Tom drains the last of his espresso and changes the subject.
‘What are your plans for today?’
‘Well, providing you don’t get us arrested, when we’re finished here I’ll call Federico and see what he got from the guy we arrested at the apartment last night. After that, I want to re-interview Suzanna.’ She corrects herself. ‘Sorry, Anna. And I’d like you to be there for that.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘Professional reasons.’ She smiles. ‘Or maybe I just don’t want to leave you today. I want you on hand for my personal satisfaction.’
‘And what if I don’t want to satisfy you?’ He picks up a croissant and a small pot of strawberry jam.
‘Then you’re dumped. History. Gone. I’ll even throw you out of that palace we slept in last night.’
He scoops jam on to his plate and scrubs the end of the croissant in it. ‘And that’s supposed to be a threat?’
She laughs. ‘No, seriously, this case obviously has some confusing religious dimensions. It would be good to have you around to make sense of them.’
‘Glad to help in any way I can.’
Valentina hesitates for a moment. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to pay you – you know, like we did in Venice.’ She struggles to explain. ‘Given our relationship, I’m worried it might seem a little – corrupt.’
He sees her point. ‘It’s really not necessary. I’ll settle for sleeping with the boss.’
‘Deal.’ She drinks some water. ‘While we’re seeing Anna, I’ll have Federico run background checks on her – medical, criminal, social records, et cetera. We need to find out where she works, where she gets her money from, who she knows and who knows her.’
‘And who’s scaring her so much she has to rest in a bed of bibles.’
‘Exactly.’ Valentina forks a slice of cheese on to her plate. ‘I really want to go through the diaries we found at her apartment. I told Louisa about them last night when you were sleeping. She says they’re probably life logs – a sort of diary kept by each of the alters. I’ll try to get her opinion on those too.’
‘Have you thought about the fire – who might have done it?’
Valentina has. Long and hard. She plays down what she really thinks. ‘Someone who had a grudge against whoever lived there before I did? Maybe they owed money or had crossed some mafioso. Or it could be lunatic teenagers; vandals these days are pazzo.’
‘That’s not who did it.’
‘Or maybe the owner of the building, wanting to cash in on insurance.’
‘That’s not it either.’
She knows he’s right.
Tom stretches his hand across the table and takes hers. ‘Whoever started it wanted to kill you. They wanted you dead so you wouldn’t uncover some nasty secret to do with this case.’
‘That might not be true.’ She squeezes his fingers.
‘I think you know it is.’
She has no option but to put him right.
‘What if it’s not? What if it’s you they were trying to kill, and not me?’
62
Federico is almost sober.
He spends twenty minutes steaming the booze out of his system in a shower at HQ.
For breakfast he grabs black coffee from the canteen and drinks it while chain-smoking two cigarettes on the steps of the station house. It’s not healthy, but it’s the closest he’ll ever get to a low-calorie, zero-fat meal.
Back at his desk, he enters the new information he has on the male prisoner languishing downstairs in the cells and pulls up his record. On his computer monitor he stares at a slightly younger version of the guy they arrested.
The text below the mug shot tells him it’s Guilio Brygus Angelis and he’s thirty years old. He’s unmarried and has no children.
No surprises there.
Federico scrolls down. Guilio was born in Athens and moved to Rome with his mother, Maya, when he was only three. It figures. Both the Christian and surnames are Greek, not Italian.
Maya worked in a city library and died a year later.
The report doesn’t say how.
Federico reads on. There’s no trace of the kid being fostered or adopted. He only appears on official records again in his early teens. It seems he was in trouble.
Serious trouble.
His juvenile record shows convictions for possession of drugs, assaults on two teachers and even an attack on a Catholic priest inside a young offenders’ detention centre where he spent just over a year.
By his late teens, the librarian’s child had added another volume of serious charges, including burglary and wounding. He spent his twenty-first birthday in jail for theft, assault and breach of previous bail orders.
Recently, though, there’s no trace of any convictions and no outstanding warrants for his arrest.
On paper, Guilio almost looks as though he’s turned over a new leaf.
Or at least he did, until he got caught red-handed in Anna’s apartment and nearly beat Valentina to death.
Federico stops scrolling and sits back.
One thing puzzles him.
Why are there no listed associates? From what he’s just read, it doesn’t seem as though this guy ever hung around with gangs or teamed up with anyone to commit his crimes.
That’s unusual.
He dives deeper into the files and digs around in the assessment notes from the governor at the detention centre.
Eventually he falls on a clue.
Guilio is described as ‘painfully shy’, ‘explosively violent’ and ‘an out-and-out loner’. The centre’s psychiatric report says that ‘pre-puberty castration can be expected to have resulted not only in his anger and violence but also in his introversion’.
Federico logs off and catches the elevator to reception.
He steps outside for a final cigarette before starting his interview with Guilio, and watches people drift by the front of the Carabinieri building. The weather’s turned wintry again. Everyone’s wrapped tight in coats and scarves and gloves. It’s his least favourite time of the year. Give him summer any day. Girls with long smiles and short skirts. That’s how God intended things to be.
63
Administrator Sylvio Valducci has foreign guests arriving within the next hour. This means he’s more than happy for Louisa Verdetti to meet the Carabinieri on her own. With a little luck they’ll lock her up and throw away the key.
Even before her early-morning call to him, he’d already decided that from now on she could take all the risks with this so-called DID patient, and if things turned out all right then he’d take the credit.
His one brush with the law has given him plenty to talk about at lectures around the globe. If things go pear- shaped, then at least by distancing himself from the action, he’s renewing the possibility of sacking Verdetti.
Louisa knows all this as surely as if Valducci had said it to her face and then mailed her a summary of his words.
