Teresa touched the old, grubby jacket. “How about some new clothes?”
“I get my own clothes.”
“You’re such a pretty kid. Slim too. It would be a pleasure to buy something. I was never slim. At your age…”
Teresa tried to remember herself then, to put the image she had in her own head against what she saw in Laila now. “I was a fat, bad-tempered little monster. Not much changes.”
The girl laughed, a little nervously.
“What’s so funny?” Teresa asked. “Don’t you believe me?”
“No!”
There was a divide you couldn’t cross and if she knew more about kids, as much as Peroni did, she’d have understood that already. A kid could never see an adult and imagine them when they were young, never envisage them as anything but what they were: part of another world, in Laila’s case a threatening one, fixed, run by other people, with their arguments and hidden possibilities. Peroni had worked on that assumption from the moment he started talking to the girl. He didn’t pretend to be anything he wasn’t. He simply set out his position-I will be your friend, you can trust me, just keep listening and you’ll see-and let her find a way to get close to him, like a moth attracted to a distant flickering flame. It established a connection, almost straightaway. It created room for hurt too. Teresa and the kid had both heard the tail end of Peroni’s heated conversation with Falcone. Peroni even told her a little of what it was about. Teresa, the grown-up rational adult, was able to dismiss this level of bickering as the way things were. Laila was different. She heard the sound of men yelling at each other and shrank into herself, fearing the worst.
“So what do you think I was like when I was your age?”
Laila thought about it. “Normal.”
“Hah! How wrong can you get? I’m not normal now, kid. You want to know what they call me? In the Questura?”
“What?”
“ ”Crazy Teresa.“ The lunatic pathologist. Mad as they come.”
Laila shook her head, refusing to accept a word of it. This seemed, to Teresa Lupo, dreadfully unfair.
“It’s true,” she asserted, “whether you believe it or not. And I am crazy. Crazy enough to buy you some stuff just because I want to. Just because all that black gear drives me nuts. Why be pretty and hide it?”
Laila didn’t think of herself as pretty. Pretty didn’t exist in Laila’s world. She probably didn’t think of herself at all. A flicker of anxiety crossed her face. “When will they make me go?”
“Nobody’s making you do anything, Laila.”
She didn’t believe that either. Teresa couldn’t blame her. It was a particularly vague answer, one full of holes even a thirteen-year-old street kid could see.
“Gianni stays with me?”
“Sure. For a while. But he’s a cop. He’s got work to do. Lots of work. You’re not his…”
Teresa checked herself, horrified at the words running through her head: You’re not his kid, he’s got two of them and he already thinks he’s failed them. You’re just filling in the spaces without even knowing it.
“It’s not his job, Laila. We’ll work something out. But Gianni and Nic are paid to find bad people and put them in prison. They have to find that man you saw. They need you to help them.”
The girl threw her skinny arms around herself, staring at the floor.
“I didn’t see anything,” she mumbled. “I just…”
You didn’t threaten in a situation like this. That couldn’t work. Yet they’d spent hours trying to pull out the facts of what happened, piece by piece, from Laila’s head, and it was all so… meagre. The address had come easily. The rest was a jumble. She had followed the man because he looked “interesting.”
Really. How, Laila? The kid didn’t explain. She merely shrugged. This was what she did. Follow people. Maybe, Teresa thought, offer them something-she didn’t want to think what-then take their money and their wallets, too.
They’d got Laila to talk as far as she wanted to. Then she’d clammed up, however subtly Peroni tried to find a way past her defences. Every understated question just walked straight into a brick wall.
Teresa Lupo tried to imagine what it was like for her that night. You sneaked into an old temple because someone left the door open. So what were you thinking?
It’s warm in there.
OK. And what do you think when you get there and see two people, a man and a woman, close up to each other, something going on?
They’re going to make out and I can watch.
OK too. She knew she’d have done that at thirteen.
I can steal stuff. God knows what.
And that was OK as well, except nothing had gone the way it was supposed to. The two didn’t make out. Probably not, anyway, from what Teresa had seen of the body.
The man had strangled her with his special piece of cord, the one he kept for such occasions. Then he took off all her clothes, pulled out a scalpel, looked around the room, flipped her over so that her dead face bit into all that ancient stone, did his work (which he’d know by heart by now, without the need for templates, because he’d done it-how many?-eight times before already), then flipped the poor mutilated bitch back and let her blank, unseeing eyes stare at the oculus, pulled out her arms like that, cold fingers pointing out at some hidden magical points in space.
Teresa looked at Laila and a hidden inner voice provided the answer, persuaded her she knew what had happened, so surely she didn’t need to keep asking this poor kid over and over again.
Laila had done what any sane person would have done in the circumstances. She’d hidden in the shadows, just where she was when Nic came into the place, cowering, shivering, stifling the scream in her throat, refusing to look because seeing would make those noises she was hearing take on another dimension, let them climb straight into her brain and stay there forever.
Teresa put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and smiled. “Just tell me the truth, Laila. Then we’ll leave it. You really didn’t see anything, did you? It was just too… bad. Too scary to look. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’d all have done the same.”
“I told you,” the girl said with a pout.
No, you didn’t, she wanted to say. Even Gianni Peroni had missed that, maybe because it needed a woman to understand how a teenage girl would react to that particular fear. Men had a curiosity they couldn’t quell. They had to watch. It was compulsive. A woman had somewhere else to go, somewhere inside herself where she could believe the world was still warm and kind and ultimately good.
She wished to God Peroni had been awake and standing there then. Because Teresa Lupo knew this kid was telling the truth, and knew, too, she was hiding something. No amount of street life, no big, shadowy pre-history, could explain the shifty expression in her eyes. There was a secret there. Maybe it was too personal-thirteen-year-olds could do things for a man too. Maybe…
You haven’t a clue, Teresa told herself. Quit guessing. Either she tells or she doesn’t.
Teresa thought about Falcone and how he would have handled an interview like this. He and Peroni were so different, used such dissimilar tactics to reach the same end. Temperamentally she was closer to Falcone. She didn’t like fishing, didn’t care for walking around a problem, looking for its weaknesses. You plunged in, asked the right questions, then stood there, arms crossed, tapping your feet loudly on the floor until the answers came. It was one reason she liked Peroni so much. Loved him even, though she wasn’t quite sure exactly what that meant. Gianni added some charity into the day-to-day routine of investigation. He got what he wanted by exploiting some innate belief that in just about everyone there existed some small spark of humanity, if only you could find it. She was in no doubt this was a weird way for a cop to proceed. Even Costa, who was once a pushover, had started to toughen up his act of late. The job did that to most of them. Why twenty years of dealing with vice made Gianni Peroni the man he was, more sensitive, not less, was beyond her.