The Lost Girls of Rome by Donato Carrisi Page A

He did not remember what past experience that memory came from, but he knew that was how it was.
    He lifted himself into a sitting position and tried to put his thoughts back into some kind of order. He had let the young man escape when he should have found a way to detain him. He tried to be lenient with himself, telling himself he wouldn’t have been able to make him see reason anyway. And he had achieved one result, at least.
    In the fight, he had got hold of the letter.
    He groped on the floor for the torch, which had slipped from his hand earlier. He found it, gave it a couple of knocks to switch it on and aimed it at the envelope.
    There was no sender indicated, but it was addressed to someone called Raffaele Altieri. The date on the postmark was three days earl ier. Inside was a sheet of paper containing only the address of Lara’s apartment in the Via dei Coronari. But what struck him was the symbol that seemed to serve as a signature.
    Three small red dots forming a triangle.
    6 a.m.
    She hadn’t slept. After Schalber’s phone call, she had tossed and turned in bed for hours. Finally the alarm clock had told her that it was five o’clock and Sandra had got up.
    She got ready in a hurry and called a taxi to take her to Headquarters: she didn’t want any of her colleagues to spot her car. They certainly wouldn’t have asked for an explanation, but for some time now she had been irritated by the way they looked at her. The widow. Was that what they called her? It was certainly the way they thought of her. Their compassion hit her like a nasty slap whenever they passed her. The worst of it was that some of them felt obliged to say something. She’d built up quite a collection of platitudes. The most popular was: ‘Be brave, David would have wanted you to be strong.’ She would have liked to record all of these phrases so that she could then demonstrate to the world that if there is anything worse than indifference to other people’s grief it’s the trite way most of us try to deal with it.
    But maybe that was just her being over-sensitive. All the same, she wanted to get to the storeroom a fraction before the night shift ended.
    It took her twenty minutes to reach her destination. En route, she dropped into the canteen for a takeaway croissant and cappuccino.
    Her colleague was getting ready to leave. ‘Hello, Vega,’ he said, seeing her come in. ‘What are you doing here at this hour?’
    Sandra put on her sweetest smile. ‘I brought you breakfast.’
    His eyes lit up. ‘You’re a friend. It’s been a busy night: they arrested a gang of Colombians who were dealing outside the Lambrate station.’
    Sandra didn’t want to get involved in a pointless conversation, so she came straight to the point. ‘I’d like to pick up the bags I left here five months ago.’
    Her colleague looked at her in surprise, but didn’t hesitate. ‘I’ll fetch them.’
    He disappeared into the depths of the storeroom. Sandra heard him muttering to himself as he searched. She was impatient, but tried to control herself. She had been extremely irritable lately. Her sister said that she was going through one of the four phases that follow the death of a loved one. She had seen that in a book, though she couldn’t remember the sequence, which meant she couldn’t tell Sandra which phase she was in now and if she’d soon have got through all of them. Sandra doubted she would, but she had let her talk. The same went for the rest of the family, none of whom really wanted to deal with what had happened to her. Not out of insensitivity, but because there wasn’t really any advice you could give a twenty-nine-year-old widow. So they simply told her things they had read in magazines or cited the experience of a distant acquaintance. This was sufficient for them to feel they were doing the right thing, and that was fine with Sandra.
    After five minutes, her colleague returned with David’s two large bags.
    He was carrying them by