Costa stayed.
There was a body there, lying on its back, rigid on the bed. The dead woman was in a dressing gown, her hands taut around her throat.
One step closer and he’d seen all he needed. The knife was still in her body, plunged deep into her throat. Her fingers gripped the shaft and the blade. Black gore caked around the neckline of her grubby nightdress. As he watched, one of the cats ran across the room, dashed onto her chest, and began to lick in a proprietorial, threatening gesture, staring at him, daring him to intervene.
Costa yelled at the thing, then shooed it away with a violent gesture. It darted into the shadows and waited.
He tried to hold his breath as he took a good look around. Then he went back to where Peroni stood. The odour was still there, identifiable: cat piss and old dried blood.
“Is it what I think?” the big man asked.
“Stabbed in the throat. Probably as she lay in bed. As you noticed, there are no photographs at all. Just this…”
He passed Peroni the photo frame he’d found in the bedroom. The glass was broken. Half the picture had been torn away. What remained showed the sickly-looking Bernardo Giordano out of doors, standing, smiling proudly, the way a man would have smiled if he were being photographed next to someone, a child perhaps, of whom he was inordinately proud.
“What the hell’s going on, Nic?” Peroni asked. “Why would Giorgio Bramante want to kill some crazy old woman out here? Did he know about Alessio?”
Costa shook his head. A knife in the throat? Torn-up photos?
Peroni took two steps up the stairs, found a patch in the lee of the wall that had been left reasonably dry, sat down and stared glumly at his partner.
“If we do nothing but call in about this, Messina will have our hides. I don’t care a damn about that. In fact, unlike you, I might welcome it. But we’ll either get thrown into a cell to await his pleasure or bullied into going back on duty. Then we’ll have to wait for him and Bavetti to read the instruction manual on how to start a murder investigation. If Leo has any time left at all, it’s not that kind of time.”
Peroni hit the target spot on. He always did. Costa wondered whether he’d ever be able to work with another officer when the big man finally gave in to temptation and took retirement.
“I agree,” Costa said.
“So what do we do?”
“When we have something we can work with, we go. And make that call on the way out.”
Peroni nodded. “And when will we have something?”
“As soon as we talk to the old man.”
Peroni smiled. He wasn’t slow. He’d picked it up instantly too. He just wanted Costa to make the connection, to take the lead he knew was there already.
“‘You’d think that boy of hers would help,’” he quoted.
“Exactly.”
Finally, something was moving. Costa’s head felt light and clear, the way it did when a case began to open up.
They walked back up the stairs, grateful for what might almost pass for fresh air. As he hit the top step, Costa’s phone rang.
Giorgio Bramante turned the flashlight on his watch and frowned. Falcone sat on the broken stone wall in his cell, following his movements in the gloom.
“Are you in a hurry, Giorgio?”
“Perhaps they’re happy to let you rot,” Bramante replied without emotion.
“Perhaps,” he agreed.
From what he could work out — Bramante had taken his watch after searching him in the piazza after the taxi had left — Falcone had spent a half day or more trapped in this subterranean prison, locked behind an iron door in a chamber of brick, rock, and earth that appeared to be as old as Rome itself. To his faint surprise he had been treated with a distant respect. No violence, not much in the way of threats. It was as if Bramante’s mind was, in truth, elsewhere, on other matters, and abducting Falcone was merely a step along the way.
He had been given a blanket and some water, left alone for hours, though Falcone had the sense Bramante never strayed far from the site. The man had a mobile phone and a pair of binoculars. Perhaps he simply walked to the distant entrance they’d passed on the way in to see if they were still alone. Perhaps he was waiting….
Now that he was back, he looked as if he would stay for good, perched on the remains of an old, upright fluted column outside the iron gate, unwrapping a supermarket panino.
“I could use something to eat,” Falcone remarked.
Bramante looked at him, grunted, then broke the sandwich in half and passed it through the bars.
“Is this the last meal for a condemned man?” Falcone wondered. “I’d always pictured something more substantial.”
“You’re a curious bastard, aren’t you?”
“That is,” Falcone replied, nodding, “one of my many failings.”
“You were curious all those years ago.”
“About you, mainly. There was so much that puzzled me.”
“Such as?”
Falcone took a bite of the sandwich. “Why you took Alessio there in the first place.”
Bramante cast him a dark look. “You don’t have children.”
“Enlighten me.”
He looked at his watch again. “A son must grow. He has to learn to be strong. To compete. You can’t protect them from everything. It doesn’t work. One day — it comes, inevitably — you’re not around. And that’s when it happens.”
“What?”
“What people think of as the real world,” Bramante answered wearily.
“So being left alone in a cave, somewhere he was frightened — that would make Alessio stronger?”
Bramante scowled and shook his head. There was something Falcone, to his dismay, still didn’t grasp.
“I never had the courage to think about parenthood,” Bramante confessed. “When I married, it was one of the first things my wife learned about me. You’d think she would have worked that out before. Being a father seems to require something selfless. To raise a child, knowing that, in the end, you must send it on its way. Cut the strings. Let it go. Perhaps I’m too possessive. The few things I love I like to keep.”
The last sentence surprised Falcone. He wondered if Bramante really meant it. He wondered, too, how Raffaella Arcangelo was feeling. It had been a cruel, hard way to say goodbye. But wasn’t that the point?
Then he heard something from above, a loud, high-pitched sound. The screech of a police siren.
“But at the age of seven?” Falcone asked. “He was too young, Giorgio. Even a man like me knows that. You were his father. You, of all people…”
Bramante reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a black handgun. He pointed it straight through the bars, holding the barrel a hand’s length away from Falcone’s skull.
The inspector took a final bite of the sandwich, finishing it.
“I hate processed cheese,” he commented. “Why do people buy this rubbish?”
“What is it with you, Falcone?” Bramante snapped. “Don’t you know how many men I’ve killed?”
“I’ve a pretty good idea,” the inspector replied. “But you didn’t kill Alessio, even if a part of you feels you did. Yet that is what instils the most guilt in you. Surely you see the irony?”
Bramante didn’t move.
“I had hoped,” Falcone went on, “to find him. Not just for you. For his mother. For us all. When a child goes missing like that, it breaks the natural order somehow. It’s as if someone’s scrawled graffiti on something beautiful. You can fool yourself it doesn’t really matter. But it does. Until someone removes the stain, you never feel quite happy. You never come to terms with what’s happened.”
“And you’re that person? The person who removes the stain?”