Falcone reached over, took the pad out of her bag, and put it back in her hands, then stabbed the pen that was still in her fingers onto the page.
“What did that mean, do you think, Beatrice?” he persisted. “That it was time for Alessio to start ‘growing up’ somehow?”
“He was a child! A beautiful, awkward, spoilt, bloody-minded, mischievous little boy. And…” She threw back her head, as if that could stop the tears. “And Giorgio loved him more than anything. More than me. More than himself. I don’t know what he meant. All I know…” — there was a pause as she wiped her face with the sleeve of the grubby blue cardigan — “…is that it wasn’t just my son who died that day. I didn’t know the man in that cell. I didn’t know him when I went to his apartment round the corner. He just looks like Giorgio Bramante. There’s someone else inside the skin. Not the man I loved… love. You pick the words. You make them up. You tell the whole stinking world if you want. After all…” — the lined, bitter face was glowering at him from across the narrow room again — “…that’s what you do, isn’t it?”
“When someone’s been beaten to death while I sit outside listening, twiddling my thumbs?” Falcone asked. “Of course. I also try to catch criminals before they can do more harm than they have already. I hope to lessen the hurt that people wish to do to one another, even if they have little desire to do that themselves. It’s a foolish idea, perhaps.”
He struggled to his feet, then bent and took Beatrice Bramante’s hands. She stiffened at his touch. His fingers fell on the old blue cardigan, gripped tightly around her palms.
“May I?” he asked.
Gently, he pulled back the cheap fabric. He knew what he’d see there, why a woman like Beatrice Bramante would hide herself inside those long, baggy sleeves.
The marks on her wrists were fresh, dark red weals, not deep, not the kind of wound inflicted by someone looking to end their own life. She was harming herself, regularly he guessed. And perhaps…
He thought about something that had been nagging since the moment he first heard it.
“The T-shirt you gave to the church. The blood on it was yours, wasn’t it?”
She snatched her hands from him and dragged the blue sleeves over them again.
“What a clever man you are, Falcone! If only you’d been this perceptive fourteen years ago.”
“I wish that had been the case too,” he replied, and returned to the sofa. “The blood was yours. To begin with anyway. Did you go back to the church again after that?”
“Never. Why?”
“I have my reasons. Why that church in the first place?”
“Where else would I take it? Giorgio worked with Gabrielli. He was a part-time warden there. I didn’t know anyone else. I read about that little museum of theirs in the paper. I…” She sniffed and wiped her nose with the sleeve over her right hand. “I wasn’t myself at the time.”
“When did you tell Giorgio?”
She shook her head. “I can’t remember. In prison. Not long before he asked for the divorce. He thought I was crazy. Perhaps he was right.”
There was another question. It had to be asked.
“Were you harming yourself before Alessio disappeared? Or did it begin then?”
“This is none of your business! None of your business…”
“No,” Falcone agreed, and felt he had his answer. “You’re right. All the same I think it would be advisable if I asked someone to come round to talk to you from time to time. The social people…”
The woman’s face contorted in a fit of abrupt fury. “Keep out of my life, you bastard!” she screeched, stabbing a finger at him, not minding that her sleeves fell back as she did this, revealing the crisscross pattern of marks on both her wrists, rising almost to the elbow. “I will not allow you in here again.”
“As you see fit, signora,” he replied simply.
It was dark outside. Thick black clouds were rolling in from the Mediterranean, obscuring the moon. Soon there would be rain. Perhaps a roll of thunder.
Falcone waited until they were in the car before giving his orders.
“How much experience do you have of surveillance, Prabakaran?”
“I’ve done the course, sir. Nothing… practical.”
“Tomorrow, and until I say otherwise, you will begin surveillance of Signora Bramante. I want to know where she goes. When. Who she sees. Everything.”
“But…?” She fell silent.
“But what? It’s important you tell me if an order is unclear. I abhor being misunderstood.”
“Beatrice Bramante has met me twice now. However hard I try, she’s bound to see me. She’ll know she’s under surveillance.”
The car wound past the market, which was now closed. Falcone peered at the shuttered stalls, the piles of discarded vegetables littering the pavement. As he watched, a burst of squally wind picked up some of the empty boxes, whirling the rubbish in a spiral, depositing the trash everywhere. A flash of thick greasy rain dashed against the windscreen. The weather was breaking.
“I would be very disappointed if she didn’t see you. If the woman has been assisting her husband in this, she’s a party to murder already. For her own sake, I do not wish her to become further involved.”
“But…?”
“Officer,” he said, a little impatiently. “I owe Giorgio Bramante nothing. He is, as far as any of us can determine, the one proven murderer in this whole sorry saga. Beatrice Bramante is different. All the same, it may well be that we have to arrest her before long. Nevertheless, we owe her the benefit of doubt and what charity I can provide. You will follow her. You will ensure you are seen. And at the end of each day, you will report back directly to me. Do I make myself clear?”
Rosa nodded and said nothing. Falcone scarcely noticed. His memories of what had happened fourteen years ago were getting clearer all the time. Now that he could look back with some perspective on what had happened, he was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy about several important aspects of the investigation.
“We also owe that woman truth of what happened to her son,” he added. “I want Giorgio Bramante. And I want truth.”
After just an hour of work — reading through Falcone’s documents and throwing questions at Arturo, whose replies proved he had a clear and capacious memory — it was clear to Emily Deacon that Falcone’s papers covered only a part of the story. When Bramante had been arrested for Ludo Torchia’s death, a grim case of child abduction had turned, instead, into a circus. The police and rescue services were out in force poring over the Aventino and through the labyrinth of tunnels and caves of Bramante’s excavation, looking for the missing boy. Hundreds of civilians had abandoned their jobs to join in the hunt. Swiftly, the investigation became swamped by controversy as the implications of Bramante’s arrest sank in, and it became apparent that the authorities had little idea how to find Alessio Bramante. Emily recognised the symptoms of a full-scale media onslaught: the blind, irrational fury of the public, the angry impotence of a police force driven by legal and public necessities, not what it believed was correct in the circumstances. Then it all petered out in the unsatisfactory way that was all too familiar in cases involving missing children. Alessio was never found. His father held out his hands and went willingly to jail. Five teenagers walked free, then vanished because every lawyer who looked at the case declared, very publicly, that it was impossible to bring anyone to trial after the prime suspect had been beaten to death in police custody. The rules of procedure and evidence had been torn to shreds when Giorgio Bramante had resorted to his fists to bludgeon some information out of the miserable Ludo Torchia. There was no going back.