It’s all so strange, and yet so real that he actually feels like he’s choking.
Then he realises he is.
He sits bolt upright in bed.
Gasps.
His lungs are filled with smoke.
The apartment is covered in blackness.
Thick, deadly smoke is pouring into the bedroom.
He jumps from the quilt and resists the urge to open the window. If there’s a fire outside the room, then the draught will only fan it.
He drops to the floor and looks through the crack beneath the door.
Red and orange flickering lights.
Flames!
The apartment is several floors up. There are no trees close to the window. No fire escape. The only way out is through the lounge and the front door.
Tom’s eyes are stinging. His throat is raw. The lack of oxygen is already making him weak as he tugs the quilt off the bed and steps into the small en suite. He quickly soaks the quilt in the shower and wraps several wet towels around his head and hands. His feet are bare and he knows there’s no hope of finding his shoes.
He returns to the bedroom and very carefully opens the door to the rest of the apartment.
Palls of dark smoke and fire seem to turn like dragons and swirl towards him.
For a moment he’s thrown.
He’d expected the seat of the blaze to be confined to the kitchen, no doubt caused by him forgetting to turn something off on the cooker.
But that’s not the case.
The flames have already engulfed the entrance area. A wall of fire stands between him and the safety of the front door.
There’s no more time to think.
Wrapped in the quilt, he runs into the heart of the blaze.
The front door is burned to cinders.
He crashes through the charred frame, ripping into a hinge as he stumbles out on to the concrete landing.
The quilt is on fire.
Tom sheds it.
One of the towels wrapped around his hands is burning like a torch. He drops it and steps away.
The fresh, cold air fills his lungs so sharply that it hurts.
People are running past him. Screaming. Carrying children in their arms or on their backs. They’re bowling each other over in the crush to get down the narrow stairwell and out into the street.
Tom runs barefoot after them. Glass cracks beneath the soles of his feet.
By the time he reaches the safety of the street, most of the apartment block is ablaze.
Some streets away are the frantic klaxons of approaching fire engines.
Only now does he care about the fact that he’s completely naked.
50
It’s the first time Valentina has seen the corpse under any decent lighting.
Down by the bridge under a mix of Carabinieri flashlights and forensic arc lamps, it looked more like an alien life form than anything human.
Now — spread out on Filomena Schiavone’s autopsy table — the cadaver looks pitifully real and strangely feminine.
What little remains of the dead man has almost no body hair and no eyebrows.
‘Ciao!’ shouts the ME incongruously, as she happily scurries around the far side of the morgue, almost oblivious to the strip of pallid butchered flesh separating her from Valentina. ‘You’ve come on a very busy day.’ Nonna sounds energised. ‘We’ve still got two traffic incidents from this morning, an auto-erotic fatality from last night, an overdose and a new domestic murder.’ She points to a set of stainless-steel drawers against the wall. ‘There’s a full report on your case for you over there. I gave a prelim copy to your lieutenant while your officers were taking prints from the body. Now let me run you through the highlights.’ She pauses and smiles. ‘I used to say let me run you through the bullet points, but then we had a couple of Mafia cases and there really were bullet points, so it was a little confusing.’ She laughs at her own story.
‘I can see it would be,’ Valentina agrees.
‘Reasonably well-nourished male,’ continues Nonna. ‘He tapes out at one hundred and seventy-eight centimetres. Would have weighed around seventy-two kilos, so we’re talking of a fit young man in his late twenties.’ She stops for a moment. ‘You know about him being a eunuch?’
‘I do,’ says Valentina, ‘but as I’m a complete stranger to eunuchs, can you explain to me exactly what it means?’
‘You’re right to ask. Too many officers presume too much. Traditionally eunuchs were not only castrated males; they were men who’d been castrated early enough to be hormonally affected. Despite, or maybe as a result of their increased femininity, they often made very trustworthy and exceptionally fierce guards. Of course they were more commonly used in both Rome and Greece as body servants and even officials.’
Valentina pulls a face as she looks at the corpse. ‘Sounds horrendously unnecessary.’
‘Indeed. Though I’ve met a few men I’d like to have done it to. Interestingly, the word doesn’t come from the act of castration. It goes back to the Greek word eunoukhos, describing the keeper or guard of a bedchamber or harem.’
Valentina nods towards the table. ‘Can you tell if our victim was castrated recently?’
‘He wasn’t. The scars are old. I suspect he was mutilated in his teens.’
‘Urgh!’
‘It hasn’t been done in a hospital. By the looks of it the entire scrotum, including both testicles, has been tied up with a very tight band and then cut off. The skin remnants beneath the ligature then rotted as the flesh above the band healed. It’s a highly dangerous procedure and hugely painful. It’s amazing he didn’t get gangrene.’
‘What a life he had.’
‘And quite a death, too. Come around this side and I’ll show you how your eunuch met his end, no pun intended.’
Valentina negotiates her way to the top of the table.
The victim’s head is elevated on a movable white block and the professoressa expertly readjusts the corpse to expose the area she wants Valentina to see. ‘The skull has a large hole in it — large enough for you to fit your hand in.’ Schiavone puts her fingers against the brutal opening and Valentina flinches. ‘There is also evidence of minor blows to the head. Fractures can cross the suture lines of the skull but not other fractures, so I’m sure these are separate injuries.’
The ME shifts around the table to show the front of the skull. ‘Now things get interesting. This frontal area, including the nasal cavities and eye sockets, is pitted with soil and grit.’
Valentina doesn’t entirely see the point. ‘Meaning?’
‘Your victim was lying face down when someone threw a large boulder on to the back of his head, causing the damage we’ve just looked at.’
‘To kill him? To finish him off?’
‘Possibly.’
‘You can’t tell if he was alive at that time?’
Nonna looks a little uncertain. ‘Technically I’d say alive, but very, very close to death. What I mean, though, is that this final act might not have been one of mercy, of putting the man out of his suffering. It may have been a display of anger. Someone still full of rage and needing to vent it.’
‘Classic overkill.’
She considers the phrase. ‘Perhaps.’
Valentina points to the cadaver. ‘So he’s lying face down when he’s hit with this rock, then more are piled on top of him. That doesn’t make sense, because when the body was found, it was face up.’
‘Fermare! You’re jumping to conclusions.’
Valentina holds up her hands. ‘Mi dispiace.’
‘It’s okay. Most good detectives jump to conclusions.’ She puts her gloved fingers to the corpse’s face. ‘The dust and grit engrained in the skin wasn’t from the river area. I’ve sent samples off for environmental analysis but honestly, I’ve examined enough bodies from the Tiber to categorise those samples without a microscope. Your man was killed somewhere else, somewhere more urban. It was post-mortem that the body was brought to the river and buried beneath rocks under the bridge.’