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.
Today the tiny cafe was as deserted as the frozen piazza. There was a pretty young girl behind the counter but she looked tired and careworn. He sat on a stool pouring sugar into a double macchiato and knew: those times would never come again. They were locked in the past. A part of him had understood that would happen all along. Kids grew up, invented their own lives, went away in the end. But his own stupidity had hastened the process irreversibly, sent them scattering north to Tuscany, where he’d never be anything but a stranger to them now.
He finished the coffee and ordered another. On days like this the system needed caffeine. Then he tried to distract himself by focusing on Laila, racking his brain again about where she might have gone. Something didn’t make sense. He had established a bond with the kid. It just didn’t add up that she should flee the house like that, without a word, without a good reason. He was out of options too. Short of pounding the streets aimlessly, hoping for some rare good luck-and surely that was a waste of time-he might as well give in, call Leo Falcone, get some sleep, then rejoin the team. Maybe even pat the surly American on the back and say sorry a little more loudly if that was what was needed.
The girl behind the counter came with the second coffee and said, to his dismay, “I know you from the summer. Where are your kids?”
“It’s not ice-cream weather,” was the best he could offer.
“It’s not anything weather,” she complained. “I don’t know why I bothered opening the doors. Waste of time.”
“Thanks. I’m flattered.”
“Oh.” She laughed and the sudden burst of amusement brought back the memory of her, not much more than a kid herself, piling up ice cream generously as they waited and watched under the bright, burning July sun. “Sorry. I was just feeling a bit down.”
Everyone did from time to time, Peroni reminded himself. You just had to stop it slipping into self-pity.
“Gimme an ice cream, then,” he said.
Her lively eyes opened wide in amusement. “What?”
“You heard. A tub. Those cones are too damn difficult for an old guy like me. Coffee. Pistachio. And another flavor, too. You choose.”
She looked at him as if he were crazy. “In this weather?”
“Yeah. In this weather. Me customer, you waitress. Work on the relationship, kid.”
The girl disappeared out back for quite a while. When she returned she’d taken off the white uniform and was now wearing a short red skirt and a black sweater.
She sat down next to him. There were two dishes in her hand, each with a selection of multicoloured blobs of ice cream.
“It’s on the house,” she said. “I’m calling it a day.”
“Wise move,” he answered and tried the chocolate. It was exquisite, though the cold made his teeth hurt. “What is it? Boyfriend trouble?”