Free The Seventh Sacrament by David Hewson Page B

Benedetto turned her head away from the butchers’ stands, tried to stop the fleshy, organic stink of them creeping into her mouth and nostrils, breathed deeply once, gasping down a lungful of the market’s now vile and rotting aroma, wondering whether she was about to be sick.
    It was an unconscionable time before anyone listened, and that was the closest human being she could think of who knew her: the kindly young girl in the market’s vegetable stall. She listened to Ornella’s ragged, incoherent story, then sat her down with a stiff caffè corretto before calling the police.
    When Ornetta looked up, still desperately queasy, she found a dark-skinned woman staring thoughtfully into her face, her eyes full of concern and curiosity.
    “My name is Rosa Prabakaran,” the woman said. “I’m a police officer.”
    “The church…” she murmured, wondering where to begin.
    The young policewoman nodded, confidently, in a way that made Ornella Di Benedetto feel a little better.
    “We know, signora,” she said, glancing around the hall, not looking too hard at the meat stands either. “I just came from there. Shall we go somewhere else? Now? Please?”
             

    I T HAD BEEN A GOOD WINTER, THE BEST NIC COSTA COULD remember in years. There were just two cases left of the vino novello they’d made the previous autumn. Costa was surprised to find that the modest homegrown vintage, the first the little estate had produced since the death of his father, met with Leo Falcone’s approval too. Either the wine was good or the old inspector was mellowing as he adjusted to an unaccustomed frailty.
    Or both. The world was, Costa had come to realise over the past few months, occasionally ripe with surprises.
    That lunchtime they’d taken a few bottles over to the new home Falcone was sharing with Raffaella Arcangelo, a ground-floor apartment in a quiet backstreet in Monti, rented on a temporary basis until the inspector became more mobile. The injuries Falcone had suffered the previous summer were slow to heal, and he was slow to adapt to them. The meal was, they knew without saying, a kind of staging point for them all—Costa and Emily Deacon, Gianni Peroni and the pathologist Teresa Lupo, Leo Falcone and Raffaella—a way of setting the past aside and fixing some kind of firm commitment for the future.
    The previous twelve months had been hard and decisive. Their last investigation as a team, exiled to Venice, had almost resulted in Falcone’s death. Nic’s partner Peroni and Teresa had emerged unscathed, perhaps stronger than ever once the dust settled. While Teresa returned to the police morgue, Peroni became a plainclothes agente again, walking the streets of Rome, on this occasion in charge of a new recruit, a woman who, as the ugly cop was only too keen to tell anyone in earshot, drove him to distraction with her boundless enthusiasm and naïveté.
    Costa had pulled the best prize of all out of the bag: a winter spent organising security for a vast art exhibition set around the works of Caravaggio, one that had played to full audiences in the Palazzo Ruspoli from its opening in November to its much-mourned closure two weeks before. There had been some last work to be done, most important of all a final round of security meetings for the return shipping of exhibits, and one long trip to London to liaise with the National Gallery. Then finally, two days before, nothing. No meetings. No deadlines. No phone calls. Only the realisation that this extraordinary period of his life, one which had opened up so many new avenues, was now over. After a week’s holiday he, too, would be back on the job, an agente working the centro storico of Rome, uncertain of his future. No one had told him if he’d be reunited with Peroni. No one had hinted when Falcone might be back in harness. Only one piece of advice had been handed down to Costa from on high by Commissario Messina. It was time, Messina said one evening on his way