The Lost Girls of Rome Read Online Free Page A

cupboard. Still images from a film, each captured in its little window. Then the train would pass. And those lives would continue on their way, unaware of her.
    She had always tried to imagine what it would be like to prolong that exploration. To walk unseen among those people’s most precious possessions, to watch them as they went about their everyday lives, as if they were fish in an aquarium.
    And in all the places she had lived, Sandra had asked herself what had happened within those walls before she entered them. What joys, quarrels and sorrows had flared then faded without leaving an echo.
    She would wonder about the tragedies and horrors preserved like secrets in those places. Luckily, houses and apartments forget quickly. The occupants change, and everything starts all over again from the beginning.
    Once in a while, those who go away leave traces of their passing. A lipstick forgotten in a bathroom cabinet. An old magazine on a shelf. A sheet of paper with the telephone number of a rape crisis centre hidden at the back of a drawer.
    Through these little clues, it is sometimes possible to trace someone’s story.
    She had never imagined that the search for such details would actually become her profession. But there was a difference: by the time she arrived in these places, they had lost their innocence for ever.
    Sandra had joined the police through a competitive examination. The training had been standard. She carried a service gun, and knew how to use it. But her uniform was the white coat of the forensics team. After a specialisation course, she had chosen to become a forensic photographer.
    She would arrive at a scene with her cameras, her sole purpose that of stopping time. Once everything was frozen by her lens, it would never change again.
    The second lesson Sandra Vega had learned was that, like people, houses and apartments die.
    And her destiny was to be there just before they died, when their inhabitants would never again set foot in them. The signs of that slow death agony were unmade beds, dishes in the sink, a sock abandoned on the floor. As if the inhabitants had fled, leaving everything in disorder, to escape the sudden end of the world. When in reality the end of the world had actually happened within those walls.
    And so, as soon as Sandra crossed the threshold of an apartment on the fifth floor of a tower block on the outskirts of Milan, she realised that what was awaiting her would be a particularly unforgettable crime scene. The first thing she saw was the decorated tree, even though it was a long time since Christmas. Instinctively she understood why it was there. Her sister, too, at the age of five, had stopped her parents from taking down the decorations once the holiday was over. She had cried and screamed one whole afternoon, and in the end her parents had given up, hoping that sooner or later it would pass. Instead of which, the plastic fir tree with its little lights and coloured balls had stayed in its corner for the whole summer and the following winter. That was why Sandra suddenly felt her stomach gripped in a vice.
    The tree told her there was a child in this apartment.
    She could feel the child’s presence in the air. Because the third lesson she had learned was that houses and apartments have a smell. It belongs to those who live in them, and it is always different and unique. When tenants change, the smell disappears, to give way to a new one. It forms over time, mixing in other odours, natural and artificial – fabric softeners and coffee, schoolbooks and indoor plants, floor polish and cabbage soup – and it becomes the smell of that family, of the people who comprise it. They carry it on them and don’t even smell it.
    The smell was the one thing that distinguished the apartment she saw now from the dwellings of other single-income families. Three rooms and a kitchen. The furniture acquired at different times, depending on financial circumstances. The framed photographs,