tells herself, she knows people have faith, and faith can’t be detected by Luminol spray or DNA swabs.
Brancati taps the glass. ‘In December 1838, Giuseppe Stitz was reading a book of prayers when this mark of a hand appeared on it. He gave testimony that he then heard the voice of his dead brother asking for prayers.’
Valentina has seen enough of the exhibits. ‘Thank you, Father. You have been most helpful.’
Tom extends his hand and shakes that of the priest. ‘Would it be all right if Captain Morassi and I look around the church and then come back to see you in the sacristy if we have any final questions?’
‘I must go in twenty minutes.’ He holds up his wrist and a cheap watch. ‘Will you be done by then?’
‘We will,’ Valentina readily promises.
He nods and leaves.
‘Well,’ she says to Tom, ‘what do you make of that?’
‘A little more than you do.’ Tom glances around. ‘But that’s not the point. I don’t see any real tie to your woman prisoner. Except that she sent us here.’
‘ Maybe sent us here.’
‘Maybe,’ he concedes, then walks past her into the main body of the church.
The place is in half-light. Searching it seems impossible.
Tom wanders up the left and Valentina the right. It all suddenly seems pointless to her. With most searches you know what you’re looking for – a gun, a knife, a murder weapon, bloodstains, footprints, fingerprints, hairs, fibres, a suicide note or even a death-bed confession.
She finds a stack of prayer books.
Pointless.
There are dozens of them.
Each with hundreds of pages and thousands of words. She looks across the church and pauses. What did she just think of?
Notes, suicide notes, confession notes. She makes her way through the pews to one of two old-fashioned con fessionals pushed against the right-hand wall of the church.
Tom sees her from the other side and drifts across. Valentina slips through a rusty-brown curtain and sits on the bench where the priest normally positions himself. She notices there are two wooden shutters, allowing him to hear confession from either side. She opens them both and smiles at the sight of a tube of peppermints tucked away in the corner of a narrow shelf.
Tom’s face appears through the shutter in front of her and makes her jump.
‘Madonna!’ she says, pleased that nothing worse slipped out.
‘Three Hail Marys as penance,’ chides Tom. ‘You find anything?’
‘Nothing.’ She pulls a small penlight torch from her pocket and shines it around. ‘Just Father Brancati’s food stash.’
‘I had a McDonald’s during confession once. It was coming up to Christmas and I was doing double shifts. You’d be amazed what goes on in those booths.’
He walks around the outside and squeezes in alongside her.
It’s a tight fit.
Valentina has to chase off some sudden and inappropriate thoughts that would surely get her a very long spell in Purgatory, if not somewhere worse. ‘How long is it since you’ve been in one of these?’ she asks, shining her torch up across the plaster of the ceiling and wall.
‘Seeking forgiveness, or giving forgiveness?’
‘Either.’
‘Three years since I heard confession. Not quite as long since I wiped the slate clean.’
‘Is that really what it does?’ She plays the beam across the wood inside the confessional.
‘With venial sin, yes. In the case of my mortal sins, no.’ For a second, she remembers how they met. The first time he told her of the incident in Los Angeles. The lives he took in a fight in the gang-infested streets of Compton. She’s about to say something comforting when she thinks she sees something. ‘Move a minute. Just move to one side.’
Tom shuffles round.
Valentina crouches, and her knees crack. She holds the torch like she’s throwing a dart and focuses the beam on the wall. Scraped into the plasterwork are the words DOMINA.
DOMINUS. TEMPLUM. LIBERA NOS A MALO.
She focuses on the words.
Cassandra’s words.
But Tom’s eyes are on something beneath the writing.
A geometric shape, hovering beneath the phrase DELIVER US FROM EVIL.
A triangle.
A very special triangle.
34
Father Brancati goes wild when he sees the graffiti.
‘ Vandali! ’ he shouts. ‘They have no respect. They steal. They wreck things. Not even the Church is sacred any more.’
‘A little strange,’ Tom points out, more quietly, ‘to find vandals who write in Latin.’
Until then the priest hasn’t noticed. He’s so familiar with the old language that he subconsciously translated the text as automatically as reading a prayer book. ‘Yes, I suppose it is. Very strange.’ He moves to touch the lettering with his fingers, to feel the imprint of whatever rough tool was used to scrape out the plaster.
Valentina grabs his hand. ‘Please don’t touch it. It’s a crime scene and will need to be photographed.’
He looks shocked. ‘Crime scene? What? Why?’
She gently leads him out of the confessional. ‘As I mentioned when I phoned you, we’re investigating a violent incident, and there is a link to your church that we have to look into.’ She eases him round and walks him part way down the aisle. ‘You’ve been very kind and helpful, Father. Would you mind waiting in the sacristy until I have finished here?’
Brancati minds very much, but still does as she says.
He’s worried about what’s going on.
Worried about the publicity, the effect on the mission, what his superiors might say. He heads for the sacristy and goes straight to the bottle of brandy he keeps in the cupboard alongside the altar wine.
He’ll find his mints later.
Tom takes a snap of the writing with his camera phone while Valentina makes a call to the station.
She reappears moments later. ‘Federico is sending a photographer and CSI; they’ll take shots, and dust and spray everything and anything all around here.’ She points at the triangle. ‘That’s identical to the pendant we found on the prisoner. She even wrote about it in a story, said she’d had it stolen from her while she was being persecuted in ancient Rome. Does it mean anything to you?’
Tom is on his knees, peering closely at the symbol. ‘Maybe it’s a scalene.’
‘A what?’
‘Scalene. It means that none of the sides are the same length and none of the angles match. It’s the only triangular shape where none of the sides or angles are equal.’
‘Geometry wasn’t my strong subject at school.’
‘What was?’
‘Boys,’ she says cheekily. ‘Aside from the boring geometry, does it mean anything?’
Tom stares at it while he thinks. ‘Triangles have always had immense symbolic power. The Nazis used a whole range of them to pick out and persecute minority groups in their concentration camps. Red for political dissidents, green for criminals, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, brown for Gypsies, black for lesbians and pink for homosexuals. I believe the famous six-pointed star was invented because gay Jewish men had to wear a pink triangle overlapping the yellow one that denoted their religion.’
