15

SCAMARCIO HAD DECIDED TO take the 6.00 am train to Genoa because the connections to Arquata Scrivia were good, and a quick glance at the map had told him that Anita Meinero lived just a few minutes’ walk from the station. At least the journey would give him the chance to study his notes, and perhaps make a few calls. In light of the late conversation with Meinero’s sister, he’d delegated the visit to Borghese’s last Facebook friend to Sartori, filling him in on the possible love triangle. He’d have preferred to have conducted the interview himself, but he knew he had to start using Sartori, and not just for his own selfish ends. If the man was going to develop into a good detective, he had to be given the chance to grow.

Amidst his notes, Scamarcio returned to the question marks he’d scored boxes around. Again, he wondered why, if Amato had called to advise her that the session was over at 3.20 pm, Mrs Borghese had arrived home so much later. Perhaps her father had simply been too ill to leave, but hadn’t one of the priests said she’d been heading back when they called? Had she hit traffic? Scamarcio needed to speak with her again, lay these small doubts to rest.

He glanced up from his papers. They’d finally left the outskirts of Genoa and were passing what looked like a refinery on their left. Winking in the sun were large circular containers with metal tubes running in every direction. A few brightly coloured villas stood lonely on the brows of small hills, empty rolling green all around. He noted that it was a different green here, up north. It was denser and deeper — like the Kodachrome green of a Super 8 film. As he rested his head against the window, the backdrop morphed into rugged cliffs, black and unforgiving. Scamarcio noticed pile after colourful pile of storage containers, many bearing the names ‘Maersk’, ‘Hanjin’, or ‘MSC’. After a few minutes, they passed a car park full of truck cabs, and he guessed that Arquata Scrivia served as a transportation hub between Genoa and the north.

The train slowly rolled into the station, and Scamarcio took in the drab apartment blocks and ragged pylons. The place could not be described as beautiful.

He pulled out the map he’d printed from his computer and started the walk from the station. There was a small fountain and a few benches across the road from where the cars pulled up, and he noticed three or four black men sitting around, apparently idle and bored. They were smartly dressed in clean denim and fashionable trainers, but a few locals were standing some distance away, eyeing them with concern.

This is it, a nutshell tableau of Italy’s immigrant issue, reflected Scamarcio. Boatloads of migrants made the harrowing crossing from Libya, saw their friends, family, babies drown — only to end up somewhere like Arquata Scrivia, where the local population had never seen a black man, and where the chances of finding a job were non-existent. For the life of him, Scamarcio couldn’t understand how the Italian government expected to create a living, a future for these people, if they had nothing to offer them. It was hard enough for the average Italian to find work; there was no slack in the system. Scamarcio had sympathy and compassion for these migrants — everyone deserved the right to a decent life — but he also knew that Italy was the very last place these poor souls would find it. The EU seemed happy to dump the problem firmly in Italy’s backyard. It was just Italy’s hard luck that the peninsula lay thirty miles from Africa and was perceived as the gateway to paradise.

As he walked further up a main road lined with tiled apartment blocks and bars with blacked-out windows, Scamarcio spied another trio of Africans in neon-yellow safety jackets. They were pushing a cleaning cart and seemed to be sweeping the street. At least the local council had found something for these men to do. Maybe he was wrong: maybe the guys on the benches would find work; maybe it would be better than what they’d left behind. But, somehow, he doubted it. Somehow, he’d sensed their disappointment as he’d passed.

He swung a left and then a right and took a road that led to the foot of a steep hill covered in pine trees. On the right were a series of attractive villas, small palms in their gardens. He stopped outside the first of these, checked the address on his piece of paper, and rang the bell. A muffled voice crackled over the intercom.

Scamarcio introduced himself and pushed open the gate at the sound of the buzzer. Anita Meinero was standing in the doorway to her home, a little girl clutching her knee.

Scamarcio extended a hand, and Meinero took it. She was good looking, with strong cheek bones like her brother, but unlike him, she had blonde hair and blue eyes.

‘Do you have any news?’ she asked, her heartbroken eyes searching his.

‘Not yet, but we’re pursuing several theories.’

She seemed to remember her manners. ‘I’m sorry, please come in. It’s cold.’

She led Scamarcio into a long hallway with a light wood floor. The hallway opened onto a modest-sized living room with a large window that looked onto the front garden. The furniture was dark and solid and didn’t match the pale floor.

‘Please sit down, Detective. You must be tired after the journey.’

The little girl was eyeing Scamarcio with a mixture of fear and curiosity. Anita Meinero turned on the TV and said, ‘Oh look, it’s Masha and the Bear.’

The child tottered over to the TV and sat down on the carpet, quickly engrossed.

‘I don’t like to let her watch too much TV, but it’s the only way we’ll be able to talk,’ she said. ‘Can I offer you a coffee?’

Her eyes were red-rimmed and her hands were shaking slightly. Scamarcio didn’t want to cause her any extra stress.

‘No thanks, I’m fine. I’ve just had one. At the station.’

He took a seat on a wide-patterned sofa, then stood up again immediately and removed a large piece of Lego that had been lying beneath him.

‘Sorry,’ said Anita Meinero, her voice fragile. ‘However much I try to keep things tidy, I can never keep up.’

‘I’m about to have a child myself,’ said Scamarcio, not quite sure why he’d brought it up.

‘Your first?’ She also seemed a bit surprised.

‘Yes, I’m quite nervous, actually.’

‘I think that’s normal.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Scamarcio, ‘I didn’t come here to talk about me. Would you like me to tell you the circumstances in which we found Alberto, or would you prefer I didn’t? It’s up to you.’

Anita Meinero nodded wordlessly, thinking. Eventually, she said, ‘Tell me.’

As Scamarcio started to speak, she closed her eyes. He talked her through the details of the scene in the hotel room, and then explained Giangrande’s findings and theory.

‘What is the drug they found in his body normally used for?’ Anita Meinero asked, looking up. Scamarcio had hoped he wouldn’t have to mention it.

‘Erectile dysfunction.’

She closed her eyes again.

Scamarcio sighed. ‘Anita, it would really help if you could tell me a bit about your brother. I’ve spoken to his colleagues at the Vatican, but none of them knew him like you did. If he had a secret or a problem, I figure it would have been you he confided in. Am I right to think that?’

She nodded and wiped a tear from her eye.

‘So, what I want to know, Anita — what I need to know — is whether something had changed in his life of late, or whether he had changed.’ She kept nodding, and Scamarcio felt a small spark of hope.

‘He called me,’ she said, her voice starting to break. She glanced at her daughter and swallowed, trying not to cry. ‘It was before I went on holiday, so that would be about ten days ago now.’

‘Was it a routine call?’

‘No, he was worried about something.’

‘What did he say?’

She sniffed and brought a hand to her mouth. ‘He was concerned about his boss, the cardinal.’

‘Cardinal Amato?’

‘Yes, the one who does the exorcisms.’

‘What was the problem with Amato?’

‘They were treating this young lad, in Parioli, I think, or a nice suburb like that, and they’d been treating him for quite some time …’

Scamarcio’s heart was starting to race. ‘Anita, have you seen the news since you’ve been back?’

‘No, I haven’t really had a chance. I got your message, and then, well, my world came crashing down. Why?’

‘Never mind for now. So, this lad in Parioli?’

‘Well, Alberto told me he thought that the cardinal was obsessed with him. He said the situation wasn’t healthy — it was making my brother uncomfortable.’

‘Obsessed in what way?’

‘I’m not sure it was sexual — it might have been, but Alberto didn’t spell that out, as such. He just said that the cardinal gave this boy far more time than the others … that he was always calling him on his mobile, that he seemed to care about him more than the rest, that he was always asking about him.’

Scamarcio said nothing. His felt a buzzing between his shoulder blades.

‘I told my brother to talk to someone — one of his superiors in the church — let them know that he was worried.’

‘And what did Alberto say?’

‘He said, no way, he couldn’t do that, it would be career suicide.’ She fell silent for a moment and appeared to be thinking something through. ‘I was worried about him after that call. He’d seemed so preoccupied and worked up. I actually tried to ring him back the next day, before I went away, but I couldn’t get hold of him.’

Scamarcio sat back slightly on the couch. The sister’s testimony dragged Amato back into the frame and threw him right down in the middle of the picture. But there was also something subtler here, something that had repercussions on a different level, and Scamarcio made himself focus. The deeper question was, why had Alberto been so troubled by the cardinal’s ‘obsession’ — troubled enough to mention it to his sister? As his friend had said, Alberto had a good heart. Maybe his morality meant that he was struggling to accept the cardinal’s behaviour. But then, why had none of the other priests raised this supposed obsession with Scamarcio? Were they all just trying to avoid career suicide? Was it really just a case of uniform self-interest? As much as he tried, Scamarcio couldn’t simply write it off as that. Sure, it had seemed as if they were all keeping to a script, but they had also seemed genuine in their ways. There had to be something significant to the fact that Alberto was worried about this so called ‘obsession’ and that the others were not. Now, Scamarcio just needed to work out what that was.