Emily smiled. There was something in the older woman’s manner — a simple, unspoken sentence, “I understand” — that made her feel a little better already.
“You’re getting married in the summer,” Anna added. “That would be a good time to start thinking of trying again. Here’s a suggestion from a stuffy, old-fashioned, rural Catholic. Life is a journey, not a race, Emily. Be patient. Be a rebel for your generation. Try bearing a child in wedlock. I suggest you discuss this with your uncle. He can’t wait to come in. If that’s all right with you.”
Emily shook her head. “My uncle?”
Anna’s bright eyes flared with sudden outrage. “I knew that old goat lied! Messina swore you were his niece! The daughter of some American relative of his. How else do you think you got a private room?”
“Ah,” Emily said quietly. “My uncle. I’d love to see him.”
It was inevitable that, after the brief medical formalities — he already appeared to understand as much about her condition as she did — the conversation would turn inexorably to what had happened in Rome.
Arturo Messina explained what he knew — which seemed considerable — with the precise, composed directness she expected of a man of his background and experience. When he was done, he turned his face away from her and stared into the street outside, now dark, with just a single lamp to illuminate the old walls of the convent opposite, the night punctuated again by the continuing echo of ball against brick, and the distant laughter of the young.
“A woman’s anger is different from a man’s,” Arturo said. “We find ourselves gripped by a sudden, cataclysmic fury. With a woman, anger lasts. Had I discovered what had happened to that boy when I should have, none of this would have occurred.”
She reached out and took his hand. He looked weary and old.
“You could say that about so many things, Arturo. If Bramante had been a better father, if he’d been capable of controlling his temper and his weaknesses. If this woman had come to her senses over the years, instead of letting her hatred grow alongside his.”
“None of these would have mattered if I’d found him,” he said immediately.
“No. But we’re not perfect, none of us. You did what you thought best. What else could you do?”
He nodded and said nothing, although she could sense his dissatisfaction.
“And Alessio?” she asked. “What will happen to him?”
He shrugged, as if there were few options to be considered. “The lawyers will run up some tidy bills about that. The charge, I imagine, will be an accessory to attempted suicide. The woman’s death could be construed as self-defence. He had nothing to do with the other killings, or so he says, and Leo seems to believe him, so it must be true.”
Arturo paused and looked down at her.
“What about the boy Giorgio first killed? Ludo Torchia?”
He grimaced. “Torchia was no boy.”
“Then why didn’t he tell you the truth? It would have been so simple….”
Arturo Messina laughed and squeezed her hand. “You know, you really do belong in a police force somewhere,” he observed. “You tell me.”
She considered the possibilities.
“Because he was just a boy. What Ludo was looking for was adulthood, and he believed the only way to find it was through some ritual. Any ritual. It was simply that Giorgio provided a convenient one. A ritual that bound them together, in some kind of implicit secrecy Torchia felt he couldn’t break. Not even in circumstances like those.”
Arturo nodded.
“Especially in circumstances like that, don’t you think?” Emily continued. “When is a warrior most tested? In extremis. It makes no sense, not in our world. But it’s not for us to appreciate what they believe. All that matters is that it was real to those concerned. Ludo was terribly flawed. I imagine little else was real to him. He told Giorgio the truth. That he’d no idea what had happened to Alessio. Giorgio didn’t believe him. And so he killed him.”
Arturo Messina’s face fell. “Nor did I.”
“At least Leo wasn’t hurt,” she said, hunting for some news with which to console him.
“More by luck than anything. I don’t imagine Bramante much cared whether Leo was harmed or not. He simply wished to enrage the police sufficiently to engineer the end he wanted, once his labours — if I may describe them that way — were complete.” He shook his head. “Lord knows, he tried hard to drive my son to want him dead. Entering the Questura like that. Abducting Leo. Doing what he did to that poor young policewoman.”
“They were insane. The Turnhouse woman and Bramante.”
“He was, perhaps,” he replied. “If you count being simultaneously homicidal and suicidal as madness, and there I’m not sure. In his own mind, I imagine Giorgio felt himself to be as sane as the rest of us. As to the woman… no. She wished to inflict upon the man who had failed her the greatest pain imaginable. After all, she could have discouraged him in this pointless cycle of revenge when he was in jail, instead of becoming his accomplice. She certainly understood that if you condition a child, if you make it think there is only one possible view of the world, the one which you present to it, then the poor soul will do anything. Anything. Even murder its own father. You asked why Alessio would believe these stories. Because they came from her. And because they were the only stories he had.”
“But she was wrong, Arturo,” Emily pointed out. “In the end, he wouldn’t kill his father.”
He leaned over to the bed and peered into her face. “That is true. Nevertheless, I should tell you something. I was a good police officer for many a year, and a poor commissario only once. Judith Turnhouse did not simply want Alessio to shoot his father. She wanted Giorgio to understand two things before he died. That his son still lived and would bring about his own end. And that she had taken him. Both as a child and as a man. As a lover, if one can call it that. Perhaps she treated Alessio the way Giorgio had once treated her. Need I say more?”
“But…” she started to object, and found she lacked the words.
“We call this insanity only because we’re afraid to see it for what it truly is,” Arturo insisted. “A perversion, a monstrous perversion, of the emotions we all feel and desperately hope to suppress. Loss and rejection. Hatred and revenge. She was obsessive, cunning, and fixated. But she was not insane. We should not allow ourselves the comfort of thinking that.”
Arturo eyed the clock on the wall. “Your young man will be here very soon, I think. I would have brought flowers but I didn’t want to steal his thunder. He will feel guilty. He will believe he neglected you at a time when you most needed him.”
“That’s not true,” she answered. “I never told Nic what was happening here. I didn’t want to distract him. Anyway, there was nothing he could do. And plenty he could — and did — achieve in Rome.”
Arturo Messina seemed to approve of that answer.
“Listen to an old man,” he told her. “We are human. We are designed to think with the head and with the heart. Ignore one and the other will fail you, too. Talk to Nic, my dear. Listen to him. Make sure he does the same with you. It is at moments like these that families go wrong. I speak from experience. The fissures, the doubts, the guilty unspoken fears… these enter our lives unseen only to surface years later, like old wounds we thought we’d forgotten. Be wary, my young friend. Both of you. Once you allow these creatures to breathe, they can be hard to smother. After a time… impossible perhaps. Raffaella Arcangelo and Leo Falcone must be thinking these same thoughts themselves. She is determined to see him, you know. However embarrassed he might be over that stupid phone call.”