Free The Seventh Sacrament by David Hewson Page A

criminal would give Santa Maria dell’Assunta a second look. No thrill-seeking teenager could possibly think it was worth breaking into; there were much more atmospheric underground caverns scattered throughout Rome if that was what they wanted.
    Still, she hesitated there for a good two minutes, the bag with fresh rat poison in it hanging on her arm. It was absurd.
    With a brief curse at her own timidity, Ornella Di Benedetto threw the shattered chain and padlock out of the way, mentally making a note that she would have to charge someone, city or diocese, for a replacement, and pulled open the oak door.
             

    T HE LIGHTS WERE STILL ON IN THE INTERNAL PORTICO. She turned them off, then walked into the diminutive nave, where a thin winter sun was streaming through the cracked stained glass on the western end of the building.
    To her dismay, the door to the crypt was open. There was a light in there, too, the familiar weak yellow haze creeping up from the underground cavern.
    The sight made her furious. She hated waste. Electricity was more expensive than ever.
    She walked to the door and reached for the switch, averting her gaze from the corridor, not through fear but practicality. She needed to try to understand what had happened. To work out whether it was worth calling the police.
    It was possible, just, that someone was still down there, hidden with her familiar skeletons, up to no good. That thought hadn’t occurred to her until her fingers touched the old damp powdery plaster of the corridor wall.
    But why would anyone break into an empty, deconsecrated church for anything but some idiotic amusement? It was ridiculous, she reminded herself, but then became aware of the smell, elusive at first, but soon familiar. It was the smell of the market in Testaccio, the local one off Mastro Giorgio, where every morning she bought the day’s food: salad and vegetables, and a little meat from one of the many stalls with their vivid red displays of pork and beef, chickens and lamb. Even, in one seldom-visited corner, horse, which only the old people ate these days.
    So she didn’t turn off the lights. Something about the smell made that impossible. Instead, Ornella Di Benedetto took three steps down the narrow, worn stone stairs, just far enough to see into the crypt, with its serried rows of grey, tidy bones.
    And something else among them, too. Something gleaming under the bulbs, a half-familiar shape transformed somehow, metamorphosed into the source of that rank, permeating stench that wouldn’t quit her nostrils.
    When she finally reached the street, babbling like a madwoman, trying to catch the attention of passersby who ignored her shrieking implications, she’d no idea how long she’d spent in that place, or what, in truth, she’d done there.
    They stared at her. All of them. Every shopper in the market. Every stallholder. Everyone.
    I am not insane, Ornella wanted to scream at them. I am not!
    Even though she couldn’t recall how she had made her way from the Piazza Albania into Testaccio in order to find the market, or how long it had taken. An hour at least, or so it seemed from the market clock, which now stood at five past eleven. Somewhere along the way, she thought, she’d sat down and passed out for a while, like some neighbourhood drunk, stunned by cheap grappa.
    Her eyes worked their way across the hall, to the lines of butchers’ stalls where the meat hung fresh and livid on the hook, scarlet flesh, waxy white fat, veins and organs, limbs and carcasses, entrails and the occasional small pig’s head.
    Since she was a child, this market had been a place of delight. The aroma of flowers mingled with the fresh salt tang of the fish stalls. Oranges from Sicily next to stands selling fresh white buffalo mozzarella at prices even ordinary people could afford.
    She’d never really thought about the meat stalls until then, when the sight and the stench of the crypt came back to her. Ornella Di