by Tobias Jones
‘And what did you see?’
‘A man who thought my daughter was his ticket to the big time.’ She looked wistfully round the room and then motioned with her head that we should leave it in peace. I followed her back to the living room with its one floral sofa.
We sat next to each other on the sofa, sitting so close that it was easier to talk to each other staring ahead at the TV and the table.
‘They were together for a while,’ the woman went on, reminiscing about her daughter’s lost innocence. ‘We argued about it. I thought he was inappropriate and told her so. He was her first love, the first man in her life, and she thought he could do no wrong. So we argued and, one day, she just left.’
‘Why did you say the first man in her life? What happened to her father?’
The woman let out a derisive sigh. ‘He legged it long before she was born.’ I could see her out of the corner of my eye, shaking her head. ‘That’s why I was so hard on her when Mori came sniffing around. I didn’t want history to repeat itself.’
‘What history?’
‘What happened to me,’ she said, raising her voice slightly.
I waited, not wanting to push her back to a painful past. ‘Which was?’
I could hear her breathing. Another cat came in and leapt on the table. ‘I was charmed by a man. Some student who was here on holiday with friends. I barely knew what was happening until it was too late.’ We watched the cat in silence for a while, seeing it arch its back and raise its tail as if a puppeteer had tensioned all its strings.
‘That was back in the seventies,’ she said. ‘A single, pregnant girl in the countryside back then was a pariah. People thought I was stupid, loose, immoral. I was treated like I was a murderer. People actually spat at me when I pushed Anna round the village. It was like my life was over. My parents had died, I had no job and no prospect of marriage, and the only thing I had in the world was my little girl. My beautiful, precious, bubbly little girl.’
I looked at her and nodded.
‘That’s all she was when Mori arrived in his flash car, a little girl. And I could see everything starting over again. So I did everything I could to stop it, and that only pushed her further away until,’ her voice broke, suddenly going high-pitched. She stopped abruptly as if silence was the only way to dam the tears.
I looked down at her hand and put mine over it, wrapping my fingers round her loose skin. Her other hand immediately gripped my forearm like I was the only thing keeping her afloat. We sat like that for a while, strangers clinging on to each other.
It sounded as if she had unwittingly lost the prospects and possibilities of her own youth. She had been scorned and shunned, and then the only thing she had in the world, her precious child, had been taken away. And had then gone missing. I stared at the muted TV, watching the fake cheerfulness. It seemed like a distorted mirror of the woman’s sorrow.
‘Why do you care?’ she said after a while.
I repeated to her that I was looking for a young girl. That that was my job.
‘Seems more than a job,’ she said, staring at me.
I looked back at the TV, not wanting to admit it was true. But I knew I was in this game because I had seen too many children lose their families and vice versa. And since I’d never had a family, I was on a mission to put others back together. I met hundreds of kids who had lost their parents, if they had ever had them. Or parents who had lost their kids because of the usual addictions and weaknesses. This job was my way of putting the pieces back together, of trying to reunite families before it was too late. Maybe that’s why this woman and I seemed to have a bond.
‘Where did they go?’ I asked her.
‘Rome.’ She was shaking her head. ‘Mori had put an idea in her head that she could be a showgirl. It became an obsession for her. She wanted to be on TV, to become a star. It got to the stage where she was prepared to sacrifice anything for that ambition.’
‘Including herself?’
She looked at me sharply. ‘She would never have committed suicide. Someone wanted her out of the way.’
I must have looked doubtful, because she started telling me about how her daughter had been scared in the days before her death. ‘She knew too much about certain men in positions of power. She was at all their little parties and when she didn’t get what she wanted, she threatened to expose their sordid world. And the next thing I knew, she was missing. I would rather,’ she had a sharp intake of breath, ‘know she were dead than have this. This uncertainty, this terror that any day the worst is still to come. I still can’t mourn her properly.’
I said nothing to contradict her. It was possible Anna had paid the price for threatening to spill some dirty beans. But it seemed just as likely that she had taken too much bad gear and gone the way of so many aspiring starlets before her. Someone may have just chucked her in the Tiber after an overdose.
‘Did Anna ever mention to you the people she was seeing in Rome? The jobs she was doing?’
She shook her head, staring at her feet. ‘We were barely speaking to each other back then. She knew what I thought of what she was doing with her life. And I knew what she thought of what I had done with mine.’ She looked up at me. ‘We had grown so far apart . . .’ She trailed off, her eyes losing focus as she stared at the wall opposite.
‘No names, no mention of anyone in particular?’
She shook her head slowly, her stare still lost in the distance. ‘I don’t see that I can really help you. It was so long ago.’
‘Mori’s still around. Whatever happened to your daughter might be about to repeat itself. I’m sorry to remind you of all this, but anything you can tell me . . . anything Anna told you, might be useful.’
She sat there motionless. I watched the wheat outside the window swaying in the breeze. It looked like a desert sand dune, changing shape and staying the same.
‘The last time I spoke to her,’ she said dreamily, ‘she told me she was going to be on television, that she had been assigned a role as one of the dancing troupe in one of those programmes. She was so excited, she thought she had finally made it. It was like the first time she managed to tie her shoelaces – an unbridled pride in what she could do. She wanted me to know that it had worked out, that her career was taking off. Said it like she had proved me wrong.’ She spoke with a weariness that suggested she never shared the excitement. ‘That was the last time I spoke to her.’
‘She didn’t say which programme?’
She shrugged. ‘She probably did, but I dismissed it all as another of her fantasies. She was good at talking herself up. It’s what she did when she had done talking herself down. She had no grip on reality. She lived in a fantasy world.’
That’s why she wanted to go on TV, I thought. That’s where fantasies came true, where everything was possible. TV has no grip on reality either, which is why it’s obsessed with reality, like it’s a medicine the industry needs to try to wean itself off the fake, the false, the fantastic. Only instead of reality curing television, reality is infected by TV, it becomes fake and false itself. It changes what’s normal. We begin to think something is only truly real if it’s been on television. That, I guessed, was why so many wounded girls with low self-esteem like Anna thought that an appearance would make their lives so much better, so much more real.
‘Mori took Anna away from me.’ She was speaking quietly, almost to herself. ‘He was the one that took her away.’ She said it as if he had done more than simply drive her to Rome.
‘He took away her dream too,’ I said. ‘He’s the reason she never got taken on as a showgirl by the studios.’
‘How?’
I didn’t want to tell her about the compromising images, about the career the two had forged together. ‘I don’t know exactly,’ I said weakly. ‘But it was his fault her dream never came true.’
‘And did he kill her?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
&nb
sp; ‘No motive. She had made him money in the past, and he probably thought she would in the future.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t see it.’
‘Who, then?’
‘It’s possible the station’s owner had something to do with it. Or someone in his organisation. Your daughter knew about a few financial scams he was running and was threatening to make it all public.’
‘Like what?’
I gave her a brief outline of Di Angelo’s involvement with the inflated viewing figures and the inflated invoices. She shook her head as I was talking. ‘He’ll be at home in the Senate.’
‘There’s no evidence he was involved with Anna’s disappearance. He’s a major political player. People like that don’t get dragged into investigations, or if they do they’ll make out they’re victims of a political conspiracy. And he’s not just a politician, he’s still got that TV station behind him. It’s like he’s holding a nuclear weapon and his enemies have only water pistols. He can aim just where he wants. He’s as close as this country comes to an untouchable.’
She looked at me, shaking her head with an aggrieved smile on her face.
‘I’m afraid,’ I said slowly, ‘that it’s unlikely you’ll ever get a satisfactory answer to what happened to Anna. I keep asking questions, but the answer never seems to get any closer.’
Her face betrayed despair. She looked pained and angry at the same time as she looked up at me. ‘Grieving parents always say they never give up. That they’ll keep fighting. That’s what you always hear them say.’ She stared at the table and shook her head. ‘I can’t keep fighting any more. There’s no point. I’m no closer to knowing where my Anna is, or who put her there.’
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything I could say.
‘And sometimes,’ her voice was faltering slightly, ‘sometimes I think it’s my fault. I didn’t give her everything in life, I didn’t make her life here happy or loving. She left and went to Rome because she hated it here. She hated me too, I think.’
‘Why would she hate you?’ I asked, trying to reason her out of her melancholy.
‘She had good reason.’
‘Every daughter argues with her mother. That’s normal.’
‘This wasn’t normal. And it was my fault.’
I kept quiet, expecting her to explain.
She looked up at me, wanting to make eye contact before starting some sort of confession. ‘Her childhood wasn’t normal.’ She shut her eyes wearily as she drew breath. ‘There was a lot of poverty in the mountains in the seventies. Not much work and even less charity. I had no family and no income and a daughter to feed. A young woman in those conditions is prey to wolves, and there are plenty of those around these parts.’ She looked at me again, briefly, to show that she knew what she was saying, and to check that I knew too. ‘You never realise what you’ve become until hindsight shows you. You don’t know until it’s too late that a one-off will become a habit, or that you’ve got a reputation instead of a name.’
She was talking in code, but I thought I understood. And she was using words almost identical to Chiara Biondi to explain how she had slipped into the same profession.
‘It started with one married man who propositioned me one day. Said we could keep everything discreet. He would come here after Anna was in bed – she was just a baby – and would leave me elaborate presents. I told him we needed food not flowers, and he started saying he didn’t have the time to do the shopping, but that he wanted to look after us, so he would leave us some money.’ She shrugged, staring at the table again. ‘And before I knew it I was being paid. It seemed like a kindness at first. Someone who cared for us. It was only afterwards that I realised what was going on, when he had stopped coming and the money dried up. I still see him around occasionally, walking arm in arm with his wife as he pushes the grandchildren in a pram.
‘We needed the money, and so there were others after that. People began to know who I was and what I did. They knew I was desperate and vice versa. And as she was growing up, Anna realised what was happening. At school one day some children started bullying her and she came home crying, saying her friends had been saying horrible things about me. I tried to reassure her that I was still her mother, that she was my precious daughter, but even at that age she knew that she was the daughter of the village whore.’
Her language had taken on a tone of self-disgust. She blamed herself and her lifestyle for forcing Anna away, and even blamed herself for everything that happened afterwards.
‘And what about Anna’s father?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘He was just some boy who was here on holiday one summer. That was long before I needed the money, before . . . before all that.’
‘Which summer?’
She looked up to the window behind me. ‘Well, Anna was born in 1975, that spring, so it must have been the summer of 1974. He left me his address and we thought we would stay in touch, see each other again. But then I wrote to him that autumn, to tell him I was expecting, and all I got back was a letter from his lawyer.’
‘What did it say?’
‘That his client recognised no responsibilities or obligations and that I wasn’t to repeat slanderous allegations about him. After that letter I forgot all about him. I thought I would rather raise a child myself than go through the courts.’
‘Why? Surely it might have been a help?’
‘The courts can’t make a man love his child. If he wanted nothing to do with her, I wanted nothing to do with him.’
‘Have you still got that letter?’
‘I threw it in the bin.’
I didn’t even know myself why I was interested. I was curious, I suppose, nothing more. I was clutching at straws and hoping that one of the straws might lead to something solid.
‘Anna used to say that one day she would track down her father and make him proud of her. Make him realise his mistake in abandoning her. That was her dream.’ Her voice was faltering again. ‘That was all she wanted: for her father to look at her and love her. Even when she was grown up that was what she longed for. And she really thought it would happen. She didn’t realise that maybe that letter said all there was to say: that he wanted nothing to do with her. She still had this innocent idea that she could melt his heart. I think she spent her short life desperately trying to melt men’s hearts. That’s all she cared about, and she perhaps never realised, until it was too late, how callous they can be.’
‘Who was her father?’
‘He was called Fausto. Like I said, he was a law student who came here on holiday one summer.’
‘Fausto?’
She nodded, and the nod slowly turned into a disdainful shake of her grey head.
‘Not Fausto Biondi?’
‘How do you know that?’
I stood up quickly. She was watching me from the sofa, confused now.
‘What does it matter who her father was? He was never a part of her life.’ She was shuffling behind me now as I got up to leave.
‘Biondi,’ I said, standing in front of her now, ‘is the man who hired me. It’s his eighteen-year-old daughter, Simona, who’s gone missing.’
She looked at me, frowning in incomprehension. ‘Biondi?’
‘I’ve got to get back to Rome.’ I was in a hurry now, knowing that I’d finally found the link between the two stories. ‘Give me your number.’
She found a scrap of paper and a pen and slowly wrote down her number. I looked at it, thanked her and let myself out. I turned the key in the car and sped off towards the capital.
‘Any news?’ Biondi asked urgently when I announced myself at the intercom.
‘Plenty.’
‘What?’
‘Let me in.’
The gate swung open and I saw the front door of the villa open. Biondi was standing there with his hands on his hips, staring at me like a disappointed sports coach watching failing athletes.
‘What’s happened?’ he barked.
I looked at
him and walked into the house. ‘Where can we talk?’
He led me through a passageway under the stairs that led to a sunny room overlooking a little garden.
‘What’s the news? Where’s Simona?’
‘The news is that she’s not your daughter,’ I said slowly. ‘She’s Chiara’s child. You and your wife adopted her to stave off a scandal. But she’s Chiara’s girl.’
Biondi was staring at the seagrass matting of the conservatory floor. He looked confused, his frown so genuine that I wondered what happens to secrets when they’re buried that long. Maybe they become secrets even to the person who keeps them, and when they finally come up for air, that person is suddenly surprised by the hidden truth.
‘Chiara’s daughter,’ he said quietly to himself. ‘Yes, technically she is.’
‘Technically?’
‘But she’s always been our child.’
‘Grandchild.’
He looked up from the floor and fixed his eyes on me. ‘What does it matter to you? Daughter, granddaughter – she’s missing. She’s in danger, abducted by some man we’ve never met. We want her back. I hired you to find her, not to nose around in our family’s past.’
‘Never met?’
‘What?’
‘You said “some man we’ve never met”. She’s with someone called Fabrizio Mori.’ I passed him the snap of Mori. ‘Remember him?’
He stared at the photo as if it were bringing back bad memories. He didn’t say anything.
‘Tell me how you met him.’
He passed back the photo, looking at me and dropping his head like he had given in. ‘I made a mistake in my youth. A moment of madness. I had only been married for a year.’ He picked up a petite watering can and started watering the plants on the windowsills. ‘I was on holiday in the mountains with a couple of friends. We were in our early twenties, we were carefree. We just wanted some fun.’
