She grabs his chin, reaches for her back pocket and pulls out her ID card. ‘I’m Captain Valentina Morassi. Who are you? Why are you here?’
He doesn’t answer.
There’s something about him that’s unnerving.
Now she spots it.
He has almost no facial hair.
In fact he looks almost feminine.
Valentina gets a flashback to the morgue.
The ball-less eunuch found bizarrely butchered beside the Tiber.
Could this be another?
‘Get up!’
The man either can’t or won’t.
‘Tom, help me.’
Between them they drag the prisoner to his feet. Valentina starts to unbuckle his black jeans.
Tom is shocked. ‘What are you doing?’
Valentina clearly has no concern for his rights. She drags his jeans and underpants down around his ankles, pushes him back on to a sofa and uses her foot to spread his legs. ‘ Porca vacca! Another eunuch.’ She wheels away from the debagged prisoner and pulls out her radio.
While she calls in the arrest, she pushes open the bedroom door, gun extended.
The place is in darkness.
She can just make out the outlines of a low bed, a small dresser and a wardrobe.
No Anna.
She returns to Tom. ‘Can you re-dress this asshole while I clean up? I have glass in my hair and God knows where else.’
‘Hey, that’s above and beyond what comes within the boyfriend remit.’
She manages a smile and walks away. ‘I know. Loop the cuffs under a chair leg and sit on him.’
Tom shoots her a look that says he can handle the small guy without needing to do that.
The bathroom is tiny.
Valentina finds there are only women’s things in there. One toothbrush, one tube of paste and some eyebrow tweezers on a glass shelf beneath a cheap white plastic mirrored cabinet. She pulls it open. Inside there’s a tube of thrush cream, a box of Tampax, a bottle of headache pills and some AllergEze.
No sign of the cotton wool or cotton buds that she was hoping for.
She closes the door and squints at the mirror. When she puts her hand to her head, she feels several splinters of glass. Carefully she picks them out with her fingers, briefly inspects the sparkling fragments then washes them away. It takes several minutes to be sure her scalp is glass-free.
She takes off her blouse and by twisting in front of the mirror she can see small slivers of smashed glass embedded in her spine. There’s also an angry red mark around her lower vertebrae where she’s been kicked.
Valentina contorts her fingers and uses the eyebrow tweezers and mirror to pick out the shards. She looks at the nearby shower. It’s a temptation. A hot soak is just what she needs, but she knows that’s a long way off. Just processing the piece of shit in the other room is going to take ages.
She pulls her blouse back on and now becomes aware of her damaged right hand. She can wriggle all of her fingers, but her knuckles are grazed and swollen. A pity she didn’t connect with the son-of-a-bitch’s jaw instead of the wall.
Her attacker is flat out on the floor when she re-enters the room. Tom is sitting near him, his foot in the middle of the guy’s back.
‘All okay?’ she asks.
‘Fine.’ He looks almost bored.
‘I’m going to check the rest of the place, all right?’
He nods.
Valentina goes back to the bedroom, fumbles for a switch and eventually finds it. She pushes it down, but the light doesn’t come on. She clicks it again.
Nothing.
Something is wrong.
She senses it.
She missed something earlier.
Something important.
58
Before Valentina can enter the bedroom and satisfy her curiosity, the arrest team arrives.
She fills them in on the prisoner.
Maybe a night in the cells will loosen the eunuch’s tongue. Come tomorrow she’ll have enough energy to find out what the hell he was doing in the apartment rented by their missing woman.
She borrows a flashlight and returns to the bedroom.
The room is spookily cold and smells of damp, like wet and rusty iron.
Under the glare of the torchlight, the darkness gives way to a tobacco-coloured creaminess. Beyond the burn of the beam, all the walls and even the ceiling seem to be lined with some kind of shabby tiles that are hanging loose.
She shines the light up.
There’s no central lightshade or bulb, only a dangling flex and raw open socket where the appliance should be.
Valentina moves the beam around.
Dozens of strange shadows crawl over the walls and move in sync with her torch.
She flicks the beam back to the ceiling.
Unbelievable.
Hundreds of identical rosary beads, complete with silver crucifixes, dangle cross down from the plaster ceiling.
‘Tom! You need to see this.’ She twists the beam to full flood.
He comes to the doorway and stops.
Valentina moves the torch around. ‘What do you make of it?’
He has to shield his eyes from the brightness. ‘Nothing to be frightened of. Do you mind? You’re blinding me with that thing.’
‘ Scusi.’ She dips it and in doing so notices that the floor is also strangely covered.
Tom moves to the centre of the room and touches her hand. ‘This is a place of sanctuary. It’s a refuge for someone who is very frightened.’
‘And someone totally damned crazy.’ Valentina pans the light beam back and forth across the floor. ‘Isn’t this the Bible? Isn’t the whole floor covered in pages from the Bible?’
Tom bends so he can see. ‘Yes, it is. In Latin, too.’
She shines her light upwards and around. ‘And the walls and the ceiling; the whole room is covered in Biblical text.’
Tom crosses himself.
Valentina runs her hand over the papered wall. ‘It’s so creepy.’
‘The word of God is creepy?’
‘Yes. When it’s plastered all over the place like this, it’s immensely creepy.’ Valentina’s light picks out brass candlesticks arranged around a small painted statue of a Madonna and Child. ‘Not only creepy, but a fire risk. It’s a wonder this place didn’t go up in flames every time she lit a candle and said a prayer.’
Tom examines the papered walls. Unless he’s mistaken, it’s not only a Vulgate, a standard Latin Bible, that has been ripped up and stuck there. He recognises some other pages as sections of the Polyglot Bible for the Greek New Testament. He moves along, his hands feeling and tracing the wallpapered text.
He points out several pages of old print. ‘These are extracts from the Septuagint, the oldest Greek version of the Jewish Bible.’ He slides his hand along, ‘Next to it are pages from the classic Hebrew Bible.’ He points a long, shadowy finger. ‘Just at the edge of your light there, I can see English – those are sections of the Old Testament.’
‘What’s going on, Tom?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s like someone has taken out an insurance policy and covered themselves with every form of overlapping religion.’
His foot knocks against something. ‘Shine your light down here for a second.’
She flashes the beam his way.
‘Down at my feet.’
‘My God, what is it?’
He crouches. ‘The bed – it’s made from bibles.’
She steps closer and kneels beside him.
Tom pulls at part of the single bed. ‘The frame is made four bibles high and by the looks of it, one… two… three deep. They’ve been used like bricks to build a small wall, with the openings facing outwards, so the inside fits tight against a single mattress.’ He manages to force some pages open. ‘Looks like masonry nails have been driven through them and into the floor to hold them together.’
Valentina moves her hand beneath the torchlight and over the bed. ‘And the mattress and quilt are both lined with more bible pages.’ She is the first back on her feet. ‘Now tell me you don’t find this creepy.’
Tom gets up as well. ‘I don’t. I’ve seen similar things.’