by David Hewson
Laila couldn’t stop stealing either, even in the house. Peroni had patiently removed all manner of stuff—cutlery, food, family photographs, even an old, stained ashtray—from the multitude of pockets in the grubby black jacket the girl wore all the time. God knows what she’d stashed in the room Nic had given her upstairs, where she retreated from time to time.
The three of them now sat in front of the bigger of the two fires, Laila sprawled out teenage-fashion on an old sofa, trying to read a comic book Nic had dug up from somewhere. Peroni was slumped in the chair next to her, eyes closed, snoring lightly. It was getting on for noon. Teresa had already called the office and checked with Silvio Di Capua. The autopsy on Mauro Sandri was done, the report filed safely in the cabinet marked “boring,” the one that said people who die from gunshot wounds and knives were rarely deserving of further attention. Agent Leapman and his friends had made sure she couldn’t get her hands on the one body that did interest her, that of the so-called Margaret Kearney.
Silvio sounded as if he was coping. He needed to be left on his own more, Teresa thought, needed to understand he was capable of this.
Then the sequence of events of the previous day raced through her mind.
“Shit,” she hissed abruptly to herself and reached again for the phone. Gianni Peroni didn’t even stir. He was sound asleep.
When she phoned, Teresa had meant to tell Silvio to take the dead American woman’s belongings round to the embassy. It had slipped her memory. You’re getting old, she thought. This is Alzheimer’s kicking in.
And it doubtless meant another argument soon, maybe more trouble for Leo Falcone from those faceless men above him. She’d heard whispers going round the Questura the previous night. Falcone was in trouble. His career escalator was stuck. Maybe soon it would start to go the other way.
Yeah, she thought. These were the tricks men played when they wanted something. Don’t take a person to one side and say, what’s the problem? Just bring out the whips and the shackles and start talking demotion. Maybe worse.
On the other hand …
It meant there was the opportunity for another look. Once they’d achieved something here. Not that she expected to find anything. She didn’t fool herself about that for one moment. It would just feel right to be trying. She’d been no use to Peroni and Nic with the girl. They might as well have invited in an alien.
Or Leo Falcone, she suddenly thought.
“Laila,” she whispered, catching the kid’s attention. She got a hint of a suspicious smile in return. Teresa nodded at the sleeping Peroni, making the obvious gesture with her two palms pressed to the sides of her head.
Then she pointed to the kitchen and got up. The girl, as she’d hoped, followed her.
There was just enough juice left for a couple of small glasses. Men and shopping, she thought. Venus and Mars.
“We made a good snowman. You must have done that before.”
The girl made a puzzled face. “No.”
The squat figure sat in the garden, staring back at them through the frosted glass, an old man’s hat found in a cupboard somewhere perched lopsidedly on his white head.
“We treat you like a kid. And you’re not. Not really, are you?”
Laila squirmed. Teresa wished she could get the hang of this awkward challenge in communication. Peroni had a family of his own. It gave him a head start with a recalcitrant kid like this.
“It doesn’t matter. When I go to town, is there something you need? Someone you’d like me to contact?”
The dark eyes clouded over instantly. All that suspicion again. Maybe Peroni would have been graced with a real answer. Not her. “No …”
Teresa touched the old, grubby jacket. “How about some new clothes?”
“I get my own clothes.”
“You’re such a pretty kid. Slim too. It would be a pleasure to buy something. I was never slim. At your age …”
Teresa tried to remember herself then, to put the image she had in her own head against what she saw in Laila now. “I was a fat, bad-tempered little monster. Not much changes.”
The girl laughed, a little nervously.
“What’s so funny?” Teresa asked. “Don’t you believe me?”
“No!”
There was a divide you couldn’t cross and if she knew more about kids, as much as Peroni did, she’d have understood that already. A kid could never see an adult and imagine them when they were young, never envisage them as anything but what they were: part of another world, in Laila’s case a threatening one, fixed, run by other people, with their arguments and hidden possibilities. Peroni had worked on that assumption from the moment he started talking to the girl. He didn’t pretend to be anything he wasn’t. He simply set out his position—I will be your friend, you can trust me, just keep listening and you’ll see—and let her find a way to get close to him, like a moth attracted to a distant flickering flame. It established a connection, almost straightaway. It created room for hurt too. Teresa and the kid had both heard the tail end of Peroni’s heated conversation with Falcone. Peroni even told her a little of what it was about. Teresa, the grown-up rational adult, was able to dismiss this level of bickering as the way things were. Laila was different. She heard the sound of men yelling at each other and shrank into herself, fearing the worst.
“So what do you think I was like when I was your age?”
Laila thought about it. “Normal.”
“Hah! How wrong can you get? I’m not normal now, kid. You want to know what they call me? In the Questura?”
“What?”
“ ‘Crazy Teresa.’ The lunatic pathologist. Mad as they come.”
Laila shook her head, refusing to accept a word of it. This seemed, to Teresa Lupo, dreadfully unfair.
“It’s true,” she asserted, “whether you believe it or not. And I am crazy. Crazy enough to buy you some stuff just because I want to. Just because all that black gear drives me nuts. Why be pretty and hide it?”
Laila didn’t think of herself as pretty. Pretty didn’t exist in Laila’s world. She probably didn’t think of herself at all. A flicker of anxiety crossed her face. “When will they make me go?”
“Nobody’s making you do anything, Laila.”
She didn’t believe that either. Teresa couldn’t blame her. It was a particularly vague answer, one full of holes even a thirteen-year-old street kid could see.
“Gianni stays with me?”
“Sure. For a while. But he’s a cop. He’s got work to do. Lots of work. You’re not his …”
Teresa checked herself, horrified at the words running through her head: You’re not his kid, he’s got two of them and he already thinks he’s failed them. You’re just filling in the spaces without even knowing it.
“It’s not his job, Laila. We’ll work something out. But Gianni and Nic are paid to find bad people and put them in prison. They have to find that man you saw. They need you to help them.”
The girl threw her skinny arms around herself, staring at the floor.
“I didn’t see anything,” she mumbled. “I just …”
You didn’t threaten in a situation like this. That couldn’t work. Yet they’d spent hours trying to pull out the facts of what happened, piece by piece, from Laila’s head, and it was all so … meagre. The address had come easily. The rest was a jumble. She had followed the man because he looked “interesting.”
Really. How, Laila? The kid didn’t explain. She merely shrugged. This was what she did. Follow people. Maybe, Teresa thought, offer them something—she didn’t want to think what—then take their money and their wallets, too.
They’d got Laila to talk as far as she wanted to. Then she’d clammed up, however subtly Peroni tried to find a way past her defences. Every understated question just walked straight into a brick wall.
Teresa Lupo tried to imagine what it was like for her that night. You sneaked into an old temple because someone left the door open. So what were you thinking?
<
br /> It’s warm in there.
OK. And what do you think when you get there and see two people, a man and a woman, close up to each other, something going on?
They’re going to make out and I can watch.
OK too. She knew she’d have done that at thirteen.
I can steal stuff. God knows what.
And that was OK as well, except nothing had gone the way it was supposed to. The two didn’t make out. Probably not, anyway, from what Teresa had seen of the body.
The man had strangled her with his special piece of cord, the one he kept for such occasions. Then he took off all her clothes, pulled out a scalpel, looked around the room, flipped her over so that her dead face bit into all that ancient stone, did his work (which he’d know by heart by now, without the need for templates, because he’d done it—how many?—eight times before already), then flipped the poor mutilated bitch back and let her blank, unseeing eyes stare at the oculus, pulled out her arms like that, cold fingers pointing out at some hidden magical points in space.
Teresa looked at Laila and a hidden inner voice provided the answer, persuaded her she knew what had happened, so surely she didn’t need to keep asking this poor kid over and over again.
Laila had done what any sane person would have done in the circumstances. She’d hidden in the shadows, just where she was when Nic came into the place, cowering, shivering, stifling the scream in her throat, refusing to look because seeing would make those noises she was hearing take on another dimension, let them climb straight into her brain and stay there forever.
Teresa put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and smiled. “Just tell me the truth, Laila. Then we’ll leave it. You really didn’t see anything, did you? It was just too … bad. Too scary to look. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’d all have done the same.”
“I told you,” the girl said with a pout.
No, you didn’t, she wanted to say. Even Gianni Peroni had missed that, maybe because it needed a woman to understand how a teenage girl would react to that particular fear. Men had a curiosity they couldn’t quell. They had to watch. It was compulsive. A woman had somewhere else to go, somewhere inside herself where she could believe the world was still warm and kind and ultimately good.
She wished to God Peroni had been awake and standing there then. Because Teresa Lupo knew this kid was telling the truth, and knew, too, she was hiding something. No amount of street life, no big, shadowy pre-history, could explain the shifty expression in her eyes. There was a secret there. Maybe it was too personal—thirteen-year-olds could do things for a man too. Maybe …
You haven’t a clue, Teresa told herself. Quit guessing. Either she tells or she doesn’t.
Teresa thought about Falcone and how he would have handled an interview like this. He and Peroni were so different, used such dissimilar tactics to reach the same end. Temperamentally she was closer to Falcone. She didn’t like fishing, didn’t care for walking around a problem, looking for its weaknesses. You plunged in, asked the right questions, then stood there, arms crossed, tapping your feet loudly on the floor until the answers came. It was one reason she liked Peroni so much. Loved him even, though she wasn’t quite sure exactly what that meant. Gianni added some charity into the day-to-day routine of investigation. He got what he wanted by exploiting some innate belief that in just about everyone there existed some small spark of humanity, if only you could find it. She was in no doubt this was a weird way for a cop to proceed. Even Costa, who was once a pushover, had started to toughen up his act of late. The job did that to most of them. Why twenty years of dealing with vice made Gianni Peroni the man he was, more sensitive, not less, was beyond her.
But Peroni had gone as far as he could. It was time to lean on Falcone’s tactics a little. Besides, all she was doing was telling Laila the truth, juiced up a little.
“Do you know what it means to get fired?” Teresa asked sotto voce, casting an eye into the living room, making sure Peroni was still asleep.
Some emotion flickered in Laila’s eyes. “I’m not stupid.”
“I know that. I just wanted to make sure you understood.”
“Understood what?”
Teresa hesitated, as if she’d overstepped the mark. “It’s nothing. It’s about Gianni. It doesn’t concern you.”
“I know what being fired means,” the girl repeated.
“When that other man came, the inspector,” Teresa continued, “he asked us to go outside. Remember?”
Laila took Falcone’s banknote out of her pocket, rolled it in her fingers and almost smiled.
“Quite,” Teresa said evenly. “You heard the inspector and Gianni arguing. Did Gianni tell you what he said?”
“No,” she replied, puzzled.
“Typical.” It would have been, too. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Laila. I shouldn’t, but you two seem to get along so maybe you ought to know. Gianni’s in trouble. Things haven’t been going so well recently.”
She let that sink in, waited for the moment, hoped she wouldn’t come to hate herself too much along the way.
“The inspector came to tell Gianni that it’s make-or-break time. Either he gets you to tell him what you know or he’s fired. No job. No money, Laila. Nothing. He’s got kids too. One about your age.”
The girl shivered and stared at the table. “It’s not true.”
Teresa shrugged. “If that’s what you want to think. It doesn’t matter. Why should you worry about Gianni anyway? You don’t even know him.”
She reached forward, touched the kid’s lank hair and hoped to God Peroni never found out about this. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you with this. It’s none of your business. I’ve got to go soon. I’ll be upstairs for a little while. Please don’t tell him I told you.”
Teresa went up the old stone steps and found a spare bedroom. There was nothing for her there. She just wanted them to be together, Peroni and the girl. She could imagine Peroni waking up, finding the kid staring at him, ready to talk. It could work. She’d seen that extraordinary bond grow between them that morning. It had to work. The kid wouldn’t talk to anyone else.
So she lay on the cover of the bed in the dusty, musky-smelling room, closed her eyes and dreamed a pleasant dream, a stupid, childlike fantasy set in a bright world of pastel colours where the sun always shone, where families, young and old, stayed together always, sharing the years, growing closer all the time. It was the kind of dream place you never wanted to leave, a warm, embracing neverland just beyond reach.
A noise intruded into this welcome reverie: the sound of the downstairs door.
Nic, she thought. He knew as much about family as Peroni in a way. It was all wrapped up in a tight bundle inside this old, cold farmhouse buried beneath the snow off the old Appian Way. Where you could just sleep forever with a musty, ancient coverlet keeping out the freezing cold.
Except …
The door opened and closed again after a while and that didn’t add up, that could only be part of this half dream.
Maybe.
Cursing herself, Teresa Lupo threw off the stupor, forced herself awake and, with growing trepidation, went downstairs.
Peroni still slumbered in front of the fire. Nic was going through the place, room by room.
“Where’s Laila?” he asked. “Upstairs with you?”
“I don’t think so,” she answered.
Teresa Lupo went to the front window. The snow was piling down again, a thick blanket of gigantic soft flakes. Through them she could just make out a couple of fresh tracks zigzagging towards the gate, fast disappearing in the blizzard.
“Shit,” she sighed to herself. “Shit, shit and double shit. The kid’s only thirteen for Christ’s sake. How the hell am I supposed to know she’s an escapologist? Didn’t you see someone on a bike when you came here?”
Nic stuck a hand towards the blizzard beyond the window. “In that weather?”
She went back to the living room. Her handba
g was open, her purse, too, the money all gone.
A big, familiar figure came and stood by her. She could sense his puzzlement without even looking at him. Peroni had some silent, unseen way of communicating his emotions.
“Where is she?” Costa asked again.
“You’ve got a bike here?”
He nodded.
“Not anymore. She must have taken it. I’m sorry, I fell asleep.”
“For Christ’s sake …” Peroni muttered under his breath. “Excuse me! You were sleeping too. And you were the cop here, remember?”
Costa was juggling the keys to the jeep already. He looked wiped out. “I was trying to help!” Teresa yelled, watching the two men head for the door, not bothering to look back. “I was trying …”
Then they were gone.
“Shit,” she said to no one.
She didn’t even have time to tell them it was her fault. Or to wonder:
Why?
A swirl of fatigue swam around her head. Then something made her jump: the phone trilling like a wild beast, the volume turned up to max the way a solitary man would in a big house like this.
“Yeah?” she yelled into the thing.
It was Silvio Di Capua, screaming hysterically from his mobile, wondering why she hadn’t answered hers, not understanding it was in another room, dead to the world while she slept elsewhere. She listened, ruefully grateful that some work had appeared to thrust aside the doubts and guilt lurking inside her head. Silvio had danced this frantic little dance in tantrum-land all too often, but this time round it sounded as if he had good reason to do so.
“It’s a body, Silvio,” she said, when she had a chance to interrupt the babbling sea of details and questions. “Just remember that and follow procedures.”
“Oh, wonderful!” he yelled. “Procedures, procedures. Tell me that when you get here. It’s a slaughterhouse and right near McDonald’s too.”
“Well, in that case it’s somewhat appropriate, don’t you think?”
“This is not a time for jokes, Teresa. Falcone’s livid you weren’t answering your phone.”
“What am I?” she screamed back at him. “Instant fucking pathologist? Just add water and I crawl out of the bottle?”
