The Girl in the Fog Page 21

  For Avechot, a brief season of unexpected, if occasionally tiresome popularity had come to an end. But nobody would ever forget that winter.

  Vogel was about to dismiss the audience – he had to get back to the city as soon as possible, because he was due to appear on a well-known evening talk show – when Stella Honer again raised her hand. ‘Special Agent Vogel, one last question,’ she said, although he hadn’t signalled to her to speak. ‘After this major success, can we say that the Derg case was merely an unhappy interlude in your career?’

  Vogel hated Stella’s almost feral skill at targeting open wounds. He allowed himself a forced smile ‘Well, Signora Honer, I know it’s quite easy for you and your colleagues to distinguish between success and failure, but for us police officers there are shades of grey. The Mutilator – as you in the media dubbed him – never struck again. Maybe one day he will, or maybe not. But I like to think that we scared him so much that he’ll think twice before planting another bomb.’

  He had scored a point, now was the moment to escape. He walked away from the microphones before anyone else could detain him with any more uncomfortable questions.

  As the main player in the drama headed for the exit, accompanied by the flashes of the cameras, Officer Borghi moved away from the wall at the back of the room to join him. Part of him was happy that it was finally over, but there was another part of him, a small but tenacious part, that couldn’t resign itself to the outcome. For a while, he had genuinely thought he was part of something epic, a kind of battle between good and evil. But after Martini’s arrest, he hadn’t felt any sense of relief. When it came down to it, the case had been solved by a stroke of luck. The positive aspect was that now he could go back to Caroline and they could await the arrival of their daughter together. But he would miss the work. He would miss Avechot.

  Borghi caught up with Vogel outside the gym. ‘Do you want me to drive you to the hotel?’ he asked.

  Vogel looked up at the sky. ‘No, thanks. I think I’ll take advantage of the nice weather and have a little walk.’ And he took his usual black notebook from his overcoat.

  It was an action Borghi had seen him perform dozens of times in the course of the investigation. He was curious to know what Vogel wrote down so diligently. There was surely much to learn from those notes.

  ‘Well, Officer Borghi, we have to say goodbye.’ Vogel actually placed a hand on his shoulder, a fatherly gesture that wasn’t at all like him. ‘In the next case that presents itself, I’ll ask for you to be assigned to my team.’

  On this occasion, Vogel thought, things had gone well and it hadn’t been necessary to lay the responsibility for failure on a subordinate. But Borghi could prove useful to him: the boy was sufficiently green to believe everything he was told.

  ‘It’s been an honour to work for you, sir,’ Borghi said with conviction. ‘I’ve learned a lot.’

  Vogel doubted it. His investigative method was a mixture of tactics and opportunism. It couldn’t easily be learned, and he wasn’t ready to share his secrets. ‘Well, good for you,’ he said with a smile.

  He was about to go when Borghi said. ‘I’m sorry, sir, there’s something I’ve been wondering …’

  ‘Go on, officer.’

  ‘Have you ever wondered why Martini should have kidnapped and killed Anna Lou and hidden her body? I mean … what do you think was his motive?’

  Vogel pretended to consider the question seriously. ‘People hate, Officer Borghi. Hate is something intangible, it’s hard to demonstrate and doesn’t produce evidence that can be exhibited in a courtroom. But unfortunately, it exists.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. Why should Martini have hated Anna Lou?’

  ‘Not her in particular, but the whole world. Deep down, the teacher led a humble life, with not much to satisfy him. His wife had cheated on him with another man, he’d come close to losing his family and being left on his own – as, indeed, happened later. In the long term, when anger accumulates it has to find an outlet. I think Martini harboured a desire for revenge on other people. And killing Anna Lou, with her youthful innocence, was a perfect way to punish all of us.’

  Borghi, though, wasn’t completely convinced. ‘Strange, because in the academy they taught us that hate isn’t the prime motive for murder.’

  Vogel smiled again. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice you’ll never again hear from a police officer. Forget everything you were taught and learn to consider every case on its own merits, or you’ll never develop the instinct for catching criminals.’

  He watched the cashmere coat as Vogel walked away. The instinct for catching criminals, he thought. As if it were the opposite of the instinct to kill.

  Hate isn’t the prime motive for murder, Vogel repeated to himself as he walked into his hotel room. What did that snotty-nosed kid know about murderers? And how had he dared to doubt his words? But he would never let his rage obscure the sense of well-being he had been feeling all day. Borghi had no future, that much was certain.

  The clothes that had been hanging in the wardrobe all these days had already been placed on the bed. Each item in its own wrapper. Like the shoes, which had been slipped into cotton bags. Then there were the ties, the shirts, the underwear. The whole of it occupied the entire surface of the mattress, forming a perfect, very neat and very colourful mosaic. Soon, Vogel would transfer everything to his suitcase. But when he went to the bed, he noticed something that hadn’t been there before.

  On the bedside table, next to the TV set, was a package.

  He approached it suspiciously. Someone from the hotel staff must have put it there while he was away. But there was no note with it. That struck him as strange. After a moment’s hesitation, he decided to unwrap the gift anyway.

  When he opened the box, he found a battered old laptop.

  What kind of joke is this? he thought. He lifted the screen. There on the keyboard was a small piece of cardboard with a message on it, written in pen in a very neat hand.

  He’s innocent.

  Beneath these words, there was a mobile phone number. It was the same number from which he had received two anonymous texts – I need to talk to you. Call me on this number – which he had erased, thinking they came from a reporter looking for a scoop.

  Vogel was annoyed. He couldn’t stand invasions of his private sphere. Nevertheless, he had to admit to himself that he felt a strange kind of curiosity about what was on the computer. Common sense told him to stop right there, but when it came down to it, it didn’t cost anything to check.

  He reached out his hand and turned on the laptop.

  It took a while to come to life. The black screen turned blue. In the middle, just one icon, that of an internet browser. Vogel was about to click on it, but the connection was automatic. There now appeared an internet page with bare, rudimentary graphics. This must be an old website that had been around for years, he immediately thought, one that nobody visited any more but that continued to float like detritus on the surface of the internet.

  The page even had a name.

  The man in the fog.

  Beneath that title was an array of six faces: all of young girls, all very similar, with red hair and freckles. Above all, they were very similar to Anna Lou Kastner.

  At the other end of the line, the telephone rang several times. At last a hoarse female voice answered. ‘You took your time, Special Agent Vogel.’

  Vogel immediately went on the offensive. ‘Who are you and what are you trying to prove?’

  The woman remained calm. ‘I see I have your attention at last.’ These words were followed by a brief series of coughs. ‘My name is Beatrice Leman, and I’m a journalist. Or rather, I was.’

  ‘I’m not going to issue any statement about what I’ve just seen – whatever it is. So don’t be under any illusions: you’re not going to become famous because of this.’

  ‘I’m not after an interview,’ Leman replied. ‘There’s something I’d like to show
you.’

  Vogel thought this over for a moment. His anger didn’t diminish, but there was something that told him he should listen to this woman. ‘All right, let’s meet.’

  ‘You’ll have to come to me.’

  Vogel let out an irritated laugh. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  The woman hung up before he could reply.

  21 January

  Twenty-nine days after the disappearance

  Beatrice Leman was confined to a wheelchair.

  It had taken Vogel four days to make up his mind to go and see her, but in the meantime, he had discreetly gathered information about her. As a journalist, she had mainly handled local news, but her articles had on several occasions embarrassed politicians and powerful people. She’d been a tough customer, but now she was past it. She no longer scared anybody.

  At first, Vogel had decided to ignore her. She was just an old journalist looking to make a comeback and regain a modicum of fame. But then it had occurred to him she might get in touch with Stella Honer, for example. And Stella certainly wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to exhume the Kastner case, not if it meant offering the public a juicy alternative version of the truth established by his investigation. It would be disastrous if someone gave credit to such ravings, especially in the light of the fact that he had falsified evidence in order to nail Martini. Vogel didn’t want anyone sticking their nose into the case, not now. So in the end he had decided to meet the woman.

  Leman lived in a chalet just outside Avechot. She had never married and her only company was a horde of cats that swarmed all over the study that served as her den. When she greeted him, she struck Vogel as an embittered, disillusioned woman, her face furrowed by deep brown lines and her grey hair gathered into a bun. She was wearing a sweater covered in cigarette ash, and there were ashtrays filled with cigarette ends everywhere. A persistent odour of stale nicotine hung over the house, mixed with the pungent odour of cat urine. Leman must be so used to it, she could no longer smell it. Documents and old newspapers lay in heaps on shelves and on the floor.

  ‘Welcome, Special Agent Vogel,’ she said as she led him inside. There was a kind of path through the chaos that allowed Leman to move surprisingly easily with her wheelchair.

  Vogel pulled his cashmere overcoat tight around him. He didn’t want to touch anything, afraid of the dust and, above all, the germs there might be in the room. ‘Frankly,’ he said by way of introduction, ‘I don’t know what I’m here for.’

  Leman laughed. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the main thing is that you’re here.’ Then she took up position behind a desk and motioned to him to sit down on the chair in front of it.

  However reluctantly, Vogel sat down.

  ‘I see you haven’t brought me back the laptop I sent you. It’s the only one I have and I’d really like to have it back.’

  ‘I thought it was a gift to me,’ Vogel said ironically. ‘I’ll try to get it back to you as soon as possible.’

  Leman lit a cigarette.

  ‘Is that necessary?’ Vogel asked.

  ‘I’ve been paraplegic from birth because of a mistake by an obstetrician, so I don’t give a damn about what might harm other people.’

  ‘All right, but let’s get to the point. I have no time to waste.’

  ‘I founded a little local paper and edited it for forty years. I did everything myself: from the news to the obituaries. Then the internet came along and rendered all my efforts obsolete. I had to close down for lack of readers. Now, people know in real time what’s happening on the other side of the world, but don’t know what the fuck is happening around the corner.’ After this brief preamble, Beatrice took a heavy file down from one of the shelves, causing a small avalanche of documents and newspapers. She laid it on her lap, but didn’t open it. ‘As a journalist, you deal with hundreds of cases in your career,’ she resumed. ‘But there’s always one that stays with you: you can’t forget the names or the faces of the victims, and you carry inside you a kind of parasite that feeds on your sense of guilt. Maybe it’s the same for you in the police.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Vogel acknowledged, just to get her to continue with her story.

  ‘Well, my solitary worm started to dig a hole for itself with the disappearance of Katya Hillman.’ She lifted the file again and let it fall heavily on the table. ‘She was the first.’

  The thud echoed briefly in the cramped room. Vogel looked in silence at the voluminous file. He knew that once he started in on this, it would be hard to get out of it later. But he had no choice. He lifted the cardboard cover and began leafing through the file.

  The first thing he came across was an old photograph of Katya Hillman. He had already seen it on the website, but now he gave it a closer look. The girl was wearing a blue smock: a school uniform. She was smiling at the camera. She had honest blue eyes. The other images of teenage girls with red hair and freckles followed. Vogel studied them one by one. They looked like sisters. There was the same innocence in their facial expressions. Predestined, he told himself. The curse of innocence had fallen on them.

  As he looked through the file, Leman watched him, smoking her cigarette in silence, holding it between her fingertips and consuming it in slow, deep drags, letting the ash accumulate unsteadily at the end.

  Vogel noted that along with the personal details of the supposed victims, there were numerous newspaper articles written by Leman herself and some perfunctory police reports.

  ‘The girls all came from difficult family situations,’ Beatrice said, breaking the silence. ‘Violent fathers, mothers who suffered but never reported their husbands. Maybe that was why the police in Avechot and the other villages never investigated the disappearances too closely. It was almost natural for the girls to want to run away from those hellholes.’

  ‘But you saw a connection between the cases. You thought there might be a single person behind them.’

  ‘Girls aged fifteen or sixteen, with red hair and freckles. It all pointed to an obsession. To me, it was obvious. But nobody believed me.’

  ‘The last disappearance was thirty years ago,’ he said, reading the date on a report.

  ‘Precisely,’ Beatrice said. ‘This Martini of yours wasn’t living in Avechot then. In fact, he was still a child.’

  Yes, Vogel thought, Stella Honer would love this story. Although he thought its similarity to the Kastner case was a mere coincidence, he couldn’t just shrug his shoulders and leave. First he had to disabuse Leman of the notion that there might be a connection. And to do so, he had to know more. ‘When Anna Lou went missing, why on earth did nobody in the valley apart from you bring any of this up?’

  ‘Because people soon forget, didn’t you know that? Years ago, I created the website I showed you, hoping to keep the memory alive, but nobody cares about those poor girls any more.’

  ‘And why “the man in the fog”?’

  Leman’s voice, already deep thanks to her cigarette habit, became a low rasp. ‘People vanish in the fog. We know they’re there, but we can’t see them. Those girls are still among us, Special Agent Vogel, regardless of whether something terrible happened to them, regardless even of whether they’re dead. For some obscure reason, the man in the fog took them – because I’m sure we’re dealing with one man. We know it’s not Martini, so I can only assume he’s still out there, in search of new prey.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he said. ‘Why stop for thirty years, then start again?’

  ‘Maybe he moved somewhere else and now he’s come back. Maybe he struck again in other places and we don’t know about it. We just have to look for girls with the same characteristics.’

  Vogel shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t buy it. With all the fuss around the Kastner case, someone would have brought any similar cases to the attention of the police or the media.’

  Leman was about to say something in reply, but broke off to cough. ‘It’s not just that file I wanted to show you,’ she
somehow managed to splutter. She opened a drawer in her desk and held out a package to Vogel. ‘I got this a while ago, but if you look at the postmark, you’ll notice it was sent the day Anna Lou disappeared.’

  Vogel lost interest in the file and grabbed the package.

  ‘As you can see, it was sent here but addressed to you. But since you didn’t answer my texts, a couple of days ago I opened it.’

  Vogel lifted the envelope to see the contents through the torn edge. Then he put his hand inside and took out a little pink book covered in pictures of kittens.

  Anna Lou’s real diary, he thought immediately.

  The one she had hidden from her mother. The one they hadn’t found. Presumably, she had kept it in the satchel that had ended up in the channel.

  Vogel looked at the heart-shaped padlock that sealed it.

  He tried to rationalise the situation. The only reason anyone could have had to send the diary to Leman was to draw attention to the case of the man in the fog. Who was he? And what did Martini have to do with any of it? A presentiment was growing in him that he had been mistaken about the teacher. And yet he had the same feeling he’d had with Derg. In that case, too, the conviction that he knew the identity of the culprit had driven him to falsify the evidence. Only, there, he hadn’t made any mistake. Derg really had been the Mutilator, that was why he had stopped.

  ‘What do you want in return?’ he asked the woman, waving the diary. He was trying to be practical.