The Whisperer (18 page)

An old group photograph—the boys who had lived in the orphanage just before it was closed—taken from what had once been Father Rolf’s office.

Sixteen little boys posed around the old priest, only one smiling at the lens.

A smile among the tears.

Eyes bright, hair tousled, one incisor missing, a visible grease stain on his green pullover, displayed as if it were a badge of honor.

Billy Moore rested forever in that photograph and in the little graveyard next to the orphanage church. He wasn’t the only child buried there, but his grave was the loveliest. With a stone angel spreading its wings in a protective gesture.

After listening to the story from Mila and Boris, Gavila asked Stern to get hold of all documents relating to Billy’s death. The officer complied with his usual zeal, and when they were confronted with the papers they were immediately struck by a curious coincidence.

“In the case of potentially infectious diseases like meningitis, the health authorities must be informed. The doctor who received the report from Father Rolf is the same one who then drew up the death certificate. The two documents have the same date.”

Goran tried to think this through: “The nearest hospital is twenty miles away. He probably didn’t even take the trouble to check the identity.”

“He trusted the priest’s words,” added Boris, “because priests don’t usually tell lies…”

“Not always,” thought Mila.

Gavila had no doubts on the matter: “We’ve got to exhume the corpse.”

The snow had started falling in small, hard grains, as if to prepare the ground for the flakes that would come afterwards. Soon it would be evening, so they would have to get a move on.

Chang’s gravediggers were at work and were using a little bulldozer to dig the frost-hardened ground. As the team waited, no one spoke.

Chief Inspector Roche had been informed about the developments and was staving off the press, which had suddenly whipped itself up into a state of great excitement. Maybe Feldher really had tried to speculate on what the two officers had told him without giving too much away. Besides, Roche always said, “What the media doesn’t know, they make up.”

So they had to get a move on before someone decided to fill that silence with some well-crafted nonsense. It would be hard to deny everything.

There was a dull thud. Finally, the bulldozer had touched something.

Chang’s men climbed into the hole and started digging by hand. A plastic cloth covered the box to slow down its decomposition. It was cut away to reveal the lid of a small white coffin.

“It’s all rotten here,” said the medical examiner after a quick glance. “If we pull it up, we risk breaking everything. And this snow is messing everything up,” added Chang, speaking to Goran, from whom he awaited the final decision.

“Fine…open it up.”

No one had expected the criminologist to organize an exhumation on the spot. Chang’s men stretched a tarpaulin over the hole, supporting it on poles like a big umbrella, to shelter the site.

The pathologist put on a waistcoat with a lamp on the back, then went down into the hole beneath the eyes of the stone angel. In front of him, a technician with an oxyhydrogen flame began to melt the zinc soldering of the coffin and the lid began to move.

How do you wake up a child who’s been dead for eighteen years?
Mila wondered. Billy Moore would probably have deserved a short ceremony, or a prayer. But no one had the desire or the time to do it.

When Chang opened the coffin, Billy’s wretched remains appeared, still wearing what was left of a first communion suit. Smart, with a clip-on tie and trousers with turn-ups. In a corner of the casket were the rusted skates and an old tape recorder.

Mila remembered Feldher’s story:
He had two obsessions: those damned roller-skates that he used to ride up and down the empty corridors, and football. But he didn’t like playing. He preferred to stand on the sidelines doing the radio commentary.

They were Billy’s only belongings.

Chang slowly began to cut away parts of the fabric of the suit with a scalpel and, even in that awkward position, his movements were quick and precise. He checked the state of conservation of the skeleton. Then, turning to the rest of the team, he announced: “There are a number of fractures. I can’t be one hundred percent certain about when they happened…but in my view this child definitely didn’t die of meningitis.”

S
arah Rosa brought Father Timothy into the mobile unit’s camper, where Goran was waiting for him with the others. The priest still looked anxious.

“We have a favor to ask you,” Stern began. “We urgently need to talk to Father Rolf.”

“I told you: he’s retired. I don’t know where he is now. When I got here six months ago I only met him for a few hours. Just long enough to do the handover. He explained a few things to me, he gave me a few documents and the keys and then he left.”

Boris turned back to Stern. “Perhaps we ought to speak directly to the Curia. Do you happen to know where they send retired priests?”

“I’ve heard there’s a kind of rest home.”

“Could be, but…”

They turned back to look at Father Timothy.

“What?” asked Stern.

“I seem to remember that Father Rolf planned to go and live with his sister…Yes, he told me she was more or less the same age as him, and she’d never married.”

The priest seemed pleased to have made a contribution to the investigation at last. And he had managed to offer the help he had previously denied.

“I’ll talk to the Curia, if you like. Thinking about it, it shouldn’t be too hard to find out where Father Rolf is. And I’ll probably think of something else.”

The young priest seemed calmer now.

Then Goran said, “It would be a great help to us, and we would avoid a lot of pointless publicity about what’s happening here. I don’t think the Curia would mind.”

“I think you’re right,” Father Timothy agreed.

When the priest left the camper, Sarah Rosa turned back to Goran, visibly vexed.

“If we’re all agreed that Billy’s death wasn’t an accident, why don’t we put out a warrant for Father Rolf? He clearly has something to do with it!”

“Yes, but he wasn’t responsible for the murder of the little boy.”

Mila was struck by the word “murder,” which Goran was uttering for the first time. Billy’s fractures might be indications of a violent death, but there was no proof that anyone else had been involved.

“And how can you be so sure that the priest isn’t guilty?” Rosa went on.

“Father Rolf only covered the thing up. He came up with the story of Billy’s meningitis, so that no one would risk delving any deeper for fear of infection. And then the outside world did the rest: no one cared about those orphans, you can see that too, can’t you?”

“And the orphanage was about to close anyway,” Mila added.

“Father Rolf is the only one who knows the truth, that’s why we have to question him. But I’m worried that if we put out a warrant…well, we still mightn’t find him. He’s old, and he might be determined to take this story to the grave.”

“So, what do we do?” Boris was impatient. “Should we wait for the priest to get in touch?”

“Certainly not,” replied the criminologist. Then he returned his attention to the plan of the orphanage that Stern had brought back from the local land registry office. He pointed out an area to Boris and Rosa.

“You have to go to the eastern pavilion. You see? The archive is there, with all the files on the boys who lived in the orphanage until it closed. Obviously we’re only interested in the last sixteen children.”

Goran handed them the group photograph with Billy Moore’s smile. He turned it over: on the other side were the signatures of all the little boys in the picture.

“Compare the names: we need the one with the only missing file…”

Boris and Rosa looked at him, puzzled.

“How do you know there’s one missing?”

“Because Billy Moore was killed by one of his schoolmates.”

In the same group picture that showed Billy Moore smiling, Ronald Dermis was standing third from the left. He was eight. That meant he must have been the institution’s mascot before Billy arrived.

For a child, jealousy can be reason enough for wishing someone dead.

When he left the orphanage with the others, the bureaucracy had lost track of him. Had he been adopted? Unlikely. He might have ended up in a care home. It was a mystery. Almost certainly, the hand of Father Rolf was behind that gap in information.

It was absolutely necessary to find the priest.

Father Timothy had assured them that the Curia was taking care of it: “His sister died, and he asked to be reduced to lay status.” So he had left the priesthood. Perhaps it had been his sense of guilt for covering up a murder, perhaps it was the unbearable discovery that evil can be very well concealed even by the appearance of a child.

The team was troubled by this and other hypotheses.

“I still haven’t worked out whether I should launch the manhunt of the century, or wait for you to deign to come up with some kind of reply!”

The plasterboard walls of Roche’s office trembled at the sound of his voice. But the chief inspector’s anxiety bounced off Goran’s stubborn calm.

“They’re chasing me for the story of the sixth child: they say we’re not doing enough!”

“We won’t find her until Albert decides to give us a clue. I’ve just had Krepp on the line, he says that crime scene’s clean as well.”

“At least tell me if you think Ronald Dermis and Albert are the same person!”

“We’ve already made the same mistake with Alexander Bermann. For the time being I wouldn’t rush to hasty conclusions.”

Roche wasn’t used to taking advice about how to conduct his cases. But this time he accepted it.

“But we can’t sit here waiting for that psychopath to take us wherever he wants to. We’ll never save the girl that way! Especially given that she’s still alive.”

“There’s only one person who can save her. And that’s him.”

“Do you really expect him to hand her over, just like that?”

“I’m just saying that at a certain point he might want to make a mistake himself.”

“Damn it to hell! Do you think I can live on hope while those people out there just want me to look ridiculous? I need results, Dr. Gavila!”

Goran was used to Roche’s temper tantrums. They weren’t directed at him in particular. The chief inspector had them with the whole world. It was a side effect of the job: when you’re too high up, there’s always someone wanting to drag you down.

“I’ve taken a ton of crap over the last little while, and it wasn’t all directed at me.”

Goran knew how to be patient, but he was aware that that didn’t always work with Roche. So he tried to take the initiative, to get him off his back.

“Do you want me to tell you one thing that’s driving me mad?”

“Anything to get me out of this impasse, please.”

“I haven’t mentioned it till now…the tears.”

“And?”

“There were at least five liters around the corpse of the second girl. However, tears are saline, that’s why they tend to dry straightaway. But these didn’t. I wondered why—”

“And why, if I may ask?”

“They’re artificial: they precisely reproduce the chemical composition of human tears, but it’s a trick. That’s why they don’t dry…do you know how tears are re-created artificially?”

“I have no idea.”

“That’s the point: Albert does. And he did it, he devoted some time to it. Do you know what that means?”

“You tell me.”

Roche sat back in his armchair, staring into the void.

“What can we expect, in your view?”

“Frankly, I fear the worst is yet to come.”

Mila went down into the basement of the Institute of Legal Medicine. She had acquired some figurines of famous footballers—or at least that was what they had told her when they had sold them to her. That little gesture was part of a farewell ritual. In the morgue, Chang had reassembled Billy Moore’s corpse to bury it again beneath the stone angel.

The pathologist was completing the post-mortem, and had X-rayed the fractures. The boards were exposed on a light panel which Boris was standing next to. Mila wasn’t surprised to find him there.

When he became aware of her, he felt the need to justify himself. “I came by to see if there was any news.”

“And is there?” asked Mila, going along with his story so as not to make him feel embarrassed. Boris was clearly there for personal reasons.

Chang broke off his work to answer the question from Mila.

“The body had dropped a long way. From the seriousness and number of fractures that I have found on the skeleton, we may deduce that death was almost instantaneous.”

That “almost” contained hope and, at the same time, anguish.

“Obviously no one can say whether Billy jumped, or whether he was pushed…”

“Obviously.”

Mila noticed that on the chair there was a brochure for a company of funeral directors, certainly not a service supplied by the police. It must have been Boris’s idea: paying his own money to ensure that Billy received a decent burial. On a shelf were Billy’s skates, perfectly polished, and the tape recorder, a birthday present from which the boy was never separated.

“Maybe Chang has worked out where the death occurred,” said Boris.

And the medical examiner walked towards some enlarged photographs of the boarding school.

“Bodies fall freely, and gain weight along with their velocity: it’s an effect of the force of gravity. In the end it’s as if you’re being squashed against the ground by an invisible hand. So, if we combine the data concerning the age of the victim—readings of bone calcification—with those of the extent of the fractures, we can estimate the height from which the fall occurred. In this case, more than forty feet. Thus, taking into consideration the average elevation of the building and the inclination of the ground, we may assert with almost one hundred percent certainty that the child fell from the tower, at this point here…do you see?”

Another “almost” mixed in among Chang’s words as he pointed to the exact spot in the photograph. At that moment an assistant appeared at the doorway.

“Dr. Vross, you’re wanted…”

For a moment Mila couldn’t connect the medical examiner with his real name. Plainly none of his subordinates dared to call him Chang.

“Excuse me,” he said, leaving them on their own.

“I have to go too,” said Mila, and Boris nodded.

As she left, she passed close to the shelf with Billy’s skates and tape recorder on it, and set down the figurines she had bought. Boris noticed.

“His voice is on it…”

“What?” she asked, not understanding.

Boris nodded at the tape recorder, and repeated: “Billy’s voice. His made-up news reports…”

He smiled. But it was a sad smile.

“Have you managed to listen to them?”

Boris nodded. “Yes, only the first bit, then I couldn’t go any further…”

“I understand…” Mila said simply.

“The tape is almost perfectly preserved, do you know that? The acids produced by the”—he couldn’t bring himself to say it—“decomposition process haven’t damaged it. Chang says that’s pretty rare. Maybe it depended on the nature of the ground he was buried in. There were no batteries, I put them in myself.”

Mila pretended to be surprised, to ease Boris’s tension. “So the tape recorder works.”

“Of course it does. It’s Japanese!”

They both laughed.

“Do you want to listen to the whole thing with me?”

Mila thought for a moment before replying. She didn’t really want to.
There are things that should be allowed to rest in peace,
she thought. But in this case it was Boris who needed to listen, and she didn’t want to tell him he couldn’t.

“OK, then, turn it on.”

Boris walked over to the tape recorder, pressed play and, in that cold morgue, Billy Moore came back to life.

“…We’re in the legendary Wembley Stadium, sports listeners! The match is one that will go down in the history of the game: England v. Germany!”

He had a lively voice, with a sibilant “
s
” on which his sentences frequently stumbled. His words contained the sound of a smile, and Mila thought she could actually see Billy, young and carefree, trying to give the world some of his distinctive joy.

Mila and Boris smiled with him.

“The temperature is mild, and even though it’s late autumn, no rain is forecast. The teams are already lined up in the center circle to hear the national anthems…The terraces are packed with fans! What a sight, ladies and gentlemen! We will shortly witness a great football clash! But first the list of players who will be taking part in today’s—
Oh my Lord, I am sorry and I repent with all my heart for my sins, because by sinning I have deserved your punishment, and much more because I have offended you, who are infinitely good and worthy of love beyond all things.”

Mila and Boris looked at one another uncomprehendingly. The voice that had been superimposed over the first recording was much feebler.

“It’s a prayer.”

“But that’s not Billy…”

“
…I propose with your holy assistance never to offend you again, and to shun all opportunities for sin. Lord of mercy, forgive me.”

“That’s fine.”

A man’s voice.

“
What do you want to say to me?”

“
I have said many bad words recently. And three days ago I stole some biscuits from the larder, but Jonathan ate them with me…And also…also I copied my maths homework.”

“Nothing else?”

“That must be Father Rolf,” said Mila.

“…”

“Think very carefully, Ron.”

The name chilled the silence in the room. And Ronald Dermis, too, returned to his childhood.

“
Actually…there is something…”

“And do you want to talk to me about it?”

“…No.”

“If you don’t talk to me, how can I give you absolution?”

“…I don’t know.”

“You know what happened to Billy, don’t you, Ron?”

“God took him away.”

“It wasn’t God, Ron. You know who it was?”

“He fell. He fell from the tower.”

“But you were with him…”

“…Yes.”

“Whose idea was it to go up there?”

“…Someone had hidden his skates in the tower.”