He crept forward and peered through the glass. From this angle he could see a table lamp glowing in the corner of the small, cluttered room. Costa tried to imagine what that meant. Then the wind abated briefly and his heart sank like a frozen stone.
There was a TV on inside. He could hear it. When he stretched his head further beyond the edge of the French door he could see it: a distant, small colour set in the corner of the room. Rousing music, a horse whinnying and gunshots. He glanced at the screen and knew the scene instantly; it was one of those iconic Hollywood moments you never forgot.
John Wayne with an eyepatch turning his horse to face the bad guys at the end of True Grit. Costa almost wept at the irony.
Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.
It’s so easy in the movies. You put the reins between your teeth and ride.
He tried to convince himself he was feeling braver.
Then he saw the man.
People watch TV, stupid, his distant brain reminded him.
He was where you’d expect someone to be while glued to the box. Upright in a chair on the other side of the little room, with his back to Costa and the window, just the top of his head visible, a good crop of brown hair now, not the stupid Mickey Mouse hat Costa had seen on two occasions.
Costa pressed his back to the wall, slid his body down to sit in the snow, head against the brickwork, eyes closed, desperately trying to think.
There was no alternative. His damn phone was gone. Falcone would wait in the street. Not forever. But maybe long enough for him to freeze to death in the vicious gale that gripped this cruelly exposed Roman rooftop.
Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.
You put the reins between your teeth and ride.
He glanced at the French windows. No one expected burglars at this level. Then he took another look inside. The man was engrossed in the TV. He wouldn’t, surely, be sitting in an armchair with a weapon on his lap.
Never assume.
Someone who carved shapes out of his victims’ backs was impossible to predict. All Costa could do was take every precaution in the book, and add a few of his own.
He got up quickly, stood foursquare to the windows, then kicked as hard as he could. The doors flew open, glass crashed to the tiled floor inside. The volume of the TV set suddenly seemed abnormally loud.
“Police!” Costa yelled, and followed up that meaningless comment with all the other orders that were supposed to make sense on these occasions.
The man didn’t budge.
Costa moved purposefully towards the chair, wishing the damn TV would stop screaming like that, wishing the room wasn’t so stuffily hot and filled with a strong smell, aware, too, that there was something deeply strange here, that the walls were covered with a familiar pattern, repeating over and over, painted in a colour he didn’t want to think about too closely.
And the man didn’t shift an inch, which made Costa feel foolish as he watched the back of his head and the thick brown hair, waiting for a response, saying, more than once, “Don’t move.”
There was a noise: voices, the sound of wood smashing, the racket of an entry team on the other side of the door.
Focus.
“Don’t,” he said, accidentally nudging the chair, and watched in shock as a woman’s head, ripped from her body, red gore blackening around her throat, rolled sideways over the arm, fell on his foot, finished upright on the carpet, long brown hair flowing back from a pale dead face, mouth open, fixed in a scream, glassy eyes staring at him, seeing nothing.
“Shit!” he gasped, and lurched over to the smashed French windows, turned his back on this crazy scene, breathed in as much of the freezing, snow-filled air as he could get into his lungs, hoping it would get the noxious smell of meat out of him somehow.
They were inside now. He could hear their voices behind him, hear the shock and someone starting to retch.
And it was as if someone had turned a key, opened the door to a little enlightenment. The unnatural heat and the stench had stirred something the frozen rooftop had put into cold storage. The pieces finally started to fall into place. Teresa Lupo had, in a sense, warned him, if only he’d pursued the point far enough to get the detail.
She’s not exactly complete.
The cord was in one of the suitcases, not around her neck, because it couldn’t have been…
Nic Costa turned round and looked at the room. The geometric pattern covered half of the side wall and would probably have extended further had not the source run out. It was a running fresco painted in what could only be the woman’s blood. And a message too, in English. One word in big, bold, dark red letters, underneath the scrawls: WHO?
The SOCOs would have a field day here. The place had to be crawling with promising material and that, in itself, was strange. Costa had read the files, had understood what happened in the Pantheon. The killer had always been meticulous about cleaning up afterwards. But here he seemed to be leaving a deliberate sign.
I am nearly done. Help me.
Falcone walked through the room, stared at the item on the floor, and sniffed.
“Neat,” he said. “You just prop the poor bitch’s head up on a couple of cushions, turn on the TV and all you see is someone working on a couch-potato habit. Clever.”
Then he came up to Costa, something in his hand.
“You dropped this, that’s why we came up,” the inspector said, and gave him the mobile phone that, just a couple of minutes earlier, had tumbled all the way from the windy rooftop down into the drifts in the street. “Nothing personal, Nic, but I think it’s time you went home and got some sleep. Don’t you?”
BY FOUR IT WAS DARK. By five the city was a treacherous warren of icy alleys, deserted under a blinding moon. But at least the blizzard was over. Gianni Peroni had taken the jeep everywhere he could think of. Back to the Serbian’s cafe next to Termini. Down to the dark corners by the river where she’d lurked the night before. It was futile. The Serbians knew nothing. In the streets there were plenty of kids: dark, miserable figures, huddled inside their black jackets, crowding round fires built from noxious-smelling trash. Not one admitted to seeing her. Peroni tried every last trick in the book-money, threats, sweet talk-and it was just no good. They knew her. That much was plain. But Laila was an outcast in this bunch for some reason. Too strange, too difficult, to fit in.
The way they lived depressed him. It was all such a waste. And it made him think of his own children, warm in a comfy, fatherless home outside Siena, getting ready for Christmas, eyes glittering in anticipation of what was to come.
For the first time ever he wouldn’t be there. Not for one minute. He wasn’t a reflective man. He hated looking back. There were too many painful memories lurking in the recent past. Time healed, he knew that. One day the hurt would subside and, with that miraculous capacity for self-deception every living being on the planet seemed to possess, the good times would come to be uppermost in his mind once more. Till then he just had to swallow down the awkward mix of emotions that kept gripping him. He’d been a good father but, in the end, a lousy husband. It was just another of life’s cruel tricks that one couldn’t cancel out the other.
Tired, bored, almost despondent, he took a break and went for a coffee in one of his favourite places, the little cafe run by the old-fashioned restaurant Checco er Carrettiere behind the Piazza Trilussa in Trastevere. He knew why he went there. He used to take the kids during the summer, watch them wait goggle-eyed as some pretty girl in a smart white waitress uniform piled high some of the best ice cream in Rome.