The Villa of Mysteries (4 page)

BOBBY DEXTER’S DETERMINED EXPRESSION was one Lianne recognized. It usually meant they were headed for trouble.

“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to take back a head for Tom Jorgensen to look at. One that’s a million times better than that piece of Greek shit of his.”

She gaped at him, outraged. “What?”

Bobby raised the shovel to shoulder height, holding it like an axe, a little breathless already from the anticipation. “Watch. Watch and learn.”

He brought the metal down hard where the statue’s neck ought to be. Nothing much happened. Some dirt moved. But Lianne was yelling, louder than she’d ever done before.

“Bobby Dexter,” she screeched. “What the hell are you doing? This thing’s like a piece of art or something. It’s history. You’re just going to smash it to pieces so you can make out your dick’s bigger than Tom Jorgensen’s?”

He held the shovel high, swaying slightly. “What do you know about the size of Jorgensen’s dick?”

“It was a figure of speech, moron.”

Bobby Dexter blinked at her. He looked downright ugly. The light was failing now and the world was getting weird. He took one more swipe at the statue’s neck and missed, sending up a shower of stinking earth that bounced straight back into his face. A few grains fell into his mouth. He spat out the dirt as if it were poison.

“If you break that statue, we’re over, Bobby,” she said, dead serious. “I mean it. I don’t go talking to my father. I get a lawyer. The moment we get back to Seattle.”

He hesitated, staring at her as if wondering whether she really did mean it. “You tell me that when we’re back home with the best fucking piece of coffee table statuary in private ownership anywhere in Washington State. You’d be amazed what a nice piece of household ornamentation can do for dinner parties.”

“Bobby—” she yelled.

“Bullshit.” He took a final swing.

This one connected. The sharp side of the spade went deep into the neck. There should have been a sharp, cracking sound that indicated a good clean break, one that went right across the stone in a level line with just enough randomness in it to look convincing. She knew Bobby well enough to understand what he was thinking. There were probably ideas in his head already.

But everything just went straight out of their heads a moment after the blade hit. Lianne Dexter realized right then that they’d been wrong, terribly wrong, both of them. They saw what they wanted to see. Not what
was
. Maybe there was a reason behind that. Because what
was
turned out to be the last thing they wanted to encounter anywhere on this planet, least of all on their own down a little lane, next to a stinking grey river in a country where their language skills extended only to ordering pizza, beer and wine.

The blade didn’t strike hard stone. It met flesh, a kind of flesh anyway. Something that looked like leather, tanned, tough, but supple. The side of the spade cut straight through just where the neck met the shoulders, severing something that resembled a real human tendon, spattering both of them with a mixture of foul-smelling wet mud that seemed to have something distinctly organic, almost alive, inside it.

Lianne’s face was covered with the peat gore that had spat back at them when he attacked the thing. She was spitting bits of it out of her mouth, sobbing, dry-retching as she did so.

She stopped for a moment and watched Bobby bend down to look closely at the thing, just a hint of reverence in his face.

On the ground in front of them, partly severed from the body by the spade, was the head of a young girl, sixteen, seventeen, no more, dressed in a classical gown, holding some large, ceremonial wand in her left hand. The force of the blow had removed most of the solid cake of peat that had sat on her features. What they saw now was her face which, beneath the crud, seemed beautiful. She had a high forehead and prominent cheekbones. There wasn’t a wrinkle in sight on her flawless leather skin. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were partly open as if she were uttering a final, dying sigh. She had perfect teeth which were just closed together with a hint of pearly whiteness showing through the brown stain of the earth. Her long hair was tied back behind her neck and matted into solid strands. Her expression was one of utmost peace. She looked, Lianne Dexter thought, happy, which was, she knew, ridiculous in the circumstances.

And just in case they were in any doubt about the nature of this object before them there was the matter of the neck. When Bobby had come down hard with the shovel he’d done what he hoped: split through into the interior. Bobby and Lianne Dexter were now looking at the inside of another human being’s throat and it was black and complicated and messy, with bones and sinews and passages that looked vaguely familiar from some distant school lesson in anatomy.

“Holy shit,” Bobby muttered and started shivering.

A 747 swooped low over them. They felt the heat of its breath. They inhaled the chemical stink of its fearsome engines. When the roar of its gross presence diminished Bobby Dexter became aware of another noise. It was his wife, screaming.

“No,” he pleaded. “Not now, Lianne. I’m trying to think for chrissake.”

Then he gave up altogether. Two men, one short, one tall, were walking towards them, staring intently. Some way behind them there was something else: a red fire engine struggling down the lane trying to reach the charred and smoking remains of the Clio.

The men were waving badges. They didn’t look sympathetic.

The older cop was a bull-necked gorilla of a man with a disfigured, scowling face and piercing, aggressive eyes that looked as if they could see everything. The younger, shorter one was staring at the thing in the ground, the shit-coloured cadaver with the head all to one side where Bobby had lopped it with the shovel.

“This day just gets stranger,” Gianni Peroni murmured. “Pinch me. Tell me I’m dreaming.”

“You’re not dreaming,” Nic Costa replied. He couldn’t stop looking at the object half-hidden in the mud. Not for the weeping woman who looked as if she’d thrown up and was now hunched in a ball down by the edge of the river. Or the man, who held a shovel uncertainly in his hands, his body swaying rhythmically.

A man who, for no reason at all, suddenly pointed the spade at both of them and, with a slow, effortful slur to his voice, said, “Listen. Don’t fuck with me. Don’t even think about it. I’m an American citizen.”

“H
OW LONG HAS SHE BEEN LYING THERE? ANSWER ME that.”

Teresa Lupo stood next to the brown cadaver that lay at a stiff, awkward angle on the shiny steel table in the morgue. The pathologist looked even more proprietorial than usual about the corpse in her care, and immensely pleased with herself too. It was two weeks now since Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni had encountered the body and the screaming American couple by the muddy banks of the Tiber, just a couple of kilometres from the sea at Ostia. Bobby and Lianne Dexter were back home in Washington State, talking to lawyers about their divorce and who should have custody of the cats, still feeling lucky to have escaped Europe without facing a single charge (which proved, Lianne thought, exactly what kind of people they were over there anyway). Costa and Peroni had, in the meantime, become, if not quite a team, partners of a kind, able to get through the day with a sense of shared duty and the promise that soon their artificial relationship would be over.

The body had made international headlines for a few days. Somehow a photo had been smuggled to the media, showing the serene, frozen face that had emerged from the chemical-smelling peat. It was a genuine mystery. No one knew how old the body was. No one knew whether the girl had died of natural causes or was the victim of some obscure crime. There was wild speculation in some of the Italian tabloids, stories which talked about ancient cults that had killed followers who had somehow failed the entry ceremony.

Nic Costa hadn’t taken any notice. It was pointless to speculate until Teresa Lupo had passed judgement. Now she had made up her mind. They had been summoned to the morgue for ten that morning. At noon Teresa planned to give a press conference outlining her findings. The very fact she’d arranged this herself without asking advance permission from Leo Falcone spoke volumes. It meant she was confident there was no criminal investigation on the way. He and Peroni had simply been invited along out of politeness. They found the specimen; they deserved to hear its secrets revealed. Costa wished Teresa had left them out of it. He was starting to get the feel for police business again, starting to like the idea he could be good at it. If this really was a closed case, he’d rather be somewhere else, dealing with a live one.

The three of them — Falcone, Peroni and Costa — sat on a cold, hard bench watching her make a few last-minute, fussy observations of the corpse. Costa understood what this was: a dry run for the press conference which would be part of her re-entry into police life. Teresa Lupo had briefly quit her job after the Denney case, vowing never to return. She had been close to Luca Rossi and felt the pain of his death as much as anyone in the station. More, perhaps, than Nic Costa. More certainly than Falcone who, while quietly racked by guilt over the loss of his man, was too obsessed by the job to be distracted for long.

Grief chased her from the tight, close embrace of the force. Grief brought her back to the fold. She was like the rest of them: hooked, incapable of staying away. She loved getting to know her customers, trying to understand their lives and what had brought them to her slab. Unravelling these mysteries fulfilled her and now she was starting to show it, Costa thought. She was carrying a little less weight. The ponytail had gone, replaced by a businesswoman’s crop, black hair short and sculpted carefully to hide the outline of her heavy neck. She had a large, animated face and slightly bulbous blue eyes that darted around constantly. There was something a touch obsessive inside the woman, something that quickly chased away most men who tried to get close to her. Maybe that was what made her the pathologist the cops always wanted on their side, however fierce her temper, however sharp her tongue . . .

“Ten years. Twenty max,” Peroni suggested. “But what do I know? I’m just a busted vice cop. You got to bear the responsibility for any screw-ups I make, Leo. I’m used to dealing with people I know are guilty from the outset. All this detection stuff . . . it’s not my thing.”

Falcone put a hand to his ear. “Excuse me?”

“Sir,” Peroni said meekly. “You got to bear the responsibility, sir.”

Falcone sat there in a grey suit that looked as if it were new that morning, letting his fingers run through his angular, sharp-pointed silver beard, staring at the body, thinking. He’d returned from a holiday somewhere hot only the day before. A deep walnut tan stained his face and his bald scalp. It was almost the colour of the corpse on the slab. The inspector seemed miles away. Maybe his head was still on the beach, or wherever he went for enjoyment. Maybe he’d been through the force disposition. There was a flu epidemic gripping the city. People were calling in sick from everywhere. The Questura had so many empty desks that morning it looked like Christmas Day.

Teresa was grinning. Peroni had said exactly what she wanted to hear. “That’s a good and sensible suggestion, even for a busted vice cop. Your basis for it being . . . ?”

He waved his hand at the table. “Look at her. She’s a touch messed up but she don’t stink too bad. Nothing going mouldy. I’m sure you people have seen worse. Smelled much worse too probably.”

She nodded. “The smell’s from the treatment. She’s been lying in a shower ever since we got her here. Fifteen per cent polyethylene glycol in distilled water. I’ve been doing a lot of research on this girl. Reading books. Talking to people. I’m in touch with some academics in England by e-mail who know exactly how to handle a body in this condition. After ten weeks or so maybe we’ll need to get her freeze-dried to finish the job properly.”

“Don’t we get to bury her in the end?” Costa wondered. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with dead people?”

She screwed up her big pale face in amazement. “Are you kidding me? Do you think the university would allow it?”

“Since when did she belong to them?” he asked. “However old she is, she was a human being. If this isn’t going to become a crime investigation, what’s the problem? When does a corpse turn into a specimen? Who decides?”

“I do,” Falcone said, coming out of the daydream abruptly. Costa peered at him. There was something odd going on. Falcone wasn’t as cool, as self-composed as normal. He looked glum, which was unusual. It was rare that anyone was able to discern much sign of human emotion in him at all. Costa wondered who Falcone had been on holiday with. The dour inspector’s marriage had ended years ago. There were rumours of occasional attachments since then but that could just be station gossip. When Leo Falcone was in the Questura, nothing else seemed to exist except the force. When he was gone, he was out of it completely, never mixing with his colleagues, never wanting to be invited round for dinner. Maybe the inspector, who always seemed so calm, so in control when it came to other people’s lives, had no hold whatsoever on his own. Maybe he went on holiday by himself, sitting on some sunny beach somewhere reading a book like a hermit, turning browner and browner, meaner and meaner.

“Hear me out,” Teresa pleaded. “It’ll all become clear, I promise. A couple of decades? Nice guess. But I have to tell you it’s out. By a touch under two thousand years.”

Peroni snorted. “Someone’s been hitting the wacky baccy around here, Leo. Excuse me.
Sir
. How else can you come up with that kind of shit?”

“Wait for it, wait for it,” she demanded, waving a finger at him. “I can’t be precise, not yet, but I hope to give you something pretty accurate very soon. This body’s been in peat all that time. From the moment you put a corpse in that kind of bog it starts getting preserved. Sort of a mixture between mummification and tanning, and completely unpredictable too. Plus, there’s no end of industrial effluent getting poured into the river out there and God knows what that does. I got parts of her almost as hard as wood, other areas soft, almost pliable. Haven’t even contemplated a conventional autopsy — for reasons that will shortly become obvious — so God knows what kind of state she’s in internally. But I have a date. Peat plays havoc with normal radiocarbon dating techniques. I won’t get technical on you. Let’s just say the acid in the water depletes just about anything we can use for a radiocarbon test. There are things we can try, like getting some cholesterol out of her, since that’s virtually immune to long-term soaking. But right now I’m working with some organic material from the dirt beneath her fingernails. And that’s somewhere between 50 >AD and 230 AD.”