The Girl in the Fog

by Donato Carrisi

  ‘Is that where you’ve been all day?’ Vogel’s tone was reproving but good-natured. ‘While you were spending your time on this stuff, I also had some video footage checked.’

  ‘What video footage?’ Borghi asked in surprise.

  ‘The footage from the security cameras in the Kastners’ neighbourhood.’

  ‘But you said you weren’t interested in it, because it only showed the houses, not the street.’ Everyone cultivates his own garden: Vogel had used those words at the first briefing. What was he hiding from him now?

  But Vogel wasn’t about to share his findings. He put a hand on Borghi’s shoulder and walked him to the door. ‘Get some rest, Borghi. And let me do my job.’

  11 January

  Nineteen days after the disappearance

  ‘I have no intention of authorising any arrest.’

  Mayer’s words sounded final, decisive. Once again, Vogel had come up against the prosecutor’s stubbornness.

  ‘You’re ruining everything,’ he said. ‘We need to arrest Martini, otherwise everyone will say we’re tormenting an innocent man for nothing.’

  ‘And isn’t that the case?’

  Vogel had brought her a crucial clue as a gift – enlargements of frames from the footage captured by security cameras in the Kastners’ neighbourhood – hoping it would be enough to make Mayer change her mind. Obviously, it hadn’t worked.

  ‘I need concrete proof. What part of that don’t you understand?’

  ‘You need proof to sentence someone, but you only need clues to arrest them,’ Vogel replied. ‘If we arrest Martini now, he’ll probably decide to cooperate.’

  ‘You want to extract a confession from him.’

  They had been going on like this for at least twenty minutes, shut up in Vogel’s changing room-cum-office. ‘Once Martini realises he’s lost everything and has no way out, he’ll talk to ease his conscience.’

  They were both standing among the lockers, but Mayer kept tapping her high-heeled shoe nervously on the floor. ‘I’m not stupid, Vogel, I’ve figured out what your game is. You’re trying to back me into a corner and force me to make a decision I don’t agree with. You’re threatening to make me look ridiculous in the eyes of the public.’

  ‘I don’t need to threaten you in order to achieve my aim,’ he said. ‘I have rank and I have experience. They should be enough to add weight to my theory.’

  ‘Just like in the Mutilator investigation?’

  Mayer had mentioned this deliberately. In fact, Vogel wondered why she hadn’t done so sooner. He smiled. ‘You know nothing about the Derg case. You think you know, but you don’t.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, what is there to know? A man was thrown in jail because of a cleverly fabricated charge. He spent four years of his life in a narrow cell, in solitary. He lost everything – his family, his health. He nearly died from a stroke. And why? All because somebody skewed the investigation by planting a false piece of evidence.’ There was contempt in the prosecutor’s voice. ‘What’s to guarantee that won’t happen again?’

  Vogel refused to answer. Instead, he picked up the frame enlargements he had laid out on the table, which he had thought were his winning cards, and walked to the door, intending to leave the room immediately.

  ‘Do you even remember when it was that you lost your integrity, Special Agent Vogel?’

  Mayer’s words reached him at the door and he came to an abrupt halt. Something was preventing him from leaving. He turned back to the prosecutor with a look of defiance. ‘Derg was pronounced innocent by a court of law, and received generous compensation for four years’ unfair detention … But if he wasn’t the Mutilator, then how come the attacks suddenly stopped after he was arrested?’ Without waiting for an answer, he walked out.

  Outside, in the gym turned operations room, he was greeted by total silence. His men, who had obviously heard the argument, were staring at him, wondering if all the work and effort they had put in over the previous twenty days had been in vain.

  But Vogel turned to Borghi and said, ‘It’s time we spoke to that teacher.’

  It was an unusually sunny morning for January. It didn’t seem like winter. Loris Martini had woken very early. In fact, it would be more correct to say that the thoughts assailing him had woken him. His anxiety could be summed up in a simple message.

  The moment has come. They’re going to arrest you.

  But he didn’t intend to waste this beautiful, sunny, oddly warm day. He’d made Clea a promise and he intended to keep it. So he picked up his box of tools and went into the garden, where reporters and nosy neighbours wouldn’t be able to disturb him. There, shielded by tall hedges, he had begun to transform the derelict gazebo into a greenhouse.

  As he worked hard with hammer and nails, he could feel the sun kissing the back of his neck, the small drops of sweat slowly running down his forehead, the effort toughening his muscles and his heart. There was something rejuvenating about it. But every so often, sadness would descend on him and stay there, silently, reminding him why he had come to this point, why he had lost everything.

  It had all begun before Avechot. The little village in the mountains had seemed like the right place to start over again. Instead, it had been merely the sequel to a nasty episode.

  The thing. Even Stella Honer knew about it.

  Martini wondered how she had found out. The answer was staring him in the face, but he didn’t see it at first. This often happens to men who are naïve. Especially those whose wives are stolen from them without their even noticing.

  Of course. It was Clea’s ex-lover who had sold the information. Elementary.

  And to think that until now he had felt something like respect for the man. Maybe because Clea had chosen him and he trusted his wife’s judgement. He knew it was absurd. But it was also a way of raising her in his estimation, because he couldn’t bear to think that Clea had been so shallow.

  We’re always trying to save others in order to save ourselves, he thought. And perhaps playing the role of the understanding husband had helped him to avoid his duty to face the truth.

  If Clea had cheated on him, it had to have been his fault, too.

  On that distant morning in early June, a pupil’s stupid prank had brought classes to an early end. The anonymous phone call claiming that there was a bomb in the school was typical of the end of the academic year, when pupils were trying to get out of the final exams in order to avoid failure. Everyone knew it was a hoax, but the safety procedures had to be followed. So they all went home early.

  As Martini walked into his apartment, he was greeted by an unexpected silence. Usually when he got home, Clea and Monica were already there and made their presence known by the fact that the television or the stereo was on, or simply by their smell. Lily-of-the-valley for Clea, strawberry chewing gum for Monica. That morning, though, there was none of that.

  On the bus ride home, Martini had thought about how to use those unhoped-for extra hours. He was supposed to be preparing the papers for the final exams, and that was exactly what he would do. But once he was in the apartment, he realised he didn’t feel like doing that. He went to the refrigerator, made himself a salami and cheese sandwich, then sat down in an armchair and switched on the television at low volume. They were showing an old basketball match on one of the channels. He couldn’t believe he had all this time just for himself.

  He couldn’t remember when exactly it happened, whether he had finished his sandwich or what score the game had reached, but he could still recall the sound that had insinuated itself between the commentator’s voice and the noise of the bouncing ball.

  It was like a flapping of wings, a kind of rustling.

  At first, he merely turned his head, trying to work out where it was coming from. Then a gut feeling made him stand up. The sound hadn’t been repeated, but all the same he went into the corridor. Four closed doors, two on each side. For some reason, he chose the bedroom door. He slowly opened it and saw them.


  They weren’t aware of him, any more than he had been aware of them earlier. In that small apartment, they had continued alongside each other, unawares, for several minutes. And they could have carried on like that if something hadn’t occasioned their encounter.

  Clea was naked, only her legs and pelvis covered by the sheet. Her eyes were closed, and she was lying in a position he knew well. Loris concentrated on the man beneath her, convinced he was looking at himself. But it was somebody else. And what was happening had nothing to do with him.

  Beyond that, he remembered nothing.

  Clea said she heard the door slam. It was only then that she’d realised what had just occurred.

  When he returned home several hours later, she was wearing a loose white sweater and tracksuit bottoms that were too big for her. Maybe she was trying to hide her body – and with it, her sin. She was sitting in the armchair in which he had watched the match that morning. Knees pulled up to her chest, rocking back and forth. She looked at him with vacant eyes. Her hair was dishevelled, her face pale. She didn’t make any excuses. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said. ‘Right away, tomorrow.’

  In his aimless wanderings around town, he had searched for something to say to her, without finding it. Now he said just two words, ‘All right.’

  From then on, they had never mentioned it again. They had moved to Avechot a couple of weeks later. She had given up a job she loved and everything else, just so that she could be forgiven with his silence. And Loris had realised how terrified she was at the prospect of losing him. If only she knew that he was even more terrified than she was …

  The worst thing, however, was finding out the identity of the man his wife had been cheating on him with. Like her, he was a lawyer, and he had the money and the means to help her escape the wretched life which was all her husband could offer her.

  Loris had to come terms with a devastating truth: Clea deserved better.

  And so they had taken refuge in the mountains, so as not to think about it again. But the sour residue of the betrayal remained and was slowly eating away at whatever love they still felt for each other.

  That was why he had made that promise. Never again.

  Now, beneath the undeserved sun of a January morning, he thought once again about the thing, hoping it really was over. When the phone rang in the house, he dropped the hammer on the grass dried by the winter and went into the kitchen to answer it.

  ‘All right, I’ll be there,’ was all he said.

  He opened the fridge. Inside, there was only a wrinkled apple and a four-pack of beer. He took one bottle out and went back to the garden. He opened the bottle with a screwdriver. Then he sat down on the dead grass, his back against one of the beams of the gazebo, and calmly sipped his drink, his eyes half-closed.

  Once he had finished, he looked at his hand, still bandaged ever since the day Anna Lou Kastner had disappeared. He unrolled the bandage and checked the scar. It had almost healed.

  Then he picked up the screwdriver with which he had opened the beer and did the same thing with his injury. He sank the point into his flesh and parted the sides. Not a single moan emerged from his lips. He had been a coward in the past, so he knew he deserved this pain.

  The blood started gushing out, staining his clothes and slowly dripping on the bare soil.

  The warm, sunny day was nothing but a memory now. In the evening, thick, compact clouds had swept into the valley, bringing heavy rain in their wake.

  There was still a flashing sign wishing HAPPY HOLIDAYS to passing motorists on the window of the roadside restaurant. Christmas and New Year had been over for a while, but nobody had had time to remove it. They had been too busy lately.

  At ten o’clock that night, though, the restaurant was empty.

  Vogel had asked the elderly owner to put aside a booth for him, for a special meeting. Although he hadn’t claimed any credit for the sudden increase in business over recent weeks, the man felt indebted to him anyway.

  The glass front door opened, triggering a buzzer. Martini stamped his feet on the ground to shake the rain from his coat, then took off his peaked cap and looked around.

  It was dark, except for the light over one of the booths against the wall. Vogel was already sitting there, waiting for him. Martini walked towards him, his Clarks shoes groaning in contact with the linoleum floor. He sat down at the pale blue Formica table, facing Vogel.

  Vogel was elegantly dressed, as usual. He hadn’t taken off his cashmere coat. On the table in front of him was a thin folder, on which he was drumming with the fingers of both hands.

  It was the first time they had met.

  ‘Do you believe in proverbs?’ Vogel said, without so much as a hello.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Martini asked.

  ‘I’ve always been fascinated by how simply they distinguish between right and wrong. Unlike laws. Laws are always so complicated. They should be written like proverbs.’

  ‘You think right and wrong are simple?’

  ‘No, but I find it comforting to think that someone else should see it that way.’

  ‘Personally, I don’t think the truth is ever simple.’

  Vogel nodded. ‘You may be right.’

  Martini put both arms on the table. He was calm. ‘Why did you want us to meet here?’

  ‘No cameras or microphones, for once. No pain-in-the-neck reporters. No games. Just you and me … I want to give you the chance to convince me that I’m wrong, and that your involvement in this business is purely a misunderstanding.’

  Martini tried to look confident. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Where shall we start?’

  ‘You have no alibi for the day Anna Lou disappeared, and on top of that, you injured your hand.’ He pointed to the bloodstained bandage. ‘I see it hasn’t healed yet. Maybe it needs a few stitches.’

  ‘My wife thinks so, too,’ Martini replied, making it clear he didn’t care for this pretence at concern. ‘It was an accident, as I’ve said before. I slipped and instinctively grabbed a branch to break my fall.’

  Vogel looked down at his folder without opening it. ‘Strange, the forensics man noticed that the sides of the cut are identical … as if caused by a blade.’

  Martini didn’t reply.

  Vogel didn’t labour the point, but moved on. ‘Mattia’s videos, in which your car appears. You’re going to tell me it’s just a coincidence, and anyway it’s impossible to see the driver’s face. And the car was available to the rest of your family … By the way, does your wife have a driving licence?’

  ‘I was always the one driving, leave my wife alone.’ He had gone against Levi’s instructions, but he didn’t care. He didn’t want Clea to be involved, not even if it would help improve his position.

  ‘We’ve analysed the inside of the car,’ Vogel went on. ‘No trace of Anna Lou’s DNA, but oddly enough, there were cat hairs.’

  ‘We don’t have a cat,’ Martini said, somewhat ingenuously.

  Vogel leaned towards him and spoke in a honeyed voice. ‘What would you say if I told you that, thanks to the cat hairs, I can place you on the spot where the girl disappeared?’

  Martini seemed not to understand, but on his face there was curiosity as well as fear.

  Vogel sighed. ‘There’s something that struck me right from the start. Why didn’t Anna Lou resist being taken? Why didn’t she scream? None of the neighbours heard anything. I’ve reached the conclusion that she went with her kidnapper of her own free will … Because she trusted him.’

  ‘Which means she knew him well. And that rules me out. She may have attended my school, but you won’t find anybody who could testify they saw us talk to each other, let alone socialise.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Vogel said calmly, ‘Anna Lou didn’t know her kidnapper. She knew his cat.’ At last, Vogel opened the folder and took out the frame enlargement he had shown Mayer that very morning to persuade her to arrest Martini. ‘We’ve examined the footage from the security came
ras in the girl’s neighbourhood. Unfortunately, none of the cameras point to the street. What is it they say? “Everyone cultivates his own garden.” But it seems that in the days before Anna Lou disappeared, there was a stray cat roaming the area.’

  Martini looked at the photograph. It showed a large tabby cat, ginger and brown, sprawled on the grass.

  Vogel pointed at something. ‘Can you see what’s round its neck?’

  Martini took a closer look and saw a bracelet made of tiny coloured beads.

  Vogel slipped from his wrist the one that had been given to him by Maria Kastner and put it down next to the photograph. ‘Anna Lou used to make them and give them to the people she liked.’

  Martini seemed frozen, unable to react.

  Vogel decided the moment had come to deal the knockout blow. ‘The kidnapper used the cat as bait. He took it there several days earlier and let it loose, confident that Anna Lou, who loves cats and couldn’t have one of her own, would be bound to notice it sooner or later … She not only noticed it, she adopted it by putting a bracelet round its neck. So from now on, my dear Signor Martini, I won’t be constantly after you. If I manage to find that cat, you’re done for anyway.’

  A few moments passed in silence. Vogel knew he had him. He watched him, waiting for a reaction, anything that would tell him he wasn’t wrong. But Martini didn’t say a word. Instead, he stood up and calmly made for the exit. Before stepping outside, though, he turned to Vogel one last time. ‘Talking of proverbs,’ he said. ‘Someone once told me that the devil’s most foolish sin is vanity.’ He left the restaurant, again triggering the buzzer on the door.

  Vogel sat on for a while, enjoying the quiet. He was convinced that he had scored an important point. But Mayer was still a problem. He had to find a way to neutralise her.

  The devil’s most foolish sin is vanity.

  Whatever did Martini mean by that? It could be interpreted as an insult. But Vogel wasn’t sensitive. He knew perfectly well that you take the blows and then you hit back. And the teacher’s hours were numbered.