“Of course. You can’t work a site of that size on your own. Giorgio took five of his best postgrad students into his confidence and told us what was going on. We laboured down there for a year. Another three months and we could have been in a position to tell people what we had.”
“Which was?” Costa asked.
“The largest and most important mithraeum anyone’s ever found in Rome. Probably the best source of information we were ever going to have on the Mithraic cult.”
“And now it’s all gone.”
“No,” she snapped. “It’s all in little pieces. In fifty years’ time, perhaps, when everyone’s forgotten about Giorgio’s mess, maybe they’ll come up with the budget to try to put it all back together. Maybe. Not that it will matter to me by then. Just because what I work with is timeless doesn’t mean I’m that way myself.”
Peroni took out a pad. “The other students. We’d like their names.”
She thought about arguing for a moment, then reeled off what he wanted. One now worked in Oxford, two in the States. The last was a professor in Palermo. She hadn’t seen any of them in years.
“Is that it?” she demanded.
“We’re trying to find out where Giorgio might be now,” Costa replied. “We’re trying to understand what happened back then. Whether that can help us today.”
“I don’t—”
“We’re trying, Professor Turnhouse,” Peroni interjected, “to understand what happened to Alessio, too. Doesn’t that make you curious in the slightest?”
She hesitated, gave Peroni a dark look, then said, “If you really want my help, you can cut out that kind of bullshit. I didn’t have anything to do with Alessio getting lost. I haven’t the faintest idea what happened to him. You’re the police, aren’t you? Isn’t that your job?”
Costa slid a hand across to Peroni’s arm and stopped the big man reacting.
“Agreed,” he said evenly. “Which is why we’re here, Professor Turnhouse. What was Giorgio like back then?”
She said something curt and monosyllabic under her breath, then stared deliberately at her watch.
“Also,” Costa persisted, “what’s he like now? Changed or what?”
She stopped looking at her wrist and gazed straight into his face. Judith Turnhouse wasn’t a woman who felt frightened of anything, he realised. She was a senior academic, an important cog in an important wheel, at least inside her own head. She wasn’t much interested in anything else.
“Now?” she repeated icily.
“Giorgio Bramante came here. A week ago. He had an argument with someone. So loud even the Carabinieri outside heard it. Then he stormed off. My guess is he had that argument with you.”
She toyed with the pen on the desk. “Really?”
“You know,” Costa continued, “on that basis alone I could go to a magistrate. Giorgio is a convicted killer who’s picked up his old bad habits. He’s a threat to the community. I could ask for papers that would let me go through everything here. Your computers. Your files. Every last site you’re working on inside that hill…”
“We’re working on nothing,” she grumbled. “Everything is elsewhere these days.”
Peroni smiled and folded his very large arms over his chest. “We could sit here looking at you for so long, that year-end report will be about next year. If you’re lucky.”
Her pale, anxious face was taut with some inner, constrained fury.
“Or,” Costa suggested, “we could just have a friendly chat, a look around that site, and be out of here by noon. It’s up to you.”
Judith Turnhouse picked up the phone, then said, in an accent still marked by her native American, “Chiara? Cancel all my appointments.” She glared at them. “Persuasive pair, aren’t you?”
“Rumour has it,” Peroni concurred.
“You.” She pointed at Costa. “The polite one. Start taking notes. I’ll tell you everything I know about dear, sweet Giorgio, past and present.”
She rose and went to a floor-length cupboard by the window. From it, she removed a bright orange jumpsuit, stepping into it in an easy, familiar fashion.
“After that,” Judith Turnhouse added, “I’ll show you what was once a miracle.”
By seven o’clock they still had only the one student, the one suspect: Ludo Torchia. The others would, Falcone suspected, be found soon. They weren’t the kind to stay invisible for long. They dabbled in drugs and took a close, almost unhealthy, interest in Giorgio Bramante’s theories about Mithraism, Ludo Torchia most of all. But nothing Falcone had seen made him suspect these six were capable of cooking up the conspiracy the media were looking for.
Torchia had been placed in the last interview room in the basement, a former cell with no window to the outside, just an air vent and bright lighting, a metal table and four chairs. It was the place they reserved for more difficult customers, and ones they wanted to frighten a little. There were four other rooms adjoining it, running to the old metal staircase that led up to the ground floor offices. No one else was in for questioning that night. Falcone was leaving the other rooms open for the remaining students when they were found. The Bramante case was the Questura’s sole focus, and would remain so until either a resolution emerged, or it became apparent that the moment was lost, and the investigation would gradually subside into the low-key, quiet operation that would acknowledge what Falcone now believed to be true: Alessio Bramante was already dead.
Under instructions to await Commissario Messina’s arrival, he had spoken with the student only to establish the bare essentials: his name, his address. Everything else — all the routine checks and procedures — were to wait. Messina was, it seemed, playing this game by ear. It seemed a dangerous and unnecessary response to the hysteria now being played out in the street and on the TV.
Falcone also decided that Giorgio Bramante, to the man’s obvious fury, would wait elsewhere until Messina’s arrival. He half hoped he could make his superior see sense. Then, at ten minutes to eight, the commissario returned to the Questura. Falcone took one look at his face and realised it wasn’t even worth the effort. The man looked as furious as Bramante himself. He also looked lost, something which Falcone did not see in Alessio’s father.
“The others?” Messina demanded.
“Still looking,” Falcone replied. “We’ll find them.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the commissario grumbled. “One will do. Where’s Giorgio?”
Reluctantly, aware that there was no sense in arguing, Falcone went to fetch the man himself.
Giorgio Bramante didn’t say a word when he saw Messina. That, in itself, Falcone found intriguing.
Messina clapped him on the shoulder and peered into his eyes.
“We will find your boy, Giorgio,” he said firmly. “Give us twenty minutes with this creature to ourselves. If we have nothing after that… it’s your turn.”
It was hard to believe there had ever been anything of value here. Beyond the Orange Garden, on the steep slope that led down the sharp riverside incline of the Aventino, adjoining the Clivo di Rocca Savella, was what now looked like a rubbish dump. The ground was uneven, part grass, part dun earth. Empty plastic bottles were strewn around in patches of debris beneath low, meagre scrub. Costa spotted two used syringes before they’d even scrambled down the muddy narrow path that led from the park above, then wound, by a snaking, perilous route, on to the throng of the riverside road below.
They stumbled through the mud until they found a small platform of even earth. The rain had stopped. Judith Turnhouse had dragged up the hood of her caving suit. She looked around, grimaced, then pulled the hood down again.
“This is it?” Peroni asked.
“This was it,” she replied.