Viper

91

Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio The clay was stained and smelled like the sweat of a skunk in summer. After ninety minutes of rock shifting and another sixty of digging, Luella's team called her over. They'd shovelled out a big trench and had found something.

Jack and Sylvia stood way beyond the excavation, outside the crime-scene area, in the safe zone. She could see them talking intensely. Serious faces, sombre moods moulded by death. It was something she still had to get used to. She sent one of the carabinieri soldiers over to get them. They needed to see this.

Luella clambered into the trench and stood at the end of it. Her team had cleared the ground around something bulky, bound in grey-black plastic sheeting. She tried to imagine it was anything other than what it obviously was. A body wrapped and buried in plastic sheeting. A crime-scene photographer hovered above her. He'd already snapped twenty minutes' worth of frames. The pale light dimmed further as Sylvia and Jack appeared at the edge of the dig and peered down. Their faces were full of expectancy and sadness.

'I'm just about to open it,' she said.

Sylvia nodded. Luella dipped her head and hands to the earthy plastic and heard the camera click. It took a while to find the edge of the sheeting. It had been wrapped several times around whatever was in it. 'I'm going to need help. Can you call one of my assistants over?'

Sylvia shouted to the rest of the team. A well-muscled guy called Gelsone slipped into the hole and helped Luella. She directed his hands beneath the sheeted lump and he took the weight as she carefully unfolded the wrapping. It was an awkward job, like getting a king-sized quilt into its cover, only here you couldn't shake anything.

Luella stopped. 'Get a photographer down here.'

The snapper slid into the pit.

'Careful!' shouted Sylvia.

Luella finished pulling back the sheeting. The camera clicked again. The image of the rotted skull burned into everyone's mind.

Body Number One, Jack was sure of it. Numero Uno.

But which sex?

And then another revelation rocked them.

The bones were dark, creamy yellow. Unburned.