known from the start there was something she wanted to tell him. Yet it took all this time.
‘I never realized it would be someone I’d like so much,’ Mina said quietly. She sidled up to him, brushed against his body.
‘The passport, Nic. You haven’t done anything with it, have you? No one else in the Questura has a clue?’
He didn’t want to answer. She knew anyway.
She took his hand and wound her fingers in his.
‘Why is that?’
Costa could see the bend in the Tiber, the miasma rising from the water in the heat, could imagine the dome of St Peter’s just out of view, and ahead of it, near the Castel Sant’Angelo, the bridge with its blind angels, and the patch of road where, centuries ago, a young girl had been brutally executed.
Her lips moved to his cheek, to his ear. Mina kissed him once, biting lightly. Her hands ranged over his chest. She took them away and pulled the half-unbuttoned shirt over her head, the lazy, easy way a child did, then pushed her small breasts against him.
‘I know what you want,’ she murmured. ‘I saw it in Bernard’s eyes. I see it in yours. .’
He tried to push her away.
‘I saw it in Daddy’s face. That last night. When he was sitting on the bed, crying, scared as hell, half-drunk, head bleeding because he’d tried to go outside once and fallen at the window, failed. He was scared. Ready to back out. To go whimpering all the way back to Bernard and offer to put his name on that testament of lies after all. Let Bernard do what he liked to the rest of us so long as he got enough money to live a few more weeks. When we’d worked so hard for this. So hard. .’
He tried to say something. He didn’t want to hear more.
Her voice was hot in his ear. Her lips worked damp and warm against his skin. Her fingers fought to drag his to her small, taut breast.
‘So I sat down on the bed and kissed him. Told him I loved him. I always would. That I’d prove it for him and I did. And he stepped out of the window and I watched him fall.’
Costa wished he’d never come to this lonely hidden tower in the garden by the river. That he’d taken the advice of Falcone and buried this case deep in the ground until it was as lost as the scattered remains of Beatrice Cenci.
‘Was that one of your guesses, Nic? Did you dare go that far? I don’t think so. It wasn’t Joanne Van Doren with Daddy. Not that night.’
Closer, closer.
‘Are you glad you were right in a way? I was Beatrice after all but willingly, lovingly. It was his last moment on earth. He was frightened and lonely and desperate. I owed him all that and he wanted it. Besides.’ She kissed his ear, biting the flesh. ‘There was no going back then, was there?’
She had the stance of some cheap coquettish model. He watched as she pushed the red passport down the front of her slacks then placed his fingers there, on the warm skin of her stomach.
‘You want your evidence, Nic? Take it. That’s why you came, isn’t it?’
He withdrew his hand, bent down, picked up the cotton shirt from the floor and gave it to her.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s the last thing on my mind.’
Out in the garden, among the lilies and the orange trees, beneath the shadow of the tower of the Casina delle Civette, he found himself looking back towards the window, unable to prevent this last backward glance. She stood there, a little hunched, still half-naked, clutching the shirt to her pale skinny chest, watching him leave.
He was too far away to read the expression on her face, and for that Nic Costa was grateful.
FIVE
He rode the rattling turquoise Vespa all the way to Montorio, mostly following the route that the bier of Beatrice Cenci had taken four centuries before. Then he parked outside the church where her remains lay hidden, scattered by time and the cruelty of man.
The place was deserted. The day was still terribly hot. Costa perched on the wall and realized there were two calls he could make. One to the Questura. One to another destination. The first would be irreversible. Perhaps the second too, though in a different, more subtle way.
At least one of these decisions could be postponed. So he phoned and waited until finally there was an answer.
Almost thirty minutes later he saw Agata Graziano walking up the hill below and waved to her from the wall, smiling, his heart full of some inexplicable joy.
She trudged round the long, winding hilly corner and joined him as he sat on the brickwork, looking back at the city the way Mina had once done when they came here.
‘Hello stranger,’ she said, and hitched herself up beside him, letting her legs swing, childlike, over the edge.
‘Am I?’
‘What?’
‘A stranger?’
She was back in old jeans and a T-shirt, hair free and wild, no make-up on her dark, interesting features. There were a couple of crease lines round her eyes. He liked them.
‘Flowers,’ he said, and pulled out from behind the wall the expensive bouquet he’d bought in Trastevere. It was a little battered from the journey up the hill, clutched in his hand as he rode the scooter.
She took them, smelled the fragrant blooms, and smiled.
‘I felt you were a stranger. For a while,’ she said.
‘Sorry. I never meant it that way.’
She watched him with her keen and glittering eyes. Agata had changed again, he thought. Gone was the insular, intransigent sister he’d first met, and the lecturer dressed like one more Roman businesswoman. Perhaps she was finding her real self. It seemed a struggle.
‘It was the girl who got in the way, wasn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Mina. Mina Gabriel?’
She shuffled closer, frowned and toyed with some moss in the brickwork, tugging it out of the cracks.
‘I wish you weren’t so eagle-eyed sometimes,’ she complained.
‘It was a guess.’
‘Really? You still don’t know, do you? I saw you with her. That Monday after her father died. My first day at work. I was in the Piazza Venezia and you two whizzed past on that silly little scooter of yours.’ Agata’s eyes fell to the machine on its stand beneath the trees. She shook her dark head. He watched the way her hair moved, ever more grateful it was unruly, untamed once again. ‘I was so mad. So jealous.’
‘Jealous?’ He laughed, couldn’t help it. ‘She’s seventeen years old.’
‘There she was. Holding onto your waist. Young and beautiful. Free as a bird, riding through Rome as if there was no tomorrow. And me trudging to work, wondering what I’d let myself in for.’
Something had happened. He knew it.
‘Mina was a very troubled young girl. I thought that, perhaps, I could help. Nothing more.’
‘I know. But she was so young. So beautiful. Flying through Rome on a scooter. Holding onto you.’ She turned and stabbed him in the chest with a short, dusky finger. ‘I wanted that to be
‘You’re young,’ he said. ‘You’re beautiful.’
She raised a single eyebrow and stared.
‘I mean,’ he insisted quickly, ‘you should never look back. Not like that. There’s nothing there you can change.’
‘I know that. But you can still yearn for something, even if it’s just a dream.’
She kicked her legs against the wall, glanced at him, shrugged her slight shoulders then looked at the view, the forest of spires and great buildings, the distant peaks of the Sabine Hills.
