so seriously?’
Falcone ignored the question. ‘The tattoo. Tell us about that.’
The point of the question was lost on her. ‘What’s there to tell? I noticed she’d been wearing long sleeves all the time. Then yesterday she just comes out and announces it. He told her to get one. He even suggested what it should be like, took her down some stupid tattoo parlour he knew. Paid for the thing, would you believe.’
‘Does he have a name?’ Costa wondered. ‘Did she say where he lived?’
She shook her head. ‘Apparently she wasn’t ready for him to meet me. Not just yet.’
‘Why? Did she give a reason?’
‘She’s still a kid. Young even for her years. She’s still at the stage where a parent’s embarrassing. What was I supposed to do? It wasn’t as if she was spending the night with him or anything. And that’s what’s really strange. Look, I’m never going to win mother of the year contest. Most of the time Suzi’s been growing up I’ve been in some shit part of the world photographing dead people. But I know my daughter. We can talk to each other. She wasn’t sleeping with this boy. Not yet. It was as if they were waiting for something. In fact …’
She hesitated, wondering whether this was going too far, ‘… she’s never slept with anyone. She’s a virgin. Her decision. Perhaps she looked at me and realized where it could get you.’
‘Waiting for what?’ Falcone asked.
‘If I knew that I’d tell you,’ she snapped. ‘But I’m sure of one thing. When. It happens in two days’ time. March the 17th. I heard her talking on the phone. Making arrangements to meet him. She sounded excited. Not that she’d talk to me about it, of course.’
Costa thought about the date. There were too many coincidences. ‘Can we take a look in her room?’
‘Feel free. It’s the tidy one at the end.’
Falcone nodded at Costa. Teresa got up and followed him without being asked. The two of them wandered down the corridor, listening to Falcone’s persistent drone continue to wear at Miranda Julius behind them. Costa couldn’t help glancing into what he assumed was Miranda Julius’s bedroom. It wasn’t the tidy one. There were clothes scattered everywhere, a couple of professional-looking cameras, and a notebook computer, open, ready for work.
‘Jesus,’ Teresa groaned, when they were out of earshot. ‘That man has the manners of a warthog. Can you believe he ever got married? What are we looking for, Nic? Why am I here for God’s sake? It’s a missing kid, isn’t it?’
‘I’m sorry. I thought you might like the opportunity to do a little cop work.’
She came to a halt, giving him a filthy look. ‘I’ve got a corpse half finished back in the morgue. One that looks two thousand years old but only went in the ground sixteen years ago. I’ve got scientific problems with names you couldn’t even pronounce. And you think I might “like the opportunity”?’
He opened the door to the girl’s room. ‘You want to look or don’t you?’
‘Lemme in.’ She barged through and stared at the contents. Then she carefully closed the door behind her, not wanting to hear Falcone’s voice, needing the privacy herself too. ‘This is a teenager’s room? Hell, my place is worse than this. Come to that …’ She was thinking on her feet. Costa always liked to watch this. ‘… how come the mother looks like that? Like the kid’s sister? She’s just a year younger than me, for God’s sake, and if you walked her through the Questura every last jack-ass in there would be clutching at his groin making those heavy breathing noises you like so much.’
‘They’d do that for you if they thought you wouldn’t hit them.’
She glared at him. ‘You couldn’t stop staring at her. I couldn’t help noticing that.’
He ignored the remark and went over to the table by the girl’s single bed. There was a portfolio of photographs, black and white, printed in large format. He flicked through them: images from every war that had made the headlines in the last decade, Afghanistan, Palestine, Rwanda, places in Africa he couldn’t begin to identify. Teresa came to join him.
‘Is that what she meant?’ she asked. ‘When she said she went around photographing dead people?’
‘She’s a war photographer apparently.’
Corpses lay still on the ground, broken, bloody. Lost children, their eyes like saucers, stared back at them from the prints. ‘Makes my job look kind of normal,’ Teresa said. ‘What drives you to that kind of work? Particularly when you’ve got a kid waiting at home?’
‘I don’t know.’ Were the photos in the daughter’s room because Suzi liked them? Or because she kept asking herself that question too. There was something complicated going on here, he thought.
‘If I had a mother who took photos like that I’d maybe think of running away myself,’ Teresa said carefully. ‘You understand what I’m saying?’
He’d done plenty of missing kid inquiries. He knew what they felt like. And it wasn’t like this. ‘Of course I do. Half the time the kids aren’t running towards something; they’re running from it. Do you really think that’s what’s happening here? They’re on holiday, Teresa. I’ve dealt with more runaways than I can remember. I don’t recall one of them ever being a foreign tourist.’
‘Point taken,’ she said quietly. ‘All the same—’
There was a pile of family snaps on the bedside table. Miranda Julius did take them all the time. Most were of the girl, looking lovely, happy. A few were taken by someone else, a stranger perhaps, or a waiter. There they were outside the Villa Borghese, on the Spanish Steps, eating pizza, laughing. Nic Costa looked at them and felt a pang of guilt. If he was right, Suzi Julius could be in big trouble right now, trouble that would bring her mother pain and possibly grief, whatever the outcome. Pictures spoke, they told stories. These two were close. They loved each other.
Teresa was staring at them too. ‘Nice photographs,’ she said simply. ‘Nice to know she doesn’t just snap dead people.’
For a moment he wondered: was there a small, bitter note inside Teresa Lupo’s voice, whispering: Look on with envy, because you’ll never know this, you’ll never feel the joy or the pain?
‘Can you imagine the feeling of responsibility?’ she asked. ‘What it must be like? Knowing someone else depends on you that much?’
He thought of his own dead father. He did know it, but only from the point of view of the dependant.
‘You can see it on her face,’ she continued. ‘Whatever happened, whether there was a row or not, she’s just sitting in there asking herself, “Is there something I could have done?”’
‘It’s always like that,’ he said by way of an explanation. ‘You’re a pathologist. It’s just that you don’t see it.’
She toyed with one of the best photos: the two of them laughing in a pale winter sun on the Ponte Sisto. ‘Just because it’s always like that doesn’t make it any easier.’
‘No.’ He wondered
