The Faces of Angels (61 page)

Back on the gallery, we listen, then Isabella steps forward and opens the next door. It's another bedroom, its windows shuttered and black. Her candle catches a wash of colour on the wall, mauve or pale blue. In the centre of the room there's the unmistakable shape of a bed. Behind her, I stop in the doorway. Suddenly my heart is beating in irregular little skips. Sweat is breaking out across my chest. This is it. I can sense it. I can sense him. Just as surely as if we've come face to face.

‘Isabella!' I whisper. But she's already stepped into the room. Her candle throws a halo of light.

The bed is huge, an old-fashioned monstrosity. Sitting in the centre of the empty room, it looks like a stage set for an erotic performance. Isabella lowers her candle and I see two pieces of cord hanging from each of the bedposts. Knotted, they're plenty long enough to tie someone down with, to go around a wrist or an ankle. Without really meaning to, I walk up close. I stand beside Isabella, and when I move my candle I see the cords are dark, stiff and crusted.

There are stains on the bed too. I thought there was a coverlet, or a blanket, but now I realize it's the mattress. It's covered in something dark, as if paint has been thrown at it.

Isabella is just standing here, staring. She looks as if she can't move. I step aside, winging my little light around the room, and see a door in the far wall. Sophie. My mind's darting around now, going faster and faster like something about to explode. It's not midnight yet, I think crazily. So he can't have killed her. She has to be alive.

My sneakers slap on the floor. I'm not even trying to be quiet any more, but the sound surprises me, and when I look down I see the boards are pale, almost as though they've been scrubbed. Just for a second I allow myself to think I'm wrong, and that because there's no blood under my feet, maybe no one died here after all. Maybe this is just some kinky place to tie people down and use the ‘discipline.' Then I open the little door.

The candlelight catches the shine of old-fashioned porcelain. A basin, a bathtub. Shadows and flame bounce out of the mirror. The room feels alive, as if the walls are throbbing, and it takes me a second to understand what I'm seeing.

Brown smears run across the white tiles like finger-paint. When I look down, I see footprints and skid marks. The bathtub is streaked and the little basin spattered, as if someone threw a can of rust-coloured paint at them. But that's not what makes the bile rise in my throat so I have to clamp my hand over my mouth.

What does that is Billy's hair. Long springy strands of it stick to the sides of the basin, and lie in trampled, matted wads in the bathtub and on the floor.

Tears are streaming down my face and my nose is running. I drop the piece of wood, back up, and bang into Isabella.

‘Don't look!' I scream. ‘Don't look, don't look, don't look!'

But it's too late, she's already seen. Her mouth opens and closes, then she turns, and runs.

We fly onto the gallery, screaming Sophie's name now. Over and over and over. Isabella throws her shoulder against doors, flings them open, one after another, cracking and splintering rotten wood, but it's me who finds her.

At the very end of the gallery, there's a linen closet. It's not much bigger than the chair that Sophie is tied to. She has a sack over her head and I snatch at it with my free hand, screaming for Isabella. When she takes both the candles, we see a bowl, a spoon and strips of sheet like the ones he's bound and gagged her with, and a plastic bucket she's been forced to use as a toilet.

I undo the gag first, and Sophie chokes. She leans forward, gasping and coughing, and I put my arms around her, feeling her matted blonde hair and the heat of her skin. The closet is unbelievably hot and it stinks.

‘I wet myself,' she says when she finally looks at me. One of her eyes is swollen closed.

She is still wearing her church dress, but it's soiled and ripped, and when I get her hands undone I see that one of them is horribly swollen. ‘I hit him,' Sophie says. Her voice is raspy as if her tongue is swollen. ‘He shut my hand in the car door.'

‘Locci?' I'm working on the knots around her legs. They're not as easy as they should be and the sheet is damp with urine.

‘I don't know.' Sophie shakes her head and winces at the motion. ‘I never saw him. He put a bag over my head, from behind. And when he fed me, he wore a mask. He wore a mask and he didn't say anything!'

The words come out in a howl, and Sophie starts to try to kick and claw at the knots, panicked, like an animal that's realized it's about to be slaughtered. She hits me in the side of the head, and would tip the chair over, except the space is too tight. Finally Isabella drops the candles, stands on them to put them out and grabs her by the shoulders. She pushes Sophie backwards, holding her against the wall, murmuring in Italian, while I feel my way through the last knots.

When we try to stand her up, Sophie almost falls down. She howls in pain. She has no shoes and he's done something to her feet. Cut them. Burnt them. We might get her down the stairs, but then what would we do? Drag her down the long drive? Across the olive groves? He'll be coming soon and he'll find us.

I turn to Isabella. ‘Maybe one of us should go for help? Go and find the phone?'

‘Don't leave!' Sophie wails. ‘Please don't leave! He'll come.'

Isabella looks at me in the dark, both of us terrified. ‘We have to get her out of here,' she says. ‘We can only do it if we stay together.' She's right. He would almost certainly overpower one of us and Sophie. The three of us have a chance. I grab Sophie's arm and sling it over my shoulder, and Isabella does the same. Between us, we lift her off the chair and out of the fetid, stinking closet.

‘Come on,' Isabella says. ‘We can carry her like this.'

We each get an arm around Sophie's waist, and she holds on to Isabella's shoulder with her good hand. Without the candles it's dark, but we can see well enough to make our way along the gallery.

‘OK,' I hear myself saying, ‘that's great, that's fine.' It's mindless, words to reassure myself as much as Sophie.

We work our way to the head of the stairs, then we have to stop, trying to figure out how to get Sophie down without hurting her more. We decide Isabella will go first since she's tallest, Sophie will follow a step or two above, her arms over Isabella's shoulders using her as support, and I will come last, holding Sophie from behind. When we get ourselves in place, Sophie even giggles. Then a glow of lights washes the fan window above the front door.

It's dim but growing brighter, and for a wonderful second I think it's the police, that they have somehow found out where we are, that my shadow followed us, and called help. I even whisper, ‘
Polizia.
' But Sophie shakes her head.

‘It's not blue.' Her voice is very small. ‘A police car or an ambulance would be red or blue,' she says and I freeze. Isabella looks back at me.

‘It's him,' Sophie mews. ‘It's him.' The lights are getting brighter. Now we can hear tyres crunching on the gravel.

Sophie starts to scream, but Isabella shoves her hand over her mouth. ‘Quick,' she hisses, ‘quick, quick!' And we stagger backwards.

Isabella throws open the door of the first empty room. ‘We have to hide,' she says. ‘We have to hide!' But there's nowhere here to hide except the alcove, and even there there's barely room for the three of us.

‘We wait,' Isabella whispers. ‘We'll hear him go by. Then we run. We can get downstairs. To his car.'

We all nod, but I think:
With Sophie?
I can't see Isabella's face in the dark, but I know she's thinking the same thing I am. Whoever he is, he'll be strong and fast. He's abducted four young, healthy women. And we'll have only a few seconds between the time he goes along the gallery and the time he realizes Sophie's not in the closet. I can't even remember if we shut the door. If he sees it open, he'll know. And he'll come looking for us. Right away. Both of us grip Sophie's arms, and she whimpers. Below, the car stops and we hear a door slam. Footsteps crunch on the gravel and then, all at once, the night is ripped with an explosion of sound.

There is the furious barking of a dog, yelling, running, and more barking. Fonzi. I had completely forgotten about him. He must have followed us up from the groves. A gun cracks, and there is the screeching sound of acceleration, then another shot.

Isabella lets go of Sophie's arm and screams. She doesn't care any more who hears her or what they do about it. Instead, she leans against the grimy wall and howls, for her sister and her dog and everything that has been taken from her.

Isabella is still crying when, a few seconds later, the house is washed in lights, and filled with the sound of running footsteps and men yelling, ‘
Polizia!
'

In the confusion, slamming of doors and shouting, I am more afraid now than I have been all night. Clinging to Sophie, I feel as if I'm drowning, as if a dam has broken inside me, and all the awfulness of what has happened in the last few weeks is rising up in one terrible black wave of fear. When Pallioti finally takes my arm and tries to speak to me, I can't even hear what he's saying.

Medics take Sophie away on a stretcher. They wrap Isabella in shiny paper-foil blankets, and even though she is told over and over again that Fonzi is fine, that he screwed up a police stakeout, but nobody shot him and he's downstairs waiting for her, she can't stop crying. She apologizes, repeating herself as if she can't stop saying the words, and finally the police guide her down the stairs, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets.

I sit on the stairs where someone has put me, wrapped in a foil blanket, although it isn't cold. Below me, half of the Florence police force seems to be streaming in and out of the front door of the villa. There's an air of euphoria. Policemen slap hands and pat each other on the back. Until they follow the forensics spacesuit people upstairs. Then they come down rather more subdued.

Eventually I hear that, though he got away, they have a clear sighting and, despite the dog, they got a shot at the car. It's only a matter of time now before they bring him in. He was medium height, medium build, dressed in black. The sports bag he'd taken out of the boot, and subsequently dropped when Fonzi attacked him, is being examined by the scene-of-crime people. A few minutes later a murmur goes around: it contained cord. A knife. And a red silk bag.

From my perch I pick out the cop who fired the shots. He was outside when the car drove in, and would have nabbed this guy, except that he couldn't bring himself to shoot the German shepherd when it got in the way. He's tall and thin, with nubbly bones at the back of his neck, and when he finally turns round and climbs the stairs towards me I feel as if I've known him a long time. He fixes me with his strange golden eyes. ‘I should thank you,' he says, ‘for the tulips.'

‘I brought you lunch too. But you'd gone.'

He nods, and we watch each other for a second. Then I ask, ‘Where's your dog? Or isn't he your dog?'

He laughs. His face creases up and suddenly he doesn't look as thin as he did in the portico of an abandoned church. Now he looks like a greyhound. Lean and mean. Like he could be a policeman, if he wore the right uniform. ‘Oh he's mine all right,' he says. ‘I left him at home with my wife tonight, though. Sometimes we argue over who gets to take him to work.'

‘Is she a cop too?'

‘No,' he laughs. ‘She's a travel agent.'

‘I thought you were an angel.'

“It's a common mistake.' He holds out his big El Greco hand. ‘Lorenzo Beretti, Signora Thorcroft. I'm pleased to meet you, officially.' His grip is warm and strong.

‘How did you know I was here?' I ask. ‘Tonight?' Then it dawns on me. He's my shadow. He always has been. I look over his shoulder for Pallioti, but I can't see him.