Falcone returned to the sofa. Beatrice hadn’t moved.
“I never had children, never even thought about it, to be honest,” he admitted. “It’s only natural in the circumstances to want to imagine how they would grow up.”
“Natural?” She echoed his words with a hard, sarcastic edge.
“What’s that symbol? The one with the stars. It seems important to you.”
She shrugged. “Not really. Giorgio had me design it for the school. The stars come from Mithraism. Giorgio was a little… obsessed with his work sometimes. It spilled over into the rest of our lives.”
“Was he unfaithful?” Falcone asked abruptly, aware of the young policewoman’s sharp intake of breath next to him.
Beatrice Bramante stared at her hands. Then she shook her head, saying nothing.
“Were you?” Falcone pressed.
Again, she was silent.
“I’m sorry,” Falcone said, after a moment. “These are standard questions. We should have asked them years ago, but somehow the occasion never arose.”
She stared up at him, her face creased with hate. “So why ask them now? Do you enjoy torturing me?”
“I’m just trying to understand.”
“We were an ordinary family until that day. No affairs. No secrets.”
“And yet Giorgio took Alessio down into that place,” he replied. “You didn’t know he’d done that. I know you never said that to us at the time. And I didn’t pursue it. You had enough to deal with. But you didn’t know. It was obvious you didn’t understand either. At least, that’s what I thought.”
“What is it you want from me? I ask myself that question every day. Every morning. Every night. What if I’d taken him to school instead? What if he’d been sick? Or gone in a different direction? When you lose a child, Falcone, a part of you never stops playing that awful game.”
The big sovrintendente shuffled next to Rosa, glanced at Falcone as if wondering whether he was allowed to intervene, then spoke anyway.
“And what if they’d turned the wrong corner and found some idiot drunk coming up the street, with his car on the wrong side of the road?” Taccone asked. “We’re police, signora. We hear people going through that kind of agony every day. It’s understandable. But it’s pointless too.”
Falcone wished he had Costa and Peroni by his side, not this well-meaning pair, one raw and unobservant, one decent and unimaginative.
“No,” the inspector said quietly, “it’s not pointless at all. Alessio didn’t disappear because of some drunk driver. His father took him to that place for some purpose. Perhaps what followed was an accident, but the reason he was there to begin with is something I can’t begin to comprehend. Can you?”
Police drivers possessed the same contempt for speed limits as the average civilian. So, to Emily Deacon’s surprise, it took less than two hours to get from the centre of Rome to Arturo Messina’s isolated villa on the outskirts of Orvieto. Her bedroom, which was next to Raffaella’s on the third floor of the palatial home, had an extraordinary view, out over the rolling countryside of Umbria towards the rock face fronting the small, castellated city which gave the region its name. The Duomo, Orvieto’s grandly elegant cathedral, stood proudly over the città, its single rose window staring out like a monocular eye, watching over everything in its care. But this was February. The light was gone too soon for them to enjoy much of the tour of the premises offered by Messina senior, a man of far more prepossessing character than his son. If Arturo felt any embarrassment about the circumstances of their visit and the fact that it stemmed from the case that had cost him his career, he didn’t show it. The old commissario must have been in his early sixties but looked a decade younger, of medium height and stocky build, with a dark, handsome face, a small, neat moustache, and bright, twinkling brown eyes.
The house was far too large for one man. Messina, who had lost his wife to illness some five years before, told, without hesitation, how it had been handed down from generation to generation after his great-grandfather had acquired it some eighty years before. From the ornate entrance hall on the ground floor to the guest quarters and the small but impeccable garden at the rear, with its view to the Duomo, it was a perfect little palace. When Emily asked what he did with his time, Arturo regaled them both with stories of trips into the wild hills to hunt game, fishing on the local rivers, and long outings to distant restaurants with his friends from the Questura. Orvieto appeared to be a retirement ground for old cops. Two had called by that afternoon, one for coffee and, Emily thought, a look at Arturo’s visitors, the second with a couple of pheasants for supper. Arturo Messina wasn’t lonely. This idyllic break from Rome seemed a little too good to be true, until he took her to one side and showed her the package Falcone had sent that afternoon.
She’d stared warily at the crest of the Rome Questura on the covering message. When she opened it, Messina stole one good look at the cover page, then went to a cupboard to find something which he retrieved and placed on the table. It took her straight back to her days in the FBI school in Langley, with an alacrity that was scary.
“That, Arturo,” Emily declared, “is a conference phone.”
“Even an old man like me knows what century this is,” he replied cheerfully. “I like to keep up with the times. Besides, if Leo Falcone is going to rope you into this case, I can surely come too. It was mine once, remember?”
“But…”
“But what?” The brown eyes gleamed at her. “Oh, come. There’s nothing personal here. Do I look like a man eaten up by resentment? Even if I was, isn’t the case more important?”
“That’s not really my decision, is it?”
“I’ll talk to Leo when we’re ready. Agreed?”
She said nothing.
“You are prepared for this, aren’t you?” the old man asked kindly.
She didn’t look ill. She didn’t even look pregnant. It was just tiredness. Mainly. The physical symptoms were just tiny, nothing. They would go away soon and she’d get that rosy bloom she expected to see on all pregnant women.
So the two of them sat down and began to pore over the documents Falcone had despatched to await her arrival. The Bramante case, Emily soon realised, raised many intriguing questions, some of which, as Arturo Messina readily acknowledged, had never been addressed at the time. This was common in all complex investigations, and one reason why cold-case analysis existed. A fresh eye didn’t just see new opportunities. It saw old ones that had been un-exploited or simply unobserved. And sometimes they were the most promising of all.
Beatrice Bramante got up and went to the small sink next to the hot plate. She took down a bottle of what looked like cheap brandy from the cabinet above and poured herself a large glass. Then she came back, sat down in front of them, and took a long, slow drink.
“It took me a year to find the courage to ask him,” she said. “Giorgio is not the kind of man you can interrogate. But I imagine you know that.”
“And he said?”
Beatrice Bramante was crying now, in spite of herself, in spite of the obvious shame she felt as they watched her try, and fail, to choke back the tears.
“He told me… there was a time in everyone’s life when they had to start growing up. That was all he had to say on the matter. Then he told me he wanted a divorce. Quick. Unchallenged. That was my reward for asking. There was nothing more to say. Nor is there now. This is enough for me, Falcone. Please go.”
Taccone was trying to read the old grubby carpet. Rosa Prabakaran was tidying her notepad into her bag, anxious to get out of there.