The Whisperer (31 page)

“And what will you do with the rest of the staff?”

“They’re in custody until we’ve cleared up the issue of whether or not they took any money, and how much they knew.”

“Rockford didn’t stop at corrupting the people he had around him, did he?”

Goran was reading Roche’s thoughts, and the chief inspector admitted: “Some years ago, a policeman’s suspicions were aroused: he was investigating the disappearance of a teenage boy who had run away from home and robbed a general store. His trail brought us here. At that point, Rockford consulted some powerful friends, and the cop was transferred…Another time, a couple were parked on the road that runs along the wall surrounding the estate. They saw someone climbing over it: it was a half-naked boy, wounded in one leg and in a state of shock. They took him in their car and brought him to hospital. He only stayed there for a few hours: someone came and got him, saying they were from the police. From that point onwards nothing more was heard of the boy. The doctors and nurses were given large bribes to keep their mouths shut. The couple were illicit lovers, and all that it took was a threat to reveal all to their respective spouses.”

“That’s terrible,” said Mila.

“I know.”

“And what can you tell us about the sister?”

“I don’t think Lara Rockford’s quite right in the head. The traffic accident left her in a really bad way. It happened not far from here. She did it to herself: she came out into the road and drove her car into an oak tree.”

“We should still talk to her. And to Rockford,” said Goran. “He probably knows who Albert is.”

“How on earth are you going to talk to him? He’s in an irreversible coma!”

“Then he’s got away with it!” Boris’s face was a mask of rage. “Not only can he be no help to us, but he won’t spend a day in jail for what he’s done!”

“Oh, no, you’re wrong,” said Roche. “If there is a hell, they’ll be waiting for him there. But he’s going there very slowly and painfully.”

“Then why are they keeping him alive?”

Roche smiled ironically, raising one eyebrow: “His sister wants them to.”

The inside of the Rockfords’ house was deliberately made to make you think of a castle. The interior architecture was dominated by black marble, whose veined surfaces absorbed all the light. Heavy velvet curtains obscured the windows. Most of the paintings and tapestries showed scenes of hunting and bucolic revelry. A huge crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling.

Mila felt a sudden sensation of bitter cold as soon as she passed through the doorway. However luxurious it might have been, the house had a very decadent atmosphere. If you listened carefully you could hear silences past, which had settled over time into that looming quietude.

Lara Rockford had “consented to receive them.” She knew very well that she couldn’t have got out of it, but the use of that phrase provided a clue to the kind of person they were about to meet.

She was waiting for them in the library. Mila, Goran and Boris would question her.

Mila saw her in profile, sitting on a leather sofa, her arm sweeping elegantly as she brought a cigarette to her lips. She was extremely beautiful. From a distance, they were all struck by the slight curve of her forehead running down the slender nose to end in a fleshy mouth. As they got closer, they saw an intense, magnetic green in her eye, framed by a long, graceful eyebrow.

But when they came in and saw her from the front, they were startled by the sight of the other half of her face. It was ravaged by an enormous scar that, starting at her hairline, dug its way down her forehead to plunge into an empty eye socket, before plummeting like the furrow of a tear to end below her chin.

Mila also noticed the woman’s stiff leg, obvious despite the other leg thrown over it. Beside her, Lara held a book. The cover was turned face down and they couldn’t see either the title or the author.

“Good day,” she said. “To what do I owe your visit?”

She didn’t invite them to sit. They stood where they were on the large rug that covered almost half the floor.

“We’d like to ask some questions,” said Goran. “If possible, of course…”

“Please, I’m listening.”

Lara Rockford stubbed out what was left of her cigarette in an alabaster ashtray. Then she took another from the pack in her lap, in a leather case, along with a gold lighter. As she lit it, her thin fingers trembled very slightly.

“It was you who offered the ten million reward for finding the sixth girl,” said Goran.

“It seemed the least I could do.”

She was challenging them on the terrain of truth. Perhaps she wanted to upset them, perhaps it was only her curious refusal to conform, as a contrast to the austerity of the house in which she was exiled.

Goran decided to rise to the challenge.

“Did you know about your brother?”

“Everyone knew. No one said anything.”

“Why did they break their silence this time?”

“What do you mean?”

“The gamekeeper who found the little girl’s body: I imagine he was on the payroll too…”

Mila guessed what Goran had already worked out, that Lara could easily have just hushed up the whole business. But she hadn’t wanted to.

“Do you believe in the existence of the soul?”

As she asked the question, Lara stroked the cover of the book beside her.

“Do you?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while…”

“Is that why you won’t let the doctors disconnect your brother from the machines that are still keeping him alive?”

The woman didn’t reply immediately. Instead she raised her eyes to the ceiling. Joseph B. Rockford was on the floor above, in the bed in which he had slept since childhood. His room had been turned into an intensive care ward worthy of a modern hospital. He was connected to a machine that breathed for him, that fed him medicines and liquids, that cleansed his blood and relieved his bowels.

“Don’t misunderstand me: I
want
my brother to die.”

She looked sincere.

“Your brother probably knew the man who kidnapped and killed the five little girls, and now he’s keeping the sixth one prisoner. You can’t imagine who it could be…”

Lara turned her one eye towards Goran: at last she was looking him in the face. Or rather she was ostentatiously letting him look at her.

“Who knows, it could be a member of staff. One of the ones who are here now, or one who was here in the past. You should check.”

“We’re already doing that, but I fear that the man we’re looking for is too clever to grant us a similar favor.”

“As you will already have understood, the only people who came into this house were people whom Joseph could pay. Taken on and salaried, under his control. I’ve never seen strangers here.”

“But you saw the boys?” Mila asked on impulse.

The woman took a long time to reply. “He paid them too. Every now and again, especially recently, he liked to give them a kind of contract with which they sold him their soul. They thought it was a game, a joke to get a little money out of a crazy billionaire. So they signed. They all signed. I found some of the parchments in the safe in his study. Their signatures are quite legible, even if what was used was not ink in the strict sense of the word.”

She laughed at her macabre allusion, but it was a strange laugh that disturbed Mila. It gurgled up from the depths. As if she had chewed it for a long time in her lungs before spitting it out. It was raucous with nicotine, but also with pain. Then she picked up the book she kept by her side.

It was
Faust
.

Mila took a step towards her.

“Do you have any objections if we try to question your brother?”

Goran and Boris looked at her as if she had lost her mind.

Lara laughed again. “What do you intend to do? He’s more dead than alive now.” Then her face grew serious as she said, “It’s too late.”

But Mila insisted: “Let us try.”

A
t first sight, Nicla Papakidis looked like a frail woman.

Perhaps because she was short and disproportionately wide at the hips. Perhaps because of her eyes, which contained a sad gaiety that made her look like a song from a Fred Astaire musical, or the photograph of an old New Year’s ball, or the last day of summer.

In actual fact she was very strong.

She had built up her strength a little at a time, in years of adversities great and small. She was born in a little village, the first of seven children, the only woman. She was only eleven years old when her mother died. So it was up to her to keep the household going, look after her father and bring up her brothers. She had managed to get them all through school so they would end up with decent jobs. Thanks to the money she had saved with her untiring sacrifices and severe household economies, they had never wanted for anything. She had seen them marry good girls, set up homes and provide about twenty little nieces and nephews who were her pride and joy. When even the youngest of the brothers had left the paternal home, she had stayed to look after her father in his old age, refusing to put him in a retirement home. To keep from burdening her brothers and sisters-in-law with that weight, she’d just say: “Don’t worry about me. You’ve got your families, I’m on my own. It isn’t a sacrifice.”

She had tended to her father until he was over ninety, looking after him as if he was a newborn baby. When he died, she had brought all the brothers together.

“I’m forty-seven years old, and I don’t think I’ll ever get married. I won’t have any children of my own, but I love my nieces and nephews as mine. Thank you for the invitation you have all sent me to come and live with you, but I made my choice some years ago, even if I am revealing it to you only now. We will not see each other again, dear brothers…I have decided to dedicate my life to Jesus. From tomorrow I will lock myself away in a closed convent until the end of my days.”

“So she’s a nun!” said Boris who had been listening in silence to Mila’s story as he drove.

“Nicla isn’t just a nun. She’s much more than that.”

“I still can’t believe you managed to persuade Gavila. And not only that, but you managed to persuade Roche!”

“It’s a stab in the dark—what can we lose? And I maintain that Nicla is the right person to keep this business secret.”

“That’s for certain!”

On the backseat there was a box with a big red bow. “Chocolates are Nicla’s only weakness,” Mila had said when asking Boris if they could stop at a sweet shop.

“But if she’s in a closed order, she can’t come with us.”

“Well, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that…”

“What do you mean?”

“Nicla spent some years in a convent. When they realized what she could do, they sent her back into the world.”

They arrived shortly after midday. Chaos ruled in that part of the city. Traffic noise mingled with music from stereos, the screams of arguments from apartment blocks, as well as the sounds of the more or less legal activities going on in the streets. The people who lived there never moved away. The center—which was only a few subway stops away—with its smart restaurants, boutiques and tearooms, might as well have been on the planet Mars.

You were born and you died in areas like this, and you never left.

The SatNav of the car they were traveling in had stopped giving directions immediately after the highway turnoff. The only street signs were the murals that marked the borders of gang territories.

Boris turned off into a side street that ended in a blind alley. For some minutes he had been watching a car that had been given instructions to follow their movements. The fact that two police officers were driving around hadn’t gone unobserved by the sentries who kept every corner of the neighborhood under constant surveillance.

“Just drive at walking pace and keep your hands in view,” Mila had told him, having been in these parts before.

The building they were headed for was at the end of the street. They parked between the carcasses of two burned-out cars. They got out, and Boris started looking round. He was about to turn on the central locking when Mila stopped him.

“Don’t. And leave the keys in, too. These guys would be capable of forcing the doors just out of spite.”

“So what’s going to stop them stealing my car?”

Mila passed by the driver’s side, rummaged in her pocket and took out a red plastic rosary. She wrapped it around the mirror.

“This is the best anti-theft device around here.”

Boris looked at her, puzzled. Then he followed her towards the building.

The cardboard sign at the front door announced:
Food queue starts at 11
. And since not all those for whom the message was intended knew how to read, a drawing had been added with the hands of a clock above a steaming plate.

It smelled of a mixture of cooking and disinfectant. In the hallway some mismatched plastic chairs stood around a table with some old magazines on it. There were also some brochures about various subjects, from the prevention of tooth decay in children to ways of avoiding sexually transmitted diseases. The idea was to make this place resemble a waiting room. Various handbills and leaflets spilled from a noticeboard on the wall. Voices could be heard running from one point of the building to the other, although it was impossible to know exactly where they were coming from.

Mila pulled Boris’s sleeve. “Let’s go, she’s upstairs.”

They started going up. There wasn’t a single unbroken step, and the banister swung dangerously.

“What kind of place is this?” Boris avoided touching anything for fear of some kind of contagion. He went on complaining until they reached the landing.

A very pretty girl of about twenty stood by a glass door. She was handing a bottle of medicine to an old man in ragged clothes who stank of alcohol and acidic sweat.

“You have to take one a day, OK?”

The girl didn’t seem bothered by the stench. She spoke in a loud, kind voice, clearly articulating her words as you do when talking to children. The old man nodded but didn’t look convinced.

Then the girl pressed her point: “It’s very important: you must never forget. Otherwise you’ll end up like last time, when they took you away at death’s door.”

Then she took a handkerchief from her pocket and knotted it around his wrist.

“That way you won’t forget.”

The man smiled contentedly. He took the bottle and walked away, still looking at his arm with its new present.

“Can I help you?” the girl asked them.

“We’re looking for Nicla Papakidis,” said Mila.

Boris stared enraptured at the young woman, suddenly forgetting all the complaints he had been coming out with on the way upstairs.

“I think it’s the last room at the end,” she said, pointing to the corridor behind her.

When they passed beside her, Boris’s gaze fell to her breasts, and encountered the gold cross the girl was wearing around her neck.

“But she’s a…”

“Yes,” Mila replied, trying not to laugh.

“Shame.”

As they walked down the corridor, they were able to look into the rooms that appeared on either side. Steel beds, camp beds or only wheelchairs. They were all occupied by human relics, young and old, without distinction. They were suffering from AIDS; they were drug-dependent or alcoholics with their livers reduced to mush, or they were just sick and old.

They had two things in common. Weary expressions and the awareness of having made poor life choices. No hospital would have had them in that condition. And they probably didn’t have a family to look after them. Or if they did, they had been banished from it.

People came to this place to die. That was what it was all about. Nicla Papakidis called it “the Port.”

“This really is a wonderful day, Nora.”

The nun was carefully combing the long white hair of an old woman lying on the bed facing the window, accompanying her gestures with relaxing words.

“This morning as I walked through the park I left a little bread for the birds. With all this snow they spend all their time in their nests, keeping each other warm.”

Mila knocked at the already open door. Nicla turned round, and when she saw Mila her face lit up.

“My little one!” she said, coming over to hug her. “How lovely to see you again!”

She was wearing a sugar-colored sweater, with the sleeves rolled up because she always felt hot, a black skirt that reached below her knees, and trainers on her feet. Her hair was short and gray. Her very white complexion stressed her intensely blue eyes. The whole effect was one of candor and cleanliness. Boris noted that she wore a red rosary around her neck, like the one Mila had tied to the car mirror.

“This is Klaus Boris, a colleague of mine.”

Boris stepped forward, somewhat uneasily. “A pleasure.”

“You’ve just met Sister Mery, haven’t you?” Nicla asked, shaking his hand.

Boris blushed. “As a matter of fact…”

“Don’t worry, she has that effect on lots of people…” Then she turned to look at Mila again: “Why did you come here to the Port, little one?”

Mila grew serious. “You may have heard of the case of the missing girls.”

“We pray for them here every evening. But the newsmen don’t tell us much.”

“I can’t either.”

Nicla stared at her: “You’ve come here about the sixth one, haven’t you?”

“What can you tell me about her?”

Nicla sighed. “I’m trying to establish contact. But it isn’t easy. My gift isn’t what it once was: it’s got a lot weaker. Perhaps I should be glad of that, since if I lost it entirely they would let me go back and join my fellow sisters in the convent.”

Nicla Papakidis didn’t like being called a medium. She said it wasn’t the right word to describe a “gift from God.” She didn’t feel special. Her talent was. She was just the conduit chosen by God to bear it within her and use it for the benefit of others.

Among the many things she had said to Boris while they were heading for the Port, Mila had told him about when Nicla had discovered she had superior sensory abilities.

“At the age of six she was already famous in her village for finding missing objects: wedding rings, house keys, wills too well hidden by the deceased…One evening the chief of the local police turned up at her house: a five-year-old boy had gone missing and his mother was desperate. She was brought to the woman, who begged her to find her son. Nicla stared at her for a moment, and then said, ‘This woman is lying. She buried him in the vegetable garden behind the house.’ And that’s exactly where they found him.”

Boris was very shaken by the story. Perhaps that was partly why he went and sat a little apart from the others, letting Mila talk to the nun.

“I have to ask you something a bit different from usual,” said the policewoman. “I need you to come to a place and try to make contact with a dying man.”

Mila had used Nicla’s visions several times in the past. Sometimes the solution to her cases had come thanks to her intervention.

“Little one, I can’t move from here, you know: they always need me.”

“I know, but I can’t help insisting. It’s the only hope we have of saving the sixth little girl.”

“I told you: I’m not sure my ‘gift’ still works.”

“I thought about you for another reason, too…there’s a large sum of money available for anyone who finds the girl.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that. But what could I do with ten million?”

Mila looked around her, as if it was natural to think of using the reward money to renovate this place. “Believe me: when you know the whole story, you’ll realize that it would be the best possible use for that money. So, what do you say?”

“Vera has to come and see me today.”

It was the old woman in the bed who spoke. Until then she had lain silent and motionless looking out the window.

Nicla approached her: “Yes, Nora, Vera will be coming later.”

“She promised.”

“Yes, I know. She promised and she will keep her word, you’ll see.”

“But that boy is sitting on her chair,” she said, pointing to Boris, who immediately began to get up.

But Nicla stopped him: “Stay where you are.” Then, in a quieter voice: “Vera was her twin. She died seventy years ago when they were still children.”

The nun saw Boris blanch and smiled wryly: “No, officer, I can’t contact the afterlife. But Nora likes to be told that her sister is coming to see her every now and again.”

“So you’ll come?” Mila pressed. “I promise someone will bring you back here before evening.”

Nicla Papakidis thought about it again for a moment. “But you’ve brought something for me?”

A smile spread across Mila’s face. “The chocolates are waiting for you down in the car.”

Nicla nodded contentedly, then turned serious again. “I won’t like what I see in that man, will I?”

“I really don’t think so.”

Nicla clutched her rosary. “Fine, let’s go.”

It’s called “pareidolia”: it’s the instinctive tendency to find familiar shapes in chaotic images. In the clouds, in constellations or in the flakes of oatmeal floating in a bowl of milk.

In the same way, Nicla Papakidis saw things blossoming inside her. She didn’t call them visions. And she liked the word
pareidolia
because—like herself—it had Greek origins.

She explained it to Boris as she sat in the back of the car gulping down one chocolate after another. What startled him wasn’t so much the nun’s story as the fact that he had found his own car where he had left it, without a scratch, in that rough neighborhood.

“Why do you call it the Port?”

“That depends what you believe in, Boris. Some see it only as a point of arrival. Others as one of departure.”

“What about you?”

“Both.”

In early afternoon the Rockford estate came into view.

Goran and Stern were waiting for them outside the house. Sarah Rosa was upstairs making arrangements with the medical staff looking after the dying man.

“You’ve got here just in time,” said Stern. “The situation has worsened very quickly since this morning. The doctors are sure it’s only a matter of hours now.”