The Sleeping Nymph, page 21
“It’s terribly maternal,” she replied gently.
They fell quiet, but it wasn’t a heavy silence: it was a moment of peace under a night sky that finally shone with stars.
44
“Fffooagh . . . I . . . I . . . don’t . . . didn’t . . . no.”
De Carli frowned.
“That’s not Marini,” he said, referring to the message he’d just heard on Teresa’s mobile phone.
“I’m telling you, it’s him. It’s his number,” she muttered. “What on earth is he saying?”
“Ffooagh,” said de Carli.
“Very helpful, thank you.”
Teresa had woken up that morning to find this deranged message on her voicemail, followed almost immediately by a call from police headquarters relaying some shocking news. It had been a bad start to what promised to be a long and complicated day.
“Try calling him back,” she told de Carli. “We don’t have much time.”
He played the message again on speaker and just then, Parisi walked in.
“We’re ready to go,” he announced, then paused when he heard the garbled voicemail. “Is that who I think it is?” he asked in amazement.
“Who do you think it is?” Teresa replied.
“A drunk detective.”
Teresa banged her fist on the table.
“I knew it!” She got up and grabbed her bag. “Let’s go get that idiot.”
As she walked out of the door, she barged into Albert Lona and shuddered at the unexpected physical contact. He seemed perfectly aware of the distress his proximity was causing: he had always been able to sniff out the slightest shifts in her mood and use them to his own advantage.
He grabbed her arm.
“You look like you can hardly stand, Superintendent Battaglia,” he said.
He tightened his hold on her arm for a brief moment, then loosened his grip and let go.
No one spoke. Teresa could feel the presence of her men behind her, sense the silent fury coming from them.
“We’re ready,” she declared, ignoring his taunt.
He scanned her face, the scratches the accident had left on her cheek and the darker spot where her head had bumped against the frame of the car.
“I heard about what happened yesterday. How irksome for the police to be involved in an accident of this kind.” He looked around the office. “Where’s Inspector Marini?” he asked.
“He already left. He went ahead of us,” said Teresa.
Albert smiled.
“I hope he can be trusted to do his job,” he said cryptically, then leaned close to her ear. “Though I do wonder: Can you? I’m not so sure,” he murmured.
Teresa stepped away, feigning composure.
“We’re an efficient team,” Parisi piped up behind her.
“And Superintendent Battaglia is the best there is, on and off the field,” added de Carli.
Lona spared them the briefest of inquisitive glances, but Teresa knew he’d seen all he needed to see: Parisi and de Carli were on the new district attorney’s radar now, and they would have to be very careful.
“I do hope so, for your sake,” Lona replied courteously. “It seems the case of the Sleeping Nymph has suddenly become rather more complicated.”
He walked off with an air that promised trouble. Teresa turned to her men.
“Don’t challenge him,” she scolded them. “That’s exactly what he wants you to do.”
But she could tell from the look they gave her in response that nothing she said would make a difference. She’d always suspected it, but now she knew for sure: Parisi and de Carli knew about her past.
The keys were still in the lock and the front door was ajar. Marini must be home.
“I’ll go in alone,” said Teresa. “Wait in the car.”
“Please take pictures,” de Carli begged her.
“Go!”
The flat was just as Teresa had pictured it. The color palette and the absence of all inessential items exuded a kind of masculinity and it was as neat as its owner, the tidiness like a cloak, a way of keeping life on a tight leash and controlling its shape.
“Marini?” she called out. “Is anyone home?”
She felt uneasy walking among his possessions, in his carefully designed and yet sparsely furnished home, befitting a man who, like a soldier, seemed to feel the need to adhere to a strict notion of order. She was prying, uninvited, into his hidden world, though her gut told her that most of what she could see was pretense.
Teresa also saw the traces of something unexpected but very familiar: loneliness. It was there in certain details that would have escaped another person’s notice and it was even more obvious in what was absent: there were no photographs and no souvenirs. Not a single one. Marini had erased himself. He seemed to exist wholly in the present. There was no trace even of the woman Teresa had seen on the terrace the day before. Whoever she was, she’d disappeared and left nothing in her wake.
“Marini?” she called out once more.
She walked into his bedroom. Sunlight filtered in through small eye-shaped holes in the closed shutters. Teresa noticed a pile of books on a bedside table, including several texts she had “strongly” recommended that he should consult: volumes on criminal psychology and forensic pathology. She had never thought he’d actually read them.
A slight movement drew her attention to a dim corner of the room, where Marini was sat on the floor, his body slumped against the wall. She crouched down next to him. He reeked of alcohol.
“Jesus Christ, how much did you have to drink?”
He tilted his face up and her heart broke a little. Massimo had been crying.
“What happened?” she whispered.
He opened his eyes. A tear slipped through his lashes and slid all the way down to his chin.
“I’m finished,” he told her.
Teresa tried to pull him to his feet, but he was like a dead weight.
“If Lona finds out about this, you’re definitely finished,” she snapped, but she knew that anger was merely her way of dissimulating her concern. “He thinks you’re busy cracking the case. Imagine that! He’d have a fit if he saw the state you’re in . . .”
Marini pushed away the trembling hands with which she had tried in vain to pull him up, but he didn’t let go. He held them tight in his own.
“Is he angry with you?” he asked her.
Teresa had expected his speech to be slurred, but he just sounded tired. She recognized that tiredness. It was the residue of despair.
“No, not yet,” she replied softly, forcing a smile.
He gripped her hands tighter before letting go.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
Teresa looked into his eyes properly. She saw fear in them and couldn’t fathom what might have reduced this bright, determined young man into this wretched state.
“What’s going on with you, Marini?” she asked him softly, scared of breaking the fragile connection that had formed between them.
He put his head in his hands.
“I’m lost.”
“Tell me what happened and maybe I’ll manage to find you.”
Marini looked at her and Teresa saw no trace of hope in his eyes.
“Is someone ill? Are you ill?” she volunteered.
He let out a quick laugh like a strangled sob.
“No one’s ill, Superintendent.”
Teresa couldn’t think of anything else. She’d seen him look troubled, melancholy even, but never quite so utterly hopeless. She put her hand under his chin.
“What happened when you went home for the holidays?” she asked.
He tried to look away, but Teresa wouldn’t let him.
“What happened when you went home?” she repeated, more forcefully this time, feeling certain now that the home Marini had come from, perhaps even run away from, was where the source of the problem lay.
Teresa was beginning to think she wouldn’t get anything out of him, when Marini finally spoke.
“I saw Elena again,” he whispered. “We slept together.”
Teresa didn’t know what to say.
“Well,” she said. “That’s not the end of the world, is it?”
“I left while she slept, and then for weeks and weeks I avoided her calls.”
Teresa was surprised.
“That’s not good,” she remarked.
“Elena is pregnant.”
The words fell from his mouth in a quick exhale, as if he were confessing to some torturous sin or dark passion. Marini was staring into space, his elbows resting on his knees, his shirt unbuttoned and blotched with stains.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” he said.
With a sigh, Teresa sat on the floor next to him.
“Forgive me for asking, but . . .” she began.
“Yes, the baby is mine.”
She was staring into space now, too. It wasn’t hard to guess where the problem lay: he didn’t want the child.
“Elena came looking for me,” he resumed, “but again, I rejected her. She said she’ll be staying in a hotel for a few more days, but then . . .”
Teresa couldn’t help herself.
“Is this really who you are?” she snapped. “If you were only looking for some casual fun—”
“It’s not casual. It never was.”
He spoke with such forcefulness that she could see there must be a lot more to this story beyond what those few words revealed.
“Well, what is she to you, then?” she inquired, her tone more even now.
Her hope was that in talking things through, Marini might be able to organize his thoughts better and perhaps make sense of the emotions that seemed to be crushing him into a broken mess.
He made a vague gesture as if to say: How can I explain to you something that even I don’t know how to describe?
“We’ve got plenty of time,” she said untruthfully, settling in beside him. The hardness of the floor was like a knife twisting into her beleaguered back. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Marini sighed.
“I mean it, you know. I’m not going anywhere.”
“She was my first,” he said, his voice barely a whisper now. “And still my only one.”
Teresa wasn’t sure she’d heard right.
“When you say your only one . . .”
“Just her.”
“In what way?”
“In every way.”
“It’s very romantic,” she said.
He rested his chin on his knees.
“It’s weird. I know you’re thinking it.”
She shrugged.
“I’ll admit I didn’t expect it of someone like you. But what about all these girls you’ve been going out with?”
He made a face.
“There haven’t been that many. And they were dates, that’s all.”
Teresa did laugh then.
“God knows what they must have thought of you,” she said.
“I can only imagine.”
Teresa gave him a gentle nudge.
“So then, what’s the problem?” she asked. “If she’s the one you’ve chosen, why all this drama?”
She would never forget the expression on Marini’s face when he looked at her then: so vulnerable, so scared. He was distraught.
“Because I can’t,” he replied, his gaze sliding back into the empty distance.
Once again, they were silent. Teresa couldn’t figure out what he was so terrified of. He hadn’t told her everything, and certainly didn’t intend to do so right then and there. But she could sense his suffering, like a chill surrounding his body, a nausea biting at his insides, a restlessness wringing his hands.
“Tell me what to do,” she heard him say.
Teresa looked up at the sky. It was hidden behind the roof, but it was like she could see it anyway.
“I can’t help you,” she told him. “You want me to tell you that you’re right to give them up if you don’t feel ready, but if I were you, I’d take that baby in a heartbeat.”
She was conscious of him staring at the side of her face now, his gaze suddenly more focused. She was conscious of how her voice had betrayed her and cracked as she’d spoken, of all her defenses crumbling into dust.
Tell him. Tell him now and don’t overthink it.
“It feels like someone else’s life now, but once upon a time, I was married,” she began. “I was thirty and a cop already. I was more than capable in the professional sphere, but I can’t say the same about my private life.
“He used to beat me. Regularly. Even when I got pregnant, he didn’t stop. I know now that a woman whose partner beats her when she’s pregnant is twice as likely to be killed by that same man. But back then I was a shadow of myself. By the time I’d mustered the strength to leave, it was too late: he found me and beat me one last time. I lost the baby—and the ability to become a mother. Forever.”
She got to the end of her speech, out of breath and with her heart beating madly in her chest. She had never thought she would speak of that old sorrow ever again. There was too much anguish in it, too much shame.
“Superintendent—”
Teresa raised a hand to stop him.
“Not a day goes by where I don’t think of how that love was betrayed, betrayed by me of all people, when it was my job to protect it. Not a day goes by where I don’t think about the baby I never got to hold,” she said. “There’s nothing, nothing I wouldn’t do to have him here with me.”
She clasped a hand over her stomach as if to cling to the scar that sliced through it and marked the fork in her life.
“You don’t realize what it is you’re giving up and the thing that drives me mad is that I could sit here for hours, for days, trying to convince you and still you wouldn’t understand. We never understand what it’s worth until it’s lost.”
She dried her eyes. The silence was so thick that she could hear Marini swallow.
“Elena will move on,” she whispered. “She’ll have your baby and she’ll know happiness, never mind you, never mind the complications. You, on the other hand . . . You, Marini, will drown in your regrets. You’ve been invited to witness a miracle. Think about that the next time you even consider turning the invitation down.”
She stood up, smoothed her trousers down. She managed somehow to regain her composure and held out a hand to help him to his feet.
“Get yourself cleaned up now. There’s been a murder in the valley of the Sleeping Nymph,” she told him.
She watched as the effects of this news wiped the tumult and confusion from his expression. She paused before letting the other shoe drop.
“They’ve found a heart. We don’t know yet whose it is.”
45
What drives a man to reject his own unborn child?
What drives a man to rip the heart out of another man’s breast?
To beat a woman unconscious, to paint the walls of their marriage with her blood?
What drives that woman to stay?
We can never really know ourselves or those we spend our lives with. We can try to describe ourselves somehow, but ultimately, it’s what we choose to do when we are presented with a fork in the road that reveals who we truly are. Either that, or the secrets we hide.
Marini’s secret, whatever it is, must be as dark and painful as the mystery hidden in the heart of this valley.
Back in the valley, Teresa felt as if they had wandered into a maze of shadows and now it was her task to shine a light toward the way out. But that morning, darkness was more than just a figure of speech. The day had dawned murky over the Resia Valley, as if the night had found a way to multiply and had generated an imperfect replica of itself, bruised, bloated and seething. The clouds above their heads were like purple lungs, expanding and contracting in turn, releasing downpours so thick that they obscured the outline of the mountains. From the depths of the forest rose a sinister stench of rot, of decay accelerated by persistent moisture.
Had Teresa believed in magic—the dark kind—she would have interpreted all this as a bad omen. She didn’t think this recent homicide was a coincidence; it had to be connected to the discovery of the Sleeping Nymph and the arrival of the police in the valley. That’s what years of experience and an understanding of the laws of probability told her. But, more importantly, it was her subconscious warning her, alerting her to the presence of evil—and not some generic evil, either: it was methodical, as evolved as it was brutal, and directly hostile, too. This was no longer a cold case: the danger was imminent.
The discovery had been made at the spot where the road to the villages turned uphill. The area had already been cordoned off. Police cars blocked the entrance, with officers stationed to direct authorized personnel and turn away those who had no business being there. But people had found other ways to get close to the scene and they stood now along the edge of the forest, bursts of motionless color among the foliage. Through the trees, they watched with quiet composure the early progress of the investigation.
Parri was already there, directing the crime scene search. Agents from the forensics team were combing the area for clues, personal items and any other evidence. The flash of the reflex cameras was indistinguishable from the bursts of lightning the sky periodically hurled into the forest.
“It’ll be bedlam here soon,” Teresa heard him say as he urged his colleagues to locate, tag and photograph every trace before the rain erased it forever.
Teresa and Marini walked up to him, pausing on the other side of the cordon until Parri spotted them and waved them over. They put on crime scene suits and shoe covers, then followed a path through an area already marked and thoroughly searched by the forensics team.
The coroner greeted them with a wry smile.
“Well, the plot has certainly thickened,” he remarked.
