The Lost Girls of Rome (16 page)

Horror as spectacle
.

Marcus sat up in bed. Something was germinating in his mind.
Anomalies
. He switched on the light and retrieved the profile of Valeria Altieri from the floor. That fine-sounding surname belonged to her husband: before she was married her name was Colmetti, a name less suited to the jet set. She came from a small middle-class family, her father a clerk. She had attended teacher training college, but her true talent was beauty. That, and a natural propensity to drive men wild. At twenty she had tried to make it as a film actress, but had only managed to obtain a few walk-on parts. Marcus could imagine how many men had tried to get her into bed by promising
her an important role. Maybe at first Valeria had yielded. How many compliments with a double meaning, how many unwanted fumblings, how many faked orgasms had she had to endure in order to realise her dream?

And then, one day, Guido Altieri had come into her life. A handsome man, a few years older than her, from a well-known and highly respected family. A lawyer with an assured future. Valeria knew she wasn’t able to love anyone exclusively. Guido in his heart was aware that this woman would never belong to anybody – she was too selfish and too beautiful for one man alone – and yet he asked her to marry him.

It was there that everything started, Marcus told himself, getting up to look for a pen and paper to take notes. The wedding had been only the beginning, the first act in a chain of apparently happy events that would inevitably lead to the slaughter in the bedroom.

He found a notebook. On the first page he drew the symbol of the triangle. On the second he wrote EVIL.

Valeria Altieri represented everything that men might want, but that nobody could have. Desire, especially when it is uncontrollable, makes us do things we wouldn’t believe ourselves capable of. It corrupts, undermines, and occasionally it can be a motive for murder. Especially when it is transformed into something else, something dangerous.

An obsession, like the one tormenting Raffaele Altieri.

But if Raffaele was obsessed by a mother he had barely known, then perhaps someone else had felt a similar obsession. And what is the only solution in such cases? Marcus was afraid to answer his own question. He said it in a low voice. A single word.

‘Destruction.’

Annihilating the object of our obsession, rendering it incapable of hurting us any more. And making sure it stays that way forever. To achieve that aim, death sometimes isn’t enough.

Marcus tore the pages with the symbol and the word from the notebook. He held them in his hands, looking from one to the other, hoping to find the key to this mystery.

He sensed someone behind him, looking at him insistently. He turned and saw who it was: his own reflection in the windowpane. Although he hated looking at himself in mirrors, this time he didn’t move.

He read the word reflected there – EVIL – but the other way around.

‘Horror as spectacle,’ he repeated to himself. And he realised that the woman’s scream he thought he had heard coming from Ranieri’s office was not an acoustic hallucination. It was real.

The large red-brick villa was situated in the exclusive Olgiata area. It was surrounded by a luxuriant garden with an English lawn and a swimming pool. The two-storey house itself was well lit.

Marcus walked along the drive. The privilege of entering the gates of these dwellings was limited to a select few. But it hadn’t been difficult for him to get in. No alarm had gone off, no private guard had come running. And that could mean only one thing.

Someone inside the villa was expecting a visit.

The glass-fronted door was open. He went in and found himself in an elegant living room. No voices, no other noises. To his right was a staircase. He started climbing. The lights were out on the upper floor, but through the doorway of a room at the end of the corridor he could see the dancing reflections of a fire. He followed them, sure that at the end of his journey he would find what he was looking for.

The man was in his study. Sunk in a leather armchair beside a lighted fire, with his back to the door and a glass of cognac in his hand. Facing him – just as in Ranieri’s office – the jarring combination of a plasma TV and a video recorder.

He realised that he was no longer alone.

‘I sent everybody away. There’s nobody else in the house.’ Guido Altieri seemed to be confronting his fate pragmatically. ‘How much do you want?’

‘I don’t want money.’

Altieri made as if to turn. ‘Who are you?’

Marcus stopped him. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d prefer you not to look at my face.’

Altieri humoured him. ‘You won’t tell me who you are, and you haven’t come for money. So what brings you to my house?’

‘I want to understand.’

‘If you’ve come this far, you already know everything.’

‘Not yet. Do you intend to help me?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Because, apart from saving your own life, you can also save that of an innocent girl.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘You also received an anonymous message, didn’t you? Ranieri’s dead, the two killers have been shot and then burnt. And now you’re wondering if I was the person who sent all those notes.’

‘The one I received announced a visitor for this evening.’

‘Not me, and I’m not here to harm you.’

The crystal glass in Altieri’s hand reflected the flames of the fire.

Marcus paused before coming to the point. ‘When an adulterous woman is murdered, the first suspect is always the husband.’ He had quoted Clemente’s words, even though at first that motive had seemed too obvious. ‘The murder on the eve of a religious festival, the night of the new moon … All coincidences.’ Men sometimes let themselves be guided by superstition, he thought. And to fill the void of doubt, they are ready to believe in anything. ‘There was no ritual, no sect. The word written behind the bed, “Evil”, wasn’t a threat, it was a promise … Read the other way round, it says “Live”. A joke maybe, or maybe not … A message that had to go all the way to London, where you were: the job had been carried out as requested, you could go home … Those marks on the carpet, the occult triangle, weren’t a symbol. Something had been placed in the pool of blood next to the bed and then moved to the other side. As simple as that. A creature with three paws and a single eye. A video camera on a tripod.’

Marcus thought again of the woman’s scream he had heard coming from Ranieri’s office. It hadn’t been an acoustic hallucination. It was the voice of Valeria Altieri, and it came from the video
cassette Ranieri kept in his safe, the cassette he had viewed before taking it away with him in the leather briefcase.

‘Ranieri arranged the murder, you simply commissioned it. But after the anonymous note and those bodies in the warehouse, he was certain somebody knew the truth. He felt hunted, he was scared they wanted to pin it all on him. He was paranoid. He ran back to his office and burned the note. If someone had managed to track down the killers after nearly twenty years, then they were quite capable of replacing the tape in the safe with a fake, that was why he checked it before taking it away with him … Tell me, was the one Ranieri owned the original or a copy?’

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Because it was destroyed when his car crashed. And without it, there’ll never be justice.’

‘A sad twist of fate,’ Altieri commented, sarcastically.

Marcus looked again at the video recorder beneath the plasma TV. ‘It was at your request, wasn’t it? You couldn’t be content with your wife’s death. No, you had to see it. Even at the risk of becoming a laughing stock: the husband betrayed by his wife while he was on a trip abroad, in the family home, in the marriage bed. You would be the butt of everyone’s jokes, but in the end you would have your revenge.’

‘You couldn’t possibly understand.’

‘You may be surprised. For you, Valeria was an obsession. A divorce wouldn’t have been enough. You wouldn’t have been able to forget her.’

‘She was one of those women who can make you lose your reason. Some men are attracted by creatures like that. Even though they know that, in the end, they’ll be led to their own destruction. These women seem sweet and loving, but they only grant you the leftovers of their affection. After a while you realise that you can still save yourself, have another woman who loves you truly, children, a family. But at that point you have to choose: either you or her.’

‘Why did you want to see it?’

‘Because then it’d be as if I’d killed her myself. That was what I wanted to feel.’

‘And so, every now and again, when you were alone in the house like now, you sat down in that lovely armchair, poured yourself some cognac and put on that tape.’

‘Obsessions are difficult to get rid of.’

‘And whenever you saw it, what did you feel? Pleasure?’

Guido Altieri lowered his eyes. ‘Regret … that I hadn’t done it myself.’

Marcus shook his head: he felt anger, and he didn’t like to feel anger. ‘Ranieri hired the killers. The word written in blood was an amateur touch, but the symbol on the carpet was a stroke of luck. A mistake that might have revealed the presence of the video camera, instead of which it turned into an unexpected advantage, by complicating everything.’ Marcus laughed at himself for having thought of Satanism as a motive, when the reality was much more banal.

‘But you understood everything.’

‘Dogs are colour blind, did you know that?’

‘Of course, what has that to do with it?’

‘A dog can’t see a rainbow. And nobody will ever be able to teach it what colours are. But you know as well as I do that red, yellow and blue exist. Who’s to say that isn’t true of people, too? There may be things that exist, even though we can’t see them. Like evil. We know it’s there only when it manifests itself, by which time it’s too late.’

‘Do you know evil?’

‘I know men. And I see the signs.’

‘What signs?’

‘Bare little feet walking in blood …’

Altieri made a bad-tempered gesture. ‘Raffaele wasn’t supposed to be there that night. He was meant to go and stay with Valeria’s mother, but she was sick. I didn’t know that.’

‘But he was there, in the house. And he stayed there for two days. Alone.’

Altieri fell silent, and Marcus realised that the truth hurt him. He was pleased to see that part of the man at least could still experience a recognisably human feeling.

‘For all these years, Ranieri had the task of putting your son off
the scent as he continued to investigate his mother’s death. But at a certain point, Raffaele started receiving strange anonymous notes that promised to lead him to the truth.’ One of them led him to me, Marcus told himself, even though he didn’t know why someone had wanted to involve him in the case. ‘First your son dismissed Ranieri. A week ago he managed to track down the killers, lured them to an abandoned warehouse and killed them. He killed Ranieri, too, by tampering with his car. Which means he’s the one who’s coming here. I just got here before him.’

‘If it wasn’t you, then who plotted all this?’

‘I don’t know. What I do know is that less than twenty-four hours ago a serial killer named Jeremiah Smith was found dying, with two words written on his chest:
Kill me
. In the ambulance team that came to his rescue was the sister of one of his victims. She could have taken the law into her own hands. In my opinion, Raffaele has been offered the same opportunity.’

‘Why are you so interested in saving my life?’

‘Not just you. That serial killer kidnapped a young student named Lara. He’s keeping her prisoner somewhere, but he’s in a coma and can’t talk.’

‘Is she the innocent girl you mentioned a while ago?’

‘If I find out who arranged all this, I may still save her.’

Altieri raised the glass of cognac to his lips. ‘I don’t know how I can help you.’

‘Raffaele will be here in a little while, probably looking for revenge. Call the police and turn yourself in. I’ll wait for your son and try to persuade him to talk to me. There’s every chance he knows something that may be useful to me.’

‘You want me to confess everything to the police?’ From his derisory tone, it was obvious he had no intention of doing any such thing. ‘Who are you? How can I trust you if you won’t tell me who you are?’

Marcus was tempted to reply. If that was the only way, he would contravene his rule. He was about to tell him when the shot rang out. He turned. Behind him stood Raffaele with a gun in his hand pointed straight at the armchair in which his father was sitting. The
bullet had perforated the leather and the upholstery. Altieri slumped forward, dropping the glass with the cognac.

Marcus would have liked to ask the boy why he had opened fire, but he realised that Raffaele had chosen revenge over justice.

‘Thank you for getting him to talk,’ Raffaele said.

Marcus knew now what his role had been in the whole affair. It was why somebody had brought them together in Lara’s apartment.

He was to provide Raffaele with the missing piece of the puzzle: his father’s confession.

Marcus was on the verge of asking him a question, still hoping to find the link between this twenty-year-old case, Jeremiah Smith and Lara’s disappearance. But before he could say anything, he became aware of sounds in the distance. Raffaele smiled at him. It was the police siren. He had called them, but he didn’t make a move to escape. This time justice would be done, all the way. Even in this, he wanted to be different from his father.

Marcus knew that he only had a few minutes left. He had many questions, but he had to leave. They couldn’t find him here.

Nobody was supposed to know that he existed.

8.35 p.m.

After putting what she needed in a bag, Sandra managed to get a taxi near the Via Giolitti. She gave the address to the driver, then sat back and went over the plan she had worked out. She was running an enormous risk. If they discovered her true purpose, she would certainly be suspended from the force.

The taxi passed the Piazza della Repubblica and turned into the Via Nazionale. She didn’t know Rome very well. For someone like her, born and brought up in the North, this city was an unknown quantity. Too much beauty, maybe. A bit like Venice, which always seemed populated only by tourists. It was difficult to believe that people actually lived in such a place. That they worked, did their shopping, took their children to school, instead
of spending all their time looking in awe at the splendours around them.