The monster hands shift. But they are not gone. Now her attacker has hold of her feet and starts to pull her across the floor.
Valentina slides in the broken lamp glass. It digs into her back where her blouse has come up and spikes into her scalp like a crown of thorns.
She tries to lurch forward as she’s pulled. Grabs at thin air. Swings a wild punch and connects painfully with a wall to the right of her.
One of her legs flops free.
From the blackness comes a hard kick to her kidneys. She whooshes air and pirouettes in pain.
A follow-up kick catches her in the spine and she gets her first rush of panic. Maybe she’s going to get badly beaten here. Or worse.
There’s a blinding flash.
The light is on.
Tom is standing by the door with his hand on the switch.
He sees Valentina and her attacker bent over her.
It isn’t Anna. It’s a man.
There’s a second of inaction, a moment when everyone is overwhelmed by the first sight of each other.
Tom ends the stand-off.
The room is small, and within two steps he’s able to plant a high kick deep into the man’s abdomen.
Before he even doubles up, Tom slips behind him and executes a lethal choke hold. The guy is a good six inches smaller. All the big American has to do to fully immobilise him is turn his hip and inch him up along his outstretched leg.
Valentina gets to her feet.
She unholsters her handcuffs and locks them around the man’s wrists. She pushes him to his knees and breathes a sigh of relief.
Tom wants to go over to her, take her in his arms and comfort her, but he knows he can’t. This is her stage.
She has to be the one in control and he has to back out.
Valentina walks around the front of the kneeling man and gets in his face. ‘What’s your name?’
He dips his head.
She grabs his chin, reaches for her back pocket and pulls out her ID card. ‘I’m Captain Valentina Morassi. Who are you? Why are you here?’
He doesn’t answer.
There’s something about him that’s unnerving.
Now she spots it.
He has almost no facial hair.
In fact he looks almost feminine.
Valentina gets a flashback to the morgue.
The ball-less eunuch found bizarrely butchered beside the Tiber.
Could this be another?
‘Get up!’
The man either can’t or won’t.
‘Tom, help me.’
Between them they drag the prisoner to his feet. Valentina starts to unbuckle his black jeans.
Tom is shocked. ‘What are you doing?’
Valentina clearly has no concern for his rights. She drags his jeans and underpants down around his ankles, pushes him back on to a sofa and uses her foot to spread his legs. ‘ Porca vacca! Another eunuch.’ She wheels away from the debagged prisoner and pulls out her radio.
While she calls in the arrest, she pushes open the bedroom door, gun extended.
The place is in darkness.
She can just make out the outlines of a low bed, a small dresser and a wardrobe.
No Anna.
She returns to Tom. ‘Can you re-dress this asshole while I clean up? I have glass in my hair and God knows where else.’
‘Hey, that’s above and beyond what comes within the boyfriend remit.’
She manages a smile and walks away. ‘I know. Loop the cuffs under a chair leg and sit on him.’
Tom shoots her a look that says he can handle the small guy without needing to do that.
The bathroom is tiny.
Valentina finds there are only women’s things in there. One toothbrush, one tube of paste and some eyebrow tweezers on a glass shelf beneath a cheap white plastic mirrored cabinet. She pulls it open. Inside there’s a tube of thrush cream, a box of Tampax, a bottle of headache pills and some AllergEze.
No sign of the cotton wool or cotton buds that she was hoping for.
She closes the door and squints at the mirror. When she puts her hand to her head, she feels several splinters of glass. Carefully she picks them out with her fingers, briefly inspects the sparkling fragments then washes them away. It takes several minutes to be sure her scalp is glass-free.
She takes off her blouse and by twisting in front of the mirror she can see small slivers of smashed glass embedded in her spine. There’s also an angry red mark around her lower vertebrae where she’s been kicked.
Valentina contorts her fingers and uses the eyebrow tweezers and mirror to pick out the shards. She looks at the nearby shower. It’s a temptation. A hot soak is just what she needs, but she knows that’s a long way off. Just processing the piece of shit in the other room is going to take ages.
She pulls her blouse back on and now becomes aware of her damaged right hand. She can wriggle all of her fingers, but her knuckles are grazed and swollen. A pity she didn’t connect with the son-of-a-bitch’s jaw instead of the wall.
Her attacker is flat out on the floor when she re-enters the room. Tom is sitting near him, his foot in the middle of the guy’s back.
‘All okay?’ she asks.
‘Fine.’ He looks almost bored.
‘I’m going to check the rest of the place, all right?’
He nods.
Valentina goes back to the bedroom, fumbles for a switch and eventually finds it. She pushes it down, but the light doesn’t come on. She clicks it again.
Nothing.
Something is wrong.
She senses it.
She missed something earlier.
Something important.
58
Before Valentina can enter the bedroom and satisfy her curiosity, the arrest team arrives.
She fills them in on the prisoner.
Maybe a night in the cells will loosen the eunuch’s tongue. Come tomorrow she’ll have enough energy to find out what the hell he was doing in the apartment rented by their missing woman.
She borrows a flashlight and returns to the bedroom.
The room is spookily cold and smells of damp, like wet and rusty iron.
Under the glare of the torchlight, the darkness gives way to a tobacco-coloured creaminess. Beyond the burn of the beam, all the walls and even the ceiling seem to be lined with some kind of shabby tiles that are hanging loose.
