The Sandal

The phones all buzzed at once, a little after one in the afternoon on Thursday 19 February. The appuntato's, as he ate a sandwich at the front-desk screen; the brigadiere's, as he filled in a form for a lost driving licence; and Teresa Malnati's, lying face down on a pile of statements. Three short buzzes, the same alert, the same second.

“Chiara Varenghi found alive in Marseille. Mother: it's her.”

Teresa read the line twice. She turned the phone face down on the desk, as if the screen might still change its mind. In the next office someone said Madonna out loud, and the appuntato stopped chewing.

She had known since that morning. She had found out sideways, at seven, in her kitchen, while she was packing Giada's snack for school: a message from a colleague at company headquarters in Como, three words and a question mark. The comandante of the stazione, Luogotenente Corti, had gone to the Villa dei Gelsi himself the evening before, with a captain from Como, to break the news to the family. Nobody had thought to ring Teresa. Or else everybody had thought of it, which was worse.

She was forty-one, a maresciallo, with fifteen years' service in this barracks above the lake, an eleven-year-old daughter and a divorce without any shouting. Officially, she no longer smoked. She went down the back stairs, pushed open the door to the yard where the patrol cars were parked, and lit a cigarette between the wall and the skip. Down below, the lake was grey and flat. You couldn't see the far shore. February rubbed out everything more than a kilometre away.

She thought about the sandal.

On Saturday 28 June 2014, she had been twenty-nine and a brigadiere. That summer she was mostly on nights. For the Sagra di San Giovanni, men had been sent from every stazione on the west shore to hold the road: the Statale Regina was closed around Ossuccio to any car without a pass, and hundreds of furious drivers had to be turned back, Milanese in white shirts, Swiss who swore blind they'd booked a table. She had spent the evening at a roadblock, a torch in her hand, between two orange cones.

From up there she had watched the lake fill with lumaghitt. Thousands of tiny flames set on the water, drifting slowly towards the island, and boats everywhere, no navigation lights, loaded with families. There was no moon that night. The dark was total, except on the water. When the fireworks started, at about 10.40 p.m., everyone had looked up, the furious drivers, the Swiss, the appuntato beside her, Teresa too. For three quarters of an hour, nobody on the shore had looked at anything but the sky. She remembered that afterwards. Everyone was looking up.

The radio had called her back at around twenty past one. A girl, a minor, was unaccounted for at Laglio, an address on the Regina at the north end of the village. The Villa dei Gelsi. She knew the name, like everyone round the lake: the Varenghis, silk, a factory at Grandate, scarves sold in Paris and Tokyo.

She had got there a little before two. The gate open, every light on, terraces stepping down to the water like a garden staircase. The father, Aurelio, on the phone in the hall, calling friends, neighbours, the mother of a girl in Chiara's class, his voice getting louder and louder. The mother, Livia, was standing in the drawing room in an evening dress, a silk shawl round her shoulders. She hadn't raised her voice once. She had handed Teresa a recent photo of her daughter, already out of its album, and given her the exact time they had left for dinner with friends in Ossuccio, a quarter past seven, and the exact time they had got back, ten to one. Chiara had stayed at the villa with her brother. The brother had gone to meet friends on the shore at Ossuccio, for the fireworks. When the parents came home, there was nobody there.

The brother's name was Tommaso. Eighteen. He was sitting on the bottom stair, sweating despite the cool of the night, his hands between his knees. He answered questions before they were finished. Teresa had noticed his pupils, wide as coins in the light of the hall. She had jotted it in the corner of her notebook, without knowing what to do with it.

The boathouse was under the house, at the bottom of a stone stairway that led down from the lower garden. A covered boat shed, a vaulted roof, black water slapping against the steps, a mahogany launch under its tarpaulin. Across the opening onto the lake, some twenty snail-shell lamps were still burning on the water, all along the jetty. The family had done what everyone did that night, even fifteen kilometres from the island. Someone had lit them.

On the boards of the jetty, right at the edge, there was a sandal. Just one. White leather, a girl's sandal, the buckle done up. It was wet. Not put down: dropped. Teresa had crouched beside it without touching it. She had looked at that fastened buckle for a good minute. You don't lose a buckled sandal by walking. You lose it climbing over something, jumping, or when someone pulls you.

It was the girl's sandal. The mother had recognised it without going any closer.

The divers had searched the boathouse and the lake edge for two days. Nothing. The dogs had followed a scent as far as the jetty, and beyond that there was only water.

On Wednesday 2 July, a retired man who fished in the evenings off his own jetty, three houses further south, had come to the barracks of his own accord, his newspaper under his arm. On the night of the fireworks, at about half past ten, he had seen a motorboat come out of the Varenghis' boathouse with no lights and head for open water. A small boat, the kind you hire by the hour. He knew those boats. Everyone in Laglio knew them. They belonged to Ermes Bonacina, who hired them out at the harbour, without a licence, to tourists and fishermen, and who sold something else as well, people said, to boys from good families, in the summer.

Teresa had taken Bonacina's statement on Thursday the 3rd. A man of fifty-five, wiry, a rower's forearms, a smell of diesel and stale tobacco. Polite. He hadn't needed to think. On the night of the fireworks he'd been at Ossuccio, on the shore, like ten thousand other people. He hadn't lent anyone a boat. Maybe someone had taken one; it happened, he never locked anything.

Could anyone confirm that? Yes. The Varenghi boy.

She had taken Tommaso's statement the same day, in the small sitting room at the villa, with his mother on a chair by the window. He had said it all in one breath, his eyes on the rug.

“Ermes was with me at Ossuccio, on the shore, during the fireworks.”

The sentence was too straight. No rough edges, no hesitation, no “I think”. A sentence learnt by heart. Teresa had wanted him to go back over the times. The mother had said, without raising her voice, that her son hadn't slept for five days and that he had answered.

That same Thursday, Livia Varenghi had come to the stazione with a cardboard folder. Inside were screenshots, printed on heavy paper. A message sent from her daughter's Facebook account on 2 July: “sto bene, non cercatemi”, I'm fine, don't look for me. And a conversation with a boy called Luca, who was waiting for her, who told her they'd be all right, the two of them. The mother said Chiara had been talking about a secret boyfriend since the spring. She hadn't wanted to believe it. She added that her daughter's passport had gone from its drawer.

Three weeks later, the case had become a voluntary departure. A thirteen-year-old gone off with a boy, passport in her pocket, who would come home when she got hungry. You saw them every summer. The file had gone up to Como. The case had been taken away from Brigadiere Malnati, with kind words about her zeal. It had been explained to her that you mustn't get attached.

Chiara Varenghi never did come home hungry.

Teresa stubbed the cigarette out against the wall, picked up the end and folded it into a tissue. She went back upstairs.

It took her forty minutes to reach the right person in Marseille. A switchboard, a duty desk, one department, then another. A woman's voice that spoke no Italian, a man who spoke a little English. In the end she was put through to a lieutenant in the police judiciaire, Saïdi, who sounded tired and polite. They talked in a mixture of English and French, both of them slowly, each with their own mistakes.

Yes, he had taken her statement the day before. Yes, the mother had come that morning. He had watched her walk into the room.

“She recognised her straight away. Three seconds. I'm not making it up, I was looking at my watch.”

“And the DNA?”

“The family isn't asking for anything. The mother said there was nothing to check. The prosecutor's office in Marseille will pass it on to Italy. As far as we're concerned, she's an adult European citizen, a victim, who has been reunited with her family. I can't keep her.”

Teresa asked what she was like. He searched for the words.

“Thin. Grey. She doesn't say much. She asked for her door to be left open. She didn't cry once.”

There was a rustle of paper at the other end.

“There's something else,” he said. “She gave a name, for the man with the cellar. Just a first name. Ermes. According to her, he's dead, in a farmhouse above Gémenos, up in the hills. The gendarmes went up there last night. They found a man dead in his kitchen. We're waiting for the identification.”

Teresa didn't reply. She was looking out of the window at the lake that no longer had a far shore.

Ermes. There weren't two of those on this lake. Ermes Bonacina, the boats at Laglio harbour, the smell of diesel, the night of the fireworks at Ossuccio. A man who had shut up his little business and left the village ten years or so before, without saying where he was going, and whom nobody had missed.

A man who had an alibi for the night of 28 June 2014.

And the person who had given him that alibi was Tommaso Varenghi.