FIVE

       Largo di Torre Argentina, Rome 17th March - 6.06 p.m.

      Allegra could just about make out one of the men’s low voices. A pathologist, she guessed.

      ‘Cause of death? Well, I’ll only know when I open him up. But at a guess, oedema of the brain. Upside down, the heart continues to pump blood through the arteries, but because the veins rely on gravity, his brain would have become swollen with blood. Fluid would then have leaked out of his capillaries, first causing a headache, then gradual loss of consciousness and finally death, probably from asphyxiation as the brain signals driving respiration failed. Terrible way to go.’

      ‘How long has he been here?’ the man next to him asked. From his flinty, aggressive tone, Allegra knew immediately that this had to be Gallo.

      ‘All day. Possibly longer. It was a cold night and that would have slowed decomposition.’

      ‘And no one saw him until now?’ Gallo snapped, his voice both angry and disbelieving. She could just about detect the vestiges of a Southern accent, presumably carefully discarded over the years. After all, provincial roots were not exactly something you advertised if you wanted to get ahead. Not in Rome.

      ‘No one works here at the weekend,’ Salvatore explained in an apologetic tone. ‘And you couldn’t see him from the street.’

      ‘Terrible way to go,’ the pathologist repeated, shaking his head. ‘It would have taken hours for him to die. And right until the end he would have been able to hear people walking around the site and the cars coming and going overhead, and not been able to move or call for help.’

      ‘You think I give a shit about how this bastard died?’ Gallo snorted dismissively. ‘Don’t forget who he was or who he worked for. All I want to know is who killed him, why they did it here and why like this. The last thing I need is some sort of vigilante stalking the streets of Rome re-enacting Satanic rituals.’

      ‘Actually, Colonel, it’s Christian, not Satanic,’ Allegra interrupted with a cough.

      ‘What?’ Gallo rounded on her, looking her up and down with a disdainful expression. He was six feet tall and powerfully built, with a strong, tanned face covered in carefully trimmed stubble. About forty-five or so, she guessed, he was wearing the full dress uniform of a colonel in the Guarda di Finanza and had chin-length steel-grey hair that parted down the centre of his head and fell either side of his face, forcing him to sweep it back out of his eyes every so often. He also had on a pair of frameless glasses with clear plastic arms. From the way he adjusted them on his nose, she sensed that these had only recently been prescribed and that he still resented wearing them, despite having done what he could to make them as unobtrusive as possible.

      ‘The inverted crucifixion,’ she explained, ignoring the horrified look on Salvatore’s face. ‘It’s taken from the Acts of Peter.’

      ‘The Acts of Peter?’ Gallo snorted. ‘There’s no such book in the Bible.’

      ‘That’s because it’s in the Apocrypha, the texts excluded from the Bible by the church,’ she replied, holding her temper in check. ‘According to the text, when the Roman authorities sentenced Peter to death, he asked to be crucified head down, so as not to imitate Christ’s passing.’

      Gallo said nothing, his eyes narrowing slightly as he brushed his hair back.

      ‘Thank you for the Sunday school lesson, Miss…’

      ‘Lieutenant. Damico.’

      ‘The antiquities expert you asked for, Colonel,’ Salvatore added quickly.

      ‘You work at the university?’ It sounded like a challenge rather than a question.

      ‘I used to be a lecturer in art and antiquities at La Sapienza, yes.’

      ‘Used to be!’ he spluttered, glaring at Salvatore.

      ‘The university passed me on to the Villa Giulia. One of the experts there recommended her,’ Salvatore insisted.

      ‘Now I’m in the TPA,’ she added quickly, spelling out the acronym for the Nucleo Tutela Patrimonio Artistico, the special corps within the Carabinieri tasked with protecting and recovering stolen art. He looked her up and down again, then shrugged.

      ‘Well, you’ll have to do, I suppose,’ he said, to Salvatore’s visible relief. ‘I take it you know who I am?’

      She nodded, although part of her was itching to say no, just to see the look on his face. Ignoring the other two men standing there, which she assumed meant that he did not consider them important enough to warrant an introduction, Gallo jabbed his finger at the man next to him.

      ‘This is Dottore Giovanni la Fabro from the coroner’s office, and this is, or was, Adriano Ricci, an enforcer for the De Luca family.’

      Allegra nodded. The GICO’s involvement was suddenly a lot clearer. The De Luca family were believed to run the Bande della Magliana, one of Rome’s most notorious criminal organisations. Gallo clearly thought this was some sort of professional hit.

      He stepped back and introduced the corpse with a sweep of his hand. Even dead, she could tell that Ricci had been overweight, loose skin sagging towards the ground like melted wax on the neck of