The Lost Girls of Rome (44 page)

She was reminded of the dark photograph in the roll from the Leica.

That’s my limit, she told herself. Without that image, irretrievably lost perhaps because of an error as it was being taken, she couldn’t go any further along the path indicated to her by David.

God alone knew what there had been in that photograph.

Outward appearances were her source of information, but they were also her limitation. She realised how much good it would do her for once to be able to look inside and draw everything out, trying to find a path to forgiveness. If nothing else, a confession would be liberating. That was why, suddenly, she started talking to Jeremiah Smith. ‘I want to tell you a story about a green tie.’ She didn’t know why she had said it, it had simply come out. ‘It all goes back to a few weeks before my husband was killed. David had come back from a long assignment abroad. That evening seemed like all the other times we saw each other after a long absence. We celebrated, just the two of us. The rest of the world was shut out, and we were the last two members of the human race. Do you know what I mean, have you ever felt that?’ She shook her head, amused. ‘No, of course not. But that evening, for the first time since we had known each other, I had to pretend to love him. David asked me a routine question. ‘How are you, everything all right?’ How many times we ask each other that every day, and we never expect to get an honest answer. But when I told him that everything was fine, it wasn’t just a polite phrase: it was a lie … A few days earlier I had been in hospital having an abortion.’ Sandra could feel the tears welling up in her eyes, but she held them back. ‘We had everything it takes to be fantastic parents: we loved each other, we were sure of each other. But he was a reporter, always off photographing wars, revolutions and massacres. I was a policewoman working for forensics. You can’t bring a child into the world if your work makes you risk your life, as was the case with David, or if you see all the things I’m forced to see, every day, at crime scenes. All that violence, all that fear: that wasn’t good for a child.’ She said this with great conviction, and without a trace of regret. ‘And that’s my sin. I’ll carry it with me as long as I live. But what I can’t forgive myself is that I didn’t allow David to have a say in the matter. I took advantage of his absence to decide.’ Sandra gave a sad smile. ‘When I got back
home after the abortion, I found in the bathroom the pregnancy test I had done on my own. My child, or the thing they had pulled out of me – I don’t know what it was after barely a month – had stayed in that hospital. I’d felt it die inside me, and then I’d left it there alone. That’s terrible, don’t you think? In any case, I thought that creature deserved at least a funeral. So I took a box and in it I put the pregnancy test and a series of objects that had belonged to its mother and father. Among them, David’s only tie. The green one. Then I drove from Milan to Tellaro, the village in Liguria where we used to spend our holidays. And I threw everything in the sea.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I never told anyone. And it seems absurd that you should be the person I’m telling it to. But now comes the good part. Because I was convinced that I’d be the only one to pay the price for what I’d done. Instead of which, without knowing it, I’d brought about a disaster that couldn’t be remedied. I didn’t realise until later, when it was too late. Together with the love I could have felt for my child, I’d also thrown away the love I felt for David.’ She wiped away a tear. ‘It just didn’t work: I kissed him, I caressed him, I made love with him and I didn’t feel anything. The nest that child had started to build inside me in order to survive had become a void. I only started loving my husband again when he was dead.’

She crossed her arms over her chest, and bowed her head. Sunk in that uncomfortable position, she started to sob. The tears came out of her in one great uninterrupted flow. But it was liberating. She couldn’t stop. It lasted a few minutes, then, as she blew her nose and tried to compose herself, she laughed at herself. She was exhausted. But, incomprehensibly, she felt good here. Another five minutes, she told herself, only five. The regular beep of the cardiograph connected to Jeremiah Smith’s chest, the cadence of the respirator that was keeping him alive, worked their hypnotic, relaxing spell on her. She closed her eyes for a moment and, without realising it, fell asleep. She saw David. His smile. His dishevelled hair. His kindly eyes. That grimace he made whenever he found her looking a bit sad or thoughtful, jutting out his lower lip and tilting his head to the side. David took her face in his hands
and pulled her to him to give her one of his long kisses. ‘It’s all right, Ginger.’ She felt relieved, at peace. Then he waved at her and walked away. Dancing and singing their song: ‘Cheek to Cheek’. Even though the voice seemed like David’s, in her dream Sandra didn’t know that it belonged to someone else. And that it was quite real.

Someone was singing in the room.

10.17 p.m.

After seeing Camilla Rocca unexpectedly place her hand on the chest of the boy who had inherited her son’s heart, Marcus, for the first time, sensed an invisible, compassionate force intervening in his life. We are so insignificant in the immensity of the universe that we don’t seem to deserve the privilege of a God who might be interested in us. That was what he had always told himself. But now he was changing his mind.

We will meet where it all began.

He would see his antagonist face to face. He would receive the prize of Lara’s salvation.

And the place where it had all begun was Jeremiah Smith’s villa.

He parked the Panda outside the main gate. There were no longer any policemen guarding the entrance, and the forensics team had moved out a little while earlier. The place was desolate and melancholy, just as it must have been before it had revealed its secret. Marcus walked towards the house. Only the full moon fought the power of darkness.

The trees in the drive swayed in the cool night breeze. The rustling leaves were like fleeting laughter, mocking him as he passed then fading behind him. The statues that adorned the untended garden stared at him with their empty eyes.

He reached the villa. Seals had been placed on its doors and windows. He wasn’t actually expecting the penitenziere to be waiting for him here. The mandate in the message was clear.

This time you’ll have to look for the devil.

This was his last test. In return, he would obtain the answers.

Did those words mean that he would have to look for a supernatural sign? But he told himself once again that the penitenzieri were not interested in the existence of the devil, in fact they were the only people in the Church to doubt it. They had always considered him a convenient pretext, invented by human beings to evade responsibility for their own sins and to absolve the defects of their own nature.

The devil only exists because men are wicked.

He removed the seals from the door and entered the house. The moonlight did not follow him inside, but stopped at the threshold. There were no noises or presences.

He took the torch from his pocket and made his way along the dark corridor. He recalled his first visit, when he had followed the trail of the numbers behind the paintings. And yet he must have missed something if the penitenziere had wanted him to come back. He pushed on as far as the room where Jeremiah Smith had been found dying.

The devil doesn’t live here any more, he told himself.

A few things were missing from the previous time. The overturned table, the broken cup and the crumbs had been removed by forensics. Along with the materials – sterile gloves, pieces of gauze, syringes and cannulas – used by the ambulance crew when they had tried to revive him. Also gone were the souvenirs – the hair ribbon, the coral bracelet, the pink scarf and the roller skate – with which the monster had invoked the ghosts of his young victims to keep him company during his long nights of solitude.

But if the objects were gone, the questions remained.

How had Jeremiah Smith – a limited, antisocial man, devoid of any kind of attraction – managed to gain the trust of these girls? Where had he kept them prisoner for a month before killing them? Where was Lara?

Marcus avoided asking himself if she was still alive. He had carried out his own task with the greatest devotion, so he wouldn’t accept a different outcome.

He looked around.
Anomalies
. The sign isn’t supernatural, he told
himself, but some detail that only a man of faith could recognise. This time he had to call on a talent he was afraid he didn’t possess.

His eyes roamed the room, looking for anything that stood out. A small crack that led into another dimension. The breach utilised by evil to spread.

There is a place where the world of light meets the world of darkness … I am the guardian appointed to defend that border. But every now and again something manages to get through.

His eyes came to rest on the window. Beyond it, the moon was showing him the way.

The stone angel, unfolding its wings and looking in his direction. Summoning him.

It was in the middle of the garden, together with the other statues. According to the Scriptures, Lucifer was an angel before he fell. The Lord’s favourite. Remembering that, Marcus ran outside.

He stopped in front of the tall figure, which was lit by a pale glimmer of moonlight.

The police hadn’t noticed a thing, he told himself, examining the ground at the foot of the angel. If there’s something under here, the dogs ought to have scented it. But because of the persistent rain of the last few days the odours given off by the earth might have confused the animals’ sense of smell.

Marcus put his hands on the base of the statue, pushed it, and the angel moved, revealing beneath it an iron trapdoor. It was not locked. All he had to do was lift the handle.

Darkness. A strong smell of damp rose like a fetid breath from that hole. Marcus aimed his torch: six steps led to the abyss. No voice, though. No noise.

‘Lara!’ he called. Then three more times. Then once again. But there was no answer.

He went down the steps.

The beam of light illumined a narrow space, with a low ceiling and a tiled floor that dipped at a certain point. It must have been a swimming pool once, but somebody had turned it into a secret room.

Marcus moved his torch around in search of a human presence. He feared now that he would find merely a silent corpse. But Lara was not here.

Only a chair.

That was another reason the dogs didn’t scent anything, he told himself. But it was here that Jeremiah brought them. This was the lair where he kept them prisoner for a month before killing them. There were no chains on the walls, no devices for giving vent to his sadistic impulses, no alcoves in which to have sex. No torture, no violence, Marcus reminded himself: Jeremiah didn’t touch them. Everything was reduced to that chair. Next to it was the rope he used to tie them up and a tray with the knife, some eight inches long, with which he cut their throats. That was the extent of his perverted imagination.

Marcus went closer to the chair and saw that there was a closed envelope on it. He picked it up and opened it. Inside were the original plans of Lara’s apartment, including the location of the trapdoor in the bathroom, a list of her movements and timetable, notes that mentioned the plan to hide the drug in the sugar, and finally a photograph of Lara smiling. Over her face, a question mark had been scrawled in red. You’re mocking me, Marcus said to himself, addressing the penitenziere. The contents of the envelope were incontrovertible evidence that Jeremiah really had taken the girl.

But of Lara herself there was no trace. Nor of his mysterious companion who had led him here.

Marcus was seething with rage. The penitenziere had failed at his task. He cursed him, and cursed himself. The mockery was unbearable. He didn’t want to stay a moment longer in this place. He turned to go out again, but the torch slipped from his hands. As it fell, it lit up something behind him.

Someone was in the corner.

He had been watching the scene. And he wasn’t moving. In the beam of light, all that could be seen was the outline of an arm, clad in black. Marcus bent down to pick up the torch and slowly lifted it to the stranger.

It wasn’t a person, but a priest’s cassock on a hanger.

Everything suddenly became clear. That was how Jeremiah Smith had approached his victims. The girls had not feared him because they had seen, not a monster, but a man of the cloth.

One of the pockets of the cassock was bulging. Marcus approached and put his hand in. He took out a small medicine bottle and a hypodermic syringe –
succinylcholine
.

He hadn’t been mistaken. And yet the objects in that pocket told a different story.

Jeremiah did it all himself.

He had known that the sister of one of his victims was on duty that night. So he had called the emergency number describing the symptoms of a heart attack. He had waited for the arrival of the paramedics before he injected the poison. He could even have thrown the syringe in a corner of the room or under a piece of furniture: the ambulance team in their excitement wouldn’t have noticed and forensics would have confused it with the waste material left by the doctor and paramedic after their intervention.

He didn’t disguise himself as a priest. He is a priest.

The beginning of his plan must have gone back to about a week earlier, when he had sent the anonymous notes to those involved in the murder of Valeria Altieri. Then he had sent the email that had informed Pietro Zini about the Figaro case. And then he had called Camilla Rocca to inform her that Astor Goyash would be at the Hotel Exedra a few days later.

He is the penitenziere.

All the time they had had him in front of their eyes without knowing who he really was. Just like Dr Alberto Canestrari, Jeremiah had simulated a natural death with the succinylcholine. No toxicological test would locate it. All you needed was a one-milligram dose to block the respiratory muscles. A few minutes and you choked to death, as had happened with Canestrari. The drug provoked immediate bodily paralysis, leaving no room for second thoughts.