The Sleeping Nymph, page 40
She frowned.
“No. But Francesco did.”
Teresa and Marini glanced at each other.
“What did he tell you?”
“I was a little girl. He’d tell me about a treasure hidden in the valley: an icon made of gold and gemstones that no one had ever managed to find, not even him. He said it was guarded by owls and foxes and the spirit of the old stag. It was a fairy tale.”
“We think it wasn’t a fairy tale, and that Alessandro was looking for it, too.”
Krisnja’s expression shifted: she understood now.
“You don’t think he’s the killer?”
Teresa didn’t reply; though she still had her reservations, she couldn’t deny that the killer might be Alessandro, just as she couldn’t deny it might be Francesco, or indeed Matriona, who was still unreachable. She asked Krisnja if she knew where Matriona might have gone.
“She’s not run away,” Krisnja replied gravely as if to allay Teresa’s suspicions. “She’d never do that. Sometimes she spends the whole day in the woods or up in the plateaus, gathering her herbs. She must have gone out at dawn. She’s bound to be back before dark.”
“Herbs like Datura stramonium?” Teresa pointed out.
She felt sorry for the girl; one day someone would open her eyes to the web of lies that surrounded her.
Krisnja didn’t reply.
“Did you know about the rituals Matriona performs?” Teresa insisted.
The girl seemed surprised.
“Matriona’s a midwife,” she said. “She’s helped many babies from this valley into the world. Everyone knows that.”
Teresa didn’t probe further.
“I’ll get someone to escort you home,” she said, leading her back to Francesco.
The old man seemed genuinely fond of Krisnja, his expression filled with the kind of protective concern Teresa had only ever seen fathers wear. But fathers, too, could turn out to be the embodiment of evil.
“Stay with her,” she ordered Marini. “Don’t let her meet with anyone, not even Francesco.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Emmanuel’s house, back to the only connection we have between the present and the past. That man was executed for some kind of betrayal. There must be something we’ve missed.”
96
Emmanuel Turan’s house was just as Teresa’s heart remembered it, the air inside reverberating with absence, an emptiness hidden beneath layer upon layer of objects piled up in towering heaps, like tombs that marked where happiness was buried.
The power was still cut off and would likely be cut off forever. The bluish light from her flashlight roamed like a specter over the remains of a carcass: the house itself seemed to have died with its owner.
Had the old man even been aware of the pain his life consisted of? Had he ever wished for better? Probably not, Teresa thought; after all, it was the only existence he’d ever known. But when her eyes fell once more upon the newspaper clippings he had framed, she felt ashamed of her own thoughtlessness: that poor man had known exactly what love was and he’d displayed his yearning for it in the very heart of his home.
She resumed her search. In recent months, she had become even more methodical and thorough than before; the fear of forgetting had made her look at the world with more attentive eyes.
It was as if the empty space left by her fading memory had been filled by a secret, omniscient awareness. Teresa felt things, now. Her body remembered what her mind could not. When something was different from what she had seen before, she experienced a sense of unease triggered by the discrepancy between what she was seeing and the coordinates of the map her subconscious had previously drawn.
And now it was happening inside this house. She’d had to break the police seal on the door to go back inside, so everything had to be exactly as she had previously left it. But it was different now. Or was it just that it was dark?
“The photographs,” she told de Carli.
He handed her a tablet with the snapshots from their previous search of the house. Teresa swiped through them as she paced among the detritus of the old man’s life.
But when she compared the photographs to the scene around her, she found nothing to justify her uneasiness.
She sat on a stool in the only spot that was clear of debris, placed her flashlight on her lap and set about reluctantly summarizing the latest developments on a notepad that had so far failed to fill the void left by her stolen diary: it was a struggle, and it was dull, and often she didn’t even finish the sentence she’d begun writing.
“You’re only hurting yourself this way,” she mumbled to herself as she put on her glasses.
Her pen fell to the floor and rolled all the way to the edge of the carpet nearby.
Teresa started looking for it in the flashlight beam and when she found it, she stopped and stared.
“De Carli!” she called out, making no move to pick up the pen. “The floor’s sloping.”
De Carli came over to examine the worn floorboards.
“It’s an old mountain cottage, Superintendent,” he remarked. “It’s made of wood, it’s normal for it to sag here and there. There’s a cellar underneath. We’ve already searched it.”
“The carpet. It’s been moved.”
He went to stand behind her and looked at the photograph she had pulled up on the tablet.
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m telling you it has.” Teresa stood up. “Not by much, but it’s definitely been moved.”
She took a step forward but stopped when the floor creaked.
“Let’s lift it up.”
They each grabbed a corner and pulled the carpet aside.
“Holy shit!” de Carli exclaimed.
Someone had removed the floorboards under the carpet, sawing them off haphazardly. They could see the network of beams beneath and underneath those, just darkness.
A trap. Another few steps and Teresa could have hurt herself on the sharp edges of the sawn wood—or even fallen through the gap.
“Light, please.”
Their flashlights lit up a tiny realm of chaos created by decades of mental illness.
“We need to get down there,” she said.
“The entrance is outside.”
When she pulled herself upright, Teresa felt her head spin.
You just need some sleep, she thought to herself. But as they walked out of the front door, she froze. It looked like they were leaving, but shouldn’t they be going the other way? Hadn’t they come to search the house? She put her hand on the doorknob and pushed the door back open.
“Where are you going, Superintendent?”
“Do we have the photographs from the scene?” she asked.
De Carli seemed to struggle for a response.
“You’ve got them . . .”
Teresa flicked the light switch over and over.
“The power’s off,” she muttered, but she went in anyway, striding confidently through the house.
“Superintendent!”
The sudden feeling of emptiness beneath her feet ran like a shiver through her gut—that second brain equipped with its own extensive neural network. But it all happened strictly inside Teresa’s mind; her body remained inert and by the time she’d lifted her arms to reach for something to hold on to, she’d already landed on the floor below, straight into a pile of old rags and cardboard boxes.
“Superintendent, are you all right?”
She emerged from the rubble feeling groggy. Gravity seemed to have become twice as powerful as usual. She looked up and was blinded by the beam from de Carli’s flashlight.
“I’m fine,” she replied.
“I’m coming.”
“All right, but do go around the normal way,” she sighed, picking her own flashlight up in the meantime.
Its beam shined onto the wall in front of her.
There was a piece of paper stuck to the wall. Teresa walked up to it with a feeling of déjà vu. She had seen those words before, heard them in her mind. She was their author.
I’m developing a sixth sense concerning anything to do with him, like a mother with her son. A mother who not only wants to protect him, but also needs him to grow up fast, before she has to leave him forever.
It does me no good to think of him that way—it makes me fragile; it leaves my heart exposed. It’s not healthy to get so attached to someone now when I should really be preparing to say goodbye. And I also wonder . . . If I were ever put in the awful position of having to choose between saving him and saving an innocent person, what would I do? Having these feelings makes me vulnerable to manipulation and undermines my professional integrity.
It was a page ripped out from her diary, a profanation of her private world, marred by a message written in a stranger’s hand.
Who will you choose?
The stranger had drawn an almost perfect circle around Marini’s name. Teresa had sent him away from the frontline of their investigation in a bid to keep him safe. He was about to become a father, and Teresa didn’t want him anywhere near the killer. But her orders had ended up isolating him from the rest of the squad.
Teresa felt dizzy. She had tried to lay a trap, but become caught in one herself—and it certainly wasn’t the hole in the floor she had just fallen through.
I came close to taking away the thing he holds most dear, and now he wants to take the same thing away from me.
Teresa realized with dawning horror that she was dealing with a mind capable of predicting what she would do next, a mind that had, up until that moment, moved like a ghost that leaves no trace of its passage but had suddenly altered its modus operandi to leave her a written message. It could only mean one thing: it wasn’t afraid of her, because it had nothing to lose.
Marini was in danger.
97
The coffee was boiling hot and far too sweet, but Massimo barely noticed as he drank it all up in two quick gulps, his eyes fixed on a spot beyond his own reflection on the windowpane. It was going to be a long night.
Krisnja’s house faced the forest, which looked like a black silhouette swaying in the wind. Just then the moon rose from behind the crest of the mountain range and illuminated the clearing. The charred remains of the barn nearby surfaced in the night like the skeleton of some long-deceased pachyderm. Behind it, he could see the lights of the girl’s uncle’s house twinkling softly in the darkness.
Massimo looked closer. There was a shadow next to the swing hanging halfway between the two houses. Even at that distance, he recognized the shape: it was Francesco. He was standing there in the middle of the night, motionless, and seemed to be staring right back at Massimo.
Massimo cast a surreptitious glance toward Krisnja: she seemed oblivious to his unease and engrossed in tracing mysterious shapes on the surface of the table with the tip of her finger.
He turned again toward the clearing: it was deserted. He tried to find Francesco among the shadows moving in the wind, but he seemed to have dissolved into the darkness.
Or maybe he’s moved closer.
“We’d better close these shutters, too,” he said, barricading the only access route he hadn’t yet blocked.
Krisnja didn’t reply. Her silence was unnerving. She seemed to be waiting for something inevitable to happen, her hands—stained red with scars and disinfectant medication—resting on the table in helpless surrender. Her face was no longer the Sleeping Nymph’s but a map of suffering. When she’d stood in front of the mirror and peeled off her bandages, Massimo had wanted to stop her but found that he couldn’t move. He’d been petrified, not by what had emerged from beneath the bandages, but by the sight of that wounded creature, whose appearance had reminded him of a hunted animal.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he told her. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
Krisnja closed her eyes for a moment before replying.
“Yet you’re here. To protect me from someone.”
Massimo tried to smile, thinking he must look a little like a fool, and a little like a liar.
“If he’d wanted to kill you, he’d have done it back in the forest, when you were easy prey,” he replied.
“So what does he want? Why is he doing all this?”
Massimo threw his hands in the air.
“Fear, first and foremost. An unhealthy obsession with something he felt was being stolen from him and that he had to guard.”
“At any cost?”
“Yes, even at the cost of a human life.”
Krisnja lowered her eyes. The light from the ceiling lamp threw the shadows of her long eyelashes onto her cheeks.
“You sound like your superintendent,” she told him. “Like someone who feels pity for the killer.”
Massimo wasn’t sure whether “pity” was the right word, and he wasn’t sure it was compassion, either. Perhaps it was more a kind of identification: he needed to understand the killer because he had been one himself, once. And he still was.
You never stop being a killer. It’s like a baptism.
“But by doing this, he’s exposed himself,” Krisnja resumed, drawing Massimo’s attention.
He put his empty cup on the table. His hands were shaking, though his voice was firm.
“I don’t think it’s possible to make that kind of calculation when you’re so blinded by instinct that you’re capable of cutting into someone’s chest,” he replied.
Krisnja’s eyes snapped up to meet his as if in response to some primal call.
“I wonder sometimes if it’s possible to feel the beat of a heart, hear its dying tremors, through the blade of a knife pushing against it,” she said. “Maybe that’s how it was for Aniza, and for Emmanuel, too.”
Suddenly, she turned toward the hallway.
“Did you hear that?” she said.
“What?”
“There it is again!”
Krisnja stood up, knocking her chair over.
“Calm down,” said Massimo, walking up to her. “I didn’t hear anything.”
She placed a finger against her lips. Her pupils were dilated.
“There’s someone here,” she whispered, her voice transformed by terror.
Massimo heard it too, now: a hoarse scrabbling.
Like a fingernail scratching away at something.
He motioned at her to stay where she was.
He followed the sound, which had now morphed into limping footsteps. It was coming from the room at the end of the corridor, Ewa’s room, but Massimo had already been inside and checked it as thoroughly as he’d done all the others. There was no one in this house except for him and Krisnja.
He moved up to the closed door and put his ear against it.
A sudden bang against the door frame almost made him yelp.
There really was someone there—and now they were whispering something, a series of unintelligible words that seemed to be floating out of the keyhole. A rustling sound traversed the length of the door as if someone on the other side were running their hand over it in a gentle caress.
Massimo took his gun out of its holster and unlocked the safety catch. His breathing had sped up, and he could feel the blood pumping in his temples. His mind ran through everything he’d ever learned about tactical entry methods, lines of fire and, of course, cover—which he didn’t have. He thought of Krisnja, who might end up caught in the crossfire if this escalated into a gunfight—a situation Massimo definitely wanted to avoid but that might become inevitable.
He should have called for reinforcements, but then a familiar voice he never thought he would hear again erased every other thought from his mind.
The light around him seemed to shimmer and Massimo flung the door open.
The bedroom was plain and sparsely furnished: a bed, a chest of drawers and a commode, all antiques. There seemed to be no one there, but Massimo had heard him clearly.
The shadows swirled in a circle around him, and then expanded and shaped themselves into the silhouette of a man. In his face made of smoke, a mouth took shape and opened like a vortex to utter Massimo’s name once more.
Massimo knew now: he had crossed the threshold of hell, and that was where this man came from.
He heard the doorbell ring, but the sound seemed to belong in a different dimension. Even if he’d tried, he wouldn’t have had the strength of will to shout at Krisnja not to open the door no matter who was on the other side, because the figure in front of him now was no longer human: it had long horns growing from its head and it called out to him in his father’s voice.
98
The floodlights had come on. Blanca heard the click of the switches and felt a sudden warmth on her face. Nothing else, save for the blackness she saw turning to gray.
On the edge of the forest, the sound of a boy crying rose up from among the police and environmental protection agency vehicles as if in response to the sudden artificial brightness, to those electric moons creating pools of light in the darkness where Blanca and Smoky were meant to search.
The search area had been established on the basis of three coordinates: the place where the boy had last been seen before he’d gotten lost, the place where he’d been found and the place where the family had been camping. A circle had then been drawn around the resulting triangle, and that was the search area. It had been days since the family’s trip and it was possible that the rains might have covered once again what had momentarily resurfaced, but the zone of interest was small and if there were any buried human remains there, Smoky was sure to find them.
“He’s terrified,” said Parisi about their young witness. “He won’t go anywhere near the trees.”
“I’d like to talk to him,” said Blanca. “Alone, please.”
