The Seventh Sacrament by David Hewson

him deal with much worse than this young, overambitious commissario with just a few months in the job.
    “Good,” the inspector commented placidly. “Then let me explain. There are two reasons why no charges were pursued against any of Bramante’s students. First, we had no evidence. They provided none. Forensic provided none. We had no body. No clue as to where the child had gone or what had happened to him. Only suspicions, created principally by the unwillingness of the students to do much to help themselves. There was absolutely nothing there on which we could base a prosecution….”
    Bruno Messina was a thickset man, with a head of fulsome black hair and an expression that could turn from polite to malevolent in an instant.
    “I could have got it out of them,” he said with no small hint of menace.
    “That’s what your father believed. But he failed. Then he left the ringleader alone with Giorgio Bramante for an hour in a quiet little cell at the far end of the holding block in the basement we all know so well. Which brings me to the second reason why no one ever faced any charges over Alessio Bramante’s disappearance. I hate to remind you of this, but during that hour Bramante beat the unfortunate youth senseless. Ludo Torchia died in the ambulance, while I watched, on the way to hospital. After that, we were knee-deep in lawyers who made sure that the other suspects could get away without saying a damn thing to anyone because we’d already allowed one of their number to be, in all but name, murdered before our very eyes.”
    Falcone gave Messina the kind of look he normally reserved for impudent, uncomprehending juniors.
    “Case closed,” the inspector concluded without emotion.
    Peroni glowered at him. “I’ve got to say, I remember what was in the newspapers back then. It wasn’t quite that clear-cut. You don’t have kids. I do. If I thought one of mine might be alive, if there was the slightest chance of that, I’d have beaten the living daylights out of those students, too.”
    Falcone shrugged. “The significance of that being what exactly?”
    Peroni tautened, taken aback by the nonchalant tone in Falcone’s voice. Costa watched Bruno Messina recoil from Peroni’s visible anger, and reminded himself that those relatively new to the Questura still found his partner’s physical presence—the lumpy, scarred face, the corpulent, powerful thug’s body—intimidating.
    “That what Bramante did was understandable!” Peroni insisted stubbornly.
    “I hate having to repeat myself, but I was there. I walked into that cell because I was sick of hearing the screaming, over and over again. I was the one”—Falcone glowered at Messina—“who made sure it went to a higher authority than your father, Commissario. This wasn’t difficult, since he had, as I recall, decided to attend a management meeting the moment he left Bramante alone with the youth.”
    “He was a commissario,” Messina objected. “He was desperate.”
    “And I was just the sovrintendente, the junior meant to clean up afterwards. It was quite a mess, too. Look up the photographs. They’ll still be in the records. That cell was covered in blood. I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since. Giorgio Bramante took that student apart. Torchia was barely breathing when I got in there. An hour later he was gone.”
    Peroni said again, “Messina thought Bramante’s kid was alive, Leo!”
    “It was more than that,” Messina continued. “My father thought that, if you’d not burst in there stopping Bramante when you did, he could have beaten the truth out of that bastard. Perhaps he was right and we could have found the boy. Who knows?”
    “No one!” Falcone replied. “Not you. Not me. In situations like that, we deal with certainties, not guesswork. Ludo Torchia was brutally assaulted, in a cell in our own Questura, and he died of that assault. How are we supposed to ignore that? The law’s the law. We don’t pick