Spider - Michael Morley [81]
Ludmila Zagalsky doesn’t believe in God. She’s never been in a church or, for that matter, anywhere holy in her entire twenty-five years. Her mother didn’t even bother to have her birth registered, let alone have her baptized. But this very second she is praying. She is telling the God of her own special Darkness, whatever religion he is, that she is sorry for everything bad that she has ever done in her stinking, miserable, worthless life. She’s telling him that she forgives her stepfather for all those things that he did to her; that she hopes he’s fine and happy and healthy and that she didn’t mean it when she told him that she wanted him to rot in hell while devil dogs chewed his bollocks off. She’s asking for forgiveness for blaming her parents for her anger and for hating her mother for the beatings that she got. And she’s confessing to all the sins she’s committed and all the sinful thoughts she’s ever had. And in return, she’s asking God for only one thing.
Not to save her, but just to let her die quickly.
51
Rome
Roberto returned to the Incident Room with four coffees and a mouthful of bad news.
He put the tray of drinks down on a table and politely waited until a conversation between Jack and Benito finished.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘but while I was making coffees, I got a call from my contact in Milano.’
‘About the courier?’ asked Orsetta.
‘Yes,’ confirmed Roberto. ‘They are now sure there is no such courier company as Volante Milano. It does not exist.’
Jack lifted a coffee from the tray and accepted he was hooked again on caffeine. ‘So how did BRK get the package here, if not through a courier?’
Orsetta was thinking the unthinkable. ‘In person? You think he delivered it in person?’
Benito nodded. ‘Something like that.’
‘Please,’ interrupted Roberto. ‘My contact had an idea what might have happened. Right now, there are many students looking to earn some extra money. It seems in Milano they stand as advertisements outside airports and railway stations, offering to do anything.’
‘Anything? What do you mean?’ asked Orsetta.
‘I am sorry, maybe I don’t explain properly,’ said Roberto. ‘They hold up the card, saying they will carry things anywhere for you. They stand near the parcel offices and offer to take things anywhere on a train, even on planes. The courier companies they do not like this, they find this very bad.’
‘I bet they do,’ said Jack. ‘So what you’re saying is that BRK may have given the package to a student at the railway station, and had it delivered here?’
‘Si, yes, that is what I am trying to say,’ said Roberto, relieved finally to be understood.
‘He’s taking a bit of a risk, isn’t he?’ said Orsetta. ‘I wouldn’t trust a student to deliver something valuable for me.’
‘How do these student couriers get paid?’ asked Benito.
‘It is cash, I think,’ said Roberto.
Benito played with his goatee beard, thinking hard. ‘BRK will have bought a return ticket for the courier, maybe rail, maybe air. He’ll have paid cash, so we’ll have problems tracing it. He may have given the courier some money upfront and then promised to pay him much more when he returned.’
‘Doesn’t work for me,’ said Jack.
Orsetta was growing frustrated. She ran her fingers through her hair. ‘This is just messing up my mind.’
‘That’s it!’Jack snapped his fingers. ‘That’s exactly what he’s trying to do. Confuse us. Have us chasing shadows. There is no Volante Milano. Yet he went to enormous trouble to make it look as though he was there in Milan and used the company. He did this to make us think he had been there so that we would divert our resources to searching in Milan.’
‘So he was never in Milan?’ asked Orsetta, still struggling to make complete sense of it all.
‘No, not at all,’ explained Jack. ‘I think you’ll find that the Volante courier label was made on his own computer, and