But Foglia was spot on. Leo was desperate.
“What do you want?” the voice on the line demanded. “If it’s a free holiday, we’d love to see you. Please come. May or June, when the fresh tuna are in. I’ll teach you how to fish. How to relax.”
“I’ll take you up on that,” Falcone promised.
“No you won’t, Leo. Does it make you feel good? To know you were right all along? That Giorgio Bramante was some kind of animal?”
“Not at all,” he replied honestly. “I wish to God I’d been wrong. That he’d just come out of jail, gone to a quiet academic job somewhere, and put the past behind him.”
“But he couldn’t, could he? Not without knowing.”
“No.”
Falcone could recall precisely Torchia’s dying words in the back of that ambulance, amid the cacophony of horns and furious human voices outside. They hadn’t made sense at the time. They didn’t now.
“You must have seen many people die, Patrizio. Does it matter what they say?”
“Rarely. I had one miserable, tightfisted old bastard tell his wife to remember to turn off the lights afterwards. That was one to remember.”
“And Ludo Torchia?”
There was a pause on the line. Then Foglia said softly, “Meglio una bella bugia che una brutta verità.”
The words were just as Falcone remembered them, spat out by the dying Torchia one by one, punctuated by some kind of ironic, choking laughter.
Better a beautiful lie than an ugly truth.
“Funny old saying at the best of times,” Foglia declared. “They seem to me the dying words of an actor, someone who is playing a game in his head, even to the end. Do you have any idea what he meant?”
“The beautiful lie was surely Giorgio Bramante. The idea that he was some kind of loving father figure, the man we all believed him to be.”
“And the ugly truth?”
“There you have me.”
There was an awkward pause on the line.
“Leo, you will visit us again one day, won’t you? It’s lovely here in the spring. We would both enjoy your company.”
“Of course. You heard nothing more? There was a moment…”
When Torchia had closed his eyes again, as the drug seemed to wear off, Falcone — furious, desperate — had thrown open the ambulance door and screamed at the two medics there to find some way, any way, through the snarl of cars and buses and lorries blocking the Via Labicana. It was a slender hope, but perhaps there had been some few words that had eluded him.
“He said nothing more, Leo. I’m sorry.”
“No. I’m the one who should apologise. I should never have dragged this back into the light of day for you. It’s unfair.”
The silence again. A thought pricked at Leo Falcone’s mind. Patrizio Foglia did have some secret weighing on his conscience, surely.
“There’s something I never knew, isn’t there?” he asked.
Foglia sighed.
“Oh God. Why does it have to keep coming back? Why doesn’t the man simply mourn his own child and find himself a life somehow? Or put a gun to his own head for a change?”
“Tell me what you know. Please.”
He could never, not in a million years, have predicted what he heard next.
“I took a close interest in the autopsy,” Foglia said softly. “I had good reason, as you must appreciate.”
“And?”
“There was clear evidence Torchia had anal sex that day. Brutal. There was blood and bruising. It had… culminated too. Possibly rape. Possibly sadomasochistic. I am not an expert in these matters.”
Falcone’s mind went blank. Without thinking, he said, “Those boys were down those caves for some kind of ritual. There were drugs. I imagine we shouldn’t be surprised.”
In his ear, he heard Foglia’s long, pained intake of breath.
“It wasn’t in the caves, Leo. The evidence was plain and fresh and incontrovertible. What happened happened shortly before he died. In the Questura. In the cell where you and Messina and Giorgio Bramante questioned him.”
Falcone’s vision became blurred. His breath snagged. “And you told no one?” he asked, incredulous.
“I asked the pathologist to leave it out of his report. He was… accommodating. The Questura was in enough trouble already. Did you really want another scandal on your hands? Whether it was Bramante, Messina… or you… either way, it would have rebounded on us. Besides, what use could it possibly have been? Torchia was dead. Bramante was in custody. You had your man.”
“The boy!” Falcone responded, aware he was yelling into the phone, unable to stop himself. “What about the boy? Had I known that…”
Those were the early days of DNA. They could have identified Bramante as the sexual assailant, too, surely, and that would have changed the entire complexion of the case.
“Then what?” the voice on the line demanded crossly. “Do tell me, Leo. I would love to know.”
“Then perhaps…”
There could be no instant answer. What mattered was that he had been robbed of some knowledge that was, surely, useful, if only he could begin to comprehend its significance.
“I’m sorry,” Foglia said. “I just wanted an end to it. We all did. I wish—”
“Good night,” Falcone snapped, then slammed down the phone.
He sat alone, placed his head in his hands, didn’t mind at that moment what a passerby seeing him like this in his office would think.
Was this the ugly truth? That Giorgio Bramante was not simply just a careless father, but a man gripped by some dark, secret side to his character? If it was true, his wife, with her self-inflicted wounds and her compulsive need to paint their lost child, over and over again, must surely have known.
He swore as another realisation struck him. The young Indian detective had been deputed to followed Beatrice Bramante all day long. He’d never even looked for her report.
Falcone keyed the name Prabakaran into the computer.
It came up with nothing since the previous evening.
“Novices…”
She would be home by now. He let a low curse slip from his lips, then looked up her mobile number, picked up the phone, and dialled it, steeling himself for the conversation that would follow, one in which he would remind a junior officer that no one on his team ever went off-duty without filing a report.
The phone rang three times. A man’s voice answered.
“I would like to speak to Agente Prabakaran,” the inspector said impatiently, adding, “This is Inspector Falcone.”
“Leo,” said a cold, amused voice at the other end. “What took you so long?”
Peroni was trying to nail down possible underground locations for Bramante in the company of the worm geek, two archaeology students the intelligence team had dug up, and a room full of maps. So Costa found a quiet corner in the office and called Orvieto. Emily’s voice sounded distant, lacking the warm, confident timbre he’d come to expect. She was just a few hours away by car, but she might as well have been on the other side of the world. When he called, the others were having dinner; she was alone in her room, resting. It wasn’t like her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing. I just didn’t want company. Also, it pains me to watch others enjoying good wine when I can’t join in.”
“How do you feel?”
There was a pause. This was so new for both of them. The doctors had said she should expect to feel tired, perhaps depressed from time to time.
“Perhaps I’ll go and see someone tomorrow,” she conceded, rather than answer his question. “It’s only a little thing.”
“You do that tonight,” he said immediately. “Why wait?”
“Because I know what the doctor will say. He’ll sigh and think, Here’s another first-time mother teetering on the edge of panic. All because it’s new to her. Nothing more. Children come into the world all the time, Nic.”