The Absolution Read online

  The Institute itself, a former monastery, was so hidden away that, if it weren’t for a discreet sign by the roadside, it would have been easy to miss the tall metal gates. On either side of the long driveway, men in brown monastic robes and women in blue habits worked the Institute’s own vines, or bustled to and fro between the sprawling buildings. But a keen eye would have noticed that it was the nuns who were doing the bustling, while many of the men had a listless, medicated air. The former were nurses, while the latter were patients. Father Uriel’s psychiatric work principally involved treating that small but notorious subset of the priesthood who had committed acts of sexual abuse. He believed some of them could be cured; perhaps more importantly, he believed that all of them could be redeemed. It was not only to avoid controversy that his hospital was so tucked away. For him, contemplation, confession and prayer were at least as beneficial as psychotherapy and medication.

  He also saw a few patients with other conditions, and for a time had worked with Daniele on developing his ability to empathise with other people.

  “I’m glad you’ve come to see me,” he said when Daniele was shown into his treatment room. “It’s been a while.”

  Daniele shrugged. “I saw no point in continuing our previous sessions.”

  “Because the therapy wasn’t working?” the psychiatrist asked. He left the briefest of pauses. “Or because it was?”

  “Because I realised that your definition of working may not be the same as mine,” Daniele answered coolly. “It’s too late for me to change who I am. But if by remembering what happened during the kidnap I can clear up some unanswered questions, that’s different.”

  Father Uriel got Daniele to lie down, then placed a pair of lightweight foam headphones over his ears and a small egg-shaped pulser in each hand.

  “When you hear a click in your left ear, or feel a pulse in your left hand, I want you to look to the left,” he instructed. “When the click and the pulse come from the right, look right. I’ll guide your eye movements to begin with, but after that, just keep them going by yourself. If at any point the process becomes too painful or traumatic, I’ll stop and take you to a safe place in your mind where no one can hurt you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now focus on the end of my pen.” Father Uriel held up a retractable ballpoint and clicked the end twice. “I want you to tense and relax each part of your body in turn, starting at the toes. Tense . . . and relax. That’s it.”

  By the time he had relaxed his entire body, Daniele was feeling mentally clear-headed and physically lethargic, his whole attention locked on the end of Father Uriel’s pen.

  “I’m going to move the pen to the right now,” Father Uriel said in a calm, low voice. “And to the left . . . Good. Now I want you to think about a sensory memory from your kidnap. Back then, at seven years old, in the room where they held you . . . It could be a sight, a sound, anything.”

  “I remember the lines between the bricks on the wall,” Daniele heard himself saying. “I remember the pattern they made. I used to count the uprights between each brick.”

  “How many uprights were there?” Father Uriel continued to move the pen from side to side. In his palms Daniele felt the small, rhythmic pulse of the clickers, the sound swinging from one ear to the other, as steady as a metronome.

  “Four hundred and seventeen.”

  “Good. What can you hear, when you’re in that room?”

  “Goats. There are goats outside. Sometimes I smell them too. We’re in the countryside, somewhere remote.”

  “Who’s keeping you here?”

  “There are three whose names I know. Claudio, Paolo and Maria. Claudio is meant to be in charge but the other two discuss everything with him before they let him make the decisions.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “A week. When they brought me here they said it wouldn’t take this long. All my parents have to do is send the money and they’ll let me go. Maria says it can’t be much longer now. She’s been saying that for days.”

  Father Uriel lowered his pen. But Daniele’s eyes still swung from left to right and back again.

  “Who do you like most out of the kidnappers? Who do you trust?”

  “Claudio seems all right. Paolo I’m not sure. Maria’s nice. Sometimes she comes and sits with me.”

  “What do you talk about?”

  “About what they believe. What they’re fighting for. They’re against rich people like my father. They want a society where everyone’s the same. Where no one can be better than someone else because of what family they come from.”

  “I’m going to take you forward a week, Daniele. What’s happening now?”

  “They’re arguing.”

  “What about?”

  “Why my parents still haven’t paid. Claudio’s angry. He shouts at me. ‘What kind of brat are you? Why don’t they want you back?’” Daniele gulped. “He . . . he . . . he . . . he . . .”

  “It’s all right, Daniele. You don’t like being shouted at, I understand that. What else does Claudio say?”

  “He says they’re going to kill me,” Daniele shouted. He started, and dropped the clickers. His back arched. Reaching up, he tore off the headphones in a panic.

  “You’re in a safe place now,” Father Uriel said, careful to ensure that his own voice held no echo of the stress in Daniele’s. “A calm, quiet place where they can’t hurt you.”

  He spent five more minutes calming Daniele before bringing him out of the trance.

  “It didn’t work,” Daniele said flatly, sitting up.

  “On the contrary,” Father Uriel said. “It’s working extremely well, for a first session. You have unreasonably high expectations, that’s all.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  KAT STEPPED OFF the Alitalia flight to Palermo to be greeted by the unmistakable smell of Sicily. The last time she’d been here, years ago, it was springtime and the air had been thick with la zagara, the scent of orange and almond blossom. Today, the sun was so fierce that the runway seemed blasted a dazzling white, and heat-haze made the distant mountains shimmer and melt; but the scent was no less heady: a pungent mixture of jasmine, citrus, aeroplane fumes and the spicy, African smell of carob trees.

  A sovrintendente from the local Polizia was waiting for her in the terminal building. “Hi. I’m Turi Russo,” he said, saluting laconically.

  Only when they were in his car and driving towards the city did he raise the reason behind her visit.

  “Frankly, I don’t know why the Carabinieri are interested in this one.” A motorist pulled out in front of him without warning; Russo gestured angrily and leant on his horn, but made no attempt to pull him over. “Let alone AISI. It’s a hate crime, pure and simple. We had it wrapped up within a day.”

  “Wrapped up? You mean you arrested someone?”

  “No,” Russo admitted. “I mean we got the investigation finished and the paperwork sorted. But the signs could hardly have been clearer. The victim was Muslim. When we found him, his carotid artery had been severed just below the windpipe. The jugular veins to the heart were also cut, on both sides.” He glanced at her to see if she understood.

  “So?”

  “That’s the method halal butchers use to kill an animal,” he said bluntly. “Ergo, hate crime. It’s hardly surprising. Palermo’s a racial powder-keg right now. We’ve got an official unemployment rate of twenty-five per cent, but the real figure is much higher. Meanwhile we’re straining at the seams with Arabs, Albanians, gypsies . . . And that’s before you even get to the mulignane.”

  “The what?”

  He laughed. “Don’t you have that word up north? Aubergines. It’s what we call the Africans. Senegal, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Congo, Somalia, Liberia . . . We don’t need to read the newspapers here. We can tell where the civil wars are just by the colour of the clandestini climbing off the boats. We’re meant to stop them coming in, but until the politicians decide to get serio
us, how are we meant to do that?”

  Irritating though Russo’s racism was, in truth his opinions weren’t much different from those Kat sometimes overheard in the Carabinieri bar at Campo San Zaccaria. “Was anything stolen?”

  “Not that we could tell.”

  “What about computers?”

  Russo looked sideways at her. “That’s AISI’s interest, I take it?”

  “We picked his name up in the course of another investigation,” she said blandly. “You know how it is. Every lead has to be checked.”

  In fact, the murder of the teacher, Jabbar Riaz Karimi, was still the only lead AISI had. They’d discovered that shortly before his death he’d been searching online for any information linking the Fréjus road tunnel disaster to jihadists. When that hadn’t turned up much, he’d tried adding a name – Hafeez Bousaid – and the words “identity theft”.

  Hafeez Bousaid, they quickly established, was indeed the name from a stolen passport. Meanwhile, the agencies investigating the Fréjus road tunnel disaster were, Grimaldo had told Kat, starting to entertain the idea that it could have been some kind of cyber attack.

  None of this, though, was to be shared with Russo unless it was absolutely essential. The Italian police had a long history of ending up on the wrong side of investigations: Grimaldo was determined to limit knowledge of this one to as few people as possible.

  “I’ll need all the paperwork and the crime-scene photographs,” she said now to Russo. “And I’d like to examine the crime scene myself.”

  “No problem. The files are in the boot, so we’ll head straight there.”

  Despite his words, she suspected he made a slight detour in order to take her through the very centre of Palermo, “so you can see what it’s really like down here”. He was quite right: she was taken aback. In Venice, as in most Italian cities, the centro storico was the cultural heart of the city, the focus of its nightlife and its smartest shops. In Palermo, the centre was a sprawling, crumbling medina, an African souk housed in semi-derelict palazzi, where the throb of African music and rows of makeshift stalls had ousted any semblance of Italy.

  “I couldn’t stop here,” Russo said as he drove slowly down the street. “Usually we come in a convoy of three vehicles.” He gestured into an alleyway. “There’s probably only a few hundred clandestini living here permanently. The rest stay just as long as it takes to get a permesso di soggiorno, then they move on.”

  She gave him a sideways glance. “How do they get hold of the residence permits?”

  He shrugged. “They all want to go north, where the money is. We don’t encourage them to stay here, put it that way. If that means turning a blind eye to officials selling permits, so be it.”

  “Do they give you much trouble?”

  Russo laughed. “Not exactly . . . These Africans, they describe this area as tranquillo. Know why?”

  “No.” It certainly didn’t sound quiet to her.

  “Because nobody bothers them. Nobody asks for their papers, nobody from the electricity company looks too closely at where their power comes from, nobody chases them when they steal a purse or lift a tourist’s phone. So while it might be a little noisy at three o’clock in the morning, in all the ways that matter to them, it’s quiet.” He hooted his horn to clear a group of dark-skinned young men out of the way. They scattered languidly, eyeballing him. “We’ve got a saying down here, ‘Fatti i cazzi tuoi’ – you know it?”

  “I know it,” she said. “‘Take care of your own dick.’”

  “Even when one of their own is murdered, don’t expect anyone to come forward and tell the Polizia they’ve seen something. They’re all too busy taking care of their own dicks.”

  He drove her across town to an area he referred to as “Zen”. She thought he was being sarcastic, until she saw the signs to “Zona Espansione Nord”. It was less claustrophobic than the centre, but bleaker. High-rise apartment blocks, covered in graffiti, were surrounded by waste ground and stinking piles of refuse.

  “Believe it or not, this is a relatively good area if you’re an immigrant,” Russo said as he got out of the car and began picking his way through the litter. “To be fair, the rubbish strike isn’t their fault. That’s the council. Turns out there are more people in head office paid to supervise the rubbish collectors than there are actual rubbish collectors. Someone tried to do something about it, and they all promptly went on strike. So there you are – you can either have clean hands or clean streets. Not both.”

  Up on the fifth floor of one of the high-rises – Russo didn’t even bother to see if the lift was working – they found a door covered in police tape. “The door’s still here, anyway,” he said cheerfully as he produced the key.

  Inside, she was surprised to discover a pleasant if run-down apartment – the view alone, over the sea to the north, would have made up for the lack of amenities. There was a stack of microfibre overalls and gloves in the hallway, along with a police logbook. Kat suited up while Russo signed them both in. She noticed he didn’t put on overalls himself.

  “That’s where the body was found.” He pointed towards the balcony. “When we checked with the people downstairs, blood was running down the outside wall into their kitchen. But they still claimed not to have seen or heard anything.”

  She went through the photographs in the file. It was as he’d described, although she was struck by the way the bloodstains seemed to indicate that the body had been moved onto the balcony while the victim was still bleeding out.

  She went and stood on the spot where the body had lain, looking out over the sea. She was in shadow now. So Jabbar Riaz Karimi had died facing south-east, she thought.

  Getting out her phone, she brought up Google Maps.

  “He was facing Mecca as he died,” she said, showing him. “The killer positioned him that way. Not just the general direction, either: the exact orientation. Still think it was a hate crime?”

  He shrugged. “OK, so maybe it was another Muslim. A pious one with a grudge. It’s not going to make any difference. Whoever did it wore gloves and cleaned up anything that might incriminate him. Cheeky bastard even looked it up on the internet.”

  “What do you mean?” she said, puzzled.

  “When our scene-of-crime people got here, they found the victim’s own tablet computer open on a page about how to clean up crime scenes.”

  “He didn’t wear gloves,” she said slowly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look.” She got out her phone again. “When I used this just now to look up which way Mecca was, I had to take my glove off – it doesn’t work with the touch screen. At some point he must have taken his gloves off to use the tablet. He may well have wiped it afterwards, but even so there could still be a partial or a smudged print.”

  “Very well,” Russo said grudgingly. “I’ll get the specialists to dust the tablet again.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll take it with me when I go back to Venice. The fewer people touch it, the better. And now I think I’d better see the technical college.”

  The college was little more than half a dozen rooms in a run-down municipal building. The students were mostly non-Italian: Chinese, Middle Eastern, a smattering of Africans.

  Kat spoke to one of Jabbar Karimi’s students, who confirmed the impression she’d already formed: the teacher was a mild, pious man, good at his job. He even helped some of the students get employment after the course was over, through his brother, who worked in IT recruitment.

  A technician was working on the computers in Karimi’s classroom. When she asked what he was doing, he told her that one of the students had downloaded a piece of freeware called Boot and Nuke. It had completely erased the hard drive of every single machine on their network.

  Kat could feel the trail running cold. The killer had slipped into this place, then slipped away again, leaving not a single lead. That was unusual: most people left something. This man was either very lucky or very smart.

>   She turned to Russo. “Has there been any strange activity around here recently, anything that could be connected to computer hacking?”

  “No,” he said immediately. Then, “Well . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s probably nothing, but . . . last week there was a businessman in Palermo who almost crashed his BMW. He had some crazy story about the car’s on-board computer suddenly malfunctioning, switching the engine off and locking the steering when he was doing sixty kilometres an hour.”

  Her interest quickened. “Was the car connected to the internet?”

  “How did you know that? Apparently it was one of the newer models that has a built-in mobile broadband uplink. Anyway, the officers put it down as an ingenious story to avoid being charged with careless driving and referred the case to the prosecutors. I only heard about it because someone was joking about it in the canteen.”

  Just like Fréjus, she thought. He’s trying things out on a small scale, getting the technology just right. “Let me know if anything else in that line comes up, will you? And I’d better talk to the dead man’s brother, the one who works in recruitment.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  “LIVIA? LIVIA BOCCARDO?”

  As the teenagers streamed out of the classroom, chattering amongst themselves, the teacher looked up. “Yes?” Then, a moment later, “Minchia! Holly Boland? I don’t believe it!”

  “It’s really me,” Holly assured her, as amused by the fact that her childhood friend was a teacher as by the profanity she’d just uttered in front of her students. “Do you have ten minutes? We could grab a coffee.”

  Livia consulted her watch. “I have to go and supervise a conversation class in a minute. And the coffee here’s undrinkable. But we could sit outside.”

  “Why are the kids in school?” Holly asked.

  “Oh, it’s a summer school. The local council’s almost bankrupt, so they rent the school buildings out during the holidays. Most of the teachers are happy to earn a little extra. Besides, these foreign kids are generally well behaved. They don’t have the drugs problems our local kids do.”