The Memory Key (2 page)

So powerful was the blast in the station that it pushed the late-arriving locomotive off the tracks.

No one who was still in the waiting room survived the blast and thermal wave; no one within 15 metres survived the fragmentation of metal, glass, plastic, wood, and brick. Collapsing masonry killed several more, and three people died beneath the wheels of the train that, though its engine and front three carriages were derailed, kept moving mercilessly forward.

Chapter 2

Rome, Present Day

Sofia Fontana was on her way to meet Magistrate Filippo Principe for the fourth time. He promised her it would be the last, but she didn’t believe it. She did not much like the investigating magistrate, and resented the fact that it was she who had to come to his office. It took her two long bus rides from Trullo to Prati. The first bus, the 871, arrived with the regularity of papal elections; the second, the 23, was overcrowded and full of aggression. Her cousin Olivia had told her there was an app for the iPhone that plotted out the route and told you when the bus was coming, which was great, if you had an iPhone. Typical of Olivia to give advice on public transport, which she had probably never taken in her life.

She felt bad about not liking Principe, because she knew he liked her. But to be liked without liking, a reversal of a lifetime of experience, was a sensation to be grabbed. She tried to use the meetings as she might a psychiatry session, though if anyone was in need of counselling it was the magistrate.

Six months ago, she had almost been shot dead in broad daylight. As Principe kept reminding her, if the shooter had been less of a marksman, she would not be here now. It had focused her mind and made her realize how much she loved life.

Her white shoes had collected some dirt, which was a pity, given what they had cost. But her pale blue jeans and silk blouse felt good on her, and she was especially happy with her plaid ’60s-style red and green coat, a touch of London. Her new earrings were imitations of a pair worn in a painting of Princess Leonilla Sayn Wittgenstein. Sofia saw a portrait of the Russian princess once and decided that this woman was the idealized version of herself. If a few proteins had unfolded slightly differently and some genes, particularly those that were responsible for noses and backsides, had switched off earlier, and if others, such as those that grew legs and breasts, had worked a little harder, then she would look just like Princess Wittgenstein.

The weather was cooling now, which gave her a chance to try out the new jacket she had bought in the July sales. Leather, another new departure for her. Two months in London, the idea being to learn English, but she had spent all her conversation time with East Europeans and other Italians whose English was worse than hers. She saw that the English, who had no respect for their hair or shoes, and could be dreadful dressers, could also make odd combinations suddenly look very stylish and different, and their culture had more room for the plainer types, like herself. She felt that with a little more style, she might move beyond vulnerability.

She walked into the Palace of Justice and, having done this three times before, told the guard she had an appointment with Magistrate Filippo Principe. The guard’s dead eyes made it clear that he would be unmoved if she had an appointment with the resurrected Christ, but she felt she had to say something.

The shooting had occurred in late March. It was on the day before the clocks went forward, and she had been visiting Olivia who, uncharacteristically enough, had stayed late at university to meet her boyfriend Marco (Sofia felt the usual mixture of desire and pity as Marco’s face came to mind).

‘And why were you at the university?’

She looked in disbelief at the magistrate. ‘You have asked me that –’

‘– over and over, I know.’ The magistrate, who looked particularly ashen today, was continuously swallowing something invisible, keeping his pale lips tightly shut, as if to stop something noxious inside his body from seeping out.

‘I was on my way from the Health Institute where I work. I was taking a short cut through the university grounds.’ She pictured herself walking across the courtyard in front of the brutalist façade of the literature faculty, and, in spite of what was about to happen, envied her earlier self for the freedom of being out and about.

‘Go on,’ he prompted.

‘There was what I thought was a girl with blonde hair, walking directly towards me. In my memory, we seem to be the only ones in the courtyard at that moment. The hair was bubbly, lots of ringlets, which is why I thought she was young, but as she approached, I saw she was far older. A mature woman, and the hair was peroxide bright.’

‘Did you or she say anything?’

‘No.’

But Sofia had raised her eyes with the intention of giving a friendly smile, which died at once when the blonde woman with stone-grey eyes looked straight through her. Even as she thought about it now, she felt smaller and uglier. The woman’s eyes had conveyed something beyond disdain. Her eyes had registered a presence, but without a flicker of interest.

Urged on by the sad magistrate, she over-elaborated the moment to the point where she was not sure whether she was inventing things. The few seconds of the event now stretched out in her memory like a feature film.

‘The woman passed me by, and I heard a slight cracking sound and an intake of breath.’

‘You heard this?’ The magistrate consulted his notes, which took some time. Eventually he said, ‘This is the first time you have said anything about hearing something.’

‘Then scratch that. Maybe I didn’t. You keep asking me to tell the story, and the more I tell it, the more details come into it.’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘But maybe by now I am just making it up. Not deliberately.’

‘Don’t worry, Sofia. If I make you relive the moment, sooner to later you’ll invent your own soundtrack for it. I am not going to place too much faith in your actually having heard something, but maybe you did. You never know. Real details sometimes emerge.’

‘OK, but something made me turn round, and there, ten metres away, lay the blonde woman on the ground.’

Other people were already running towards the spot, and someone was shouting something. Sofia remembered tiptoeing slowly back and craning her head forward to look at the woman, but not really wanting to see.

The eyes that had unnerved her a minute before unnerved her again, but in a different way. They were open and staring straight at her, but had lost their contemptuous expression. On the contrary, the woman now seemed to be looking at her with absent-minded fondness, as blood dripped from the side of her head and ran in rivulets down the concrete into the grass before it could form a pool.

Someone was shouting about a shot and someone, perhaps the same person, was saying they should take cover. But she had heard no shot, seen no flash, felt no ripples in the air.

‘On second thoughts,’ she told the magistrate, ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘That’s fine, Sofia.’

Watching some people run up the steps and into the building and others out of the building and into the courtyard, Sofia had felt like she was standing upstage and watching an audience panic. Behind her, centre stage, lay the woman with the bleeding head attended to by more and more people. Hours seemed to pass, though they must have only been minutes. Her legs, which had felt as strong and incapable of movement as two stone pillars, suddenly crumbled, as someone bore her weight and accompanied her to the ground.

She was still sitting there when the ambulance man in the huge orange jacket came over to her. Could the ambulance man not see that she was perfectly fine? He sent over his smaller female colleague, and Sofia became even angrier at the blatancy of the ploy. Carabinieri were on the scene as if teletransported there. A plastic tape had already been unwound and the chaotic milling crowd had been reconstituted into a neat circle of spectators. The blonde woman was being carted away on a stretcher. The paramedic insisted Sofia had to go, and Sofia shouted no. Screamed, as a matter of fact. She did not want to get into the same ambulance as that woman.

‘We have another ambulance here just for you,’ said the paramedic.

‘I don’t need it.’

‘You have blood down on the back of your jacket and some in your hair. It’s almost certainly not yours, but wouldn’t you like us at least to check?’

It was then that she began to cry.

And now, praying that the magistrate would not try to comfort her by putting his arm around her or something, she began to cry again.

Chapter 3

Commissioner Alec Blume was sitting with Chief Inspector Caterina Mattiola under a duvet on the sofa, as good as gold because Caterina’s son Elia was in the room with them, watching TV. There had been an attack on a Catholic church in Baghdad, and the Italian reporter seemed to think that the atrocity was aggravated by the fact that today was All Souls’ Day. Scores injured.

‘I didn’t know they had Catholic churches in Iraq,’ said Caterina, drawing Elia towards her and snuggling her feet under Blume’s legs.

‘Well,’ began Blume, who had not known either but was perfectly prepared to explain why her assumption had been so foolish.

‘Oh look!’ Caterina’s voice rose to a squeal of delight as she pointed at an American army officer in fatigues fielding questions with a face that, though it wore a grave expression, had something of a George Bush smirk about it.

‘What?’ said Blume, annoyed at being interrupted. ‘Oh . . . I see.’ The caption below showed that the American army officer was called Lieutenant Colonel Eric Bloom. ‘But it’s a different spelling.’

‘Still, Eric Bloom, Alec Blume, you’ve got to say . . .’

Blume shrugged. ‘I suppose.’

‘That’s not a coincidence; it’s not even close,’ said Elia.

The kid had reached the age where he thought opinions were best delivered in scathing tones.

‘Did you not see the name, love?’ asked his mother.

Meanwhile, dead Iraqi Christians had been replaced on screen by a man floating and waving in the space station.

‘When a game of football is played,’ announced Elia, ‘it is more likely than unlikely that two people on the pitch have the same birthday. That’s mathematics, not coincidence. People get them confused all the time.’

His mother beamed at him, and nudged Blume’s backside with her foot to get him to join in the admiration.

‘You sure about that?’ said Blume. ‘We’re talking about 22 people.’

‘Twenty-three. You forgot the ref.’

‘Yeah well, 25 if there are linesmen,’ said Blume.

‘They are not on the pitch,’ said Elia in weary tones. ‘They are behind the touch line. That’s why they are called
lines
men. All you need is 23 people.’

‘Really?’ said Blume. ‘That’s really interesting. It’s bullshit, but it’s interesting you should believe it.’

‘It’s true!’ Elia’s voice was quite high-pitched for a boy. ‘I’ll show you.’

‘You do that. Tell you what, if you prove it, I’ll give you €50.’

‘You’re on,’ said Elia, ‘but you had better pay me this time.’

‘No!’ said Caterina. ‘No gambling, and €50 is too much.’

‘It’s not as if he’s going to get it.’

It was then that the phone rang to draw him out into the cold.

Half an hour later, he switched off the stereo and climbed reluctantly out of his warm car into the drizzle of the November night, and went in search of his old friend, investigating Magistrate Filippo Principe.

The magistrate, frailer and more stooped than Blume remembered him, was standing shivering on the perimeter of an area cordoned off by the forensic team, which was working quietly under arc lamps. They had set up a canopy above the slumped body of a young woman who lay with her back propped against the wall, in the attitude of an insolent pupil. The canopy, lights, the quiet team of forensic workers, the spectators outside, and the pillars clad in white marble at the university entrance gave the whole scene a theatrical effect.

The magistrate, who had not noticed his arrival, stood with bowed head in bleak silence. Blume reached out and tapped him on the shoulder blade.

‘Ah, Alec.’ Principe’s smile was slow in arriving and did not last long. ‘Thanks for coming.’

Principe’s shivering was infectious. Near him, a young woman had her face buried in the shoulder of a man in his twenties, who held her in a tight embrace, trying to stop her shaking sobs and at the same time shield her with an umbrella. Her voice, muffled against the fabric of his fleece jacket, kept repeating the name ‘Sofia’. Steam rose from the young man’s shoulder every time the woman, a girl with fine features, lifted her face to say the name.

‘Suit up and go in and have a look at her as soon as they let you,’ said Principe. He nodded at the weeping girl. ‘That’s Sofia’s cousin.’

‘Sofia?’

‘Sofia Fontana,’ said Principe. ‘That’s the name of the deceased. A lovely girl.’

‘You are shivering.’

‘It’s freezing, Alec. What do you expect? The one who is weeping is the cousin. Her name’s Olivia. She had arranged to pick Sofia up here.’

‘Right,’ said Blume. He wanted Principe to go and sit somewhere warm.