The Past is a Foreign Country by Gianrico Carofiglio Page A

– and locked herself in the servants’ bathroom with a pillow and a small .22 calibre pistol which his father had given her as a present the year before.
    No one had heard the gunshot. It was muffled by the pillow and dispersed through the dark corridors of that gloomy, overlarge apartment.
    She had celebrated her thirtieth birthday that evening.
    She would be thirty forever.
     
    Lieutenant Giorgio Chiti often thought he would go mad, too. Just like his mother. She had suffered from nerves, his father had told him many years later, in that icy, distant tone of his, a tone devoid of compassion or regret, devoid of anything.
    Suffering from nerves meant mad.
    And he was a lot like his mother. The same features, the same complexion. There was something slightly feminine in his face, just as there was something slightly masculine in hers as itappeared on those few blurred photographs and in his ever more faded memories.
    He was afraid of going mad.
    There were even moments when he was sure he would go mad. Just like his mother. He would lose control over his thoughts and actions, just as she had done. Sometimes this idea – madness as an inescapable destiny – became an obsession, an obsession he found hard to bear.
    It was at such moments that he would start to draw.
    Drawing and painting – along with playing the piano – were the things his mother had done to fill the long, empty days, in those lodgings tucked away behind the barracks. Lodgings that were always too clean, with the same shiny floors, the same smell of wax, all of them silent, with no voices to warm them.
    Pitiless places.
    Giorgio took after his mother in this, too. Ever since he was a little boy, he’d had the ability to copy really difficult drawings, and to invent animals that were fantastic and yet incredibly realistic. Half cat and half dove, for example, or half dog and half swallow, or half dragon and half man. What he liked most of all, though, was drawing faces. He loved doing portraits from memory. He would see a face, imprint it on his mind and later, sometimes hours or even days later, reconstruct it on paper. That more than anything else – that ability to draw people’s faces from memory – had stayed with him as he grew up. They were always excellent likenesses, and yet subtly different, as if he had somehow grafted his own fears and anxieties onto other people’s faces.
    Faces. Mad faces. Unhappy faces. Frozen faces, distant and stand-offish like his father’s. Cruel faces.
    Remote faces, full of melancholy and regret, staring into the distance.

9
    THE RESULTS OF their trawl through the records had been disappointing . There were about thirty men whose records were compatible with the details of the assaults they were investigating. Some were rapists , some Peeping Toms, some had molested women in parks. They had checked them all, one by one.
    Some were in prison at the time of the assaults, others had cast-iron alibis. Some were crippled or old, physically incapable of committing that kind of assault.
    They had ended up with three men who didn’t have alibis and whose appearance didn’t clash with the shreds of physical description provided by the victims.
    They had obtained warrants and had searched the men’s homes. They had no real idea what they were looking for. Just something, anything, that they could link to the case. Even if it was just a newspaper cutting about the assaults. It didn’t have to be a clue, just something to give the investigation the impetus it badly needed.
    They had found nothing, apart from piles of porn magazines and other obscene material.
    For a month, they had gone back again and again to the scenes of the assaults, looking for possible witnesses, anyone who had seen anything. Not necessarily the act itself, but a suspicious person hanging around earlier, for example, or someone who’d been past there again a little later, or on the following days.
    Chiti had read that people like that