Voices To Images. Filippo Scalise

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ on the paper with decisive strokes, a man's face started rapidly appearing on the large white sheet of Albert's block. A small bald head with few white hairs left on the temples and on the nape, two small close-set eyes, partly hidden by thick curled lashes and a small nose with a rounded tip.

      Every time the recording ended, Alberto stopped for a moment and then, with an automatic gesture, restarted the recording and continued with his work. Thin lips appeared and a small, regular chin that finished the oval of the face.

      An anonymous face had taken shape on that sheet, and Alberto appeared very confused, despite not having had any hesitation during the completion of his work.

      It had been about an hour since he had entered that room, which now seemed empty without the dozens of people who had crowded it that afternoon. He placed the drawing of the face of the alleged serial murderer in the hands of Major Messi, who thanked him and smiled at him.

      Alberto quickly excused himself from all those people, but he couldn't help gazing at Carmen's bright big green eyes. Carmen bashfully, smiled back at him.

      Alberto spent a quiet night in his small white house in Barcelona.

      The noises of the cars, which gradually receded as the night progressed, made him slowly sink into a very serene sleep.

      CHAPTER IV

      The next morning, things suddenly changed. While shaving, the local radio announced that, that same night, a young man had been killed near the Santa Eulalia Cathedral and that the murder modus operandi was similar to that of the serial killer.

      The razor fell into the sink and Alberto remained motionless for a minute, thinking back to the previous evening and to the face of the man he had imagined and drawn.

      Would they have been able to identify him with his portrait? When would this carnage end? And why did he feel doubtful? How could a seemingly common and non-aggressive man play the role of a serial killer?

      Those questions he could not answer right at that time. After a few minutes, after shaving, he was already getting dressed to leave the house.

      "It is a fact, said Professor Beniamino Pricca, it is easy for some individuals to lead a double life; tireless workers and fathers of families can hide a second existence, in which they become cruel executors of chilling rites. A little like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, do you understand Alberto !? "

      He was one of his few friends in Barcelona and that very morning Alberto invited him to breakfast, as he wanted to hear the opinion of an expert, who could help him understand more.

      So, it was absolutely possible that the little man was the killer, as Professor Pricca, a retired professor of criminology, had explained to him.

      He returned to the office with the sole certainty of having interpreted that voice well, of having grasped the nuances that had clearly reconstructed in his mind the killer’s well-defined traits, then drawn on paper by his automatic and well-controlled gestures. It was not up to him to ask himself now who that man really was and what kind of life he could live with absolutely no identity.

      His thought was distracted by three simultaneous direct calls to his office, so he had to concentrate on those real situations he had to solve.

      After that day, after the drawing of the alleged killer, Alberto began to devour the newspapers and television news, while waiting for the news of the arrest of the serial killer.

      But the murderer seemed to have disappeared. Up to that moment, between one murder and the other, there were barely two weeks but this time, for over a month, there had been no news about him, and the media's attention had also proportionately diminished.

      That afternoon, Alberto randomly decided to walk the long road of the Park to return home and, as if by magic, suddenly before his eyes, beautiful Carmen came into view, sitting on a park bench, intent on playing with her small puppy.

      They immediately recognized each other, and he hoped to be at his very best at that moment.

      He straightened the collar of his jacket and, with a quick gesture of his right hand, pulled back his black hair.

      Carmen's eyes shone along with her smile in her sweet simplicity. It was like a punch in the stomach. Alberto managed to keep control of his emotions and invited her to continue the walk with him towards the Caffè Marsella at Carrer de Sant Pau. It was a pleasant and very long conversation, during which Alberto could not, even for a moment, detach his gaze from the woman's beautiful face. He learned that, after the completion of his drawing at the Police Department, hundreds of images had been reproduced with the face of the alleged killer, images that were now available to all police districts in the country. Carmen admitted that she was impressed by his skill and above all by his courage to make that decision without fear. At the end of the conversation, the two parted with a sweet kiss on the cheek and a strong handshake, which was a foreboding of what was to come.

      After this meeting, finally, that night, Alberto rested peacefully. His sleep had been disturbed by nightmares for days and by the blurred images of the serial killer, superimposed on those of all the faces he had drawn during those long months at the Telephone Company.

      The next day he used the trivial excuse to go to the Police Department to ask for news on the investigation to Major Messi, with the sole goal of meeting Carmen.

      The Major received him coldly and gave him only a few minutes to him, making him understand that, despite the dissemination of the photographs of his portrait, there had been no new developments in the darned investigation, which was making him become the sneer of the city.

      This time it was Carmen’s turn to invite him to the police bar for a quick aperitif before lunch. An incredible intimacy had already been established between the two, who, in just half an hour, managed to figure out that they were beginning to long for each other. This time, they left with the promise of a date for the evening of the following Saturday.

      The three days that separated Alberto from that date seemed to last forever. It was the first time that he was probably falling in love.

      At the very moment he was imagining his love encounter with Carmen, he was shaken up by the news. The evening news made an extraordinary connection, precisely with his city, with the discovery of the bodies of two young men, killed with the macabre ritual of the other murders.

      They had been dead for a few weeks, but only now, by chance, had the bodies been found: one in the municipal dump, probably thrown into a rubbish bin, and another under the bridge of the Port Vell dock.

      No claim this time, no phone calls, but the same modus operandi. They had been killed in two different circumstances and at different times, probably ten days apart. This updated the moves of the killer, who, therefore, had never stopped killing.

      Alberto wanted to ask Major Messi why there were no claims right at that time, but after the last frigid meeting, he preferred to keep that question to himself.

      His mind began to think improbable police scenarios at first plausible, then extremely imaginative, in which he appeared as the hero who captured the villain on a dark rainy night and was rewarded by beautiful Carmen’s long kiss. The ringing of his phone brought him back to reality. Major Messi wanted to see him immediately.

      A dark police car with a blue flashing light picked him up in front of the house and took him directly to the central Police Department. In that short period СКАЧАТЬ