“Where does the wife live?” Costa asked.
Rosa looked nervous for a moment. “Three blocks away,” she said. “And that’s ex-wife. They divorced not long after he went to jail.”
“Clever as Bramante is,” Costa pointed out, “it’s still hard to believe he could do all of this on his own. When he’s out of jail, maybe. But to kill those people while he was on parole, he’d need transport, money, information.”
“It wasn’t his wife,” Rosa insisted. “I talked to Beatrice Bramante this morning. After I saw the old lady home.”
Falcone’s grey eyebrows rose. He said nothing.
“She saw Giorgio once in the street about two months ago, after he was released. She followed him home to his apartment and tried to talk to him. He wouldn’t talk to her. The woman’s lost everything. Her husband. Her child. Her money. She’s living in a one-room dump in a public housing block, not much better than his. There’s nothing for us there.”
“Agente,” Falcone said quietly. “When you interview potential suspects, you don’t do so alone. You go with an experienced officer. And at my command. Is that understood?”
Rosa Prabakaran’s brown eyes widened with anger. Her ambition was, Costa thought, getting the better of her. She said, “You weren’t even on the case when I saw Beatrice Bramante.”
“I am now,” Falcone snapped. “Interview rules are interview rules. If the mother had told you anything incriminating, it would have been inadmissible as evidence. Do you understand that?”
“I’d just seen what happened in there!” She pointed towards the yellow barriers outside the church. “I was trying to help.” Her brown eyes looked glassy, misting over with the sudden hint of tears.
“When you work for me, you work as part of a team. Either that or you don’t work at all.”
She didn’t burst into tears. Not quite. Then Peroni’s broad, ugly smile broke the chill.
“Youthful enthusiasm, Inspector,” he declared. “We all had it once. Even you.”
Falcone glowered at him. “Someone’s going to have to go back and see her,” the inspector said. “Properly this time. And find out what Bramante was up to when he wasn’t working.”
“Caving,” Rosa said. “He wouldn’t let Beatrice into his apartment because it was full of things he needed. She saw lots of equipment through the door. Ropes. Torches. Clothing.”
“So she did tell you something!” Falcone declared. “Let’s hope to God I don’t have to try to introduce that into court sometime soon.”
Rosa Prabakaran fell silent, mute with fury and perhaps a little shame. Falcone was busy flicking through Bruno Messina’s papers again, engrossed.
“Your shift ends in two hours,” he said to her, staring at a photo of Raffaella Arcangelo lugging shopping back to their apartment in Monti. “It’s been an eventful day. Go home now. I’ll get you reassigned to something more suitable in the morning.”
“Reassigned?”
“You heard me.”
“I figured out what that message on the wall meant. I found that body. I tracked down the woman who discovered it. I—”
“You did what you were paid to do,” Falcone interrupted. “Now leave us, Officer.”
“Sir,” she hissed, then snatched her bag and stormed out the door.
Incandescent breath coming in short gasps, aware that their attention had gone elsewhere the moment she’d stalked out of the van, Rosa Prabakaran stood between the vehicle and the old abandoned church, wondering what to do next. The three of them made her feel like an intruder, someone who had walked in on a private gathering. She had been on the force long enough to understand there was a strong, unusual relationship among these men, a relationship other officers talked about with more than a little suspicion.
She was, Rosa suddenly realised, more than a little jealous.
The woman pathologist was outside, standing by the yellow lines, gazing up at the weak winter sun, a large, amiable figure whose bright, intelligent eyes never seemed to be still. She ambled over, smiled, and held out a hand.
“Rosa?” she said.
Another searching glance from an intimate on Falcone’s team.
“Did I hear,” the woman asked, “the much-missed sound of our beloved inspector losing his cool?”
“Is it that common?”
“It used to be. I haven’t experienced it in a while. You’ll find this strange, but it’s rather heartening to hear him bawling someone out again. It means we stand a chance of getting the old Leo back.” She paused. “He nearly died last year. Remember that.”
“I know. Still, it doesn’t give him the right to be downright rude.”
Teresa Lupo frowned. “I’ve known Leo for a long time. He’s… obsessive. It’s nothing personal.”
“It sounded personal.”
“That’s one of Leo’s habits, I’m afraid. It always does. Did you, um…” — she smiled slyly — “…deserve it by any chance?”
Rosa Prabakaran didn’t answer that.
“Ah.”
Teresa Lupo studied the blue van and the three heads visible through the still-open door.
“Being right is another of Leo’s annoying traits. You’d best live with it. You could learn a lot from him. Besides, there are plenty of mediocrities around who’ll bawl you out, too. Best get the treatment from one who can teach you something. You, of all people, should bear that in mind. There are still some… old-fashioned ideas around in corners of the Questura.”
They’d covered the colour question once before, got it out of the way in the little café around the block from the Questura a few months back after Teresa had taken her to one side and quietly passed on a few tips about how to handle Gianni Peroni. Rosa Prabakaran never once felt the issue of her skin posed much of a problem for the people she worked with. Rome was a multicultural, multicoloured society. It wasn’t a big deal. She was more likely to feel out of place because of her sex.
“I won’t screw up again,” Rosa said with feeling.
“Of course you will. We all do. Tell me again. What did this man we’re looking for actually do?”
“He was a university professor. An archaeologist.”
Teresa Lupo’s pale, flabby face screwed up with dissatisfaction. The pathologist was, Rosa thought, remarkably like Peroni in some ways.
“That was years ago.”
Rosa sighed. Another dissatisfied customer. “That’s what he did. OK?”
“No, what did Giorgio Bramante do?” Teresa insisted. “In prison. After prison. When he wasn’t being a university professor. Forget about the way you want to think of him. As some nice, middle-class individual gone wrong. Give me what you know about him after he lost his son.”
“In prison he worked in a slaughterhouse. When he got out, he went and did the same job. In some Testaccio butcher’s shop that had a slaughterhouse somewhere else. A horse butcher, would you believe?”
The pathologist thought about this, then smiled again, a broad, confident, happy smile. “Odd, don’t you think? A smart man could have got a better job, surely.”