‘Fucking brilliant.’
He turned the third page, and started on the fourth. He saw, from the corner of his eye, the carabinieri recruit, the kid just off the training course, flush with pleasure.
‘Not you. You want a lecture? I’ll give you one. If you stand against the power of the Camorra clans, you’ll have behind you tens of thousands of uniformed men. But still, I think, you’ll hesitate. Luigi Rossetti – who stands behind him? Only his wife. But he had the courage, alone, to stand up against the weasel girl from a clan family. All you’ve done is listen. Don’t think you have the courage of the Rossetti parents. Did the weasel swear at them when they attacked her?’
‘She said nothing.’
‘Did she challenge them? Do I need to offer protection to the parents? Can he go back to teaching, she to her work? Their courage was amazing, but should they spend the rest of their days in hiding? Are they dead already? What did you read on her face?’
‘Humiliation.’
Castrolami finished reading and shuffled the pages, straightening them. He chuckled, but without mirth. ‘Understand. This weasel is the daughter of Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli, the sister of Vincenzo and-’
The recruit interrupted him, which very few did. ‘It was humiliation. Also, she’s a member of the clan, yes, but also a friend of Marianna Rossetti. She came to Marianna Rossetti’s funeral and brought flowers. The Rossetti family have no connection – my maresciallo is definite on this – with the Camorra inside Nola or beyond it. This friendship crossed a divide.’
The pencil had a blunt tip and was chewed at the other end. Castrolami rapped it on his desk, found a small place, a few centimetres square, clear of papers and beat a tattoo. His forehead was cut with a frown. Mario Castrolami could accept preconceptions and believe them, but when he was confronted with a superior argument he could ditch them. The Borelli girl had been at the funeral.
‘It’s rare, but not unknown, for a member of a clan to have a friendship with someone outside it.’
‘She didn’t fight back. She was shamed.’
‘I believe you.’
‘Is it useful?’
On the desk, files and folders made foothills and mountains. Coffee had sustained him through the evening. Around his desk, against the walls, there were filing cabinets, some locked and others open, showing squashed-in paper. There were more files at his feet, and on the bookshelves that flanked the door. He could have pointed to them or to the chart Sellotaped to the wall on the right of the door, which listed the clans and the districts they fed off, with lines running between them, blue to show alliances and red to show feuds, or to the montage of mug-shots on a board that hung to the left of the door, a hundred faces, men and women, categorised as major organised-crime players. He could have waved his arms theatrically to demonstrate the scale of the war in which he was a foot-soldier, the numbers of the enemy, and spoken of a campaign without end. Had he done so, he thought he would have cheapened himself.
‘In a year or two, what you’ve brought me may prove important – or in a week. I don’t know… The problem is that you didn’t see Immacolata Borelli arrive, and you don’t know how she left. Where did she come from? What was her destination? You’ve given me a little, which is tantalising… Thank you.’
Alone again, he felt excited, which was unusual for him, after twenty-five years with the Arma, and seventeen in the ROS. But it was there, unmistakable. He sank down from his chair, was on hands and knees, and his stomach sagged as he burrowed for the file that held her photograph. When he found it and extracted the photograph – taken in Forcella by a long-lens surveillance camera – he stared at it. Could a woman from that family show remorse and be humiliated by the death of a friend? He gazed at the photograph and searched for an answer.
Time ebbed. Eddie was slumped on the bed.
Before getting back to his room, he had sat for three hours in the restaurant on the left side, going up, of Kingsland high street. Opposite him there had been an empty chair and a laid place that went unused.
The heels of his trainers left smears on the coverlet. Her face would have puckered, a frown wrinkling her forehead, if she had been there to see them. She was not. Her picture, straight ahead of him, had pride of place on the wall facing the bed. The landlord’s offering, a Victorian artist’s effort at cattle grazing beside the Thames, was out of sight behind the wardrobe, Mac’s picture in its place. She was in the Mall, in front of the Palace, smiling, her hair thrown back, T-shirt strained, and the sun was on her. It was the best photograph he had of her, so he’d taken the memory stick to the camera shop the Punjabis ran, in Dalston Lane, where they’d blown it up to thirty inches by twenty. The picture was stuck to the wall – if it was taken down the paper would come with it. He thought it was there in perpetuity and had come to believe that he and Mac were in it for the long term.
The Afghan place, which did a wonderful lamb dish, was their favourite, and they could make the food last for ever, as they gazed into each other’s eyes and held hands across the table. It was as if they belonged in the place, and the people who ran it – from Jalalabad – welcomed them with an enthusiasm that lifted the soul. All the time he had sat there he had waited for her to push the door wide and come in, panting, then hang on his neck to whisper apologies and murmur some excuse. She’d have kissed his lips and he’d have kissed hers and… He had studied the menu as a break from watching the door – not that he needed to because he knew it by heart. He hadn’t ordered food for one, hadn’t even ordered a drink. He hadn’t believed she wouldn’t come.
To the left of the photograph was the door to his room, a flimsy dressing-gown – Mac’s – hanging on it. She would have complained loudly, in a jumble of Italian and English, if she had seen the smears on the coverlet, because it was his and her bed when she slipped into his little home. Only one room, only one window overlooking an overgrown back garden, then another row of houses, chimneys and greyness. The rain had fallen more heavily as the evening had gone by and now it was spattering the window panes. They had made love on that bed, sometimes fast, sometimes noisy, sometimes slow and quiet. They had first been on it after their second meeting… not long then, maybe twenty minutes, until she’d said she had ‘to get back’, and had wandered over his threadbare carpet, retrieving the scattered, sodden clothes, and had refused to let him walk her to her front door. It had been the happiest two months in the life of Eddie Deacon… He lay on his bed and hated the world.
He’d left the restaurant after three hours because his was the only table with a spare place and two couples were waiting. The owners had seemed to sympathise, but had made clear that his love life was his concern and their priority was to seat one of the waiting couples. He had shambled out, and for a while he hadn’t noticed that the rain was persistent, driving. The misery had eaten into him. Nobody who knew him, who saw him with Mac, could believe that Eddie Deacon had landed a girl like her. Dear old Eddie, ‘steady Eddie’, one of thousands who drifted along and didn’t stand out, who was better than bloody ordinary but who didn’t bother to be exceptional, had a girl on his arm who was dramatic, impressive, head-turning… and a bloody good shag. He had shuffled home and the rain had dribbled down his face, and he’d been within a hair’s breadth of being knocked over crossing a road because hadn’t seen the van coming. He hadn’t known such love or such unhappiness.
On that bed, her still astride him and him still inside her, his sweat running with hers, her hair in his face, his lips brushing the cherrystone nipples, two evenings ago, they had fixed the rendezvous time and place. Always, in the two months since the park-bench meeting beside the Serpentine, she had been on time for their meetings. There were magazines on the floor, dropped haphazardly or chucked, Espresso and Oggi, fashion magazines and home-refurbishment magazines, a pile of her textbooks, dictionaries and notepads. He liked it best when she wore the dressing-gown, nothing else, and sat cross-legged on the bed, close to him, and they worked on her English – he liked every damn thing about her. It was the first and only time she had failed to turn up.