was responsible sixteen years ago suddenly get the itch again?’
Teresa shrugged. ‘Pushing it a bit, isn’t it? She’s blonde, pretty and young, if that’s what you mean. From the pictures I’d say she’s a bit on the thin side for most Italians. The mother’s more our size. I wish. Nic, there are skinny blonde kids in Rome all the time. Why would it take sixteen years for him to run across one again? Face it. She’s probably just one more runaway kid.’
He looked at the scattering of disjointed facts that faced them. ‘I don’t think so. It feels wrong. What the hell does it all mean? What does it say in that book you read? What exactly happens? Where do they get their victims from?’
‘They’re not victims, Nic,’ she insisted. ‘If you think that you’re misreading everything. What happened to them was a privilege, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time.’
‘Unless it went wrong,’ he reminded her.
‘Unless it went wrong. But that can’t have happened often. These girls were gifts. Some of them were slaves handed over by their owners. Some were daughters led there by their own fathers. They went through the ritual. They came out changed. Acolytes of the god, remember. That must have meant something.’
‘But what?’ he muttered. ‘I still think this feels wrong.’
‘Don’t ask me. I’m a pathologist. Not an archaeologist. Or a cop. Or a psychic for that matter. Listen to yourself. It feels wrong. Are you really going to go back out there and tell Falcone that?’
Yet he felt sure she had seen some kind of link too. He could recognize it in her face, the bright spark of intelligence mixed with the dread of what that new information could mean.
‘You’re the only person I have right now who’s researched all this. Please—’
She sat down and sighed. ‘Don’t do this to me, Nic. Don’t take what I say as gospel. I don’t like being imprecise. I’m trained for the opposite.’
‘Just point me somewhere. I’ll check it out. I promise. Tell me more about this ritual.’
‘All I know is what I read. The ceremony was about the initiation of chosen girls into adulthood. On one particular day: 17 March. Sounds familiar? This was party time. There’d be men there, for sure. Priests, hangers-on, hoping they could get in on the fun. They drank, they danced, they swallowed every ancient Roman narcotic they could find. Then they did tricks to each other that would make a bunch of Hell’s Angels walk out of the room feeling things were going a little too far. But this was about the girls. It was about giving them something they could use in adulthood. An advantage, maybe. Or some kind of membership of a club they could use later on.’
Costa stared at her, expecting more. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The man who wrote the thing said himself it’s all guesswork. No one really knows what happened. All they know is that it got out of hand sometimes. It got bad enough for the Romans to ban it after a while. Long before the Christians came along with peace and love. It was all too much for them. They just carted off the organizers, put them to death somewhere, then relaunched the thing as some toned-down happy-clappy ceremony called the Liberalia. The same kind of stunt they pulled off to wind up with Christmas, if you recall. What preceded it? Who knows?’
He tried to make sense of this. ‘So maybe two thousand years later someone’s playing the same tricks? Using the same rituals?’
‘We don’t know that. All you’ve got is a tattoo. A date—’
‘And a dead body.’
She tried to look hopeful. ‘Which has no connection whatsoever with this girl. Be honest with yourself. The mother’s probably right. The kid’ll walk back in with a certain smile on her face thinking, “Thank Christ I got that out of the way”. Jesus, a virgin at sixteen. What kind of lives do these people lead?’
He wasn’t listening. He was doing the cop thing – opening drawers, looking into the contents, only with a touch more respect than most of them had. Nic Costa didn’t up-end the things and turn the stuff out onto the floor. He just sifted carefully, as if he felt he were intruding.
‘Do you realize,’ she said out of nowhere, ‘that if I meet someone now and we have a kid, when that kid is Suzi Julius’s age I will be turned fifty? My God, who’s the virgin here?’
Costa opened the bottom drawer, slid his hand beneath a neatly folded nightdress and stared up at her.
‘What?’ she said.
He took out a couple of items: obscure things, hidden, wrong.
One was the stalk of some plant, dried. A pine cone was attached to the thinner end, clinging clumsily to the stump, held there with tape. It looked like a schoolkid’s craft project.
‘She was working out how to make it,’ Teresa said glumly.
‘The name again?’ he asked.
‘Thyrsus.’ She took it from him and sniffed the stem, her face deadly serious all of a sudden. ‘That’s fennel. Just like the one from the peat.’
‘And this?’ It was a plastic bag, full of seeds. Costa smelled the contents. ‘It’s not dope.’
‘Not ordinary dope.’
She looked inside the bag, deeply miserable.
‘Teresa?’
‘I found something similar in the dead girl’s pockets. I’m waiting for the full lab report. From my limited culinary expertise I’d say it’s a mixture of herb seeds. Cumin. Coriander. Fennel again. Something hallucinogenic too maybe. Something fungal. Magic mushroom in all probability.’
He waited, wondering how she knew.
‘According to the book it was part of the ritual. A small gift from the god. A thank you for what he was about to get in return.’
‘Which was?’
She was silent.
‘Guess,’ he said. ‘Give me some female intuition.’
‘If you got it right? Paradise. You lost your virginity, probably to some temple creep wearing that spooky mask from the tattoo just to look the part. This was about ecstasy. Physical ecstasy. Mental, spiritual—’
She screwed up her eyes, thinking, remembering. ‘The book said that, in public, 17 March was the day Roman boys attained their manhood. In private the women achieved some special kind of status too. At least the ones who were hanging round the cult.’
‘And if you got it wrong? If you said no …?’
‘Then I guess you met one very angry god.’ She hesitated. ‘You really believe this poor kid’s a part of all this? And she thinks she’s just playing some game?’
He looked at the home-made wand and the little bag of seeds. ‘It’s a possibility, surely? We can’t ignore it.’
‘There’s not enough here to push any of Falcone’s buttons.’
She was right. These were just
