The Whisperer (25 page)

“What’s going on?”

“The press are coming,” Boris told her. “Roche has decided to authorize pictures of the villa: a few minutes for the television news to show that we’re doing everything possible.”

She watched the fake policemen taking up position: they were ridiculous in their blue and orange uniforms, made to measure to display their muscular physiques, with hard expressions on their faces and their walkie-talkies that were supposed to give them a very professional appearance.

Albert made you look like idiots by blowing your cameras with a simple short-circuit!
she thought.

“After all this time and still no answers, Roche will be foaming at the mouth…”

“He always finds a way to come out smelling of roses, don’t worry.”

Boris took out his papers and a packet of tobacco and started silently rolling himself a cigarette. Mila had the distinct sense that he wanted to ask her something, but not directly. And if she stayed silent she wouldn’t help him.

She decided to give him a hand: “What did you do with the twenty-four hours of freedom that Roche allowed you?”

Boris was evasive. “I slept and thought about the case. Sometimes you need to clear your head…I know you went out with Gavila last night.”

Hey, he’s finally said it!
But Mila was wrong in thinking that Boris’s reference was motivated by jealousy. His intentions were quite different, as she discovered from what he said next.

“I think he’s suffered a lot.”

He was talking about Goran’s wife. And he did so in such a sad voice that it made her think that whatever had happened to the couple, it had indirectly involved the team as well.

“I really don’t know anything about it,” she said. “He didn’t talk to me about it. Just a hint at the end of the evening.”

“Then perhaps it’s better if you know now…”

Before going on, Boris lit the cigarette, dragged deeply on it and breathed out the smoke. He was searching for words.

“Dr. Gavila’s wife was a fantastic woman, not just beautiful but nice, too. I’ve lost count of the times we all ate at their house. She was part of us, as if she was on the team as well. When we had a difficult case on our hands, those dinners were the only relief after a day among blood and corpses. A reconciliation with life, if you know what I mean…”

“And then what happened?”

“It happened a year and a half ago. With no warning, without so much as a hint, she walked out.”

“She left him?”

“Not just Gavila, but Tommy too, their only son. He’s a lovely boy, he’s lived with his father since then.”

Mila had guessed that the criminologist was weighed down by the sadness of a separation, but she’d never imagined anything like that.
How can a mother abandon a son?
she wondered.

“Why did she leave?”

“No one ever worked it out. Perhaps she had someone else, perhaps she got tired of that life, who knows…She didn’t leave so much as a note. She just packed her bags and left. End of.”

“I wouldn’t have given up without knowing why she did it.”

“The strange thing is that he never asked me to find out where she was.” Boris’s tone changed, he looked around before going on, checking that Goran was nowhere around. “And there’s something that Gavila doesn’t know and mustn’t know…”

Mila nodded to show him that he could trust her.

“Well…a few months later, Stern and I tracked her down. She was living in a town on the coast. We didn’t go to her directly, we just let her spot us in the street in the hope that she might come over and talk to us.”

“And did she?”

“She was surprised to see us. But then she just waved, lowered her eyes and walked on.”

This was followed by a silence that Mila couldn’t interpret. Boris tossed his cigarette butt away, careless of the furious glance from one of the private security guards who immediately came and picked it up off the lawn.

“Why did you tell me that, Boris?”

“Because Dr. Gavila is my friend. And so are you, although I haven’t known you as long.”

Boris must have understood something that neither she nor Goran had yet managed to get into focus. Something about them. He was only trying to protect them both.

“When his wife walked out, Gavila kept going. He had to, especially because of the boy. Nothing changed with us. He still seemed exactly the same: precise, punctual, efficient. He just stopped dressing quite so smartly. That wasn’t important, it was nothing to worry about. But then came the ‘Wilson Pickett’ case…”

“Like the singer?”

“Yes, that’s what we called it.” Boris clearly regretted having mentioned it. He said tersely, “It went badly. There were mistakes, and someone threatened to dissolve the team and dismiss Dr. Gavila. It was Roche who defended us and insisted that we keep our jobs.”

Mila was about to ask what happened, sure that Boris would tell her in the end, when the alarm on Kobashi’s Maserati went off again.

“Damn, that noise blows a hole in your brain!”

At that moment Mila happened to glance towards the house and in a moment she cataloged a series of images that drew her attention: the same expression of annoyance had appeared on the faces of the security guards, and they had all put their hands to their walkie-talkie headpieces as if there had been some sudden and unbearable interference.

Mila looked at the Maserati again. Then she slipped her mobile phone from her pocket: there was still no signal. She had an idea.

“There’s one place we haven’t looked yet…” she said to Boris.

“What place is that?”

Mila pointed upwards.

“In the ether.”

Less than half an hour later, in the cold of night, the experts from the electronics team had already started to sound out the area. Each one wore headphones and held a little device aimed at the sky. They walked around—very slowly, silent as ghosts—trying to pick up possible radio signals or suspect frequencies, just in case the air contained some kind of message.

Which it did.

That
was what was interfering with the alarm on Kobashi’s Maserati and inhibiting phone reception. And had got into the walkie-talkies of the security guards in the form of an unbearable whistle.

A little while later the transmission was transferred to a receiver.

They gathered around the apparatus, to hear what the darkness had to tell them.

Not words, but sounds.

They were plunged into a sea of rustling from time to time, but there was a harmony in the precise sequence of notes. Short, then longer.

“Three dots, three lines and three dots again,” Goran translated for the benefit of the others. In the language of the most famous radio code in the world, those elementary sounds had an unequivocal meaning.

SOS.

“Where’s it coming from?” asked the criminologist.

The technician studied the signal as it appeared on his screen. Then he looked towards the street and pointed: “From the house opposite.”

I
t had been in front of their eyes all the time.

The house opposite had been watching their strenuous efforts silently all day. It was there, a few feet away, calling them, repeating its curious and anachronistic request for help.

The two-story villa belonged to Yvonne Gress. The painter, as the neighbors called her. She lived there with her two children, a boy of eleven and a girl of sixteen. They had moved to Capo Alto after Yvonne’s divorce, and she had returned to her passion for art, which she had abandoned as a girl to marry the promising young lawyer, Gress.

At first Yvonne’s abstract paintings hadn’t been well received. The gallery that showed them had closed her solo show without a single piece sold. But Yvonne, convinced of her talent, hadn’t let go. And when a friend had commissioned a portrait in oils of her family to hang over the mantelpiece, Yvonne had discovered her forte. Within a very short space of time she had become the most hotly desired portrait-painter among people weary of the usual photographs, who wanted to immortalize their own clans on canvas.

When the Morse code message drew attention to the house on the other side of the street, one of the guards remarked that Yvonne Gress and her kids hadn’t been around for a while.

The curtains were drawn, which made it impossible to look inside.

Before Roche gave the order to enter the villa, Goran tried to call the woman’s phone number. A moment later, in the general silence of the street, a ringing sound was heard coming faintly but clearly from the inside of the house. No one answered.

They also tried to contact her ex-husband, in the hope that at least the children were there. When they managed to track him down he said he hadn’t heard from the children for ages. That wasn’t strange, since he had abandoned his family for a model in her twenties, and thought he fulfilled his paternal duty by paying regular maintenance money to see that they were fed.

The technicians placed thermal sensors around the perimeter of the villa, to trace any sources of heat inside.

“If there’s anyone alive in that house we’ll soon know,” said Roche, who had blind confidence in the efficiency of technology.

Meanwhile electricity, gas and water had also been checked. The respective connections had not been cut off because the bills were paid by direct debit, but the meters had stopped three months before: a sign that for almost ninety days no one in there had turned a light on.

“That’s more or less since the Kobashis’ villa was finished and the dentist moved here with his family,” Stern remarked.

Goran asked, “Rosa, I want you to examine the CCTV camera recordings: there’s obviously a connection here.”

“Let’s hope there are no more blackouts on the system,” she said.

“We’re preparing to go in,” announced Gavila.

Meanwhile Boris put on his Kevlar protection in the mobile unit. “I want to go in,” he declared when he saw Mila appearing on the threshold of the camper. “They can’t stop me—I want to go too.” He couldn’t stomach the idea that Roche might ask the special units to go in first. “They’ll only make a mess. They’ll have to move about in the dark once they get in…”

“Well, I suspect they’ll manage,” observed Mila, without intending to contradict him too much.

“And will they also be able to guarantee their evidence?” he asked sarcastically.

“Then I want to be in there too.”

Boris stopped for a moment and looked down at her without saying a word.

“I think I’ve deserved it—after all, I was the one who worked out that the message was—”

He interrupted her by throwing her a second bulletproof jacket.

A little while later they left the camper to join Goran and Roche, reasserting to them their reasons for going in.

“Out of the question,” the chief inspector said immediately. “This is an operation for special forces. I can’t afford such recklessness.”

“Listen, Inspector…” Boris went and planted himself in front of Roche so that he couldn’t ignore him. “Send Mila and me in on reconnaissance. The others will only go in if they really need to.” Roche refused to yield. “I’ve been in the army, I’m trained for these things. Stern has twenty years’ experience in the field as I can confirm, and if he hadn’t lost a kidney he’d be volunteering with me, as he knows very well. As for officer Mila Vasquez; she went alone into the house of a maniac who was holding a little boy and a girl prisoner.”

If Boris had known what had really happened when she had put her own life on the line as well as her hostages’ lives, he wouldn’t have supported her candidacy quite so stoutly, Mila thought bitterly.

“So think about it: there’s a girl still alive somewhere, but she won’t be for long. Every crime scene tells us more about her kidnapper.” Then Boris pointed to Yvonne Gress’s house: “If there’s anything in there that can bring us to Albert, we need to find it before it gets destroyed. And the only way is to send us in.”

“I don’t think so, Special Agent,” Roche replied serenely.

Boris came a step towards him, looking him straight in the eye. “Do you want any more complications? It’s hard enough as it is…”

A guarded threat, Mila thought. She was surprised that Boris would address his superior in that tone. But it seemed like a matter between the two of them.

Roche looked at Gavila for a moment too long: was he after advice, or did he just want someone to share responsibility for the decision?

But the criminologist didn’t try to exploit the situation, and just nodded.

“I hope we won’t regret it.” The chief inspector deliberately used the plural to stress Goran’s share of responsibility.

At that moment a technician came over with a monitor for the thermal data. “Mr. Roche, the sensors have found something on the second floor…something alive.”

Everyone looked back at the house.

“The subject is still on the second floor, and isn’t moving from there,” Stern announced on the radio.

Boris silently counted backwards before turning the front door handle. The spare key had been given to him by the commander of the security guards: there was a copy for every villa, they kept them in case of emergency.

Mila studied Boris’s concentration. Behind them, the men of the special unit were ready to intervene. The special agent was the first to step inside, and she followed him. Their guns were leveled and apart from their Kevlar protection they wore caps with an earpiece, a microphone and a little torch by the right temple. From outside, Stern guided them by radio, while watching, on a screen, the movements of the outline found by the thermal sensors. The figure showed numerous fluctuating colors indicating the various temperatures of the body, from blue, to yellow, to red. It wasn’t possible to make out its shape.

But it looked like a body lying on the ground.

It might be someone who’d been injured. But before they found out, Boris and Mila would have to carry out an accurate search in line with security procedures.

Outside the villa, two huge, powerful reflectors had been set up, illuminating both facades. But because of the drawn curtains the light fell only faintly on the interior. Mila tried to get her eyes accustomed to the dark.

“All OK?” Boris asked her in a whisper.

“All OK,” she confirmed.

Meanwhile, where the Kobashis’ lawn had once been, Goran Gavila now stood, more desperate for a cigarette than he had been for years. He was worried. Particularly for Mila. Beside him, Sarah Rosa was watching the CCTV recordings, sitting in front of four monitors. If there really was a link between the two houses that stood opposite one another, they would soon know.

The first thing Mila noticed in Yvonne Gress’s house was the chaos.

From the door she had a complete view of the sitting room on her left and the kitchen on her right. The table was piled high with open cereal boxes, half-empty bottles of orange juice and cartons of rancid milk. There were also empty beer cans. The larder had been opened, and some of the food was scattered on the floor.

The table had four chairs.
But only one had been moved.

The sink was full of dirty plates and pots with encrusted food remains. Mila aimed the light of her torch at the fridge: under a tortoise-shaped magnet she saw the picture of a blond woman in her forties, smiling as she hugged a little boy and a slightly older girl.

In the sitting room, the low table in front of a huge plasma screen was covered with empty bottles of spirits, more beer cans and ashtrays spilling over with butts. An armchair had been dragged into the middle of the room, and there were muddy boot prints on the carpet.

Boris attracted Mila’s attention and showed her the map of the house, suggesting that they should split up before meeting again at the bottom of the stairs leading to the floor above. He pointed to the area behind the kitchen, keeping the library and the study for himself.

“Stern, everything still OK on the first floor?” Boris whispered into his radio.

“It’s not moving,” was the reply.

They nodded to one another, and Mila set off in the direction assigned to her.

“We’ve got it,” Sarah Rosa said to the monitor at that same moment. “Look…”

Goran leaned on her shoulder: according to the date in the corner of the screen, these images dated from nine months before. The Kobashis’ villa was just a building site. In the speeded-up shot, the workers scuttled around the unfinished facade like frantic ants.

“Now watch…”

Rosa sped through the recording until it reached sunset, when everyone left the building site to go home and come back the following day. Then she put the video back to normal speed.

At that moment there was a glimpse of something in the shot of the Kobashis’ front door.

It was a shadow, motionless, waiting. And it was smoking.

The intermittent glow of the cigarette revealed its presence. The man was inside the dentist’s villa, waiting for evening to fall. When it was dark enough, he came outside. He looked round, then walked the few yards that separated him from the house opposite and entered without knocking.

“Listen…”

Mila was in Yvonne Gress’s studio, where canvases were stacked in every corner, easels and paints scattered here and there; when she heard Goran’s voice in the earpiece she stopped.

“We’ve probably worked out what happened in that house.”

Mila waited.

“We’re dealing with a
parasite
.”

Mila didn’t understand, but Goran explained the term.

“Every evening, one of the workers employed on the Kobashi villa waited for the building site to close before immediately letting himself into the house opposite. We fear he may have”—the criminologist paused before defining such a chilling idea—“kidnapped the family in their own home.”

The guest takes possession of the nest, convincing himself that he is part of the family’s life. He justifies everything with his supposed love. But when he tires of that fiction, he gets rid of his new family and seeks another nest to infest.

As she observed the putrid signs of his passage in Yvonne’s studio, Mila remembered the
Sarcophaga carnaria
larvae banqueting on the Kobashis’ rug.

Then she heard Stern asking, “For how long?”

“Six months,” was Goran’s reply.

Mila felt a tightness in her stomach. For six months Yvonne and her children had been the prisoners of a psychopath who had been able to do whatever he liked with them. And, what was more, he did it in the middle of dozens of other houses, where other families, isolated in this affluent place, imagined they could flee the horrors of the world, trusting in an absurd ideal of security.

Six months. And no one had noticed anything.

The lawn had been mown every week and the roses in the beds had continued to receive the loving care of the gardeners of the residential complex. The porch lights were turned on every evening, with a timer synchronized to the timetable indicated by the rules of the condominium. The children had played on bikes or with balls in the drive in front of the house, ladies had walked by chattering about this and that and exchanging recipes for desserts, the men had gone jogging on Sunday morning and washed the car in front of their garages.

Six months. And
no one had seen.

They hadn’t wondered why the curtains were drawn even by day. They hadn’t noticed the mail that was accumulating in the letter box. No one had paid any attention to the absence of Yvonne and her children at social occasions in the clubhouse, like the autumn dance and the tombola on 23 December. The Christmas tree decorations—the same for the whole complex—had been arranged as usual by the management, and then removed after the holiday. The phone had gone unanswered, Yvonne and the children hadn’t come to open the door when people had knocked, and yet no one’s suspicions had been roused.

Yvonne Gress’s only relatives lived a long way away. But even they didn’t seem to have thought there was anything strange about that silence that had been protracted for so long.

Throughout that long, long time, the little family had wished, hoped, prayed every day for help or attention that had never come.

“He’s probably a sadist. And this is his game, his entertainment.”

His doll’s house,
the words ran through Mila’s mind, as she thought about the clothes worn by the corpse that Albert had left on the Kobashis’ sofa.

She thought of the countless violations that Yvonne and her children had undergone in that endless period of time. Six months of torment. Six months of torture. Six months of agony. But thinking about it, it had taken less than that for the whole world to forget about them.

And even the “guardians of the law” hadn’t noticed anything, even though they were stationed twenty-four hours a day—in a state of alert!—right in front of the house. They too were somehow guilty, complicit. And so was she.

Once again, Mila reflected, Albert had shone a light on the hypocrisy of that portion of the human race that feels “normal” just because it doesn’t go around killing innocent children by severing one of their arms. But it is capable of an equally serious crime: indifference.