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Costa as the detail came back to
him – thrown the battered body out of the window, hoping to pretend to the world that he had died accidentally from the fall.
    It had taken the investigators of the Vatican to discover the truth, through means the sixteenth century thought normal: torture, in all its forms. He had shivered as he read again how the young
woman’s arms had been ripped from their sockets as her inquisitors hauled her to the ceiling on ropes, fighting, and failing, to extract a confession. Giacomo, her brother, was less brave,
and through his cowardice and unpredictable behaviour doomed them all. Under duress the truth, and the admissions, emerged, though never from her. Beatrice’s father, a rich and cruel
nobleman, was a monster who sexually molested his daughter over a period of months, forcing her to take part in vile trysts with her own stepmother and with other men as he watched. His murder was
the patricide of a heartless tyrant, hated by all. But patricide nonetheless, a crime the Pope of the day saw fit to punish with the utmost severity.
    And so, on 11 September 1599, Giacomo was paraded through the streets of the centro storico in a tumbrel as torturers tore the flesh from his body with red-hot pincers. When they reached
the piazza by the Ponte Sant’Angelo they bludgeoned him to death with a mallet to the temple. His corpse was decapitated and dismembered, the four quarters of his body hung from the bridge on
butcher’s hooks for all to see. Beatrice’s stepmother followed to the same scaffold. Finally, watched by her younger brother, the only member of the Cenci family allowed to live,
Beatrice walked impassively to the block, her head held high in front of sympathetic crowds that lined the bridge and the banks of the Tiber, all screaming for mercy for a sinner surely more
deserving than most.
    They fell silent at the final moment. The executioner raised his blade and the hooded monks of the Confraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, the Brotherhood of the Decapitated John the Baptist,
waved their images of Christ in her face. She died from a single blow of the sword, refusing to admit her guilt or confirm a single detail of her father’s criminal and incestuous abuse.
Thousands of mourners followed her bier to San Pietro in Montorio that evening. Even now the anniversary of her death was marked each year by a faithful few, and there were those who claimed her
ghost haunted the environs of her old Roman home in the ghetto, the Palazzo Cenci, and the bridge in front of the Castel Sant’Angelo close to where she died.
    Why this obsession that spanned centuries and continents? Perhaps because her fate asked awkward, unanswerable questions. How compliant was she in the death of her father? Did she initiate the
attack, and spur on the murderers themselves when they faltered, as Giacomo had hinted? Or was she the silent victim, resigned to her death, simple and profound in her fatalism, as she had been to
her depraved father’s abuses until, in the eyes of her admirers, finally she chose to place her rights as an individual above the harsh, inflexible tenets of the law?
    There was, he thought, more to the enduring attraction of this story than met the eye. The sympathy the Cenci case aroused seemed to stem also from a general sense of unease surrounding the
taboo of incest, a crime that always generated extreme emotions. Costa had been a police officer long enough to understand that sexual abuse within the family was more common than many appreciated,
and usually went unreported and unpunished.
    ‘Daddy,’ he said quietly to himself, remembering the night before.

TWO
    He got himself a coffee and something to eat. Outside the kitchen window the vines were beginning to grow heavy with fruit. Another ten days of inaction remained. He could call
Agata, ask her out for lunch. Or tinker with the Vespa’s temperamental two-stroke engine, work on the field, tackle so many things that