The Geneva Deception Read Online Free PDF Page B

club tattoo on his left shoulder, and was still wearing a striped pair of suit trousers that had fallen halfway down his calves. His wrists and ankles were bleeding where the chicken wire used to bind him to the cross had bitten into his flesh.
    ‘Why am I here?’ she asked with a shudder, glancing back to Gallo.
    ‘This -’ He led her forward to the body and snapped his flashlight on to illuminate its face.
    For a few moments she couldn’t make out what he was pointing to, her attention grabbed by Ricci’s staring, bloodshot eyes and the way that, from the shoulders up, his skin had turned a waxy purple, like marble. But then, trapped in the light of Gallo’s torch, she saw it. A black shape, a disc of some sort, lurking in the roof of Ricci’s mouth.
    ‘What is it?’ she breathed.
    ‘That’s what you’re meant to be telling me,’ Gallo shot back.
    ‘Can I see it, then?’
    Gallo snapped his fingers and la Fabro handed him a pair of tweezers. To Allegra’s horrified fascination, he levered the object free as if he was prisinga jewel from an ancient Indian statue and then carefully deposited it inside an evidence bag, holding it out between his fingertips as if it contained something mildly repellent.
    ‘Knock yourself out,’ he intoned.
    ‘I thought it might be some sort of antique coin,’ Salvatore suggested eagerly over her shoulder as she turned it over in the light. ‘It seems to have markings etched into it.’
    ‘The ancient Romans used to put a bronze coin in the mouths of their dead to pay Charon to ferry their souls across the Styx to the Underworld,’ she nodded slowly. ‘But I don’t think that’s what this is.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Feel the weight, it’s lead. That’s too soft to be used in everyday coinage.’
    ‘Then what about the engraving?’ Gallo asked impatiently.
    She traced the symbol that had been inlaid into the coin with her finger. It showed two snakes intertwined around a clenched fist, like the seal from some mediaeval coat of arms.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said with an apologetic shrug. ‘But whatever this is, it’s not an antique nor, I would say, particularly valuable.’
    ‘Well, that was useful.’ Glaring angrily at Salvatore, Gallo turned his back on Allegra as if she had suddenly vanished.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Salvatore stuttered. ‘I thought that…’
    ‘We’ve wasted enough time. Let’s just get him bagged up and out of here so the forensic boys can move in,’ Gallo ordered as he turned to leave. ‘Then I want a priest or a cardinal or somebody else in sandals down here to tell me more about…’
    ‘It can’t be a coincidence though, can it, Colonel?’ Allegra called after him.
    Gallo spun round angrily.
    ‘I thought you’d gone?’
    ‘It can’t be a coincidence that they killed him here?’ she insisted.
    ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
    ‘In Roman times, this entire area was part of the Campus Martius, a huge complex of buildings that included the Baths of Agrippa to the north, the Circus Flaminius to the south and the Theatre of Pompey to the west,’ she explained, pointing towards each point of the compass in turn. ‘The Senate even met here while the Curia was being rebuilt after a fire in 54 BC -’ she pointed at the floor - ‘in a space in the portico attached to the Theatre of Pompey.’
    ‘Here?’ Gallo looked around him sceptically, clearly struggling to reconcile the fractured ruins at his feet with the imagined grandeur of a Roman theatre.
    ‘Of course, the one drawback of this spot was that the Campus Martius stood outside the sacred pomerium , the city’s official boundaries, meaning that, although it was quieter than the Forum, itwas not subject to the same restrictions against concealed weapons.’
    ‘What’s your point?’ Gallo frowned wearily, and she realised that she was going to have to spell it out for him.
    ‘I mean that Ricci isn’t the first person to be killed here,’ she explained, a