “We live in regulated times. Procedure is what matters. The fine print of the law. Working by the book.”

The traffic was getting worse and worse. The flashing blue light and the siren were doing them no favours. Cars, buses, and trucks blocked both sides of the Lungotevere as it wound past the piazza of the Bocca della Verità. The peace camp occupied almost the entire area of the Circus Maximus beyond. A ragtag army of tents and bodies sprawled beneath the evening sun, covering every inch of the bare and scratchy green grass that had once been an Imperial racetrack.

Taccone swore, ran the police Lancia up onto the broad pedestrian sidewalk, then floored the pedal, scattering walkers, not minding whom he pissed off. When he found a break by the next lights, he forced his way into the moving traffic flow, bullying everything else off the road.

They were outside the Questura in a matter of minutes. A mob of reporters, photographers, and TV crews mulled around the entrance. They knew a suspect was inside the building, Messina guessed. Even if some creep inside the force hadn’t told them in exchange for a few illicit lire, Giorgio Bramante surely had when he’d arrived. Bramante was that kind of man. He played to the media, whatever advice he received to the contrary. Bramante felt wronged, and a man who was wronged would always be moved more by a sense of injustice than common prudence.

Taccone braked hard to a halt, scattering the scrambling hacks.

He turned and stared balefully at Messina.

“Those days are only past, sir,” he said slowly, “if we allow it.”

When Emily called with the question where the hell is Giorgio Bramante? she had suggested it might be a good idea to collect soil samples and any other ground artefacts. She didn’t say, I’m fine, don’t worry, and by the way it’s very nice holed up out here in some swanky mansion in Orvieto while you play cut and stitch with the latest corpse on the production line.

Americans, Teresa Lupo said quietly to herself. Everyone needed a work ethic. The trouble was Americans craved one even when they weren’t working.

Fifteen minutes later, the thing crawled out of dead Toni LaMarca’s throat. Teresa screamed when she saw it. This was a first in the morgue. So was the worm. She’d seen many strange items on the shining silver table that was the focal point of her working life. None had yet scared her, not seriously. But watching — close up, since she was taking a good look at the corpse’s face at the time — a pale flabby beast with prominent eyes and a triangular head, its whole slimy body the length of a little finger, slowly wriggle its way out of a dead man’s throat, then settle on his lips, was enough to make her shriek, something Silvio Di Capua found extraordinarily amusing.

Thirty minutes later Silvio had called in the friend of a friend who turned out to be Cristiano, the evolutionary biologist from La Sapienza. Cristiano was one of the tallest human beings Teresa Lupo had ever seen, a good head higher than both she and Silvio, as thin as a rake, utterly bald, with a cadaverous face and bulbous eyes. He could have been anywhere between nineteen and thirty-seven, but he didn’t look the type to be interested in girls.

The worm, on the other hand, turned him on.

Cristiano spent thirty minutes peering at it from every angle through a magnifying glass, then asked, anxiously, “Can I keep it?”

“That worm is in police custody, Cristiano,” Teresa explained patiently. “We can’t let a creature like that go walkabout simply because you’ve taken a fancy to him.”

“It’s not a him. It’s a him and a her. Planarians are simultaneous hermaphrodites. This little fellow…”

Teresa closed her eyes and sighed, unable to believe anyone could talk so affectionately about the disgusting piece of white slime now meandering around the small specimen dish Silvio had found for it.

“…predates the Ice Age. They have the sexual appetite of a seventies rock star. Five times a day, if he can get hold of a partner, and he doesn’t much care about the condition either. Also, if you chop him in half, he can grow a new head or tail. Or even several.”

“So ‘he’ is a he?” she observed slyly.

“I was being conversational for a lay audience,” Cristiano insisted.

“You’re too kind. Does he have a name?”

“Two. We used to call him Dugesia polychroa. Then they decided some dead academic called Schmidt needed something to be remembered by. So it got changed to Schmidtea polychroa.”

“Cristiano,” Teresa said, taking his skinny arm. “Let me be candid with you. Things are just a touch busy around here at the moment. For example, this ‘little fellow’ worked its way out of the open mouth of a gentleman who got his heart hosed out in a slaughterhouse, and that doesn’t happen too often. Also, last night someone broke into the Questura, probably looking to kill a good friend of mine, then shot dead a potentially important witness in this very case. I hope to work my way round to him a little later. My colleague Silvio here was of the opinion that this creature might provide some significant information for us. It would delight me immensely if you could give me some small clue as to whether my colleague is correct.”

She paused for effect then demanded, “So what is it?”

“A flatworm.”

“Just any old flatworm?”

Silvio got in on the act. “There’s no such thing as ‘any old flatworm,’ Teresa. If you’d spent a moment reading a few papers on evolutionary biology you’d know that. These things—”

“Shut up!”

She squeezed Cristiano’s arm harder.

“Just tell me, before you go, how that thing got there. Could it have been inside him when he was alive?”

“Are you serious?” the biologist asked, eyes bulging. “Who’d let that crawl down their throat?”

“I meant as a parasite or something. Like a fluke.”

“Planarians aren’t parasites!” He looked as if she’d insulted a relative.

“What are they then?”

“Scavengers, mainly. They feed on dead meat.”

“So it could have crawled down his mouth when he was dead? Or unconscious?”

He shook his bald head in violent disagreement. “Not while he was unconscious. These things didn’t live that long by being stupid. They stay away from anything that’s breathing unless it’s smaller. They’re pretty good at devouring young earthworms if they can catch them, but that’s as far as it goes.”

She thought about this.

“Habitat,” she said. “They live in the earth. They come out when they’re hungry. This man was found in a crypt alongside a hundred or so skeletons from the Middle Ages or whenever. A natural place for these wormy things, I guess.”

“No.”

She wished he wouldn’t treat her like an idiot, just because she hadn’t spent a joyous afternoon inside the pages of Lifestyles of Rich and Famous Worms lately.

“Why not?”

“Where’s the food? Where’s the water? They need water. Without it…”

That ruled out one way Toni LaMarca could have got a slimy white flatworm down his throat.

“How about a slaughterhouse?” she suggested. “That’s full of meat. Water, too. The worms could just come out of the drains at night for a munch on the leftovers.”

Silvio sniffed. “That was a very clean slaughterhouse,” he said. “I took a good look at those drains. They were putting all the right chemicals down them. I doubt anything could live if it got that much disinfectant poured on its head every night. I know I couldn’t.”

She stared at Cristiano, hoping.

“If the drains are disinfected properly,” he said, “you wouldn’t get planarians. Even they have limits.”

And so have I, Teresa thought.

The previous evening, whiling away the hours in the Questura intelligence office, she’d stolen a good look at the papers on LaMarca’s disappearance. It had taken a while to track down the boyfriend who’d been kidnapped by Giorgio Bramante as bait. A while, too, to persuade him to talk. When he did, he told them something interesting. Toni LaMarca had been taken two nights before his body turned up at Santa Maria dell’Assunta, not one night before, as they’d first thought. It was clear from the autopsy that he’d died soon after he was abducted, too, in the slaughterhouse, she supposed. The church had been visited by the woman caretaker the day before she found the body. She’d seen nothing unusual. That meant Bramante had stored LaMarca’s corpse somewhere — out of some unforeseen necessity? — before moving it to the final location. Then, some thirty-six hours after the killing, he’d left the clue to what he had done in Sacro Cuore.

There was dirt under LaMarca’s toenails, traces of earth on his body that forensic were looking at. But the kind of information she’d get from those sources meant something only with corroboration. Dirt wasn’t unique like DNA. If they had a suspect location, they could look for a match. But without a starting point, everything they had was like that stupid white worm. Information that lacked context, data floating on the wind with nothing concrete to make it useful. It could take weeks to track down, if ever.

“So where?” she wondered aloud.

Cristiano shrugged. “Like I told you. Near water. Near a drain maybe. Or a culvert. Underground, overground. You choose.”

“Thanks a bunch,” she grunted. “You can take your pet home. Provided…” — she prodded the worm nerd in the chest — “…you promise to name him Silvio.”

The biologist hesitated and risked a glance at his friend.

“You mean you don’t want me to work on him?” he asked. “Run a few tests? They’re fatal, naturally, but I don’t think the animal liberation people will start squealing. I mean, it’s not like he’s an endangered species.”

Her mind was already elsewhere. She wanted him out of there.

“Worm autopsies are not my field, Cristiano. Talk to Silvio about it.”

“But…”

“But nothing.”

“Tell her,” Silvio ordered his pal.

“Tell me what?”

“It’s the sex thing again,” Cristiano said. “You didn’t hear me out.”

She looked at her watch. “Thirty seconds.”

“It’s a question of allopatry or sympatry, whether they’re sexual or parthenogens…”

“I will, I swear, hit someone soon. Get to the point.”

“OK. Some populations of planarians overlap and mate with each other. Some stay apart and reproduce parthenogenetically. They develop female cells without the need for fertilisation. Some… kind of do a little of both.”

“I will…”

“In Rome we have sexual types and parthenogens, and they’re allopatric. Which means they live in geographically diverse communities and are basically slightly different versions of the same organism. It’s a big deal. We have underground waterways that have been untouched, sometimes unconnected, for two thousand years. What that means is that over the centuries we’ve come to have hundreds of communities of planarians and no two are exactly the same. There’s a team that’s been logging them for over a decade at La Sapienza along with a couple of other universities too. I’m amazed you never heard of it.”

“I never kept up on worms,” Teresa muttered. “One more personal failing. So what you’re saying is that if you dissect his love tackle under a microscope, you can tell me where he came from? Which waterway?”

“Better than that. If he’s in the database, I can tell you even whereabouts. Whether it’s the head of the Cloaca Maxima or the outlet. They’re that distinct.”

She picked up the specimen dish and peered at the creature wriggling inside it.

“I’d like to say this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” she murmured. “But it won’t. Silvio — that’s you, not the worm — kindly find this gentleman a white coat, a microscope, a desk, and anything else he needs. We have human beings who require our attention.”

Judith Turnhouse didn’t have the words academic Bitch stencilled in gold on a sign on her desk. As far as Peroni was concerned, she didn’t need them. Costa watched the body language as he and his partner entered the woman’s office in the outpost of La Sapienza’s archaeology department and felt his heart sink. It was hate at first sight. Tall, excruciatingly thin, with an angular face framed by lifeless brown hair, Judith Turnhouse sat stiff and serious behind a desk where everything — computer, files, papers, keyboard — had been tidied into a neat, symmetrical pattern.

Before Costa could even finish his introduction, she took one look at their cards and said, “Make it quick. I’m busy.”

Peroni breathed a deep sigh and picked up a small stone statue on her desk.

“What’s the hurry?” he said. “Does this stuff go bad or something?”

The woman removed the object from his hands and placed it back where it belonged.

“This is our year-end. I’ve a budget to approve and an annual report to write. You can’t do research without a proper administrative structure to back it up. We tried that once before. It was a disaster.”

Costa glanced at his partner and, uninvited, the two men took a couple of seats opposite the desk. Judith Turnhouse just watched, her sharp pale grey eyes noting every movement.

“Giorgio Bramante’s disaster?” Costa asked.

“I might have guessed. In case you hadn’t noticed, Officer, Giorgio doesn’t work here anymore. They gave me his chair a few years ago. It’s a big job. Especially if you do it properly.”

“I thought Giorgio was a star.” Peroni looked puzzled. “That’s what everyone tells us.”

“Giorgio was an excellent archaeologist. He was my professor. I learnt a lot from him. But he couldn’t handle admin. He couldn’t handle people either. For him, it was all about the research, and nothing about people.”

“Even a painter needs someone to pay for his paint,” Costa suggested.

She nodded, thawing a little. “If you want to put it like that. Giorgio thought everything revolved around the pursuit of some holy grail called academic truth. The result? We discovered one of the greatest undiscovered archaeological treasures in Rome. Now it looks like a bomb site. It’s tragic.”

More tragic for Judith Turnhouse, it seemed to Costa, than the loss of one young boy.

“You were in on the secret?” Peroni asked.

“Of course. You can’t work a site of that size on your own. Giorgio took five of his best postgrad students into his confidence and told us what was going on. We laboured down there for a year. Another three months and we could have been in a position to tell people what we had.”

“Which was?” Costa asked.

“The largest and most important mithraeum anyone’s ever found in Rome. Probably the best source of information we were ever going to have on the Mithraic cult.”

“And now it’s all gone.”

“No,” she snapped. “It’s all in little pieces. In fifty years’ time, perhaps, when everyone’s forgotten about Giorgio’s mess, maybe they’ll come up with the budget to try to put it all back together. Maybe. Not that it will matter to me by then. Just because what I work with is timeless doesn’t mean I’m that way myself.”

Peroni took out a pad. “The other students. We’d like their names.”

She thought about arguing for a moment, then reeled off what he wanted. One now worked in Oxford, two in the States. The last was a professor in Palermo. She hadn’t seen any of them in years.

“Is that it?” she demanded.

“We’re trying to find out where Giorgio might be now,” Costa replied. “We’re trying to understand what happened back then. Whether that can help us today.”

“I don’t—”

“We’re trying, Professor Turnhouse,” Peroni interjected, “to understand what happened to Alessio, too. Doesn’t that make you curious in the slightest?”

She hesitated, gave Peroni a dark look, then said, “If you really want my help, you can cut out that kind of bullshit. I didn’t have anything to do with Alessio getting lost. I haven’t the faintest idea what happened to him. You’re the police, aren’t you? Isn’t that your job?”

Costa slid a hand across to Peroni’s arm and stopped the big man reacting.

“Agreed,” he said evenly. “Which is why we’re here, Professor Turnhouse. What was Giorgio like back then?”

She said something curt and monosyllabic under her breath, then stared deliberately at her watch.

“Also,” Costa persisted, “what’s he like now? Changed or what?”

She stopped looking at her wrist and gazed straight into his face. Judith Turnhouse wasn’t a woman who felt frightened of anything, he realised. She was a senior academic, an important cog in an important wheel, at least inside her own head. She wasn’t much interested in anything else.

“Now?” she repeated icily.

“Giorgio Bramante came here. A week ago. He had an argument with someone. So loud even the Carabinieri outside heard it. Then he stormed off. My guess is he had that argument with you.”

She toyed with the pen on the desk. “Really?”

“You know,” Costa continued, “on that basis alone I could go to a magistrate. Giorgio is a convicted killer who’s picked up his old bad habits. He’s a threat to the community. I could ask for papers that would let me go through everything here. Your computers. Your files. Every last site you’re working on inside that hill…”

“We’re working on nothing,” she grumbled. “Everything is elsewhere these days.”

Peroni smiled and folded his very large arms over his chest. “We could sit here looking at you for so long, that year-end report will be about next year. If you’re lucky.”

Her pale, anxious face was taut with some inner, constrained fury.

“Or,” Costa suggested, “we could just have a friendly chat, a look around that site, and be out of here by noon. It’s up to you.”

Judith Turnhouse picked up the phone, then said, in an accent still marked by her native American, “Chiara? Cancel all my appointments.” She glared at them. “Persuasive pair, aren’t you?”

“Rumour has it,” Peroni concurred.

“You.” She pointed at Costa. “The polite one. Start taking notes. I’ll tell you everything I know about dear, sweet Giorgio, past and present.”

She rose and went to a floor-length cupboard by the window. From it, she removed a bright orange jumpsuit, stepping into it in an easy, familiar fashion.

“After that,” Judith Turnhouse added, “I’ll show you what was once a miracle.”

By seven o’clock they still had only the one student, the one suspect: Ludo Torchia. The others would, Falcone suspected, be found soon. They weren’t the kind to stay invisible for long. They dabbled in drugs and took a close, almost unhealthy, interest in Giorgio Bramante’s theories about Mithraism, Ludo Torchia most of all. But nothing Falcone had seen made him suspect these six were capable of cooking up the conspiracy the media were looking for.

Torchia had been placed in the last interview room in the basement, a former cell with no window to the outside, just an air vent and bright lighting, a metal table and four chairs. It was the place they reserved for more difficult customers, and ones they wanted to frighten a little. There were four other rooms adjoining it, running to the old metal staircase that led up to the ground floor offices. No one else was in for questioning that night. Falcone was leaving the other rooms open for the remaining students when they were found. The Bramante case was the Questura’s sole focus, and would remain so until either a resolution emerged, or it became apparent that the moment was lost, and the investigation would gradually subside into the low-key, quiet operation that would acknowledge what Falcone now believed to be true: Alessio Bramante was already dead.

Under instructions to await Commissario Messina’s arrival, he had spoken with the student only to establish the bare essentials: his name, his address. Everything else — all the routine checks and procedures — were to wait. Messina was, it seemed, playing this game by ear. It seemed a dangerous and unnecessary response to the hysteria now being played out in the street and on the TV.

Falcone also decided that Giorgio Bramante, to the man’s obvious fury, would wait elsewhere until Messina’s arrival. He half hoped he could make his superior see sense. Then, at ten minutes to eight, the commissario returned to the Questura. Falcone took one look at his face and realised it wasn’t even worth the effort. The man looked as furious as Bramante himself. He also looked lost, something which Falcone did not see in Alessio’s father.

“The others?” Messina demanded.

“Still looking,” Falcone replied. “We’ll find them.”

“Doesn’t matter,” the commissario grumbled. “One will do. Where’s Giorgio?”

Reluctantly, aware that there was no sense in arguing, Falcone went to fetch the man himself.

Giorgio Bramante didn’t say a word when he saw Messina. That, in itself, Falcone found intriguing.

Messina clapped him on the shoulder and peered into his eyes.

“We will find your boy, Giorgio,” he said firmly. “Give us twenty minutes with this creature to ourselves. If we have nothing after that… it’s your turn.”

It was hard to believe there had ever been anything of value here. Beyond the Orange Garden, on the steep slope that led down the sharp riverside incline of the Aventino, adjoining the Clivo di Rocca Savella, was what now looked like a rubbish dump. The ground was uneven, part grass, part dun earth. Empty plastic bottles were strewn around in patches of debris beneath low, meagre scrub. Costa spotted two used syringes before they’d even scrambled down the muddy narrow path that led from the park above, then wound, by a snaking, perilous route, on to the throng of the riverside road below.

They stumbled through the mud until they found a small platform of even earth. The rain had stopped. Judith Turnhouse had dragged up the hood of her caving suit. She looked around, grimaced, then pulled the hood down again.

“This is it?” Peroni asked.

“This was it,” she replied.

Costa kicked over a couple of sods of grass. There was stone beneath, the ribbed surface of what looked like some kind of column.

“They brought in the bulldozers,” Turnhouse added. “They tore everything down. When we found it, all this area was still beneath the earth. There was an original entrance fifteen, twenty metres, by the park up there.”

“You mean it was made that way?” Peroni asked. “Underground? Why?”

She shrugged. “We don’t know. A place like this could have helped us understand. Mithraism was some kind of male cult, most popular among the military. It involved strict codes of behaviour, a series of rituals and hierarchies, with just one leader, a man who had absolute power. Apart from a few contemporary descriptions that survive, we’re speculating about the rest.”

Peroni scowled at the area around them. There were, Costa could see, what looked like the remnants of blocked-up tunnels and even a few small holes. Large enough for a child, perhaps, nothing bigger.

“So,” Peroni persisted, “this was like all that black magic stuff you still read about in the countryside from time to time?”

“No!” she replied quickly. “Mithraism was a faith. A real one. Followed very scrupulously, in secret, by thousands and thousands of people. Christianity was underground for most of three centuries before it became the dominant religion. The day that happened, the day Constantine won his victory at the Milvian Bridge in AD 312, is when everything here was destroyed the first time round. Somewhere in there,” — she pointed to what looked like a former entrance, now blocked with rubble and wire mesh to keep out intruders — “we uncovered the remains of more than a hundred men who’d been gathered together and slaughtered. By Constantine’s army. It couldn’t have been anyone else. The evidence is still there somewhere. It was one reason Giorgio felt so nervous about letting people understand the full extent of what we’d found here. There were… resonances.”

Peroni glanced at Costa. The two of them had discussed this idea already.

“If Alessio got lost, it would all have been made public anyway, wouldn’t it?” Costa asked her. “Could that have been why he brought the boy here?”

She treated the question as if it were irrelevant.

“Search me. You had fourteen years to ask that of Giorgio.”

“Then why did he come back to see you last week?” he persisted.

She actually laughed. “It was absurd. He wanted all his old files. His reports. His maps. Everything he’d worked on.”

“And?” Peroni asked.

“I threw him out! He worked for the university. Everything he produced during his employment is legally ours. I wasn’t giving it all away.”

“I imagine he didn’t like that,” Costa commented.

“That’s one trait he didn’t lose in jail,” she replied. “Giorgio always did have a temper. He was screaming at me as if I was still some timid little student of his. That I don’t take. Not from anyone.”

Judith Turnhouse hesitated. There was more, Nic realised.

“I ran off some copies of the maps he wanted. That was as far as I was willing to go. I was about to phone and tell you people about it when I read what was happening.”

She went quiet.

“When?” Peroni asked, nodding.

“This afternoon.”

“After the year-end budget?”

“Don’t patronise me.” Judith Turnhouse spoke with a slow, hard fury.

Costa was poking around at the edge of the clearing. There was a multitude of potential openings and tunnels in the ground that stretched from the fence by the narrow Roman alley, and ended in the sheer face of the hill on the other side.

“Where could a child have gone in a place like this?” he asked, almost to himself. “Why didn’t they find him?”

“I don’t know!” she exclaimed, exasperated.

“You went down there,” Peroni pointed out. “You were one of his students.”

“Yes! And that’s exactly why I don’t know. The conditions here were the worst I’ve ever encountered. Giorgio took such risks I sometimes wondered if we’d get out of the place alive. Some of the underground tunnels were so fragile you could bring down a landslide just by putting your hand against the wall. It’s a nightmare down there. There are man-made tunnels, natural fissures, drainage… Some parts link up with at least two branches of the river in ways we don’t even understand. Also, there are ways down to springs that emerge in the riverbed, too. If a child got lost in there, he could find a hundred different holes to fall down, and every one of them would kill him. Or…” — she stared at them — “someone could have thrown him down one.”

“You knew those students,” Costa stated. “Would they have done that?”

“Ludo Torchia was a twisted bastard. He could have done anything. But I still believe…”

She thought of something. Judith Turnhouse stooped and picked up one of the empty water bottles, one with a very visible bright red label.

“If you want to understand what we’re standing on here — a honeycomb no one, not even Giorgio, got round to mapping — watch this.”

The woman twisted the cap off the bottle, scooped some earth into the neck as ballast, and walked over to one of the few open fissures in the rock behind.

“This is a trick we learned when we were working here. My bet is it happens even more quickly now than it did back then. More rain. More erosion. Watch…”

She beckoned them to come close, held the plastic bottle over the hole, and let go. They heard the thing bouncing off rock, softer, softer. Then a distant splash into water. Then nothing, except the echoing soft ripple of a distant current, moving somewhere beneath them, constant.

“We thought this was a natural culvert, never part of the temple at all. There’s some kind of channel that descends, meets something else in the hill, then runs to the river. See there?”

She pointed towards the city, at an area of foaming water on the near side of the bridge before Tiber Island.

“By the weir there’s an outlet of the Cloaca Maxima, on the bend. You can just about make it out. The head itself is Claudian. There’s a modern arch around it they made when they built the road and the flood defences.”

Costa sought the gap in the line of the flood wall, almost directly by the churning waters of the weir.

“Got it,” he said.

“As you’ll see in a moment, somehow — and for the life of me I fail to see how this is possible — that little channel here works its way through several hundred metres of horizontal rock and ends up there. What we’re standing on is porous, fault-ridden stone, full of holes and hidden passages we can’t even begin to chart. If a child went down a place like that…” She sighed and looked at her watch. “So how is your eyesight? Mine’s not so great these days. I’m afraid this is the only party trick I have.”

“Very good,” Costa replied, watching the bobbing debris on the distant river like a hawk.

They waited five minutes. No red bottle appeared.

“When did you last try this?” Peroni asked. “Before Alessio disappeared? Or after?”

“I don’t remember. After, I think.”

“So it’s years? The drain probably got blocked.”

She shook her head. “No. That’s just not possible. We know when there’s a drainage problem around here. We’ve got sites that flood straightaway. There’s been nothing like that for a long time. On a day like this…” She pointed at the foam on the weir. Small white horses, lively, wild. “…without a blockage the water should be running more freely than usual. The channel’s still open here. You heard it yourself. I don’t know…”

For the first time since they met her, Judith Turnhouse looked uncertain of herself, vulnerable, capable of thinking that there might, perhaps, be something in her world that hadn’t been discovered, labelled, and filed safely away for the future.

“This may sound stupid but I don’t think this is quite right,” she said, so quietly it seemed she didn’t like to hear the sound of her own self-doubt.

Costa glanced down. There was a narrow, slippery path that led to the alley of the Clivo di Rocco Savella. Then a short walk across the busy Lungotevere to some steps that ran close to the weir.

The waters looked cold and grey and angry.

“I may need your suit,” Costa told her, and heard nothing, no complaint, no objection, in return.

He was twenty-one but didn’t look like an adult to Falcone. Ludo Torchia had the shifty, stupid grin of a teenager, one who’d done something bad, and was now challenging them to find out exactly what.

Messina sat opposite. Falcone took a chair in the corner and pulled out a notepad.

“We don’t need that,” the commissario said immediately.

Falcone put the pad away and closed his eyes for a moment. From what he’d observed of Torchia already, confrontation was exactly what this strange young man wanted.

“Do us all a favour, son,” Messina began. “You know Professor Bramante. You know his boy. Tell us where Alessio is. Don’t make things worse.”

Torchia sniggered and stared back at them. He had the smell of cheap stale wine about him.

He began to pick at his fingernails.

“I don’t talk to scum like you. Why should I?”

Messina blinked furiously, then managed to calm himself. “This is a police matter,” he said through clenched teeth. “When I ask you a question, I want an answer.”

Torchia leaned over the table, looked the commissario in the eye, and laughed. “I didn’t hear a question, moron.”

“Where’s the boy?” Messina yelled.

“Dunno,” Torchia said, then went back to picking his fingernails.

“Tell us why you were in that place,” Falcone intervened, and ignored the caustic glance he got from Messina.

“I am Giorgio Bramante’s student,” he replied, as if talking to a child. “I have the right to visit any academic site he’s working on.”

Falcone struggled to interpret Torchia’s attitude. It was resentful, aggressive, unhelpful. But the student was at ease, too, and that seemed odd.

“You mean Bramante invited you there?” he asked.

“No!” An angry flush finally rose in Torchia’s cheeks. “I had to find it for myself. You ask him why that was. We were supposed to be a family. Students. Faculty. All together. The only secrets were supposed to be the ones we shared.”

“This isn’t about the site. It’s about the boy!” Messina barked back at him, leaning over the table, spittle flying from his mouth.

Torchia didn’t even flinch. Falcone had seen this type before. Even if Torchia did get a beating, he probably wouldn’t mind that much. It simply validated what he believed: that he was in the company of the enemy.

“I was there to see what was mine by rights,” he said slowly. “Something Giorgio should have shown us a long time ago.”

Falcone pulled his chair nearer the table and looked Torchia in the eye.

“A child is missing, Ludo,” he said. “Somewhere in a place that’s extremely treacherous. You were seen leaving it. You ran away—”

“Nobody likes the police,” Torchia said, hastily. “Why should I help you?”

“Because it can help Alessio?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“You ran away,” Falcone repeated. “All of you. There was a reason for that. We need to know what that reason was. If something bad has happened to Alessio, you can see, surely, that you will get the blame. Unless you tell us—”

“I didn’t see him.”

He was lying. As if this were all some game. Ludo Torchia was toying with them, it seemed to Falcone, merely because he felt like it.

“Who else was there?” Messina asked. “Give me the names.”

“I don’t betray my comrades,” he said, then went back to staring at his fingernails.

Messina looked to be at the end of his tether. Torchia appeared immovable. What emotion the student possessed was suppressed tightly inside his own skinny frame.

None of the standard procedures had been followed either, all thanks to Messina’s direct instructions: Put Torchia in a room and let him stew. The formalities, the words that were supposed to be read… all the prerequisites of interviewing a suspect. A good lawyer could have a field day with the holes they’d already left open. Messina had allowed himself to become obsessed with the boy, not with any possible charges that might follow. This was, in Falcone’s eyes, not only foolish, but dangerous. The Questura had lost two high-profile cases of late, cases where guilty parties had walked free simply through breaches of procedure. It could so easily occur again.

One practical job had never taken place either. A physical search.

“Turn out your pockets,” Falcone said.

A glimmer of fear flashed in his eyes. Ludo Torchia had remembered something.

“Turn out your pockets, Ludo,” Falcone repeated. “I want to see everything. Put it slowly in front of you, item by item. Don’t leave out anything.”

Torchia swore. Then he reached into his trousers and withdrew a few crumbled tissues, some lire. A set of keys. A lighter and some cigarettes.

The backs of his hands were covered in scratches. Nail marks, Falcone thought, and reflected, miserably, that, had proper procedures been followed, this would already have been noted, would already be the subject of forensic investigation.

“You’re hurt,” he observed.

Torchia looked at his hands and shrugged. “The girlfriend got a little fresh last night. You know what they’re like.”

“I didn’t think you had a girlfriend.”

Torchia laughed.

“The jacket, too,” Falcone ordered.

“Nothing in there.”

Messina was round the table and on him, big fists grabbing at the cheap cloth. Torchia squawked, a little scared, but defiant still.

“I said…” the student screeched, trying to fight off Messina’s blows.

The commissario pulled something from Ludo’s right-hand jacket pocket and tossed it on the table. Falcone stared at the object. It was a cheap pair of toy spectacles, the kind you saw at fun fairs. The lenses were semi-opaque, divided into glittering sections.

“Alessio had a pair like that when he went missing,” Falcone said quietly. “His father told us. They were a birthday present. He turned seven yesterday.”

No one spoke. Then Torchia reached forward, picked up the spectacles, put them on, pushing them back onto the bridge of his nose when they fell forward.

“Found them somewhere. That’s all. Christ. Now I can see a million of you ugly fuckers. What kind of a crappy toy is that to give a kid for his birthday?”

He was taking them off when Messina threw the first punch. It caught Torchia on the back of the neck, sent his face flying down hard into the metal table. Blood spattered from his nose.

Messina had got in five or six more blows by the time Falcone reached them. Ludo Torchia was on the floor, cowering, arms around his face. Falcone couldn’t help but notice he was laughing.

“Sir,” Falcone said quietly, to no avail. “Sir.”

Messina dashed in a last kick, then allowed himself to be pushed back towards the cold, damp brick wall of the cell.

“This is pointless,” Falcone insisted. “If Alessio’s alive, he won’t tell. If the boy’s dead and you beat it out of him, we won’t be able to take him to court. This…” — he said the words slowly — “…won’t… work.”

Torchia was still laughing. He wiped the blood away from his mouth. It looked as if a couple of teeth had been shattered by Messina’s boot.

“Kick away, you fat old bastard,” Torchia hissed. “I wouldn’t tell you shits a thing. Ever.”

Messina backed off. There was a wild look in his eyes Falcone didn’t recognise. He was lost for a way forward. And there was only one, Falcone knew that. Patient, persistent police work. Slow, relentless questioning. None of which felt good in the light of one certainty which was, he felt, now spreading inside the Questura and out: Alessio Bramante was already dead somewhere. It was just a question of recovering the body.

“Give him to the father,” Messina ordered.

Torchia’s eyes sparked with a mix of fear and interest. “What?”

“Talk to me or talk to Giorgio Bramante!” Messina bellowed.

Torchia wiped the blood from his face and mumbled, “I’ve got nothing to say to any of you. I want a lawyer. You can’t go beating people up like this. I want a lawyer. Now.”

Messina threw open the cell door. Bramante already stood there, arms folded, waiting, still as a statue, powerful arms folded over his chest.

“Ludo,” he said simply.

“No,” Falcone declared immediately. “This is not right. This is the Questura—”

“We’re getting nowhere,” Messina snapped, taking Falcone by the arm.

Falcone couldn’t believe his ears. “Sir… if anyone should hear of this—”

“I don’t care!” the commissario yelled, pushing him aside, ignoring his protests. “Not about this stinking moron. I just want that boy. You’ve an hour, Giorgio. Undisturbed. You hear me, Falcone?”

Bramante stepped round them without a word, walked into the cell, and slammed the iron door behind him.

The corridor outside had lost a fluorescent tube some nights before. It left the place in semidarkness. Falcone moved into the light. He wanted Messina to see his face.

“I disassociate myself from this decision completely,” he said quietly. “If I’m asked what happened, I’ll tell them.”

“You do that, Leo,” Messina replied. “I hope it helps you sleep at night. But if you set foot in that room before the hour’s up, I’ll have your scrawny backside across the coals first. You’ll never make inspector. I promise. You’ll never show your smug face in this Questura again.”

Then he stalked off. Giorgio Bramante and Ludo Torchia were alone together in the small cell, in the dark bowels of the Questura, the last room in a basement corridor, far from sight.

Falcone went into the empty interview room, took out one of the small metal chairs, set it by the door of the cell, and waited.

It took scarcely minutes for the first sounds to eke their way under the iron door. Not long after, the screaming began.

The racket of the traffic almost disappeared once they’d descended the steps to the Tiber. Costa had rarely been on the broad riverside pathway during the day. At night, this was a place for the homeless and the crooked, the city’s lost and forlorn, men and a few women all hoping to stay hidden. He hardly recognised the place now. The water’s edge was green and luxuriant, with a straggle of cow parsley, wild fig, and laurel bushes tumbling down towards the grey sweep of the river. Two lean black cormorants skimmed the surface, gleaming dark darts, as they sped towards Tiber Island.

Then something rat shaped but much larger scuttled from a narrow, leaking spring and crossed their path, racing to safety in the undergrowth to their left.

“What the hell was that?” Peroni almost leapt out of his skin.

“Coypu,” Judith Turnhouse told them. “They were brought in for their fur, then went native. They give the rats something to fight.”

“You must come here a lot,” the big man said, looking uncomfortable at the thought that giant, foreign rodents were thriving in the centre of his adopted city.

“We work underground,” she said caustically. “I thought you understood that.”

The outlet was so large the pathway had been extended to form a bridge over the surging waters that roared out of the ancient stone mouth. The original exit was probably three metres high, almost a perfect semicircle, three layers of old stones now set in grey mud and water. It stood inside a huge modern enclosure that must have run almost to the road above and seemed to incorporate other, more modern drain outlets, funnelling them into the same rough, thrashing gush of grubby water as it fed into the river, just above the weir.

Straggly trees fought feebly through the mud on either side of the channel. Shredded plastic trash and paper hung from their bare branches like lost Tibetan prayers, waving feebly in the renewing drizzle. The same kind of litter lay trapped in the broken and ragged wire storm guard that had once protected the lower half of the structure, and was now broken in multiple places.

Something lurked in the darkness at the back of this hidden cavern, dug deep into the underside of the road above. Costa squinted into the gloom, took out his pocket torch, and tried to see what it was.

“I really think I need that suit—” he was starting to say, when there was a splash beneath them. Judith Turnhouse was in the grubby water, furious, screeching at the makeshift building just visible in the man-made cavern ahead.

She stormed over to the old drain and clambered up onto the modern structure above it.

Peroni stared mournfully after her.

“It’s OK, Nic,” he muttered. “I’ll do it. Your clothes are so much nicer than mine.”

“You’re too kind,” Costa said, and leapt in anyway. He got there just a second or two behind the woman, while Peroni was still thrashing through the brown mud.

It was a home of kinds. Some old timber and scaffolding thrown together to make a shelter held together by industrial polythene and scraps of tarpaulin. There was a battered picnic table inside and a little folding stool. Plus the remains of some food. Recent. A few scraps of bread and meat that, to Costa’s eye, had probably been gnawed at by a rodent after some human had discarded them.

Judith Turnhouse was going a little crazy. This was, Costa supposed, her territory in a way. The stone entrance almost looked as if it belonged in a museum, the city crest now barely visible.

“How dare they?” she screeched. “How dare they?”

“They’re homeless,” Costa replied, and suddenly remembered, with a sharp twinge of guilt, how long it had been since he’d followed his father’s dictum: one gift a day to the poor, without fail.

But the poor didn’t normally leave scraps of food lying around for the rats to finish.

He walked into the shelter. It didn’t smell any worse than the drain outside. There was no effluent around here, only dank, stagnant water and the kind of refuse that stayed around forever, modern plastic and metal.

Costa kicked over the stool and ran a foot through the rubbish that lay on the floor. Newspapers, and a few sheets from an office printer. He picked them up. The crest of the archaeological department stood on the top. Beneath was a computerised map of what appeared to be a drain system somewhere in the vicinity of the Villa Borghese, across the city.

Peroni caught up with him, a little out of breath. The big cop stared at the paper, then the woman. She was poking her way into one of the side drains. It didn’t look modern at all, now Costa saw it close up.

“Signora Turnhouse!” Peroni yelled. “Do not go in there. Please.”

She didn’t take any notice.

“Damn,” Peroni muttered. “He could still be around, Nic.”

“Agreed,” Costa said, and scrambled across the slimy stone towards her, shouting to the woman to stand still.

That worked. She stopped. He reached her, hoped she understood there was a reason a gun now rested in his hand.

“This isn’t how I remember the place.” She sounded a little scared. “I can’t put my finger on it. This isn’t as old as the rest. Fifteenth, sixteenth century, maybe. We used to use it for study work. A group of us went in here with Giorgio the first year we were here. But it was different then somehow. That’s impossible.”

Costa worked his way in front of her. The entrance to the drain was under two metres high at this point. A meagre stream of thick, muddy water gripped his ankles in a bone-chilling embrace. He pointed his flashlight into the gloom and saw nothing. Not a man. Not a thing, until a large black animal shape scuttered through the grimy water into the darkness. The woman followed him, then, after a few steps, grabbed his jacket.

“There!”

Peroni yelled that he was calling in backup. Smart move, Costa guessed. If there was anyone around, it was a good idea to let them know they would soon have more to deal with than a pair of puzzled cops and one increasingly jumpy archaeologist.

“What do you see?” he asked Judith Turnhouse; then, before she could answer, found his eyes adapting, realised what was wrong.

Something obstructed the route ahead. It looked like the larva of some gigantic insect, bulging out from the rock wall of the culvert. Except it was red brick, not the dried husk of an insect’s egg. Modern red brick, weakened by something pushing from behind. The pressure of water, perhaps, since what they seemed to be looking at was, he now came to realise, the artificial cap of something that could only be a side drain running into this main channel, one that had, at some time within the last few years, been blocked, and subject to the growing pressure of whatever sporadic force of liquid built up behind it.

The mortar between the bricks was cracked and failing. A steady stream of dank water ran through the base, filtering through the rough cement before falling into the broader flow that swirled in a chilly embrace around their feet.

Costa shone his beam on the protruding brickwork. It looked weak. He stuck out his toe and pushed at the lowermost part. Soft cement crumbled as he watched. A single brick fell, then another, then the entire underside of the small, circular wall in front of him collapsed completely and fell into the grubby stream.

A mountain of trash that must have been building for decades followed: cans and rotting wood, paper, and an unidentifiable thick brown sludge.

Then a bottle with a bright red label. Followed by another object, something Costa dreaded to see. And a smell, organic, vile, fetid, that was at once both alien and all too familiar.

The woman began shrieking. The manic sound of her voice echoed around the artificial cave in which they stood, magnified by the brickwork enclosing them, drowning out the steady rush of the water at their feet.

Behind the gobbets of trash vomited into the sewer, something else dangled down over the brickwork, what lay behind it still hidden, thankfully, in the shadows.

It was the hand and upper arm of a human being. The fingers were now stiff bleached digits of bone. Tatters of pale flesh ran through taut, open tendons to the wrist, shredded in places by what looked like teeth marks.

It was a very small hand, Costa thought. Not that of a man.

Rosa Prabakaran had spent most of her life feeling prominent, feeling as if the eyes of those around her were always watching, asking: Why? There was no reason a woman of Indian extraction couldn’t join the state police. No reason she couldn’t do anything she liked. The colour of her skin was not her problem. It was theirs. All the same, Rosa didn’t like feeling as if she were something to be stared at. Falcone’s admonition — I want her to see you — grated. It was unprofessional. It was unnecessary.

So, for the first time in her brief career, Rosa Prabakaran disobeyed orders. After catching up at home on the news of the overnight murder at the Questura, trying to absorb it, she took out some things she hadn’t worn in a long time. Bright, young clothes, from a time before the police, when she had felt free of responsibilities. A short pencil-thin skirt, a shiny leather jacket, red shoes. She put on makeup, raked out her business ponytail and let her long brown locks hang around her shoulders.

It was a touch sluttish, she decided, regarding herself in the mirror. But Beatrice Bramante would surely never recognise her now. She looked like one of the naturalised Indian girls, the kind who hung around the bars and clubs and shops near the Piazza di Spagna, picking up Italian boyfriends, living the modern life, all quick pleasures, and nothing to worry about afterwards. Her father would be out selling umbrellas like crazy in this rain, at twice the normal price, because that was how the street traders worked. Rosa was glad. He’d have worried more about her looks than the fact that she was walking out the door to try to crack some lead in a murder investigation, and in doing so prove some kind of point to people like Inspector Leo Falcone.

There was a handgun in the small patent leather handbag that hung over her right shoulder on a gold chain. Her father might have worried about that, too.

She took the Number 3 tram to Via Marmorata. Then she walked down to the street where Beatrice Bramante lived and parked herself in the café opposite, nibbling at a cornetto that was still hot from the oven.

After almost two hours and three coffees, she watched Beatrice leave her apartment block through the big iron gates at the front, nodding on her way out to the caretaker in his little cabin.

Rosa followed the woman to the market, where she bought some vegetables, bread, and a little cheese. She recalled Beatrice during the awkward interview with Falcone, trying to hide the scars on her wrists, grabbing for the booze bottle when the inspector pushed too hard. Beatrice hadn’t looked like a woman who coped well with today, let alone her tomorrows.

Finally, Beatrice moved toward one of the butcher’s stalls. Rosa remembered something else from the previous day, something dark. It was the woman from Santa Maria dell’Assunta almost fainting in this very place, sickened by what she’d seen, and by the visible reminder of it in the stalls. Hunks of bright red meat, white fat, little puddles of blood gathering on the marble slabs beneath. The harsh, organic stink of raw flesh.

Rosa looked at the sign above the stall where Beatrice had stopped. It was a horse butcher’s. The horse butcher’s. This was the place where Giorgio Bramante had worked, half the time killing the animals at the slaughterhouse out in Anagnina, the rest bringing the meat here.

Beatrice Bramante was talking in an animated fashion to a man behind the counter. A man in his early thirties who wore a bloodstained coat and the white pork-pie hat butchers seemed to favour.

Then the man stood closer to Beatrice, staring at her with admiring eyes, slipping some parcel of meat illicitly into her hands. Then following this with a brief, sudden kiss, one that took the woman by surprise, so that she glanced around nervously, wondering if anyone had seen.

Rosa had ducked behind a towering pile of fruit boxes the moment she saw Beatrice turning in her direction. There, her nostrils full of the ripe acid smell of winter lemons from Sicily, her fingers gripped the little bag, with the handgun inside. She’d left the police radio at home deliberately. This was a statement. I’m on my own. But she had her phone, and if she called Leo Falcone, told him she was standing just metres away from someone who might be Giorgio Bramante himself, none of that would matter.

She moved out from behind the lemon boxes. The man and woman were still talking, still close. Rosa took a good look at him. He was quite striking, in a damaged way. Not muscular, but not a college professor either, even one who’d spent the last fourteen years in jail. She’d seen the photos of Giorgio Bramante. They’d warned her he would be different. But not this different. And why would he return to the old job like this? It seemed inconceivable.

She remembered Teresa Lupo’s advice: Either look or don’t look. Just don’t half look.

The reason she had assumed this was Giorgio Bramante was simple: the man and the woman treated each other with a casual, intimate familiarity.

The butcher reached out and lightly brushed Beatrice Bramante’s cheek once more. Then she walked off, out under the market’s iron roof, covering her head against the rain, striding back towards her apartment, eyes on the sidewalk.

Beatrice is not alone, Rosa Prabakaran decided. She has a lover. One who worked with Giorgio. And surely must have known him.

This was valuable, she thought. In a different light, Leo Falcone would be grateful for it. Yet she was immediately aware that he would see instantly she had come to possess the intelligence through what he would view as illicit means, in direct contradiction to the orders he’d issued.

Of itself the knowledge was useless, of such limited value that its revelation could serve only to reveal her duplicity.

“I need more,” she whispered.

When the market closed, she followed him back to where, she assumed, he lived. It was in a block near the old slaughterhouse, a massive complex now being turned over to the arts, not far from the Monti dei Cocci, the small hill of Imperial-era pottery shards that was Testaccio’s one tourist attraction. At night, half of Rome came here for the restaurants and the clubs. In the day, however, it was deserted. Only a handful of visitors were heading for the arts exhibition. Rosa studied the gates of the old slaughterhouse. They’d left the huge original headstone over the building: a winged man wrestling a complaining bull to the earth by the ring through its nose. And beneath both of them a sea of carved bones, animal and human, all grimy stone after years of exposure to the weather.

Lost for what to do next, she hid from the rain in a tiny café opposite. After a while her mobile phone rang. She cursed the intrusion as an unfamiliar, unexpected voice came on the line.

It was hot that night in the basement of the Questura. Falcone was left alone outside the cell, a punishment for defying Messina over the progress of the investigation. His penance was to listen to a young man being beaten to the brink of death, a point from which there would be no return.

He had sat there for so long, racking his brains for some possible solution, some excuse which would allow him to contravene Messina’s direct orders and enter that dreadful room. There was only one, and he’d known it from the outset. What was happening was wrong. Nothing could justify it, not the mysterious disappearance of a child, nor the likelihood that Ludo Torchia was involved in it. Wrong was wrong, and any police officer who tried to run away from that simple fact would surely, one day, pay the price.

When he could take no more — Bramante was left alone in the cell with Torchia for fifty minutes, Falcone was to learn later, though it seemed much longer — Falcone threw open the door, began to say something, and found the words failed in his mouth. This was a sight he knew would never fully fade from his memory.

Giorgio Bramante stood over his victim, still furious, still wanting to go on, hate and a lust for some kind of vengeance blazing in his eyes.

“I’m not done yet,” this learned, respected college professor yelled. “Didn’t you hear your orders, you fool? I’m not done yet.”

“There,” Falcone told him, “you are wrong.”

Then he picked up the phone to the front desk, ordered the duty medic to come immediately, and called for an ambulance. After which he dialled the central complaints bureau. He described, tersely, the situation as he saw it: an act of outright brutality warranting a criminal investigation had happened in the heart of the Questura. When he heard the hesitation on the line, he made it clear that, should the authorities decide to play deaf, he would take the matter higher and higher until someone, somewhere, would listen. There was no going back.

He put down the handset. Giorgio Bramante was glaring at him with such hatred that, for a moment, Falcone feared for his own safety.

Even for Giorgio Bramante, used to hardship, the weather was bitter. After he’d fled the Questura, surprised at how easily he’d avoided capture, he trudged for two hours along deserted roads which still followed the route of the old Imperial highways, finally passing the Porta San Sebastiano around three a.m., and walking until he found what was once the Via Latina. There he planned to spend the rest of the night, and much of the coming day, dry, if not warm, in the depths of a set of closed caverns, not far from the Ad Decimum catacombs, ten Roman miles from the city, close to what, centuries ago, would once have been a military encampment.

This was the most remote of his several potential hiding places. There were ones much closer to the centro storico — caverns and remains of underground streets that had never been mapped, known only to a handful of scholars. He could live hidden away like this for months undetected.

Circumstances forced him to wait, to be patient. There was only a little more to be done now, but this was the most important of all. So he sat, in the cold, bleak cavern, thinking about the day, and what knowledge he had come to possess of this place over the years.

The present site had been discovered by a local farmer trying to break up the soil for vines. The family had kept the find secret for a decade, hoping there was some hidden treasure in its subterranean web of tunnels. All they uncovered were tombs and bones, niches hacked into the stone, row upon row, tunnel upon tunnel. And, on the final, lowest level, the temple, which they scarcely looked at once they realised there was nothing glittering among its stones.

In late Imperial times this had been a modest agrarian community, probably no more than a few farms and a small army barracks for the men guarding the gatehouses and tax collection points of the Appian Way. This temple had none of the grandeur of the great altar hidden deep within the Aventino. Here, Mithras and the bull were crudely carved. The scorpion squeezing at the beast’s groin was scarcely recognisable. The place was a mere remnant of the old religion, one that the archaeologists, once they learned of it, decided to overlook in favour of the more obvious Christian symbols that had followed: the insignia of the Cross, the legends carved into the walls that hinted someone, perhaps a saint, had rested here briefly after martyrdom.

On the first Sunday of each month, a local archaeological society led a gaggle of visitors down through the simple modern concrete entry cabin on the surface, taking thrill-seeking tourists beneath the earth to see the skeletons and what remained of the ancient funereal decorations. No one spoke of Mithras. The religion that had once been Christianity’s principal rival — though Bramante doubted any of the men who had worshipped here would have seen it that way — was now a myth to amuse children. A fairy story, a fable to file alongside Aesop.

That worked to his advantage. The site, situated half a kilometre along a narrow, now unused farm track, in a field abandoned by a farmer who’d found more profit in subsidies for growing nothing than planting young grapes, was remote. The archaeologists wouldn’t be back for another two weeks. He had privacy and security. And, thanks to thoughtful city authorities, electricity too, since a single cable feeding electric lights ran through virtually the entire network of caverns, stopping short only of the Mithraeum, which no one wanted to see.

The previous day had exhausted him. He’d slept for eight straight dreamless hours before waking. Now he sat on the first level, by a series of niches, under the dim illumination of the bulbs and the grey light of day slipping down a slender ventilation shaft. In this sector all but one of the graves was empty. In the last alcove lay a female skeleton, carefully posed for the visitors, a real human being, someone who had walked and breathed in the fields above some seventeen hundred or more years before, her remains now arranged for the curious, like a waxworks dummy from a travelling circus.

Bramante still understood the archaeological mind. His former colleagues were historians, not grave robbers. They would move only what was absolutely necessary. The bones remained, in all probability, where they had been found, which meant that he knew the girl’s name, too, since it was carved over the tomb with the odd added inscription — nosce te ipsum, “Know yourself” — a sign, surely, that there was more here than the obvious. Above the alcove was a crude tableau, no more than two hands high: a young female figure in a shift, standing, leaning on one leg, holding a cat in her arms, stroking its head, in a pose so timeless, so natural, it made any parent’s heart ache. At her feet stood a cockerel and a goat. Bramante had accompanied a couple of tours here. He’d listened to the guides talk fondly of the carving, citing it as an illustration of the idyllic pastoral life lived in the vicinity. He’d kept his own opinions to himself. People always saw what they wanted to see. For him, as a rational investigator, one who tried to sift small nuggets of truth from the dust of history, it was important to deal with the facts. The cockerel and the goat were common emblems in certain kinds of Roman statuary, notably pieces of a ritual and votive nature. The animals were there as sacrifices, not emblems of the kind of bucolic heaven Virgil tried to portray in his poetry. The truth was more mundane and more complex. While this girl clearly lived, and died, in a Christian community, it had been one that, like many, kept alive the old gods, furtively, with covert references, exactly as the followers of Jesus had done before they rose to power. The bird and the goat were there because the girl, in the mind of her mourners, was about to kill them, to dedicate a sacrament to Mercury, who would decide whether her transition to the next world would be swift and painless.

Bramante reached for the bag of food and drink he’d bought in the supermarket at San Giovanni two days before. The instant coffee tasted disgusting but at least it was warm. He ripped open a prepackaged cake, took a bite, idly examining the label. Alessio had loved these. The boy always had a sweet tooth. It was a bad habit, one his parents had found hard to discourage.

Then he looked again at the inscription above the tomb and the small, familiar assembly of brown and white bones, the fragile simulacrum of a once-living human being.

“Salute, Valeria,” Bramante said quietly, toasting her with the disgusting coffee…. I hope Mercury listened when you called. I hope you haven’t spent the last seventeen hundred years waiting for him to wave you on. The young police officer lived not far from here, with his American girlfriend. She was an attractive woman. Bramante would have taken her, had a hostage been necessary. It wasn’t personal.

He thought of the blonde American and of the way men amused themselves in jail. All that effort, all the concentration on the corporeal elements of the sexual act, as if the cerebral didn’t matter for a moment. He was aware that, at that moment, he could so easily have done exactly what many did in prison; a minute or so of grunting effort, then a kind of relief. But there was a young girl in the room, albeit a long-dead one. And Giorgio Bramante needed — prized — real contact.

He needed so much. I…

His breath began to come in short, pained gasps. His eyes started to sting.

It took just a thought to bring on an attack now. This had the makings of one as bad as any in recent days. The buzzing came back, drove a sharp, tormenting stake between his temples. His hands began to tremble. His whole body began to shake so hard he spilled some of the foul scalding coffee on his hands as he struggled to set the drink on the floor.

The stupid cake got flung into a corner by the spasmodic jerk of his arm, down into the dark where the rats could find it. Bramante didn’t care anymore. He just threw back his head, teeth clenched tight, let the rage consume him.

Madness, maybe. That’s what the woman doctor in the hospital had hinted at. Guilt perhaps, she said once, and after that, he cancelled all future appointments with her.

Psychiatrists didn’t really believe in psychopomps, invisible beings that tried to achieve their ends through ordinary humans, hoping, perhaps, in his case, to find some possible fate for Alessio, wherever he might be, longing to be home, at peace, joined with the grey world that lived alongside the present one, flitting in and out of its consciousness at will.

He wasn’t sure he believed in pscyhopomps himself. At moments like this, it didn’t really matter.

Eyes closed tightly, teeth grinding, sweat running down his brow, Giorgio Bramante saw the picture forming in his head and tried to fight it, knowing the effort was futile.

After an effort to resist — a second? a minute? an hour? — he opened his inner eye and found himself back in the place that never really left him anymore: Piranesi’s square on the Aventino. He was on his knees, neck upright, head straining, eyes ready to burst from the pressure behind them as he sought in desperation to see something through the keyhole in the door of the mansion of the Cavalieri di Malta.

It was Alessio’s voice in his ear, filling his head. Older now, and full of some emotion his father had never noticed in life. Determination. Hatred. A cold, mocking detachment.

“Can you see it?” this young-old imaginary creature asked.

Giorgio didn’t answer. There was no point in talking to a ghost.

“Well?” the voice asked in a louder, harder, crueller tone. “Or are you just thinking about yourself again, Giorgio? Who’s next on your list? That skeleton in the corner?”

He’d no idea how long the fit lasted. When it was over, when his muscles relaxed and his jaw unclenched, aching, teeth sharp and edgy from the effort of crushing them together so hard it felt something might break, Bramante was dismayed to find he’d pissed himself. He got up, grateful only that he wasn’t in his caving suit, climbed out of the jeans and underwear he was wearing, scooped some icy water from the bucket he’d brought with him, towelled himself down, then put on the last pair of clean underwear and jeans he had.

He threw the dirty ones into the corner, as far away from the skeleton’s alcove as he could manage. Then he sat down, recovered the coffee and the cake, ate and drank and thought.

“No,” he said, staring at the bones of a girl called Valeria who had died centuries ago, “I didn’t see it.”

After finishing the food and drink, he took out the little digital camera he’d stolen from a Chinese tourist dawdling outside the Pantheon three weeks before and began to flick through the pictures.

The blonde American girl really was quite pretty. Given the opportunity and the motive, he would have liked the chance to take her. He flicked through five frames, watching her walk from the entrance of the Palazzo Ruspoli, out into the Via del Corso, fighting his desire to linger because he was getting hard, in spite of himself, in spite of the watchful, dead, judgemental presence of the bones in the shadows. Then he passed over Falcone and his woman, then the other two.

The weather was made for work like this. He could go anywhere, do anything, take pictures where and when he liked, and none of them would know.

He returned to the last few pictures, the shots taken from the café across the road near Santa Maria dell’Assunta. He’d drunk a cappuccino and eaten a sandwich watching Falcone and his men bicker and fumble their way inside the old abandoned church.

It was so easy to read Leo Falcone, Bramante thought. The old man’s smiles were so rare they had to mean something. At that moment, captured in the distance, across the road, behind the yellow police tape, Falcone was looking at someone with — not affection, Bramante decided — but a kind of respect. The sort of respect he seemed to reserve for the young these days, judging by the way he kept close to the short, clever agente with the beautiful girlfriend.

He stared at the picture, once again felt certain of its use to him, but surprised, almost shocked, all the same. The police had changed in a decade and a half. That made things so much easier. Before he put on the office cleaner’s uniform the night before, he’d walked into a café and sat in front of a computer for half an hour, preparing his options. It had been so easy to track down the name of the only recent female Indian recruit to the Rome police. They liked to make a big deal of ethnic recruitment these days. The woman had been in most of the city papers three months earlier, with a photo. And her name.

Rosa Prabakaran.

There were only three Prabakarans in the book. He’d hit lucky first time. It was the girl’s father. Bramante posed as a senior officer from the Questura, concerned that he’d been unable to get through to Rosa on her private mobile number, worried that he hadn’t heard from her, and that perhaps they had the wrong number.

Giorgio Bramante knew, by now, how to work on the emotions of a parent. Fear unlocked any door.

He rubbed his hands together to give his fingers life, then took out the number her father had given him. Then he looked up to make sure he was beneath the air vent, checking the signal on his phone. One bar. Enough to get through, though probably with a lot of distortion, which was not, of itself, a bad thing.

She picked it up on the third ring. Her uncertain voice crackled and hissed through the ether.

“Agente,” Bramante said with an easy authority. “This is Commissario Messina. Where are you exactly? And what are you doing?”

It took Falcone a good five minutes to negotiate the stone steps down to the river. Teresa Lupo and her team were there already. On the far bank, photographers and TV cameras were setting up positions. The morgue team was busily erecting grey canvas barriers around the mouth to the drain. Everything seemed to be in place.

Costa and Peroni were sitting under a temporary awning by the waterside, escaping the constant drizzle. They were with a woman Falcone recognised. It took a moment to place the name: Judith Turnhouse, who had been cursorily interviewed during the inquiry fourteen years before.

He beckoned the men over, remaining out in the rain, which, with its constant cold, seemed to keep him alert.

“Well done,” he said. “You’ve achieved more than fifty officers plodding along in Bruno Messina’s footsteps.” He paused. “But are you sure?”

“It looked like a child to me,” Costa replied, nodding towards the canvas by the drain. “Teresa and her people are in there now.”

“Is this possible?” Falcone asked. “It’s a long way from the Orange Garden.”

“Definitely,” Peroni answered. “She…” He nodded towards Judith Turnhouse, who remained motionless under the awning, eyes pink from tears. “…showed us.”

Costa shuffled, uncomfortable with something. “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” he said. “The boy could have been looking for a way out. It’s not a pretty thought. If he was in there. Alive.”

“We had search parties!” Falcone objected.

“Would they have looked in there? Why? Who would have guessed he could have got that far?” Peroni nodded at the drain, built into the underside of the road, reachable only by wading through mud and filthy water.

Falcone scowled. “None of the archaeologists gave us an ounce of cooperation. If they had, perhaps we would have found this place. When we know for sure, let’s get the media in. I want a full statement broadcast as soon as possible. Perhaps if Bramante hears it, if he understands we’ve tried to give him some answers…”

The two detectives looked at him, puzzled.

“It might be enough to persuade him to come in,” Falcone suggested, aware of the cool reception he was already getting. “He can’t hate me that much. Lord knows he’s had two chances to kill me already and not taken them. If it’s the boy, what else can he want? Bramante can’t stay hidden forever.”

Costa didn’t say anything. But there was an expression in his eyes Falcone recognised. A look of doubt. The kind of look, Falcone suspected, he himself had once used on Arturo Messina.

“I want to go in there,” Falcone said.

Costa and Peroni glanced at each other.

“It’s difficult,” Costa explained. “Even for us. You need to wade through mud. There’s very little room. Teresa has hardly any space to work in.”

“I am,” the old inspector said, voice rising, “the chief investigative officer in this case. I will see what I want. I—”

Costa didn’t budge. Friendship and work didn’t mix, Falcone reflected, and had to acknowledge that the younger men were right. He wasn’t up to this kind of physical effort. He sighed and hobbled to sit on the wall, out in the gentle rain, watching the slow-moving ripples of the Tiber.

Costa and Peroni joined him, one on each side.

“You don’t want me to carry you, Leo,” Peroni said. “I will if you want. But…”

“No.” Falcone touched Peroni lightly on the arm. They were out of earshot of the rest of the team. Falcone didn’t mind the familiarity anymore. “I don’t want you to carry me. I’m sorry. It’s this damned…” He stared at his feeble legs. “It’s feeling I’m not pulling my weight.”

He stopped. Two figures had appeared from behind the grey screen masking the mouth of the drain: Teresa Lupo and her assistant. Silvio Di Capua was holding a small notebook computer in his arms, tapping with one hand, staring at the screen. The pair were conversing intently.

“I believe we have news,” Falcone said softly, and felt a strange emotion in his heart: dread, accompanied by relief.

Teresa said one last thing to Di Capua, who returned behind the canvas. Then she walked to Judith Turnhouse, spoke to her briefly, and finally joined them, sitting down next to Peroni, looking a little wary.

“I wish I still smoked,” the pathologist announced. “Don’t the rest of you have that craving from time to time? You excluded, of course, Nic, since we all know you’ve never had a real vice in your entire life.”

“News, Doctor,” Falcone insisted.

“News?” She tried to smile. “We have a positive ID. Absolutely certain.”

“I knew it!” Falcone said, excited.

“Hear me out,” Teresa interrupted. “We have an ID. Unfortunately…”

She stopped and screwed up her large, pale face.

“Do I really mean that? How can I even think that way?”

“Teresa!” Peroni cried in exasperation.

“Unfortunately — or fortunately, whichever way you wish to look at it — it isn’t Alessio Bramante.”

She was young — a rookie, it said in the paper. That didn’t mean she was stupid. There had to be rules about the use of private calls.

“I’m where Inspector Falcone sent me, sir,” she replied hesitantly. “Testaccio. To watch the boy’s mother.”

“With whom?”

“On my own. Inspector Falcone said—”

“I wasn’t told that.” He gripped the cell phone and let a little impatience drift into his voice. “I don’t understand why you’re not with the rest of the team. Do you think Inspector Falcone has some kind of… bias against you?”

“No, sir.”

But it took her a second to say it.

“So what do you have to report?”

“She went shopping in the market.”

“And?”

“She met a man. At the horse butcher’s, where Giorgio worked.”

“You’ve told Falcone this?”

“Not yet…” Over the phone line, she sounded less than convincing. “I was about to report in when you called.”

“Leave that to me. Tell me about this man she met. Young or old?”

“Perhaps thirty-five. I believe he was a fellow prisoner of Bramante’s. I don’t know if this means anything…”

“Tell me.”

“It looked as if he and Signora Bramante had a relationship. He kissed her.”

Giorgio Bramante breathed deeply and stared at the motionless skeleton in the corner.

“Did Signora Bramante look pleased by this?” he asked the rookie.

“She looked… guilty. I think she hoped no one would see.”

He wanted to scream again. He wanted to shout so loud these ancient walls would shake.

“Did she go home with him?”

“No. She left alone. He went back to his apartment when the market closed.”

“Men take advantage sometimes. You know this, surely?”

“Sir, I think…”

“Men take advantage in all kinds of ways. I feel Falcone has taken advantage of you, Agente. Would you agree?”

Silence again, but a brief one. She said, “I don’t feel it would be appropriate for me to comment.”

“You’re very loyal. I like that. Has she seen you?”

“No… No one’s seen me.”

He thought about this.

“Listen to me, Agente. This case is far more complicated than it appears. Between ourselves, far more complicated than Leo Falcone can begin to appreciate. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I’m not sure…”

“I need to discuss this with you, in confidence. What you’ve been asked to do. How you feel about it.”

“Sir…”

“Where are you now?”

“In a café near the old slaughterhouse in Testaccio. The horse butcher lives close by. I followed him home.”

“Good. Stay where you are. I’ll send someone to replace you in an hour. Until then, Agente, if Falcone calls and orders you to do otherwise, listen, but ignore him.”

“I…”

Human beings were motivated by what mattered to them.

“You do want to rise in the force, don’t you, Prabakaran?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then do as I say.”

He picked up the photos in his left hand and took a second look at her. She was an interesting young woman. Different. For some reason she sought to hide the truth of her appearance while working.

“My man won’t know you, Agente. Describe to me what you’re wearing.”

He listened carefully, relishing the meek embarrassment in her soft-toned voice as she explained the nature of her disguise, and the reasoning behind it.

“Wait for him,” he ordered, then ended the call. Once again he glanced at the bones in the alcove. He felt renewed, excited.

“They come from all four quarters of the known earth, Valeria,” he said quietly. “They come not knowing what they might find.”

The rain ceased. Sunlight broke briefly over the Tiber. This gave Falcone the excuse he needed. Planks were placed on the mud, and with great care Costa and Peroni lowered him down to the water level, and accompanied him behind the screen, slowly making their way to the mouth of the old drain. When he reached the end of the temporary wooden structure, he clambered onto the platform to reach the newer, larger arch in the ground beneath the busy road above. He was so exhausted by that stage he needed a break. Teresa Lupo seized her chance immediately.

“You” — she prodded Peroni in the chest — “are not going any further. We’ve enough to deal with in there already without having someone throw up all over the place. In fact, I would strongly advise all three of you to take one short peek down that big black hole, breathe in the stench, then grab a few of those little collapsible picnic seats we brought along for the occasion and listen to me.”

“I am the officer in charge,” Falcone protested. “I need to see for myself.”

“It’s slippery and dark and treacherous in there.” She folded her arms and stood directly in his way. “I don’t even want to think of what might happen if you fell over, Leo.”

“I am the officer in charge,” Falcone repeated, outraged.

“True,” she replied cheerfully, then pulled up one of the metal chairs, opened it with a quick, hard flick of the wrist, and sat down.

“So you can find your own way in and I won’t talk to you. Not a word. Or you can stay out here and I will. What’s it to be?”

Peroni was the first to take a chair for himself. The others followed, with Falcone still grumbling.

“I thought it was a child,” Costa said. “It looked like a child.”

Teresa sighed. She called Silvio Di Capua over with the notebook computer, found something, and turned the screen round to face them. It was a collection of photographs of a teenager with his family. The young man was a good head shorter than his father, who was a rotund, smiling, ordinary man, and the two older figures, whom Costa took to be his brothers. The picture was taken on a beach somewhere: five people at an ice cream stand, happy on holiday, faces trapped in time, looking as if nothing would ever come along to disturb their contentment.

She hit the keyboard. The next image was of dental records: upper and lower teeth, and a name in the right-hand corner.

“We had all this on file from Missing Persons,” she explained. “Sandro Vignola was a very short kid. No, a very short person. He was twenty-two when he went missing. It’s an understandable mistake, Nic. You wanted to find Alessio Bramante.”

“We all want to find him,” Falcone interjected.

“Yes,” she agreed. “We all do. Unfortunately, I can’t help you there. But if you’d like to hear about the body I do have…”

They said nothing. She smiled.

“Good. Let’s make this quick.”

She shielded her eyes against the sudden harsh spring sun and stared at the sky.

“For one thing, I don’t think this weather’s going to last. The heavens are going to open sometime soon, and when that happens everyone here is going to be swimming in mud. For that very reason I’ve told Silvio that sometime in the next twenty minutes we will be putting this poor soul into a body bag and taking what’s left of him out of here. I seriously suggest you three, and any other of your colleagues who are of a gentle disposition, do not witness this event. Any objections?”

The three of them sat hunched on their little chairs, saying nothing.

“Good,” she declared, clapping her hands. “Now listen carefully, please…”

Rosa Prabakaran didn’t know the man. He wore a dark, somewhat shabby winter jacket, pulled tight against the rain that was now slashing down from a black, churning sky. His hood, sodden from the downpour, revealed only a snatch of face and two bright glittering eyes. Intelligent eyes. Interested.

Then he pulled an umbrella out from under his jacket. It was bright pink, the kind of cheap junk her father sold during weather like this.

“Agente,” he said cheerfully, “you should be prepared for all eventualities.”

His eyes ran her up and down. It was the same look she’d got from men everywhere in Testaccio that day, though perhaps with a touch of amused irony. Rosa Prabakaran cursed herself for dressing like this. Her clothes made her anonymous to Beatrice Bramante. To everyone else, however, it was a sign screaming Look at me.

“Thanks,” she answered, and took the umbrella, wishing, as she did, that she could see more of his face. Commissario Bruno Messina hadn’t made himself clear on the phone. She didn’t understand why she was being dragged off surveillance like this. To start some kind of disciplinary action against Falcone? That idea concerned her. She didn’t like the old man, but she didn’t feel vindictive towards him either. In truth, she’d taken a more high-profile role in the case at the beginning than she could ever have expected. It was scarcely a surprise that Falcone had reduced her position to that which her experience actually justified.

The tiny café was deserted. The woman at the cash register was starting to stare at them.

“Aren’t you going to have a coffee? What’s the rush? By the way, what’s your name?”

“Pascale!” he replied immediately. “Didn’t Messina tell you? Jesus, things are in a mess…. I don’t know where all this is going. Do you?”

“No. The coffee.”

He pulled the hood around his head more tightly and peered at the rain, which was now a pewter sheet obscuring the old slaughterhouse. The stone figures on the portico roof were unclear. The man and the bull were one in their struggle for survival.

“I don’t want coffee,” Pascale said. “You don’t have the time for it.”

“Pascale…” she repeated thoughtfully. Rosa Prabakaran tried to remember whether she’d ever heard the name before.

“I’ve been away for a while. Sick leave. Ask Peroni about me next time you see him. Or Costa. You know his American girlfriend? My, is he a fortunate man.”

“I’ll ask them,” Rosa replied, and unhooked the cheap clasp on the umbrella, began thinking about the long walk to Via Marmorata, where she could get a bus or a tram.

“Where’s Signora Bramante now?”

“At home, as far as I know. She doesn’t go out much.”

“And the man? This butcher you saw?”

Her eyes went to the plain public housing block across the street. “He went in there. I haven’t seen him come out.”

“Did you watch all the time?”

“Yes,” she lied, badly. Watching suspects was fine. Watching the door of some cheap little apartment block, noting the comings and goings of people who didn’t interest you was deadly boring. When the sun came out briefly, she’d disobeyed Messina, found a bench by a small grassy slope of the Monte dei Cocci, sat there, thinking of nothing, for a long time, feeling useless, unwanted. She returned to the café on the hour, when Messina said his man would turn up. Even then, she’d been daydreaming. Wondering what she’d have been doing had she taken up the offer of a junior lawyer’s post in the criminal practice near the courts in Clodio. Not looking like some hooker, waiting to be relieved of duty in order to betray an officer she scarcely knew, that was for sure.

She didn’t know where the butcher was, and a part of her didn’t care.

“You really think they’re lovers?” Pascale asked.

“Messina mentioned that?”

“I’m taking over from you, aren’t I?”

Rosa Prabakaran thought about what she’d seen. It couldn’t have lasted more than thirty seconds. Could you really read an entire relationship from a single, snatched glimpse into the lives of two complete strangers?

“They didn’t want anyone to see them. He kissed her. She didn’t…” The right word was important. “She didn’t seem to object. That’s all I know.”

“This happens all the time,” he said, frowning. His expression had become severe, judgemental. “A man goes to jail. His best friend comes round to sample the goods. That’s the trouble with the modern world. People have no sense of duty or propriety. A little messing around outside the nest here and there… no one minds. So long as that’s all it is. So long as it doesn’t mess with the family or get in the way of what’s important. A man needs a sense of priority. The trouble is these days people just don’t care. They live their lives through the end of their dicks and nothing else. This lacks… balance.”

She didn’t like him, she decided. She wanted to go and meet Bruno Messina, give him what he wanted, then surprise her father with a bottle of good prosecco to celebrate all those rip-off umbrellas he’d sold this freezing, wet, baffling spring day.

“He’s all yours,” she said brusquely, and turned toward the door. His hand stopped her.

“Let me give you a lift to the station or somewhere,” he said. “You’re going to get drenched, and frankly you’re not dressed for it. I’ve got a civilian vehicle. No one’s going to know. Besides…” He glanced again at the block across the street where the butcher lived. “I don’t think he’s going anywhere now, is he?”

They walked round the corner, a long walk, three hundred metres or more, with him holding the umbrella over her head, letting the rain pelt down on his black hood. He was parked on a little road that ran away from the old slaughterhouse, down what looked like a country lane, narrow, empty, desolate. A line of shattered pot shards from the grassy banks of the Monte dei Cocci had spilled onto the street, dislodged by the rain. They stepped over them and walked towards a white van, parked by a couple of large overflowing trash bins from the restaurants and nightclubs up the street.

He stopped at the rear.

“You never asked to see my ID,” he said, and there was a censorious tone in his voice. “You know, if I was to tell someone that, the commissario say, it wouldn’t go down well for you.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Rosa felt bone-weary. He’d moved the umbrella so now it didn’t cover her properly. The rain fell on her exposed legs, which were cold. She was shivering.

“It’s important you see it,” he said. “I keep things inside.”

She wasn’t thinking straight, but something still told her this was wrong.

He placed a fist firmly in her back and edged her towards the van doors. There were no windows at the rear. Something was painted on the sides that she couldn’t quite make out, obscured by the rain. Lettering and a symbol, all in blood red.

He pulled out keys, worked the handle, and opened the doors. Then he nudged her forward to look. She blinked. There was a man inside the van, trussed like a Christmas turkey, some kind of rag round his mouth, hands bound behind his back, ankles tied tightly together so that he lay on the floor able only to roll helplessly around, saying nothing, going nowhere. The van interior was spotless, antiseptically clean, and his floundering meant he was careening around it, bumping into white industrial boxes full of meat.

The trussed man on the floor had frightened, familiar eyes. It was the butcher from the market. She knew that the moment she saw him, and was amazed that her first emotion was fury: anger directed at herself for being so stupid.

“What do you give a condemned man?” asked the voice behind her, which was different now. More cultured. More distanced from the interested, human emotion he must have summoned up from somewhere to get her here. “Anything he wants, I guess. Otherwise he just takes it.”

Her hands were trembling as she fought to get the little purse off her shoulder, struggling to find the gun she’d secreted inside. The strap caught. Then his powerful fist wrapped itself around the cord, snapped it, flung the bag and the precious gun into the gutter.

She thought about fighting, struggled to remember the self-defence lessons she’d learned so carefully in the training school out on the Via Tiburtina, day after day, arms and hands hurting, bruises rising on her shins. But this wasn’t a classroom. He was strong, so much more powerful than she could ever be. His hands moved everywhere, grasping, hurting, forcing. Hands that seemed to enjoy what they were doing: pushing her down onto the white metal floor of the van, next to the trussed butcher, twisting a rag around her mouth, one that tasted of something raw and chemical, tying her hands, her ankles, securing her in a few swift easy movements as easily as a man preparing a beast for the knife.

She stared up at him. He saw. The hood came down. It wasn’t the face from the photographs in the files, she realised. Not quite. Giorgio Bramante, in the flesh, had only a passing resemblance to the man Rosa thought she would see. He was greyer, more sallow-faced, with the complexion of someone dying from the inside out of some cruel disease, like a cancer gnawing away relentlessly. Except for the eyes, which blazed at her.

The eyes were happy. Hungry. Amused.

Costa listened. He’d thought he was getting blasé about this kind of detail. He was wrong. What had happened to Giorgio Bramante’s former student, Sandro Vignola, if Teresa was right — and it was difficult to see how she could be mistaken — was as vicious and heartless as anything Bramante had done to his other victims. Perhaps more so. And that made Costa ask himself: Was this different somehow?

There was much work to be done on the remains. They had suffered badly from animal attack and substantial decomposition in the airless, damp enclosure of the drain. This would take days to complete back in the morgue, and require outside assistance, possibly from a private lab or that of the Carabinieri. But two facts were clear already. Vignola had been gagged. The cloth that had been tied round his mouth to prevent him calling for help was still in place. And he’d been hobbled, hand and foot, so that he could scarcely crawl.

“Hobbled with what?” Falcone asked.

Teresa shouted to one of the morgue monkeys. He came out with a strong nylon tie, with a buckle on one end. It stank.

“I’m only guessing here,” she told them, “but I’d put money on the fact this is the same kind of hobble they use in a slaughterhouse. Remember, Bramante was working in one while he was in jail? He could have stolen a couple when he came out for the weekend. Also…” — she looked at Peroni as if to say Sorry — “…just to make sure, he broke both of the victim’s ankles. He did it after the hobble went on, so perhaps he was worried his original plan wouldn’t work.”

“This plan being?” Peroni asked.

“He crippled Sandro Vignola and put him in the drain. Then he capped the end of it with bricks. It wouldn’t take long. Not if he knew what he was doing. I asked her earlier…” She nodded at Judith Turnhouse, still sitting under the awning, now talking quietly, calmly, to a policewoman. “One of Bramante’s many specialities as an archaeologist was apparently the early uses of brick and concrete,” Teresa reported. “They knew an awful lot about that, even two thousand years ago. They knew the right mortar to make for a situation where there was damp. They knew what kind of material to choose so that it didn’t fall down after a couple of years. That’s what he did here. He bound Sandro Vignola. He made sure he couldn’t utter a sound. Then he walled him up in there and left him to die.”

Peroni muttered something indistinguishable.

“I imagine,” Teresa added, “that we’ll find the cause of death was starvation. I couldn’t see any obvious wounds apart from the broken ankles. Here’s another thing I learned from her too…” Teresa nodded at Judith Turnhouse and, for a moment, looked pleased with herself. “Walling people up and leaving them to die was one way some Roman cults treated those they believed had betrayed them.”

“You mean Bramante’s taunting them with their own rituals?” Costa asked.

“I don’t know what I mean,” she replied. “All I know is this. Geek boy over there” — she flicked a thumb at Di Capua — “did a little research on the Web before this lot came in. Everything to do with Mithras happens in sevens. There were six kids and Giorgio. There were seven different levels of rank in the temple, wet-behind-the-ears beginner to god. Does that mean anything? Who knows? But here’s a fact Silvio did find. Every level had a sacrament. Which, before you jump to conclusions, could just mean a gift to the god. An offering. Or it could be a sacrifice, too. They killed a lot of animals back then, and not necessarily for food either. Or the sacrament could be some kind of ordeal. One of which was being left alone in some dark, deserted cave, wondering whether anyone was ever going to come back and let you out.”

They took this in, still bewildered.

“Seven stages, seven sacraments,” Teresa said firmly. “By my reckoning, our killer’s still one short.”

“I’m not much interested in ancient history, Doctor.” Falcone said it severely.

“Bramante is,” Costa reminded him. “Ancient history was his life. His obsession. Just as much as being a father. Perhaps the two weren’t separate. Didn’t he say you were number seven?”

Falcone stared at him. Once Costa would have felt awed by the older man’s presence. Once he would have been too scared to correct him like that. But Falcone had changed. So had he. And now the inspector was regarding him with a curious expression, one that bore no animosity and possessed, instead, something not far from… approval.

“A complex case doesn’t necessarily demand complex solutions,” Falcone declared. “So this killing happened, what…”

“Eleven years ago.” Teresa shrugged. “That’s when Sandro Vignola disappeared, isn’t it? I’m amazed we’ve got as much to work on as we have, what with the rats and the water.”

Falcone scowled. “And there’s absolutely nothing here that’s going to be of any use to us today? No forensic? Nothing? We know this was Bramante’s work. He’s hardly likely to deny it when we find him.”

The three men stared at each other miserably.

Teresa Lupo clicked her fingers at Silvio Di Capua.

“If you people are going to ask me a question,” she said, “it would be polite to wait for an answer before you dive into your own personal pits of gloom. Show them, Silvio.”

Di Capua bent down. There was a transparent plastic case in his hand. Inside it wriggled a large, pale, corpulent worm, of a kind Costa had never seen in his life, and would feel happy never to encounter again.

“Planarian,” Di Capua said firmly, as if it meant something, and pointed towards the drain.

Teresa rapped her fat fingers on the box and beamed at the thing when it moved.

“It’s a worm,” Peroni observed.

“No,” she corrected him. “Silvio is right. It’s a planarian. Our friend in Ca’ d’Ossi had one too. That planarian didn’t come from there. It didn’t come from the slaughterhouse. It came from the underground place where Giorgio stored him before moving him in with all those other dead people.”

“It’s a worm,” Falcone said.

The Lupo forefinger waved at them, like the wagging, warning digit of a schoolteacher about to deliver up a secret.

“A very special worm,” she said. “I’ve decided to call him… Bruno. What do you think?”

The ambulance fought through the busy city streets, rocking violently across the cobblestones of the centro storico, battling the traffic to find the hospital at San Giovanni. The police doctor, Patrizio Foglia, sat next to his patient, ignoring the two medics, who seemed to be working on Ludo Torchia out of duty rather than conviction.

Falcone took the bench opposite, held on tight for the ride, and didn’t shrink from the man’s severe gaze.

“This was not my doing, Patrizio,” he said. “Save your anger for someone else.”

“You mean these things simply happen in our own Questura and no one notices? What the hell is going on, Leo?”

“There’s a child missing,” Falcone replied, and found himself depressed to discover how much he sounded like Arturo Messina. “In cases like this, people change. Giorgio Bramante is a highly respected man. Who was to know?”

“So we allow parents to carry out their own interviews now, do we? If you can call it that.”

Falcone shrugged. “If they’re parents like Bramante. Reputable, middle-class citizens who could, I imagine, make a phone call to the right person if they wanted. This was not my decision. I opposed it as vigorously as I was able. But I am a mere sovrintendente around here. I was overruled. I regret that deeply. In the end, I disobeyed Messina and stopped this when I was able.”

Torchia wasn’t moving. Falcone didn’t know a lot about medicine. Nor did he want to know much. What he saw were all the usual totems he associated with a life about to fail: oxygen and syringes, masks and mechanisms, crude toys waging a useless battle against the inevitable.

“You could have stopped it in the first place,” Foglia said with a scowl.

“Probably not. Messina would simply have dismissed me and put someone in there who would have done nothing.”

“You could have told them upstairs!”

He tried to smile. “Messina was upstairs. Please. We’ve been friends for so many years. Don’t imagine these things didn’t run through my head.”

Foglia seemed to have given up on the injured man, judging by the way he allowed the medics to do everything. This surprised Falcone. He was a good doctor. A good man. They had been friends for many years.

“Is there nothing you can do?”

He grunted at that. “As one of my illustrious forebears once said, ‘I cannot cure death.’”

“Perhaps Messina and his kind have a point,” Falcone replied idly, thinking aloud as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s. They were in the wide straight line of the Via Labicana now, a medieval pope’s highway to the great church of San Giovanni in Laterano at the summit of the hill ahead. The hospital wasn’t much further. This part of Ludo Torchia’s journey was coming to an end.

“What?” Foglia replied, his voice high-pitched with disbelief. “Beating a man to death has a point?”

“Not for me but, as I am constantly reminded, I’m no parent. You, Patrizio, are.”

They were lovely kids, two girls, twins, fast approaching the age at which they’d go to college. Foglia and his wife would, Leo knew, be heartbroken when they left home.

“Imagine this was Elena or Anna,” he went on. “Imagine you knew that she’s still alive somewhere, but she won’t be for much longer. She’s underground. Trapped. Frightened. Unable to do anything to help herself. And this… individual can tell you where she is. Possibly.”

There was a sudden chill in the ambulance. Falcone ignored it.

“Put yourself in that situation, Patrizio,” he went on. “You don’t want vengeance. You don’t care about anything but your child. If this man speaks, she may live. If he remains silent, she will surely die.”

Foglia wriggled on his chair.

“What would you do in the circumstances?” Falcone demanded. “Rattle off a suitable section of the Hippocratic Oath, then walk out of the room and start phoning around for estimates for the funeral? Not that you can be certain there will be one, naturally, because the odds are we’ll never find a body. That you will never know what happened to your own flesh and blood. You will go to your grave with that big black hole inside you till the end….”

“Enough!” Foglia yelled. “Enough!”

The ambulance lurched to a complete halt. A trumpet voluntary of car horns rose in harmonic unison and filled the air with their angry cries, like some crazed ironic fanfare for the dying man on the stretcher.

The older medic, a man in his forties, who was watching the oxygen machine like a hawk, took hold of the tube running to Torchia’s mask, waited for the commotion outside to lessen, then said, “I’d beat it out of him. Without a second thought. If I thought it would help right now, I’d squeeze this oxygen supply until the bastard came clean. What else can you do?”

“And if he’s innocent?” Falcone asked.

“If he’s innocent,” the medic answered straightaway, “he’d say so, wouldn’t he?”

Not always, Falcone thought. Sometimes, in the middle of an investigation, logic and rational behaviour went missing. In sensational cases it was by no means uncommon for some troubled individual to walk into the Questura and confess to a crime he had never committed. Some strange, inner guilt drove men to the most curious and damaging of acts on occasion. Maybe Torchia was culpable of something dark and heinous he didn’t wish to share with a couple of police officers. That didn’t guarantee it had to do with the disappearance of Alessio Bramante.

“We can do what we’re paid to do,” Falcone replied. “We can try to find out what has happened, to sort some facts from the mist. That sounds a little feeble, I know, but sometimes it’s all we have. Besides, someone tried to beat the truth out of him and look at the outcome. He didn’t say a single helpful word. We still don’t know where the boy is. Which means…”

What? He still wasn’t sure.

“Perhaps he is genuinely innocent,” he continued. “That he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, though I doubt that. Or he wanted Bramante to do what he did for some reason. It gave him some satisfaction.”

Foglia shook his head. “What possible motive could he have for that?”

Falcone felt a little ashamed. It had been wrong of him to personalise the case in the way he had, to put that cruel picture inside Foglia’s head. It had disturbed his old friend, who was now red-faced, exasperated, and confused.

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t, Patrizio. And I wish I did.” He hesitated. “Is there any chance he’ll live?”

Both of them, the doctor and the older medic, shook their heads.

“Will he regain consciousness?” Falcone asked. “I was clinging to some faint hope he might tell a stranger something he wouldn’t disclose to Giorgio Bramante. If there was a personal reason behind this we don’t understand, perhaps I’d have a chance—”

“He’s not coming back,” the medic muttered, then gingerly opened the door and peered outside. The driver stood there, lighting a cigarette. He stared back at them, guilty at first, then smiled, the quick, cheeky Roman smile everyone used when they were caught. There was an accident in the road ahead, the driver explained. They were stuck in solid traffic. It would be some time — perhaps more than fifteen minutes — before they got to the hospital.

The medic swore, slammed the door, and tugged his colleague’s arm. The other one was a thin, unremarkable young man with a head of long blond hair. He was still watching the dials and the screens, a little nervous, as if he hadn’t seen many deaths before.

“Don’t waste your time,” the older man told him. “I’d put money on him being gone by the time we get moving again. Isn’t that right?”

The doctor stared at the monitors attached to Ludo Torchia, whose breathing seemed shallow and faint.

“I believe so,” he replied. “Leo, you should have stayed in the Questura.” He said this with some faint note of reproof. “You have some of the other students, don’t you?”

“We have,” Falcone agreed. Probably all of them by now. As he’d expected, they weren’t good at hiding.

“Then they can tell you,” the doctor suggested.

Falcone shook his head and looked at the motionless figure. “Not after this. They’re surrounded by lawyers. They don’t need to say a thing. Why should they? We’ve allowed one of them to be beaten almost to death in our own interview room. They can stay silent for as long as they like. We can’t even use it against them.”

“I need a cigarette,” the older medic complained. “We’re not going to be moving for a while.”

“As a doctor,” Foglia murmured, “I shouldn’t say this. But go and have one. Both of you.”

The younger medic looked baffled. “I don’t smoke.”

His companion caught something in Foglia’s expression. “I’ll teach you,” he said, and led him out of the ambulance.

Falcone sat there, silent, lost for words.

Foglia took another look at the monitors. “He’s dying, Leo. There’s nothing anyone can do.”

“So you said.”

“You really think he might have talked to you?”

“I don’t know, Patrizio. This case makes me realise I know very little indeed.”

Foglia stood up. He walked to the equipment cabinet on the wall, reached in, and took out a syringe, then, after checking carefully, an ampoule of some drug.

“If I’m lucky, I may be able to bring him back to consciousness for a minute or so. It would be appreciated if the pathologist made no mention of this in his autopsy. I quite like my job and it’s a sight better than prison.”

He primed the syringe, checking the level very carefully.

“Well?” Foglia said. “Falcone. We don’t have all night. Neither does that boy.”

“What else will it do to him?” Falcone asked.

“He’ll probably die of heart failure within fifteen minutes.”

“No!”

“He’s dead anyway, Leo!”

“I said no, Patrizio. I’ve already arrested one man for murder tonight. Don’t make it two.”

Foglia laughed, without conviction. “I’m a doctor. Doctors make mistakes.”

“Don’t do it. Please. For your own sake.”

“What about that child?”

Falcone tried to argue, but the words weren’t there.

“Exactly,” Foglia went on. “Either way, I’m not going to get to sleep tonight.”

He found a patch of clear skin between the bruises on Torchia’s bare right arm, plumped up the vein with the same professional care he would have used on a patient in the Questura surgery, then slipped the hypodermic deep into the flesh.

It took less than a minute. Almost to the rhythm of the horns outside, the student’s chest jerked. Suddenly his eyes opened. They focused on the ceiling and the bright light overhead.

Falcone moved over to crouch by the surgical stretcher.

“Ludo,” he murmured, and found his throat was dry. His voice sounded distant and foreign. “We need to find the boy.”

Torchia’s swollen, blackened lips moved, shiny with blood and spittle. He said nothing.

“Ludo—” Falcone said.

Torchia sobbed, choked back a liquid, guttural cough, and managed to turn his head in their direction.

Falcone caught a glimpse of his eyes. He looked like a child himself at that moment: alone, scared, confused, in pain.

Then something came back, an unreadable certainty in his face, and Leo Falcone felt, against his own wishes, that he’d been wrong all along. Torchia did know something about the boy, and even now the memory amused him.

“Say something,” Falcone pleaded, and thought they were the feeblest words he’d ever uttered in his life.

Unaware that a fat white planarian, recently dissected in the morgue below, had come to bear his name, Bruno Messina sat in the large leather chair in his office looking like a man at the end of his tether.

“So there’s nothing?” he demanded, half furious, half pleased he was able to launch this accusation in their direction and deflect it from himself.

Costa had to nudge his boss for an answer. Falcone had been staring out the window, into the night, lost in thought, as if recollecting something. Fragments from the old Bramante case kept reentering the conversation they’d had on the way to the Questura, like flotsam released from the depths of some murky sea, surfacing in Falcone’s troubled mind. There had been a moment when Costa wondered whether it would be wiser for the old man to retire from the case altogether, to make way for a younger, more physically sound man. Then, just before the car parked in the secure piazza behind the station, Falcone had taken a call from the intelligence team tracing Bramante’s movements in the city and, in the space of one minute, conducted the kind of intense, rapid-fire interrogation of a junior officer no other man in the Questura could begin to match. The old Leo Falcone was there when needed, Costa realised. He was just distracted, for reasons Costa couldn’t quite comprehend.

The team had stayed at the murder scene by the river for two hours. When they returned to the Questura, Falcone had summoned a meeting of all the senior officers in the case, along with Teresa Lupo and Silvio Di Capua. That had taken more than ninety minutes. It was now just past eight o’clock, a time when shifts change, when stalled investigations risked falling into stasis, indolence, and, eventually, despair.

“Furthermore,” Messina added, “you disobeyed my express orders, Inspector. You left the Questura.”

“I thought I was only a prisoner at night,” Falcone replied, without the slightest hint of guile. “I apologise if there was some misunderstanding.”

“What are we supposed to do, Leo? One more day and all we have to show for it is one more body.”

“That’s not quite fair, sir,” Costa interjected. “We know that Bramante has been trying to find his old maps of underground sites.”

“That narrows it down,” Messina said dryly.

“We know from Bru—” Peroni corrected himself. “We know from the worm we found down by the river that he didn’t keep the last victim there.”

“I say again: that narrows it down.”

“But it does,” Costa objected. “The worm Teresa got out of Toni LaMarca isn’t in any of the databases. That means we know where Bramante didn’t hide LaMarca before he took the body to Ca’ d’Ossi.”

“Tell me something you do know!”

“Of course,” Falcone replied, taking control of the conversation, and shooting Costa a glance that said Mine now. “There are more than one hundred and fifty registered subterranean archaeological sites for which La Sapienza has no planarian records. The university archaeological department has a further forty-three that are not officially registered but were visited by Bramante in the course of his work. That means he could have used any one of them. Or somewhere else entirely.”

“This could take years!”

Falcone laughed. “No. A couple of days at most, I think. We could start now, but in the dark… he’d be gone the moment he heard something. Wherever he is, he knows the place well and we don’t. Besides, we have other work to do.”

Bruno Messina sighed. “Nearly two hundred sites…”

“That’s the total,” Costa interrupted. “It’s coming down all the time. We can rule out some because they’re not close to running water, so it’s highly unlikely there would be a planarian population. Also, we assume he’s in reasonable proximity to the Aventino. This is the area he knows best. He took LaMarca’s body to Ca’ d’Ossi in a stolen car. We found it near the Circus Maximus this afternoon. It has LaMarca’s blood in the trunk. Bramante was running a considerable risk there. An intelligent man would wish to minimise that. He won’t be far away; he’ll think it’s safer for him where he knows the sites. Tomorrow, right after sunrise, we start looking in a radius out from Ca’ d’Ossi.”

Messina exploded. “This is ridiculous! How many searches can you perform a day? Ten? Fifteen? You should have men out there now!”

“I’ve already told you,” Falcone said evenly, “it would be counterproductive in the dark. Besides, Bramante has no one left on his list but me. The others are all dead. I’d like this finished as soon as possible too. But being realistic, there is no rush. If I don’t have him when my time runs out, I hand everything over to Bavetti. He can have the credit. I don’t care. And…” He paused. “…we should not fall into the trap of acting first and thinking afterwards. That’s happened too much in relation to Giorgio Bramante already. It’s almost as if he expects it of us.”

“If that’s a criticism of my father, Falcone—”

“No, no, no.”

The old inspector looked dissatisfied, with himself more than anyone. When Costa compared him with Peroni, it was hard to believe these two men were around the same age. Gianni had found something over the past eighteen months. A new life — the odd blossoming of love in autumn with Teresa — had revived him, put colour into his battered farmer’s features, a spring into his step. Falcone had been brutally wounded in service, a shock from which he had yet to recover fully, both physically and mentally.

A stray thought entered Costa’s head at that moment: What if he never quite makes it back? How would Falcone, a man whose self-knowledge had a candid, heartless intensity, be able to face that fact?

“This is not about your father,” the inspector told Bruno Messina. “Or me. Or any of us. It’s about Giorgio Bramante and his son. His son more than anything. It’s the same now as it was fourteen years ago. If we could find out what happened to the boy, all of this would end. Had it been Alessio in that hellhole down by the river today, Bramante would walk into this Questura tonight to give himself up. I’m convinced of that.”

“Closure,” Messina said, then nodded sagely, in agreement. “You could be right.”

“Please don’t use that kind of trite cliché around me,” Falcone said immediately, sending a red flush to Messina’s choleric face. “I may not be a parent but I surely understand one thing. When you have lost a child, there’s never closure. It’s a myth, a convenient media fantasy which the rest of us adopt in order to allow ourselves to sleep at night. You’ll be asking me to ‘move on’ next….”

“I may well,” Messina snapped. “Bavetti’s chasing your heels, Leo.”

“Good. I like competition. If we find Alessio, discover what happened to him, Giorgio Bramante will give himself up because he’s lost what’s driving him — his anger, which would seem to be directed solely at me by this stage, though I still fail to understand why. Uncovering the fate of that child will take the sting out of that rage, supplant it with what should have been there in the first place and for some reason never was. The natural response of a father. Grief. Mourning. The kind of grim and bitter acceptance we’ve all seen before.”

Messina snorted. “I didn’t realise psychology was your subject.”

“Neither did I until recently,” Falcone replied. “I wish I’d made this discovery earlier. But there you are. So…” He leaned back in his chair, stretched his long legs, and closed his eyes. “This morning you said we had another forty-eight hours,” Falcone said.

“This morning you held a gun to my head,” Messina replied, offended.

“I’m sorry, Commissario. Genuinely. We haven’t had a good start to this relationship, have we? I imagine, in the circumstances, it’s inevitable. You blame me for what happened fourteen years ago. Come to think of it, so does Giorgio Bramante.”

“I want no more surprises,” Messina emphasised, bristling at the thought. “No more trips outside the Questura. No more wild-goose chases.”

Falcone threw his arms open wide in protest. “As I said! It was a misunderstanding.”

Bruno Messina drew in a deep, agonised breath. “Very well,” he conceded. “You go nowhere. None of you. Not till it’s daylight. If you have nothing come Thursday, this is Bavetti’s case. You three get out of my sight for a while. Everything runs so smoothly without you around. Why is that?”

Falcone struggled to his feet, holding on to the desk for a moment, then letting go, standing unaided. Costa restrained the urge to help him. A point was being made.

“Perhaps you’re just not looking hard enough,” the inspector suggested mildly.

Messina shot him a furious glance. “Don’t push your luck,” he said with menace. “It’s not that great at the moment, is it?”

“A day,” the inspector emphasised. “That’s all I ask. I will bring you Giorgio Bramante. That…” — he clicked his fingers at Costa and Peroni, then pointed at the door — “…is a promise.”

The three of them stood outside the commissario’s office, glad to be out of Messina’s presence.

“How exactly?” Peroni asked.

They didn’t get an answer. Falcone was already stomping down the corridor, not looking back.

They’d turned off the Via Galvani quickly, parked somewhere, maybe, Rosa guessed, in one of the deserted dead-end alleys on the far side of the Monte dei Cocci. There was no escape. Bramante had walked round to the back of the van, punched the butcher hard in the face when he tried to resist, then tied the two of them tightly together with thick, tough climbing rope. Then he’d disappeared, for hours. She’d watched the daylight die in the front windows of the van as night fell, trying to find some way of communicating with the sweating, terrified man to whom she was tethered. It was impossible. Finally, she’d persuaded him to help her kick the walls of the van for long periods on end, and still no one came. Not until Bramante returned, threw open the doors, face furious from the noise, fists flailing at the butcher again.

After that, Bramante got in behind the wheel and drove for no more than ten minutes, uphill — the Aventino, it could be nowhere else — then down a winding road, meeting no traffic, travelling so rapidly his two prisoners rolled helplessly around in the back, tethered, bumping into each other, close enough for her to see the all-consuming fright in her fellow captive’s eyes. The vehicle came to an abrupt halt. The doors flew open. Briefly — all she glimpsed were the distant lights of a tram, the Number 3, she was certain of it — they were outside, before being dragged down a stony path, falling, tumbling on the hard stones and cold damp grass, winding up in some dank passageway drenched in the rank smell of age and sewers.

She’d taken a class trip when she was in school: the catacombs somewhere out on the Appian Way. They smelled like this, the same powerful, pervasive reek, earthy and organic, that had probably hung around for centuries.

Rosa Prabakaran hated being in the catacombs, not that she let this show. It felt as if she were trapped in a grave.

Finally, pushed on by Bramante’s feet and fists, they found themselves in some subterranean chamber. Not large. Not complete either, because part of it was open to the night air, letting in some soft, slow drizzle that curled down from a dark velvet sky in which stars were faintly visible.

There were chambers off this principal vestibule, guarded with iron gates, modern ones designed to keep out intruders.

Bramante unlocked the cell to the right, opened the door, and took out a large clasp knife.

The butcher whimpered and stared in horror at the weapon. Bramante cut through the thick climbing rope with one strong swipe, then propelled the man inside with a vicious kick. The butcher fell to the floor in a pained heap, still whimpering. The door closed behind him with a clatter.

Rosa closed her eyes, found herself wondering what this meant, then immediately fought to stifle the thoughts that rose in her head.

Bramante shoved her into the adjoining chamber, closed the door behind him, locked it. He had a set of keys, she noticed. Several, on a chain, the kind a caretaker would use. Or an archaeologist going back to his old haunts.

He pushed her forward again until they were standing at the end of the room, then he lifted a large electric lantern and turned on the light. A broad sallow beam illuminated what appeared to be a cavernous chamber, with brick walls clinging to the rock and earth. One corner was open to a luminous night sky. Some dim illumination from an artificial bulb joined the light from the stars and an unseen moon there. A man or woman at ground level just might have seen them from the right position, Rosa thought, but it gave her no comfort, since Bramante must have realised this too.

They had to be somewhere central yet sufficiently deserted to avoid detection. Rosa racked her brain to imagine such a place in the heart of Rome. There were, when she came to think of it, scores. Possibly hundreds. Abandoned excavations, old archaeological finds that never brought in sufficient tourists to keep them open. The city was a honeycomb of ancient sites, some on the surface, many more below the earth. Giorgio Bramante doubtless knew them all.

One large, strong hand curled round her to lie flat on her stomach. His face crept close to hers, his breath, hot and anxious, panted in her ear.

Then the blade rose in his other hand, flashed past her eyes to prick her cheek. She felt the sharp edge of the chill metal against her skin. The knife tip found the corner of her gag, lifted it, sliced through fabric. The material fell away and she found herself choking, too terrified to say anything, aware he still had the rope in his hand, aware, too, that Bramante was an intelligent man, a man who would never have returned to her the power of speech if it could have been of any possible use.

“Do you know what this place is, Rosa?” he whispered.

“Don’t call me that,” she said, once the choking ended, struggling to adopt a quiet, firm tone, one that didn’t expose the fear she felt.

Bramante released his grip on her, just a little.

“A woman with self-respect,” he observed. “That’s important. So. Let’s try this again. Do you know what this place is, Agente Prabakaran?”

“Some…” She shivered, cold in the flimsy, stupid clothes she’d chosen.

He was hard. She could feel the anxious pressure as he held her close.

“…temple.”

“A-plus,” he said, and, thankfully, released his grip, just a little.

Giorgio Bramante pulled a flashlight out of his jacket and played the beam on the object in front of them. It was an altar, perhaps five metres long and two high. Its stone surface was still flat and level.

Like a table. Or a hard rock bed.

Something was carved on it.

“Do you see it?” Bramante asked, pushing her forward, and there was an unfathomable bitter note, tinged with sadness, in the words.

Carved into the face of the altar was the long, muscular shape of a creature. It was being wrestled to the ground by a burly figure who wore a winged helmet and held a short, stabbing sword tight in his hand. The animal’s face was contorted: bulging eyes, flared nostrils — it was a living thing struggling for life. Bells rang in her head. It was like the statues on the old Testaccio slaughterhouse, a man overpowering a colossal bull, intent on slaughter. Only here, there was more to the image. A dog was licking the blood that ran from the beast’s throat. A scorpion was pulling hungrily on its taut penis. This was a freak scene from a vivid nightmare.

“It’s insane,” she murmured, and closed her eyes because he was roaring again, like a beast himself, pulling her into him, dragging her head close into his body until his mouth was in her hair, his torso locked tight against the curves of her back.

“A man is either Mithras or the bull,” Giorgio Bramante said quietly. “The giver or the gift. After which he is nothing.”

She caught a glimpse of his face and regretted it immediately. His eyes were dead. Or absent of humanity. She wasn’t sure which.

He leaned even closer, pressing so hard now that it hurt, and whispered eagerly, “I spent so long in prison. No women. No pleasure. No comfort…”

Rosa closed her eyes and tried to remember what they told every woman in the force about a situation like this. Only one word remained clear in her head.

Survive.

Whatever drug Foglia had given Ludo Torchia seemed to race through the student’s blood system, like some deadly spike of adrenaline. The young man lay there taut, bloodied, eyes wide open, acutely alert, taking in their faces, taking in the din of the traffic outside: horns and angry human voices, an ordinary evening in the Via Labicana, such mundane noises to accompany the end of a human life.

Falcone was astonished to find those sounds were still there, fourteen years after the event, so real he could hear them. And Ludo Torchia’s face too: shock mixed with something not akin to amusement. The face of a guilty man. A guilty man who was in no mood to be helpful in his dying moments.

“Say something.”

Falcone mouthed the same words now, alone in his office, trying to marshal his thoughts in the way he used to with such fluent ease. It was all getting harder and it wasn’t just his injuries. He was old. Even before the gunshot wound in Venice, he’d passed some invisible point in his life, a moment of profound change, when all his past skills simply solidified inside him and stayed there, clinging on, hoping to defy the years. Even if they found Bramante the following day, Messina still wanted him gone. There would, he now knew, be no new talents, no fresh challenges. The time was approaching when he would have to pass on the reins to a new generation. Nic Costa one day, or so he hoped. Barring some kind of a miracle, only the sidelines waited for Leo Falcone: administration or some other corner of bureaucracy before the inevitable retirement. This part of his life was coming to a close, and he had no idea what could possibly replace it.

Or how he could even begin to approach it without putting the present case into some kind of compartment he could label “solved.” He’d snapped at Messina over the grim word “closure,” unfairly perhaps, because a part of Falcone did want this issue finished, for good. Not just with Bramante back in prison, but with the fate of the boy uncovered too. He believed, with every instinct thirty years of police work had given him, that the two were inseparable.

His mind wandered back fourteen years to the ambulance again. Everything in those last moments was so hazy. It had been hard to catch Torchia’s final, murmured words.

Reluctantly, because he knew the pain it would cause, he took out his personal address book and found Foglia’s number. The doctor had retired from the Questura six months after the Bramante case. Both men knew why, though they had never discussed the matter. Falcone knew Foglia would never be able to live with the consequences of what he’d done that day, perhaps all the more because those actions had never been brought to the light of day. Teresa Lupo’s predecessor in the morgue had quietly overlooked whatever substances he had found in Torchia’s blood — an act of deliberate negligence which Falcone knew he could never expect from Teresa. So the best Questura doctor Falcone ever worked with had taken early retirement and, when his children left home for university, departed his native Rome to live on Sant’Antioco, a little-visited island on the west coast of Sardinia, a place that seemed, to Falcone, to say Don’t visit.

All the same, he did visit, some five or six years before, spending a few quiet days watching the sea from the Foglias’ large, modern villa above a modest holiday resort, passing pleasantries, never talking about work.

It was enough.

Falcone dialled the number, waited, then heard Foglia’s familiar voice. After the excuses and brief exchanges of news, his old friend took a deep breath and announced, “I know why you’re calling, Leo. You don’t need to beat around the bush.”

The Bramante case had made big headlines fourteen years ago. It was back in them now, louder than ever.

“If I had any alternative, Patrizio….”

“My God, you must be desperate, if you need the likes of me.”

“I just…”

But Foglia was spot on. Leo was desperate.

“What do you want?” the voice on the line demanded. “If it’s a free holiday, we’d love to see you. Please come. May or June, when the fresh tuna are in. I’ll teach you how to fish. How to relax.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” Falcone promised.

“No you won’t, Leo. Does it make you feel good? To know you were right all along? That Giorgio Bramante was some kind of animal?”

“Not at all,” he replied honestly. “I wish to God I’d been wrong. That he’d just come out of jail, gone to a quiet academic job somewhere, and put the past behind him.”

“But he couldn’t, could he? Not without knowing.”

“No.”

Falcone could recall precisely Torchia’s dying words in the back of that ambulance, amid the cacophony of horns and furious human voices outside. They hadn’t made sense at the time. They didn’t now.

“You must have seen many people die, Patrizio. Does it matter what they say?”

“Rarely. I had one miserable, tightfisted old bastard tell his wife to remember to turn off the lights afterwards. That was one to remember.”

“And Ludo Torchia?”

There was a pause on the line. Then Foglia said softly, “Meglio una bella bugia che una brutta verità.”

The words were just as Falcone remembered them, spat out by the dying Torchia one by one, punctuated by some kind of ironic, choking laughter.

Better a beautiful lie than an ugly truth.

“Funny old saying at the best of times,” Foglia declared. “They seem to me the dying words of an actor, someone who is playing a game in his head, even to the end. Do you have any idea what he meant?”

“The beautiful lie was surely Giorgio Bramante. The idea that he was some kind of loving father figure, the man we all believed him to be.”

“And the ugly truth?”

“There you have me.”

There was an awkward pause on the line.

“Leo, you will visit us again one day, won’t you? It’s lovely here in the spring. We would both enjoy your company.”

“Of course. You heard nothing more? There was a moment…”

When Torchia had closed his eyes again, as the drug seemed to wear off, Falcone — furious, desperate — had thrown open the ambulance door and screamed at the two medics there to find some way, any way, through the snarl of cars and buses and lorries blocking the Via Labicana. It was a slender hope, but perhaps there had been some few words that had eluded him.

“He said nothing more, Leo. I’m sorry.”

“No. I’m the one who should apologise. I should never have dragged this back into the light of day for you. It’s unfair.”

The silence again. A thought pricked at Leo Falcone’s mind. Patrizio Foglia did have some secret weighing on his conscience, surely.

“There’s something I never knew, isn’t there?” he asked.

Foglia sighed.

“Oh God. Why does it have to keep coming back? Why doesn’t the man simply mourn his own child and find himself a life somehow? Or put a gun to his own head for a change?”

“Tell me what you know. Please.”

He could never, not in a million years, have predicted what he heard next.

“I took a close interest in the autopsy,” Foglia said softly. “I had good reason, as you must appreciate.”

“And?”

“There was clear evidence Torchia had anal sex that day. Brutal. There was blood and bruising. It had… culminated too. Possibly rape. Possibly sadomasochistic. I am not an expert in these matters.”

Falcone’s mind went blank. Without thinking, he said, “Those boys were down those caves for some kind of ritual. There were drugs. I imagine we shouldn’t be surprised.”

In his ear, he heard Foglia’s long, pained intake of breath.

“It wasn’t in the caves, Leo. The evidence was plain and fresh and incontrovertible. What happened happened shortly before he died. In the Questura. In the cell where you and Messina and Giorgio Bramante questioned him.”

Falcone’s vision became blurred. His breath snagged. “And you told no one?” he asked, incredulous.

“I asked the pathologist to leave it out of his report. He was… accommodating. The Questura was in enough trouble already. Did you really want another scandal on your hands? Whether it was Bramante, Messina… or you… either way, it would have rebounded on us. Besides, what use could it possibly have been? Torchia was dead. Bramante was in custody. You had your man.”

“The boy!” Falcone responded, aware he was yelling into the phone, unable to stop himself. “What about the boy? Had I known that…”

Those were the early days of DNA. They could have identified Bramante as the sexual assailant, too, surely, and that would have changed the entire complexion of the case.

“Then what?” the voice on the line demanded crossly. “Do tell me, Leo. I would love to know.”

“Then perhaps…”

There could be no instant answer. What mattered was that he had been robbed of some knowledge that was, surely, useful, if only he could begin to comprehend its significance.

“I’m sorry,” Foglia said. “I just wanted an end to it. We all did. I wish—”

“Good night,” Falcone snapped, then slammed down the phone.

He sat alone, placed his head in his hands, didn’t mind at that moment what a passerby seeing him like this in his office would think.

Was this the ugly truth? That Giorgio Bramante was not simply just a careless father, but a man gripped by some dark, secret side to his character? If it was true, his wife, with her self-inflicted wounds and her compulsive need to paint their lost child, over and over again, must surely have known.

He swore as another realisation struck him. The young Indian detective had been deputed to followed Beatrice Bramante all day long. He’d never even looked for her report.

Falcone keyed the name Prabakaran into the computer.

It came up with nothing since the previous evening.

“Novices…”

She would be home by now. He let a low curse slip from his lips, then looked up her mobile number, picked up the phone, and dialled it, steeling himself for the conversation that would follow, one in which he would remind a junior officer that no one on his team ever went off-duty without filing a report.

The phone rang three times. A man’s voice answered.

“I would like to speak to Agente Prabakaran,” the inspector said impatiently, adding, “This is Inspector Falcone.”

“Leo,” said a cold, amused voice at the other end. “What took you so long?”

Peroni was trying to nail down possible underground locations for Bramante in the company of the worm geek, two archaeology students the intelligence team had dug up, and a room full of maps. So Costa found a quiet corner in the office and called Orvieto. Emily’s voice sounded distant, lacking the warm, confident timbre he’d come to expect. She was just a few hours away by car, but she might as well have been on the other side of the world. When he called, the others were having dinner; she was alone in her room, resting. It wasn’t like her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing. I just didn’t want company. Also, it pains me to watch others enjoying good wine when I can’t join in.”

“How do you feel?”

There was a pause. This was so new for both of them. The doctors had said she should expect to feel tired, perhaps depressed from time to time.

“Perhaps I’ll go and see someone tomorrow,” she conceded, rather than answer his question. “It’s only a little thing.”

“You do that tonight,” he said immediately. “Why wait?”

“Because I know what the doctor will say. He’ll sigh and think, Here’s another first-time mother teetering on the edge of panic. All because it’s new to her. Nothing more. Children come into the world all the time, Nic.”

“They won’t mind. That’s why they’re there.”

“No,” she said firmly. “They’re there to treat sick people. I’ll see a doctor in the morning, just to reassure us both. I really have no reason to think there’s anything wrong. I just feel a little out of sorts. That’s all.”

He knew her well enough by now not to argue.

“When will I see you?” she asked.

“Messina’s given us one more day. After that, if Bramante is still out there, Falcone hands the investigation over to Bavetti. We’ll be gone from the Questura, all three of us. We don’t meet Messina’s approval. He doesn’t sound much like his father.”

“No,” she replied, and he could hear the sadness in her voice. “There’s some distance between those two and I don’t really understand why. Fathers and sons. I thought it was supposed to be some special kind of bond women were meant to envy. They don’t seem to have a relationship at all.”

Costa thought of his own family, the constant, abrasive difficulties he’d experienced with his father, almost till the end, when he was in a wheelchair, stricken too, and when their mutual frailty brought about some painful, redemptive reconciliation that still pricked like an awkward needle when the memories flooded back. So much time wasted on stupid arguments, on both sides. Marco Costa had never made life easy for anyone, himself and his own flesh and blood least of all.

“Just one more myth,” he murmured.

She waited for a moment, then said, “No, it’s not. I never knew your father, Nic. I really wish I had. Even so, I see someone else in your eyes from time to time and I know it has to be him. You two had something between you that never existed for me with my own dad. Or my mom either. And it’s not just you. I’ve noticed this before. It’s men. I think…”

Another, longer pause, one that told him she wasn’t sure she ought to say this.

“You think what?” he said.

“I think, in a way, once you become fathers, you feel guilty if you feel you’re just living in the moment. When a man has a son, he develops some sense of duty that tells him the day will come when he’ll pass on the torch. One generation to the next. And that’s what’s driving all of you crazy about this case. Not the missing kid, or rather not just the missing kid. You see a world where that all got taken away. Some kind of sacred bond that’s been broken. Even Leo…”

“Leo doesn’t have children!”

“Neither do you. But you both had fathers. Have you ever heard Leo mention his?”

“No.”

Costa’s gaze wandered to the glass-fronted office across the room where Falcone was still working, pale-faced. It was past eleven. The inspector looked as if he would go on for hours.

“If you want to discuss the case,” she went on, “call me, Nic. It doesn’t bother me, really.”

“I don’t have anything left to tell you. We think we can start to narrow down tomorrow where he’s hiding. It’s just a standard operation: search the possibilities, eliminate what we can, until we find something. As far as Alessio’s concerned…”

The shadow of the lost boy hovered behind everything like a ghost. Without telling anyone, Costa had, during his break earlier that evening, driven over to the little church of Sacro Cuore in Prati, talked to the church warden there, a good man who was a little scared and greatly puzzled by what had happened. Costa had spoken with the plainclothes officer on surveillance outside on Falcone’s orders, satisfied himself that the likelihood was that Bramante had never been near the place that day. Then he’d returned to the church, gone into the little room, with the strange, unworldly name — Il Piccolo Museo del Purgatorio — studied the items on the wall, the bloodstained T-shirt in particular, and tried to imagine what all this meant to Giorgio Bramante.

Plain screws fastened the glass to the case on the wall. They would be easy to remove. What eluded Costa was the reason to do so: it was a public act with a private meaning.

Bramante blamed Ludo Torchia and the other students for Alessio’s fate. That much was clear. But an intelligent man couldn’t fool himself either. He was the father. He carried the responsibility for his young son. He had brought the boy to that place. He bore his share of the blame, too, blame that had somehow transmuted, in his wife’s head, into an act of self-mutilation: cutting her own flesh to stain a garment belonging to her missing son, placing it on the wall of this dusty place that reeked of emptiness and cold damp stone. Was this act — Bramante placing a mark of each of his victims on the missing child’s shirt — some way in which he hoped to make amends?

“Perhaps you’re right, Nic. I tried to disregard what you said because it seemed so you.”

“Right about what?”

The memory of Santo Cuore bothered him for some reason that remained out of reach.

“That Alessio didn’t die in that hill. If he had, someone, surely, would have found something.”

But that idea, which he’d come to dismiss himself, now raised so many unanswerable questions.

“Someone would have known, Emily. And he would have come forward.”

“There was the peace camp at the Circus Maximus. You found out about that.”

“True… but that was fourteen years ago. I’ve no idea how we could investigate that today.”

“Quite…” He heard a deep breath on the line. “Have you talked to Teresa about this?”

“No,” he replied, baffled. “Why should I?”

“Women have conversations with each other that men avoid. All you see is the present. Teresa has an interesting past, too.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning she was a student firebrand back when she was young. Does that surprise you?”

Not for a moment, he realised. And it would never have occurred to him, either. Emily was right: all he saw was the woman he’d come to know and admire over the last few years. He’d no idea of the journey that had brought her there.

“I can imagine that. You think she’d know about this demonstration?”

“Look at the newspaper cuttings. If you were young, radical, and living in Rome back then, it’s difficult to see how she could have avoided that camp. She would have been around the same age as the one who died. Torchia, wasn’t that his name?”

“She would,” he agreed, although the very idea seemed alien and improbable.

“Another thing struck me. It’s absolutely clear these students were doing something weird down there. You found that rooster. They’d sacrificed that, right?”

“There was a dead bird. They’d been messing around. I’m just guessing about what happened to that cockerel. Because of what happened to Torchia, none of them gave a statement.”

“They weren’t there for a class assignment, that’s for sure. So let’s say it was some kind of ritual…”

“Let’s say.”

“Where do you think they got the idea?” she asked. “Everything those kids knew about Mithraism they learned from Giorgio Bramante.”

This conversation was beginning to depress him. He could hear tension, excitement, in her voice, the same emotion he’d heard when they’d worked together officially, just once, on the same case.

“What idea?”

“Nic, no one understands much about Mithraism, but what we do know suggests it was an organised, highly ritualistic cult that demanded a gift from its followers if they wanted to rise through the ranks.”

“Seven orders, seven sacraments,” he said, recalling what Teresa had told them.

“Precisely. And it’s not unreasonable to think that the higher you rose, the more you had to offer. It’s like the hierarchical structure in the Masons or some modern cults. Or the FBI, for that matter.”

“No.” He wasn’t even going to countenance this. “We’ve been here before and I still won’t accept it. I can’t believe any father would put his child through pain — or worse — just because of some ancient ritual. A stupid student, maybe. Torchia, maybe. Not a man like Bramante.”

“I told you!” Her voice rose. It worried him. “Maybe something went wrong. He probably never thought for a moment that Alessio would be harmed. He just wanted to initiate his son into the mysteries or something. Or to take part in his own sacrament. Who’s to say Torchia wasn’t part of that game, unwittingly, maybe? Who’s to say that’s why Giorgio Bramante beat him to death? Out of revenge. And to make sure none of us ever got to know what really happened down there?”

He was silent. It was a good point, even if he felt, in his bones, it needed to be challenged.

“Perhaps the reason you never found Alessio,” she persisted, “is because he just didn’t want to face his father after whatever happened. Because he couldn’t bear the sight of him for one more minute.”

“So a seven-year-old child walks out into the streets of Rome and just disappears?”

“It’s happened before. You know that as well as I do. He could be alive. He could have fallen prey to some genuine maniac out there, somewhere else, say in that peace camp. Nic…” That pained intake of breath again, as she steeled herself to say something he didn’t want to hear. “…At some stage of your life you’re just going to have to face up to the fact that there are some mad, bad people out there and it doesn’t actually matter why they’re like that. What matters is stopping them from harming the rest of us.”

Others said that kind of thing to Falcone all the time. Costa could imagine the very same words coming from Bruno Messina.

“We all want it stopped, Emily,” he replied, trying not to sound censorious. “Understanding them makes it easier.”

“Not always. When it’s all this close, understanding makes you start to put yourself in his shoes. Trying to think like a father who’s lost a son. And I don’t think it’s that simple, do you?”

“No,” he admitted. Something about the entire case continued to elude them all, he thought, and it wasn’t straightforward, simply a question of motive or action or opportunity. It was in the grey area that existed between people who knew each other, people who once upon a time loved each other. “We shouldn’t be talking like this. Get some rest. Just give me a day or two. And then we’ll get back to normal.”

“If I wanted ‘normal,’ I wouldn’t be about to get married to a police officer. I just don’t want you hurt, Nic. And I want to go home.”

Home.

It was astonishing how such a short, simple word could carry so much warmth and hope and trepidation inside it. Home was the place everyone was seeking in the end. Even the lost souls who’d supposedly touched all those ageing exhibits that wound up on the walls of that odd little museum in Prati. Perhaps that was what Giorgio Bramante ultimately wanted too: to help the child who lived in his head find some kind of peace through the elimination of those Bramante held responsible for his fate. All of whom were dead now, except for a single police officer whose only crime had been to intervene in a vicious beating deep in the heart of his own Questura, to do his duty.

Something didn’t add up.

Costa looked at his watch and, without quite thinking, or knowing why, asked one last question.

“Why would a woman, a mother and wife, someone with an apparently idyllic family life, cut herself? Deliberately, regularly? Because it wasn’t idyllic, obviously. But, beyond that, why? And why still today?”

He waited and when she spoke she was calm again.

“Mrs. Bramante did that?” Emily asked.

“The blood on the T-shirt in that church. The first blood, when she took it there. It’s hers. She admitted it to Leo. And he said there were fresh scars on her wrists when he saw her.”

“Oh…”

Emily was considering his question, in that measured, rational way which was one of the last parts of her personality that hadn’t turned Italian.

“Self-harm is complicated, Nic. It’s usually a form of self-loathing. The woman places no value on her own existence for some reason. Perhaps she is clinically depressed, or perhaps she’s expressing guilt. Perhaps other reasons. A husband who’s having an affair… I don’t know. Aren’t there psychologists on the force who can tell you this?”

“Of course,” he confessed. “It’s just so much easier talking it through with you. For one thing, I understand what you say.”

“I will,” she said severely, “start charging for these services soon.”

Something caught Costa’s attention. Leo Falcone was crossing the half-empty office in his direction, with that serious, engaged expression on his face, the one that meant something was happening.

“You’re out of our league,” he told Emily hastily. “We could never afford you. Now promise me you’ll see a doctor tomorrow. Then on Thursday I’ll be around. Whether it’s here, Orvieto, or the moon. I don’t care. I will be there.”

“It’s a promise,” she answered.

Falcone watched as Costa put down the phone. The old inspector looked as if something was wrong.

“Sir?”

“I want you to find Peroni. I want you two to look up everything you can find on Giorgio Bramante that’s been back-filed. Anything and everything, however apparently trivial.”

“Isn’t that all in the reports from the original case?” Costa was puzzled.

“No!” Falcone replied, exasperated. “Bramante was already in custody, ready to plead guilty. It was regarded as wasted effort.”

“I see… I’ll do it straightaway.”

“Tomorrow morning, first thing, talk to the mother again. Find out exactly what her relations with him were. Don’t pull any punches. Perhaps I was a little restrained.” He looked worried.

“Agente Prabakaran…”

“Never mind Agente Prabakaran!” Falcone snapped. “Just do it, Nic!”

Costa already had the following day mapped out. It would consist of ticking off potential lairs for Bramante until they found him. Or at least some evidence that they were on his trail. But there was something in Falcone’s tone, a tense, distanced note, that reminded him of the old Leo, the one no one ever liked. There was no colour in the inspector’s cheeks, no blood in Leo Falcone’s face at all.

Then something happened Costa had never witnessed before. Falcone leaned forward, just a little, and patted him gently on the back, a gesture that was familiar, almost paternal.

“I’m sorry,” he said apologetically. “It’s been a long day. I find it hard sometimes. The truth is…” Falcone’s eyes focused on something across the office, or perhaps on nothing at all. “…I’ve always found it hard, if I’m being honest with you. I simply made a point of never showing it.”

He seemed embarrassed by this sudden show of emotion.

“I’ve put you down for that sovrintendente exam,” he went on briskly. “I want you to take it. This summer. Before you get married. You’ll breeze through it, you know. It’s time you started making progress around here.”

Costa nodded, lost for words, unable to protest.

“And… Gianni,” Falcone asked. “Where is he?”

“With the maps and the worm people.”

“Tell him I’m grateful for all the work he’s put in these past couple of days. It wasn’t needed. Not from either of you—”

“Leo—”

“This is work, Agente,” Falcone interrupted him. “Don’t ever forget that. It’s friendship, too. But this profession comes first. Always. The work. The duty. They never go away.”

“Is there something wrong?”

The old man smiled and then that bony hand came out and patted him on the back again. “I’m tired, that’s all. Giorgio Bramante is a master of timing, but I imagine you’ve already noticed that. Now…”

He cast his beady eyes around the room, a look designed to stiffen the spine of anyone even contemplating slacking.

“I shall have a quick word with the troops, then I’m done for tonight. We can talk in the morning.”

“Good night,” Costa murmured, then went back to the job.

Beautiful lies. Ugly truths.

In Ludo Torchia’s dying words lay a universe of possibilities, a million ways to uncover what made Giorgio Bramante the man he had become, and exhume the fate of his son from the red Aventino earth beneath which, if logic meant anything, his remains still surely lay.

But these, Falcone reflected as he reached the staircase, were matters of conjecture. What stared him in the face now was plain fact. Rosa Prabakaran was in Bramante’s hands. He’d heard her screams on the phone line when he’d asked for proof. That sound had sent a chill, of fear and fury and shame, down Falcone’s spine. Afterwards, he was aware he’d heard something else, too: a tone in Bramante’s voice that hadn’t been there fourteen years before. Prison had coarsened this man, made something that was bad to begin with worse. Before, there had been some humanity in the man. His concern for his child had, Falcone was convinced, always been genuine. Now even that was gone, had been torn from him, gone for good.

When Bramante said he would kill the young policewoman if Falcone didn’t take her place, he was merely stating a fact. When he spelled out the conditions — the place, the time, one in the morning, less than an hour away, the absolute absence of any other officers on pain of Prabakaran’s death — Bramante’s voice had the firm, un-shakable assurance of a university professor handing out an assignment. None of this was to be the subject of argument. Falcone would do as he was told, or the woman would die. It was as simple as that, and what Falcone found a little disconcerting was how easily he was able to agree to the man’s demands.

There was no alternative. No time to put together a team. No need to risk Costa and Peroni, two men he’d leaned on too much of late, yet again.

This time was his and his alone.

He glanced back at the office to make sure no one was looking. Then, gingerly, ignoring the pain from his limbs, he walked slowly down the stairs to the ground floor and headed directly to the front counter.

Prinzivalli, the sovrintendente from Milan, a man he’d worked alongside for three decades, stood there alone, sifting papers. Falcone’s spirits fell. He didn’t have the heart or the talent to push this man around. They had known each other far too long for that.

“Can I help, sir?” The sovrintendente raised a puzzled grey eyebrow. He played rugby in his spare time and had once managed the same team in which a young, very different Nic Costa had played. Prinzivalli was as solid and trustworthy a police officer as Falcone had ever worked with.

“You’re under orders not to let me out, aren’t you?”

The sovrintendente nodded.

At that moment the bells of the old church around the corner intervened: twelve chimes. Falcone listened to the sonorous chorus of metallic sound, a collision of dissonant notes that had, he now realised, followed his life in the Questura for more than thirty years, from raw cadet to old, tired inspector. It was now past midnight in the centro storico, a time he had always loved, an hour when the modernity of Rome vanished and the streets seemed made for people, not machines. In his younger, more fanciful years, he could almost imagine the old gods rising from their distant graves, making the city alive with their presence, a magical place, where everything was possible.

Prinzivalli coughed, interrupting his reverie.

“Commissario Messina made it very clear that he does not want you to leave the premises, sir. You wouldn’t want to argue with him, would you?”

“He’s not his father, is he?”

“No.” The man in the uniform gave this some thought. “But he is commissario.”

Falcone cast an eye at the surveillance camera. It had a blind spot. If you stood between the counter and the back desk, no one saw you. It was common knowledge, useful sometimes.

He beckoned Prinzivalli there. Then he said, “Have I ever asked you to disobey orders before, Michele?”

“Yes,” the man replied dryly.

“Then we have precedent. The situation is this. I will explain it once, then you shall open the door for me. Understood?”

Prinzivalli said nothing.

“Bramante has taken that young agente, Rosa Prabakaran. Unless I meet him…” — he glanced at his watch with a small theatrical flourish — “…alone and in just under thirty-five minutes, he will kill her.”

“Good God, Leo!”

“Please. I have very little time. We know the kind of man Bramante is. We know he will do exactly as he says. I cannot for the life of me put together a team to accompany me in the time available, not one that I can trust to stay unnoticed. I have to do this on my own—”

“He wants to murder you, man!”

Falcone nodded. “So he says. But that is irrelevant. If I go, Prabakaran may live. If I don’t, she will most certainly die. The girl is young, a little naive, and my officer. My responsibility.”

Prinzivalli stayed silent.

“What I would like you to do is this: wait until one. If no one’s noticed I’m gone by then, notice for them. Raise hell. Do whatever you see fit.”

“Where are you meeting him?”

Falcone eyed him. “I’m not saying.”

“Leo…?”

“I told you. This happens on his terms or she’s dead. Now will you open that door or not?”

“You are a bad-tempered, stubborn old bastard. There are people who can help—”

“Yes,” he interrupted emphatically. “You.”

The sovrintendente looked at Falcone in his office suit, then snatched an overcoat, his own no doubt, from the stand by the door and threw it at him.

“It’s freezing out there,” he said, and stabbed at the button on the counter. The security gate flipped open.

“Thank you,” Falcone said, and, without looking back, walked outside.

The night was cold, the kind of bone-numbing cold Rome could deliver at times, one that seemed at odds with the burning airless heat of summer, just a few months away. He shuffled on the gigantic overcoat, hobbled down the street towards the cab stand, and waited, thinking.

There was always time for beautiful lies and ugly truths.

Falcone didn’t want to wake her. Besides, he knew she listened to the messages on her mobile phone religiously, never wishing to miss any human contact. Raffaella Arcangelo had experienced so little in her life. They were, in that sense, very alike.

So he called the number, waited until the robotic voice asked for his message, and then spoke, aware that he would say things — true or false? He wasn’t sure which — that he could never have broached in person.

“Raffaella,” he began, self-conscious, even in the dark, deserted Roman street, on a cold spring night, a little ashamed that, freed from the very real human rapport he enjoyed with her, it was so easy to say what he wanted. “There is something I must tell you. I apologise you must hear it like this. Unfortunately, I have no choice.”

There was a light sweeping the cobblestones. A cab, coming from the Piazza Venezia perhaps.

“This cannot go on, Raffaella. The game we’re both playing, neither of us wishing to say what we really feel. I’m grateful for what you have done for me, but that is all. I don’t love you, and I don’t wish either of our lives to be damaged by some sad pretence that I do. This isn’t your fault. If I were capable of loving, then, perhaps, it would be you. I have no idea.”

The car approached. It was looking for trade. Falcone waved.

“I am unsure precisely why you chose me. Perhaps out of pity. Or guilt. Or curiosity. It’s unimportant. What you should understand is that a man reaches a point in his life at which he realises he is looking at the remainder, the diminishing part of his existence. What lies ahead…”

It was a shiny, old black Mercedes. Still talking, Falcone climbed in and gestured to the driver to wait for a moment.

“What remains does not — cannot — include you. I’m sorry. I wish—”

Something interrupted him. The harsh, inhuman beep of a machine echoed in his ear. Then a message. The phone would listen no more. These sentiments, like everything else, were finite. Falcone wondered, for a moment, what he’d left unsaid. Nothing. Everything. There was a door to be closed, and no point in wondering what lay behind it once the deed was done.

The cab driver turned round to stare at him. A man about his own age, he guessed, with a tired, lined face and a drooping moustache.

“Are we going somewhere?” he asked.

“The Aventino. The Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta.”

The man laughed. “You won’t see anything through that keyhole at this time of night, friend. Are you sure?”

“Just drive,” Falcone said sourly, then looked at the phone again before thrusting it deep into the pockets of Prinzivalli’s capacious overcoat.