that door, he had taken a journey back in time.
It isn’t possible, he said to himself.
There was no way the room could have been preserved exactly as it had been on that tragic day nineteen years earlier.
There was only one explanation, and he found confirmation for it in the paint pots and brushes in a corner of the room, as well as in the forensic photographs Raffaele had somehow got his hands on, showing the actual scene: the scene as encountered by Guido Altieri, returning home on a quiet March morning.
Subsequently, everything had been altered. By the intervention of the police, but also by whoever had immediately afterwards cleanedeverything, trying to wipe out all memory of the horror and restore the place to its original state.
That always happens when there has been a violent death, Marcus told himself. The bodies are taken away, the blood dries, and life returns to normal.
Nobody wants to preserve those memories. Not even me, he thought.
Raffaele Altieri, though, had decided to faithfully reproduce the scene of the crime. Pursuing his own obsession, he had built a shrine to the atrocity. And in trying to enclose the evil within that shrine, he himself had been imprisoned by it.
But at least this faithful reproduction gave Marcus the opportunity to examine it and look for the anomalies he needed. So he made a belated sign of the cross and went in.
As he approached what looked like a sacrificial altar, he understood why the slaughter must have been carried out by at least two people.
The victims were to be allowed no escape.
He tried to imagine Valeria Altieri and her lover, surprised by that inhuman violence. Had she screamed, or had she held back in order not to wake her little son, who was asleep in the next room, and stop him running in to see what was happening?
At the foot of the bed, on the right, a pool of blood had formed, while to the left Marcus noted three small circular marks.
He bent down to get a better look. They formed a perfect equilateral triangle. Each side measuring roughly twenty inches.
The symbol.
He was considering the possible meanings of that sign, when, looking up for a moment, he saw something he had not noticed at first glance.
There on the carpet were the prints of small bare feet.
He imagined the three-year-old Raffaele putting his head in at the door of that room the morning after the massacre, seeing that horror and being unable to understand the meaning of it. He saw him running to the bed, dipping his feet in the pool of blood as he did so, and desperately shaking his mother, trying to wake her.Marcus could also imagine his little body on the blood-soaked sheets: after crying for hours, he must have huddled by his mother’s body and, exhausted, have fallen asleep.
He had spent two days in this apartment before his father had found him and taken him away. Two days and two very long nights, confronting alone whatever lurked in the darkness.
Children don’t need memories, they learn by forgetting.
Those forty-eight hours, on the other hand, had been sufficient to mark the existence of Raffaele Altieri for ever.
Marcus could not move. He started taking deep breaths, fearing a panic attack. Was this his talent, then? To understand the obscure messages that evil left in objects? To listen to the silent voices of the dead? To witness the spectacle of human wickedness, powerless to intervene?
Dogs are colour blind.
That was why only he had understood something the world did not know about Raffaele. That three-year-old boy was still asking to be saved.
9.04 a.m.
‘There are things you have to see with your own eyes, Ginger.’
Those were the words David always used whenever a discussion arose about the risks of his work. For Sandra, the camera was a necessary refuge, to lessen the impact of the violence she documented every day. For him, it was merely an instrument.
That distinction had occurred to her as she put together a makeshift darkroom in the bathroom of
It isn’t possible, he said to himself.
There was no way the room could have been preserved exactly as it had been on that tragic day nineteen years earlier.
There was only one explanation, and he found confirmation for it in the paint pots and brushes in a corner of the room, as well as in the forensic photographs Raffaele had somehow got his hands on, showing the actual scene: the scene as encountered by Guido Altieri, returning home on a quiet March morning.
Subsequently, everything had been altered. By the intervention of the police, but also by whoever had immediately afterwards cleanedeverything, trying to wipe out all memory of the horror and restore the place to its original state.
That always happens when there has been a violent death, Marcus told himself. The bodies are taken away, the blood dries, and life returns to normal.
Nobody wants to preserve those memories. Not even me, he thought.
Raffaele Altieri, though, had decided to faithfully reproduce the scene of the crime. Pursuing his own obsession, he had built a shrine to the atrocity. And in trying to enclose the evil within that shrine, he himself had been imprisoned by it.
But at least this faithful reproduction gave Marcus the opportunity to examine it and look for the anomalies he needed. So he made a belated sign of the cross and went in.
As he approached what looked like a sacrificial altar, he understood why the slaughter must have been carried out by at least two people.
The victims were to be allowed no escape.
He tried to imagine Valeria Altieri and her lover, surprised by that inhuman violence. Had she screamed, or had she held back in order not to wake her little son, who was asleep in the next room, and stop him running in to see what was happening?
At the foot of the bed, on the right, a pool of blood had formed, while to the left Marcus noted three small circular marks.
He bent down to get a better look. They formed a perfect equilateral triangle. Each side measuring roughly twenty inches.
The symbol.
He was considering the possible meanings of that sign, when, looking up for a moment, he saw something he had not noticed at first glance.
There on the carpet were the prints of small bare feet.
He imagined the three-year-old Raffaele putting his head in at the door of that room the morning after the massacre, seeing that horror and being unable to understand the meaning of it. He saw him running to the bed, dipping his feet in the pool of blood as he did so, and desperately shaking his mother, trying to wake her.Marcus could also imagine his little body on the blood-soaked sheets: after crying for hours, he must have huddled by his mother’s body and, exhausted, have fallen asleep.
He had spent two days in this apartment before his father had found him and taken him away. Two days and two very long nights, confronting alone whatever lurked in the darkness.
Children don’t need memories, they learn by forgetting.
Those forty-eight hours, on the other hand, had been sufficient to mark the existence of Raffaele Altieri for ever.
Marcus could not move. He started taking deep breaths, fearing a panic attack. Was this his talent, then? To understand the obscure messages that evil left in objects? To listen to the silent voices of the dead? To witness the spectacle of human wickedness, powerless to intervene?
Dogs are colour blind.
That was why only he had understood something the world did not know about Raffaele. That three-year-old boy was still asking to be saved.
9.04 a.m.
‘There are things you have to see with your own eyes, Ginger.’
Those were the words David always used whenever a discussion arose about the risks of his work. For Sandra, the camera was a necessary refuge, to lessen the impact of the violence she documented every day. For him, it was merely an instrument.
That distinction had occurred to her as she put together a makeshift darkroom in the bathroom of
Similar Books
