Red Ribbons (31 page)

‘So you see it?’ O’Connor asked.

‘The large flat stone? It’s like the one at Caroline’s burial.’

‘But this happened forty years ago, Kate. Can it be linked to our cases?’

‘If it’s connected, our killer must have been a child at the time of this girl’s death. If he witnessed it, and that’s a big ‘if’, maybe our victims are some form of copycat burial.’

‘Why copy it?’

‘I don’t know. The bishop, the one the girl went to visit, what do we know about him?’

‘There were rumours of him being indiscreet with women, young girls too, nothing concrete, just unsubstantiated accusations.’

‘Fits with what Jessica said about the protection from abuse. You said he died?’

‘A few months back. And guess what?’

‘I can’t wait.’

‘He fell from a height. It was considered an accident. He’d gone out walking near a dangerous spot. They reckon he slipped.’

‘But you don’t think so?’

‘I don’t like coincidences, Kate, never have.’

Kate’s mind was racing, trying to make the links that would make sense of all she was seeing and hearing. ‘Maybe that was the catalyst.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Something has brought our guy out of the woodwork; you said the death of the bishop was only a few months back?’

‘March this year.’

‘I’d hoped we’d find history, but I never thought it would be as old as this.’

‘So what’s your opinion on the flat stone?’

‘For what it’s worth, O’Connor, I think the stone is a pillow.’

‘A pillow?’ he said, surprised.

‘You heard me. Do you have a spare desk I can use? I’ll need to work here for a while. Home isn’t an option right now.’

‘Take that one in the corner,’ he said, nodding to the far end of his office. ‘Kate, I don’t like how this investigation it filtering out. I know clear cut cases are rare, but this one is like a bloody maze.’

‘There is a core O’Connor, and our killer is right in the middle of it. All we have to do is figure out where.’

‘And bloody fast, Kate. Look at the room out there, once those calls start flooding in about the ribbons, plaiting and talk of ritualistic burials, we’ll be so far under we might all as well be buried up in that bloody mountain.’

BACK AT MEADOW VIEW, HIS FORM COULDN’T HAVE BEEN better, having made excellent time returning from Wexford. The stroll from the garage in Terenure had pleased him too – nothing like fresh air to get a better perspective on things. Looking out the kitchen window, he reflected again on how the days were getting shorter. Despite enjoying his outdoor recreational pursuits, a part of him didn’t mind the reduction in daylight hours, believing one should always go with the seasons.

He regretted his neglect of reading material over the past few days, something he would put right very shortly. Making himself a cup of Mokalbari tea, he reviewed the books he hadn’t yet read and some he planned to read again. Shortly after he moved to Meadow View, he’d arranged for wooden bookshelves to be fitted either side of the fireplace. He liked rearranging the books, placing his new favourites on the top, giving them the status of importance they deserved. To him, books were precious, they were fuel for the imagination. He remembered his summers as a child, reading on the beach, and how in winter, when he needed to avoid his mother’s male friends, they were his greatest ally.

If he wanted to, he could convince himself he was one of the characters in whatever novel he was reading, imagining places he had never been. As a boy, he had read comics too, many of which were still in the big house. He was fond of most of the superheroes and even when he progressed to older reading material, he had always kept some old comics at hand.

The year his mother told him about Tuscany, it had sounded like
the biggest adventure ever. He plagued her for days with questions: how they would get there, who they would see, why they were going, how long they would stay. She told him very little. All he knew was that they would take the train to Dublin and then fly from Dublin airport; their final destination was a place called Suvereto, in Livorno. He couldn’t wait to visit the mobile library at the end of the month, like a scavenger, to read everything he could find on Italy. Although the holiday had come out of the blue, he had embraced the idea of such a wonderful adventure, even if his mother didn’t explain why they were going there to begin with. He wasn’t to know then that the trip was going to change everything. Even in that second blissful week, he did not have any inkling about how his life would turn out at the end of it.

He remembered the place so clearly: the extreme heat, how his clothes stuck to his body, how the shade was a blessed relief, how the midday sun made the air hard to breathe. There wasn’t even a hint of a breeze in those hours between midday and three o’clock, nothing like the winds that flanked the beach at home. The people were different too. At first, he liked listening to them speaking Italian and moving in ways that were so different from people at home – the heat made them move slower, made them happier to stop and sit and spend endless hours seemingly doing very little. At Ciampino airport he had listened to the announcements over the speaker system, the voices sounding strange with their accents and also loud, like people shouting. The airport unsettled him. Almost immediately, he felt people were staring at him, as if he was something odd, something that needed to be worked out. When they looked at his mother, it was different. The women checked her from head to toe, as if she were a mannequin in a shop window; the men smiled, following her movements by turning their heads.

Irrespective of how people looked at them, he had no intention of letting it interfere with the most exciting time of his life. It was his first holiday and the small attaché case he’d carried with him on the
train from Gorey to Dublin and on the flight to Rome was filled with comics, books on Italy and the spool of red ribbon he’d taken from the upstairs sideboard. The attaché case felt like his last connection to home, and although home was not where he wanted to be, he kept it close to his chest as he and his mother travelled by train to Livorno, and then on to Suvereto.

Sipping his tea, he thought again about the Italian countryside, and how different it was from the Irish landscape. Although there were vast fields of green, in Tuscany especially, some of the land appeared scorched, and often more rugged than the Irish sunny southeast. The vineyards seemed to run for miles, and you could pass by vast spaces without seeing anyone in the fields. He was amazed by the buildings, both big and small, with their orange rooftops and their precarious positions, stuck into the side of the mountain or valley.

When the train had reached Livorno it was past noon, the worst time for the heat. His mother had displayed more than her usual share of displeasure and annoyance as they’d waited at the station. Whoever had been supposed to meet them was late. Up until that point, she’d been elated by the trip and at some moments had even been kind, as if she cared about him. He had wondered if, like the people, she too would be different outside of Ireland, but still he held back from asking her too much. Soon she’d reverted to blaming him for everything, annoyed when he needed desperately to go to the toilet, complaining about him leaving her alone in a strange country, but eventually she had let him go inside the station.

When he’d returned, she was like a different woman. Even before he’d got to the platform, he’d heard her high-pitched voice sounding excited – the unmistakable way she spoke around men. The man she’d been talking to wasn’t like any priest or religious person he’d seen before. His garments, despite the heat of the day, had been intricate and ornate, in vibrant reds and purples, but very much at odds with the large straw hat he was wearing, like the men in the pictures with
the gondolas. He’d escorted them to the front of the station, where his car was waiting. When he’d taken off the hat in the car, the man had revealed a fat, bald head, sweating with the remaining strands of his hair. William had disliked him instantly.

He’d kept his silence in the back of the car all the way to Suvereto. The drive had been hot and clammy, with only a small breeze coming in from the windows at the front. He remembered feeling pleased he’d changed his clothes at Ciampino airport, putting on a new white shirt and navy shorts. The only thing that had bothered him was his milk-bottle-white legs, which had looked odd next to the tanned complexion of the man his mother referred to as ‘the bishop’. His mother hadn’t changed her clothes and was still wearing the heavy ones from home. She had discarded her jacket on the back seat beside him. Little by little she had pulled her skirt up well past her knees, undoing the top buttons of her blouse. Bishop Antonio had reacted the same way most men did. When she placed his hand on her right knee, he left it there. Applying her bright red lipstick, looking into the dusty vanity mirror on the passenger’s side, his mother had sat back, satisfied.

He left his memories and turned his mind back to his reading and research, while almost automatically switching on the afternoon news on the radio to keep up with events. The main coverage was still about the murdered girls. There was one difference, however: it was the first time they had mentioned the ribbons or the plaiting. Taking out the Polaroid image of Caroline from his jacket pocket, all he felt now was sadness. The similarities to Silvia were undeniable. His mind began drifting again, thinking about the room with the windows, the heat of the Italian sun beaming through the stained glass. He could still see, in the corner of the room, the rocking horse, its brown mane brought over to one side, swaying back and forth as if the rider had just left the room, the horse carrying on, believing someone was still sitting in the saddle.

THE MORE KATE LOOKED AT THE IMAGES FROM THE Tuscan burial site, the more convinced she became that if the killer was linked to this death forty years ago, either directly or indirectly, he had carried the memory of it with him all his adult life. Something had acted as the catalyst, prompting him to take action now, but the impetus, although important, wasn’t the key. The answer lay somewhere between this young Italian girl’s death and the death of Caroline Devine, and Amelia Spain, forty years later.

O’Connor, who was talking into his phone, something which had seemed permanently attached to his ear since she’d got there, looked up when she stood in front of him. She waited for him to finish his call.

‘What was it you said, O’Connor, about Caroline and Amelia being polls apart?’

‘Amelia was extrovert, confident. Other than the swimming and her looks, she was a very different girl from Caroline Devine.’

‘So we can deduce that his attraction to Caroline became stronger because of the type of girl she was. Like Amelia, she was athletic. The assailant was physically fit, which makes sense, similar attributes. He was looking for someone not unlike himself. But unlike Amelia, who may have come across as overconfident, Caroline appeared vulnerable and sensitive. She was a listener, wanted to help others, and her appreciation for books could have given her more depth in his eyes.’

‘Where’s this leading, Kate?’

‘Well, if the killings are linked to the Tuscan burial, it means the key to our killer’s motivational needs began early, sometime in childhood.’

‘So?’

‘So we now have a possible third victim, Silvia Vaccaro.’

‘You’re not saying he killed her too? As you said, he could only have been a child.’

‘It doesn’t matter right now who killed her, what matters is that if I’m right, irrespective of the catalyst behind his current killing spree, he may well be seeking to turn back time, and Silvia is the key to all of this.’

‘Keep going, Kate.’

‘We know Caroline was driven, an excellent student according to her mother, ambitious, wanting to prove herself.’

‘I’m still not getting you.’

‘His progression, O’Connor – all the time, he is looking for the ideal girl. If he is recreating the Tuscan burial, he could well be trying to replace Silvia, or his memory of her – but we must study the victim’s behaviour too, it is just as important as studying the killer’s. He befriended Amelia, was drawn to her physically, but soon lost interest, her personality was unsuitable. Then there was Caroline; the more he got to know her, the more he studied her, the more emotionally connected to her he became, the more her behaviour convinced him it was the right time to make his move. It was a calculated risk, but one he was prepared to take. When Caroline reacted badly, he would have blamed her because he believed she’d failed him. He had taken risks for her, and she had let him down.’

‘It still doesn’t answer who will be next.’

‘No, it doesn’t, but he will move on. Whatever the reason for him crossing the line, he is not going to stop now, but next time he will change things, just like he changed from Amelia to Caroline.’

‘Change how?’

‘It could be someone older.’

‘Older?’

‘Well think about it. His selection process is adapting. Initially it was looks and general interests, and then the girl’s personality traits became the decision-maker. Things turning out badly with Caroline means he won’t make the same mistake again. You have to remember, O’Connor, in this man’s eyes everything he is doing makes absolute sense. The girls are failing him, not the other way around. If he’s looking for a Silvia replacement, then it would explain the age of both victims, but as you said, he would have been a child himself forty years ago. If Caroline was close to perfect, but her behaviour disappointed him, he could well attribute it to her age and adapt his mindset. None of us can reinvent the past, at least not exactly.’

‘So what happens when he chooses his next victim?’

‘He may have chosen her already.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘He repeats, takes comfort in the familiar. Remember the locations of both girls. He didn’t move far. He’s a creature of habit, likes to stay within set territories, doesn’t want to move far away from home. Jessica may be right about him being local, but he uses a car. Statistically, serial killers with vehicles travel six times as far as those who get to their victims on foot. He’s working out of Dublin, but he could be anywhere in that geographical area. The point is, his scope is nevertheless restricted. As I say, he stays close to home. His next victim will already be known to him. She might have slipped under the radar before this, but now his needs are changing, she’ll become more important to him.’