The Girl in the Fog Page 19

  He got up to go. As he was putting the photograph back in the folder, he suddenly stopped. He had noticed something on the table. He leaned down to see it better.

  On the pale blue Formica surface, where Martini had rested his bandaged hand, there was a small, fresh bloodstain.

  16 January

  Twenty-four days after the disappearance

  Little Leo Blanc had turned five a week before he vanished into thin air.

  Back then, they hadn’t had the kind of sophisticated tools the police had now. They would simply ‘comb the area’, as they used to say. The case would be entrusted to experienced officers who had long been familiar with the place and the people, who knew how to obtain information and had no need for forensic teams or DNA. It was hard work, carried out day after day, a matter of small steps and modest results, which put all together formed the basis of the investigation. What you needed more than anything was patience.

  Patience was a quality that grew rarer with the advent of the media. The public demanded quick answers, otherwise they would switch channels, and so the networks would put pressure on the investigators, forcing them to do their work in haste. In such circumstances, it was easy to make a mistake. The important thing, however, was not to stop the show.

  Leo Blanc, with his tragic story and brief life, would unwittingly represent an important watershed between what came before and what came afterwards.

  One morning, his mother, Laura Blanc, a twenty-five-year-old widow who had lost her husband, Leo’s father, in a road accident, came to the police station of the small town where she lived. She was desperate. She said somebody had broken into her house and abducted her Leonard.

  Vogel was a low-ranking officer back then, only recently graduated from the police academy. So he had been given the most basic, most boring tasks, like filing reports or typing up complaints. All he had to do apart from that was watch his senior colleagues at work – and of course, learn. It was he who took down Laura’s statement.

  She claimed it was only that morning that she had realised she’d left in her car the carton of milk she’d bought the night before at a convenience store. She had run to fetch it before her son woke up and demanded his breakfast. After all, her car was parked only fifty metres away. Maybe because she was distracted, or maybe because the residents of the town all knew one another and usually didn’t lock their doors even at night, Laura had left her door slightly ajar. And now she couldn’t forgive herself.

  Vogel followed the normal procedure and passed the statement on to the officer who was training him. They went together to the woman’s house. There was no sign of a break-in, but they found that little Leo’s room had been turned upside down. They concluded that the child had woken up, been frightened by the presence of a stranger, and tried to fight him off. But in the end, the kidnapper had succeeded.

  Laura Blanc was in a state of shock, but still managed to reconstruct the exact process of events with the police. Only eight minutes had elapsed between her going out and returning, and during that brief window, she had exchanged a few words with a neighbour. It had been long enough, though, for the kidnapper to enter the house and take the child.

  A manhunt immediately got underway. But things would have turned out differently if a television news crew hadn’t been in the area, making a feature on migratory birds in the nearby marshes. A lieutenant had had the idea. The crew were asked to broadcast an appeal by Laura for information about her child.

  After the appeal went out, things really heated up.

  People started flooding the police with phone calls. Many were sure they had seen little Leo, and provided exact locations and circumstances. Some claimed they had seen him with a man who was buying him an ice cream, others with a couple on a train, some mentioned specific names. The majority of sightings turned out to be unfounded, but in any case, it was impossible to check them all. As a matter of fact, the mass of information raining down on the police team slowed the investigation considerably. But what was truly surprising was the number of people who called just to find out how the case was progressing. Similar calls jammed the switchboards of the networks, who decided to ‘cover the story’, as they put it, and send crews to the location.

  Vogel saw all this happen over a very short space of time. As a young, inexperienced officer, he wasn’t quite shrewd enough to grasp the nature of the revolution taking place before his eyes. Everything just looked very unreal. Transformed by the media, even the truth seemed different. Laura Blanc soon became a tragic heroine. When Vogel had first met her, she was an ordinary, rather plain girl, but now her appearance suddenly changed. With make-up and the right lighting, she started receiving letters from suitors eager to take care of her. Her son Leo was adopted as an ideal by all the mothers in the country. A five-year-old child had become an icon. People kept his picture at home and many new parents named their offspring after him.

  Just as the solution to the mystery was starting to seem like a mirage, yet another search of the Blanc house revealed a fingerprint. It took two weeks to go through police records in search of a match. In the end, that, too, was found.

  The prints were those of a man named Thomas Berninsky, a forty-year-old labourer with a history of molesting minors, who at the time happened to be working for a company that was building industrial warehouses in the area.

  The hunt for Berninsky didn’t take long. He was arrested and little Leo’s bloodstained pyjamas were found in his possession. Berninsky confessed to having had his eye on the child for quite a while, and led the investigators to the abandoned rubbish tip where he had buried the little body.

  This horrific end to the story shook the public. But a few people, high up in the echelons of the police and the networks, sensed that something had changed and that there was no turning back.

  A new era had begun.

  Justice was no longer a matter reserved for courtrooms but was everybody’s, without distinction. And in this new way of seeing things, information was a resource – information was gold.

  The death of a poor innocent child had led to the establishment of a business.

  As an idealistic young officer, Vogel had no idea as yet that he would become part of this perverse mechanism and build his own brilliant career on the back of other people’s misfortunes. All the same, he had come to a surprising conclusion. Laura Blanc had said she had left home in order to fetch the milk she’d bought the night before. Her house had been turned upside down dozens of times in police searches until they had found Berninsky’s fingerprint.

  But why had nobody ever found the famous carton of milk?

  The adult Vogel, with years of experience behind him, was still wondering that. To this day, the possible answer sent a shiver through him. Laura Blanc had quickly rebuilt her life with a man she had met before the tragic events, a man who might not have wanted to take on the responsibility of somebody else’s child. The idea that she had long been aware of the slow-witted Berninsky’s intentions and might have actually made things easier for him would have been hard to sell to the media. Laura Blanc had deliberately left the house, Vogel was sure of it. But he knew that there were secrets that had to remain hidden. That was why he had never shared his suspicions with anybody. He would always remember them, though, whenever something unusual happened in a case.

  And that morning at dawn, the case of little Leo came back to his mind as he sat in the service saloon beside Borghi, who had rushed to the hotel to pick him up.

  Apparently, divers had found Anna Lou Kastner’s brightly coloured satchel in a drainage channel.

  At times, the house became claustrophobic and then he had to escape. Martini had grown skilful at throwing the reporters camped outside off the track. For example, he had learned that the period between five and six, when the crews got ready for the first editions of the television news, was the best time to sneak out through the back.

  There was a labyrinth of ‘safe’ streets he could take to get out of Avecho
t. Then he would go deep into the woods and savour the solitude of nature, certain as he was that he would soon lose the privilege of freedom. Five days had passed since the meeting with Vogel in the restaurant. The thought of the special agent chasing after a ginger and brown tabby cat struck him as decidedly ridiculous. The truth was, Martini wasn’t the least bit afraid of what might happen to him. Although his scruffy appearance told a different story, Loris Martini hadn’t given up. His long, unkempt beard and his body odour had become a kind of shield with which, he somehow deluded himself, he could keep other people at bay. Clea would have objected. She was always very particular and was constantly giving him advice about his appearance. This had been the case ever since the day at university when Loris had worn a blue suit and a ridiculous bow tie to ask her out to dinner. Form and appearance were important to his wife.

  Martini missed Clea and Monica, but he knew he had to be strong for them, too. They hadn’t been in touch since they had left, not so much as a quick phone call. Actually, he hadn’t tried to call them, either. He wanted to protect them – protect them from himself.

  The morning dew slowly glided down the leaves. Martini loved to stroke them and feel their cool wetness on his palms. As he walked, he spread his arms wide and half closed his eyes, enjoying a momentary bliss. Then he took a deep breath of the scented air. His mind filled with green as the night receded and day appeared. Forest animals came out of their hiding places, and the birds sang, happy to have escaped the darkness.

  When the quartz watch on his wrist began to emit a brief, constant sound, Martini knew his two hours of freedom from the media were about to end and it was time to go home. But today, as he walked back towards Avechot, he saw a figure coming towards him on the opposite side of the road. He would have liked to avoid it, but there was no path to turn onto: he was surrounded by fields. He was obliged to keep walking, but he lowered his head and pulled his cap down so that the peak covered most of his face. Hands in his pockets, stooping slightly, he carried on along an imaginary line, determined to follow it faithfully. But the temptation to get a glimpse of the mysterious walker’s face got the better of him, and when he recognised him his breath caught in his throat.

  Bruno Kastner noticed him a few seconds later. He, too, felt something sudden and uncertain, because he slowed down.

  Both were about to stop, but it was as if each expected the other to do so first. Kastner had an inscrutable but composed expression. Martini didn’t think about his likely reaction, about what he might do to the alleged monster who’d kidnapped his daughter. Rather, strangely enough, he thought about what he might do in his place. And that scared him.

  Their footsteps synchronised on the asphalt, the sound of one set of steps merging with the sound of the other. The time remaining before they met seemed to last forever. When they finally drew level with one another, there were only a couple of metres between them. But neither turned to look at the other. Martini stopped first, expecting something to happen.

  But Kastner didn’t slow down. On the contrary, he picked up the pace a little and vanished from sight.

  Martini couldn’t move. All he could hear was his own heart pounding in his chest. He kept sensing Bruno Kastner’s presence behind him. For a moment, he wished the man would turn back and attack him. But that didn’t happen. When he turned to look behind him, Kastner was nothing but a dot in the distance, on the edge of the woods.

  Martini would never forget the encounter. That was the moment he came to a decision.

  Anna Lou Kastner’s brightly coloured satchel lay on the autopsy table in Avechot’s small morgue. They had put it in there in the absence of a corpse. Even so, Vogel seemed to see the girl with her red hair and freckles lying there, naked, cold and motionless, beneath the overhead light that left everything else in semi-darkness.

  Strokes of luck do happen sometimes, Vogel thought. Whoever had thrown the satchel into the drainage channel had first taken care to empty it and fill it with heavy stones, but that hadn’t been sufficient. This find was definitive proof. That there was a maniac behind all this was no longer just a theory. It was real.

  Right now, the satchel was Anna Lou. And it was as if the girl opened her eyes and turned to look at Vogel, who had been there for at least half an hour, alone, weighing up the possible implications of the find. A strand of red hair fell over her forehead and her lips moved, uttering a voiceless sentence. A message just for Vogel.

  I’m still here.

  Vogel thought about his visit to the Kastners’ house on Christmas Day. He remembered the decorated tree, which, according to the girl’s mother, would remain lit until her daughter returned – like a beacon in the darkness. He recalled the present tied with red ribbon, waiting only to be unwrapped. Now, that box would be replaced by a white coffin.

  ‘We’ll never find you,’ he said softly. And immediately this conviction took root in him.

  The devil’s most foolish sin is vanity.

  That was why it was time to act. To stop this from happening again.

  At about nine in the morning, Loris Martini got in the shower. The hot water took away his accumulated tiredness. Shortly afterwards, standing naked in front of the mirror, he looked again at the reflection of his face, something he had carefully avoided doing in the past few days, and started shaving off his beard.

  In the wardrobe, he looked through the few clothes he owned and chose the ones that best represented his state of mind. A beige corduroy jacket, dark fustian trousers and a blue and brown check shirt, to which he would add a dove-grey tie. When he’d finished tying the laces of his Clarks shoes, he put on his coat and slipped his canvas bag over his shoulder. Then he left the house.

  The reporters and cameramen were surprised to see him appear in the doorway. The cameras were immediately turned on him as he casually walked down the drive to the road, through the cordon, and out into the streets of Avechot.

  As he strolled along the main street, people stopped in disbelief and pointed at him. Customers came out of shops to witness the scene. But nobody said or did anything. Martini avoided meeting anyone’s eyes, although he could feel the pressure of them on him.

  By the time he got to the school, a small crowd had gathered behind him. Martini saw that apart from the gym, requisitioned as the police operations room, nothing had changed.

  He went up the steps to the main entrance, sure that the vultures behind him wouldn’t come any further. They didn’t. Once inside, he recognised the familiar sound of the bell. According to the timetable, the literature class was at ten. So he made for his own classroom. Those teachers and pupils who were present in the corridor watched as he walked past them.

  There was the usual chaos that prevailed between classes. The supply teacher the principal had assigned to the class would soon be arriving, but in the meantime, the pupils were taking advantage of the teacher being late in order to lark about.

  Priscilla was dressed in her old clothes again. She had gone back to wearing heavy eye make-up and ear studs. ‘I’m going to audition for a reality show,’ she was telling her girlfriends excitedly.

  ‘Is your mother OK with that?’ one of them asked. ‘Doesn’t she mind?’

  ‘Who cares if she does?’ Priscilla replied, dismissing the question with a shrug. ‘It’s my life now, I’ve found my direction, and she just has to get used to it. I may have to find myself an agent.’

  Lucas, the rebel with the skull tattoo, turned to somebody at the back of the classroom. ‘What about you, loser, hasn’t anybody offered you anything?’

  This remark was followed by general laughter, but Mattia pretended not to have heard and carried on scribbling something in his exercise book.

  The door opened. They didn’t all turn at once. The few who did fell silent. By the time Martini reached the teacher’s desk, the silence was total.

  ‘Good morning, kids,’ he said to them with a smile. Nobody responded. They were completely taken aback, including Mattia, who look
ed terrified. A few seconds went by during which Martini looked at them one by one, still standing. Then, as if nothing had happened, he went on, ‘Now then, in our last class, I was talking about narrative technique in novels. I told you that all writers, even the greatest, start off by drawing on what’s been written before. The first rule is “copy”, remember?’ There was still no response. That was fine with him, Martini thought. The class had never been this attentive.

  The classroom door opened again. This time, the pupils all turned. Vogel came in. Seeing what was happening, he raised his hand, almost apologetically, signalling to those present that they shouldn’t mind him. Then he sat down at an empty desk and looked at Martini as if inviting him to carry on with the class.

  ‘As I told you,’ Martini went on, unperturbed, ‘the real driving force in every story is the villain. The heroes and the victims are only instruments, because readers aren’t interested in everyday life, they already have their own. They want conflict, because that’s the only way they can be distracted from their own mediocrity.’ He deliberately stared at Vogel. ‘Remember: it’s the villain who makes our mediocrity more acceptable, he’s the one who makes the story.’

  Out of the blue, Vogel began to applaud. He did it with great conviction, clapping his hands energetically and nodding with satisfaction. He looked around at the class, as if encouraging them to do likewise. At first, the pupils looked at each other, not knowing what to do. Then, timidly, some of them started imitating him. It was an absurd, paradoxical situation. Vogel stood up from his seat and walked up to the teacher’s desk, still applauding. Once he was standing in front of Martini, just a couple of centimetres from his face, he stopped. ‘Good lesson.’ Then he leaned in towards him and whispered in his ear, ‘We’ve found Anna Lou’s satchel. No body yet, but we don’t need one. Because your blood was on the satchel, Signor Martini.’

  Martini didn’t reply, didn’t say anything.