“Kick away, you fat old bastard,” Torchia hissed. “I wouldn’t tell you shits a thing. Ever.”
Messina backed off. There was a wild look in his eyes Falcone didn’t recognise. He was lost for a way forward. And there was only one, Falcone knew that. Patient, persistent police work. Slow, relentless questioning. None of which felt good in the light of one certainty which was, he felt, now spreading inside the Questura and out: Alessio Bramante was already dead somewhere. It was just a question of recovering the body.
“Give him to the father,” Messina ordered.
Torchia’s eyes sparked with a mix of fear and interest. “What?”
“Talk to me or talk to Giorgio Bramante!” Messina bellowed.
Torchia wiped the blood from his face and mumbled, “I’ve got nothing to say to any of you. I want a lawyer. You can’t go beating people up like this. I want a lawyer. Now.”
Messina threw open the cell door. Bramante already stood there, arms folded, waiting, still as a statue, powerful arms folded over his chest.
“Ludo,” he said simply.
“No,” Falcone declared immediately. “This is not right. This is the Questura—”
“We’re getting nowhere,” Messina snapped, taking Falcone by the arm.
Falcone couldn’t believe his ears. “Sir… if anyone should hear of this—”
“I don’t care!” the commissario yelled, pushing him aside, ignoring his protests. “Not about this stinking moron. I just want that boy. You’ve an hour, Giorgio. Undisturbed. You hear me, Falcone?”
Bramante stepped round them without a word, walked into the cell, and slammed the iron door behind him.
The corridor outside had lost a fluorescent tube some nights before. It left the place in semidarkness. Falcone moved into the light. He wanted Messina to see his face.
“I disassociate myself from this decision completely,” he said quietly. “If I’m asked what happened, I’ll tell them.”
“You do that, Leo,” Messina replied. “I hope it helps you sleep at night. But if you set foot in that room before the hour’s up, I’ll have your scrawny backside across the coals first. You’ll never make inspector. I promise. You’ll never show your smug face in this Questura again.”
Then he stalked off. Giorgio Bramante and Ludo Torchia were alone together in the small cell, in the dark bowels of the Questura, the last room in a basement corridor, far from sight.
Falcone went into the empty interview room, took out one of the small metal chairs, set it by the door of the cell, and waited.
It took scarcely minutes for the first sounds to eke their way under the iron door. Not long after, the screaming began.
The racket of the traffic almost disappeared once they’d descended the steps to the Tiber. Costa had rarely been on the broad riverside pathway during the day. At night, this was a place for the homeless and the crooked, the city’s lost and forlorn, men and a few women all hoping to stay hidden. He hardly recognised the place now. The water’s edge was green and luxuriant, with a straggle of cow parsley, wild fig, and laurel bushes tumbling down towards the grey sweep of the river. Two lean black cormorants skimmed the surface, gleaming dark darts, as they sped towards Tiber Island.
Then something rat shaped but much larger scuttled from a narrow, leaking spring and crossed their path, racing to safety in the undergrowth to their left.
“What the hell was that?” Peroni almost leapt out of his skin.
“Coypu,” Judith Turnhouse told them. “They were brought in for their fur, then went native. They give the rats something to fight.”
“You must come here a lot,” the big man said, looking uncomfortable at the thought that giant, foreign rodents were thriving in the centre of his adopted city.
“We work underground,” she said caustically. “I thought you understood that.”
The outlet was so large the pathway had been extended to form a bridge over the surging waters that roared out of the ancient stone mouth. The original exit was probably three metres high, almost a perfect semicircle, three layers of old stones now set in grey mud and water. It stood inside a huge modern enclosure that must have run almost to the road above and seemed to incorporate other, more modern drain outlets, funnelling them into the same rough, thrashing gush of grubby water as it fed into the river, just above the weir.
Straggly trees fought feebly through the mud on either side of the channel. Shredded plastic trash and paper hung from their bare branches like lost Tibetan prayers, waving feebly in the renewing drizzle. The same kind of litter lay trapped in the broken and ragged wire storm guard that had once protected the lower half of the structure, and was now broken in multiple places.
Something lurked in the darkness at the back of this hidden cavern, dug deep into the underside of the road above. Costa squinted into the gloom, took out his pocket torch, and tried to see what it was.
“I really think I need that suit—” he was starting to say, when there was a splash beneath them. Judith Turnhouse was in the grubby water, furious, screeching at the makeshift building just visible in the man-made cavern ahead.
She stormed over to the old drain and clambered up onto the modern structure above it.
Peroni stared mournfully after her.
“It’s OK, Nic,” he muttered. “I’ll do it. Your clothes are so much nicer than mine.”
“You’re too kind,” Costa said, and leapt in anyway. He got there just a second or two behind the woman, while Peroni was still thrashing through the brown mud.
It was a home of kinds. Some old timber and scaffolding thrown together to make a shelter held together by industrial polythene and scraps of tarpaulin. There was a battered picnic table inside and a little folding stool. Plus the remains of some food. Recent. A few scraps of bread and meat that, to Costa’s eye, had probably been gnawed at by a rodent after some human had discarded them.
Judith Turnhouse was going a little crazy. This was, Costa supposed, her territory in a way. The stone entrance almost looked as if it belonged in a museum, the city crest now barely visible.
“How dare they?” she screeched. “How dare they?”
“They’re homeless,” Costa replied, and suddenly remembered, with a sharp twinge of guilt, how long it had been since he’d followed his father’s dictum: one gift a day to the poor, without fail.
But the poor didn’t normally leave scraps of food lying around for the rats to finish.
He walked into the shelter. It didn’t smell any worse than the drain outside. There was no effluent around here, only dank, stagnant water and the kind of refuse that stayed around forever, modern plastic and metal.
Costa kicked over the stool and ran a foot through the rubbish that lay on the floor. Newspapers, and a few sheets from an office printer. He picked them up. The crest of the archaeological department stood on the top. Beneath was a computerised map of what appeared to be a drain system somewhere in the vicinity of the Villa Borghese, across the city.
Peroni caught up with him, a little out of breath. The big cop stared at the paper, then the woman. She was poking her way into one of the side drains. It didn’t look modern at all, now Costa saw it close up.
“Signora Turnhouse!” Peroni yelled. “Do not go in there. Please.”
She didn’t take any notice.
“Damn,” Peroni muttered. “He could still be around, Nic.”
“Agreed,” Costa said, and scrambled across the slimy stone towards her, shouting to the woman to stand still.
That worked. She stopped. He reached her, hoped she understood there was a reason a gun now rested in his hand.
“This isn’t how I remember the place.” She sounded a little scared. “I can’t put my finger on it. This isn’t as old as the rest. Fifteenth, sixteenth century, maybe. We used to use it for study work. A group of us went in here with Giorgio the first year we were here. But it was different then somehow. That’s impossible.”