that.
He pushed himself upright with a weary hand, picked up his things, then checked she’d got herself well distant from the smell of gas. Lianne watched from the side of the road, a good ten yards from the dying Clio, her hands clasped behind her back looking like a schoolgirl waiting to be told what to do.
He walked over to join his wife.
‘You OK?’ he asked. He looked a little worried about how far this was going. That was something, she thought.
‘Sure.’ She’d stopped crying. He looked glad of that. It was something.
There was a sound from the car, a sort of breathy whoosh. They watched as a thin finger of flame flickered out from under the hood and worked its way up the windshield.
‘Now that …’ Bobby said, ‘is what I like about rental vehicles. They can do this sort of shit in front of your eyes and you just get to stand back and enjoy the show. Wish I’d hired something bigger now.’
The low scuttering wind caught the flames, rolled them over the roof of the Clio, sent them swirling inside the window, eating up the seats where, just a minute or so before, Bobby and Lianne Dexter had sat arguing. Then, with a sudden roar and a puff of heat and smoke, the Renault was ablaze, devouring itself in a cloud of black smoke and flame.
Lianne clung to her husband’s arm watching the spectacle. Bobby was right. This was Avis’s problem. This was what they were for. Why they charged the kind of prices they did.
‘What are we going to do now, Bobby?’ she wondered. Then she looked at him and found, to her relief, Bobby Dexter was smiling, happy once more, for the first time in hours.
He held up one of the things he’d taken from the back seat of the car. The metal detector they’d hired that very morning somewhere near the hotel in Rome.
‘What we came here for,’ Bobby Dexter said. ‘Daddy’s going a-hunting.’
She ventured a laugh and wondered if it came out wrong. Maybe it did. Maybe not. It didn’t matter anyway. Bobby Dexter wasn’t listening. He was working his way down to the river, walking over the odd, boggy ground that felt as if it might give way beneath them at any moment. He had the headphones on, listening. And pretty soon Bobby Dexter was laughing too. Something must have been coming through loud and clear. Lianne walked to join him. They were just twenty yards short of the river now. There wasn’t another soul around for miles. Anything they found here now was surely theirs.
‘Hear that?’
She took the headphones from him and held one earpiece to her head. It was beeping like crazy, like a kid’s game from years ago.
‘Fucking Tom Jorgensen,’ Bobby spat and she didn’t dare look into his eyes when he was talking like this. ‘I’ll teach that big fat bastard. Get me the gear.’
He was skulking in the little coffee bar around the corner from the Questura when Barbara Martelli walked in, dressed in her immaculate black uniform, helmet in hand, her long, blonde tresses bouncing above her collar with each step.
‘Nic,’ she said, looking surprised. ‘You’re back at work?’
‘First day,’ he replied, glancing at his watch. ‘When I decide to turn up.’
‘Ah.’
‘How are you, Barbara?’
‘I’m fine. I’m always fine. And you?’
He drained the macchiato. ‘Yeah.’
‘In case you forgot, this isn’t the café the cops use.’
‘So why are you here?’
She laughed. Barbara Martelli was about his height, with the kind of figure that turned every head in the station and a shock of blonde curls that seemed too full to squeeze inside that small black helmet. Her face was wrong for a cop. Too attractive, too ready to break into a smile. She looked as if she ought to be on the TV, announcing the weather or introducing some show. Instead she just floated around Rome on her big bike, handing out tickets with such charm the word was some people simply started speeding the moment they realized she was on their tail.
Back in the old days, before the shooting that put him on his back, fighting demons, Nic Costa wondered sometimes whether she was sweet on him. A couple of the guys egged him on to ask her for a date … provided he told everything afterwards. It didn’t happen. She was just too perfect. She topped every driving exam, behind the wheel and on the force motorbikes. She was a tidy shot too, a talent that got her into most diplomatic assignments. Barbara Martelli was just a little too perfect to touch.
‘Sometimes you have to escape for a while, Nic. Is that what you’re doing? If so it’s a little early. You have to get back in the ring if you want to hear the bell.’
‘I’m having a coffee,’ he mumbled.
‘How long has it been?’
‘Six months.’ Six long months of slow recovery from the shooting and the mental damage that followed. Sometimes he wondered if he’d ever make it, whether he wanted to at all.
She looked at him frankly. She was, the more he thought about it, very possibly the most attractive woman inside the Questura. He was amazed he’d never asked her out. Not that he wanted anything to happen. She was just good company to be around, someone who could make you feel special. He didn’t really know her at all.
‘You do want to come back, don’t you? It’s not just Falcone pushing you into this?’
‘No. I mean. I can’t think of anything else. Can you?’
‘No.’
‘We’re all like that, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘Short of a choice.’
He listened to his own voice and found himself disliking what he heard. What was there? Resentment? Self-pity? He was twenty-eight. He’d never talked like that before. He had been changed by what was now known as ‘the Denney case’, an unresolved mess of entanglements that had cost his partner, Luca Rossi, his life, and almost left Costa dead too. This new Nic Costa no longer ran every time he wanted to clear his head, pounding the pavements around the Campo dei Fiori, arms flailing like a madman. He’d sold his tiny apartment in the Vicolo del Bologna and moved into his late father’s old home, the sprawling farmhouse off the Via Appia Antica where he grew up. Costa’s physical wounds were, for the most part, healed; the internal ones still ached from time to time.
Nic Costa continued to miss Luca Rossi’s taciturn wit and astute insight, wishing he’d learned to appreciate them more during their brief time working together. He knew, too, that he would return to work touched by the cold, sceptical hardness of the world. It had become necessary to embrace what Falcone, who had singlehandedly talked him out of a wheelchair and back into the force, would call ‘pragmatism’.
Falcone, the cold, single-minded inspector, regarded this transition as inevitable. Maybe he was right. Costa, who with his old self hated cynicism, the defeatism that said sometimes you had to make the best of a bad job because the alternative was to lose the fight completely, was still unsure. He didn’t like the idea of trimming his principles to match the awkward, unyielding shape of brute reality. That much of his father – a stubborn, unbending
