The Lost Girls of Rome (11 page)

And some of the blood had also been used to write on the wall over the bed. A single word, in English.

EVIL

Everything now was fixed, motionless. But it was also startlingly vivid and real, as if the murders had just taken place. Marcus felt as though, merely by opening that door, he had taken a journey back in time.

It isn’t possible, he said to himself.

There was no way the room could have been preserved exactly as it had been on that tragic day nineteen years earlier.

There was only one explanation, and he found confirmation for it in the paint pots and brushes in a corner of the room, as well as in the forensic photographs Raffaele had somehow got his hands on, showing the actual scene: the scene as encountered by Guido Altieri, returning home on a quiet March morning.

Subsequently, everything had been altered. By the intervention of the police, but also by whoever had immediately afterwards cleaned
everything, trying to wipe out all memory of the horror and restore the place to its original state.

That always happens when there has been a violent death, Marcus told himself. The bodies are taken away, the blood dries, and life returns to normal.

Nobody wants to preserve those memories. Not even me, he thought.

Raffaele Altieri, though, had decided to faithfully reproduce the scene of the crime. Pursuing his own obsession, he had built a shrine to the atrocity. And in trying to enclose the evil within that shrine, he himself had been imprisoned by it.

But at least this faithful reproduction gave Marcus the opportunity to examine it and look for the anomalies he needed. So he made a belated sign of the cross and went in.

As he approached what looked like a sacrificial altar, he understood why the slaughter must have been carried out by at least two people.

The victims were to be allowed no escape.

He tried to imagine Valeria Altieri and her lover, surprised by that inhuman violence. Had she screamed, or had she held back in order not to wake her little son, who was asleep in the next room, and stop him running in to see what was happening?

At the foot of the bed, on the right, a pool of blood had formed, while to the left Marcus noted three small circular marks.

He bent down to get a better look. They formed a perfect equilateral triangle. Each side measuring roughly twenty inches.

The symbol.

He was considering the possible meanings of that sign, when, looking up for a moment, he saw something he had not noticed at first glance.

There on the carpet were the prints of small bare feet.

He imagined the three-year-old Raffaele putting his head in at the door of that room the morning after the massacre, seeing that horror and being unable to understand the meaning of it. He saw him running to the bed, dipping his feet in the pool of blood as he did so, and desperately shaking his mother, trying to wake her.
Marcus could also imagine his little body on the blood-soaked sheets: after crying for hours, he must have huddled by his mother’s body and, exhausted, have fallen asleep.

He had spent two days in this apartment before his father had found him and taken him away. Two days and two very long nights, confronting alone whatever lurked in the darkness.

Children don’t need memories, they learn by forgetting.

Those forty-eight hours, on the other hand, had been sufficient to mark the existence of Raffaele Altieri for ever.

Marcus could not move. He started taking deep breaths, fearing a panic attack. Was this his talent, then? To understand the obscure messages that evil left in objects? To listen to the silent voices of the dead? To witness the spectacle of human wickedness, powerless to intervene?

Dogs are colour blind.

That was why only he had understood something the world did not know about Raffaele. That three-year-old boy was still asking to be saved.

9.04 a.m.

‘There are things you have to see with your own eyes, Ginger.’

Those were the words David always used whenever a discussion arose about the risks of his work. For Sandra, the camera was a necessary refuge, to lessen the impact of the violence she documented every day. For him, it was merely an instrument.

That distinction had occurred to her as she put together a makeshift darkroom in the bathroom of her apartment, as she had seen David do many times.

She had sealed the door and window, replacing the small light over the mirror with one that emitted a non-actinic red light. She had recovered the enlarger from the attic and the tank for developing and fixing negatives. For the rest, she had improvised. The three small basins she would use for the processing were those she washed her underwear in. From the kitchen she had taken pliers, scissors
and a ladle. The photographic paper and chemical products, which she put to one side, had not yet reached their expiry date and were still usable.

The Leica I used 35 mm film. Sandra rewound the roll and took it out of its compartment.

The operation she was about to carry out required absolute darkness. After putting on gloves, she opened the spool and extracted the film. Relying on her memory, she cut the initial part with the scissors, rounding the corners, then slipped it into the spiral of the tank. She poured the developing liquid, which she had previously prepared, and started calculating the times. She repeated the operation with the fixing liquid, then rinsed everything under the running water, put a few drops of colourless shampoo in the tank, because she did not have absorbent, and finally placed the roll to dry on the bath.

She started the timer on her watch and leaned back against the tiled wall. She sighed. This wait in the darkness was nerve-wracking. She wondered why David had used that old camera. Part of her hoped that there was no particular significance to it, that the sole reason she was placing so much importance on it was because she couldn’t resign herself to his senseless death.

David only used the Leica to try it out, she told herself.

Even though photography was their passion and their work, there were no photographs of the two of them together. Every now and again, she reflected on this. It hadn’t seemed so strange when her husband was alive. They hadn’t felt the necessity. When the present is so intense, you don’t need a past. She had never thought she ought to be hoarding memories because she would need them one day to survive. But now, as time went on, her stock of memories was dwindling. The time they had spent together had been too short compared to the time that, statistically, she still had to live. What would she do with all those days? Would she ever again be capable of feelings as strong as those she had felt for him?

The sound of the timer roused her. At last she could switch on the red light. First she took the roll that she had hung and viewed it against the light.

Five photographs had been taken with the Leica.

At the moment, she couldn’t make out their contents. She made haste to print them. She filled the three containers. The first with the developer, the second with water and acetic acid for the stop bath, the third with the fixer, also diluted in water.

Next she used the enlarger to project the negatives on to photographic paper until they were imprinted. Then she immersed the first sheet in the basin with the developer. She gave it a gentle shake and, gradually, the image began to appear in the liquid.

But it was too dark to see anything in it.

Maybe David had made a mistake while taking the shot. She bathed it in the other two containers anyway, then hung it over the bath with a clothes peg. She did the same with the other negatives.

The second photograph showed David bare-chested, reflected in a mirror. With one hand he was holding the camera in front of his face and with the other he was waving. But he wasn’t smiling. On the contrary, his expression was serious. Behind him there was a calendar, and the month displayed was the one in which he had died. This might well be the last image of David when he was still alive, Sandra thought.

The grim farewell of a ghost.

The third photograph was of a building site. She could see the bare pillars of a building under construction. The walls were missing and the area around it was empty. This might have been taken in the building from which David had fallen, she thought, although obviously before his death.

Why had he gone there with the Leica?

David’s accident had happened at night. This picture, on the other hand, had been taken by day. Perhaps he had been reconnoitring the place.

The fourth photograph was very strange. It was of a painting – seventeenth century, she thought. But she was sure it was only part of a larger canvas. It showed a child, moving his body as if on the verge of running, but with his head still turned, incapable of averting his gaze from something that both terrified and attracted him. He had a stunned expression, his mouth wide open in astonishment.

Sandra was convinced she had seen this image before. But she could not remember what the painting was. She recalled Inspector de Michelis’s passion for art: she would ask him.

Of one thing she was certain: the painting was in Rome. And it was there that she had to go.

Her shift was due to begin at two in the afternoon, but she would ask for a few days off. After David’s death, she hadn’t taken the compassionate leave she was entitled to. If she took an express train, she would be there in less than three hours. She wanted to see with her own eyes, as David used to say. She felt the need to understand, because now she was certain that there was an explanation.

She planned the journey in her head as she printed the final photo graph in the roll. The first four had provided nothing but questions, to be added to all the unanswered questions she had accumulated up until now.

Maybe there was some kind of answer in the fifth photograph.

She treated it with particular delicacy as the image emerged on the paper. A dark stain on a clear background. It became clearer, one detail at a time. Like a wreck gradually re-emerging from the bottom of the sea after having spent decades in absolute darkness.

It was a face, in profile.

The person had clearly not realised that someone was photographing him. Did he have anything to do with what David was doing in Rome? Might he even be involved in his death? Sandra knew she would have to find this person.

Hair as black as the clothes he wore. Sad, evasive eyes.

And a scar on his temple.

9.56 a.m.

Marcus let his gaze wander over the view of Rome from the terrace of the castle. Behind him rose the Archangel Michael, his wings unfolded and his sword unsheathed, watching over human beings and their infinite miseries. To the left of the bronze statue, the bell
of mercy, whose tolling had announced executions during the dark days when the Castel Sant’Angelo was the papal prison.

This place of torture and despair had become a magnet for tourists. Here they all were now, happily snapping away, taking advantage of the sliver of sun that had peeped out from behind the clouds and was shining down on the rain-washed city.

Clemente joined Marcus and stood by his side without taking his eyes from the view. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

They used voicemail to make appointments. When one of the two wanted to see the other, all they needed to do was leave a message with the time and place indicated. Neither had ever missed any of these appointments.

‘The murder of Valeria Altieri,’ Marcus said.

Before replying, Clemente looked at his swollen face. ‘Who did that to you?’

‘I met her son Raffaele last night.’

Clemente shook his head. ‘A nasty business. The crime was never solved.’

He said it as if he knew the case well, which seemed somewhat odd to Marcus, given that at the time of the events his friend must have been little more than ten years old. There could only be one explanation:
they
had dealt with it.

‘Is there anything in the archive?’

Clemente didn’t like it being mentioned in public. ‘Careful,’ he said.

‘This is important. What do you know?’

‘There were two lines of inquiry the police followed. Both involved Guido Altieri. When an adulterous wife is murdered, the first suspect is always the husband. Guido had the contacts and the resources. If he’d wanted someone to kill her for him, he could have done so and got away with it.’

But if Guido Altieri was guilty, he had knowingly left his son with the corpses for two days merely to strengthen his own alibi. Marcus found that hard to believe.

‘And the second line of inquiry?’

‘Altieri is a big wheel in finance. At the time he was in London,
finalising an important merger. In fact, there were some pretty dubious elements to the business – something to do with oil, and also something to do with arms. There were important interests involved. The English word “Evil”, written over the bed, could be interpreted as a message for Altieri.’

‘A warning.’

‘Well, the killers did spare his son.’

Some children ran past Marcus, and he followed them with his eyes, envying their ease and self-confidence.

‘How come the two lines of inquiry didn’t lead anywhere?’

‘As far as the former is concerned, Guido and Valeria Altieri were on the verge of divorcing anyway. She was too free with her favours: the yachtsman was only the latest in a long line. The lawyer can’t have been too grief-stricken, given that he remarried a few months after the murders. He has another family now, other children. And besides, let’s admit it, if someone like Altieri had wanted to get rid of his wife, he would have chosen a less cruel method.’

‘And Raffaele?’

‘He hasn’t spoken to his father in years. From what I understand, the boy is mentally disturbed, forever in and out of psychiatric clinics. He blames his father for what happened.’

‘And the second line of inquiry, that it was a warning from someone who knew about his shady dealings?’

‘They pursued it for a while, but there was no evidence.’

‘Weren’t there any prints, any clues at the scene of the crime?’