Painted in Blood - Superintendent Teresa Battaglia Series 02 (2020) Read online

  Dedication

  For Jasmine and Sarah.

  For our foremothers, for the women of today and of tomorrow.

  For the men who honour them.

  PAINTED IN BLOOD

  Ilaria Tuti

  Translated from the Italian by

  Ekin Oklap

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  The End

  The Beginning

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  87

  88

  89

  90

  91

  92

  93

  94

  95

  96

  97

  98

  99

  100

  101

  102

  Epilogue

  Seven months later

  The Man in the Woods

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Tempus volat, valet, velat

  I am all that has been,

  and is,

  and shall be,

  and my robe no mortal has yet uncovered.

  Isis and Osiris, Plutarch

  The End

  Teresa often thinks of death. But she never pictured hers like this, or the cruel irony of being unable to remember the very thing that could save her.

  A fire about to break out, victims waiting to be rescued, yet here she is, motionless.

  Her mind has abandoned her. Her state of confusion is a grotesque addition to the last act of this tragedy. Those eyes are watching her, brimming with terror and despair, as she does the only thing she is capable of in that moment: nothing at all. Teresa is sure she will die with this vacant expression on her face. She will die helpless and inept, her arms hanging at her sides, her armour gone after a lifetime spent as a warrior.

  A warrior? A police officer, just about. A sixty-year-old woman, and a sick one at that, trying to play the hero when she can no longer remember what things are called.

  She could try guessing. It feels like lately that’s all she’s been able to do to survive: guess which road to take, where to look, what words to say and which shadows to be wary of.

  Even the knowledge of her own name has been corroded by doubt, as has the killer’s – the killer who is with her now, or perhaps in a different room, but certainly inside that house, that hell on the verge of exploding in the blackness of the valley. All because Teresa dared to confront the secret that was hidden within its walls, sheltered by the mountains.

  Teresa knows, but her mind still can’t remember.

  Who among the victims about to be sacrificed to the fire is innocent and who has shown the savage force required to tear a man’s beating heart out of his chest?

  Whom do I save?

  Then there’s him, who looks at her like the son Teresa never had. His name is still just the trace of a whisper on her lips, but their connection is visceral. Teresa can feel it in her gut, in the burn of a scar, in the red liquid rippling through her veins.

  It feels like the walls are closing in on her, crackling like the whispers that have been tormenting her for days. The sound of all of her worst fears.

  The name of the killer is . . . The name of the killer is . . .

  She is face to face with death, yet all Teresa can think of is a riddle – heard who knows where and when.

  She hears a scream, an inhuman sound that breaks through the petrified torpor that has imprisoned her and brings her back to the world.

  Then, suddenly, the scream – his scream – stops.

  ‘We’ve found it,’ she hears him say, whispering as if to save the words for the two of them alone. His pupils are dilated. ‘We’ve found Evil. It’s here. Waiting for us.’

  The words trickle and drip out of him like the beads of a diabolical rosary. He lifts his arm through the ropes that bind him and points his index finger towards a corner of the room where the darkness seems to be pulsating in time with their fear.

  ‘We’ve found it. It’s not human.’

  He screams again, so loud that something inside Teresa shatters.

  She remembers his name now.

  The time has come to find out how far Teresa is willing to go.

  The time has come to find out if Teresa is willing to trade Massimo Marini’s life for that of an innocent, if she is willing to kill the man who looks at her like the son she never had, and who is shaking now as if he has seen the devil himself over in that corner, dancing in the dark.

  The Beginning

  The haematite chalk glides across the paper, shaping arabesques into familiar curves, drawing valleys that blossom into open lips. It traces tender arcs and soft, smudged lines. A delicate profile. Long dark hair. The paper, like her skin, a luminous white.

  The redness overflows and seeps into the fibres of the sheet until colour and paper are one. Fingers press and spread the hue out, soak and colour the paper, desperate to capture the image before its beauty vanishes.

  The fingers tremble, they smooth and caress. The eyes weep and their tears mix with the redness, dilute it, reveal unexpected crimson hues.

  The heart of the world suspends its beat. The fronds and the birdsong fall silent. The pale petals of wild anemones cease to thrum with the breeze and the stars seem too abashed to show themselves in the twilight. The whole mountain is leaning in to watch the miracle unfol
ding in the valley, on a bend in the gravelly river where the water comes to a quiet rest.

  The Sleeping Nymph takes shape beneath the painter’s hands.

  She is brought into the world, as red as passion and love.

  1

  The sun cut sideways into Massimo Marini’s face, drawing out a blaze of colour as it filtered through his brown eyelashes. He was walking with nervous steps down a street flanked by hidden gardens, kept out of sight by thick walls. Petals from the taller branches of the trees behind the walls had fallen onto the street. It was like treading on something that was still alive, a carpet of dying creatures.

  It was a drowsy, placid spring afternoon, but the roiling black mass at the edge of his line of sight announced an upheaval. The air crackled with electricity, a contagious force that made the inspector restless.

  The entrance to La Cella art gallery was marked by a brass plaque on the coarse plaster exterior of a building from the 1600s. Reflected on the metal, Massimo’s eyes looked as twisted as his mood. He rolled down his shirtsleeves and put on his jacket before ringing the doorbell. The lock clicked open. He pushed the studded knocker and entered.

  The day’s warmth reached no further than the threshold. The moment he stepped through the door, a wet weight seemed to settle on him. The floor was chequered black and white, and a stairway of veined marble curved upwards towards the second floor. Light filtered through some of the high windows onto a chandelier made of Murano glass, launching emerald shimmers into the semi-darkness of the ground floor. There was a smell of lilies in the air. It reminded Massimo of incense, the inside of a gloomy church, endless litanies and the stern look on his father’s face whenever Massimo – then still a child – dared show any sign of boredom.

  His head began to pound.

  His mobile phone vibrated with an incoming call and in the silence of that solemn place, the sound seemed to belong to another universe.

  He took out his phone from his breast pocket. It writhed in his palm like a cold, flat artificial heart, but Massimo knew that on the other end of the line was a real heart in which love wrestled with rage and disappointment with pain. His phone had been ringing with that number for weeks now, often several times a day, relentless.

  He ignored the call, his mouth pasty with a sickening mixture of remorse and guilt. He let the call ring out and switched his phone off. Circumventing the marble stairway, he descended a set of wrought-iron steps that spiralled ivy-like into the basement. Muffled voices floated through the gloom. A hallway dimly lit by lamps set into the floor, a door made of pebbled glass and beyond, the gallery.

  La Cella, finally. The vaulted ceiling of coarse tiles stood above a smooth slate floor. Along the walls, most of the plaster had been scraped off to reveal the original stonework beneath. Each splash of light fell precisely onto each of the pieces on display, drawing them out like jewels from the shadows. Bronze sculptures, glass vases and dazzlingly colourful abstract paintings were the characters on that spare underground stage.

  The inspector followed the murmur of voices to a cluster of people standing in the most spacious room in the gallery. A pair of uniformed policemen stood guard along the edges. Past them, Marini recognised Parisi and de Carli, both in plain clothes. Olive-skinned, muscular Parisi was talking quietly on the phone, while de Carli – as skinny and ungainly as a teenager – watched and occasionally intervened. They had become Marini’s team ever since he had requested a transfer from the city to this small local precinct. He had thought – or at least hoped – that this change in trajectory might be a way to find solace and perhaps start over. He had ended up finding a whole lot more than he’d expected, but solace remained a fire-breathing chimera that burned him every time he reached out to grasp it.

  He walked up to his team.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked de Carli.

  De Carli pulled up his jeans, which had slid down his thighs.

  ‘God knows. They haven’t told us a thing yet. It’s all a big mystery.’

  ‘Then why did you tell me it was urgent?’

  Parisi covered the phone with his hand and tilted his chin towards the opposite side of the room.

  ‘Because she needs us. And you.’

  Marini’s eyes searched for the person who had made every minute of his life hell over the past few months, but in doing so, had brought him back to life.

  At first he only saw her feet, glimpsed between the legs of two officers. She was wearing wedge trainers and kept shifting her weight from one leg to the other; every now and then she stood on the balls of her feet to give her legs a rest.

  She’s tired, he thought. And although he had no idea why the team had been dispatched to the Cella, he knew she would be the last person to leave that day.

  Then the two officers moved and he could finally see the rest of her, standing between a bronze sculpture of a half-liquefied heart and an installation of Perspex wings hanging from the ceiling. Heart and soul, just like her.

  And determination, a vitality that sometimes threatened to crush those closest to her, but that always managed, at the very last moment, to pick them up and push them beyond what they thought possible.

  It so happened that she was also a bit of a bitch.

  There was a raggedness in her appearance, which had less to do with her age – sixty – than with some inner torment that Massimo could not yet name and that only seemed to find release in the notebook she kept permanently clasped in her hands, filling it with frenzied notes at every opportunity.

  He walked up to her and noticed the single blink with which she registered his arrival. She didn’t even turn round. She was holding one of the arms of her reading glasses between her lips and chewing nervously on a sweet.

  ‘I hope it’s sugar-free,’ he said.

  She finally looked at him, though for barely a second.

  ‘And that is your business because . . . ?’

  Her voice was hoarse and dry, and leavened with a note of amusement.

  ‘You’re diabetic, Superintendent. And supposedly a lady, too . . .’ he muttered, ignoring the curse that followed.

  It was a familiar game they played, one he almost never won.

  She stopped gnawing at her glasses.

  ‘Isn’t this supposed to be your day off, Inspector?’ she asked, boring into him with those terrible eyes of hers, so adept at seeing well below the surface.

  Massimo gave her a half-smile.

  ‘And haven’t you just finished your shift?’

  ‘All this diligence won’t compensate for your recent lapses, Marini.’

  Massimo decided to avoid the minefield of a possible response. Already, she appeared to have lost interest in him. He watched her closely, this woman whose head didn’t even reach his chest but who could crush his ego in the blink of an eye. She was almost twice his age, but frequently left him behind, exhausted, well before her own energies were spent. Her manner was often brutal and her hair, styled in a bob that framed her face, was dyed such an artificial shade of red that it was almost embarrassing. Or at least it would have been on anyone else but her.

  Teresa Battaglia could bark, and there were some who swore they had seen her bite, too – quite literally.

  ‘So? Why are we here? What’s with all the mysteries?’ he asked in a bid to draw her back to the hunt – that territory she could navigate better and faster than anyone else.

  Teresa Battaglia was staring straight ahead as if she were looking at someone, her eyes narrowed, black thoughts lodged in her furrowed brow.

  ‘Singular, Inspector, not plural. There’s only ever one mystery.’

  Superintendent Battaglia wiped the lenses of her reading glasses, as she did every time she was thinking. She was putting her thoughts in order.

  ‘Why else would we be here, if not to solve the mystery of death?’

 
2

  ‘Cold case.’

  That was how Deputy Public Prosecutor Gardini had described it not even an hour ago when he’d summoned her to the Cella. Two words, followed by something Superintendent Teresa Battaglia had heard him say countless times before: ‘I want you and your team on this.’

  Cold case. Teresa had been relieved to hear that; it meant no killer on the loose to hunt down, no potential further victims to save, no immediate threat. Only the echo of something that had happened long ago and somehow resurfaced today.

  She could handle it. She was not going to lose control of this case and even if she did, there would be no harm done – except perhaps to her ego.

  You’re a fool if you think they won’t notice what’s happening to you.

  What was happening to her had a name so powerful it could crush her, but Teresa had not retreated from the word on her medical record, had not stepped aside and let it take over her world. Instead, she had locked it away where all our most terrible fears like to settle: in the depths of her soul – and in the diary she always carried with her. Her paper memory.

  Massimo Marini was another problem in an already complicated situation. He kept looking at her as if he suspected something, as if he had access to her very thoughts. She found it difficult to keep him at arm’s length; in fact, his closeness had started to feel normal, almost welcome, and she had begun to worry that this urge to seek each other out might become a dangerous habit for them both.

  Prosecutor Gardini emerged from a room that had been cordoned off. He looked anxious, as always. A lanky man with permanently dishevelled hair and scruffy tie – as if he’d just been swept over by a gust of wind – Gardini was an accomplished magistrate who worked himself to the bone, his appearance symptomatic of the unrelenting rhythm of his life.

  He was accompanied by a noticeably tanned man of rather eccentric appearance. His brown hair had been lightened by the sun along the sides of his head, leading Teresa to deduce that his tan, too, must be natural, the kind people who practised outdoor sports tended to get. There was a certain elegance about him, a refinement reflected in the clothes he wore, classic cuts in vibrant colours: flamboyant yet entirely tasteful.

  Teresa leafed through the most recent notes in her diary but found no description of the man. Her memory was not failing her: they had never met before. But she did have an idea of who he might be.