The Lost Girls of Rome (21 page)

Having no intention of giving up, he quickly bought a new suitcase and new clothes in the airport shops and presented himself punctually at the check-in for his flight to Athens – only to discover that, due to the large numbers travelling over the holiday weekend, he was double-booked.

At eight in the evening, when he should have been sitting in the stern of a three-master sipping ice-cold ouzo with a gorgeous Indian model he had met two weeks earlier in Milan, he found himself in a departure lounge packed with tourists, filling out insurance forms to reclaim his baggage.

He should have waited until the following day and taken the first available flight, but he didn’t think he could bear that. So he rented a car with the intention of going to the port of Brindisi and there embarking on a ferry for Greece.

After driving all night, a journey of over three hundred miles, he saw the sun begin to emerge over the coast of Apulia. The road maps indicated that he was not far from his destination, but just then his car developed a fault. After chugging along for a while, it finally broke down completely.

Pulling up at the side of the road, David got out and instead of cursing his bad luck looked at the landscape around him. To his right, a white town on a plateau. To his left, a few hundred yards away, the sea.

He walked to the beach, which was deserted at that hour of the morning. On the foreshore, he took out one of his aniseed cigarettes, lit it, and celebrated the rising sun.

It was then that he looked down and saw some small, perfectly symmetrical footprints in the wet sand. Instinctively, he attributed them to a woman jogging. The coast in that direction was full of inlets, so whoever had left them had already disappeared from sight. But one thing was certain: not much time had passed, or the backwash would have erased the prints completely.

Whenever he told the story subsequently, he always found it difficult to describe what had gone through his head at that moment.
He had suddenly felt that he absolutely had to follow those footprints, and had broken into a run.

At this point in the story, Sandra would always ask him how he knew it was a woman.

‘I didn’t know, I could only hope. I mean, it could have been a little boy, or even a short man.’

She was never entirely convinced by this explanation. Her instinct as a police officer drove her to ask, ‘And how did you know they were jogging?’

But David was prepared for this, too. ‘The prints in the sand were deeper at the front, which meant the person was running.’

‘I guess that’s plausible.’

And David would resume the story from where she had interrupted him. He said that he had gone a hundred yards, climbed a dune, and from the top spotted the figure of a woman. She was wearing shorts, a figure-hugging T-shirt and trainers, and her blonde hair was gathered in a ponytail. He couldn’t see her face. He felt an urge to call out to her, which was stupid, because he didn’t even know her name.

At this point, he put on speed.

What would he say once he had caught up with her? The closer he got, the more he realised that he had to come up with something so as not to appear a complete idiot. But he couldn’t think of anything.

After much effort, he managed to come up alongside her. She was very beautiful – when Sandra heard him say this, she usually smiled. He apologised to the woman and asked her to stop. She did so, but reluctantly, and stared at this madman standing there trying to catch his breath. He couldn’t have made a great impression on her. He had been wearing the same clothes for twenty-four hours, he hadn’t slept all night, he was sweating from his run, and he probably didn’t smell particularly good.

‘Hi, I’m David,’ he said, holding out his hand. She looked at it in disgust, without taking it, as if he had offered her a rotten fish. Then he continued, ‘Do you know what Jung said about coincidences?’ And he launched into an account of all the things that had
happened to him since he had left Berlin the previous day. She stood there listening to him without saying a word, trying perhaps to figure out where he was going with all this.

She let him finish, then said that their meeting couldn’t exactly be called a coincidence. Because, although the chain of events that had led him to this beach had been independent of his will, he had decided of his own volition to follow her footprints. Which meant that the theory of synchronicity didn’t apply.

‘Who says so?’

‘Jung says so.’

David considered this an excellent objection, and fell silent. Not knowing what else to add, he bade her goodbye and sadly turned away. On the way back, he thought how wonderful it would have been if that girl had indeed turned out to be a special woman, maybe the love of his life. It would have been memorable to fall in love like that and have that story to tell in years to come. It would have transformed a series of small misadventures into a great romantic epic.

All because of some mislaid luggage.

The girl didn’t run after him to tell him she had changed her mind. He had never even learned her name. But after waiting a month for the airline to find his case, he had gone to Police Headquarters in Milan to report the theft. There, in front of a coffee machine, he had met Sandra for the first time, they had exchanged a few words, had liked each other and, a few weeks later, had started living together.

Now, waking up in her hotel room in Rome with a weight on her soul – the recent discovery that David had been murdered and the knowledge that she had to find his killer – Sandra couldn’t help smiling.

Every time David had told that story to a new friend, this friend had assumed that the girl on the beach would turn out to be her. But the amazing thing about it was that life sometimes takes the most banal way to offer us the greatest opportunities. Men and women don’t need to look for ‘signs’.

Sometimes, amid billions of people, they simply have to find each other.

If, when they were standing at that coffee machine, she hadn’t had a five-euro note and David hadn’t been able to change it for her with some coins he had in his pocket, they might not have had a reason to talk. They might have just stood there, waiting for their respective drinks, then walked away as two strangers, unaware of the love that they could have shared and – which was the most incredible thing of all – they wouldn’t have suffered any regrets for a missed opportunity.

How many times a day does this kind of thing occur and we don’t know it? How many people meet by chance and then separate as if nothing has happened, without knowing that they were perfect for each other?

That was why, although David was dead, she felt privileged.

And what of last night’s events? she wondered. That encounter with the man with the scar on his temple had left her stunned. She still couldn’t get over it. She thought she had met a killer, only to discover he was a priest. There was no doubt in her mind that he was telling the truth. He could have taken advantage of the blackout to escape, instead of which he had stayed and told her what he was. Faced with that unexpected revelation, she had wavered, unable to press the trigger. It was as if she had heard her mother’s voice admonishing her: ‘Sandra, my dear, you can’t shoot a priest. It’s simply not done.’ It was ridiculous.

Coincidences.

How to figure out the relationship between David and that man? Sandra got out of bed and went to look at his photograph again. What did a priest have to do with the investigation? Instead of providing answers, that image complicated everything.

Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten for hours. She also felt feverish. Last night, she had been soaked to the skin by the time she had got back to the hotel.

In the sacristy of San Luigi dei Francesi she had realised that what she was looking for went beyond justice. There was something else, something darker, that needed to be assuaged. Suffering produces strange effects. It weakens us, makes us more fragile. But, at the same time, it strengthens a desire we thought we could keep at
bay. The desire to inflict the same pain on others. As if revenge is the only cure for our own pain.

Sandra realised she would have to come to terms with a dark side of herself that she had never been aware of until now. I don’t want to become like that, she thought. But she feared that she had changed irrevocably.

She put to one side the photograph showing the priest with the scar on his temple and concentrated on the last two.

One of them was the dark photograph. The other was the one showing David in front of the mirror, waving sadly.

She held them both up in front of her, as if trying to grasp the connection. But they didn’t suggest anything to her. As she put them down again, she froze, her gaze fixed to the floor.

There was a small card just inside the door.

She stood there for a few moments looking at it. Then, steeling herself, she picked it up, quickly, as if she was afraid. Someone must have slipped it in overnight, during the few hours she had yielded to sleep. She looked at the card. It was a holy picture, depicting a Dominican friar.

St Raymond of Penyafort.

The name was printed on the back, together with a prayer in Latin to be recited in order to obtain the saint’s intercession. Some of the phrases were illegible, because someone had written a word across them in red ink. Only one word, but a word that sent a shiver down Sandra’s spine.

Fred.

7.00 a.m.

He needed a crowded place. At this hour of the morning, the McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps fitted the bill perfectly. Most of the customers were foreign tourists looking for more substantial fare than the usual Italian breakfast.

Marcus chose the place because he needed to feel the presence of other people. He needed to know that the world was capable of
going on despite the horrors he witnessed every day, and that he wasn’t alone in this struggle, because the families that surrounded him – bringing children into the world and raising them with love – played a role in the salvation of the human race.

He moved his cup of watery coffee, which he hadn’t even touched, into a corner of the table, and put in the middle the file that Clemente had left for him half an hour earlier in a confessional: another of the places they used for exchanging information.

The child’s drawing of the boy with the scissors that they had found in Jeremiah Smith’s attic had immediately reminded Clemente of something that had happened three years earlier. He had given him a brief account of it while they were still in the villa. But after they had left, he had rushed to the archive to look for it. The code number on the cover was
c.g. 554-33-1
, but everybody had called it the Figaro case. Figaro was the name that the media had given to the perpetrator of the crime – catchy, but showing scant regard for the victims.

Marcus opened the file and started reading the account.

The scene that had greeted the police in a small house in the Nuovo Salario area one Friday evening was a truly horrifying one. A young man of twenty-seven was lying semi-conscious in a pool of his own vomit, at the foot of the staircase that led to the upper floor of the house. Some distance from him, a damaged wheelchair. Federico Noni was a paraplegic and, at first, the police had thought he had simply fallen and hurt himself. But then they had gone up to the first floor, and it was there that they had made their macabre discovery.

In one of the bedrooms lay the naked and mutilated body of his twenty-five-year-old sister, Giorgia Noni.

She had suffered multiple stab wounds. The fatal one had torn open her stomach.

Analysing the lesions, the pathologist had established that the murder weapon had been a pair of scissors. This had caused alarm bells to start ringing in the minds of the police, because three women had been attacked previously in the same manner by a maniac – hence the nickname Figaro. They had all escaped with
their lives. But it was clear that the assailant had wanted to go one stage further. This time, he had killed.

Maniac was an imperfect definition, Marcus thought. This individual was much more than that. In his sick, twisted imagination, what he was doing with the scissors was necessary to give him pleasure. He wanted to smell his victims’ fear, mixed with the smell of the blood gushing from their wounds.

For a moment, Marcus lifted his eyes from the papers. He needed a breath of normality. He found it in a little girl a few tables away who was licking her lips as she carefully opened a Happy Meal, her eyes shining with excitement.

When is it that we change? he asked himself. When do our lives become irreversibly modified? Not that it always happens. Sometimes, everything goes the way it should.

The sight of the little girl was sufficient to restore his faith in humanity. He could again immerse himself in the abyss opened up by the file in front of him.

He started reading through the police report.

The killer had got in through the main door, left carelessly open by Giorgia Noni when she had come back after doing the shopping. Figaro was in the habit of choosing his victims in hypermarkets and then following them home. The others, though, had always been alone when they were attacked. In the case of Georgia, her brother Federico was also in the house. He had been an athlete with great prospects, but a motorcycle accident had put an end to his career. According to the young man’s testimony, Figaro had come up behind him and overturned his wheelchair, sending him crashing to the floor and knocking him out. Then he had dragged Georgia upstairs, where he had subjected her to the same treatment as his other victims.

When Federico regained consciousness, he had discovered that the wheelchair was irreparably damaged. From his sister’s screams he had realised that something terrible was happening upstairs. After trying to call for help, he had attempted to drag himself up the stairs. But his body was long out of training, not to mention that he
was still dazed from the blow on the head, and he had had to give up.

From where he was, he had been forced to listen, unable to do anything to help the person he loved most in the world: the sister who took care of him and would probably have continued to look after him for the rest of her life. He had lain there at the foot of those damned stairs, cursing, angry and powerless.