‘I’m saying it was a professional hit. I’m saying that something she’d stumbled across had made her a threat and that the painting was just a way of flushing her out into the open.’
‘If you’re right…’ Ortiz said slowly.
‘If I’m right, then we’re already too late to catch the killer. You can run a DNA test on the blood traces, but people like that are ghosts. You’ll get nothing. But I might still be able to find whoever ordered the hit.’
‘
‘Let me see her files.’ Tom turned to Ortiz. ‘I can go places you can’t, speak to people you don’t know. But I need to move fast. I need to move now.’
Ortiz went to say something, but then hesitated, his eyes again flickering towards the mirror.
‘Yeah, sure!’ Stokes gave a rasping laugh. ‘Get a load of this guy. Our necks are already on the line and now he wants us to bend over and drop our pants too?’
‘Then either charge me with something, or let me go,’ Tom shouted angrily, rising to his feet. ‘Right now you’re just wasting my time.’
‘Like I said, Kirk, you’re going nowhere,’ Stokes said coldly, standing up and swiping the door open.
‘I’m sorry, man,’ Ortiz shrugged, joining him in the doorway. ‘But he’s right. This is how it’s got to be.’
The door sealed shut behind them and the electronic reader flashed from green to red. Saying nothing, Tom reached into his trouser pocket and felt the hard outline of the swipe card Jennifer had pressed into his hand in the helicopter.
Even then, as she lay dying, she’d known how this would play out. Even then, she’d known what he would have to do.
TWENTY
Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, Isola Tiberina, Rome
18th March – 3.51 p.m.
Allegra had left Aurelio in yet another of his sulks. She had arrived late and was now leaving early, he had complained as she hurriedly saw herself out. She had pointedly reminded him that she was only leaving so she could follow up on a case that he was responsible for her being involved with in the first place. But by then he had turned the radio on and was pretending he couldn’t hear her. No matter. All would be forgiven and forgotten by tomorrow, she knew, his moods breaking and clearing as quickly as a summer storm.
Allegra wasn’t sure whether the link between the lead discs and the Delian League was meaningful or not, but one thing that she was almost certain about was that Gallo would want to know about it ASAP, so he could make that decision for himself. Normally she would have called him, but his phone appeared to have been switched off. According to his assistant, this was because there was no reception in the mortuary basement levels, where she would still catch him if she hurried.
Having signed in, she headed down to the cold store in the basement. A young man wearing a white lab coat – a medical student, she guessed, judging by his age – was manning the reception desk and glaring at a monitor.
‘Colonel Gallo?’ she asked, flicking her wallet open. He jumped up, deftly minimising a game of solitaire.
‘You just missed him,’ he replied anxiously, leaning over the top of the counter and peering down the corridor behind her as if he still might be able to see him. ‘Signor Santos is still here, though.’
‘Who?’
‘He came in for the formal ID on Argento. Colonel Gallo thought it better that they leave separately.’
She glanced at the door he had indicated and with a curious frown stepped towards it. Peering through the porthole she could see that it opened on to a large and resolutely featureless rectangular room, the only splash of colour coming from a few moulded blue plastic seats that were huddled for warmth around a water cooler bolted to the right-hand wall. Opposite these were a series of evenly spaced square aluminium doors, perhaps eight across and three high, each with a large levered handle and a name-tag slot. One of the doors was open; the drawer had been pulled out. A man was standing to one side of it, his back to her.
‘Signor Santos?’
She pushed the door open and announced herself with a warm smile and an outstretched hand. Santos turned slowly at the sound of her voice. He was in his late forties and looked slim and fit, with a tanned face and teeth the colour of polished ivory. His closecropped dark hair was sprinkled with silver and started high up his head where his hairline had begun to recede a little. He was immaculately dressed in a Cesare Attolini navy blazer and white flannel trousers that had been cut to crease at just the right place to slightly ride up over a pair of brown Church’s. His creamy pink shirt was from Barba in Naples, his striped tie from Marinella, and his belt by Gucci, although given the obvious excellence of the tailoring, this last item was clearly worn for sartorial effect rather than to keep his trousers up.
He gave her a wary, even suspicious look that prompted her into an explanation.
‘Lieutenant Allegra Damico,’ she introduced herself, holding out her ID. ‘I’m working with Colonel Gallo.’
‘I see.’ He smiled, returning her wallet with a nod. ‘Apologies. I thought you might be from the press.’
‘They’re looking for you?’
‘They’re looking for an opportunity to snatch a photograph of an elected official grieving over his dead brother’s butchered corpse. I’m here to make sure they don’t get that chance.’
‘Deputy Argento asked you to identify his brother’s body instead of him?’ she guessed.
‘Actually, Colonel Gallo suggested it,’ he corrected her. ‘He thought it might help…simplify matters.’
‘How did you know the victim?’
‘My apologies -’ Santos stepped forward with an apologetic shrug, his hand rising to meet hers – ‘I haven’t introduced myself. I am Antonio Santos, President of the Banco Rosalia.’
He handed her his business card, the way he held it out with both hands suggesting he had lived, or at least done a lot of business in the Far East. It was stiff and elaborately engraved with a sweeping copperplate script that identified him as:
‘Gio used to work for me.’
Allegra moved over to stand on the other side of the open drawer, her ghostly form reflecting indistinctly in the adjacent door’s dull aluminium surface.
Giulio Argento was lying in between them, naked and shrouded by a white sheet apart from his uncovered face and where it had fallen away from his left arm, revealing a bar-coded tag fixed to his wrist like a supermarket label. She barely recognised his waxen and hollow features but there was no mistaking, though, the ugly welt of the sword strike where it had opened up his neck like a second smile.
‘Liquorice?’
She refused. There seemed something strangely inappropriate about the way Santos was shaking the ornate tin over Argento’s body.
‘I read that Roman soldiers could go for ten days without eating or drinking with liquorice in their rations,’ he said, popping two pieces into his mouth and then slipping the tin back into his pocket. Allegra nodded, deciding against mentioning that she had read somewhere else that too much liquorice could reduce a man’s testosterone levels. ‘So? Any leads? Any clues as to who did it? Why they did it?’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t…’
‘I understand.’ He shrugged. ‘Due process, jeopardising a live investigation, respect for the victim’s family… Gallo spun me a similar line.’
‘It’s for your own protection,’ she insisted.
A pause. Santos looked back down at the body.
‘You know, the traffic was terrible the day they found the body,’ he said eventually, a strangely vacant expression on his face, as if he couldn’t quite see Argento and yet knew he was there. ‘Half the streets seemed to
