The Whisperer Page 21

  She reached the laundry.

  She moved her phone to look around her. In the marble basin in which Anneke’s body had been found someone had left a flower. Mila also remembered the prayer that they had all recited together in that room.

  And she started looking.

  First of all she looked along the outline of the walls, then she ran her fingers around the baseboard. Nothing. She tried not to wonder how long it would be before her phone ran out of battery. Less because of the prospect of finding herself in the dark again, than because of the idea that without that light, however small, it would take her much longer. After an hour, Father Timothy would come for help, and she would cut a very sorry figure. She would have to hurry.

  Where is it? she thought. I know it’s here somewhere…

  A very loud and sudden noise made her heart leap in her chest. It was a few minutes before she realized it was only her phone ringing.

  She turned the display around and read: Goran.

  She put on her hands-free and replied.

  “Is there no one at the Studio? I’ve called at least ten times in the last hour.”

  “Boris and Stern have gone out, but Sarah Rosa should be there.”

  “And where are you?”

  Mila thought there was no point telling a lie. Even though she wasn’t at all sure about her hypothesis, she decided to let him know.

  “I think Ronald was listening to us the other evening.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I compared his letter with the questions that you asked yourself during our prayer. They seem like answers…”

  “That’s an excellent deduction.”

  The criminologist didn’t seem very surprised. Maybe he had reached the same conclusion. Mila felt a bit stupid for thinking she could surprise him.

  “But you haven’t answered my question: where are you now?”

  “I’m looking for the microphone.”

  “Which microphone?”

  “The one Ronald put in the laundry.”

  “Are you at the orphanage?”

  Goran’s voice was suddenly alarmed.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve got to get out of there straightaway!”

  “Why?”

  “Mila, there’s no microphone!”

  “I’m sure there—”

  Goran interrupted: “Listen, the officers scoured the whole area, they would have found it!”

  She immediately felt really stupid. The criminologist was right: could she really have been so foolish not to consider that? What was she thinking of?

  “Then how did…” She didn’t finish her sentence. An imaginary drop of icy water slipped down her spine. “He was here.”

  “The prayer was just a trick to bring him out into the open!”

  “Why didn’t I think of that before?”

  “Mila, for the love of God get out of there!”

  At that moment she realized what a risk she was taking. She took out her gun and walked quickly towards the exit, which was at least two hundred meters from where she was. A vast distance to cover with that “presence” in the orphanage.

  “Who could it be?” Mila wondered as she climbed the spiral staircase to the refectory.

  As she noticed that her legs were giving way, she worked out the answer.

  “The tea…”

  There were disturbances on the line. She heard Goran on the headphones, asking her, “What?”

  “Father Timothy is Ronald, isn’t he?”

  Disturbances. Noise. More disturbances.

  “Yes! After Billy Moore’s death, Father Rolf sent everyone away from the orphanage before the real date of closure. Except Ronald. He kept him with him because he feared his nature and hoped he could keep him under control.”

  “I think he’s drugged me…”

  Goran’s voice was irregular. “…you said? I don’t…erstand…”

  “I think…” Mila tried to repeat, but the words thickened in her mouth.

  She fell forward.

  The hands-free slipped out of her ear. The phone fell from her hand, sliding under one of the tables. Her heartbeats were getting faster with terror, speeding the drug through her body. Her senses grew dull. But she managed to hear Goran’s voice coming from the hands-free, saying, “Mila! Mila…ay something!…oing on?”

  She closed her eyes, afraid that she wouldn’t be able to open them again. Then she told herself that she didn’t want to die in a place like that.

  “Adrenaline…I need adrenaline…”

  She knew how to get some. She was still holding the gun tightly in her right hand. She aimed it so that the barrel brushed her deltoid. And fired. The bullet ripped through the leather of her jacket and pierced her flesh, powerfully echoing around the abyss that surrounded her. She screamed through the noise. But she regained consciousness.

  Goran clearly called her name: “Mila!”

  She crept towards the light on her phone display. She picked it up and replied to Gavila.

  “All OK.”

  She got back to her feet and started walking again. It took a huge effort to move as much as a step. She felt as if she was in one of those dreams when someone’s chasing you and you can’t run because your legs are heavy, as if you were up to your knees in a dense liquid.

  The wound pulsed, but it wasn’t losing much blood. She had gauged the shot well. She gritted her teeth and, step by step, she felt as if the exit was getting closer and closer.

  “If you knew everything, why didn’t you arrest that bastard straightaway?” she yelled into her phone. “And why wasn’t I informed?”

  The criminologist’s voice was clear again. “Sorry, Mila. We wanted you to go on acting naturally with him, so as not to arouse his suspicions. We’re monitoring him from a distance. We’ve put signal tracers in his car. We hoped he could lead us to the sixth child…”

  “But he didn’t…”

  “Because he’s not Albert, Mila.”

  “But he’s still dangerous, isn’t he?”

  Goran stayed silent for a moment too long. He was.

  “I’ve raised the alarm, they’re on their way to you. But it’ll take some time; the control cordon has a radius of several kilometers.”

  Whatever they do, it’ll be too late, thought Mila. In that weather and with the drug circulating around her body, draining her strength, she hadn’t a hope. And she knew it. She should have listened to that stupid taxi driver when he’d tried to discourage her from coming here! And—damn it—why hadn’t she agreed when he’d offered to wait for her until she’d finished? And now here she was, in a trap. She had chased herself right into it, perhaps because unconsciously part of her wanted it to happen. She was seduced by the idea of taking risks. Even of dying!

  No, she insisted to herself. I want to live.

  Ronald—alias Father Timothy—still hadn’t made his move. But she was sure she wouldn’t have long to wait.

  Three short sounds in sequence brought her back to her senses.

  “Fuck,” she said, as her phone battery abandoned her once and for all.

  The darkness closed over her like the fingers of a hand.

  How many times had she found herself in a mess? After all it had happened before. In the music teacher’s house, for example. But how many times had she found herself in a mess like this? The answer she gave herself caught her off guard.

  Never.

  Drugged, injured, without her strength and without her mobile phone. That last lack made her feel like laughing: what could she have done with the telephone? Perhaps call some old friend. Graciela, for example. And ask her, “How are you? I’m about to die!”

  The darkness was the worst thing. But she had to see it as an advantage: if she couldn’t see Ronald, he couldn’t see her either.

  He’s expecting me to head for the exit…

  She really did want to leave this place behind her. But she was aware that she mustn’t follow her instinct, or sh
e would die.

  I’ve got to hide and wait for reinforcements to arrive.

  She established that this was the wise decision. Because sleep could have come for her at any moment. She still had the gun, and that reassured her. Perhaps he was armed too. Ronald didn’t look like someone who was good with guns, but then she wasn’t good with them either. But Father Timothy had been good at acting shy and apprehensive. Basically, Mila reflected, he might be able to hide lots of other skills.

  She crouched under one of the tables in the huge refectory, and listened. The echo didn’t help: it amplified useless noises, obscure creaks, far off and deceptive, that she couldn’t interpret. Her eyelids closed, inexorably.

  He can’t see me. He can’t see me, she repeated constantly to herself. He knows I’m armed: if he makes a noise or uses the torch to look for me, he’s a dead man.

  Unlikely colors started floating in front of her eyes.

  It must be the drugs…she said to herself.

  The colors turned into faces, and grew animated just for her. It couldn’t only be her imagination. Suddenly, flashes were going off at various points in the room.

  That bastard’s in here and he’s using a camera flash!

  Mila tried to aim her gun. But those blinding lights, distorted by the hallucinogenic effect of the drug, made him impossible to locate.

  She was imprisoned in a huge kaleidoscope.

  She shook her head, but she was no longer in control of herself. A moment later she felt a tremor running through the muscles of her arms and legs, like an uncontrollable convulsion. However much she tried to banish it, the idea of death kept seducing her with the promise that, if she closed her eyes, everything would stop. Stop forever.

  How much time had passed? Half an hour? Ten minutes? And how much time did she have left?

  And at that moment she heard him.

  He was close. Very close. No more than four or five meters away from her.

  Then she saw him.

  It only lasted a fraction of a second. In the halo of light surrounding him, she spotted the sinister smile that oozed from his face.

  Mila knew he would find her at any moment, and she wouldn’t have enough energy to shoot at him. So she had to do it first, even if it meant revealing her position.

  She aimed into the darkness, pointing her weapon in the direction in which she saw him reappearing from one moment to the next in the halo of the flash. It was risky, but she had no alternative.

  She was about to pull the trigger when Ronald started singing.

  The same beautiful voice as when Father Timothy had intoned his hymn of prayer in front of the team. It was a contradiction in terms, a freak of nature that such a gift should have been stored in the unfeeling heart of a murderer. And it was from that heart that the song of death, high and dismayed, rose up.

  It could have been sweet and touching. Instead, what Mila felt was terror. Her legs were finally giving, as were the muscles of her arms. And she let herself slip to the floor.

  The glare of a flash.

  Torpor wrapped around her like a cold blanket. She heard Ronald’s footsteps getting more distinct as he approached to flush her out.

  Another flash.

  It’s over. Now he’s going to see me.

  It didn’t really matter how he killed her. She abandoned herself to death’s flatteries with unexpected calm. Her last thought went to child number six.

  I’ll never know who you were…

  A faint flow enwrapped her completely.

  The butt of her pistol slipped from her palm. Two hands gripping her. She felt herself being lifted up. She tried to say something, but the sounds remained stuck in her throat.

  She lost her senses.

  As she awoke she was aware of a springy gait: Ronald was carrying her over his shoulder, they were climbing the stairs.

  She lost consciousness again.

  A very strong smell of ammonia sucked her from her artificial sleep. Ronald was holding a small bottle to her nose. He had tied her hands, but he wanted her to be alert.

  She was buffeted by an icy wind. They were outside. Where were they? Mila sensed that they were somewhere high up. Then she remembered the enlarged photograph of the orphanage that Chang had produced to show her the spot from which Billy Moore had fallen.

  The tower. We’re on the tower!

  Ronald lost interest in her for a moment. She saw him walking towards the parapet and looking over the edge.

  He wants to throw me down.

  Then he came back and grabbed her by the legs, dragging her to the cornice. With the little strength remaining to her, Mila tried to kick out, but without success.

  She screamed. She struggled. A blind desperation filled her heart. He lifted her torso onto the parapet. With her head thrown back, Mila looked at the chasm below her. And then, through the curtain of snow, she made out in the distance the gleaming lights of the police cars approaching along the highway.

  Ronald leaned over. She felt his hot breath as he whispered, “It’s too late, they won’t get here in time…”

  Then he started to push her. Even with her hands tied behind her back, she managed to grip the slippery edge of the cornice. She battled with all her strength, but she couldn’t resist for long. Her only ally was the ice that covered the floor of the tower, making Ronald’s foot slip every time he tried to give her the final push. She saw his face distorting with the effort, and losing his calm because of her stubborn resistance. Then Ronald changed his technique. He decided to lift her legs beyond the parapet. He planted himself in front of her. And at that precise moment a desperate survival instinct made her put all her remaining strength into her knee, which she landed in his lower abdomen.

  Ronald staggered backwards, bending breathlessly over, his hands clamped over his crotch. Mila worked out that this was her only chance before he recovered.

  Without her strength, gravity was her only ally.

  The wound to her shoulder was on fire, but Mila ignored the pain. She straightened up: now the slippery ice was against her, but she still took a run and hurled herself towards him. Ronald saw her suddenly pouncing at him and lost his balance. He waved his arm around in search of a handhold, but by now he was halfway over the cornice.

  When he worked out that he wasn’t going to make it, Ronald stretched out a hand to grab Mila and drag her with him into the chasm that gaped below him. She saw his fingers claw at the hem of her leather jacket in one last terrible caress. She saw him plunge in slow motion, the white flakes seeming to break his fall.

  The dark received him.

  19.

  T he deepest darkness.

  A perfect barrier between sleep and waking. The fever has increased. She feels it on her reddened cheeks, on her aching legs, in her churning stomach.

  She doesn’t know when her days start and finish. Whether she has been lying there for hours or weeks. Time doesn’t exist in the belly of the monster that has swallowed her: it dilates and contracts, like a stomach slowly digesting its food. And it’s no use. Here time is no use for anything. Because she can’t answer the most important question.

  When will it end?

  The deprivation of time is the worst of her punishments. More than the pain in her left arm, which sometimes spreads towards her neck and presses on her temples until it makes her feel ill. Because one thing is clear to her now.

  This is all a punishment.

  But she doesn’t know exactly what sin she must be punished for.

  Maybe I was bad to my mother or father, I’ve thrown too many tantrums, I never want to drink milk at the table, and I secretly throw it away when they aren’t looking, I insisted that they bought me a cat, promising that I would look after it forever, but after I met Houdini I asked for a dog and they got very angry and said we couldn’t get rid of the cat, and I tried to make them understand that Houdini doesn’t like me at all, or perhaps it’s because I got bad marks at school, this year my first report was half a di
saster, and I have to get better at geography and drawing, or maybe it was the three cigarettes I smoked secretly on the roof of the gym with my cousin, but I didn’t inhale, no, in fact maybe it’s the ladybird-shaped hair grips that I stole from the mall, I swear I only did it that one time, and I’m very stubborn, specially with Mom who always wants to decide what clothes I have to wear, and she hasn’t worked out that I’m a big girl now and I don’t like the things she buys for me because we’ve got different tastes…

  When she’s awake, she goes on thinking of an explanation, trying to find a motive that would justify what’s happening to her. So she ends up imagining the silliest things. But every time she seems to have identified a reason at last, it collapses like a house of cards because her pain outweighs her guilt.

  Other times, though, she gets angry because her father and mother haven’t yet come to get her.

  What are they waiting for? Have they forgotten they have a daughter?

  Then she regrets it. And she starts calling out to them in her mind, hoping she has some kind of telepathic power. It is the last resource remaining to her.

  There are also times when she is convinced she is dead.

  Yes, I’m dead and they’ve buried me down here. I can’t move because I’m in a coffin. I’ll be here forever…

  But then the pain reminds her she is alive. The pain is both a sentence and a liberation. It drags her from her sleep and brings her back to reality. As it’s doing now.

  A hot liquid slides into her right arm. She feels it. It’s nice. It smells like medicine. Someone is taking care of her. She doesn’t know whether to be happy about it or not. Because it means two things. The first is that she isn’t alone. The second is that she doesn’t know if the presence near her is good or bad.

  She has learned to wait. She knows when it will manifest itself. For example, she has understood that the weariness filling her at all times and the sleep into which she suddenly plunges are not autonomously decided by her body. It’s a drug that dulls her senses.