The Garden of Evil by David Hewson

murdered. Until you people find the man who did it, there’s not much more to say. But the Frenchwoman’s different. Silvio?”
    Di Capua shuffled over, a short stocky figure in his bunny suit, bald-headed, with a circlet of long, lank hair dangling over the collar of his top. He carried a set of papers and a very small laptop computer.
    Teresa took some of the documents from her colleague and glanced at them. “You can tell the French Embassy she died of natural causes. If it’s any comfort, I don’t imagine we will be using those words about anyone else who’s expired hereabouts. The French won’t argue. I spoke to her doctor in Paris. He’s amazed she lived as long as she did, and frankly so am I. Congenital, incurable heart disease. Plus she had full-blown AIDS, which was unresponsive to any of the extremely expensive private treatments she’d been receiving for the past nine months. They kept away the big day for a while but not for much longer. She saw her physician the week before she died. He told her it was a matter of weeks. Perhaps a month at the most.”
    “We’ve been through this before,” Peroni objected. “She still had a knife wound.”
    “A scratch,” Di Capua said, and called up on the computer a set of colour photographs of the dead woman’s neck and face, then her pale, skeletal torso. They all crowded round to stare at the images there, frozen moments from a death that had taken place just a few steps from where they now stood. Even Peroni looked for a short while before he turned away in disgust. Costa could scarcely believe what he was seeing. Perhaps time or the light in the studio had played tricks. Perhaps the curious painting had disturbed his powers of observation, amplifying everything—the light, the atmosphere, his own imagination. When he’d first seen the body of Véronique Gillet on the old grimy floor, he’d been convinced she, like Aldo Caviglia, was the victim of some savage, unthinking act of violence. In truth, the knife mark barely cut through her white, flawless skin. Now the thin, straight line of dried blood looked more like an unfortunate accident with a rosebush than a meeting with a sharp, deadly weapon.
    “She died of heart failure when he attacked her?” Peroni suggested, coming back into the conversation, pointedly not looking at the photos. “It’s still murder, isn’t it?”
    “Oh, poor sweet innocent,” Teresa said with a sigh. “Take a deep breath. It’s time for me to shatter a few illusions about our pretty little curator from the Louvre. As I told you when we first arrived here, Ms. Gillet had intercourse shortly before she died. And no, I don’t think it was rape. There’s nothing to indicate that. No bruising, no marks on her body. No skin underneath her fingernails. This was consensual. Sex on the sofa, in front of that creepy painting.
    With a knife to add a little spice to the occasion.”
    Peroni looked out over the stinking holes in the flagstones to the dusty window. It had started to rain: faint grey streaks coming down in a soft slanting veil onto the smoke-stained stones of the
centro storico
.
    Susanna Placidi glowered at the two pathologists. “How the hell can you know that?”
    “Evidence,” Di Capua said simply. “Here. Here and here.”
    He pointed to the photos. Elsewhere on Véronique Gillet’s body, on the upper arms, on the smooth plateau of her stomach, and beneath her breasts, there were healed cut marks and a network of shallow but visible scars from some earlier encounter.
    Teresa Lupo went through them, one by one, indicating each with a pencil.
    “These are indicative of some form of self-inflicted wound, or ones cut by a . . . partner, I imagine that’s what we’d have to call it. Human beings are imaginative creatures sometimes. If you want specialist insight into sadomasochistic sexual practices, I can put you in touch with some people who might be able to help.”
    “They could be just . . .
cuts,
”