The Sleeping Nymph, page 33
Albert walked up to them.
“Get the girl and her dog out of here,” he ordered.
Teresa stood between Blanca and the men, with Marini by her side.
“Let’s talk about this,” she ventured.
Albert looked at her as if she had uttered a profanity.
“You will follow my orders, Superintendent, and step aside. Your involvement in this investigation is now at risk.”
Teresa swore—and rather loudly, too.
“If I’m wrong, I’ll go straight away,” she said, throwing the district attorney some bait. “But if we want to find out, we’re going to have to remove this carcass and keep digging.”
She watched him weighing his options—her head against a cubic meter of earth—and she knew that he wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to witness her public humiliation.
And just as she had predicted, Albert nodded, signaling to the men that they should resume digging.
Marini picked up a shovel and joined in.
Teresa went to stand next to Blanca, making sure the girl could feel her presence while also taking care not to make their familiarity too obvious to Albert.
“It’s there,” she heard Blanca whisper.
Smoky had calmed down, too: as far as he was concerned, his job was done.
The sun began to set behind a bank of inky clouds and as the shadows advanced, death emerged from beneath the veil hiding it: when the shoveling suddenly stopped, Teresa knew that something else had emerged from the earth.
“Superintendent!” Marini called out.
She hurried over. Inside the dark, wet hole, ensconced in a tangle of roots, lay the frail corpse of an old man.
It was Emmanuel Turan.
Teresa crouched at the edge of the tomb.
The body lay in the fetal position, with the arms crossed protectively, but Teresa could still clearly see its slashed chest, where in place of the heart someone had placed a flower as pale and withered as the corpse itself: wood anemone.
“A fresh corpse buried beneath an old animal carcass,” she murmured.
It was a momentous discovery and it gave them unprecedented insight into killer’s mind.
“He nearly managed to sabotage the search altogether,” remarked an incredulous Marini.
Teresa had never seen anything like this in her whole career.
“He used a natural dip in the terrain, then covered it up,” she said, gesturing at the hole.
“He knows the landscape well.”
Teresa caught a glimpse of Albert muttering under his breath, but soon he’d vanished from the scene.
She got back to her feet and tapped the head of the search team on the shoulder. He looked a lot less sure of himself than he had been earlier.
“The girl might be blind,” Teresa remarked, throwing his own words back at him. “But it looks like she can see better than all of you put together.”
She walked up to Blanca and took her hand.
“You’ve left them all speechless,” Teresa told her. “Even I’ve never managed that before.”
She saw Blanca smile and finally relax.
“Men always have more trouble believing,” Blanca remarked.
How true.
Teresa peered into the edge of the forest, where more people had gathered in the meantime. She couldn’t make out their faces, but she was sure there were many familiar figures there, and she was also sure the killer was among them, too. He had always been there, always one step ahead.
He’s watching us. He’s never stopped watching us. Even now his gaze is upon us.
Smoky was suddenly restless again. Teresa saw Blanca frown.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“He wants to go again. He’s caught another scent.”
80
Marini led the way, clearing errant roots and branches that might have scratched Blanca or tripped her up. Teresa and the forensics team followed a few steps behind. Teresa watched Blanca closely, saw how she gave Smoky the time he needed to map out the smells of the unfamiliar landscape he’d been thrown into, how she waited patiently for him to retrieve the trail of the scent when it seemed to have faded. And they all held their collective breaths until he picked it up again and pushed on.
“I read him and he reads me,” Blanca had once told Teresa.
Farther back, officers from the local police station, the human remains search team and, trailing behind, the environmental protection agency wound their way along the path in a silent procession, looking strained. No one dared oppose Teresa now and certainly no one questioned where the girl and her dog were leading them.
They didn’t know what they would find at the end of that invisible path yet, but the scent they were following was that of human blood. Any time Smoky detected the slightest trace of hemoglobin, he would stop and let out a short bark.
It was an unsettling sound to human ears, for its rhythm had been set by the killer himself: he had sprinkled the forest floor with tiny droplets of blood, as if in a dark and terrible fairy tale. He had used what had once been Emmanuel’s lifeblood to show them which way to go.
Despite their misgivings, the forensics team had agreed, at Teresa’s insistence, to share their initial impressions.
“Our blood pattern analysis suggests these are passive stains caused by drops falling to the ground under gravitational pull,” the forensics expert had explained with some reluctance.
Form is key. It tells us where something began and how it developed. It also shows us its strength. And it reveals the intention behind it.
These weren’t accidental splashes sprayed randomly over the surrounding vegetation; these were perfectly symmetrical drops, which had fallen perpendicular to the ground, and right along the center of the path.
Teresa had no doubt that the perpetrator had meant it that way. He had proven himself too methodical, too clever and organized a killer to leave them there by mistake. Every time Smoky sat down to signal he’d found something, the officers in their white overalls would crouch over that part of the forest to gather and catalogue the samples to be added to the case file. Five droplets of blood had been found so far.
“What are you thinking?” Marini asked, falling back to walk beside her.
Teresa didn’t immediately reply. She was searching for the right way to put her instinctive response into words without losing her grip on reason altogether. But she couldn’t find one. Her subconscious pressed upon her, clamoring to be heard.
She looked up at the ceiling of leafy branches and listened to the distant hooting of an owl, the sound carried on the wind until it reached them where they stood. Smoky’s howls floated in the air like a summons. She thought again of the black heart displayed at the entrance of an old and mysterious realm, and of the droplets of blood scattered over the ground.
Five little crimson pebbles our Little Thumbling left along the way . . .
“In his own way, he’s telling us a fairy tale,” she murmured.
“Fairy tales usually have a happy ending,” Marini remarked.
“That’s why we’re here: to give him that happy ending. And just like in every proper fairy tale, someone had to die and someone else had to suffer.”
“The trail stops here,” said Blanca, interrupting their musings. She was kneeling next to Smoky, stroking his fur. “He can’t smell anything else.”
“Well, it looks like the fairy tale . . .” Marini began, but he never completed his sentence.
His expression changed as he pointed at something he’d spotted in the vegetation, a sharp, crooked shadow rising from the earth.
“There’s something there,” he said.
Teresa followed his gaze. It was a roof.
“It looks like the fairy tale continues in a little house at the edge of the forest,” she said, finishing Marini’s sentence for him.
The ruin was a dilapidated homestead that hadn’t been used in decades and had been entirely subsumed into the forest, which was slowly smothering it in tangles of ivy and honeysuckle. Those parts of the walls that still stood upright showed the outline of three ground-floor rooms, with a passageway of black rotting wood connecting them to what remained of the floor above. Half of the roof had caved in, and wooden beams stuck out of gaps that had once been windows.
The front door still stood, however, and the faded plaster on the architrave bore a tremulous inscription: C + M + B.
“What does it mean?” asked Marini.
Teresa ran a gloved hand over the washed-out wood of the door. She knew there was nothing sinister in those letters; she remembered them from her childhood.
“Christus mansionem benedicat,” she said. “A Christian tradition in many agrarian communities, though in actual fact it is pagan in its origins. It’s considered a powerful talisman against the forces of darkness. The head of the household would write these letters on the front door and on the door to the stables on the night of the Epiphany, to protect his family and his livestock. And they’d anoint the buildings with incense.”
She let her hand fall back to her side. The memories felt like fragments from someone else’s life.
“I’ll go in first,” said Marini.
She pulled him back and stepped across the threshold before he could.
There was little left inside that could still be considered human—or entirely so, at any rate. All traces of human presence were slowly being erased. What was left of the walls were flagstones on the verge of crumbling forever into dust. The fireplace, where the family would have gathered in the evenings, had become a repository for debris. It was a sad sight, but there was also something remarkable about it all. It was a demonstration that life always survived, even if in different form—quieter, more subtle, yet still powerful.
Teresa opened her mouth to speak, but the words got stuck in her throat like dry seeds.
In a little nook between two stones, someone had tucked a piece of paper, its rectangular shape as familiar to Teresa as her own limbs.
Her handwriting was on it. It was a page from her diary.
The blood in her veins seemed to freeze. She stood perfectly still. That piece of paper, and the notes it bore, were evidence.
If I leave it there, everyone will be able to read it. It could be something trivial—or it could reveal my illness.
If I take it and hide it away, I’ll be safe, but my personal and professional integrity will be damaged irreparably.
“Take it. Now!” said Marini, glancing over his shoulder. “Take it and hide it.”
Teresa didn’t move. She would never forgive herself if she did that.
In the end, Marini did it for her. Quickly, he took the piece of paper from the wall before anyone else could see it, folded it in half and put it away in his pocket without looking.
It was only then that Teresa came to her senses. She grabbed his arm.
“What the hell are you doing?” she snarled.
He put his hand over hers and gently pushed it away.
“I’ll figure out a way to get this tested without anyone knowing it’s yours,” he told her. “Even I will never find out what it says.”
So he knew where the note came from.
Teresa swallowed her pride.
“Why are you doing this?” she managed to ask.
Marini shrugged as if it were no big deal.
“Because I owe it to you. Because it’s the right thing to do.”
Teresa swayed on her feet. She felt exposed and vulnerable. She couldn’t stay there, so she left, pushing her way through, head down, through the throng of officers waiting outside.
Faced with a new black storm gathering on the horizon, and the looming, inscrutable presence of nature all around her, her distress transformed itself into a fiery rage.
“I won’t let you intimidate me!” she shouted at the woods.
Whoever it was who had stolen her paper memories, they were out there somewhere, listening.
81
Massimo had tried calling Elena a number of times, but she wasn’t picking up. He gave up and sent her a message instead:
I wish I could be there with you both.
She’d read it over an hour ago, but still hadn’t responded.
It hadn’t cost him anything to admit what he’d written and he wasn’t trying to play games. It was the truth. But he was still stuck in that ruin of a house in the middle of the woods, feeling more tired and more filthy by the minute as he waited for the forensics team to give them the all-clear. Superintendent Battaglia was on the phone to headquarters, though he could tell from the lack of emotion in her voice that there was no news.
When the phone vibrated in his hand and he saw Elena’s name come up on the screen, he reached out instinctively to lean on what was left of the wall before he opened her message.
What is it?
He quickly typed a response:
I just wanted to check that you were all right.
Tell me what you’re thinking, Massimo. Stop running away.
I miss you.
She didn’t reply, so he wrote again.
We need to talk.
No. Tell me what you’re thinking!
He took a deep breath.
I needed to forgive myself. I’ve done that now. I don’t want to lose you.
Her response came swiftly.
Help Teresa first. We’ll be waiting for you.
Massimo could feel a smile forming on his face. He retrieved the diary page from his pocket and slipped it inside an envelope he’d pilfered earlier from someone’s forensics kit. Having sealed the envelope and signed his name across the flap, he called de Carli over and gave it to him.
“This needs to get to the lab as soon as possible,” he told him. “I’ve already let Colle know. Make sure you hand it to him directly, and tell him to hurry up and ask no questions.”
De Carli turned the envelope over in his hands.
“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what’s inside,” he said.
Massimo put the lid back on his pen and looked around for Superintendent Battaglia.
“I can tell you that what you’re doing is illegal, immoral and might even cost you your job. But it’s for a good cause. Anything else you need to know?” he replied.
De Carli didn’t bat an eye.
“I’d say that’s more than enough to go on. Right then, I’m off.”
Now that the torn diary entry was safe, and once he’d made sure there weren’t any other pages lying around, Massimo left the forensics team to it. He sat next to Superintendent Battaglia on the worn doorstep of the ruined homestead and nudged her with his elbow. He had no clue why that notebook mattered to her so much, but the sight of her stricken face had filled him with rage and protectiveness of a kind he’d rarely felt before.
“It’s under control,” he told her.
She nodded but didn’t speak.
“That’s worrying, Superintendent; you should be telling me I’ve never got anything under control.”
She seemed on the verge of a smile, but soon looked grave again.
“I used to think you were obsessive about this sort of thing, but clearly I was wrong,” she said, her hands deep in her pockets and her eyes staring into the distance. “What you did was crazy, and brash, and could potentially spell the end of your career.”
“Why do I get the feeling you like me more whenever I do something stupid?”
“Because I know all the stupid stuff comes from the heart.”
Massimo offered her a sweet. The superintendent took it, watching him with a shocked expression as he unwrapped his own.
“To hell with restraint,” he told her.
“To hell with restraint.”
They sat there chewing quietly on their sweets, strange tokens of a new beginning.
“What now?” Massimo said eventually.
The superintendent paused to think.
“We’re getting closer. I can feel it,” she murmured. “But not close enough yet to see his face. And I still can’t figure out what it all means, what it is, deep down, that moves him.”
“You don’t think we’re dealing with an ordinary motive here.”
Superintendent Battaglia shook her magma-red bob vigorously from side to side.
“It’s anything but ordinary, Marini. There’s layers and layers of malaise lurking here, buried as deep as the skeletons hidden in this forest. Just think of the force of the symbolism he’s employed.”
“Like the heart.”
“What’s the first thing you thought of when you saw it? Go on, just tell me the first thing that popped into your head.”
“Some kind of ritual.”
She nodded.
“Rancor, jealousy, money: these are all things that can drive someone to commit murder. But not to rip someone’s heart out.”
“What if there’s more than one perpetrator?” asked Massimo.
“Are you thinking of a cult?”
“Yes.”
She seemed to be considering this for a moment.
“In the nineties, there was a sect in the United States that performed ritual sacrifices. Its devotees would eat the hearts of their victims. When they were discovered, it turned out they were all upstanding members of society, entirely beyond suspicion in the light of day. Some of them paid for their crimes, but many others were never heard of again; they probably went underground.” She stood up and brushed the dust off her trousers. “But I don’t think that’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with here, Inspector Marini. Our killer isn’t secretive: he wants to communicate with us.”
