Peroni strode over to the young agente, kept well back this time, bent down on one knee, on the far side from Teresa.
“Rosa,” he said quietly. “I know this is a terrible time to ask. But Leo — did you see him? Do you know what happened?”
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were glazed with tears, so shiny she couldn’t be seeing a thing, except, Costa thought, some unwanted mental images of what had happened.
“No,” she said firmly.
Peroni glanced at Teresa, pleading.
“Leo’s a good man,” she insisted. “I know you didn’t get on well, Rosa, but we really need to find him.”
Something, some memory, made the young policewoman shudder, raising her hand to her mouth. Teresa Lupo hugged her, tight, in a way no man could, perhaps for a long time.
“I don’t know.” Rosa choked with fury on her own ignorance. “He just did what he did, then took us here. I didn’t even know about Inspector Falcone until these men came. What was he doing?”
“He gave himself up to free you,” Teresa answered quietly. “That’s what we think, anyway.”
Rosa’s head went down again.
“You should go back to the Questura now with these officers,” Peroni said, nodding at the uniformed women. “Tell them what you want. Just…”
Rosa Prabakaran’s agonised, tear-stained face rose to look at them. “I didn’t ask him to do that!” she cried. “I didn’t know!”
“Hey, hey, hey!” Peroni said quickly. “Leo would have done that for any of us. That’s…” He cast an ugly glance in the direction of Messina and Bavetti, who’d just walked out of the refrigerated storage room, and now stood, white-faced and shocked, talking in low tones to each other. “That’s what comes naturally to some people.”
Rosa dragged an arm across her face, like a child, angry, ashamed.
Then the two senior officers marched over briskly, trying to look unmoved.
“I want,” the commissario announced to everyone in earshot, “everything focused on finding this bastard Bramante from now on. We assume Falcone is alive. When Bramante killed before, he usually made his handiwork very obvious. Until that is the case — and I pray it won’t be — we assume Falcone is a prisoner, not a victim. I want officers armed at all times. I want helicopter surveillance. And the hostage rescue unit. I want them too. The firearms people.”
Costa blinked. “Firearms?”
“Exactly,” Messina concurred.
There were two specialist state police hostage teams in the city. One focused on negotiation, the second was specifically trained to deal with urgent, high-priority incidents involving captives. Messina was making it clear he wanted the latter. The team existed more out of pride than necessity. The Carabinieri and the secret services handled most security events. But what they had, the state police wanted too.
“If Leo’s a hostage,” Peroni observed, “the last thing we want is a bunch of people pointing guns at the man who’s holding him.”
“You’re experts on hostage-taking now, are you?” the commissario barked. “Is there anything you two don’t have an opinion on?”
“We’re just trying to pass on what we think Inspector Falcone would say in the circumstances,” Costa interposed.
“Leo Falcone walked out of the Questura against my direct orders! He’s just made things ten times worse.”
Messina glanced down at Rosa Prabakaran. He looked as if he really didn’t want to see her at all. “What happened here, Prabakaran?” he demanded. “I need to know. Now.”
“No, Commissario.” Teresa Lupo rose. She prodded a stubby finger into his dark serge coat. “Not now. There are protocols and procedures for situations like this. They will be followed.”
“You’re the pathologist here,” Messina bawled at her. His hand flapped close in her face. “You do your job, I’ll do mine. I want to know.”
“Know what?” Teresa demanded, standing her ground.
“What happened?”
Costa broke in. “Agente Prabakaran has nothing to tell us about Inspector Falcone. She wasn’t even aware he’d been taken until someone told her this morning.”
“I am the commanding officer. I demand a full report—”
“Oh please!” Teresa interrupted. “Don’t you have eyes, man? Can’t you see what happened?”
“Remember your place,” Messina hissed, and stuck out a beefy arm to push her out of the way.
Costa watched what happened next with amazement.
Teresa Lupo’s arm rose in what seemed to him a passable imitation of a boxer’s right hook, caught Messina on the chin, then sent the large commissario spinning back into the arms of Bavetti, who just managed to break his fall as the man hit the stone floor.
A barely hidden ripple of amusement ran around the officers, uniformed and plainclothes, watching the scene. No one, except Bavetti, moved a muscle to help the fallen man.
Teresa turned to Costa and Peroni. “Do you really think Leo could still be alive?”
“Bramante was in no rush to kill him before,” Costa insisted, adding, with a glance at Messina, half dazed on the ground, “We could be in luck. If we had something to offer him…”
“Such as?” she asked.
“Such as finding out what happened to his son,” Costa suggested.
“This is ridiculous,” Messina snapped savagely, scrambling to his feet, not yet ready to look Teresa Lupo in the face. “If we didn’t get to the bottom of that fourteen years ago, what chance do we have now?”
She shook her head in disappointment. “For you, Commissario, I suspect the answer is none. Silvio?”
Di Capua, who was just loving this, made a military salute. Teresa threw her briefcase across to him with one easy movement.
“You know the routine,” she told her assistant. “Check for anything at the scene that can narrow down that list of potential sites Leo left us. Once the gentlemen here have ceased walking around with their chins dragging on the floor, they will, I trust, realise their time will be better spent trying to find the living instead of gawping at the dead.”
“Done,” Silvio replied happily. “And you?”
The pathologist stroked her forehead with the back of her large hand, then emitted a long theatrical sigh.
“If anyone asks, I have a terrible headache. Ladies?”
The two female police officers were helping Rosa Prabakaran to her feet. Teresa Lupo took one big stride towards them, sending Bruno Messina scampering back as she approached.
“I think,” she said, “it’s time to leave this place to the weaker sex.”
“With the exception,” she added, pointing to Peroni and Costa, “of you two.”
The hospital seemed to be run by nuns, mute, unsmiling figures who drifted around busily, taking patients and equipment and pale manila record folders around the maze of endless corridors. It was in a beautiful Renaissance building not far from the Duomo, a massive, ornate, foursquare leviathan that, from the outside, looked more like a palace than a place for the sick, or those just thinking of joining them. Arturo Messina had insisted on accompanying her. He sat with Emily on hard metal chairs in a waiting room with peeling paint and rusty windows that gave out onto a grey courtyard, its cobblestones shining with the constant rain. Four other women in front of her in the queue waited patiently with telltale bulges in their tummies, only partly covered by the magazines they read intently.
Emily Deacon, who was still slim, still, in her own mind, only half-attached to the being growing inside her, glanced at them and felt an unwanted sense of shock. This is me too, she thought. This is how I will look in just a few months.