David Hewson (32 page)

Falcone
had ordered him to keep the ring tone on his phone turned off until they knew
the state of the cabin. No one wanted the risk of an unwanted call. But in the
freezing cold Costa found it difficult to think straight. His brain felt numb.
Had he remembered to turn it off or not? And if so when?

With
numb fingers he struggled to pull the handset out of his pocket, fumbling it in
his hands. The thing was off. He still couldn't remember doing that. Then
he tried to put the phone away, found it slipping in his frozen fingers, knew
what would happen next, how the ineluctable laws of gravity and stupidity could
collide at times like this.

The
handset turned in his dead, icy grip, revolved slowly through the snow-flecked
air, bounced off the ledge and tumbled down into the street below.

Costa
closed his eyes, felt the flakes begin to fall on them instantly and cursed his
luck. He couldn't go back down the ladder. He was too weary, too cold. The
icy rungs were perilous enough when he was climbing, with the odds and gravity
in his favour. Nothing could persuade him to risk a descent.

He
took out his gun, checked the safety was on, the magazine loaded. He was a
lousy shot at the best of times. Now, with unsteady fingers and a head that
felt like a block of ice, he'd be as much of a danger to himself as
anyone else.

Trying
to clear an open space in his mind, he pushed the weapon into the side pocket
of his jacket and hoped some warmth and blood would come back to his hand, and
with them some semblance of control.

Costa
edged carefully along the narrow ledge, spent one dizzying, terrifying moment
negotiating the corner, then rolled onto the deep snow of the terrace, glad
that he finally had some railings between him and the precipice down to the
street. When he got back his breath, when his head told him to keep moving or
he'd just curl up in a tight, shivering ball, freeze and die on the spot,
he stood up, clung to the wall and edged along it. There was just one small
window here. A bedroom in all probability. He neared the glass. The curtain was
closed. There was no light inside, not a sign of life.

Keep it that way
, he prayed and stumbled on towards the river side of the building.

A
memory came from his mountaineering days.
Wind speed increases with
altitude
.

A
sudden, gusting blast roared round the cabin's apex, crackling with
vicious energy, dashing hard, stinging ice into his face. He huddled into
himself, drawing his arms around his head, fighting to keep upright, vainly
trying to wish away the blank numbness growing in his brain. Then the blizzard
paused for breath. After a moment in which Costa doubted his ability to go on,
he struggled towards the corner of the building, hugged the drainpipe there,
steeled himself against another battering from the storm.

Sometimes
there were no choices. Whatever the situation inside the cabin, he'd have
to break in. It was simply too dangerous to do anything else. He turned the
corner, clinging to the brickwork. Most of this side of the building was given
over to a French window, almost opaque under a glazing of ice, with just a
small gap kept clear by an updraught from the heating inside.

He
crept forward and peered through the glass. From this angle he could see a
table lamp glowing in the corner of the small, cluttered room. Costa tried to
imagine what that meant. Then the wind abated briefly and his heart sank like a
frozen stone.

There
was a TV on inside. He could hear it. When he stretched his head further beyond
the edge of the French door he could see it: a distant, small colour set in the
corner of the room. Rousing music, a horse whinnying and gunshots. He glanced
at the screen and knew the scene instantly; it was one of those iconic
Hollywood moments you never forgot.

John
Wayne with an eyepatch turning his horse to face the bad guys at the end of
True
Grit
. Costa almost wept at the irony.

Fill your hand, you son of a bitch
.

It's
so easy in the movies. You put the reins between your teeth and ride.

He
tried to convince himself he was feeling braver.

Then
he saw the man.

People watch TV, stupid
, his distant brain reminded him.

He
was where you'd expect someone to be while glued to the box. Upright in a
chair on the other side of the little room, with his back to Costa and the
window, just the top of his head visible, a good crop of brown hair now, not
the stupid Mickey Mouse hat Costa had seen on two occasions.

Costa
pressed his back to the wall, slid his body down to sit in the snow, head
against the brickwork, eyes closed, desperately trying to think.

There
was no alternative. His damn phone was gone. Falcone would wait in the street. Not
forever. But maybe long enough for him to freeze to death in the vicious gale
that gripped this cruelly exposed Roman rooftop.

Fill your hand, you son of a bitch
.

You
put the reins between your teeth and ride.

He
glanced at the French windows. No one expected burglars at this level. Then he
took another look inside. The man was engrossed in the TV. He wouldn't,
surely, be sitting in an armchair with a weapon on his lap.

Never assume
.

Someone
who carved shapes out of his victims' backs was impossible to predict. All
Costa could do was take every precaution in the book, and add a few of his own.

He
got up quickly, stood foursquare to the windows, then kicked as hard as he could.
The doors flew open, glass crashed to the tiled floor inside. The volume of the
TV set suddenly seemed abnormally loud.

"Police!"
Costa yelled, and followed up that meaningless comment with all the other
orders that were supposed to make sense on these occasions.

The
man didn't budge.

Costa
moved purposefully towards the chair, wishing the damn TV would stop screaming
like that, wishing the room wasn't so stuffily hot and filled with a
strong smell, aware, too, that there was something deeply strange here, that
the walls were covered with a familiar pattern, repeating over and over,
painted in a colour he didn't want to think about too closely.

And
the man didn't shift an inch, which made Costa feel foolish as he watched
the back of his head and the thick brown hair, waiting for a response, saying,
more than once, "Don't move."

There
was a noise: voices, the sound of wood smashing, the racket of an entry team on
the other side of the door.

Focus.

"Don't,"
he said, accidentally nudging the chair, and watched in shock as a
woman's head, ripped from her body, red gore blackening around her
throat, rolled sideways over the arm, fell on his foot, finished upright on the
carpet, long brown hair flowing back from a pale dead face, mouth open, fixed
in a scream, glassy eyes staring at him, seeing nothing.

"Shit!"
he gasped, and lurched over to the smashed French windows, turned his back on
this crazy scene, breathed in as much of the freezing, snow-filled air as he
could get into his lungs, hoping it would get the noxious smell of meat out of
him somehow.

They
were inside now. He could hear their voices behind him, hear the shock and
someone starting to retch.

And
it was as if someone had turned a key, opened the door to a little
enlightenment. The unnatural heat and the stench had stirred something the
frozen rooftop had put into cold storage. The pieces finally started to fall
into place. Teresa Lupo had, in a sense, warned him, if only he'd pursued
the point far enough to get the detail.

She's not exactly complete
.

The
cord was in one of the suitcases, not around her neck, because it
couldn't have been...

Nic
Costa turned round and looked at the room. The geometric pattern covered half
of the side wall and would probably have extended further had not the source run
out. It was a running fresco painted in what could only be the woman's
blood. And a message too, in English. One word in big, bold, dark red letters,
underneath the scrawls: WHO?

The
SOCOs would have a field day here. The place had to be crawling with promising
material and that, in itself, was strange. Costa had read the files, had
understood what happened in the Pantheon. The killer had always been meticulous
about cleaning up afterwards. But here he seemed to be leaving a deliberate
sign.

I am nearly done. Help me
.

Falcone walked through the room, stared at the item on the floor, and
sniffed
.

"Neat,"
he said. "You just prop the poor bitch's head up on a couple of
cushions, turn on the TV and all you see is someone working on a couch-potato
habit. Clever."

Then
he came up to Costa, something in his hand.

"You
dropped this, that's why we came up," the inspector said, and gave
him the mobile phone that, just a couple of minutes earlier, had tumbled all
the way from the windy rooftop down into the drifts in the street. "Nothing
personal, Nic, but I think it's time you went home and got some sleep. Don't
you?"

BY
FOUR IT WAS DARK. By five the city was a treacherous warren of icy alleys,
deserted under a blinding moon. But at least the blizzard was over. Gianni
Peroni had taken the jeep everywhere he could think of. Back to the
Serbian's cafe next to Termini. Down to the dark corners by the river
where she'd lurked the night before. It was futile. The Serbians knew
nothing. In the streets there were plenty of kids: dark, miserable figures,
huddled inside their black jackets, crowding round fires built from
noxious-smelling trash. Not one admitted to seeing her. Peroni tried every last
trick in the book--money, threats, sweet talk--and it was just no
good. They knew her. That much was plain. But Laila was an outcast in this
bunch for some reason. Too strange, too difficult, to fit in.

The
way they lived depressed him. It was all such a waste. And it made him think of
his own children, warm in a comfy, fatherless home outside Siena, getting ready
for Christmas, eyes glittering in anticipation of what was to come.

For
the first time ever he wouldn't be there. Not for one minute. He
wasn't a reflective man. He hated looking back. There were too many
painful memories lurking in the recent past. Time healed, he knew that. One day
the hurt would subside and, with that miraculous capacity for self-deception
every living being on the planet seemed to possess, the good times would come
to be uppermost in his mind once more. Till then he just had to swallow down
the awkward mix of emotions that kept gripping him. He'd been a good
father but, in the end, a lousy husband. It was just another of life's
cruel tricks that one couldn't cancel out the other.

Tired,
bored, almost despondent, he took a break and went for a coffee in one of his
favourite places, the little cafe run by the old-fashioned restaurant Checco er
Carrettiere behind the Piazza Trilussa in Trastevere. He knew why he went
there. He used to take the kids during the summer, watch them wait goggle-eyed
as some pretty girl in a smart white waitress uniform piled high some of the
best ice cream in Rome.

Today
the tiny cafe was as deserted as the frozen piazza. There was a pretty young
girl behind the counter but she looked tired and careworn. He sat on a stool
pouring sugar into a double macchiato and knew: those times would never come
again. They were locked in the past. A part of him had understood that would
happen all along. Kids grew up, invented their own lives, went away in the end.
But his own stupidity had hastened the process irreversibly, sent them
scattering north to Tuscany, where he'd never be anything but a stranger
to them now.

He
finished the coffee and ordered another. On days like this the system needed
caffeine. Then he tried to distract himself by focusing on Laila, racking his
brain again about where she might have gone. Something didn't make sense.
He had established a bond with the kid. It just didn't add up that she
should flee the house like that, without a word, without a good reason. He was
out of options too. Short of pounding the streets aimlessly, hoping for some
rare good luck--and surely that
was
a waste of time--he
might as well give in, call Leo Falcone, get some sleep, then rejoin the team. Maybe
even pat the surly American on the back and say sorry a little more loudly if
that was what was needed.

The
girl behind the counter came with the second coffee and said, to his dismay,
"I know you from the summer. Where are your kids?"

"It's
not ice-cream weather," was the best he could offer.

"It's
not anything weather," she complained. "I don't know why I
bothered opening the doors. Waste of time."

"Thanks.
I'm flattered."

"Oh."
She laughed and the sudden burst of amusement brought back the memory of her,
not much more than a kid herself, piling up ice cream generously as they waited
and watched under the bright, burning July sun. "Sorry. I was just
feeling a bit down."