Baker frowned. ‘No, I don’t think I did. When we realised that Stacey had gone, I didn’t give it another thought. It must still be amongst our stuff, I guess.’
‘I’d like to take a look.’
Genovesi was shaking his head now, seemingly no longer able to keep a lid on his frustration.
‘And you didn’t talk to anyone else on the beach?’
‘No, not before Stacey was taken. After we realised she’d gone, we kept calling for her and shouting, and then they all came over to see if they could help.’
‘All of them?’
‘Well, I think all of them. It was chaos, we were in a panic — it’s just a blur, really. I don’t remember how things went.’
‘And when you first arrived at the beach, you took that spot by the rocks? The same spot where you were sleeping when Stacey disappeared?’
He watched the guilt cloud his face. ‘Yes, we didn’t move from there.’
‘And how much time passed between you arriving on the beach and your daughter disappearing?’’
‘I don’t know. I guess about an hour — maybe more, maybe less.’
‘But your wife called the station at three-thirty — that’s an hour and a half if you arrived at two, as you told my colleagues.’
‘Then it must have been an hour and a half. Like I say, I lost track of time.’
‘And when you arrived on the beach, what did you do?’
‘We left our things by the rocks, and then Stacey and I went for a swim. Jane wanted to stay on the beach to sunbathe.’
‘How long were you in the sea?’
‘It seemed like a while. The water was warm, and Stacey was having a wild time.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘Twenty minutes, I think — maybe more.’
‘Is your daughter a strong swimmer?’
Baker swallowed slowly, trying to keep it together. ‘She was doing really well at school with her swimming. They said they had high hopes for her with her sport. She takes after her dad — and her grandpa.’ Fat tears were forming. Scamarcio watched them break surface tension, roll down one cheek, and drop from his chin. His shoulders were heaving now, and Genovesi turned away, embarrassed. Zanini rooted in his pocket for something, before finding a battered wad of paper tissues and handing them over.
Scamarcio pressed on. ‘And when you came back to the shore, what did you do?’
Baker took the tissues, but wiped his face with his sleeve. ‘I put up the umbrella and started with my book. Jane was still sunbathing.’
‘On her back?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘And where was Stacey?’
‘She dried herself off, and then took her bucket and spade down to the water. I think she was trying to make a sandcastle.’
‘Did she ask you for help?’
‘No, she’s quite determined, and likes to do things on her own.’
‘How long was she down there?’
‘I’m not sure — maybe twenty minutes, maybe more. Then she came back up because she wanted an ice-cream. She’d seen the man selling them, and asked me to buy her one.’
‘There was a man selling ice-cream on the beach?’
‘Yeah, I’m not sure where he’d come from. I kinda felt sorry for the guy that there were so few of us there that day. ‘
Scamarcio tried to keep his voice level, and turned to Genovesi: ‘I didn’t know about the ice-cream guy. You know about the ice-cream guy?’
The chief shrugged. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’
Switching back into English, Scamarcio said: ‘Did you tell my colleagues about the ice-cream man?’
Baker sniffed. ‘I’m not sure — maybe not. I can’t remember whether it came up when they interviewed me. Was that a crucial detail?’ He breathed in deeply. ‘Jesus, what’s wrong with me — why didn’t I think of it before?’
‘Mr Baker, try to stay calm. It may prove to be important; it may not. Either way, we will look into it.’
Scamarcio had the sense that he was starting from zero — no thorough statements had been taken. Then another troubling thought struck him: ‘I take it my colleagues brought the interpreter along when they interviewed you and your wife?’ The fact that Genovesi showed little reaction to the last question only served to heighten his disquiet.
Baker shook his head. ‘No, it was just these guys — the men with you now.’
Why the hell hadn’t they found an interpreter? What was wrong with them? He wasn’t certain, but he suspected that Genovesi’s English fell far short of fluent and that his men were worse. He would put it to the test when they’d finished with Baker.
‘This ice-cream seller — can you describe him?’
‘He was African, tall. Wore a gown and a hat — he looked like he was from the Congo or somewhere like that. I was surprised that he would be here in Italy, actually.’
‘A lot of Africans travel here looking for work. They come over on boats to Lampedusa, off Sicily. More and more of them are arriving each month.’
The American was nodding, but didn’t seem to be listening.
‘Did you see anyone else buy from him?’
‘No, not that I remember.’
‘After you got the ice-cream, what happened?’
‘She sat down under the umbrella to eat, and polished it off pretty quickly. Jane gave her some tissues to clean her mouth with, and then she went back to the water again — back to her sandcastle.’ He smiled. ‘She seemed really happy: she was singing to herself.’ A shadow crossed his face.
‘And then?’
‘And then I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I know, I’m being woken up by Jane shouting. Stacey had already gone.’ He stopped and looked across the bar into nothing. ‘That was the final time I saw her — down by the water singing.’ His voice fell to a whisper. ‘I hope to God that won’t be my last memory of her.’
Scamarcio pushed on. ‘And when you last saw your wife before falling asleep, she was still sunbathing on her front?’
‘I think so, yes.’ He thought for a moment. ‘She’d got Stacey cleaned up after the ice-cream, and then I think she just lay down again, back to how she was before.’
‘On her front?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘But you’re not sure?’
Baker rocked back on the stool. ‘Fuck no, Detective, of course I’m not sure. I was tired; I’d had wine with my lunch. I don’t know. I think that’s what happened, but I could be wrong. She could have been on her back — it’s possible. Why does it even matter?’ He shook his head and took a drink.
‘So you don’t know whether your wife fell asleep or not after you?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t remember seeing her sleeping before you dozed off?’
‘No.’ He stopped and looked towards Genovesi and the officers, canvassing support. ‘Listen, if she says she wasn’t sleeping, she wasn’t. She wouldn’t lie about that — she’d know it could be important.’
‘Does your wife sleep a lot normally?’
Genovesi tried an eye-roll, but his officers didn’t notice; they were following Scamarcio’s interview with rapt attention.
‘Normally, I’d say no. But in the weeks before we came away, she seemed to be sleeping more than usual — sleeping soundly. I was surprised because I thought that, with all that had happened in our marriage, she would have had trouble switching off. I certainly did.’
Scamarcio made a mental note. He felt sure that he’d identified the first missing element. All he needed now was the evidence.
25
THEY LEFT BAKER at the bar, and took the elevator to the fourth floor. Despite the air conditioning, Genovesi was sweating, and the smell just added to Scamarcio’s irritation.
&nbs
p; ‘Who interviewed the Bakers?’ he asked once they were alone in the lift.
‘I did,’ barked the little man. ‘Got a problem with that?’
‘Perhaps.’
He saw a vein swell up on Genovesi’s neck. ‘I’ve been a policeman for twenty-five years, and I will not be lectured to by the son of a mafia whore.’
Scamarcio was taken aback by the intensity of his reaction, but he took time to separate his immediate emotions from his rational mind, as he had been taught. It was difficult — it took every ounce of self-control he could muster — and for several seconds he watched his own knuckles turn white. The two young officers studied the ground. The space was too small for a fight.
Eventually, he said: ‘I don’t understand how a detail like the ice-cream guy could get overlooked. You all know the first twenty-four hours are crucial.’
Genovesi was clasping and unclasping his fists, warming up now, thought Scamarcio. With his stubby arms, it made him seem even more primordial. He conjured up a cartoon image of the chief of the Elba squad, his huge red fists dragging along the ground behind his squat frame. That calmed him somewhat.
‘Were we supposed to just guess that the ice-cream guy was there? The father didn’t mention it.’
‘First page of the textbook: the questions you ask.’
Genovesi threw open his arms in disgust. ‘The textbook?? The fucking textbook? You don’t learn policing from a textbook!’ He gathered the tips of his fingers into a sharp point, and shook his right hand up and down. ‘How dare they send me some wet-behind-the-ears son of a mafia bitch to run my case, and then have him lecture me about bastard textbooks!’
Scamarcio felt the burn of anger along his spine, across his ribs, tearing at the pit of his stomach. He wrestled with it, trying to keep it down. He couldn’t afford another fight.
Genovesi was in full flight: ‘I did a bit of research when they told us you were coming, and I have to say that I really don’t understand how you’ve managed to rise so high so fast, to climb that greasy pole down there in Rome. Tell me, Scamarcio, how did you get here, really? Did your father’s old associates grease a few palms? Were they looking for an inside man?’ He was panting now. His little outburst had robbed him of breath, and he was shaking with rage.
Scamarcio had faced these charges before, but wondered now with a sudden welcome detachment why Genovesi was quite so angry. He could understand that his nose might have been put out of joint by having a younger man sent over to assist with his case, but this reaction seemed disproportionate.
Quite calmly, in English, translating the familiar swearwords directly from the Italian, he said: ‘No, you piece of piss whore’s cuckold. I’m just extremely good at my job — unlike you, you shit from a bird that flies at arsehole height.’ From his blank expression, it was clear that Genovesi hadn’t understood a word. Theory confirmed.
Scamarcio sighed softly. He felt sorry for the young officers, who looked like they might expire from embarrassment. Or maybe it was the stench of Genovesi’s sweat.
The elevator came to a stop, and they spilled out into the hallway. The corridor was light and airy, and carpeted with that strange bamboo material that always smelt slightly stale.
‘Here we go: number 423,’ said Zanini breezily, attempting to restore normality. ‘Polizia,’ he shouted, but not too loudly.
After several moments, the door opened onto an empty room. A voice came from the bathroom: ‘Come in. I’ll just be a second.’
Scamarcio could smell scent; it felt expensive, with notes of junipers and roses, and something else. They filed inside and stood awkwardly around the beds — two big doubles and a small single in the corner. Both the doubles had been slept in; the little bed was untouched.
The waft of scent intensified as the woman entered the room. For a few moments, Scamarcio’s brain struggled to make the connection, so very different was she from the picture he had ready in his mind. When he had been talking with her husband, he had imagined a once-good-looking woman who was now a little out of shape — flesh that sagged slightly, a few too many wrinkles across the brow, and one-too-many circles under the eyes. But now the phrase ‘a racehorse of a woman’ came to his mind.
‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.’ She moved with a swan-like grace, and with her lustrous, brown hair and long athletic limbs, she reminded him of the American supermodel Cindy Crawford.
‘No problem,’ said Genovesi, who was now dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief, looking for a chair to collapse into.
‘Would you like some water? It’s so hot,’ she said, hovering at the end of one of the double beds, her legs magnificent in denim. Scamarcio was trying to compute how Mr Baker could tire of such a woman, could prefer an unsophisticated intern to such class and elegance. His guess was that he must have felt very excluded and ignored to cheat on a wife like this. Maybe the affair was simply a warning shot to reclaim her attention. Or, returning to the perennial dilemma, maybe you just got bored with anyone in the end, however attractive they were. He wanted Mr Baker to come up from the bar so he could observe the two of them together, and try to figure it out.
They declined the water and pulled out some chairs from a small table under the window. It made for a slightly awkward situation: four men alone in a room with a stunning woman. They could have done with a female officer, but he wondered whether Elba even had one. If Genovesi was anything to go, by they were still living in the 1970s.
‘Mrs Baker, can you talk me through what happened the afternoon that Stacey disappeared? I’ve been sent here by the Flying Squad in Rome, and I’m trying to make sure that we haven’t missed anything crucial.’
She extracted a cigarette from a crumpled packet next to her on the bed. There was a lighter inside and she lit up, lifting her head and closing her eyes as she took the first drag.
‘I didn’t catch your name.’ She opened her eyes again and surveyed him through the smoke.
Now she was closer, he noticed the swollen eyelids, and wondered whether she’d been crying when they’d arrived.
‘I’m sorry. It’s Scamarcio — Detective Scamarcio.’
‘What does that mean in Italian?’
He paused. Genovesi smirked.
‘It means something rotten,’ he said. ‘Our surnames can be strange.’
She smiled weakly and took the smoke down deep into her lungs. ‘Where did you learn your English, Mr Scamarcio?’ Her voice was tired and heavy, as if she was on autopilot. He noted a deadness in her eyes now, and a plasticity to her skin that he had seen on someone else, some years before.
‘I spent five years in LA.’
‘LA,’ she said absently. ‘Now you tell me, I can hear it in your accent.’ She stopped, wrinkles carved her brow. ‘Have we met before? I have a feeling that I’ve seen you somewhere.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ He hoped she hadn’t. He had tried to consign those years to the past, although every now and again a photo came back to haunt him.
‘Mrs Baker, can you talk me through the events of that afternoon? You’d been to Da Claudio, the fish place, for lunch, had you not?’
She sighed, cupping her chin with a hand. ‘That’s right.’
‘Do you remember anything about the other diners?’
She shook her head. ‘I really didn’t notice them. I was in a bit of a haze that day — I hadn’t slept well the night before.’
Why had the husband said she was sleeping soundly?
‘Mr Baker mentioned seeing a big group there.’
‘Yes, I think there was a party of locals, but I really didn’t pay them much attention. You know what it’s like when you have a little one — you spend all your mealtime making sure they eat.’
There was no energy in her words; no life behind them.
‘And you don’
t remember any of the other customers?’
‘No.’ Then, as an afterthought: ‘I’m sorry.’
‘And when you got to the beach?’
She had finished the first cigarette, and was toying with the next. Scamarcio wanted to open a window; the heat and the smoke were getting to him.
She paused in thought, her unlit cigarette suspended in mid-air. ‘There were three other families — the English couple Paul spoke to, the Scandinavians, and then the young Italian couple. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other.’ A bitterness caught her face, and for an instant she lost some of her beauty.
‘And what did you do when you got to the beach?’
‘We laid out our things by the rocks, and Paul and Stacey went down to the water to swim. I stretched out on my towel to sunbathe.’
‘How long were they in the water?’
She thought about this for a while. ‘You know, I’m really not sure. It seemed like a long time — maybe as much as half an hour.’
‘And then?’
‘And then they were back, and Stacey was asking for ice-cream.’
‘She was asking for an ice-cream when she came out from the water?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘She didn’t go down to the shore to play first?’
She sighed. ‘God, I don’t know — she might have done. How can I be expected to remember every tiny detail?’
‘It’s those details that will help us find your daughter.’
She said nothing.
‘Your husband believes she went to build a sandcastle after she came out of the water, and that she did that for half an hour or so before asking for an ice-cream.’
‘Well, if that’s what he says, that’s how it must have been. Like I say, I had my eyes closed. I was sunbathing.’
Most mothers would have opened their eyes from time to time to check on their children, thought Scamarcio. His theory seemed to be taking shape.
‘And what about the ice-cream seller? Did you get a look at him?’
She sighed again. ‘Not really.’
‘Can you remember anything about him?’
The Few Page 11