Mila looked at him in the mirror over the basin. “Thanks for the advice.”
“No, seriously. If you need a better place to live, I can give you a hand.”
Mila glanced at him quizzically. “You wouldn’t by any chance be inviting me to stay at yours, officer?”
Boris, embarrassed, quickly backtracked. “No, I didn’t mean that. It’s more that I could ask around and see if there’s a colleague who might want to share her apartment, that’s all.”
“I hope I won’t be staying here long enough to need it,” she observed with a shrug. After drying her face, she spotted the bag he had brought her. She almost snatched it from his hands and went and sat cross-legged on the bed to inspect its contents.
Coffee and croissants, as she had hoped.
Boris was caught off guard by her movements, all the more so when he saw her hands covered with bandages. But he said nothing. “Hungry?” he asked instead, shyly.
She answered with her mouth full. “I haven’t had a bite for two days. If you hadn’t come this morning, I don’t think I’d have had the strength to get out the door.”
Mila knew she shouldn’t have said anything like that, it sounded too much like encouragement. But she couldn’t find another way of thanking him, and besides, she really was hungry. Boris smiled at her proudly.
“So, how are you getting on?” he asked her.
“I’m pretty adaptable, so, OK.”
Apart from the fact that your friend Sarah Rosa practically hates me, she thought.
“I liked your intuition about the blood sisters…”
“A stroke of luck: I just fished among my adolescent experiences. You must have done stupid things when you were twelve, didn’t you?”
As she noticed the bafflement of her colleague, who was trying helplessly to think of a reply, she couldn’t help smiling.
“I was joking, Boris…”
“Oh, of course,” he said, blushing.
Mila swallowed down the last mouthful, licked her fingers and threw herself on the second croissant in the bag, which was meant for Boris, although in the face of such ravenous hunger he didn’t have the courage to say anything.
“Boris, tell me one thing…why did you call him Albert?”
“It’s a very interesting story,” he said. He cautiously moved to sit beside her. “Five years ago a really strange thing happened to us. There’s this serial killer abducting women, raping them, strangling them and then letting us find the corpses with their right feet missing.”
“Their right feet?”
“Exactly. No one can understand it because when he acts this guy is very precise and clean, he leaves no clues. He just does this amputation thing. And he strikes at complete random…So, we’re already at the fifth corpse and we can’t stop him. At this point Dr. Gavila has an idea…”
Mila had finished the second croissant as well and moved on to the coffee. “What kind of idea?”
“He asks us to go through the archives for all cases concerning feet, even the most petty and trivial.”
Mila looked more than puzzled.
Then she emptied three sachets of sugar into the polystyrene cup. Boris noticed and pulled a disgusted face; he was about to say something about it but instead went on with his story. “It struck me as ridiculous too, at first. So, instead we start looking and it turns out that a little while ago there was a thief going around the area stealing women’s shoes from the stands outside shoe shops. They only have one shoe per size and model—you know, to stop them being stolen—and usually it’s the right one, to make it easier for the customers to try them on.”
Mila froze, holding her cup of coffee in midair, and thought for a moment, delightedly, about the originality of that investigative hunch. “So you kept an eye on the shoe shops and caught the thief…”
“Albert Finley. A thirty-eight-year-old engineer, married, two young sons. A little house in the country and a camper van for holidays.”
“Normal guy.”
“In the garage at his home we find a freezer and inside it, carefully wrapped in cellophane, five women’s right feet. He enjoyed making them wear the shoes he stole. It was a kind of fetishist obsession.”
“Right foot, left arm. Hence Albert!”
“Exactly!” said Boris, putting a hand on her shoulder in a gesture of approval. Mila abruptly moved aside, jumping off the bed. The young policeman was hurt.
“Sorry,” she said.
“No problem.”
It wasn’t true, and Mila didn’t believe him. But she decided to pretend that it was as he said. She turned her back on him and went back towards the basin. “I’ll just get myself ready, then we can go.”
Boris got up and went to the door. “That’s fine. I’ll wait for you outside.”
Mila saw him leaving the room. Then she looked up at the mirror. Oh God, when will it end? she wondered. When am I going to let anyone touch me again?
All the way to Bermann’s house they had hardly exchanged a word. In fact, as she got into the car, Mila had found the radio on and immediately understood that this was a declaration of intent about how the journey was to be. Boris had been hurt, and perhaps now she had another enemy within the unit.
They got there in just under an hour and a half. Alexander Bermann had lived in a small villa surrounded by trees, in a quiet residential area.
The street in front had been screened off. Beyond that boundary there was a crowd of onlookers, neighbors and journalists. Mila, looking at them, thought it had begun. As they arrived, they had listened to a radio news item about the discovery of little Debby’s corpse, and Bermann’s name had also come out.
The reason for so much media euphoria was simple. The graveyard of arms had been a public relations disaster, but now at last they had a name to give the nightmare.
Mila had seen it happen on other occasions. The press had clung tenaciously to the story and in a very short time they would be trampling indiscriminately over every aspect of Bermann’s life. His suicide amounted to an admission of guilt. For that reason the media would insist on their version. They would put him in the role of monster without allowing any contradiction, trusting solely in the force of their unanimity. They would cruelly tear him to pieces, just as he was supposed to have done to his little victims, but without seeing the irony of the parallel. They would extract liters of blood from the whole business, just to spice up the headlines and make them more enticing. Without respect, without fairness. And even when someone was bold enough to point it out, they would take refuge behind the handy idea of “press freedom” to conceal their unnatural prurience.
Mila and Boris made their way through the little crowd, entered the exclusion zone set up by the law-enforcement officers and walked quickly along the drive to the front door of the house, unable to avoid being dazzled by a few camera flashes. At that moment Mila caught Goran’s eyes on the other side of the window. She felt absurdly guilty because he had seen her arriving with Boris. And then stupid for having thought such a thing.
Goran turned his attention back to the inside of the house. Shortly afterwards, Mila stepped through the door.
Stern and Sarah Rosa, with the help of other detectives, had already been there for a while, and were bustling around like worker ants. Everything had been turned upside down. The officers were painstakingly examining furniture, walls and anything else that might be able to reveal a clue to the mystery.
Once again, Mila had been unable to join in the search. Besides, Sarah Rosa had immediately barked in her face that she had only observation rights. So she started looking around, keeping her hands in her pockets so that she didn’t have to justify the bandages wrapped around them.
What attracted her attention were the photographs.
There were dozens of them arranged around the place on tables and chests of drawers, in elegant walnut or silver frames. They showed Bermann and his wife in happy times. A life that now seemed far away and impossible. They had done
a lot of traveling, Mila noticed. There were pictures from all over the world. But as the pictures became more recent and their faces older, their expressions seemed veiled. There was something in those photographs, Mila was sure of it. But she couldn’t say what it was. She had had a strange feeling as she walked into that house. Now she thought she had a clearer sense of what it might be.
A presence.
Amidst all the comings and goings of the police officers, there was another spectator. Mila recognized the woman in the photographs: Veronica Bermann, the wife of the alleged murderer. She could tell immediately that the woman was proud by nature. She maintained an attitude of decorous detachment as those strangers touched her things without asking her permission, violating the intimacy of those objects, those memories, with their invasive presence. She seemed not so much resigned as consenting. She had offered to cooperate with Chief Inspector Roche, confidently asserting that her husband had nothing to do with those terrible accusations.
Mila was still watching her when, turning round, she found herself confronted with an unexpected spectacle.
There was an entire wall covered with preserved butterflies.
They were in glass frames. There were strange ones and beautiful ones. Some of them had exotic names, which were quoted along with the place of origin on a bronze plate. The most fascinating ones came from Africa and Japan.
“They’re beautiful because they’re dead.”
It was Goran who said it. The criminologist was wearing a black jumper and wool trousers. Part of his shirt collar stuck out of the neck of his pullover. He came and stood next to her to get a better look at the butterfly wall.
“When we see something like this we forget the most important and most obvious thing…those butterflies will never fly again.”
“It’s unnatural,” Mila agreed. “And yet it’s so seductive…”
“That’s exactly the effect that death has on some individuals. That’s why serial killers exist.”
Goran made a small gesture. That was all it took for all the members of the team to gather around him immediately. A sign that even if they seemed entirely absorbed in their own tasks, they were really still looking at him, waiting for him to say or do something.
Mila had confirmation of the great trust that they placed in his hunches. Goran guided them. It was very strange, because he wasn’t a police officer, and cops—at least the ones she knew—had always resisted putting their trust in civilians. It would have been more accurate for the group to call themselves “the Gavila team” than “the Roche team,” particularly since Roche, as usual, wasn’t there. He would only appear if incontestable evidence appeared that would nail Bermann once and for all.
Stern, Boris and Rosa took up their positions around the criminologist, according to their usual pattern. Mila remained a step behind: afraid of feeling excluded, she excluded herself.
Goran spoke in a low voice, immediately catching the tone with which he wanted the conversation to proceed. He probably didn’t want to disturb Veronica Bermann.
“So, what have we got?”
Stern was the first to reply with a shake of his head: “There’s nothing in the house to link Bermann to the six little girls.”
“His wife seems to be in the dark about everything. I asked her a few questions, and I didn’t have the feeling that she was lying,” added Boris.
“Our men are going over the garden with the corpse dogs,” said Rosa. “But there’s nothing so far.”
“We’ll have to reconstruct all of Bermann’s movements over the past six weeks,” observed Goran and everyone agreed, even though they knew it would be an almost impossible task.
“Stern, is there anything else?”
“No strange movements of money in his account. The biggest bill that Bermann has had to foot over the past year was a course of artificial insemination for his wife, which set him back a fair bit.”
Listening to Stern’s words, Mila realized what it was that she had felt just before entering the house and then looking at the photographs. Not a presence, as she had thought at first. She had been wrong.
It was more of an absence.
What she had noticed was the lack of children in this house, which, with its expensive and impersonal furnishings, was a house created for two individuals who feel destined to remain alone. That was why the course of artificial insemination mentioned by Officer Stern seemed contradictory, since in that place you couldn’t even feel the anxiety of someone expecting the gift of a child.
Stern concluded his exposition with a quick sketch of Bermann’s private life. “He didn’t use drugs, he didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke. He had a card for a gym and one for a video store, but he only rented documentaries about insects. He went to the local Lutheran church and, twice a month, worked as a volunteer at a rest home.”
“A saintly man,” said Boris sarcastically.
Goran turned towards Veronica Bermann to check if she had heard that last remark. Then he turned to look at Rosa: “Is there anything else?”
“I’ve scanned the hard disk of the home and office computers. I’ve also recovered all deleted files. But there was nothing of interest. Just work, work, work. The guy was fixated on his job.”
Mila noticed that Goran had suddenly become distracted. It didn’t last long, and he soon returned to concentrate on the conversation. “What do we know about his Internet use?”
“I called his web server and they gave me a list of the web pages he had visited over the last six months. Nothing there, either…It seems he has a passion for sites dedicated to nature, travel and animals. And he bought antiques online and, on eBay, mostly collectible butterflies.” When Rosa had finished her report, Goran folded his arms again and started looking at his colleagues, one by one. That brief look took in Mila, too, and at last she felt involved.
“So, what do you think?” he asked.
“I feel as if I’ve been dazzled,” Boris said suddenly, emphatically underlining the phrase with a hand screening his eyes. “He’s too clean.” The others nodded.
Mila didn’t know what he was referring to, but she didn’t want to ask. Goran slid a hand over his forehead and rubbed his weary eyes. Then that distraction appeared on his face once again…it was a thought that took him elsewhere for a second or two, and suggested that the criminologist was filing something away for future reference. “What’s the first reason for investigating a suspect?”
“We all have secrets,” said the diligent Boris.
“Exactly,” said Goran. “We all have a weakness, at least once in our lives. Each of us has one secret, big or small, that we can’t own up to…and yet look around: that man is the prototype of the good husband, the good believer, the great worker,” he said, marking out each word on his fingers. “He’s a philanthropist, a health fanatic, he only rents documentaries, he has no vices of any kind, he collects butterflies…Can you believe in a man like that?”
This time the reply was taken for granted. No, you couldn’t.
“So what’s a man like that doing with the corpse of a little girl in his boot?”
Stern cut in: “He’s having a cleanup…”
Goran agreed: “He casts a spell on us with all this perfection to keep us from looking elsewhere…and where are we not looking at this moment?”
“So what do we have to do?” asked Rosa.
“Start from the beginning. The answer is there, among the things you’ve already examined. Go through everything again. You’ve got to remove that brilliant coating covering it all. Don’t be deceived by the glare of the perfect life: that glitter is only there to distract us and muddle our ideas. And then you’ve got to…”
Goran wandered off again. His attention was elsewhere. This time they all noticed. Something was finally materializing in his head, and growing.
Mila decided to follow the criminologist’s eyes as they moved around the room. They weren’t simply lost in the void. She noticed that he was looking at some
thing…
The little red LED flashed intermittently, marking out a rhythm of its own as a way of attracting attention.
Gavila asked in a loud voice: “Has anyone listened to the messages on the answering machine?”
The room instantly froze. They stared at the phone, winking its red eye at everyone, and immediately felt guilty, exposed by that glaring oversight. Goran paid no attention, and simply went and pressed the button that activated the little digital recorder.
A moment later, the darkness regurgitated a dead man’s words.
And Alexander Bermann entered his house for the last time.
“Erm…It’s me…Erm…I haven’t much time…But I wanted to tell you I’m sorry…I’m sorry, for everything…I should have done it before, but I didn’t…Try to forgive me. It was all my fault…”
The communication broke off and a stony silence fell over the room. Everyone’s eyes, inevitably, came to rest on Veronica Bermann, who was as impassive as a statue.
Goran Gavila was the only one who moved. He walked towards her and gripped her shoulders, entrusting her to a policewoman to lead her into another room.
It was Stern who spoke for everyone: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, we would seem to have a confession.”
8.
She would call her Priscilla.
She would adopt the method used by Goran Gavila, who gave an identity to the murderers he was hunting down. To humanize them, to make them more real in his eyes, more than just fleeting shadows. So Mila would christen victim number six, giving her the name of a luckier little girl who was now—somewhere, who knows where—going on being a little girl like so many others, unaware of what she had escaped.
Mila took the decision on the way back to the motel. An officer had been given the task of taking her there. Boris hadn’t offered his services this time, and Mila didn’t blame him, having rejected him so abruptly that morning.
The choice of the name Priscilla for the sixth child was not due solely to the need to give her a sense of humanity. There was another reason, too: Mila couldn’t go on referring to her with a number. Now she felt she was the only one who still had the girl’s identity at heart, because after hearing Bermann’s phone call, finding her was no longer a priority.
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