The Memory Key
Authors: Conor Fitzgerald
Tags: #Mystery, #Police Procedurals, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Literature & Fiction
To my brother, Cormac.
Thank you for everything you have done.
Contents
Also available by Conor Fitzgerald
Central Italy, 1980
The unmarried woman in the thin blue dress turned to the old man on the broken bench and said, ‘I think the clock has stopped.’
The old man sighed and glanced up at the wall. As he did so, the big hand dropped down a notch from one to two minutes past the hour, and the woman blushed and apologized.
A philosophy student with cutaway jeans, who had turned his oversized backpack into a divan and was reclining luxuriously on it, relit his self-rolled cigarette, more paper than tobacco, and laughed at the woman’s embarrassment.
‘They should have a second hand on it,’ said the man in brown corduroys and orange shirt who was sitting opposite. She suspected him of trying first to look up her dress, then to look through it. Certainly, when she had crossed her legs a few minutes earlier, watching him from the corner of her eye, his head had swivelled in her direction and his eyes flickered over her thighs, which she didn’t mind too much, because he had a nice and easily embarrassed face. He circled his finger to represent the sweep of a second hand moving across the clock face. ‘That way you could at least tell if the clock was working, but time always slows down when . . . oops.’
He pulled in his legs as a boy went racing fiercely by, determined to win a race against his baby sister to whom he had given a two-step head start, one step for every year. The boy slapped the wall triumphantly as he arrived, which turned out to be the funniest thing his sister had ever seen. Her squeals then turned out to be the funniest thing he had ever heard. They were soon on the floor, egging each other on, until, finally, the mother stood up, took them by the hand and led them back to their seats against the wall.
‘They should just rename the 10:05 the 10:20,’ said an elderly woman pretending to address her very old husband but clearly aiming her comments at the entire waiting room. ‘Then they could stop pretending to apologize. It’s the same every Saturday.’
A girl with dark hair and a serious expression glanced up from her book and looked quickly around the crowded room. A woman with golden hair cascading in ringlets down her left shoulder, whose arrival had drawn the frank attention of the man in corduroys and furtive glances from almost everyone else, set a hefty suitcase down on the floor, then immediately picked it up again, as if testing its weight.
Two young women, one in jeans, the other in a multicoloured flared skirt, both unkempt and sporting Tolfa bags, bent their heads together and looked for a moment like they might actually kiss.
A robust man in a navy jacket and red shirt, with a neat beard, leaning against the wall crossed his arms and surveyed the people present with an appraising frown, as if they were unwanted guests in his living room, and shook his head in amazement at a private thought. A grandmother opened her large handbag and took out a cheap packet of biscuits and handed them to her grandson, who, mortified, grabbed them out of her hand and retreated to the corner of the waiting room before opening the crinkly plastic and beginning to nibble surreptitiously. A deeply tanned man in a beige safari suit with a powder-blue shirt kicked impatiently at his suitcase and puffed out his cheeks. A baby fell asleep, its face nestled into its father’s neck, just below the bristle line. The father tried to pass the drooped bundle to his wife, who shook her head firmly, and warded him off with her hands. ‘I have had enough,’ she was saying.
An InterRailing English couple, who had been in Venice for three nights and had decided there that they would get married before finishing their studies, were now more anxious to get back to Bristol than to visit Rome. They came in, looked around, saw there were no free benches, and left, he saying something disparaging about the Italian way of life, she murmuring something more conciliatory. A minute later, the girl was sitting on the outside ledge of the window, her back against the glass. As she leaned down to say something to her grumpy fiancé, the lumbar curve of her spine was visible in bumpy relief beneath her blouse, part of which had ridden up her back a little, exposing a small section of smooth skin.
The moustachioed stationmaster walked by the open doorway, paused, slapped his thigh with a rolled-up copy of
Gazzetta dello Sport
, and started heading back the way he had come, but was waylaid by a Milanese businessman angered both by the delay and by three days in the company of the smug communists of this flat and red-stone city.
A mouse-grey suitcase, a plastic shopping bag, and a cheap tartan travel bag sat on a gunmetal table set in an alcove that might once have served as a ticket desk. The blonde woman lifted the tartan case, and looked around to see who claimed it. The girl with the book glanced up and gave a friendly nod of permission. The blonde woman pushed the tartan case back a bit, and heaved her own on to the counter, curtly refusing an offer of help from the bearded man. She pushed her suitcase towards the wall, and, in what seemed like a courteous gesture, pulled the few other pieces of luggage to the front of the counter, from where they could be more easily retrieved.
The clock ticked off another minute. The boy in the corner finished his biscuits, a non-stopping train on the far track hooted twice, then went hurtling by causing the glass panes to rattle. It clattered noisily over some points, then continued rhythmically on its way, its wheels beating out the sound of
tsk-tsk, ciao-ciao
on the jointed tracks, as if to mock the people it was leaving behind. As the train bid its last faint
ciao-ciao
, Adriano Celentano’s voice could be heard singing ‘Il Tempo Se Ne Va’ from someone’s transistor. A short, thick-lipped man stood up and in a grave Sardinian accent told the man holding the baby that he might take his seat, and then marched off quickly to avoid the embarrassment of being thanked. The running boy crashed into the blonde woman’s elegant leg. Instead of looking bashful, he used her thigh as pivot, swung behind her, and reversed direction to run straight back to his mother, who threw over an apologetic glance but received nothing in return from the woman’s grey-blue eyes.
The station speakers announced the imminent arrival of the train from Milan to Rome, and the people in the waiting room shifted, and raised the murmurs of conversation into a hubbub of preparations. The young woman closed her book,
Abba Abba
was its title; the mother gathered her unruly children. The student got off his backpack and set it upright, flexing his shoulder muscles in preparation for lifting it with a single manly jerk for the benefit of the two women on the far side of the room, who had yet to see him. The man with the corduroy trousers shook his head almost imperceptibly as the woman with the angelic hair, too young and way, way out of his league, walked out of the door. What must it be like to have a woman like that? What must it be like to
be
a woman like that?
The blonde woman’s hurried departure registered on the minds of several people who assumed illogically that the train must have arrived already, without further announcement. Their preparations became more urgent and a sense of movement spread through the warm waiting room.
The woman in the thin dress stood up and smoothed the paisley-patterned acrylic above her knees. She glanced over at her admirer, who smiled at her. He was, like her, in his early thirties. ‘May as well stay in here,’ she ventured. ‘There’s hardly room to move on the platform. Saturday’s always so busy.’
‘Are you catching the Rome train?’
‘Yes. You?’
‘Yes, I live there.’
‘Really?’
‘You don’t then?’
‘No actually, I do, or I will . . . I have a new job.’
‘Really? Great! What sort of . . .’
The old woman called her grandson over and ordered him not to leave yet and not to get lost. The grandson therefore returned to where he had been.
‘We apologize for the delay . . . please stand back from the yellow line as the train approaches.’
‘Never find a seat . . . unless they’ve added a carriage. Sometimes they do that.’
‘I could have sworn it was in this pocket, I . . .’
‘Careful, love.’
‘Just like you.’
‘I can’t wait to see their faces.’
‘Don’t even think of eating that now.’
‘Hold my hand.’
‘. . . a great day.’
The blonde woman, whose name was Stefania Manfellotto, walked across the forecourt in front of the station towards a Fiat Ritmo driven by Adriano Pazienza, the man she would later marry in prison.
‘All set?’ he said as she ducked in and sat beside him in the front seat.
‘Get me out of here.’
Adriano turned on the engine and drove away from the train station. As he reached the intersection, he glanced at his watch. ‘Five minutes.’
‘If it works,’ said Stefania.
Adriano patted her knee, and ran his hand upwards towards the inside of her thigh, then took it away to change gear. ‘It’ll work.’
The suitcase that she had positioned beneath a supporting wall, contained 18 kilos of Compound B, an explosive usually found in landmines, mixed with 5 kilos of nitroglycerine. The timed detonator activated at twenty-five minutes past the hour.