The Lost Girls of Rome (29 page)

He is not like you.

It referred to Federico. It meant they weren’t both suffering from physical handicaps. The boy was simulating his.

But where was Figaro now?

If Federico lived like a recluse, he could not have left the house through the front door. The neighbours might have seen him. How did he manage to get out undisturbed to attack his victims?

Marcus continued his search. As he approached the staircase leading to the first floor, he noticed that there was a door under the stairs, and that it was ajar. He opened it and went in. As he did so, his head knocked against something hanging from the low ceiling. A lamp with a short rope next to it. He pulled on the rope and the light came on.

He found himself in a narrow cubbyhole that stank of mothballs. Old clothes were kept here, divided into two rows. Men’s clothes on the left, women’s clothes on the right. They had probably belonged to the boy’s dead parents, Marcus thought. There was also a shoe rack and boxes piled up on shelves against the wall.

He noticed two dresses on the floor, a blue one and a red flowery one. Maybe they had slipped off their hangers, or maybe someone had dropped them. Marcus put a hand between the hangers and moved the clothes aside, revealing a door.

He deduced that the cubbyhole had originally been a passageway.

He opened the door. He took the torch out of his pocket and shone it at a short corridor with peeling, damp-stained walls. He walked along it until he reached a place into which a number of large boxes and a few items of furniture no longer in use were crammed. The beam of light fell on an object lying on a table.

An exercise book.

He took it and started leafing through it. The drawings on the first pages were clearly the work of a child. The same elements recurred endlessly.

Female figures, wounds, blood. And scissors.

A page was missing, clearly torn out. Presumably the one they had found hanging, framed, on the wall of Jeremiah Smith’s loft. He had come full circle.

The subsequent pages of the exercise book, however, bore witness to the fact that this practice had not ended with his youth. The drawings continued, more precise, more mature in their line. The women were much more defined, the cuts ever more realistic. A sign
that the monster’s sick, twisted imagination had grown as he had grown.

Federico Noni had always harboured these violent fantasies. But he had never realised them. It was probably fear that had stopped him. Fear of ending up in prison, or of being pointed out by everyone as a monster. He had created the mask of the good athlete, the good boy, the good brother. He had even believed it himself.

Then the motorcycle accident had happened.

That event had released everything. Marcus recalled the policewoman telling him that she had heard Federico Noni say the doctors believed he would recover the use of his legs. But then he had refused to continue with his physiotherapy.

His condition was the perfect camouflage. At last, he could let his true nature emerge.

Reaching the last page of the exercise book, Marcus discovered that it contained an old press cutting. He unfolded it. It went back to more than a year before and reported the news of Figaro’s third assault. Across the article, someone had written in black felt-tip pen the words
I know everything
.

Giorgia, Marcus thought immediately. That was why Federico killed her. And that was when he discovered that he liked the new game more.

The assaults had begun after the accident. The first three had been useful as preparation. They were a kind of exercise, although Federico may not have been aware of it at the time. What awaited him was another kind of satisfaction, one that was much more gratifying. Murder.

The killing of his sister had been unplanned but necessary. Giorgia had understood everything and had become an obstacle, as well as a danger. Federico couldn’t allow her to tarnish his clean image, or to cast doubt on his precious disguise. That was why he had killed her. But it had also helped him to understand something.

Taking a life was much more gratifying than a mere assault.

And so he had not been able to restrain himself. The dead girl in
Villa Glori Park was the demonstration of that. But this time he had been more cautious. Having learned from experience, he had buried her.

Federico Noni had deceived everyone. Starting with Pietro Zini. All it had taken was a false confession by a compulsive liar, a confession he had confirmed. An inadequate investigation, based on the assumption that only an obvious monster could have committed such a crime, had done the rest.

Marcus put down the exercise book because he had caught sight of an iron door half hidden behind a sideboard. He went and opened it.

A raging wind burst into the little room. He looked out and saw that the door led to a deserted side street. Nobody would notice who went in or out. It had probably fallen into disuse over the years, but Federico Noni had learned to use it.

Where is he now? Where has he gone? The question echoed again in Marcus’s head.

He closed the door and hurriedly retraced his steps. Coming back into the living room, he started rummaging around. He didn’t care if he left prints, his one concern was that he might be too late.

He looked at the wheelchair. On one side there was a kind of pocket for keeping things. He put his hand in and found a mobile phone.

He’s clever, he told himself. He left it here because he knows that, even if it’s off, it might help the police to establish his location.

That meant that Federico Noni had left home to commit a crime.

Marcus checked the last calls. There was one incoming one, from an hour and a half earlier. He recognised the number because he had dialled it himself that afternoon.

Zini.

He pressed the recall button, waiting for the blind ex-policeman to reply. He heard the ringing, but nobody answered. Marcus hung up and, with a chilling sense of foreboding, rushed out of the house.

9.34 p.m.

As she looked in the mirror in the bathroom of the Interpol guest apartment, Sandra thought again of what had happened that afternoon after her meeting with the penitenziere.

She had wandered for nearly an hour through the streets of Rome, letting herself be carried by the wind and her thoughts, heedless of the risk she ran after the ambush by the sniper that morning. As long as she was among people, she felt safe. When she had had enough she’d returned here. She had waited a while on the landing before knocking, trying to put off for as long as possible Schalber’s reprimands for her long absence. But as soon as he had opened the door to her, she had seen the relief on his face. It had surprised her: she hadn’t expected him to be worried about her.

‘Thank God nothing’s happened to you,’ were his only words.

She was stunned. She had expected a million questions, instead of which Schalber had been content with her brief summary of her visit to Pietro Zini. Sandra had handed him the file on the Figaro case and he had leafed through it in search of any clue that might lead them to the penitenzieri.

But he had not asked her why she had taken so long to get back.

He had invited her to wash her hands because dinner would soon be ready. And then he had gone into the kitchen to get a bottle of wine.

Sandra turned on the tap in the wash basin and stood there looking at her own reflection for another few seconds. She had deep eye sockets and her lips were chapped, because of her habit of biting them when she was tense. She ran her fingers through her dishevelled hair, then looked for a comb in the cabinet. She found a brush in which some long, brown hairs were trapped. A woman’s, she thought, remembering the bra she had seen on the arm of the chair in the bedroom of the guest apartment that morning. Schalber had justified its presence by saying that the apartment was used by many people, but she had noticed his embarrassment. She was sure he knew the provenance of that undergarment. There was no reason for it to bother her that another woman had been in the bed in which
she had woken up, maybe even just a few hours earlier. What irritated her was that Schalber had tried to justify himself. As if it was of any interest to her!

At that moment, she felt like an idiot.

She was envious, there was no other explanation. She could not bear the thought that people had sex. The very word was liberating, even if only in the privacy of her own head. Sex, she repeated to herself. Maybe because that possibility was denied her. There was nothing actually stopping her, but part of her knew that this was how it had to be. Once again she seemed to hear her mother’s voice: ‘Darling, who would ever want to go to bed with a widow?’ Her mother had made it sound like a kind of perversion.

No, she really was being an idiot again, wasting time on such thoughts. She had to be practical. She had been in the bathroom for too long and Schalber might start to get suspicious, so she had to hurry up.

She had made a promise to the priest, and she had every intention of keeping it. If he helped her to locate David’s killer, she would wipe out all traces that led to the penitenzieri.

In any case, it was better to put the clues in a safe place for the moment.

Sandra turned towards the bag she had brought into the bathroom and placed it on the cistern. She took out the mobile phone and checked that there was sufficient space in the memory. She was about to erase the photographs she had taken in the chapel of St Raymond of Penyafort, but then she thought better of it.

Someone had tried to kill her there, and these images might help her discover who it had been.

Then she took from the bag the photographs from the Leica, including the one of the priest with the scar on his temple, which Schalber did not know about. She placed them in a row on a shelf and photographed them one by one with the mobile: it was better to possess copies, just as a precaution. She took a transparent plastic bag that could be hermetically sealed and put in the five photographs, lifted the ceramic lid over the cistern and dropped the bag in the water.

She had been sitting for ten minutes in the little kitchen of the apartment, looking at the laid table, while Schalber toiled at the stove, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, an apron round his waist and a dishcloth thrown over his shoulder. He was whistling. He turned and found her lost in thought. ‘Risotto in balsamic vinegar, mullet in foil, and a radicchio and green apple salad,’ he announced. ‘I hope you approve.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, surprised. That morning he had made breakfast, but making scrambled eggs didn’t exactly mean knowing how to cook. This menu, though, suggested a passion for food. She was full of admiration.

‘You’ll sleep here tonight.’ It was a statement of fact, not a suggestion. ‘It’s unwise to go back to your hotel.’

‘I don’t think anything will happen to me. And besides, I left all my things there.’

‘We can go and get them tomorrow morning. There’s a very comfortable sofa in the other room.’ He smiled. ‘Of course I’ll be the one to make the sacrifice.’

Soon afterwards, Schalber put the risotto on the plates and they ate, mostly in silence. The fish was delicious, and the wine helped her relax. It was a change from all those evenings she had spent alone at home since David’s death, knocking back glass after glass of red wine until she fell into a stupor. This time it was different. She hadn’t thought she was still capable of sharing a decent meal with someone.

‘Who taught you to cook?’

Schalber swallowed a mouthful of food and took a sip of wine. ‘You learn to do a lot of things when you’re alone.’

‘Never been tempted to get married? The first time on the telephone, you told me you came close a couple of times …’

He shook his head. ‘Marriage isn’t for me. It’s a matter of perspective.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We all have a vision of our lives. It’s like a painting: there are some elements in the foreground, others in the background. The background elements are at least as necessary as the foreground
ones, or there wouldn’t be any sense of perspective and everything would be flat and unrealistic. Well, the women in my life are background elements. They’re indispensable, but not so indispensable as to be moved into the foreground.’

‘So what is there in your life? Apart from you, obviously.’

‘My daughter.’

She hadn’t been expecting that reply. Schalber was delighted to see that he had surprised her.

‘Do you want to see her?’ He took out his wallet and began looking in the pockets.

‘Don’t tell me you’re one of those fathers who go around with a photograph of their little girl in their pocket! Damn it, Schalber, you’re really going all out to astonish me.’ Her tone was ironic, but actually she found it rather touching.

He showed her the creased photograph of a little girl with ash blonde hair, exactly like his. She even had his green eyes.

‘How old is she?’

‘Eight. Gorgeous, isn’t she? Her name’s Maria. She loves dancing. In fact, she attends ballet school. Every Christmas or birthday she asks for a puppy. Maybe this year I’ll give in.’