The Lost Girls of Rome (20 page)

Marcus shone his torch over a series of framed photographs neatly arranged on an oak table. The story of the family was condensed into those faded images. A picnic in a meadow, a very young Jeremiah on his mother’s lap, his father embracing both of them in a protective hug. On the villa’s tennis court, in immaculate sportswear, clutching wooden rackets. At Christmas, dressed in red, posing in front of a decorated tree.

Waiting stiffly for the camera’s self-timer to go off, always composed in a perfect triptych, like ghosts from another era.

At a certain point, though, these photographs lost one of their protagonists. A teenage Jeremiah and his mother, smiling sadly and formally: the head of the family has left them after a brief illness and they continue the tradition, not so much to perpetuate his memory as to distance themselves from the shadow of death.

One image in particular aroused Marcus’s curiosity. It struck him as rather macabre that they had found a way to include the dead man in the pose. Mother and son stood on either side of a large sandstone fireplace above which hung a rather austere portrait of the father.

‘They haven’t found anything to link Jeremiah Smith to Lara,’ Clemente said behind him.

In the room, marks of the police search were evident. Objects had been moved, furniture inspected.

‘So they still don’t know he was the one who took her. They won’t search for her.’

‘Stop it,’ Clemente said, his tone suddenly hard.

Marcus was surprised: it wasn’t like him.

‘I can’t believe you still don’t get it. You’re not a detective, and you’re not allowed to intervene. You’ve been trained to do what you do, and that’s it. Do I have to spell it out for you? There’s every chance the girl will die in the end. In fact, I’d say it’s almost certain she will. But it won’t depend on anything we do or don’t do. So stop feeling guilty.’

Marcus concentrated again on the photograph showing a solemn twenty-year-old Jeremiah Smith posing beneath his father’s portrait.

‘Where do you want to start?’ Clemente asked.

‘In the room where they found him dying.’

It was clear that the forensics team had been hard at work in the living room: there were halogen lamps on stands, deposits of residue from the reagents they used to detect organic liquids and prints, and numbered stickers marking the positions of finds that had been photographed and then taken away.

It was in this room that a blue hair ribbon, a coral bracelet, a pink knitted shoe and a red roller skate – items belonging to Jeremiah Smith’s four victims – had been found. These souvenirs indisputably proved that he had been involved, and keeping them had been a risk. But Marcus could imagine how the killer had felt every time he touched these trophies. They were the symbols of what he did best: killing. Having them in his hands, he absorbed their energy, as if violent death had the power to reinvigorate the person who dispenses it.

They were kept in the living room, because Jeremiah wanted them next to him. That way the girls were always there. Souls in torment, prisoners of that house together with him.

But among the objects there wasn’t one that belonged to Lara.

Marcus entered the room, while Clemente remained in the doorway. The furniture was covered with white sheets, apart from the sofa in the middle of the room and the old television set. A small table had been overturned, and on the floor were a broken bowl, a pool of milk, now dry, and crumbled biscuits.

Jeremiah had knocked them over when he had felt ill, Marcus thought. In the evening he had milk and biscuits while watching TV. The image of solitude. The monster didn’t need to hide, other people’s indifference was shelter enough. If only the world had paid any attention to him, he might have been stopped earlier.

Jeremiah was an unsociable character, and yet he transformed himself in order to lure his victims.
Apart from Lara, he took the others by day,
Marcus recalled. What method did he use to approach them and gain their trust? It must have been convincing, because the girls didn’t fear him. Why didn’t he use the same
tricks to make friends? The one thing that drove him was murder. His success was down to evil. Because evil somehow made him seem a good person, someone you could trust. But Jeremiah Smith had overlooked one important fact: there is always a price to be paid. The greatest fear of every human being, even of those who have chosen to live as hermits, is not death, but dying alone. There is a subtle difference. And it’s one that you don’t realise until you experience it.

The thought that nobody will mourn us, that nobody will feel our loss or remember us. It’s the same thing that was happening to me, Marcus thought.

He was looking at the part of the room where the ambulance team had tried to resuscitate Smith. Sterile gloves, pieces of gauze, syringes and cannulas: everything was still there, as if frozen in that moment.

Marcus tried to focus on what had happened before Jeremiah Smith started to feel the symptoms. ‘Whoever poisoned him knew his habits – he did to Jeremiah exactly what Jeremiah had done to Lara. He introduced himself into his life, into his house, and observed him. He didn’t choose sugar to conceal the drug, but maybe he put something in the milk. It was a kind of retaliation.’

Clemente watched as his pupil entered completely into the psyche of the person who had done all this. ‘That’s why Jeremiah felt bad and telephoned Emergency.’

‘The Gemelli is the nearest hospital – it was only natural for the call to be directed there. Whoever did this to Jeremiah Smith knew that Monica, the first victim’s sister, was the doctor on duty in Emergency last night and that she’d go with the ambulance.’ Marcus seemed impressed with the skill of the person who had orchestrated this opportunity for revenge. ‘He doesn’t act randomly, he’s meticulous.’ He had taken the crime scene apart, piece by piece, revealing the conjuring trick that had been played. ‘Yes, you’re good,’ he said, addressing his adversary as if he were present. ‘And now let’s see what else you have in store for us.’

‘Do you think there are any clues that could lead us to the place where Lara’s being kept prisoner?’

‘No, he’s too clever for that. Even if there had been, he would have removed them. The girl is a prize, don’t forget that. We have to deserve her.’

Marcus started moving around the room, convinced there was something he was still missing.

‘What do you think we should be looking for?’ Clemente asked.

‘Something that has no connection with anything else. Something the police wouldn’t notice, but that only we could grasp.’

He needed to find the precise point to start his examination of the scene. He was sure that from there, the anomaly would be evident. The most logical spot was right here, where Jeremiah had been found dying.

‘The shutters,’ he said. Clemente went and closed the shutters over the two large windows that looked out on the back of the house. Now Marcus let the beam of his torch wander over the room. The shadows of the objects rose in turn, like obedient little soldiers, as he aimed at them. The sofas, the sideboard, the dining table, the armchair, the fireplace with the painting of tulips above it. Marcus was struck by a feeling of déjà vu. He turned back and again shone his torch at the painting.

‘That shouldn’t be here.’

Clemente did not understand. But Marcus had a clear memory of the sandstone fireplace as he had seen it in one of the photographs in the study: the photograph of mother and son standing beneath an oil portrait of Jeremiah’s late father.

‘It’s been moved.’

The portrait wasn’t there now. Marcus went up to the painting of the tulips, shifted the frame and ascertained that the mark left on the wall over the years was a different size. He was about to put it back into position, when he noticed a number on the back, in the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas: the number 1.

‘I’ve found it,’ Clemente called to him from the corridor.

Marcus joined him and saw the painting of Jeremiah’s father on the wall next to the door.

‘The pictures have been swapped round.’

He took the painting from the wall and checked the back. The
number this time was 2. They both looked around, with the same idea in their minds. They separated, and started taking every painting off the wall, trying to find the third one.

‘Here it is,’ Clemente announced. It was a landscape painting hanging at the end of the corridor, at the foot of the staircase that led to the upper floor. They started climbing and, halfway up, found the fourth painting. They knew now they were on the right track.

‘He’s showing us the way,’ Marcus said. But neither of them could imagine where it would lead them.

On the second-floor landing they located the fifth painting, then the sixth in a little passage, and the seventh in the corridor that led to the bedrooms. The eighth was very small: a tempera painting of an Indian tiger. It was next to a little door in what must have been Jeremiah Smith’s bedroom as a child. A battalion of lead soldiers on a shelf, a Meccano set, a catapult, a rocking horse.

We often forget that even monsters were children once, Marcus thought. There are things we carry with us from childhood. But God knows where the urge to kill comes from.

Clemente opened the little door to reveal a steep flight of stairs that probably led to the attic.

‘Maybe the police haven’t yet had a good look up there.’

They were both sure that the ninth painting would be the last in the series. Cautiously they climbed the uneven steps. The ceiling was low, forcing them to stoop. At last they came out into a large room crammed with old furniture, books and trunks. A few birds had made their nests between the rafters. Startled by the presence of the two men, they began whirling around, desperate for a way out, which they found in an open dormer window.

Clemente looked at his watch. ‘We can’t stay too long, it’s almost dawn.’

So they immediately started looking for the painting. There were various canvases piled up in a corner. Clemente looked through them. ‘Nothing,’ he announced after a moment or two, shaking the dust from his clothes.

Marcus caught a glint of gold from behind a chest. He stepped
around it and saw a richly decorated frame hanging on the wall. There was no need to turn it to realise that this was indeed the ninth picture. The content was unusual enough to confirm that they had reached the end of this strange treasure hunt.

It was a child’s drawing.

Done with coloured pencils on a sheet from an exercise book, it had subsequently been put in this frame that was much too elaborate for it, the very incongruity calculated to attract attention.

It depicted a day in summer or spring, with the sun casting a pleasant glow over a luxuriant scene. Trees, swallows, flowers, a small river. There were two children in the picture, a little girl in a red polka dot dress and a little boy clutching an object in his hand. Despite the gaiety of the colours and the innocence of the subject, Marcus felt a curious sensation.

There was something malign in that drawing.

He took a step forward to get a better look at it. Only then did he realise that what he saw on the little girl’s dress were not polka dots but bleeding wounds. And that the little boy was holding a pair of scissors.

He read the date written in the margin: it went back twenty years. Jeremiah Smith was already too old at the time to be the artist. No, this picture was part of somebody else’s sick fantasy. He remembered Caravaggio’s
Martyrdom of St Matthew
: what he had in front of him was the depiction of a crime scene. But, when it had been drawn, the crime had not yet been committed.

Even monsters were children once, he repeated to himself. The one in the drawing had grown up in the meantime. And Marcus realised that he would have to find him.

6.04 a.m.

The first day in forensics they teach you that in a crime scene there is no such thing as coincidence. Then they continue to repeat it to you at every opportunity, in case you forget it. They tell you that coincidences are not only misleading but could turn
out to be harmful and counter-productive. And they cite various extreme cases in which this had compromised investigations irrevocably.

Thanks to this conditioning, Sandra didn’t much believe in coincidences. But in real life, she admitted that these accidental connections between events could sometimes be useful, at the very least to call our attention to things we wouldn’t see otherwise.

She had come to the conclusion that some of them were of little importance. These were the ones that could be dismissed with the words: ‘Oh, it’s just a coincidence.’ Others, though, seemed designed to point our lives in a different direction. These were given a different name: ‘signs’. These make us feel we are receiving an exclusive message, as if the cosmos or a superior entity has chosen us. In other words, they make us feel special.

Sandra recalled that Jung had called this second kind of coincidence
synchronicity
. He had enumerated the fundamental characteristics of these coincidences. They were absolutely acausal, in other words unconnected to the nexus of cause and effect. They coincided with profound emotional experiences. And they possessed a strong symbolic value.

Jung maintained that certain individuals go through life looking for deeper meanings in every unusual event that happens to them.

Sandra was not one of those people. But she had been forced to re-evaluate her position. And this turnaround had been brought about by David’s story of the extraordinary chain of events that had led to their meeting.

It was two days before the August bank holiday and he was in Berlin. He was supposed to join a few friends on Mykonos, where they would board a sailing boat for a cruise around the Greek islands. That morning, however, his alarm clock had not gone off; he had woken up late, yet still managed to get to the airport moments before check-in closed. He remembered thinking: What luck! He hadn’t known what was in store for him.

To get to his destination, he needed to catch a connection in Rome. But before he could get on this second plane, the airline told
him there had been a problem and his luggage had been left behind in Berlin.