The Garden of Evil (6 page)

Two

F
OUR HOURS LATER THEY WERE BACK, MEANDERING
around the table of food Bea had prepared, chattering in the idle, restless, uncomfortable way that happened after funerals. People he knew. Strangers from America, who were distant with him, for good reason. This was the first time they’d met Emily’s Italian policeofficer husband. It would be the last too.

Teresa Lupo had hardly spoken a word. She was in the kitchen, a disconsolate, untidy figure seated on a chair at the table, not eating or drinking, Peroni holding her hand, watching the tears pouring down her cheeks. The pathologist had been fine in the crematorium. It was the farmhouse, the place the four of them had spent so many hours, that got to her. Teresa worked with death, was comfortable with its presence in the surroundings where it belonged. In a house, one that had so briefly been Emily’s home, everything was different.

Costa walked over from the living room, placed a hand on her shoulder, saw the way she wasn’t able to meet his eyes, then received a knowing nod from Peroni. There came a time when there were no more words of consolation left, for any of them. This was that time. Emily was gone. He’d spent eleven days in some curious limbo where bureaucracy—formal identifications and death certificates—mixed with the ludicrous long hours dealing with funeral directors. And, in between, when he found the opportunity, trying and failing to convince Falcone to let him return from compassionate leave to work on the case.

Instead, the inspector had insisted he stay away, placing a car at the end of the drive to keep the determined army of curious media out and, Costa knew, him in. Emily had told him what the newspapers were like. A photogenic death always meant headlines. She’d been proved right, and the lurid facts of the case had only served to feed the media frenzy. The beautiful wife of a Roman police officer was dead, murdered in front of his eyes by a killer who’d fled a crime scene where, it later transpired, several other women, one of them an upper-class French art historian, had died. The story contained all the elements the media loved: attractive women, vicious crimes of a sexual nature, and an apparent inability on the part of the police to locate a single potential suspect, in spite of a huge, and national, hunt.

Costa had ordered every important newspaper, had watched most of the daily news bulletins, and had followed the case on the Web, the way Emily had showed him. Two things continued to nag at him. It was impossible, surely, to believe the police had not come across a single lead in a case so rich with forensic evidence. And no one ever mentioned the painting, the image of which had yet to be entirely displaced by the shocking memories of what came after.

He waited until people began drifting away. Leo Falcone had arrived with Raffaella Arcangelo; the two seemed so friendly that Costa wondered if that romance had returned. A sudden death altered the landscape. Falcone was a man who enjoyed his own company, but had found something else during the time Raffaella had cared for him the previous year. Now that he was fit and active in the Questura, he had no need for her physical support. But emotionally . . . Costa wondered, as he watched Falcone slyly remove himself from the dwindling crowd, find the back door, then disappear into the garden.

He excused himself from the kindly American cousin who stood next to him, running out of words, and followed Falcone outside. There had been a time when the inspector would have been smoking one of his foul-smelling cigarettes. That habit had disappeared. He was seated by the decrepit wooden table that looked out over the bowed, blackened vines, a place where Nic and Emily had entertained all four of them—Falcone and Raffaella, Teresa and Peroni—often the previous summer.

Costa took a seat next to his boss and stared at the land. Everything—the house, the garden, the fields—seemed larger somehow. Emily’s absence magnified the world and its emptiness.

FALCONE CAST A QUICK LOOK BACK THROUGH THE FRENCH
windows, into the lounge.

“I’d smoke if I could get away with it. Women . . .”

Costa briefly closed his eyes and stifled his astonishment—which should not, he knew, have been so great—at the man’s lack of tact.

“You and Raffaella . . . I don’t want to pry, Leo.”

“Oh.” Falcone kicked at some pebbles on the ground. Sometimes he was alarmingly childlike. “That’s back on. I called her.” He turned to look at Costa, as if asking for some kind of reassurance. “I needed to, Nic. Not just to make arrangements for today. I wanted to see her. Everything seemed so cold otherwise. It wasn’t that I felt alone, you understand.”

Costa made some sympathetic sound.

“God . . .” Falcone shook his head with a sudden bitter fury. “I miss Emily. I miss that bright mind. And talking to her. She didn’t think the way we do. I could listen to her throwing an idea around for hours. It’s all so . . . futile.”

He turned to Costa and made his next point with that familiar long index finger. “Had that architect’s career not worked out, I would have got her into the police, you know.” He sighed. “Lord knows we need officers who see things differently. Particularly today.”

“Leo . . .” Costa said, a little testily.

“What?”

“Is this your version of sympathy? Do you behave this way at all funerals?”

“Most funerals I avoid!” Falcone replied, hurt. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re saying what I’m supposed to say. And I’m listening to what you’re supposed to listen to.”

“Oh.” The old man nodded. Perhaps there was a vestige of comprehension there. “
That
kind of sympathy.”

Falcone reached over and patted Costa’s knee. His avian face had a winter tan, the silver goatee was newly trimmed, and his eyes were full of intelligence, understanding, and a firm, unbending friendship.

“You surely know how I feel, Nic. How we all feel. Do I really have to spell it out? I’m not a man for wasted words. I never have been. If you need me, you know where I am. The same goes for Gianni and Teresa, though I imagine they’ve told you that ten times over, because that’s their way.”

They hadn’t, in fact. Costa understood why. In some strange way the four of them were so close that they had no need of these spoken reassurances. Those were reserved for outsiders.

“So?” Falcone asked.

“So what?”

“So when would you like to come back to work?”

“I’ll be back the instant you want me.”

“Good. There’s an attachment coming up in Sicily just after Christmas. It would be an excellent opportunity under any circumstances. People-smuggling. Rome needs some expertise there.”

“Sicily.” Costa groaned.

“Sicily,” the inspector agreed.

Costa waited, searching for the words.

“This is what friends are for, Leo. I have never exercised that friendship until now. I want this case. Emily’s murder. You have to give it to me.”

A swarm of dark crows danced on the horizon, near the distant circular outline of the tomb of a long-dead Imperial matron, Cecilia Metella. Falcone watched them for several long seconds, then said, “I can’t do that. I find it grossly unfair of you to exert personal pressure in this way. Compassionate leave could stretch to a month or more if you want it.”

“I’d be even crazier after a month. This is enough. Besides, I have every right . . .”

The crows lost their importance. Falcone turned to him, a flash of anger in his face.

“You have no rights whatsoever, other than those of any other bereaved civilian. Don’t be so ridiculous. An officer investigating his own wife’s death? What do you think the media would make of that? Or those clowns on the seventh floor?”

“It’s an investigation into several murders. I would leave my own feelings to one side.”

“Who do you hope to fool with that argument? Me? Or yourself?”

Costa didn’t have a good answer, only pretexts, and now, faced with Falcone’s stubbornness, he knew they wouldn’t work.

“I have to do something.”

Falcone shook his bald head. It gleamed under the low winter sun.

Costa sought the words. These thoughts had dogged him ever since her death. They wouldn’t go away. “I can’t bury her, Leo. Not properly. Unless . . .” He sighed. “I need to work. Otherwise everything just keeps going round and round in my head.”

Falcone shrugged. “Then work in Sicily.”

“I have to do something
here
.”

“I hate personal issues,” Falcone grumbled. “You feel responsible. It’s understandable. Anyone would. It’s the way we’re made. It will pass.”

“No,” Costa murmured. “It won’t. Not on its own.”

“And what if you fail?” the older man asked severely. “What will that do to you?”

“I won’t fail.” That thought had really never occurred to him.

Falcone sniffed, took a sly look back at the house again, slipped a small cigar out of his pocket, then lit it. “You have no idea what you’re asking. We are more than a week into this investigation, yet I have nothing . . .” He scowled. Some thought, some irritant, affected him at that moment. “. . . nothing concrete to show for all the work we’ve done. Frankly, several aspects baffle me more every time I look at them. With you gone and Peroni drooping around the place like a dog that’s lost its best friend . . . we’re not in top form, to be honest. They’re already whispering upstairs that perhaps we should hand over everything to the Carabinieri. If I could do this, Nic, do you honestly believe I’d turn you down?”

“You can find a way,” Costa insisted. “You always do.”

Falcone was up on his feet, with an easy swiftness that showed the injuries that had troubled him since the shooting in Venice were now in the past. Falcone could do it. His standing in the Questura was high again. He could do anything he liked, if he wanted.

And now he was angry. The heat suffused his walnut cheeks.

“Dammit!” he barked, just loud enough for a few faces at the window to turn in their direction. “What kind of occasion is this to start throwing professional demands at me?”

“It’s my murdered wife’s funeral, sir,” Costa replied with a flat, cold disdain.

Three

H
ALF-RECOGNISED FACES, PEOPLE HE HADN’T SEEN FOR
years. Funerals always brought them out, and Costa had never been good with names. They were almost all gone within thirty minutes, leaving Bea clearing away the plates and glasses and Costa talking to a somewhat embarrassed Raffaella Arcangelo alone in a chair in the dining room, stroking the ancient, half-slumbering dog.

“You’ll have to go and speak to him, Nic,” she said. “It’s freezing cold out there, he doesn’t have a jacket, and he won’t come in of his own accord.”

“It’s like dealing with a child,” he complained.

She nodded. “I have very little experience with children but I must admit it does sound very similar. All the same . . .”

Costa stormed outside, bracing for another argument. Falcone was back at the decrepit wooden table, puffing on another cigar, blowing the smoke out towards the dead, hunched vines waiting for spring and a reawakening.

He watched Costa sit down, then said, “You’d have to work over Christmas.”

“That,” Costa replied, exasperated, “is hardly an obstacle.”

Falcone nodded. “I hate Christmas too.”

The last few people were drifting outside, Raffaella among them. They couldn’t, Nic knew, leave without saying goodbye. This had to be brought to an end.

“What am I supposed to
do,
Leo?”

The shrewd old eyes flashed at him again. There was an unmistakable expression of self-doubt in them, something Costa had rarely seen in his boss. Falcone reached into his jacket pocket. He withdrew a copious set of keys and removed two from the ring.

“These are for my old apartment in the
centro storico,
in Governo Vecchio. You know it?”

Costa had never been invited there. The place predated Raffaella and the apartment she had shared with Falcone. But he knew the location, just a stone’s throw from the Piazza Navona.

“I had been planning to move back there now that I can walk properly,” Falcone went on. “But Raffaella prefers Monti. Here.”

He handed Costa the keys.

“I have a home,” he protested, waving a hand at the house.

“Bea can look after it. In three days’ time I want you to pack your bags. Expect to be gone a week or more. And”—the finger jabbed at him—“don’t tell a soul where you’re going.”

This was interesting, Costa thought.

“Teresa is due to deliver some kind of news to me then,” Falcone continued, before Costa could ask a single question. “The woman never hurries, naturally. You have a reason to be at that meeting. Take it. We are due at that damned studio for her theatricals. Afterwards you will return to compassionate leave. In my apartment. I will explain later.”

He looked lost for a moment, staring at the grey horizon as if seeking answers. “Finding a criminal is only half the challenge,” he added cryptically. “Don’t make me regret this, Nic.”

Costa didn’t have time to answer. A voice drifted from the door. It was Raffaella. Falcone dipped the cigar down below his waist and flicked it into the vineyard with a long, agile finger.

“You have some identification for these dead African women?” Costa asked in a quiet voice.

“What do you think?” Falcone grumbled. “If a man wishes to commit a crime, best commit it against the underclass. These women’s families are too scared to complain. Or . . .” He didn’t wish to go on.

“Someone has to be able to ID them, Leo.”

“You’d think . . .” the inspector replied with a sour, pinched smile. “Fake names. Fake identities. These are illegal immigrants desperate to stay out of our way. Even when we do find them . . .” He shrugged.

“There must be—” Costa insisted.

“Nic. Please. Enough. I have two officers in Nigeria at this very moment, following up the only real lead we have. It could take months of work, even if people there are willing to speak to us, and they won’t be. Do not equate your absence in all this with a lack of effort on our part. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Costa shook his head. “I never meant it that way,” he murmured. “I just don’t understand—”

“None of us understands. Perhaps Teresa will shed a little light on matters when we meet. But there’s something else you must do first. That painting we found in the studio. You must either tell me it’s important or let me forget about it altogether. An art expert attached to the Barberini is due to start looking at it shortly. I will make some calls, arrange an appointment for you. I happen to have made this expert’s acquaintance before. She comes highly recommended. The woman’s name is Agata Graziano. The gallery has a laboratory close to the Piazza Borghese. She’s the best apparently. And there’s one more thing . . .”

He elaborated no more and simply gazed at the still-smouldering cigar on the cold winter earth. Then he said: “I want whoever did this, Nic. Just as much as you.”