“You heard.”
Neri looked at the pair of them. Adele was acting as if the kid didn’t even exist. “I wish you two could work up the energy to be civilized to each other once in a while. It would make my life a whole lot easier.” He watched. They didn’t even exchange glances.
“Families,” Neri grunted, then phoned downstairs, telling them to get the Mercedes ready. He keyed in the security code that unlocked the big metal door. It felt like a prison sometimes, hiding behind the bodyguards, riding around in a car that had been discreetly filled with bullet-proof panelling. But that was the way of the world these days.
“Bye,” Emilio Neri grunted, and was gone, without even looking back.
Mickey waited awhile, pretending to read the magazine. Finally he put it down and looked across at her. She’d finished the orange juice. She was lying back on the sofa in her perfect silk pyjamas, eyes closed, glossy red hair splayed out on the white leather. Pretending she was asleep. She wasn’t really. They both knew that.
“Maybe he’s right,” he said.
She opened her eyes and turned her head lazily, just enough to meet his gaze. She had very bright eyes, vivid green, never still. Not smart eyes, he thought. Just sufficiently expressionless to hide the odd lie.
“About what?”
“About us getting along a little better.”
She became alert, alarmed perhaps. She looked at the door. There was a hard cast in her face: fear.
Mickey got up, stretched his arms and yawned. He was wearing a thin tee-shirt and tight designer jeans. She watched him, worried. They heard the sound of the big main door to the street slamming shut three floors below, and then, directly after, the growl of the departing Mercedes.
Adele Neri got up from the sofa, went to the door and threw the bolt, walked across to her stepson, put a hand on his fly and ran the zip down, clutching at what was inside.
“You need to shop for new pyjamas,” Mickey said.
“What?”
He took hold of the neckline of her top and tugged hard with both hands, tearing at the silk. The fabric ripped wide open. Her meagre white breasts came under his fingers. He bent down, sucking at them briefly, then jerked down the pants, helping her shrug out of the things, running his palms everywhere, letting his tongue work briefly into her small, tight navel, then slide lower into the thatch of brown hair.
Mickey got up, cupped his hands around her thin, tight buttocks, gripped her thighs, lifting her into the air, pushing backwards until her shoulders were up against the door. The green eyes looked into his. Maybe there was an expression there. Need. Maybe not.
“Never much wanted to bang a skinny chick until you came along,” he mumbled. “Now I don’t want to bang nothing else.”
She was doing things with her hands, things that were sneaky and gentle and rough and unsubtle at the same time. He was hardening in her fingers. His jeans were round his ankles now. She hitched up her legs and straddled his waist, holding on tight, guiding him.
“If he ever finds out, Mickey—”
“We’re dead,” he said, and felt his body meeting hers in all the right places.
Mickey Neri pushed himself forward, stabbing into her. It was the best feeling he’d ever known. She was squealing. She was going crazy, chewing on his neck, whispering filthy words into his ear, pulling his long hair. He pushed harder. He was in deep, as deep as it got.
“Worth it,” he panted, knowing already he’d have to work hard to prolong the pleasure. Maybe she knew some tricks there too. “Worth every second.”
“OK,” TERESA LUPO SAID briskly. “I spent many nights sweating over this but I’ll try to compress it as much as I can. Look—”
They did as she wanted, and got up to stand over the cadaver. She seemed quite young, Costa thought, halfway between girl and woman. Perhaps seventeen, if that. Her face was disconcerting, still alive somehow and undoubtedly beautiful. Her features seemed Saxon or maybe Scandinavian. They had the precise, symmetrical perfection he associated with fair-haired northerners. Someone had washed part of her matted hair. It was now a kind of muddy blonde, tinted by the redness of the peat. The smell was pungent close up too.
“You will recall,” Teresa said, pointing at the cavity around the cadaver’s throat, “that our thoughtful American friend tried to remove her head, believing it to be that of a statue. This wound was caused by the sharp end of his shovel. I’m amazed you people let the bastard go without doing a single thing to him, by the way, but that’s your decision, not mine.”
“Hear, hear,” Peroni agreed.
“We went through this, Gianni,” Costa said. “What were we supposed to charge them with?”
“Drunk driving?” Peroni suggested.
“Couldn’t hold them in the country until trial.”
The older man scowled. “How about disrespect? Yeah, I know. It’s not a crime. Maybe it ought to be.”
Teresa smiled at Peroni and said, “I agree.” Then she took a pointer and indicated an area on the girl’s neck, just above the deep gash made by Bobby Dexter’s spade. “You can still see what happened originally though. That shovel wasn’t the first time someone struck a blow here. The girl’s throat was cut. From behind too. From the wound you can see whoever did it worked from side to side. It doesn’t work like that if they come in from the front. Then you just get a slash from the centre out. Here—”
There were more pictures on the desk. Careful blow-ups of the neck. “There’s the slice the bozo made. There’s hardly any earth on the tissue. But here—”
They looked closely at the photos. Close up the second, older wound, clearly tinted by the brown, acid water over the years, was unmistakable.
“That didn’t happen two weeks ago. That happened not long before she got put into the bog. That killed her.”
Falcone nodded at the pictures. “Good work,” he said. “That was all I wanted to know.”
“There’s more,” she added, trying not to look too eager.
Falcone laughed. She found it disconcerting that she amused him. “Don’t tell me, Doctor. You’ve solved the case. You have a motive. You know when. You know who did it.”
“That last part’s beyond even me. The rest… be patient.”
The inspector smiled, amused, and waved her to go on.
There was a book on the desk. She picked it up, and held it up for them to see. It was entitled Dionysus and the Villa of Mysteries. The cover photograph was of an ancient painting: a woman in a dishevelled dress, holding her hand over her face in terror of some half-seen night creature with staring, demonic eyes which leered at her from the edges of the image. The shapes had been damaged over the years. The creature was largely unrecognizable. But they could see what was depicted here. It was some kind of ceremony, one in which the woman was, perhaps, assaulted. Or even sacrificed.
“This was written by a professor at the university here,” she said. “I got put onto it by an academic at Yale who’d done some work on a bog body found in Germany, close to a Roman town.”
“This is relevant?” Falcone asked.
“I think so. Most of these deaths weren’t accidental. There was some kind of ritual going on. The guy who wrote this is trying to work out what that might be.”
“Something to do with Dionysus?” Costa asked. “I don’t get it. That’s Pompeü. We went there on a field trip when I was at school.”
“So did we,” Peroni added. “First time I ever got drunk.”
“Jesus,” she said. “What a pair you two make. Yes, Nic. The Villa of Mysteries is at Pompeü and, according to this guy, who is, I am reliably informed, the world’s living expert on the Dionysian mysteries, it is important. But it wasn’t the only one. Pompeü was the provinces. Suburbia if you like. It was small time compared to what went on elsewhere. In Rome in particular. Ask yourself. Who’s got the biggest churches? Us or them?”