The Whisperer (9 page)

Veronica’s face didn’t move a muscle, but her eyes grew more intense. Then she began: “Alexander and I had known each other since high school. He was two years older than me, he was on the hockey team. He wasn’t a great player, but they were all very fond of him. We started going out together, but in a group, just friends; nothing was going on yet, and it didn’t even occur to us that something else might bring us together. To tell the truth, I don’t think he ever ‘saw’ me like that…as a possible girlfriend, I mean. And neither did I.”

“It happened later…”

“Yes, isn’t that strange? After high school I lost track of him and we didn’t see each other for many years. Mutual friends told me he’d gone to university. Then one day he reappeared in my life: he called me, saying he’d found my number in the phone book. Then I found out from friends that in fact, when he’d come back after graduating, he’d asked around about me and wanted to know what had become of me…”

Listening to her, Goran had a sense that Veronica Bermann wasn’t just abandoning herself to nostalgia, but that in some way her story had a precise purpose. As if she was deliberately guiding him somewhere, far away in time, where they would find what they had come looking for.

“It was then that you started seeing each other again…” said Mila. And Goran noticed with satisfaction that the officer, following Boris’s advice, had decided not to ask Veronica Bermann any questions, but to suggest sentences that she would then complete, so that it seemed more like a conversation than an interrogation.

“It was then that we started seeing each other again,” repeated Mrs. Bermann. “Alexander started pressing me to marry him. And in the end I accepted.”

Goran concentrated on that last sentence. It sounded wrong, like a proud lie hastily added to the discussion in the hope that it might pass unobserved. And he remembered what he had noticed the first time he saw the woman: Veronica wasn’t pretty, she probably never had been. A mediocre, undramatic kind of femininity. While Alexander Bermann was a handsome man. Pale blue eyes, the dark smile of someone who knows he can exert a certain fascination. It was hard for the criminologist to believe that it had taken such persistence to persuade her to marry him.

Mila resumed control of the conversation: “But lately your relationship hadn’t been going very well…”

Veronica paused. For quite a long time, thought Goran. Maybe Mila had cast her bait too soon.

“We had problems,” she admitted at last.

“You tried to have children in the past…”

“I took some hormonal treatment for a while. Then we tried insemination as well.”

“I imagine you both really wanted a baby…”

“It was Alexander who was keenest on the idea…”

She said it defensively, a sign that that might have been the reason for the greater friction between the couple.

They were getting close to their goal. Goran was satisfied. He had wanted Mila there to talk to Mrs. Bermann because he was sure a female presence would be the ideal way of striking a sympathetic bond, and break down any possible resistance on the woman’s part. He could, of course, have chosen Sarah Rosa, and perhaps that wouldn’t have upset Boris’s susceptibilities. But Mila had struck him as more suitable, and he hadn’t been wrong.

The policewoman leaned over the little table that separated the sofa from the place where Veronica Bermann was sitting, to set down her coffee cup. It was a way of meeting Goran’s eye without letting the woman see. Goran nodded slightly: it was a sign that the time had come to stop beating about the bush and try for the all-out attack.

“Mrs. Bermann, why, in your husband’s answering machine message, did he ask you to forgive him?”

Veronica turned her head away to hide a tear that was threatening to break through the barrier she had created for her emotion.

“Mrs. Bermann, your confidences are safe with us. I’m going to be frank with you: no policeman or lawyer or judge will ever be able to force you to answer this question, because the fact is that it has no relevance to the investigation. But it’s important that we know, because it’s quite possible that your husband is innocent…”

Hearing those last words, Veronica Bermann turned to face her.

“Innocent? Alexander didn’t kill anyone…but that doesn’t mean he was faultless!”

She said this with a dark rage that had appeared without warning and distorted her voice. Goran had the confirmation he had been waiting for. Mila understood it too: Veronica Bermann had wanted this. She had been waiting for their visit, their questions camouflaged by innocuous phrases scattered here and there in the conversation. They had imagined that they were leading the dialogue, but this woman had prepared her story to bring them to this precise result. She had to tell someone.

“I suspected that Alexander had a lover. A wife always takes this kind of eventuality into account, and at that moment she also decides whether or not she’ll be able to forgive. But sooner or later a wife also wants to know. And that’s why one day I started going through his things. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, and I couldn’t predict how I would react if I found any proof.”

“What did you find?”

“Confirmation. Alexander was hiding an electronic diary identical to the one that he usually used for work. Why take two the same except to use the first to conceal the second? That’s how I found out the name of his lover: he marked all their appointments! I confronted him with the facts: he denied everything, and immediately made the second diary disappear. But I wouldn’t leave it there: I followed him to that woman’s house, to that squalid place. I didn’t have the courage to go any further, though. I stopped at the door. I didn’t even want to look her in the face, in reality.”

Was that Alexander Bermann’s unmentionable secret? Goran wondered. A lover? They’d gone to all that trouble for so little?

Luckily he hadn’t informed Roche of his initiative, or else he would also have had to face the mockery of the chief inspector, who would by now have closed the case. Meanwhile Veronica Bermann was a river in full spate and had no intention of letting them go any further before giving vent to her grievances about her husband. Her husband’s attitude of resolute self-defense after the discovery of the corpse was plainly nothing but a shrewd facade. A way of escaping the weight of accusation, to dodge the sprays of mud. Now that she had found the courage to free herself from the pact of conjugal solidarity, she too had begun to dig Alexander Bermann into a hole from which he would never be able to escape.

Goran tried to catch Mila’s eye to get her to bring the conversation to an end as soon as possible. It was at that moment that the criminologist noticed a sudden change in the policewoman’s features, which now revealed an expression somewhere between astonishment and uncertainty.

In the many years of his career, Goran had learned to recognize the effects of fear on other people’s faces. He could tell that something had deeply disturbed Mila.

It was a name.

He heard her ask Veronica Bermann, “Could you repeat the name of your husband’s lover for me?”

“I told you: that whore’s name is
Priscilla
.”

I
t couldn’t just be a coincidence.

Mila recalled, for the benefit of those present, the most salient aspects of the last case she had dealt with. The case of the music teacher. As she reported what Sergeant Morexu had said about finding that name—Priscilla—in one of the diaries belonging to the “monster,” Sarah Rosa raised her eyes to the sky, and Stern echoed her gesture with a shake of the head.

They didn’t believe her. That was understandable. And yet Mila couldn’t stop thinking that there was a connection. Only Goran indulged her. No one knew what the criminologist was hoping to achieve, but Mila wanted to explore that quirk of fate at all costs. Veronica Bermann had said she had followed her husband to his lover’s house, and that was where they were headed now. It was possible that other horrors were hidden there. Perhaps even the bodies of the missing children.

And the answer to the question of number six.

Mila wanted to tell the others, “I called her Priscilla…” But she didn’t. It felt almost like blasphemy now. It was as if the name had been chosen by Bermann himself, the girl’s killer.

The structure of the little building was typical of a place on the outskirts of town. They were in the classic ghetto area, built in the sixties as the natural adjunct to a new industrial area. It was made up of gray buildings which had over time been coated by the reddish dust from a nearby steelworks. Buildings of little commercial value, in urgent need of repair. A transient population lived there, chiefly immigrants, the unemployed and people who got by on state benefits.

“Why would anyone come and live in a place like this?” Boris wondered, looking around disgustedly.

The house number they were looking for was at the end of the block. It was a basement flat reached by an external staircase. The door was made of iron. The three windows at street level were protected by grilles and boarded off on the inside.

Stern tried to look through them, bent into a ridiculous position, hands cupped around his eyes and hips jutting backwards so he didn’t get his trousers dirty.

“You can’t see anything from here.”

Boris, Stern and Rosa nodded to one another and arranged themselves around the entrance. Stern gestured to Goran and Mila to stay back.

It was Boris who stepped forward. There was no bell, so he knocked. He did so energetically, with the palm of his hand. The noise was intimidating, while Boris’s tone remained deliberately calm.

“This is the police. Open up, please, madam.”

It was a technique of psychological pressure to make the other party lose their bearings: addressing them with fake patience and at the same time asking them to hurry. But in this case it didn’t work, because there didn’t seem to be anyone in the house.

“OK, then: let’s go in,” suggested Rosa, who was the most impatient to check.

“We have to wait for Roche to call and tell us he’s got a warrant,” Boris replied and looked at the time. “We shouldn’t take too long…”

“Roche and his warrant can fuck right off!” Rosa retorted. “There could be anything in there!”

Goran said, “She’s right. Let’s go in.”

From the way everyone accepted the decision, Mila knew that Goran carried more weight than Roche in this team.

They arranged themselves around the door. Boris took out a set of screwdrivers and started fiddling with the lock. After a few moments the mechanism clicked open. Holding the gun firmly in his fist, he pushed the iron door with his other hand.

The first impression was that the place was completely uninhabited.

A corridor, narrow and bare. The daylight couldn’t get in. Rosa pointed her torch and they saw three doors. The first two on the left, the third at the end.

The third was closed.

They started to walk forward into the apartment. Boris at the front, Rosa behind him, then Stern and Goran. Mila brought up the rear. Apart from the criminologist, each was carrying a weapon. Mila was only “attached” to the unit so she couldn’t, but she kept a gun slipped into her jeans, behind her back, with her fingers closed around the butt, ready to draw. That was why she had come in last.

Boris tried the switch on one of the walls. “There’s no light.”

He raised the torch to examine the first of the three rooms. It was empty. On the wall he noticed a damp patch rising from the foundations, eating away at the plaster like a cancer. The heating and drainage pipes crossed on the ceiling. A pool of sewage had formed on the floor.

“What a stench!” said Stern.

No one could have lived in these conditions.

“Hardly what you’d call a love nest,” said Rosa.

“Then what is this place?” Boris wondered.

They reached the entrance to the second room. The door was stiff on rusted hinges, and slightly ajar: a possible attacker could easily have been hiding behind it. Boris kicked the door wide open, but there was no one there. The room was virtually identical to the first. The floor tiles had come away, revealing the concrete that covered the foundation. There was no furniture, just the steel skeleton of a sofa. They walked on.

There was one last room. The one at the end of the corridor, with the closed door.

Boris raised the first two fingers of his left hand, bringing them up to his eyes. Stern and Rosa nodded at the signal and took up position on either side of the door. Then the young officer took a step back, lifted his foot and kicked the door at handle height. The door burst open and the three officers immediately put themselves in the line of fire, at the same time illuminating all the corners with their torches. There was no one there.

Goran pushed his way among them, sliding his latex-gloved hand along the wall. He found the switch. After two brief flickers, a fluorescent light lit up on the ceiling, casting its dusty glow on the room, which was quite different from the others. First of all it was clean. The walls showed no signs of damp, because they were covered with plastic, impermeable paper. Here the floor still had its tiles, and they weren’t broken. There were no windows, but an air conditioner came on after a few seconds. The electric wires weren’t set into the walls, a sign that they had been added later. Plastic channels led the cables to the switch with which Goran had turned on the light, and also to a plug on the right-hand side of the wall where there was a desk and an office chair. And on the table, a personal computer that was switched off.

That was the only furniture, apart from an old leather armchair against the opposite wall, on the left.

“From the look of it, this was the only room Alexander Bermann was interested in,” Stern said, turning to Goran.

Rosa stepped through the door and walked towards the computer: “I’m sure this is where we’re going to find the answers we’re looking for.”

But Goran stopped her, holding her back with one hand. “No, we should follow procedure. Let’s leave here now, so as not to alter the humidity of the atmosphere.” Then he turned to Stern: “Call Krepp and tell him to come with his unit to take prints. I’ll tell Roche.”

Mila carefully studied the light that gleamed in the criminologist’s eyes. She had a strong sense that he was close to something important.

He ran his fingers over his head, as if combing hair that he didn’t have. All he had was a strip of hair at the back of his neck, from which a ponytail emerged and fell down his back. A green and red snake stretched along his forearm, its jaws opening on his hand. His other arm had a similar tattoo, and there was yet another on his chest where it was revealed under his shirt. In the middle of the various piercings that covered his face was Krepp, the scientific expert.

Mila was fascinated by his appearance, so unlike the average sixty-year-old. She thought:
This is how punks end up when they get old
. And yet, until a year before, Krepp had been a perfectly normal middle-aged man, fairly austere and rather gray in his manners. From one day to the next, a change occurred. But after everyone had checked that the man hadn’t lost his senses, no one had said a word about his new look, because Krepp was the best in his field.

After thanking Goran for preserving the original humidity of the scene, Krepp had immediately set to work. He had spent an hour in the room with his team, all in overalls and with masks on their faces to protect themselves from the substances they used to take fingerprints, then he had left the basement and come over to the criminologist and Roche, who had joined them in the meantime.

“How’s Krepp?” the chief inspector had said by way of greeting.

“That business about the graveyard of arms is driving me out of my mind,” Krepp began. “We were still analyzing those limbs in search of useful prints when you called us.”

Goran knew that taking a print from human skin was the most difficult thing in the world, because of possible contamination, or because of the sweating of the subject under examination or, in the case of a corpse, such as the arms, because of the processes of putrefaction.

“I tried using iodine fuming, kromekote paper, and even electromyography.”

“What’s that?” asked the criminologist.

“It’s the most modern way of taking prints left on the skin: radiography in electronic emission…That bastard Albert is pretty clever at not leaving prints,” said Krepp. And Mila noticed that he was the only one now who referred to the murderer by that name, because for the others he had by now assumed the identity of Alexander Bermann.

“So what have we got here, Krepp?” asked Roche, who was fed up hearing things that were of no use to him.

The technician slipped off his gloves and, still looking down, began to describe what he had done: “We used ninhydrin, but the effect wasn’t entirely clear under the laser, so I improved it with zinc chloride. We took some prints on the wallpaper by the light switch and the porous covering of the table. It was harder with the computer: the prints were superimposed on one another, we would have needed cyanoacrylate, but we should take the keyboard to the atmospheric chamber and—”

“Later. We have no time to get hold of a replacement keyboard and we have to analyze the computer now,” Roche broke in, desperate to know. “So: the prints belong to a single person…”

“Yes, they all belong to Alexander Bermann.”

Everyone was struck by the sentence, except one person; the one who already knew the answer. And he had known it since the moment they had set foot in the basement.

“From the look of it, ‘Priscilla’ never existed,” Gavila said.

He made the statement without looking at Mila, who felt a twinge of pride nonetheless.

“There’s something else…” Krepp had started talking again. “The leather armchair.”

“What?” asked Mila, emerging from the silence.

Krepp looked at her as one does when noticing something for the first time, then lowered his eyes to her bandaged hands and suddenly assumed an expression of concern. Mila couldn’t help thinking it was ridiculous that Krepp, looking as he did, should have looked at
her
like that. But she maintained her composure.

“There are no prints on the armchair.”

“And is that strange?” asked Mila.

“I don’t know,” said Krepp. “I can only say that they are everywhere else, but not there.”

“But we have Bermann’s prints on everything else: what does it matter?” Roche cut in. “They’re enough to fix him good and proper…and if you really want to know, I’m starting to like this guy less and less.”

Mila reflected that he should really have liked him quite a lot, given that he was the solution to all his problems.

“So what do we do with the chair, do we go on analyzing it?”

“Forget that damned chair and let my men take a look at the computer.”

At the words “my men,” the team members tried not to look at one another, to keep from laughing. Sometimes Roche’s steely tone could be even more self-contradictory than Krepp’s appearance.

The chief inspector walked off towards the car that waited for him at the end of the block, but not before reassuring his people with the words, “Keep at it, guys, I’m counting on you.”

When he was far enough away, Goran turned to the others. “OK,” he said. “Let’s see what’s in that computer.”

They resumed possession of the room; the plastic-coated walls made it look like a huge womb. Alexander Bermann’s lair was about to open itself up only to them. At least that was what they hoped. They put on their latex gloves. Then Sarah Rosa sat down at the terminal: it was her turn.

Before turning on the PC, she connected a little gadget to one of the USB ports. Stern turned on a tape recorder, setting it next to the keyboard. Rosa described the operation: “I’ve connected Bermann’s computer to an external memory: in case the PC crashes, this will copy the whole of the hard disk in a flash.”

The others were standing behind her in a silent group.

She turned on the computer.

The first electrical signal was followed by the familiar sound of the drives starting up. It all seemed normal. Slowly, the PC started to wake from its lethargy. It was an old model that was no longer produced. The data of the operating system appeared in order, followed soon after by the image of the desktop. Nothing important: just a blue screen with the icons of very common programs.

“It looks like my PC at home,” Boris ventured, but no one laughed.

“OK…let’s see what Mr. Bermann has in his documents folder.”

“There are no text files…that’s strange,” observed Goran.

“Maybe he chucked everything away at the end of each session,” Stern suggested.

“If that’s the case, I can try to get them back,” Rosa said confidently. Then she put a CD in the disk drive and quickly uploaded some software capable of restoring any deleted files.

The computer memory never empties completely, and it’s almost impossible to erase certain data, all of which are indelibly stamped there. Mila remembered someone telling her that the silicone composite imprisoned in every computer works a little like the human brain. Even when it seems that we’ve forgotten something, somewhere in our heads there’s actually a group of cells that preserves the information, and it may give it back to us, if not in the form of images, then as instinct. We don’t necessarily have to remember the first time we were burnt by fire as children. What matters is that that awareness, stripped of all the biographical circumstances in which it was formed, remains stamped on our minds to reappear every time we approach anything hot. Mila glanced down at her bandaged hands. Apparently the wrong information was stored in some part of her.