“I’ve just been through that with Falcone. Bramante had other things on his mind.” She’d hoped the picture of what she’d seen in the crypt wouldn’t come back. The presence of this inquisitive, infuriating pathologist, who understood so much more than she was going to say, made that impossible. With the memory came the inevitable question.
“What kind of gun does that?” she asked. “I’ve seen photos of wounds before. None of them…” The sight of the man remained in her head, a lurid spectacle lit by her bright police flashlight. And the smell was still there too. The stench of meat and the iron tang of blood.
“What did you see?”
“You know what I saw!”
“Of course I don’t. Tell me. This is important.”
She wanted to go home. Her real home, not the plain little apartment she’d insisted on renting in order to make a point. She wanted to talk to her father, sit down with him and have a quiet meal, watch TV, look at her old law books, and wonder why she didn’t take his advice and go for a comfy, well-paid job convicting criminals instead of a difficult, poorly paid one trying to sort them out from the rest of society.
“I saw a naked man, quite deliberately placed on the ground, as if he were a corpse in some kind of ritual. He was in a crypt full of skeletons. Old ones, all in a line. The odd one out. All to himself. At the front.”
“Good. And?”
“Something… a shotgun, I don’t know, had blown a hole in his chest. I could see…” She shook her head. “What’s the point?”
“The point,” Teresa Lupo said severely, “is that you’re supposed to be a police officer. Either look or don’t look. Just don’t half look.”
Rosa could feel her temper rising again, ready to snap. “I did look.”
“No, you didn’t. Was he killed in that room?”
“I don’t know…. No. I don’t remember seeing much blood. I would have thought there’d be lots. When you shoot someone.”
“There is when you shoot someone, at least with something that could cause a wound that big. But he wasn’t shot.”
“I saw!”
“You saw a wound on his chest. Then you jumped to easy, quick conclusions. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Most people would have done the same. But if you want to work around Leo Falcone, you need to drag yourself out of the category of ‘most people.’”
“I saw…” Rosa tried to summon the scene again, painful as it was. The man’s chest had been a mess, worse than anything she’d seen in any photos of a car accident or a murder.
Teresa Lupo was waiting.
Finally, Rosa said, “I saw bone. Not broken bone. Part of a rib cage. It wasn’t damaged. It looked like all those other skeletons in there. Except it was white. Very white.”
The pathologist nodded. “Good. Next time I’d prefer not to have to drag it out of you. Now let me tell you something I saw when I took a close look at him. On his back, beneath the scapula — the shoulder blade — was another wound. It was made by some sharp, spiked metallic object, one that had gone through the flesh and under the bone, causing some very extensive bruising. As if whatever caused the wound had carried the dead man’s weight, too, for a while anyway.”
“So he was stabbed in the back? With a spike?”
“You’re being literal again, Rosa. What if the spike was stationary and he was put on it?”
She wanted to scream. This wasn’t how they’d told her to work at the training college. This was imagination, not the slow, methodical technique she’d believed was the way to proceed with criminal investigations.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said finally, exasperated. “It doesn’t make sense.”
The expression of amused exasperation on Teresa Lupo’s face worried her. Rosa Prabakaran was suddenly aware that she was developing a Force 10 headache.
“Oh my God,” she blurted out, shocked, baffled by not knowing what thought process had tied those two disparate threads of knowledge together. “He worked in a slaughterhouse.”
“Great place to kill people, if you think about it,” Teresa said with a grin. “And full of hooks. Now, by way of thanks, do you want me to talk you back into this case or not?”
Rosa found herself staring hungrily at the control van. The three of them were still deep in conversation.
“You think you can do that?” she asked hesitantly.
“Watch…” Teresa Lupo declared, marching for the door already, “…and learn.”
Twenty minutes later a plain blue Fiat was speeding past the ageing concrete façade of the film studios at Cinecittà, out to the nondescript modern suburb of Anagnina. Peroni was driving. Teresa and her right-hand man, Silvio Di Capua, were in the back looking like five-year-olds on their way to a party, though one to which they had, for the moment, no invitation. There were no papers to guarantee entry to the slaughterhouse where Giorgio Bramante worked. Papers took time, and preparation. They were hoping to circumvent both. Somehow…
Costa glanced out the window. Little more than a kilometre away was his home. When he and Emily had left the farmhouse that morning, it was to spend a pleasant, lazy day in the city with friends. The old job had intervened without warning. He’d no idea when he’d be back, or see Emily again. There’d been time only to make a brief call to her before they left. She’d been in the car to Orvieto, as the commissario had promised, just a few minutes from the villa owned by Messina’s father. She’d sounded a little puzzled, resigned to being out of the city for a while, accepting that there wasn’t much alternative. Raffaella Arcangelo felt the same way, she’d said. Costa wondered whether Falcone had found the time to speak to her yet.
He watched the flat, dead lands of the modern suburbs flash past the window. He hadn’t raised the subject of Emily’s health. He didn’t know how. Not on a phone call from a police van outside a former church overrun with scene-of-crime officers trying to piece together a picture of a murder. That would have to wait.
A hand came over from the back seat and tapped his shoulder.
“They kill horses on your doorstep,” Di Capua declared, with his customary tact. “I bet you didn’t know that.”
“Being a vegetarian,” Costa observed, “I’m not sure it’s any of my business. How do you carnivores feel?”
“About horse-eating?” Peroni waved a massive, pale hand at the passing landscape. “Barbaric. Cows. Pigs. Lambs. That’s what they’re bred for. Horses… it just doesn’t feel right.”
“Exactly,” Teresa agreed.
Silvio Di Capua said nothing, until a jab in the ribs from his companion prompted him to complain, “I haven’t eaten horse in ages. You hardly find it anywhere these days. Besides, it’s dead already, isn’t it?”
Teresa’s hand swatted his shoulder. “If you didn’t buy it, they wouldn’t kill horses for you to eat in the first place, idiot.”
“In which case they wouldn’t breed the things, would they?
Except as ponies for rich kids, and…” — he waved at the housing tracts flashing past outside — “…I don’t see much of a market for them around here. So instead of being dead, they’d just be unalive. You’re arguing that’s an improvement?”
No one said anything for a while after that, until Peroni simply muttered “Barbaric” again, then turned the car onto a small industrial park, cruised slowly along until he got the right number, and pulled up by a large iron security gate behind which lurked an anonymous low building, much like a factory unit anywhere. A sign on the gate said, simply, Calvi. Just the owner’s name. Not a hint of what went on inside. Horse butchers didn’t advertise their presence too loudly.
They got out, Peroni pressed the bell, and the five of them waited. A truck was just visible on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. It was an animal transporter. Dark, glittering eyes moved behind the slats on the rear door. They could hear the occasional sound of hooves tramping on wood and a low, nervous neighing.