When the Dead Awaken (8 page)

Sabrina D'Avalos's eyes studied the floor with their usual intensity.

‘We ought to compare the 9-mm bullet from Lucia Forlani with the ones found in Paolo Iacovelli and Fabiano Batista,' she said.

‘I fail to see the connection,' he said. ‘Lucia and Salvatore Forlani were abducted from Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II at the exact same time as the attack on Nanometric – and at the same time as the murders of Iacovelli and Professor Batista.'

‘There's no connection if one assumes that Lucia Forlani was killed on the day she was abducted,' she conceded. ‘But it's just an assumption. No one knows for sure.'

Renda looked at her.

‘You're right and I'm tired. It's an automatic subconscious assumption, as you say. I'll see to it.'

‘Thank you. I have another and final request, dottore. Something personal.'

‘A last request? That sounds serious.'

‘Just a wish then, if you prefer.'

Renda inflated his cheeks and let the air escape in a thin, controlled stream.

‘What might that be?'

Sabrina told him.

When she had finished, she looked at him closely.

‘If that's what you really want,' he said.

‘It is.'

Renda nodded and looked into the distance.

‘You want to start in Milan?'

‘That was my plan.'

‘Perhaps you should consider stopping off in Castellarano. Form your own impressions,' he said.

Sabrina raised an eyebrow. ‘Why on earth would I want to do that?'

‘Why? It's almost on your way.' He smiled. ‘It was where Lucia Forlani grew up. Where Giulio Forlani's family spent their summer holidays. His mother was born there. Perhaps they met each other in Castellarano. It's the start of everything. In this case, I mean.'

‘I thought you said there was no case?'

Renda smiled again. He had spent his life in courtrooms and no one, least of all a green assistant public prosecutor, would ever catch him out in a contradiction.

‘I was being kind, dottoressa.'

Castellarano, Reggio Emilia, Northern Italy

The small town rested on a slope under a pure blue sky with a river that wound through the low brown mountains like a green ribbon. The birthplace of Lucia Forlani. The city wall embraced the sand-coloured houses. Sabrina had parked the Opel in the almost empty car park outside the tourist office. She walked under an archway and felt momentarily disoriented in the confusion of small streets behind the city wall.

It was outside the tourist season, and she wandered across piazzas where most of the cafés were boarded up. Chairs and tables were stacked, secured with long chains and padlocks, parasols were leaning against walls; the foliage of the plane trees had started to wither and drop. The leaves lay still on the cobblestones in this strangely airless town. She passed a small medieval castle with a hexagonal tower that she, with the help of a tourist brochure, identified as the Castle of Countess Mathilde. One
of the Medicis. Everything was well cared for, in good condition, freshly painted and clean. There was no rubbish in the streets, no graffiti on the walls. It was hard to believe that Naples and this little town existed in the same country. This place could have been in Switzerland.

She walked through a labyrinth of narrow streets, where women with all the time in the world sat on doorsteps or white plastic chairs. They greeted her with a nod and a smile. Sabrina smiled and nodded until her jaw started to ache. Most shops were dark and deserted. Even the ‘For Sale' signs were faded and tattered. A few shops survived by selling regional culinary specialities and the usual rustic tourist tat.

The streets started to climb upwards. The cobbles had been laid in wide, shallow steps and she could see the sky open up ahead. She reached a park from where she could get an overview of the river and the mountains – and a bit of a breeze.

Sabrina had the park to herself. She walked past a long washing trough carved out of granite. A jet of water spouted from the mouth of a crusader and golden leaves whirled on the black surface of the water. She sat down on a marble bench and surveyed the soaring towers, walls and battlements of Castellarano's famous convent school. Behind the convent lay a wide, green common, the playing fields alive with tiny figures playing lacrosse, football, or sprinting round the orange surface of the athletics track.

Lucia Forlani – or Lucia Maletta, as she then was – had once run around down there, Sabrina thought. She had probably striven for academic and sporting excellence. She knew that the convent school was one of the most desirable south of the Alps and that its students came mainly from Europe's wealthiest families, but twenty per cent of each year's intake was made up of poor or orphaned girls who could pass the entrance exam and be found deserving by a selection committee. The scholarship covered the cost of tuition, books, clothes, pocket money, board and lodging. Lucia Forlani had been one of the lucky ones. Depending on how you looked at it.

Sabrina pressed the palms of her hands against the cold marble of the bench and raised her face towards the sun. She closed her eyes and let herself sink into the sunlight, listening to the distant sounds from the playing fields and the rustling of leaves across the cobblestones.

‘Excuse me … ?'

The tall woman was watching her with a smile. She gestured towards the bench and Sabrina moved up.

‘Thank you.'

The woman sat down. She placed her shopping bag between her feet and stretched out her arms towards the sun for a moment. She lifted her face and closed her eyes. The woman was slim and well built; probably in her early forties with grey in her curly dark brown hair. Her skin was smooth, golden and healthy. She wore no jewellery.
Her slate-grey dress was simple and she had a thin woollen cardigan over her shoulders.

The woman found a brown paper bag in her shopping bag, and pushed back the paper to reveal a bunch of blue grapes, which she offered to Sabrina.

She took a couple and ate them slowly.

‘You're not from here, signora,' the woman said.

‘Signorina. No, I'm from Milan, but I work in Naples.'

The other woman held out her hand.

‘Antonia Moretti.'

‘Sabrina.'

The woman smiled with a hint of pity. ‘Naples …'

Sabrina laughed. ‘I know what you're thinking, signora. I do. But even Naples has its good points. You just have to try harder to find them.'

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to … '

‘Are you from Castellarano, signora?'

‘I've lived here all my life. Or rather, in an old grocer's shop just outside the town. It was my parents' shop. It's closed now. The traffic was diverted from the old road that went through the town to a big new ring road and they built supermarkets along that which are more convenient, it would seem.'

She held out the bag again.

Sabrina took a few more grapes and stood up.

‘Thank you, signora. Time for me to go.'

‘To Milan? You're going home?'

‘Yes.'

‘Drive safely.'

‘Thanks for the grapes.'

The woman smiled.

She had come straight from the undertaker's.

The face under the hands of Antonia Moretti was a perfect oval, the features of the seventeen-year-old girl beautiful; nothing defining her character had yet developed under the smooth skin.

Above the white towelling hairband following the girl's hairline, her black hair was matt and fragrant and the silk under her neck damp.

At the electric organ Signorina Lombardi smiled and her down-at-heel shoes tapped out a simple rhythm from a dancing school long since sold. The organist had mastered the art of sleeping and sitting upright at the same time. Antonia pulled a sable-hair make-up brush from the bun at the nape of her neck, dipped it in the second square from the top on the palette and traced the colour from the bridge of the girl's nose over her cheekbones, from her chin over her cheeks and jawline, from her throat to her collarbone, from her finely plucked eyebrows to the hair-band, and her face lit up – it almost came alive.

She hesitated. The reason was the multitude of holes in
the girl's nostrils and ear lobes. The corresponding studs, twisted silver rings and beetle-black enamelled pendants with yellow runes and symbols of rebellion, lay untouched on the table. Her boyfriend, who had survived the crash, wanted the jewellery reinstated and Antonia had wedged his proffered photo inside the coffin lid between the white silk and the oak, above the mirror that collected light from the lamp and showed her the far side of the girl's face.

Antonia looked at Enzo in the mirror. Her eccentric lodger sat in the back pew of the chapel of rest like a piece of driftwood. He usually accompanied her to Ugo Conti's firm of undertakers. As if he didn't quite trust her to handle the emotions or didn't quite know what she did, while he himself was an expert on all matters relating to death. She didn't remember ever asking him, wishing for it or giving permission. As usual, Enzo had enforced his will through deaf-eared, brute stubbornness. Like certain children, he heard only what he wanted to hear.

Her lodger would usually daydream in his pew until Antonia had finished with the deceased. Then Enzo would leave the chapel by a side door before the mourners entered.

The boyfriend's photo showed the girl riding pillion on a yellow motorbike, smiling triumphantly at the photographer. But the smile didn't reach the soft corners of her mouth, the expression in her eyes didn't match the short
tomato-red hair, flattened and tousled by the black crash helmet on her lap.

Antonia restored collapsed nuances behind the cheekbones and under the jawline with powder, traced concealer to the corners of the eyes with the tip of her finger and closed the girl's lips with a strip of Velcro. And froze at the sight of the parents' photo, which was next in line.

As in almost every one of these tragedies, the parents' suggestion was a posed photograph from the girl's Communion, taken in Matteo Rivolti's studio in Via San Michele, where the town's well-off citizens would go when their children were baptized, confirmed or married.

Amalia Nesta wasn't smiling in this picture; the lower half of her face was obscured by the frilly collar of the white dress. Innocence embalmed.

She glanced up at the mirror. Enzo would appear to have fallen asleep.

The undertaker's wide back filled the space between the double doors that swung open with a squeak, which in turn woke up Signorina Lombardi. She raised her hands to strike a suitable, elegiac chord, but Antonia shook her head.

‘Antonia, Antonia … they're waiting. We're all waiting. Even poor Signorina Lombardi is waiting. Look at her, the poor woman. And the girl, she's not the Mona Lisa, is she?
That's not what they're paying for. Not the Mona Lisa, Antonia. That's not what they're getting.'

Up close, the undertaker looked as if he were carved out of African ebony. Ugo Conti was broader and darker than the men from the highlands around Castellarano.

He removed the big black glasses that matched a heavy, bluish lower face and dabbed his cheeks, eyes and lips with a handkerchief. He looked only at Antonia – the firm's perfectionist prima donna – completely ignoring the meek Signorina Lombardi and the huge silent man in the back pew; Signora Moretti's strange pet.

‘But she is, Ugo … That's exactly what she is,' Antonia said.

‘The father wants to murder the boy,' Ugo said. ‘He blames him for everything. For the accident.'

‘I understand,' Antonia said.

The undertaker stiffened.

‘Antonia … pardon me, but you don't. You don't know what you're talking about. Now what are you doing?!'

The undertaker raised his hands as if he physically wanted to stop Antonia as she removed every trace of make-up from the dead girl's face with cleansing wipes. She took the boyfriend's and the parents' photos and handed them to Ugo. The jewellery followed suit. All of it.

Only one photo remained in the lid of the coffin.

‘Silence, Ugo. Let me work in peace.
Per favore
. She's old
enough to be herself now. She doesn't belong to everybody else.'

In the mirror she received a nod of approval from Enzo. A faint smile in his beard. Perhaps she was imagining it. Enzo Canavaro was not a man who allowed himself to be easily read. It was as if most expressions had long since been washed from his lean, sinister face.

The girl's younger sister had slipped the bent photo into Antonia's hand when her parents' attention was momentarily distracted by the undertaker. The face of the dead girl in the photograph reflected the sun and the sea by the railings on a summer ferry. The angle showed the older sister looking up through the lens of a disposable camera. It had captured her smile, and a glint in the eye that wasn't just a squint against the sun. The expression was genuine and natural.

Antonia's brushes instinctively found the right shades: the colours of a summer day; a smoky blue, like the water in the wake of the Adriatic ferry, was dabbed on the upper eyelid, and a blue eyeliner a shade lighter was applied to the edge of the lower lid.

Ugo Conti held his breath as he followed the last strokes that transformed the girl, which interpreted her far beyond her parents' or her boyfriend's restricted and irreconcilable expectations.

He clapped his hands together and breathed a sigh of
relief. As he hastened towards the anteroom he snapped his fingers at the right ear of Signorina Lombardi, as if she were under hypnosis.

Enzo left.

The double doors opened to let in the mourners.

The girl's boyfriend limped to a chair on the left of the central aisle, while the little family sat down to the right. The boyfriend was in pain, Antonia could see that. The muscles in his neck were tense, his lips bloodless. The little sister's face was soft and mournful, the father's grave, while the mother was slowly strangled in the never-ending grip of grief.