The Lost Girls of Rome (39 page)

By a process of elimination, Marcus and Clemente concentrated on the minors who had disappeared in Rome three years earlier. They narrowed the choice down to two. A boy and a girl.

Filippo Rocco had vanished one afternoon after leaving school. His classmates who were with him hadn’t noticed anything. He was twelve years old and had a cheeky grin which displayed a gap where an upper incisor was missing. He was wearing the smock of the religious school he attended, a pair of jeans, and an orange sweater with a blue polo shirt and trainers. His satchel was covered with Scout badges, as well as the emblem of the football team he supported.

Alice Martini was ten years old and had long blonde hair. She wore glasses with pink frames. She had disappeared while she was in the park with her family: father, mother and younger brother. She was wearing a white Bugs Bunny sweatshirt, a pair of shorts and canvas shoes. The last person who had seen her was a balloon seller: he had spotted her near the toilets talking to a middle-aged man. But it had been a fleeting glimpse and he had not been able to provide the police with a description.

Marcus gathered other information from the websites of the newspapers that had reported the two disappearances. Both Alice’s parents and Filippo’s had put out appeals, taken part in talk shows and given interviews to keep interest in the two cases alive. But neither investigation had led anywhere.

‘Do you think the child we’re looking for is one of these two?’ Clemente asked.

‘It’s likely, but I would’ve preferred there to be only one. Time isn’t on our side. Up until now the penitenziere has calculated everything, planning for one act of revenge to be carried out every day. First, the sister of one of Jeremiah Smith’s victims finds him dying in his house and discovers the truth. The following evening, Raffaele Altieri kills his father, the person responsible for the murder of his mother twenty years ago. Yesterday, Pietro Zini killed Federico Noni, guilty of assaulting a number of women and of killing first his sister Giorgia to silence her and then a girl buried in Villa Glori. Have you noticed that in these last two cases the messages from the penitenziere to the avengers arrived with split-second timing? He left us just a few hours to discover and stop the mechanism he’d set in motion. I don’t think this case will be any different. So we have to hurry: someone will try to kill Astor Goyash by tonight.’

‘It won’t be easy getting to him. You’ve seen the kind of bodyguards he uses. He never goes anywhere without them.’

‘In that case I need you, Clemente.’

‘Me?’ Clemente said, surprised.

‘I can’t keep an eye on the families of both missing children, so we have to divide the tasks. We’ll use voicemail to communicate: as soon as one of us finds out something, he leaves a message.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Find the Martinis, I’ll deal with the parents of Filippo Rocca.’

Ettore and Camilla Rocca lived in Ostia, in a small one-storey house facing the beach. It was a decent-looking house, bought with savings.

Theirs was a normal family.

Marcus had often asked himself what that adjective really meant. It could mean a whole lot of small dreams and expectations that had become fixed over time and constituted a protection against any misfortune. For some, the greatest aspiration was to live a quiet life without too many upsets. It was a tacit pact with destiny, renewed every day.

Ettore Rocca was a travelling salesman and was often away from
home. His wife Camilla was a social worker in a centre providing support to disadvantaged families and young people in difficulty. She spent her life helping others, even though she herself had become someone who needed help.

The couple had chosen to live on the coast because Ostia was quieter and less expensive. It meant commuting to Rome to work, but it was a sacrifice worth making.

When he entered their house, Marcus felt for the first time that he was an intruder. There were bars on the doors and windows, but he had had no difficulty in opening the main lock, closing it once he had entered. He found himself in a combined living room and kitchen. The dominant colours were white and blue. Not much furniture, all of it in a nautical style. The dinner table seemed to have been made out of the planks of a boat and above it hung a fisherman’s lamp. On the wall was an old tiller with a clock face inlaid in it, and a fine display of shells stood on a shelf.

The sand came in with the wind and crackled under his shoes. Marcus moved further into the room, hoping to see some sign that might lead to the penitenziere. First of all, he looked at the refrigerator, on which a sheet of paper was held in place by a magnet in the shape of a crab. It was a message from Ettore Rocca to his wife.

See you in ten days. Love you
.

So the man was away on business, although it might also be a lie for the benefit of his spouse. He might be preparing to kill Goyash. Given the risks involved, he wanted to leave her out of it, to protect her. A week to prepare, shut up in a motel outside the city. But Marcus couldn’t indulge in speculation. He needed confirmation. He continued to search the room and, as he proceeded, he felt that something was lacking.

There was no sense of grief here.

Perhaps naively, he had expected that Filippo’s disappearance would have created a kind of fracture in his parents’ lives. Like a wound that, instead of being on the flesh, was on the objects, and you would just have to touch them to see them bleed. No, the boy
seemed to have vanished even here. There were no photographs of him, no mementoes. But perhaps it was in that void that the grief manifested itself. Marcus wasn’t able to perceive it, because only a mother and a father could see it. Then he understood. When he had looked at little Filippo’s face surrounded by other missing children on the police website, he had wondered how their families managed to carry on. It wasn’t the same as when a child died. When one disappeared, you had to learn to live with doubt. Doubt could insinuate itself everywhere, corroding everything from inside, without your being aware of it. It consumed the days, the hours. Years might pass without an answer. By comparison, Marcus had thought, how much better to know for certain that your child had been killed.

Death took hold of your memories, even the most beautiful ones, and inseminated them with grief, making them unbearable. Death became the master of the past. But doubt was worse, because it took away your future.

He entered Ettore and Camilla’s bedroom. On the double bed, their pyjamas were laid out on the respective pillows. The blankets were smooth, the slippers matched. Everything in its place. As if all that order could compensate for the madness of grief, the upheaval caused by a tragedy. Domesticating everything. Training the objects to carry on a charade of normality, making them repeat the comforting news that everything is fine.

And in that idyllic little picture, he at last found Filippo.

The boy was smiling out of a framed photograph, together with his parents. He had not been forgotten after all. He, too, had his place here: on a chest of drawers, beneath a mirror. Marcus was about to leave the room when his eye fell on an object and he realised he had been mistaken.

On the bedside table, on the side of the bed where Camilla slept, was a baby monitor.

There was only one explanation for the presence of that object.

Struck by the discovery, Marcus continued to the next room. The door was closed. Opening it, he discovered that, in what had once been Filippo’s room, next to his bed there was now a crib. The space
was divided equally. On one side, posters of Filippo’s favourite team, the desk where he had done his homework, on the other a changing table, a high chair, a heap of games for infants, even a music box with little bees playing ring-a-ring-a-roses.

Filippo didn’t know it yet, but he had a little brother or sister.

Life is the one antidote to grief, Marcus told himself. And he understood how the Roccas had found a way to take back their future and sweep away the fog of doubt. But then something nagged at him. Would this family really endanger their attempt to regain some kind of peace of mind in order to carry out an act of revenge? How had they reacted to the news that their firstborn was dead? Always assuming that Filippo really was Canestrari’s victim, he reminded himself.

He was on his way out of the house, intending to track down Camilla Rocca at the centre where she worked and follow her for the rest of the day, when he heard the throbbing of a car engine. He moved the curtain away from a window and saw a runabout that had just parked on the path. Camilla was in it.

Taken by surprise and unable to leave, he looked frantically for somewhere to hide. He found a room that was used as both a laundry and a store room. He went and stood in the corner behind the door and waited. He heard the front door being unlocked, Camilla coming in and closing the door, the sound of the keys being placed on a shelf, her heels clicking on the floor. She took off her shoes and dropped them, one after the other. Marcus peered through the crack in the door. She was walking barefoot and carrying a couple of cardboard boxes. She had been shopping and had come back home earlier than expected. But her son, or daughter, was not with her. She came into the laundry to hang a new garment on a hook. She did not turn. The thin wooden door was the only thing separating them. If the woman had moved it, she would have seen him. But instead she turned and made for the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

Marcus heard the water running in the shower and left his refuge. He passed in front of the closed door and, coming back into the living room, saw a gift-wrapped package on the table.

In this house, life had somehow resumed.

Instead of heartening him, the thought made him uneasy. He was overcome with a sense of panic. Clemente, he murmured: it seemed likely that the family they were looking for was the one he had sent his friend to keep an eye on.

Taking advantage of the fact that Camilla Rocca was in the shower, he took the telephone attached to the wall of the kitchen and dialled the voicemail number. There was a message from Clemente. He sounded excited.

‘Get here as soon as you can. Alice Martini’s father is loading his car with luggage. I suspect he’s getting ready to leave the city. And there’s something else I discovered: the man owns an unlicensed gun.’

5.14 p.m.

She had not said anything to Superintendent Camusso about the danger she had been in while in the gallery under Lara’s apartment. It doesn’t have anything to do with the girl, she had told herself. It concerns only me and David.

And besides, she was not afraid any more. She had realised that her pursuer had an ulterior motive. He didn’t want to kill her. At least not yet. He’d had the opportunity in that tunnel, before she made the call to Camusso. It wasn’t that he had missed his chance; he’d held back deliberately.

He was checking up on her.

Sandra had a sense that Camusso suspected she was not telling him the whole story. She wondered if she was imagining it, blaming her lack of sleep and the fact that she hadn’t eaten. So she had accepted the inspector’s invitation to join him at Francesco’s, a typical Roman trattoria in the Piazza del Fico. Although it was already mid-afternoon, they’d eaten pizza at a table in the open air, enjoying the smells and sounds of the neighbourhood. Around her, Rome with its stone streets, its buildings with their rough facades, its ivy-covered balconies.

Then they had come straight back to Headquarters. Camusso had shown her around the fine building he was lucky enough to work in, and Sandra had omitted to tell him that she already knew it from having got round one of his colleagues to do some research in records.

They made themselves comfortable in the superintendent’s office. Here too, there was a high frescoed ceiling, but the furnishings did not reflect the man’s eccentric taste. They were very sober and minimal, unlike Camusso, who moved like a splash of colour through the room. As he arranged his purple jacket on the chair behind the desk, Sandra noticed that he wore turquoise cufflinks. She couldn’t help breaking into a smile.

‘Are you absolutely sure Lara is pregnant?’ Camusso asked.

They had already tackled the subject at the restaurant. The superintendent could not resign himself to the thought that women possessed a sixth sense for certain things, even though Sandra had excellent evidence to support her theory.

‘Why do you doubt it?’

Camusso shrugged. ‘We’ve spoken to her friends and her colleagues at university: nobody mentioned a boyfriend, even a casual one. Judging from her phone records and her emails, she didn’t seem to be in any kind of relationship.’

‘You don’t have to be in a relationship to get pregnant,’ she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. But she could understand his objections: Lara didn’t seem the type to sleep around. ‘I was wondering about Jeremiah Smith. In every case except this one, he lured his victims in broad daylight, somehow persuading them to have a drink with him. How did a man like that manage to attract these girls?’

‘I’ve been following this case for six years now and I still can’t explain it,’ Camusso said, shaking his head. ‘Whatever trick he used, it was certainly effective. Every time it was the same story: a girl disappeared, and we put everything we had into finding her, knowing we had just one month. Thirty days during which we recited a script for the sake of the family, the press and public opinion. Always the same lines, the same lies. Then our time was up and
we found a body.’ He paused for a long time. ‘When I realised the other night that this fellow in a coma was the killer, I heaved a sigh of relief. I was happy. You know what that means?’

‘No.’

‘I was enjoying the fact that another human being was dying. I said to myself: God, what’s happening to me? What that man did was terrible, but he’s made us become like him. Because only monsters are happy at the thought of death. I tried to convince myself that, when you came down to it, his dying meant that other girls would be spared. It was saving lives. But what about ours? Who would save us from the joy we were feeling?’