The Memory Key: A Commissario Alec Blume Novel Read online

  To my brother, Cormac.

  Thank you for everything you have done.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Appendix

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Also available by Conor Fitzgerald

  Chapter 1

  Central Italy, 1980

  The unmarried woman in the thin blue dress turned to the old man on the broken bench and said, ‘I think the clock has stopped.’

  The old man sighed and glanced up at the wall. As he did so, the big hand dropped down a notch from one to two minutes past the hour, and the woman blushed and apologized.

  A philosophy student with cutaway jeans, who had turned his oversized backpack into a divan and was reclining luxuriously on it, relit his self-rolled cigarette, more paper than tobacco, and laughed at the woman’s embarrassment.

  ‘They should have a second hand on it,’ said the man in brown corduroys and orange shirt who was sitting opposite. She suspected him of trying first to look up her dress, then to look through it. Certainly, when she had crossed her legs a few minutes earlier, watching him from the corner of her eye, his head had swivelled in her direction and his eyes flickered over her thighs, which she didn’t mind too much, because he had a nice and easily embarrassed face. He circled his finger to represent the sweep of a second hand moving across the clock face. ‘That way you could at least tell if the clock was working, but time always slows down when . . . oops.’

  He pulled in his legs as a boy went racing fiercely by, determined to win a race against his baby sister to whom he had given a two-step head start, one step for every year. The boy slapped the wall triumphantly as he arrived, which turned out to be the funniest thing his sister had ever seen. Her squeals then turned out to be the funniest thing he had ever heard. They were soon on the floor, egging each other on, until, finally, the mother stood up, took them by the hand and led them back to their seats against the wall.

  ‘They should just rename the 10:05 the 10:20,’ said an elderly woman pretending to address her very old husband but clearly aiming her comments at the entire waiting room. ‘Then they could stop pretending to apologize. It’s the same every Saturday.’

  A girl with dark hair and a serious expression glanced up from her book and looked quickly around the crowded room. A woman with golden hair cascading in ringlets down her left shoulder, whose arrival had drawn the frank attention of the man in corduroys and furtive glances from almost everyone else, set a hefty suitcase down on the floor, then immediately picked it up again, as if testing its weight.

  Two young women, one in jeans, the other in a multicoloured flared skirt, both unkempt and sporting Tolfa bags, bent their heads together and looked for a moment like they might actually kiss.

  A robust man in a navy jacket and red shirt, with a neat beard, leaning against the wall crossed his arms and surveyed the people present with an appraising frown, as if they were unwanted guests in his living room, and shook his head in amazement at a private thought. A grandmother opened her large handbag and took out a cheap packet of biscuits and handed them to her grandson, who, mortified, grabbed them out of her hand and retreated to the corner of the waiting room before opening the crinkly plastic and beginning to nibble surreptitiously. A deeply tanned man in a beige safari suit with a powder-blue shirt kicked impatiently at his suitcase and puffed out his cheeks. A baby fell asleep, its face nestled into its father’s neck, just below the bristle line. The father tried to pass the drooped bundle to his wife, who shook her head firmly, and warded him off with her hands. ‘I have had enough,’ she was saying.

  An InterRailing English couple, who had been in Venice for three nights and had decided there that they would get married before finishing their studies, were now more anxious to get back to Bristol than to visit Rome. They came in, looked around, saw there were no free benches, and left, he saying something disparaging about the Italian way of life, she murmuring something more conciliatory. A minute later, the girl was sitting on the outside ledge of the window, her back against the glass. As she leaned down to say something to her grumpy fiancé, the lumbar curve of her spine was visible in bumpy relief beneath her blouse, part of which had ridden up her back a little, exposing a small section of smooth skin.

  The moustachioed stationmaster walked by the open doorway, paused, slapped his thigh with a rolled-up copy of Gazzetta dello Sport, and started heading back the way he had come, but was waylaid by a Milanese businessman angered both by the delay and by three days in the company of the smug communists of this flat and red-stone city.

  A mouse-grey suitcase, a plastic shopping bag, and a cheap tartan travel bag sat on a gunmetal table set in an alcove that might once have served as a ticket desk. The blonde woman lifted the tartan case, and looked around to see who claimed it. The girl with the book glanced up and gave a friendly nod of permission. The blonde woman pushed the tartan case back a bit, and heaved her own on to the counter, curtly refusing an offer of help from the bearded man. She pushed her suitcase towards the wall, and, in what seemed like a courteous gesture, pulled the few other pieces of luggage to the front of the counter, from where they could be more easily retrieved.

  The clock ticked off another minute. The boy in the corner finished his biscuits, a non-stopping train on the far track hooted twice, then went hurtling by causing the glass panes to rattle. It clattered noisily over some points, then continued rhythmically on its way, its wheels beating out the sound of tsk-tsk, ciao-ciao on the jointed tracks, as if to mock the people it was leaving behind. As the train bid its last faint ciao-ciao, Adriano Celentano’s voice could be heard singing ‘Il Tempo Se Ne Va’ from someone’s transistor. A short, thick-lipped man stood up and in a grave Sardinian accent told the man holding the baby that he might take his seat, and then marched off quickly to avoid the embarrassment of being thanked. The running boy crashed into the blonde woman’s elegant leg. Instead of looking bashful, he used her thigh as pivot, swung behind her, and reversed direction to run straight back to his mother, who threw over an apologetic glance but received nothing in return from the woman’s grey-blue eyes.

  The station speakers announced the imminent arrival of the train from Milan to Rome, and the people in the waiting room shifted, and raised the murmurs of conversation into
a hubbub of preparations. The young woman closed her book, Abba Abba was its title; the mother gathered her unruly children. The student got off his backpack and set it upright, flexing his shoulder muscles in preparation for lifting it with a single manly jerk for the benefit of the two women on the far side of the room, who had yet to see him. The man with the corduroy trousers shook his head almost imperceptibly as the woman with the angelic hair, too young and way, way out of his league, walked out of the door. What must it be like to have a woman like that? What must it be like to be a woman like that?

  The blonde woman’s hurried departure registered on the minds of several people who assumed illogically that the train must have arrived already, without further announcement. Their preparations became more urgent and a sense of movement spread through the warm waiting room.

  The woman in the thin dress stood up and smoothed the paisley-patterned acrylic above her knees. She glanced over at her admirer, who smiled at her. He was, like her, in his early thirties. ‘May as well stay in here,’ she ventured. ‘There’s hardly room to move on the platform. Saturday’s always so busy.’

  ‘Are you catching the Rome train?’

  ‘Yes. You?’

  ‘Yes, I live there.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You don’t then?’

  ‘No actually, I do, or I will . . . I have a new job.’

  ‘Really? Great! What sort of . . .’

  The old woman called her grandson over and ordered him not to leave yet and not to get lost. The grandson therefore returned to where he had been.

  ‘We apologize for the delay . . . please stand back from the yellow line as the train approaches.’

  ‘Never find a seat . . . unless they’ve added a carriage. Sometimes they do that.’

  ‘I could have sworn it was in this pocket, I . . .’

  ‘Careful, love.’

  ‘Just like you.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see their faces.’

  ‘Don’t even think of eating that now.’

  ‘Hold my hand.’

  ‘. . . a great day.’

  The blonde woman, whose name was Stefania Manfellotto, walked across the forecourt in front of the station towards a Fiat Ritmo driven by Adriano Pazienza, the man she would later marry in prison.

  ‘All set?’ he said as she ducked in and sat beside him in the front seat.

  ‘Get me out of here.’

  Adriano turned on the engine and drove away from the train station. As he reached the intersection, he glanced at his watch. ‘Five minutes.’

  ‘If it works,’ said Stefania.

  Adriano patted her knee, and ran his hand upwards towards the inside of her thigh, then took it away to change gear. ‘It’ll work.’

  The suitcase that she had positioned beneath a supporting wall, contained 18 kilos of Compound B, an explosive usually found in landmines, mixed with 5 kilos of nitroglycerine. The timed detonator activated at twenty-five minutes past the hour.

  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.