The Spanish Quarter was the beating heart of old Naples, a crowded, tight, dark grid of dilapidated tall buildings with interior courtyards mostly now converted into cheap apartments set either side of cobbled lanes narrowed by the display trays outside the small fishmongers and grocers, by the pavement tables outside the pizza parlours, by the illegally parked Vespas and the three-wheeler delivery vans pulled in tight against the walls. Add in concrete bollards in unexpected places, and you had a one-way system so labyrinthine that it could reduce hardened tourists to tears.
On Cesco’s advice, Izzo circled round to approach it from the south, turning onto Lucia’s street in time to witness a man and woman scuffling at its far end. The woman cried out and fell to the ground, while the man took off running towards them. He was wearing dark glasses and had a hoodie drawn tight around his face, with a bulging green canvas haversack on his back and a black crocodile-skin handbag and kitchen knife in either hand, along with the tattered remains of a cheap white plastic supermarket bag that he threw away even as he ran by.
The Spanish Quarter was Camorra turf. Muggings were commonplace. Izzo braked then put the Fiat into reverse to go after him, only for a three-wheeler to come up behind them and then refuse to budge. He pulled into the side instead, jumped out. But the mugger was long gone, and his first duty now was to the victim, who’d picked herself up and was sitting on the front step of a courtyard entrance. He reached in through the Fiat’s open window to grab the keys. ‘Wait here,’ he told Rossi. He hurried along the pavement, passing a teenage girl astride a pushbike filming on her phone. His heart skipped a beat when he saw that the victim was Lucia, surrounded by the items that had evidently fallen from the ripped shopping bag. An unopened glass jar of runny honey had smashed on the pavement. A new pair of kitchen gloves and a glazing brush were both still in their original packaging. A chill ran through him. He recalled the third threat – to paint the victim’s face with honey for the birds to pluck their eyes. No ordinary mugger then. That man had been their killer.
And he’d just let him get away.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked, crouching beside Lucia.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, though her tears and grimaces of pain said otherwise.
‘That man. Did you know him?’
She shook her head. ‘He had his face hidden. Though there was something…’
‘Yes,’ said Izzo. The schoolgirl was still filming. Everyone was a journalist these days. He went up to her. ‘Did you get his face?’ he asked, showing his badge. She shrugged and set her footage playing, holding it out so that they both could watch. It began in a blur of movement, then the mugger pushed Lucia to the ground and sprinted off with her handbag, passing close enough for her to catch the shadowed interior of his drawstring hoodie, his eyes hidden by mirror sunglasses, his mouth an expressive mix of euphoria, exertion and panic.
‘May I?’ he asked. He plucked the phone from her before she could say no, then texted the clip through to Andreas, their media liaison. He waited till it was on its way, then called him on his own mobile to have him distribute it to the region’s media, along with the warning that the hooded man was a suspect in the Herculaneum murder and therefore not to be approached.
‘That was the Lamborghini killer?’ said the girl when he handed back her phone. ‘Cool.’ He watched her cycle off. It would be on YouTube and TikTok within minutes. But so what? The more publicity the better.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Rossi.
Izzo scowled at him. ‘I told you to wait in the car.’
‘Sorry. I must have misheard.’
‘Aren’t you under arrest?’ frowned Lucia.
‘A misunderstanding,’ he assured her. ‘Isn’t that right, Detective?’
‘Up to a point.’
‘Then you should let Carmen know. She’s worried sick.’
‘I already did.’
Lucia turned back to Izzo. ‘Why are you even here? Have you been… watching me?’
‘Of course not. It’s just that something has come up. Something I need to discuss with you as a matter of urgency. To do with Taddeo Santoro.’
‘I heard. Such terrible news.’
‘This isn’t about that. Or not exactly. My colleague Valentina Messana discovered something in his house. Something disturbing. I’m afraid it involves you.’
‘Me?’
He took a deep breath. ‘Santoro had a safe in his spare bedroom. A safe not even his wife knew about. We found cameras and a number of DVDs inside. DVDs of women who it seems he’d drugged into spending the night at his house.’
‘Oh Christ,’ said Lucia.
He sat beside her on the step, pressed her hand between his own. ‘Only Valentina has seen it. Only she, I and Cesco know about it. And Cesco knew anyway, from the email you sent him. The thing is, Lucia, Valentina’s going through the other DVDs now, taking screenshots of the victims so that we can notify them ourselves, before they find out some other way. But, to identify them, we naturally need the help of someone likely to know them.’
‘You want me to look at them? See who I recognise?’
‘Would you?’
‘How many are we talking?’
‘Two dozen or so.’
‘Two dozen! Dear God. How bad are they? What… what exactly did he do?’
‘I could put you on with Valentina, if you like? But I’m afraid it was pretty bad. Though, from what I understand, it could have been somewhat worse.’
She nodded twice as if accepting this. Then she scowled furiously. ‘That bastard. I was so young. He asked me out to his house to talk about an exhibition. He kept pressing more wine on me. From his own vineyard, he kept telling me. When I tried to say no, he looked so hurt. Then my head started spinning. He helped me to his spare room. I was embarrassed when I woke the next morning. Getting drunk at his house, of all people. But he was so understanding. Except that his wife tended to get furiously jealous. She’d crucify him if she found out. Perhaps it would be best to keep it secret. I was grateful. Grateful! Then I heard whispers about it happening to other women too, but I didn’t say a word. I can’t explain it. It was like I froze whenever it came up. I froze and put it from my mind until it was gone again.’
‘You’re not to blame.’
‘Two dozen of us. Two dozen! Think what I could have stopped!’
‘Stopped how? You had no proof.’
‘The proof was in his fucking safe. If I’d made the police…’ She stopped, frowned. ‘Oh shit!’ she said. ‘The safe!’
‘What about it?’ asked Izzo.
‘Not that safe. My one. The one in the library. That bastard who just attacked me. He took my bag. It had my keys in it. The keys to the Colonna room. The keys to the safe. The one with our new scroll in it.’ Then her face fell even further, and she added: ‘I know who it was now. And where he’s headed too.’
Carmen was at a research table in Rare Books & Manuscripts when Rupert Alberts came hurrying by, breathing heavily with exertion. He was wearing a grey jacket with red piping and its hood down and had a green canvas haversack on his back. He was also carrying a black crocodile-skin handbag and a keyring, both of which looked like Lucia’s.
She rose uncertainly to her feet, watched as he marched up to the door of the Colonna room and made to unlock it. No way would Lucia have trusted Alberts with her bag and keys. No way. A little dizzily, she went after him. He was a Jesuit, a Monsignor, a respected figure in the Congregation of the Order of the Faith. Surely one could trust such a man. And yet she didn’t. He opened the door, slipped inside, made to swing it shut behind him, only for Carmen to reach it before it could lock. ‘Hey!’ she said, even as he sank to his knees beside the table to pull the server out from beneath it. ‘What are you doing?’
Alberts looked up in annoyance. ‘Get out,’ he said.
‘Does Lucia know you’re here?’
He rose to his feet and took a pace towards her, hoping to cow her into retreating. But she knew that if she left him here alone, he’d lock the door from the inside and complete his task unimpeded. And now that she suspected what that task was, she couldn’t let him do it. So she stepped sideways instead, circling around the table to keep it between them. He scowled and closed the door anyway, locking it with the mortice key that he then returned to his pocket. ‘Don’t get in my way,’ he warned, returning to the server, laying it on its side. ‘Not unless you want what Conte and Santoro got.’
She looked at him in horror. ‘That was you?’
‘I didn’t want to hurt them,’ he said. ‘But Taddeo wouldn’t listen.’ He unstrapped his haversack, took out a metal mallet. It was hardly the kind of implement one had lying around, making it obvious that he’d thought this mission through. The mallet had such a heavy head that he had to hold it in both hands to wield it properly. He smashed the server with it, stinging his hands so badly that he let it go briefly to give them a shake. Another two blows and the hard black plastic shell cracked apart, exposing its soft innards, which he pounded until his face was shining with sweat.
A knock at the door. ‘What’s going on?’ demanded Victor.
‘Destroying the scroll won’t do you any good,’ said Carmen, loudly enough for him to overhear. ‘There are copies everywhere.’
He looked up, wiped his forehead. ‘Not true. Lucia gave us her word.’
‘You idiot,’ mocked Carmen. ‘You think she’d risk something this precious? She has a full set on her laptop. She showed them to me yesterday evening.’
He smiled at that. ‘Liar,’ he said.
‘Then how would I know it’s St Paul, not Philodemus?’
‘You saw that when you broke in. From our annotations.’
‘And Thomas?’ she asked. ‘Not a brother of Christ. A brother in Christ.’
‘You heard us arguing.’
‘No. I saw it on Lucia’s laptop. The earliest and truest version of the letters of St Paul, set to upend everything you and your Church believe in. All your centuries of misogyny and hate. People will see you and your precious Bible for the frauds you are. That’s why you want to destroy it.’
‘The Bible is the word of God,’ he said, mopping his brow a second time as he went over to the safe. ‘If he’d wanted us to have a different text, he’d have arranged for that instead.’
Crunching on the terrace gravel. The thin white cotton curtains covering the oak doors went a little darker as faces pressed against the panes of security glass. ‘And what if us finding this scroll is his way of doing just that?’ she asked.
He blinked at that, as though the point hadn’t occurred to him before. But then he waved a hand in front of his face, as though her objections were a cloud of gnats. ‘Then he’ll find a way to stop me, won’t he?’ He took the stack of CDs on top of the safe out of their cases, snapped them into halves, quarters and even smaller fragments with his hands. Then he opened each of the four volumes of Novum Testamentum Graece to St Paul, ripping out and crumpling their annotated pages, heaping them in a stack that he then squirted with lighter fluid. He took a book of matches from his pocket and struck one to set the bonfire blazing. He stood there watching it burn for half a minute or so, kicking back fugitive leaves as they tried to escape. Satisfied, he crouched to unlock the safe. He smashed the hard drives with his mallet, then pulled out the scroll-holder, saving the best till last.
‘It won’t do you any good,’ Carmen told him. ‘Lucia and the professor will tell the world.’
He wiped his face again, smearing it with sweat and soot. ‘They can speak of what they’ve seen. Not of what they haven’t.’
‘You mean about Tertullian?’
His head snapped round. Finally she had his attention. ‘What do you know about…’ Then he worked that out too. ‘You’ve been gossiping with Victor.’ He considered this for several seconds, then shook his head. He set the mallet down, undid the scroll-holder’s catches, lifted its lid to reveal the scroll in all its charred and vital beauty. His hands trembled as he lifted it from its nest. A threat to his faith, yes; but sacred history too.
‘But I know more,’ she said. ‘I know why Tertullian spooks you.’
‘He doesn’t.’
‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘I mean Marcion, of course.’
He looked round, irritated by her persistence, almost certain that she was bluffing. But almost wasn’t quite good enough. ‘Go on, then.’
The assault on the terrace doors grew more violent. From pulling and pushing to kicking and shoulder-barging, though all fruitless against the bolts and locking bar. If she could somehow get to them… But for that she needed time. Time and distraction. The letters of St Paul didn’t seem to worry him. That left her with only one option. ‘It’s his gospel, isn’t it?’ she said, watching closely for anxiety or relief. ‘The Gospel of Marcion.’
‘His gospel was a fraud. He stole it from St Luke.’ But there was a slight catch in his voice.
‘No,’ she said, suddenly seeing it. ‘It was the other way round, wasn’t it? Everyone agrees that Mark wrote his gospel before Matthew, because it’s simpler and more coherent. No nativity, no resurrection, no strained references to Jewish scripture. Marcion and Luke are exactly the same. Yet no one ever argues Marcion was first.’ She finished on an almost triumphant note, only for him to look quizzically at her, as if what she was saying wasn’t wrong so much as mere prelude. But to what? She had no idea. Alberts realised it too. He dropped the scroll to the floor, then stamped on it again and again, breaking it into small carbonised clumps and shreds of papyrus that he squirted with lighter fluid. Then he fished his matches out from his pocket once more before pausing for a deep breath, aware of the enormity of the—
She darted for the doors, catching Alberts by surprise. She threw up the locking bar and pulled up a floor bolt before he could get to her. He grabbed her by her hair. She pulled down the top bolt even as he dragged her away across the floor. She twisted round to snatch the book of matches from his other hand. He cried out in frustration and clawed at her hand to grab the matches back. She rolled into a defensive ball, struck a match against the strip and held it as it flared alight against the others until all of them burst into a violent flame that she instantly crushed out. Then the lock gave and the terrace doors burst open, allowing those outside to rush on in.
‘Stay back!’ yelled Alberts. He yanked Carmen to her feet by her hair, dragged her over to his haversack. He took out a kitchen knife out from it, pressed it against her throat. There were dark stains on its blade, she couldn’t help but notice. Stains that looked just like dried blood. Despite his earlier confession, it was the first time she’d truly believed him capable of murder. And the prospect of what he’d do to her in revenge or to save himself turned her legs to water.