Second, the superintendent pointed out, the purpose of the liaison officer was to liaise, which, as they both knew, meant to keep the family in the UK apprised of everything relative to the investigation that was occurring on foreign soil. But the parents of the child were in Italy, no? Or at least on their way to Italy, according to the sergeant’s own words. Indeed, the mother of the child lived in Italy, no? Somewhere in Lucca? Outside of Lucca? In the vicinity of Lucca? And with an Italian national, yes? So she had no reason to request a liaison officer. Hence, there was no case to present as to the need of sending Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers into Tuscany to be of assistance in whatever was going on.
“What’s going on,” Barbara said, “is the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl. A nine-year-old British girl. No one saw it happen, and whatever it was that happened, it happened in the middle of a market. A crowded market with hundreds of witnesses who apparently saw nothing.”
“As of yet,” Ardery said. “They can’t all have been talked to at this point. How long has the child been gone?”
“What difference does it make?”
“I wouldn’t think I’d need to explain that to you.”
“Bloody hell, you know the first twenty-four hours are crucial. And now it’s been more than forty-eight.”
“And I assure you, the Italian police know that as well.”
“They’re telling Angelina—”
“Sergeant.” Isabelle’s voice had been firm but not unsympathetic despite her words. Now, however, it had an edge. “I’ve told you the facts. You seem to think I have power in this matter when I don’t. When a foreign country—”
“What part of this don’t you bloody understand?” Barbara cut in. “She’s been snatched in public. She might be dead by now.”
“She might well be. And if that’s the case—”
“Listen to yourself!” Barbara shrieked. “This is a kid we’re talking about. A kid I know. And you’re declaring ‘she might well be’ like you’re talking about a cake left too long in the oven. It might well be burnt. The cheese might well be mouldy. The milk might well be sour.”
Isabelle surged to her feet. “You damn well control yourself,” she said. “You’re too involved by half. Even if the embassy rang up and said the Met’s presence was wanted at once, you’d be the last officer I’d consider sending. You’ve no objectivity at all, and if you don’t understand that objectivity above everything else is crucial when it comes to a crime, then you need to get back to wherever you learned your policing skills and learn them again.”
“And what if something like this happened to one of your boys?” Barbara demanded. “Just how objective would you manage to be?”
“You’ve gone quite mad” was the conclusion to it all, plus the order to get back to work.
Barbara stormed from Ardery’s office. For the moment, she couldn’t even recall what the work was that she was supposed to get back to. She flung herself in the direction of her desk, where her computer’s screen attempted to remind her, but she could think of nothing and would be good for nothing unless and until she got herself to Italy.
LUCCA
TUSCANY
Chief Inspector Salvatore Lo Bianco had an evening ritual that he adhered to as often as he was able to be at home for dinner. With a cup of caffè corretto in his hand, he climbed to the very top of the tower in which he and his mamma lived, and there in the perfectly square rooftop garden he drank in peace and watched the sunset. He enjoyed sunsets and how they caressed the ancient buildings of his city. But more than sunsets, he enjoyed the time away from his mamma. At seventy-six years old and in possession of a very bad hip, she no longer climbed to the top of Torre Lo Bianco, the tower that had been his family home for generations. The last two flights of stairs were narrow and metal, and a misstep on them would finish her off. Salvatore didn’t want to endanger his mamma even though he hated living with her as much as she loved having him at home once again.
Having her Salvatore at home meant she’d been right, and his mamma loved being right more than she loved being content or even being in a state of grace. She’d worn black since the day he’d brought home the Swedish girl he’d met eighteen years earlier in Piazza Grande, and to this maddening choice of telegraphing her displeasure—she’d even worn black to their wedding—she had now taken to carrying rosary beads every moment of the day, and she’d been fingering them piously since the evening he’d revealed that he and Birgit were divorcing. He was supposed to think that his mamma was praying for Birgit to come to her senses and ask her husband to return to the family home in Borgo Giannotti, just beyond the city wall. But the truth of the matter was that she was fulfilling her promise to the Virgin: Bring an end to this blasphemous marriage of my son to quella puttana straniera, and I will spend the rest of my life honouring you with a daily rosary. Or five. Or six. Salvatore didn’t know how many rosaries were actually involved, but he imagined there were plenty of them. He wanted to point out to her that the Catholic Church didn’t recognise divorce, but there was a part of him—good son that he was—that simply didn’t want to spoil her fun.
Salvatore took his caffè to one side of the tower garden and spent a moment inspecting his tomato plants. Already they were showing their fruit, which would ripen beautifully here so high above the city. He looked from them in the direction of Borgo Giannotti. He had things on his mind and one of them was Birgit.
His mother had been right, of course. Birgit had been a mistake on every front. Opposites might indeed attract, but their kind of opposite was of the magnetic variety: Positive and negative, they repelled each other. He should have known early on that this was going to be the case when he’d brought her home to meet his mamma and her reaction to his mamma’s devotion to him—she’d only that day washed, starched, and perfectly ironed his fifteen dress shirts—had been along the lines of “So you have a penis. So what, Salvatore?” instead of understanding the importance of the male child in an Italian family where extending the family line and name was paramount to everyone in it. He’d thought this amusing at first, Birgit’s lack of understanding about this element of his culture. He’d thought the clashes of Italian and Swedish traditions and beliefs would become minimal over time. He’d been wrong. At least she hadn’t decamped to Stockholm with their two children once he and she had parted, and for this Salvatore was grateful.
Second on his mind was the matter of this missing child. This missing British child. It was bad enough that she was foreign. That she was British made it worse. Shades of Perugia and Portugal were all over the situation. Salvatore knew not a soul would blame him for not wanting this circumstance in Lucca to turn in a direction similar to those. Tabloid reporters everywhere, international tabloid reporters at that, television news encampments right outside the questura, hysterical parents, official demands, embassy phone calls, jurisdictional jockeying among the various police forces. Things hadn’t got to that point yet, but Salvatore knew that they could.
He was mightily worried. Three days after the girl’s disappearance and the only leads they’d come up with were from a half-drunk accordion player who performed on market days near Porta San Jacopo and a well-known young drug addict who on these same days knelt directly in the pathway of the shoppers entering the mercato with a sign on his chest reading, Ho fame, as if with the hope that this declaration of hunger would delude passersby who might otherwise rightly suspect he intended to use whatever euros he managed to collect to purchase whatever it was he was actually intending to ingest. From the accordion player, Salvatore had learned that the child in question was present every market Saturday to listen to him play. La Bella Piccola, as he called her, always gave him two euros. But on this day, she had given him seven. First she had given him the coin. Then she had placed a five-euro note into his basket. He thought this note had been handed to her by someone standing near her. Who was this? the accordion player had
been asked. He didn’t know. In the crowd, he explained, there were always many people. Along with his dancing poodle, he smiled and nodded and did his best to entertain them. But the only ones he truly noticed were those who give him a little money for his music. Which was why, of course, he knew la Bella Piccola by appearance if not by name. Because, as he had already said, she always gives me money, Ispettore. He said this last with an expression indicating he knew quite well that Salvatore Lo Bianco would rather part with a finger than drop a coin into someone’s basket.
When asked if there was anything at all unusual that he noticed about the girl that day, the accordion player first said there was nothing. But after a pause for thought he admitted that a dark-haired man might have given her the five-euro note, as such a man had been standing behind her. But, for that matter, an ageing woman with crepe-skinned breasts that hung to her waist might have done so as well. She’d been standing right next to the girl. In either case, all he could tell the ispettore by way of description was dark hair for the one and pendulous breasts for the other, which applied to eighty percent of the population. Indeed, the woman could have been Salvatore’s own mother.
The kneeling young drug addict added a bit to this. From this man—a hapless youth called Carlo Casparia, the disgrace of his long-suffering Padovan family—Salvatore had learned that the girl had passed right by him. Although he was facing outward—away from Porta San Jacopo so that he could greet the entering shoppers with his spurious declaration of hunger—Carlo knew it was the same child whose picture was now posted on walls and doors and in windows round the town. For she’d paused and looked around as if she’d been seeking someone, and when she saw Ho fame on his sign, she’d skipped back to him and had given him the banana she had been carrying. Then she’d walked on. From there, she’d simply vanished. Into thin air, as things turned out. There were no other leads.
Once the mother of the child had made it apparent through various means of hysteria that the child wasn’t a runaway, that she wasn’t playing with friends somewhere, that they—the mamma and her lover—had searched the area, that every corner had been poked and every loose stone had been overturned, Salvatore had rounded up the usual suspects. He’d ordered them brought to the questura, and there on Viale Cavour, he’d grilled eight sex offenders, six suspected paedophiles, a recidivist thief awaiting trial, and a priest about whom Salvatore had had suspicions for years. Nothing had come of this, but the local paper had the story now. It wasn’t big yet—it had not, thank God, gone either provincial or national—but it would if he didn’t come up with this child soon.
He took a final sip of his caffè corretto. He turned from the sight of the sunset and headed for the rooftop opening that would take him back down to his mamma. His mobile rang, and he glanced at the number. He groaned when he saw it and considered what to do.
He could let the call go to voice mail, but he knew there was little point to that. The caller would continue to ring him four times an hour all through the night. He gave a moment’s thought to tossing the mobile over the tower’s edge to break in the narrow street below, but instead he answered.
“Pronto,” he sighed.
He heard what he expected to hear. “Come to Barga, Topo. It’s time you and I had a little talk.”
BARGA
TUSCANY
It was only natural that Piero Fanucci could not possibly live in a town convenient to Lucca. That would have made everyone’s life easier, and il Pubblico Ministero was not a man interested in making anyone’s life easier, least of all the policemen who did his bidding. He liked to live in the Tuscan hills. Thus he lived in the Tuscan hills. If someone he wished to converse with concerning an investigation had to sweat an hour’s drive on an April evening to get to him, that was simply how things were.
At least il Pubblico Ministero didn’t live in the old part of Barga. Getting to him, then, would have meant a climb up endless stairs and a negotiation of the maze of passageways that led in the direction of the Duomo, high on the top of the hill. Instead, thank God, Fanucci lived along the road from Gallicano. It was a dangerous series of switchbacks climbing at a hair-raising angle from a village in the valley, but at least one could get there by car.
When Salvatore arrived, he knew that il Pubblico Ministero would be alone. His wife would be travelling to the home of one of their six children, which was how she had navigated her marriage to Fanucci since those children had become old enough to marry and to purchase homes of their own. His occasional lover—a long-suffering woman from Gallicano who cleaned and cooked and obeyed a single word from Fanucci, resta, by taking herself to his bedroom once she’d finished her solitary dinner in his kitchen and had done the washing up after his solitary dinner in the dining room—would also have departed. Fanucci would be with his only true love, among the cymbidiums he tenderly babied in a manner he might have applied, but did not, to his family. Salvatore would be meant to admire whichever of the orchids was currently in bloom. Until he had done so, and at a length and with the level of sincerity il Pubblico Ministero required, he would not be told the reason that he had been summoned to Barga.
Salvatore parked in front of Fanucci’s house, a stout and square terracotta-coloured villa that stood in a plot of expensively maintained gardens behind a wrought-iron gate. This was, as always, locked, but a code admitted him.
He didn’t bother with the house. Instead, he walked around to the back of the villa where a terrace overlooked a steep drop to the valley and the hillsides opposite, into which dozens of Tuscan villages were tucked. Lights were coming on in those villages now. In another hour, they would provide a scattering of sequins on the cape of night.
At the far corner of the terrace rose the roof of the orchid house, which stood on the lawn below. Steps led down to this lawn, and a gravel path edged it. Salvatore followed this to the grape arbour that provided shade for a seating area. A table and chairs stood here, on the table a bottle of grappa, two glasses, and a plate of the kind of biscotti that Fanucci favoured. Il Pubblico Ministero himself was not seated here, however. As Salvatore had anticipated, he was within the orchid house awaiting compliments. Salvatore mentally readied himself and entered.
Fanucci was in the midst of spraying the leaves of a dozen or more of his plants. These stood on a potting shelf that ran along one side of the orchid house. They were spindly in that way of orchids, tied to thin bamboo poles to keep them upright, each offering a single spine of blooms that Fanucci was tenderly keeping away from the spray. He had his spectacles on the tip of his nose and a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips. His gut hung over the cintura that cinched his trousers.
Fanucci didn’t look up from what he was doing. He didn’t speak. This gave Salvatore time to evaluate his superior in an effort to know what to expect from him during their encounter. For Fanucci was notoriously volatile, il drago to some and il vulcano to others.
He was also the ugliest man Salvatore had ever seen, deeply swarthy like the contadini in Basilicata, the land of his birth; cursed with warts that exploded from his face like something only San Rocco could cure; in possession of a sixth finger on his right hand which he waved about in conversation, all the better to read upon the faces of those to whom he spoke the level of their aversion for him. His appearance had been a torment in his impoverished youth, but he’d learned to use it. At an age and of a level of success at which he now could have done something to normalise his looks, he refused to do so. They served him well.
Salvatore said, “Beautiful as always, Magistrato. What do you call this one?” and he gestured to a bloom whose fuchsia petals bore flecks of yellow that eased into the interior of the flower like spots of sunlight banishing the night.
Fanucci glanced briefly at the orchid. He dislodged ash from his cigarette down the front of a white shirt already spotted by olive oil and tomato sauce, no concern to Fanucci who would not, of course, have to wash the garment. He sa
id, “It does nothing, that. One flower a season. It belongs in the garbage. You know nothing of flowers, Topo. I keep thinking you will learn, but you’re hopeless.” He set down his sprayer. He drew in on his cigarette and coughed. It was a deep and wet cough and his breath wheezed in his chest. Smoking was suicide for the man, but he persisted. There were many officers in both the polizia di stato and the carabinieri who hoped he would succeed in his efforts. “How’s your mamma?” Fanucci asked him.
“Same as always,” Salvatore said.
“That woman’s a saint.”
“So she would have me believe.”
Salvatore strolled to the end of the potting shelf, admiring the flowers as he went. The air inside the orchid house was fragrant with the scent of fine potting soil. Salvatore thought how he would have liked to feel it—rich, loamy, and crumbling—within his hands. There was an honesty about this soil that he liked. It was what it was, and it did what it did.
Fanucci finished his nightly babying of his orchids and stepped out of the orchid house. Salvatore followed. At the table, he poured two glasses of grappa. Salvatore would have preferred San Pellegrino, but he accepted the grappa as he was meant to do. He said no to the offer of the biscotti, however. He slapped his hands on his stomach and made noises to suggest his mamma’s fine cooking was doing him in, although he was, as always, scrupulously careful about his weight.
He waited for Fanucci to get around to the purpose of this evening’s command appearance in Barga. He knew better than to suggest that il Pubblico Ministero might want to reveal the significance of this encounter and not waste his time with social niceties or anything else. Fanucci would play out this meeting in whatever way he’d decided to play it out. There was no point to pushing the man. He was as immovable as a boulder. So Salvatore asked after the man’s wife, after his children, after his grandchildren. They talked of the wet spring they’d had and the promise of a long and hot summer. They spoke about a ridiculous dispute among the vigili urbani and the polizia postale. They considered how to manage the crowds for an upcoming battle of the bands that would occur in Lucca’s Piazza Grande.
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