Home Before Dark (2 page)

'Where shall I put these?’ India was still clutching the hand
mirrors.

He didn’t answer but went on dabbing with growing
intensity at the canvas on his easel. I wasn’t altogether
surprised to see that it was the same painting – a lurid, lifesize
calvary in the manner of Titian – that he’d been working
on the last time we met. His gift was for teaching.

'Where shall I put these?’ India repeated. I noticed her
portrait, a small delicate head, leaning against the wall. 'You
did ask for them.’

'Anywhere.’

She set them down noisily on the only uncluttered surface,
and left.

'Two seconds . . . and I’ll be with you,’ he said.

Stepping back at last, he surveyed his work and sighed.
Then, taking one of the mirrors and facing away from the
canvas, he held it up to frown over his shoulder at what he’d
done.

“77 vero maestro”, Leonardo called it – the true master.
Gives you a different perspective, a fresh eye,’ he explained
as he joined us. 'The mirror doesn’t lie. How are you both?’

We shook hands. His was damp with sweat and it occurred
to me that our being there together might be making Bailey
nervous. This couldn’t be easy for him either.

We had found no fault of any kind with the atelier over

Sophie’s death. Bailey had written us a moving letter of
condolence, but he hadn’t seen Laura since it happened. For
her he reserved a grave little smile of unspoken sympathy.
We talked awkwardly about this and that: the sultry weather,
the tourist problem, the scholarship my wife and I had
endowed in Sophie’s name.
'Can we just get on with it?’ Laura said.
He looked embarrassed for a second, then nodded and led
us over to an old leather sofa under the window. On a coffee
table lay the dark green folder that Laura’s brother, Will, had
given his niece for her last birthday. It was engraved in gold
with her initials SL. I glanced at Laura, but her face gave

nothing away.
Deftly tying his hair back with a rubber band, Bailey opened
the folder and began to leaf through the drawings. They were
mostly of plaster casts of antique and Renaissance statues. It
was academic work, clearly of a high standard; I can’t say
that I recognised it as Sophie’s.
'Early days, but already you can see evidence of real talent,’
Bailey enthused, holding up a charcoal sketch of a Roman
mask. 'Her sfumato – the smoky transition from light to
shadow – is remarkably accomplished for a beginner. Sophie
was driven, you know. She had that passionate fury in her
eye when she drew . . .’
'Bailey,’ I stopped him, 'we’re a little pushed for time, you
mentioned a sketchbook.’
'Ah yes, the sketchbook.’ He put the drawing back on top
of the others and closed the folder. 'We were just looking for
it before you arrived. It seems to have gone temporarily astray.’
There was a moment’s silence.
'What do you mean?’ Laura frowned. 'You don’t have it?’
He fiddled with the ribbon-ties of the folder. 'It was on
the desk in my office upstairs. I saw it there last night. We
only discovered it was missing an hour ago.’
'Well, I expect there’s been some mistake,’ I said. The atelier
had a reputation for being disorganised.
'I’m sorry, but I find this unacceptable.’ Laura flew up
from the sofa, walked around the coffee table and stood over
Bailey. 'Why couldn’t you have just sent us the drawings?
We’ve come all the way out here to Florence . . . for what?
So you can tell us Sophie showed “promise”?’ Laura is the
calmest person I know, but she can be formidable when
roused. 'And now you’ve lost the sketchbook?’
Under her stony blue gaze, Bailey wilted. 'I’m sure it’ll turn
up.’ He rubbed the back of his neck. 'How long are you
staying in town?’
'We fly home the day after tomorrow,’ I intervened.
'Since we’re obviously never going to see them,’ Laura said
acidly, 'would you mind explaining what was so special about
these drawings?’
Bailey looked at me before answering.There was no conspiracy
to hide anything from my wife. I just thought it best not to
worry or alarm her until we could all look at the sketchbook
together, and then decide what, if anything, should be done.
I nodded for him to go ahead.
'The drawings are of a house,’ he began hesitantly. 'Pen
and ink, mostly interiors, they’re minutely, even obsessively
detailed. There are one or two human figures, but insubstantial,
more like effigies than real people . . .’
Laura interrupted. 'What house? The villa where Sophie
was lodging?’
He shook his head. 'It’s a white clapboard Colonial, with
a porch, the kind you get in any affluent American suburb.
Inside, things are much as you’d expect, only in miniature.
The mood is bleak, shut-in, heavy with menace. The sense
of scale and the tension comes from the doors and windows,
which allow surreal glimpses of our own full-size world. It’s
like being trapped inside a doll’s house.’
Bailey paused to let this sink in.
I looked at Laura. Her face was expressionless.
'There’s a drawing of the kitchen, for example, which shows
the back door standing ajar. Across the threshold lies a shadow – the windows are dark, as though the shadow has fallen over
the whole house. What you see outside is a sliver of trouser
leg and part of what looks like a giant sneaker.’
Laura bit her lower lip. She looked down at her hands.
Watching her, I could tell she was struggling to keep her
composure. 'I suppose you think this tells us … reveals things
about Sophie’s state of mind?’
'The drawings speak for themselves,’ Bailey said. 'I have
no idea what it signifies, but some of them do seem oddly
prescient.’
'If that’s the case . . .’ She fell silent, my poor wife. I could
see the tears welling up. When she spoke again, her voice was
trembling. 'Why didn’t she call? Why didn’t she talk to someone?’
'Come
and sit down, Laura,’ I said quietly.

The day we lost Sophie was the day we said goodbye to the
future. With immediate effect all her tomorrows were
cancelled, and so many of ours that when we looked ahead
we realised life as we knew it had really ended.
Laura and I found it hard to talk to each other. There are
no adequate words and if there were you wouldn’t want to
use them. We took refuge in the comfort that family and

friends bring, we gave each other succour, yet we remained
two people locked in separate rooms of misery and despair.
It may be every parent’s nightmare to lose a child, but you
wake from the nightmare. That’s when the worst part begins.
Every morning the pain of loss is there, waiting to flood
back in with returning consciousness. I grew to hate that brief
dawn of forgetfulness before it did. The visceral ache gets
less but never really goes away.
It’s not that you have to go on living, it’s the fact that
you do.

In the early days, at the mercy of strangers, we let ourselves
be guided through the world of officialdom like bewildered
refugees. It makes a difference, of course, when things go
wrong abroad, if you have money. We were shown nothing but
kindness by the Florentine authorities, particularly the Questura, the Italian state police. This may sound like ingratitude, but I
should have been less trusting.
I took a liking to Andrea Morelli, who headed the investigation
into Sophie’s murder. He had an easy-going charm,
seemed steady rather than brilliant, but cut a reassuringly
solid figure. His promise to bring 'whoever did this terrible
thing’ to justice defused for a time my own longing for
revenge.
I convinced myself that we were in good hands. There was
no reason to think that Inspector Morelli’s sympathetic
manner, the sensitive way he handled Laura, his understanding
of sophisticated lives, made him any less competent or
determined to find Sophie’s killer, but I’m pretty sure now
he knew from day one that he’d landed a case he wasn’t going
to solve.
Our daughter was beaten and strangled to death on a night
in April, the twenty-seventh to be exact, when the temperature
dipped unexpectedly below zero. She’d been in Florence for
six months and had just e-mailed us to say she was loving
her second term at the atelier. Another couple of weeks, she’d
have been twenty.
We’d arranged for her to lodge at the Villa Nardini, where
her room looked out over the formal gardens. In the 'boscos’, an area deliberately left to grow wild, there’s a semi-derelict
grotto, and it was there that her body was discovered by the
family dogs on their morning rounds. Why Sophie, who hated
the cold, had gone into the garden late at night remains a
mystery.
There was little physical evidence. Nothing to indicate
whether she had an assignation, or was followed and forced
inside the grotto. No tracks or fingerprints were found, no
fibres, no bodily fluids, saliva, skin or hair samples, from
which
DNA
could have been extracted. Forensic tests
established that Sophie’s murderer didn’t assault her sexually
(which was some small comfort). She was knocked
unconscious, then strangled.
The fact that he was careful, meticulous even, in the execution
of a crime that is usually associated with ungovernable passions,
Morelli believed suggested that Sophie was murdered by
somebody she knew.
However brutal, he insisted, it was not an arbitrary act.

The investigator’s office was on the sixth floor of the Questura
building on Via Zara. A small cell-like room with a combed
ceiling, it barely had space for a desk and two chairs. Under
the high window, a cluster of framed diplomas and family
photographs, haphazardly arranged, lent the only personal
touch.
'I can understand your frustration, Signor Lister,’ Morelli
said, as he shut the door behind us and gestured for me to
sit. 'Believe me, I share it.’
'In other words,’ I said flatly, 'you’re no further forward.’

He smiled. 'We’ve made some progress since your last
visit.’ His lightly accented English was close to faultless.
'We’ve widened local enquiries to a five-kilometre range.
We’re concentrating now on the immigrant population. It
takes time.’
'How many people have you got working on the case?’
Morelli leant back in his chair and crossed his legs. A
balding thirty-four-year-old Genoan, short but robustly built,
he had a glow of health about him that I’d come to resent.
I imagined him working on his golf handicap, or his suspiciously
uniform tan, when he should have been finding
Sophie’s killer.
'It varies, but I can assure you, Signor Lister, this is still
an active investigation. We’re taking computers at random
from internet cafes all over Florence, examining the hard
drives. The Computer Crime Squad in Milan is building a
profile, which should give us a better idea of who we’re
looking for.’
None of this was new. 'What evidence is there that Sophie
was stalked online?’
'If we had evidence, he’d be in custody by now. But we’re
almost sure that’s how he got into her life. Cyber-stalkers are
often isolated, emotionally void individuals. The immigrant
fits the profile because he may be experiencing stress or
culture shock and suffering a sense of loss of his culture of
origin.’
'Andrea, it’s been over a year, you don’t even have a
suspect.’
He reached for the phone on his desk, keyed in a couple
of numbers and asked in English for the Sophie Lister file.
'We haven’t given up hope.’
I shook my head. It’s not what you want to hear from
someone in charge of a murder investigation. Not when the
victim is your child.
Morelli had found nothing so far to support his theory
that Sophie knew her murderer. Her teachers and friends
from the atelier, her landlady, the other lodgers at the Villa
Nardini, all confirmed what she had already told us – she
was too busy with her work to get romantically involved. No
one remembered seeing her with a stranger, or noticing any
change in her behaviour. There’d been no suspicious types
hanging around the villa or the atelier in the Oltrarno.
If Sophie felt threatened, or was aware that she was being
stalked, she never spoke of it to anyone. I kept thinking
about Bailey’s description of the drawings, wondering how
long she had lived in fear. Why didn’t she tell us? Laura
had been right to ask. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to know
the answer.
Sophie was religious about keeping in touch, calling home
on her mobile once or twice a week and e-mailing the family
(mostly her brother, George, to whom she was particularly
close) on a regular basis. She had a laptop with her in Florence,
but couldn’t hook up to the internet from her lodgings the
Villa Nardini made few concessions to modern times.
Like many students, she used internet cafes to go online,
surf the Web and conduct her e-mail correspondence. It was
in one of these brightly lit anonymous places, as common in
Florence as pizzerias, that the police believed she may have
encountered her killer.
'I don’t think he met her online,’ Morelli said. 'At least not
in the conventional way. I think he saw her first in the real
world, then maybe afterwards they started talking and formed
an online relationship.’
There was no electronic trail. Even with their limited
resources to carry out an investigation in cyberspace, the Questura had established that much. Sophie didn’t frequent
chat rooms – or if she did, it wasn’t under the screen-name
she had registered with
MSN
. There were no recorded
conversations in the archives of the main service providers. I’d also
done some research of my own.
'How would he have found her?’ I asked.
'Let’s say he spots her on the street, in a shop or restaurant – she was, after all, striking – and follows her to an internet
cafe. She sends some e-mails. He waits until she leaves, then
slides into her seat and gets her details from the computer
terminal she’s just been using. Or maybe he shoulder-surfs
her as he walks past her screen, and memorises her e-mail
address.
'Later he contacts her online, a casual friendship develops,
and she responds in the innocent belief that he’s far away,
in another town, even another country . . . while, all along,
he’s sitting across the room or at the next terminal, observing
her.’
The investigator paused and our eyes met as he smoothed a hand over his polished head. 'He uses the internet to gain
personal information about her, then begins a combination
of onlinereal-world stalking. One day he just turns up in her life and identifies himself as the person she talks to online.’
There was a knock at the door and his secretary entered. She handed a file to Morelli, then left again without even a glance in my direction.
He opened the folder and withdrew some photographs. 'Remember these?’
The glossy prints he spread on his desk were of a chalk outline in the paved floor of the grotto chamber. It had been drawn around Sophie before her body was removed from the scene.
I nodded. I had no idea what was coming.
He leaned forward and picked up one of the prints. The diagram, a map of the last place on earth she occupied, still filled me with revulsion and anger. I was never shown photographs
of Sophie’s body.