The Whisperer (6 page)

Mila found herself at the center of attention again. She lowered her head to her notes, trying to bring some order to her thoughts before starting to speak. Meanwhile Roche nodded to her to stand up.

Mila got to her feet. “Debby Gordon and child number six knew one another. Of course this is just a supposition on my part, but it would explain the fact that they both have an identical mark on their index fingers…”

“What is it exactly?” Goran asked curiously.

“Well…it’s that ritual of pricking your fingertip with a needle and mixing your blood by bringing your fingertips together: an adolescent version of the blood pact. You usually do it to consecrate a friendship.”

Mila herself had done it with her friend Graciela; they had used a rusty nail because needles had struck them as too girly. The memory suddenly flooded into her mind. Graciela had been her playmate. Each knew each other’s secrets, and once they had even shared a boyfriend, even though he hadn’t known anything about it. They had allowed him to believe that he was the clever one who managed to go out with both friends without their noticing. What had happened to Graciela? She hadn’t heard from her for years. They had lost contact too soon, never to see one another again. And yet they had promised each other eternal friendship. Why had it been so easy to forget her?

“If that’s the case, child number six should be a contemporary of Debby’s,” she concluded.

“The Barr body test carried out on the sixth limb bears out this thesis: the victim was twelve,” said Boris, who couldn’t wait to gain points in Mila’s eyes.

“Debby Gordon went to an exclusive boarding school. It isn’t plausible that her blood sister could have been a schoolmate, because none of the other students are missing.”

“So she must have met her outside of the school setting,” Boris butted in again.

Mila nodded. “Debby had been at the school for eight months. She must have felt very lonely far from home. I would guess that she had trouble bonding with the other girls. So I suppose she met her blood sister in different circumstances.”

Roche said, “I want you to go and take a look at the girl’s room at the school: something might come out of that.”

“I’d like to talk to Debby’s parents too, if possible.”

“Sure, do what you see fit.”

Before the chief inspector could continue, there was a knock at the door. Three quick taps. Immediately afterwards a short man in a white shirt made his entrance, even though no one had invited him in. He had bristly hair and unusual almond eyes.

“Ah, Chang,” said Roche by way of welcome.

The man was the medical examiner dealing with the case. Mila realized almost immediately that he wasn’t actually oriental. His name was Leonard Vross, but everyone had always known him as Chang.

The little man came and stood next to Roche. He carried a dossier that he opened straightaway, even though he had no need to read its contents because he knew them by heart. Probably keeping those pages in front of him gave him a sense of security.

“I’d like you to listen carefully to what Dr. Chang has discovered,” said the chief inspector. “Even though I know that it might be difficult for some of you to understand certain details.”

The reference was to her, Mila was more than sure.

Chang put on a pair of glasses that he kept in his shirt pocket, cleared his throat and began to speak. “The state of preservation of the remains, in spite of their having been buried, was excellent.”

This confirmed the idea that not very much time had passed between the making of the arm graveyard and its discovery. So the pathologist expanded on a number of details. But when Chang finally had to illustrate the method by which the six little girls had been killed, he got straight to the point.

“He killed them by cutting off their arms.”

Lesions have a language of their own, and they use it to communicate. Mila was well aware of that. When the medical examiner turned the page of the file to the enlargement of the photograph of one of the arms, she immediately noticed the reddish halo around the cut and the break of the bone. The seepage of blood into the tissue is the first indication of whether the lesion is lethal or not. If it has been inflicted on a corpse there is no activity from the cardiac pump, so the blood flows passively from the torn vessels, without settling in the surrounding tissues. If, on the other hand, the blow is delivered when the victim is still alive, the heart is pushing the blood into the injured tissues in a desperate attempt to scar them. In the little girls, the lifesaving mechanism had stopped only when the arm had gone away.

Chang went on: “The lesion occurred halfway down the brachial biceps. The bone isn’t shattered, the break is clean. The killer must have used a precision saw: we haven’t found any iron filings along the margins of the injury. The uniform section of the blood vessels and the tendons tells us that the amputation was completed with what I would call surgical skill. Death was caused by bleeding.” Then he added: “It was a hideous death.”

At this phrase, Mila felt an impulse to lower her eyes in a sign of respect. But she immediately noticed that she would have been the only one.

Chang went on: “I would say he killed them straightaway: he had no interest in keeping them alive longer than necessary, and he didn’t hesitate. The methods of killing are identical for all the victims.
Except for one…
”

His words hung in the air before raining down on his listeners like a shower of icy water.

“What do you mean?” Goran asked.

Chang pushed his glasses back from the tip of his nose and stared at the criminologist. “Because for one of them it was even worse.”

Absolute silence settled on the room.

“The toxicological examinations have revealed traces of a cocktail of pharmaceuticals in the blood and the tissue. In this case: antiarrhythmics like disopyramide, ACE inhibitors and atenolol, which is a beta-blocker…”

“He reduced her heart rate, lowering the pressure at the same time,” added Goran Gavila, who had already understood everything.

“Why?” asked Stern, for whom it wasn’t clear at all.

A grimace, like a bitter smile, appeared on Chang’s lips. “He slowed down the bleeding to make her die more slowly…he wanted to
enjoy the show
.”

“Which child was it?” asked Roche, even though they all knew the answer.

“Number six.”

This time Mila didn’t need to be an expert on serial killers to work out what had happened. The medical examiner had effectively stated that the murderer had altered his modus operandi. Which meant that he had become confident about what he was doing. He was experimenting with a new game. And he liked it.

“He changed because he was happy with the result. He was getting better and better,” concluded Goran. “From what we can tell, he was enjoying it.”

Mila suddenly felt a strange sensation. It was that tickle at the base of the neck that alerted her every time she was getting close to a solution to one of her missing-person cases. It was hard to explain. When it happened, her mind would reveal an unexpected truth. Usually that perception lasted for longer, but this time it disappeared before she could grasp it. Some words from Chang swept it away.

“One more thing…” The doctor turned to face Mila: even though he didn’t know her, she was the only strange face in that room, and he must already have been informed about the reasons for her presence. “The parents of the missing girls are in the next room.”

From the window of the traffic police station, hidden away among the mountains, Alexander Bermann was able to enjoy a complete view of the car park. His car was down there, in the fifth row. From that observation point it looked very far away.

The sun, already high in the sky, made the sheet metal gleam. After last night’s storm he could never have imagined a day like this. It was like late spring, and it was almost hot. A faint breeze came through the open window, bringing a sense of peace. He was strangely content.

When he had been stopped at the road block at dawn, he hadn’t been flustered, he hadn’t panicked. He had stayed inside the car, with the annoying sensation of dampness between his legs.

From the driver’s seat he had an excellent view of the officers beside the police car. One of them was holding the envelope containing his documents, running through them, dictating to the other the data which the other man then passed on by radio.

Soon they’re going to come over and make me open the boot,
he thought.

The officer who had pulled him over had been very polite. He had asked him about his fog lamp, and been sympathetic as he told him that he didn’t envy him for having been forced to drive all night in that awful weather.

“You’re not from around here,” he had announced, reading the numberplate.

“No, you’re right,” Alexander had replied. “I’m from somewhere else.”

The conversation had ended there. For a moment he had thought of telling him everything, but he had changed his mind. The moment had not yet come. Then the officer had walked off towards his colleague. Alexander Bermann didn’t know what would happen, but for the first time he had relaxed his grip on the wheel. The blood had started circulating in his hands again, and their color had returned.

And he had found himself thinking about his butterflies again.

So frail, so unaware of the spell they cast. While he had stopped time for them, making them aware of the secrets of their fascination, the others merely drained them of their beauty. He took care of it. What could they accuse him of, after all?

When he had seen the policeman coming back towards his window, those thoughts had suddenly fled and the tension, which had relaxed for a moment, had mounted again. They had taken too long, he had thought. As he came over, the officer held one hand at his hip, level with his belt. Bermann knew what that gesture was. It meant that he was about to draw his gun. When he was finally nearby, he heard him say something that he wasn’t expecting.

“We’d like you to follow us to headquarters, Mr. Bermann. Your logbook is missing from your documentation.”

That’s strange,
he had thought
. I was sure I put it there
. But then he had understood: the man with the balaclava had taken it out when he had been unconscious…And now here he was, in this little waiting room, enjoying the undeserved warmth of the breeze. They had shut him up in here after confiscating his car. Without knowing that the threat of an administrative sanction was the last of his worries. They were holed up in their offices, completely unaware, making decisions about things that no longer had any importance for him. How do you change the hierarchy of priorities for a man who no longer has anything to lose? His most urgent thought at the moment was that the caress of that breeze shouldn’t cease.

Meanwhile he still had his eyes fixed on the car park and the comings and goings of the policemen. His car was still there, in full view. With its secret locked away in the boot. And no one noticed anything.

As he reflected on the uniqueness of his situation, he noticed a squad of policemen coming back from their midmorning coffee break. Three men and two women, all in uniform. One of them seemed to be telling a story, and waved his arms about as he walked. When he finished, the others laughed. Alexander hadn’t heard a single word of the story, but the sound of laughter was contagious and he found himself smiling. It didn’t last long. The group passed close to his car. One of them, the tallest, suddenly stopped, letting the others continue on their own. He had noticed something.

Alexander immediately spotted the expression that had formed on his face.

The smell,
he thought.
He must have caught the smell
.

Without saying anything to his colleagues, the policeman started looking round. He sniffed the air, trying to find the faint trace that had for a moment put his senses on the alert. When he found it again, he turned towards the car next to him. He took a few steps in that direction, then froze by the closed boot.

Alexander Bermann, seeing the scene, sighed with relief. He was
grateful
. Grateful for the coincidence that had brought him here, for the breeze that had been granted him and for the fact that he would not be the one who opened that damned boot.

The caress of the wind subsided. Alexander got up from his seat by the window and took his mobile out of his pocket.

The time had come to make a phone call
.

D
ebby. Anneke. Sabine. Melissa. Caroline.

Mila silently repeated those names as she gazed through a pane of glass at the family members of the five identified victims, who had assembled in the morgue of the Institute of Legal Medicine. It was a gothic building with big windows, surrounded by bare parkland.

There are two missing,
was Mila’s obsessive thought.
A father and a mother that we haven’t yet managed to find.

They had to give a name to left hand number six. The girl Albert had tormented the most, with that cocktail of drugs to slow down death as painfully as possible.

He wanted to
enjoy the show
.

She thought again of the music teacher case, when she had freed Pablo and Elisa.
And yet you rescued three,
Sergeant Morexu had said, referring to the note found in the man’s diary. That name…

Priscilla
.

Her boss was right: the little girl had been lucky. Mila became aware of a cruel link between her and the six victims.

Priscilla had been chosen in advance by her executioner. It was only by chance that she had not become his prey. Where was she now? What was her life like? And was there a part of her, deep and hidden, that was aware of escaping a kind of horror like that?

From the moment she had set foot in the music teacher’s house, Mila had rescued her. And she would never know. She would never be able to appreciate the gift of the second life that had been granted her.

Priscilla, like Debby, Anneke, Sabine, Melissa, Caroline. Predestined, but without their destiny.

Priscilla, like number six. A faceless victim. But she at least had a name.

Chang maintained that it was just a matter of time, that the identity of the sixth little girl would emerge sooner or later. But the idea that she had disappeared forever made it difficult to consider any other option.

But now she
had
to be clear-minded.
My turn,
she thought, as she looked through the glass separating her from the parents of the little girls who already had a name. She studied the human aquarium, the choreography of those silent, grief-stricken creatures. Soon she would have to go in there to talk to Debby Gordon’s father and mother. And she would have to give those parents what remained of their grief.

The morgue corridor was long and dark. It was in the basement of the building. It was reached by a flight of stairs or a lift that wasn’t usually working. There were narrow windows on either side of the ceiling, which let in a very small amount of light. The white glazed tiles covering the walls didn’t manage to reflect it, which had probably been the plan when they were put there. The result was that it was dark there even by day, and the fluorescent lights on the ceiling were always lit, filling the spectral silence of the place with their unceasing hum.

What a horrible place to face the news of the loss of a child,
Mila reflected, still studying those suffering parents. There was nothing to comfort them but some anonymous plastic chairs and a table of smiling old magazines.

Debby. Anneke. Sabine. Melissa. Caroline.

“Take a look,” said Goran Gavila, standing close behind her. “What d’you see?”

First he had humiliated her in front of everyone. And now he was being familiar.

Mila went on observing for a long while. “I see their suffering.”

“Take a better look. There’s more.”

“I see those dead children. Even though they aren’t there. Their faces are the sum of their parents’ faces. That’s how I can see the victims.”

“And I see five nuclear families. Each one with a different social background. With different incomes and different lifestyles. I see couples who have, for various reasons, had only one child. I see women who are long past forty, and for that reason can’t biologically hope for another pregnancy…that’s what I see.” Goran turned to look at her. “
They
are his true victims. He has studied them, he has chosen them. An only daughter. He wanted to strip them of any hope of overcoming their grief, of trying to forget their loss. They will have to remember what he did to them for the rest of their days. He has amplified their grief by taking away their future. He has deprived them of the possibility of passing on a memory of themselves to the years to come, of surviving their own death…and he has fed on that. It is the reward for his sadism, the source of his pleasure.”

Mila looked away. The criminologist was right: there was a
symmetry
in the evil that had been done to these people.

“A pattern,” Goran stated, correcting her thoughts.

Mila thought again about girl number six. There was no one to mourn her yet. She had a right to those tears, like all the others. Suffering has a task to perform. It rebuilds the bonds between the things of the living and those of the dead. It is a language that stands in for words. That changes the terms of the question. It was what the parents on the other side of the glass were doing. Minutely rebuilding, with their pain, a scrap of the life that no longer existed. Weaving together their frail memories, binding the white threads of the past to the thin ones of the present.

Mila summoned her strength and crossed the threshold. The parents’ eyes immediately moved to her and there was silence.

She walked towards the mother of Debby Gordon, sitting beside her husband, who rested his hand on her shoulder. Her footsteps sounded grim as she stepped in front of the others.

“Mr. and Mrs. Gordon, I need to talk to you for a moment…”

Mila pointed the way with a movement of her arm. Then she made them walk ahead of her towards a second little room, with a coffee machine and a snack dispenser, a worn sofa against the wall, a table with blue plastic chairs and a rubbish bin full of plastic cups.

Mila asked the Gordons to sit on the sofa and went to get one of the chairs. She stretched her legs, feeling another little pang in the wound in her thigh. It wasn’t all that strong: she was getting better.

Mila screwed up her courage and began by introducing herself. She talked about the investigation, without adding any details to what they knew already. Her intention was to put them at ease before asking them the questions that interested her.

The Gordons hadn’t stopped looking at her for a moment, as if she somehow had the power to stop the nightmare. Both husband and wife were attractive and elegant. Both lawyers. The kind that are paid by the hour. Mila imagined them in their perfect home, surrounded by selected friends, with their gilded lives. It made sense that they could send their only daughter to study at a prestigious private school. Both husband and wife must be two sharks in their profession. People who can deal with the most critical situations in their own field, who are used to smashing in the teeth of their opponents, and never being discouraged by adversity. But now they were both completely unprepared for a tragedy like this.

Once she had finished the exposition of the case, she got to the point: “Mr. and Mrs. Gordon, are you by any chance aware of any special friendship that Debby might have made with a girl her age outside of the boarding school?”

The couple looked at one another as if, rather than an answer, they were trying to find a plausible reason for the question. But they couldn’t find it.

“Not that we know of,” said Debby’s father.

Mila, however, wasn’t satisfied with that meager reply. “Are you sure that Debby never talked to you on the phone about anyone who wasn’t a schoolmate?”

As Mrs. Gordon struggled to remember, Mila found herself studying her outline: that flat stomach, the toned muscles of her legs. She understood immediately that the choice to have only one child had been carefully mulled over. This woman would not have weighed down her physique with a second pregnancy. But it was too late now: her age, close to fifty, would not allow her to have any more children. Goran was right. Albert hadn’t chosen them by chance.

“No…but lately she had sounded much more at ease on the phone,” said the woman.

“I imagine she must have asked you to bring her home…”

She had hit a sore point, but she couldn’t help it if she wanted to get to the truth. His voice cracking with guilt, Debby’s father admitted: “It’s true: she was out of her element, she said she missed us and Sting…” Mila looked at him, baffled, and the man explained: “Her dog…Debby wanted to come home, to her old school. Well, she never actually said that. Perhaps she was afraid of disappointing us, but…it was apparent from her tone of voice.”

Mila knew what was going to happen: these parents would forever reproach themselves for not listening to their daughter’s heart when she begged them to let her come home. But the Gordons had put their ambition before her, hoping that it was something that could be genetically transmitted. There was really nothing wrong about their behavior; they had wanted the best for their only daughter. Basically, they were just behaving like parents. And if things had gone differently, perhaps one day Debby would have been grateful to them. But that day, sadly for them, would never come.

“Mr. and Mrs. Gordon, I’m sorry to have to insist, I can imagine how painful this is, but I must ask you to think back to the conversations you had with Debby: the people she saw out of school might turn out to be very important to the solving of the case. Please, think back, and if anything comes to mind…”

The two of them nodded at the same time, promising they would try to remember. Mila glimpsed a figure behind the glass of the door: Sarah Rosa, trying to attract her attention. Mila apologized to the Gordons and left. When she stood face-to-face with Sarah Rosa in the corridor, the woman said only a few words.

“Get yourself ready, we have to go. They’ve found the body of a little girl.”

Special Agent Stern was still wearing a jacket and tie. He preferred brown or beige or blue suits, and shirts with thin stripes. Mila worked out that his wife was keen on him walking around in well-ironed clothes. He looked well-groomed, his hair combed back with a little brilliantine. He shaved every morning, and the skin on his face was soft rather than smooth; it smelled good. He was a very precise character, Stern. One of those who never change their habits, for whom an orderly appearance is more important than being fashionable.

And he must have been very capable in his work as a collector of information.

During the car journey that brought them to the place where the body had been found, Stern threw a mint into his mouth, then quickly set out the facts as he knew them.

“The arrested man is called Alexander Bermann. He’s forty years old and he’s a sales representative—machine parts for the textile industry. He’s a great salesman, apparently. He’s married, and he’s always lived a quiet life. He is highly regarded, and well known in the city where he lives. His work brings him in a fair income: he’s not rich exactly, but he’s doing OK.”

“He’s clean, then,” added Rosa. “Not the kind you’d expect.”

When they reached the traffic police station, the officer who had found the body was sitting on an old sofa in one of the offices. He was in shock.

The local authorities had handed the place over to the violent crimes unit. And they got to work with the help of Goran and under the eyes of Mila, whose role consisted simply in checking the presence or otherwise of useful clues that would let her do her job more easily without actively intervening. Roche had stayed in the office, letting his men reconstruct what had happened.

Mila noticed that Sarah Rosa kept her distance from her. She couldn’t help being pleased about that—even though the policewoman was keeping an eye on her, waiting to catch her out, she was sure of it.

A young lieutenant offered to walk them to the exact place. Trying to look confident, he was at pains to make it clear that nothing had been moved. But all the members of the unit knew very well that it was probably the first time he had faced a scene of this kind. In a career as a provincial policeman, you don’t often come across such a horrible crime.

Along the way, the lieutenant set out the facts with extreme precision. Perhaps he’d rehearsed the speech beforehand, so as not to get it wrong. So it came out like a written statement: “We have ascertained that yesterday morning Alexander Bermann arrived at a hotel in a village very far from here.”

“Four hundred miles away,” Stern specified.

“It would appear that he drove all night. The petrol tank was almost empty,” the lieutenant added.

“Did he meet anyone at the hotel?” asked Boris.

“Apparently he dined with clients. Then he retired to his room…that’s what the people who were with him say. But we’re still checking their versions.”

Rosa jotted this down in a notebook, and Mila glimpsed the note from over her shoulder:
Collect hotel guest version re timetables
.

Goran broke in: “Bermann hasn’t said anything yet, I suppose.”

“Suspect Alexander Bermann refuses to speak without a lawyer present.”

They reached the car park. Goran noted that white screens had been arranged around Bermann’s car to conceal the spectacle of death. But it was only one hypocritical precaution among many. Agitation is often a mask used to respond to terrible crimes. That was something that Goran Gavila had learned early on. Death, especially violent death, exerts a strange fascination on the living. Corpses always arouse our curiosity. Death is highly seductive.

Before reaching the scene of the crime, they put on plastic shoe covers and caps to hold their hair in, and the inevitable sterile gloves. Then they passed around a small container of camphor paste. Each of them took a little to rub under their nostrils to keep any kind of smell away.

It was a tried and tested ritual, which needed no words. But also a way of finding the right level of concentration. When she received the tub from Boris, Mila felt like a participant in that strange act of communion.

The traffic police lieutenant, having been invited to walk ahead of them, suddenly lost all his confidence and hesitated. Then he left.