Missing

by Monty Marsden

  “It’s here…” Claps said. He pointed to a spot on the ground. “They took me here… yesterday… I marked the exact… spot.”

  Dr Manara walked closer to the border of the small open area and hunkered down where four small boughs were rooted in the ground to mark the area. She pulled a trowel from her bag and slowly began to work on the soil.

  “Yes.” She said. “It’s here – I can see a fairly recent cut.”

  “That’s where… they dug… to unearth the body… last year.”

  “How deep were they?”

  “Less than twen… twenty…”

  “Twenty centimetres?”

  “Yes… centimetres.”

  “Only the trunk, arms and skull, you said.”

  Claps nodded.

  “Which way were the remains facing? I mean, how was the skull positioned?”

  Claps pointed to a spot.

  “Then we’ll have to imagine a depth reaching twenty centimetres down starting from about here.” Dr Manara made a mark on the ground. “That is where the lower part of the body – which was unearthed and eaten by the animals – had to be.”

  Cristina Manara remained silent for a little while. “Well,” she said eventually with her happy smile. “It might take a couple of hours, but I need some of the tools I left in my suitcase in the car.”

  *

  Two hours hadn’t been enough – it was almost 4 p.m. when Dr Manara shouted out to Claps. “I’m done!” She sounded tired and satisfied.

  All that time, she had been peeling the soil with consistency and delicacy to a depth of twenty centimetres, bit by bit. She had carefully isolated every root she had found.

  “Holly oaks,” she said, after pointing out the trees. “The smaller ones are euphorbia and mastic trees. Their roots will helps us date the death of the victim more precisely.”

  Dr Manara classified and numbered about twenty roots and quickly jotted down on her note pad the position of the roots in the pit. Then, she chopped the roots gently and placed them in a box.

  “When the pit was dug to hide the body,” she began to explain. “The roots of the neighbouring trees were cut off – however, they grew again and fed off the rotting body. If we analyse the root, we can figure out its age from the number of growing circles that it has inside.”

  “One circle… per year.”

  “Exactly. So once we identify the re-growth spot, we can calculate with accuracy how many years have passed since the burial.”

  “The pit… was dug… again… last year.”

  “Yeah, I’ll most likely find regrowth signs from last year too, but I picked up a few roots to analyse and some of them seemed promising – with a little bit of luck, I’ll be able to tell you the date.”

  “That’s… important.”

  “I know.” Dr Manara’s face didn’t reveal any joy yet. “You’re convinced that Ami wasn’t the first one and that there was at least one more victim.”

  “Yes, at… at least. Listen, Cri… Cristina. Three years… ago… found another pit… here in… Tus… cany… little African girl… killed… three… four months before… little finger… amputated.”

  Dr Manara remained silent for a while – she looked grim.

  “Claps, I’d like to see those bones, I want to analyse the amputation spot – even if it was a long time ago, we’ll still be able to recover some information.”

  Claps nodded.

  “When will you be… able to… date it?”

  “I just need my lab.” Dr Manara glanced at her watch. “There’s a train in an hour.”

  “You have… not eaten… yet… Cristina.”

  “Neither have you – don’t worry, I’m used to eating whenever I can, I’ll get some food at the station.”

  The sun was no longer high in the sky and the air was getting a little colder now. Claps and Dr Manara set off towards the car – Claps chased one of his thoughts for a moment. After a struggle, he managed to organize the words into a sentence.

  “Listen… Cristina… I want to give… again… a face… to the victims.”

  “A facial reconstruction?” Dr Manara nodded. “It’s possible. We’re able to reconstruct faces much more easily nowadays and we’re quite good at it, but I need the two skulls to do that.”

  “The magistrate… has already… approved… you should… have them…with you… at the lab… tomorrow.”

  “Okay then, we’ll begin our work straight away. Do you think you’ll be able to identify them like this?”

  Claps froze for a moment, he shrugged almost imperceptibly and lowered his eyes. “Don’t know… difficult.”

  He remained silent and still for a few more moments, then he lifted his eyes again towards Dr Manara. “They’re victims… with no… name… no justice… let’s give them… a face…”

  The two remained in silence until the car approached the motorway.

  “How long… until…”

  “To reconstruct the two faces?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dr Portanova will take care of it, he’s the best and the fastest.”

  “How… long?”

  “You said that the remains in the other pit weren’t a skeleton, right?”

  “Died… three or… four months…”

  “Her body still had the flesh, cartilage and hair, then. Do you have any photos?”

  “Of… course… you’ll have every… thing… tomorrow…”

  “Okay, it’ll be only a skull by now but with the photos from back then everything will be quicker and more precise. You know, if we only have the skull, features such as the ears, nose and hair can only be guessed at in facial reconstructions. This case will be different and Dr Portanova will have an easier task of it – you might have some very good results within the next three days.”

  “The other… one?”

  “We’ll do it right after – five or six days at most.”

  *

  Claps really struggled to make phone calls – when he spoke to somebody who was right in front of him, his speech was a lot better. The first few times that he had tried it, it had felt like he was regressing a few months in his recovery. He could hardly remember any words and if he somehow tried to grasp them, they sounded foreign to his ears. It was an excruciating battle to decipher their meaning.

  He had learned to speak into a phone with his eyes closed – he would imagine the face of the person that he was speaking to and spoke as if they were standing in front of him.

  That was one of the many tricks that he had to learn to at least resemble a normal person.

  Yes, to resemble.

  Was it more like lying to himself?

  Claps dialled a number on the service telephone in his hotel room. As soon as he heard the beeps, he gazed out of the window towards the sea; he closed his eyes and imagined Sensi as he was about to answer the phone.

  “Claps! Are you still in Tuscany?”

  “Yes… I’ll move on… tomorrow.”

  “How did it go with Dr Manara?”

  Claps struggled to tell the story.

  “Okay, we’ll be able to get some more details, including the victims’ faces. However, to be honest, I don’t know how much use this will be in catching the monster.”

  “We… we’ll see… you?”

  “We’ve recovered the names of the hospital staff who were in contact with Mr Beattie while he was hospitalised.”

  “And…?”

  “Three of them moved elsewhere, two of them have retired. All of the remaining ones were on duty during the first few days when Ami was kidnapped. All but four – we’re working on that.”

  “And… other… patients?”

  “The search on the other patients was a little more difficult – Mr Beattie was hospitalised for thirty-two days and then moved back to England. We’ll have to verify one by one the records of all of the patients during that time period.”

  “You can… select…”

  “Sure: male, nearl
y two metres tall… that’s still a lot of work, though. We’re also assuming that Mr Beattie’s driving licence was stolen from him while he was hospitalised and not at any other time. He spent four months in Italy. Anyway, we’re focusing on the hospital staff for now. If necessary, we’ll move onto the patients and finally to their visitors.”

  “I’ll call you… tomorrow… good work…”

  Claps hung up and opened his eyes again.

  4

  The pit where the second victim had been buried was about forty kilometres away from the first one – there was a dirt road between the two areas, which stretched through hills and wild areas towards Siena.

  Claps had set off from Follonica quite early and had arrived in the morning at the police station that had dealt with the case a few years ago.

  “There isn’t much to say, really.” The police commissioner had told him. “The body was found by chance in the woods by two people who had gone to pick mushrooms. There had been a storm a few days before – the woods are on a slope and the rainwater probably carried a lot of soil downhill with it. The pit wasn’t very deep. The guys noticed some small toes sticking out of the soil. There’s a specific procedure to be followed in cases like this – we verified that the guys hadn’t fallen victim to a prank, we isolated the area, we notified the co-ordinating officer, who in turned notified the deputy head. The following day, a team from Rome came over to unearth the body and to begin the investigation and the analysis procedures. You’ll have read the report…”

  Claps looked away. Of course he had read the report – female, estimated age eleven or twelve years, African ethnicity, passed away about three months before her body was found, cause of death, strangulation. Moreover, signs of rape had been found on the remains and there was no organic trace that would allow the investigators to reconstruct the killer’s DNA. The little finger on the left hand was also missing – it had been chopped off cleanly by a sharp, heavy weapon – an axe, a meat cleaver or something similar, the scientific investigator had said.

  “Back then, there were no reports of missing persons made that corresponded to the victim’s profile in the whole country – we assumed that the victim belonged to a group of illegal immigrants from Africa, perhaps she was the daughter of a family without residence permits. We thought about the causes – a vendetta, a feud… a mess within their own community. We looked for more information everywhere, even beyond our province, but it was like facing a wall. The few who didn’t run away as soon as they saw us, said that they’d never heard of a little girl disappearing three months earlier. However…”

  “However?” Claps had echoed.

  “In the Massa Marittima camp, a woman had some kind of reaction – she had begun to cry desperately and appeared to be asking where her child was in her own language. The two policemen may have got the wrong impression though – eventually, the few men from the community who had remained on site tried to take the lady away. They explained to the policemen that she was simply over anxious – she thought that the police had come to arrest her. The following day, the police came back with an interpreter to ask further questions, but the lady wasn’t there any more – she had disappeared, the few people in the camp said that she had left for good, they didn’t know where and with whom. She had simply vanished and it was impossible to get in touch with her. Anyway, we attempted to gather some more information for a few weeks…” The police commissioner spread his arms eloquently.

  Claps made no further comments and asked for directions to the community camp in Massa Marittima. He also asked to be accompanied to the site where the body had been found.

  *

  The pit was about a hundred metres away from the dirt road that let visitors into the woods. For Claps, this was déjà-vu – the monster’s method of disposing of the young bodies was basically the same everywhere.

  A tiny dirt path, difficult to even walk along in places, made its way through the undergrowth to a small open area where there was a pit.

  The young policeman who had accompanied Claps pointed silently to the spot where the victim had been found.

  Exactly the same method.

  Claps closed his eyes, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of vertigo and eventually saw the whole scene in his mind – the panting man digging a pit at night, his wild breathing…

  Was the moon out that night… or did he have to use a lamp?

  How did he feel about the atrocity he had committed?

  He could see his back, as he leant over to dig the pit, grunting with exertion.

  He could almost smell the odours, the pungent, horrible smell of blood and sweat. And death.

  He saw him straighten up. He lifted up the small body, it appeared very light. He laid it into the pit.

  “Are you okay, sir?”

  The young policeman touched his arm, the vertigo disappeared suddenly.

  Claps felt almost completely unable to speak. He asked to return to the car, and drove to Milan.

  *

  Elisa had taken three days to finish her drawing. It still looked childish, but it was one of the best drawings that she’d made so far. Above all, it was the first one that represented a human being.

  There was a young blonde girl at the centre of the page, it was as if she was suspended in the air, her dress was light blue, her arms spread wide, her long hair was wavy and blown by an invisible wind.

  The little girl didn’t smile – Elisa had drawn her eyes, but not her mouth.

  Around the little girl, it was all white.

  “Yes,” Trevis thought. “Elisa feels like she’s suspended, surrounded by emptiness, nothingness. You don’t need a mouth to speak to the void.”

  *

  Claps’ phone vibrated – he had just driven into Lodi. It would only take a few more kilometres on the motorway for him to finally reach the city.

  He slowed down and pulled out towards the right lane, then he pressed on the loud speakers.

  “Hey, it’s Cristina.” Dr Manara’s cheery voice echoed inside the car – it was slightly distorted by the speakers. “What’s this noise?”

  “I’m in… the car… almost in… Milan.”

  “That’s great… still, your car sounds incredibly noisy!”

  Claps pulled over and stopped in the emergency lane. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine Dr Manara’s face on the other end of the line.

  “Any… news?”

  “Do you still want to know a more precise date for that pit?”

  “Tell… me.”

  “I had to work longer than expected on those roots, but we’re lucky – we have no doubts. The pit was dug four years ago.”

  “Margin of…”

  “Margin of error? Definitely not less than four years, and almost equally certainly not more than four and a half years.”

  Four years before – the first victim had been killed back then. The following year, the second victim. Only now, Ami…

  “How many young bodies are still hidden away in the woods?” Claps asked himself. “Two? Three? More than that?”

  “Claps? Are you still there? Can you hear me?”

  An articulated lorry drove past and shook the car.

  “Yes… I was thinking… a year between the… first and the se… the second victim… three years between the second victim… and Ami.”

  “I know what you mean.” Dr Manara suddenly sounded very serious. “There must be more pits somewhere.”

  “Yes.”

  “We must stop that motherfucker. We have to catch him.”

  For a few seconds, nobody spoke. Then, Dr Manara broke the silence, she sounded a little unnatural. “I have some news for you, Claps – LAFoD have received the remains. Dr Portanova will begin working on the first skull early tomorrow morning, I’ll ask him to focus on this case only. You’ll see the victim’s face in a couple of days.”

  “I’ll need… photos.”

  “You’ll have as many as you want, from every angle.”<
br />
  “Let’s be… quick.”

  “I’ll call you as soon as Dr Portanova finishes his work. Goodbye for now, Claps.”

  “Goodbye, Cristina. Oh…”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank… you.”

  “Better late than never – I’d lost hope of hearing those words. Ha ha, I don’t know what to do with words of thanks – let’s just catch that motherfucker.”

  5

  Dr Portanova begun work straight away. Cristina Manara had been very clear – this case was the highest priority. Dr Portanova was one of the best in the world in his field – he specialized in manual reconstruction of the face, which meant giving a face back to someone whose remains were only a heap of bones. He would create the face with modelling clay, layer by layer.

  This technique had been slowly replaced by software aided reconstruction thanks to newer, more sophisticated and yet easily accessible technology. The final results, however, were not identical to those obtained through the use of modelling clay – for this reason, Dr Portanova was internationally renowned.

  As well as working at LAFoD, he attended conferences, took part in debates, enjoyed beer and listened to rock music from the seventies.

  Dr Portanova wore his MP3 earphones – he was staring at the resin cast standing a few inches away from him. It reproduced perfectly the skull of the unfortunate victim. He hung the photos from the day she was found on the wall.

  He glanced at the photos, then closed his eyes when Led Zeppelin began their ‘Immigrant Song’ with a loud scream.

  “I’ll have to give you a name, little one.” He couldn’t hear his own voice over the loud music coming through the headphones.

  As a first step, he would position some measuring needles to determine the thickness of the facial muscles. Then he would reconstruct them one by one by using modelling clay, from the deepest layers.

  “Aisha…”

  The photos would be of great help to him in reconstructing the shape of the nose and the ears – similarly, he would follow the photos to shape the hair.

  “Aisha is a beautiful name, it means life.”

  After this process, he would finally use a software tool to refine the soft tissues. It was going to be a long, difficult job which required some excellent skills and an enthusiasm for art, but also sensitivity and a good dose of – sometimes painful – empathy for the person whose face he was modelling. This aspect of the job was miles away from a cold piece of software that created an expressionless, dull face in a few minutes – almost as cold as a manikin, or a flat photokit. Dr Portanova’s faces were alive.