starts getting preserved. Sort of a mixture between mummification and tanning, and completely unpredictable too. Plus, there’s no end of industrial effluent getting poured into the river out there and God knows what that does. I got parts of her almost as hard as wood, other areas soft, almost pliable. Haven’t even contemplated a conventional autopsy – for reasons that will shortly become obvious – so God knows what kind of state she’s in internally. But I have a date. Peat plays havoc with normal radiocarbon dating techniques. I won’t get technical on you. Let’s just say the acid in the water depletes just about anything we can use for a radiocarbon test. There are things we can try, like getting some cholesterol out of her, since that’s virtually immune to long-term soaking. But right now I’m working with some organic material from the dirt beneath her fingernails. And that’s somewhere between 50 AD and 230 AD.’
They just stared at her.
‘Is that really possible?’ Falcone asked eventually.
She went over to the desk and picked up a large brown envelope next to the computer. ‘You bet. None of this is new. The archaeologists have a term for it. “Peat bodies”. They’ve been there for centuries but no one noticed until companies started digging up the bogs for the gardening business. The area behind Fiumicino was never big enough to work commercially. Mind you, there’s been a lot of rain this winter. Maybe that took off some of the surface soil and made it easier to find.’
She crossed the room and passed them a set of colour photographs. They were of corpses, brown corpses, some contorted, half shrunken, half mummified, a little more exaggerated than the one now on the slab but recognizably similar all the same.
‘See this one,’ she said, pointing at the first picture. It was the head of a man, apparently turned to leather. The features were almost perfectly preserved. He had a calm, composed face. His eyes were closed as if in sleep. He wore some kind of rough leather cap, the stitching still visible on the crude seams. ‘Tollund, Denmark. Found in 1950. Don’t be fooled by the expression. He had a rope around his neck. Executed for some reason. Some good radiocarbon material there. Puts his death somewhere over two thousand years ago. And this—’
The next picture was of a full corpse: a man, reclining on what looked like rock. He was more shrivelled this time, with his neck turned at an awkward angle and a head of matted red hair.
‘Grauballe, also in Denmark, not far away, though he’s even older, third century BC. This one had his throat cut ear to ear. They found traces of the ergot fungus – the magic mushroom – in his gut. It’s not easy to recreate what went on but there’s a common theme. These people died violently, maybe as part of some ritual. Drugs tended to be involved. Here—’
She began scattering pictures over their laps, corpse after mummified corpse, many crouched in that tortured, agonized position any cop who’d visited a modern murder scene already knew too well. ‘Yde Girl, in Holland, stabbed and strangled. She was maybe sixteen. Lindow Man, England. Beaten, strangled then dumped in the bog. Daetgen Man, Germany. Beaten, stabbed and beheaded. Borremose Woman, found in Denmark, face caved in, probably by a hammer or a pickaxe. These were all people in primitive, pagan agrarian societies. Maybe they did something wrong. Maybe there was some kind of sacrificial rite. Peat bogs often had a kind of spiritual significance for these tribes. Perhaps these were offerings to the bog god or someone. I don’t know.’
Falcone put down the photos. He seemed remarkably uninterested in them. ‘I don’t care what happened in Denmark a couple of millennia ago. What happened here? How, specifically, did she die?’
She didn’t like that. Teresa Lupo had been expecting a little more credit for what she’d found out, Costa thought. She deserved it too.
‘Listen,’ she answered sharply. ‘We have limited resources. Like Nic said, when do we have a body and when do we have a specimen? I can make that judgement for myself, thanks. This is a very old corpse. I’m a criminal pathologist, not a historian. There are people who can perform a full autopsy on this girl and the rest. It’s not a job for us.’
‘How did she die?’ Falcone repeated.
She looked at the frozen, leathery face. Teresa Lupo always felt some sympathy for her customers. Even when they’d expired a couple of thousand years ago.
‘Like the rest. Badly. Is that what you wanted to know?’
‘Usually, it’s the first thing we need to know,’ Falcone said.
‘Usually,’ she agreed. Then she gestured at the cadaver on the shining table. ‘Does this look usual to you?’
There were times when Emilio Neri thought himself a fool for hanging on to the house in the Via Giulia. He’d taken on the property thirty years before, in return for an unpaid debt from some dumb banker who’d got in over his head gambling. Neri, then a rising capo in the Rome mobs, reluctantly became the owner. He’d rather have driven the yo-yo into the countryside somewhere and put his eyes out before dropping him in a ditch. But this all happened at a time when his actions were circumscribed by others. It would be a further ten years before Neri became don in his own right, giving him the sway to order executions directly, and take a cut of every transaction running through the family’s books. By then the banker was back in business and never made the mistake of getting into his debt again, much to Neri’s disappointment.
In the 1970s the Via Giulia was still pretty much a local area for everyday Romans, not the chic street for rich foreigners and antique dealers it was to become. Created in the sixteenth century by Bramante for Pope Julius II, it ran parallel to the river, set some way below the level of the busy waterside road, and was originally intended to be a grand entrance to the Vatican, by the bridge to the Castel Sant’Angelo. The market of the Campo dei Fiori was no more than a two-minute walk away. Trastevere was maybe a minute more, crossing over the medieval footbridge of the Ponte Sisto. On a fine summer evening Neri used to make that walk regularly, pausing in the middle of the bridge to look along the river towards the vast, sunlit dome of St Peter’s. He was never much interested in views but this one pleased him somehow. Perhaps that was why he held on to the house, although by now he could afford just about any property in Rome, and was beginning to acquire a portfolio that would include homes in New York, Tuscany, Colombia and two country estates in his native Sicily.
The walk to Trastevere took him out of himself for a while. The restaurants were good too, which was something Neri could never resist. Until he was fifty he’d been relatively fit, a big, powerful, muscular man who could impose his will by force and brute physical violence if need be. Then the food and the wine took hold. Now he was sixty-five and carrying way too much weight. He looked at himself in the mirror sometimes and wondered whether there was anything to be done. Then he remembered who he was and knew it didn’t matter. He had all the money a man could want. He had a beautiful young wife who did anything he pleased, and was smart enough to look the other way if he felt like the occasional distraction. Maybe he was fat. Maybe he wheezed now and again, and had halitosis so bad he popped mints into his large, grey-lipped mouth the way some of his underlings sucked on cigarettes. Who cared? He was Emilio Neri, a don to be feared in Rome and beyond. He had influence. He had hard cash pouring into his offshore accounts, from prostitution, drug trafficking, money laundering, arms and any number of semi-legitimate investments. He didn’t care what he looked like, what he smelt like. That was their problems.
In all this pampered life there was just one minor sore and, to Neri’s occasional annoyance, it lived downstairs, one floor above the six servants he employed needlessly, just to fill up the space and dust things before they ever got dusty. While he and Adele occupied the top two storeys of the house – and had sole use of the vast terrace, with its palm trees and fountains – his only son, Mickey, had, after three fraught years pissing off Neri’s friends
