The Lost Girls of Rome (3 page)

‘But how did he—’

‘We’ll get to that,’ Marcus interrupted him. He moved around the room, trying to focus on the exact sequence of events. His head was whirling. The pieces of the mosaic were starting to come together before his eyes. ‘Lara had a visitor.’

Clemente knew what was happening. Marcus was beginning a process of identification. That was his talent.

He was seeing what the intruder had seen.

‘He was here when Lara was out. He sat down on her sofa, he lay on her bed, he searched among her things. He looked at her photographs, he made her memories his own. He touched her toothbrush, sniffed her clothes, tried to find her smell. He drank from the same glass she’d left in the sink to be washed.’

‘I don’t follow you …’

‘He knew where everything was. He knew everything about Lara, her timetable, her habits.’

‘But there’s nothing here to suggest an abduction. There are no signs of struggle, nobody in the building heard screams or cries for help. How can you be so sure?’

‘Because she was asleep when he took her.’

Clemente was about to speak, but Marcus got in first. ‘Help me find the sugar.’

Even though Clemente didn’t quite grasp what was going through Marcus’s head, he decided to humour him. In a cupboard over the oven he found a box with the word SUGAR on it. In the meantime, Marcus examined the sugar bowl in the middle of the table, next to the tea things.

They were both empty.

The two men looked at each other with these objects in their hands, a charge of energy vibrating between them. It wasn’t mere coincidence, and Marcus hadn’t made a random supposition. He had had an intuition that might confirm his theory.

‘Sugar is the best place to hide a drug. It conceals the taste and guarantees that the victim will absorb it easily.’

And Lara had been feeling tired lately, her friends said. This clinched it for Clemente, although he couldn’t tell Marcus.

‘It happened gradually, there was no hurry,’ Marcus continued. ‘That proves that the person who took her had been here before that night. Along with her clothes and mobile phone, he also got rid of the sugar containing the drug.’

‘But you’re forgetting the chain on the door,’ Clemente said. That was the one detail that blew any theory to pieces. ‘How did he get in? And above all, how did they both get out?’

Marcus looked around again. ‘Where are we?’ Rome was the
greatest inhabited archaeological site in the world. The city had developed in layers; you only had to dig a few feet down to find traces of earlier periods, earlier civilisations. Marcus knew very well that even on the surface life had become stratified over the course of time. Every place contained many histories, many lives, within it. ‘What is this place? I don’t mean now, but before. You told me the building dates from the eighteenth century.’

‘It was one of the residences of the Costaldi family.’

‘Of course. The nobles occupied the upper floors, and down here were the storerooms and the stables.’ Marcus touched the scar on his left temple. He had no idea where that memory came from. How did he know that? Much had vanished for ever from his memory. But odd fragments of information surfaced unexpectedly from time to time, provoking the awkward question as to where they came from. There was a place within him where certain things existed but remained hidden, a place of mist and darkness that he was afraid he would never find.

‘You’re right,’ Clemente said. ‘That’s how the building used to be. The university authorities received it as a bequest about ten years ago and converted it into apartments.’

Marcus looked down. The parquet floor was of solid, untreated wood, with narrow floorboards. ‘No, not here,’ he muttered to himself. Undaunted, he headed for the bathroom, followed by Clemente.

He took a bucket from the broom cupboard, placed it under the shower and half filled it. Then he took a step back. Clemente, who was standing behind him, still did not understand.

Marcus tilted the bucket so that the water spilled on to the tiled floor. A puddle spread beneath their feet. They stood looking at it, expectantly.

After a few seconds, the water began to disappear.

It looked like a conjuring trick – just like a girl disappearing from an apartment locked on the inside. Except that this time there was an explanation.

The water had filtered through the floor.

Along the sides of some of the tiles, little bubbles of air appeared, eventually forming a perfect square, each side approximately three feet.

Marcus crouched down and felt the tiles with his fingertips, trying to discover a crack. When he thought he had located one, he stood up again and searched for something to use as a crowbar. He found a pair of scissors that did the trick. He put his fingers into the opening and lifted the square, revealing a stone trapdoor.

‘Wait, I’ll give you a hand,’ Clemente said.

They slid the lid to one side, uncovering a flight of time-worn travertine steps that went down six feet until it met what appeared to be a passage.

‘This is the way the intruder came,’ Marcus announced. ‘At least twice: when he came in and when he went away with Lara.’ He took out the little torch he always carried with him, lit it, and aimed it at the opening.

‘You want to go down there?’

He turned towards Clemente. ‘Do I have any choice?’

Holding the torch in one hand, Marcus descended the stone steps. Reaching the bottom, he realised he was in a tunnel that ran under the building in two directions. It was not clear where it led.

‘Are you all right?’ Clemente called down to him.

‘Yes,’ Marcus replied distractedly. In the eighteenth century, the gallery had probably been an escape route in case of danger. All he had to do was venture in one of the two directions. He chose the one from which he seemed to hear the distant noise of pouring rain. He went at least fifty yards, slipping a couple of times because of the wet ground. A few rats brushed against his calves with their hot smooth bodies before scurrying away into the darkness. He recognised the roar of the Tiber, swollen by days of persistent rain, and the sickly odour of the river, reminiscent of an animal in a headlong race. He followed it and soon came to a solid grille through which the grey light of day filtered. Impossible to go any further this way. So he turned back, went past the steps, and set off in the other direction. Almost immediately, he spotted something shining on the ground.

He bent down and picked it up: it was a crucifix on a gold chain.

The crucifix Lara had been wearing around her neck in the photo graph of her and her parents that she kept on the chest of drawers. It was the final proof that his theory had been correct.

Clemente was right. This was his talent.

Electrified by his discovery, Marcus did not notice that Clemente had come down to join him until he was right on top of him.

He showed him the chain. ‘Look …’

Clemente took it in his hands and examined it.

‘Lara might still be alive,’ Marcus said, excited by his discovery. ‘Now that we have a lead, we can find out who took her.’ But he realised that his friend did not share his enthusiasm. On the contrary, he seemed troubled.

‘We already know. We just needed confirmation. Unfortunately, we now have it.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The drug in the sugar.’

Marcus still did not understand. ‘So what’s the problem?’

Clemente gave him a solemn look. ‘I think it’s time you met Jeremiah Smith.’

8:40 a.m.

The first lesson Sandra Vega had learned was that houses and apartments never lie.

People, when they talk about themselves, are capable of creating all kinds of trappings around themselves that they actually end up believing. But the place where they choose to live inevitably reveals all.

In the course of her work, Sandra had visited many houses and apartments. Every time she was about to cross a threshold, she felt as if she ought to ask permission, even though, for what she had come to do, she didn’t even need to ring the doorbell.

Years before taking up her profession, whenever she travelled by train at night, she would look at the lighted windows in the buildings and wonder what was going on behind them, what stories were
being played out. Every now and again she’d caught a glimpse of one of these stories. A woman ironing while watching television. A man in an armchair sending up smoke rings from his cigarette. A child standing on a chair rummaging through a cupboard. Still images from a film, each captured in its little window. Then the train would pass. And those lives would continue on their way, unaware of her.

She had always tried to imagine what it would be like to prolong that exploration. To walk unseen among those people’s most precious possessions, to watch them as they went about their everyday lives, as if they were fish in an aquarium.

And in all the places she had lived, Sandra had asked herself what had happened within those walls before she entered them. What joys, quarrels and sorrows had flared then faded without leaving an echo.

She would wonder about the tragedies and horrors preserved like secrets in those places. Luckily, houses and apartments forget quickly. The occupants change, and everything starts all over again from the beginning.

Once in a while, those who go away leave traces of their passing. A lipstick forgotten in a bathroom cabinet. An old magazine on a shelf. A sheet of paper with the telephone number of a rape crisis centre hidden at the back of a drawer.

Through these little clues, it is sometimes possible to trace someone’s story.

She had never imagined that the search for such details would actually become her profession. But there was a difference: by the time she arrived in these places, they had lost their innocence for ever.

Sandra had joined the police through a competitive examination. The training had been standard. She carried a service gun, and knew how to use it. But her uniform was the white coat of the forensics team. After a specialisation course, she had chosen to become a forensic photographer.

She would arrive at a scene with her cameras, her sole purpose that of stopping time. Once everything was frozen by her lens, it would never change again.

The second lesson Sandra Vega had learned was that, like people, houses and apartments die.

And her destiny was to be there just before they died, when their inhabitants would never again set foot in them. The signs of that slow death agony were unmade beds, dishes in the sink, a sock abandoned on the floor. As if the inhabitants had fled, leaving everything in disorder, to escape the sudden end of the world. When in reality the end of the world had actually happened within those walls.

And so, as soon as Sandra crossed the threshold of an apartment on the fifth floor of a tower block on the outskirts of Milan, she realised that what was awaiting her would be a particularly unforgettable crime scene. The first thing she saw was the decorated tree, even though it was a long time since Christmas. Instinctively she understood why it was there. Her sister, too, at the age of five, had stopped her parents from taking down the decorations once the holiday was over. She had cried and screamed one whole afternoon, and in the end her parents had given up, hoping that sooner or later it would pass. Instead of which, the plastic fir tree with its little lights and coloured balls had stayed in its corner for the whole summer and the following winter. That was why Sandra suddenly felt her stomach gripped in a vice.

The tree told her there was a child in this apartment.

She could feel the child’s presence in the air. Because the third lesson she had learned was that houses and apartments have a smell. It belongs to those who live in them, and it is always different and unique. When tenants change, the smell disappears, to give way to a new one. It forms over time, mixing in other odours, natural and artificial – fabric softeners and coffee, schoolbooks and indoor plants, floor polish and cabbage soup – and it becomes the smell of that family, of the people who comprise it. They carry it on them and don’t even smell it.

The smell was the one thing that distinguished the apartment she saw now from the dwellings of other single-income families. Three rooms and a kitchen. The furniture acquired at different times, depending on financial circumstances. The framed photographs, mostly of summer holidays: the only ones they could afford. The
tartan cover on the sofa in front of the TV: it was here that they took refuge every evening, sitting crammed together watching the programmes until sleep overcame them.

Sandra mentally catalogued these images. There was no warning in them of what was going to happen. No one could have predicted that.

The police officers were moving through the rooms like uninvited guests, violating the family’s privacy with their mere presence. But she had long since got past the feeling that she was an intruder.

Hardly anyone spoke at crime scenes like this one. Even horror had its code. In this silent choreography, words were superfluous, because everyone knew exactly what to do.

But there were always exceptions. One of these was Fabio Sergi. She heard him cursing from somewhere in the apartment.

‘Fuck, I don’t believe it!’

All Sandra had to do was follow his voice: it came from a narrow windowless bathroom.

‘What’s happening?’ she asked, putting the two bags with her equipment down on the floor of the corridor and slipping on plastic overshoes.

‘It’s been a great day so far,’ he replied sarcastically, without looking at her. He was busy giving energetic taps to a portable gas fire. ‘This damn thing doesn’t work!’

‘I hope you’re not going to blow us all up.’

Sergi glared at her. Sandra didn’t say anything else, her colleague was too nervous. Instead she looked down at the corpse of the man occupying the space between the bathroom door and the toilet bowl. He was lying face down, stark naked. Forty years old, she estimated. Weight approximately fourteen stone, height six feet. The head was twisted at an unnatural angle, and there was an oblique gash across his skull. Blood had formed a dark pool on the black-and-white tiles.