Freddie didn’t release the tarpaulin. “Max, you’re my friend, and I don’t know who else to tell.”
They looked at each other in silence. Then Max nodded and Freddie folded back the tarpaulin.
The girl was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with an innocent beauty that even the cold pallor of death couldn’t erase. Her hair was long, straight, black as bitumen, and it framed an oval face that descended to an elfin chin. Her lips were large and surprisingly red. Lipstick, he realized. Which was odd. It was in short supply, and not many Maltese girls wore it at the best of times.
Freddie tilted her head to the right and gently drew back her hair. A raw and ragged gash ran from beneath her right ear toward her collar bone, widening as it went.
“Christ …”
Freddie’s hand delved beneath the tarpaulin and produced a jagged shard of metal, twisted and razor-edged. “Ack-ack shrapnel. It was still in her when she was brought in.”
It was a common cause of injuries and deaths, the lethal hail of metal dropping back to earth from exploding artillery shells. You could hear the splinters tinkling merrily in the streets and on the rooftops whenever a raid was on, a deceptively harmless sound.
“She bled to death?”
“It looks that way.”
“So?”
Freddie hesitated. “I think it was made to look that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean these … and these.” Freddie raised her wrists in turn. The marks were faint, easy to miss.
“Rope burns?”
“Her hands weren’t bound when she was found. And look at her nails.”
They were long, painted red, and several of them were cracked or broken.
“She fought back. There’s also some bruising around her shoulders and her thighs. Also her labia.”
What a horrible word. It struck Max, enough to extinguish all thoughts of carnality. It was about all he could think as he struggled to take in what Freddie was telling him.
“You think she was violated?”
“I know she was violated. And probably by the same man who then killed her.”
“Freddie, come on. That’s a leap too far.”
“She’s not the first.”
“What?”
“There have been others, two others I’ve seen since the beginning of the year. Not like this, not exactly. One had been crushed by falling masonry; the other one had drowned.”
“Drowned?”
There were many ways to die on Malta, but drowning wasn’t the first that sprang to mind, certainly not since the beaches had been wired off against invasion.
“She fell into a collapsed cistern while walking home in the dark. At least, that’s the way it looked. Both were sherry queens from the Gut.”
“Sherry queens” was service slang for the Maltese dance hostesses who worked the bars and bawdy music halls that infested the lower end of Strait Street in Valetta, a disreputable quarter dubbed the Gut.
“Jesus Christ, Freddie. You should have told someone.”
“What makes you think I didn’t? Apparently the matter is now in the hands of the appropriate authorities.”
“Sounds like lieutenant governor’s office speak.”
“You should know.”
He certainly did. The Information Office answered directly to the lieutenant governor and his coterie of self-important lackeys.
“So why am I here?”
“Because she had something on her that changes everything. Something in her hand. I had to pry it out. Rigor mortis had set in.”
Freddie reached into the hip pocket of his khaki shorts and handed something to Max. It was a piece of material—a cloth shoulder tab, torn where it had been ripped from a uniform. Enough of it remained, though.
“Oh Christ,” said Max.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
Max’s apartment was a short walk from the hospital through the streets of Floriana. He passed a long line of women queuing for paraffin. There was some kind of scuffle taking place that involved a lot of raised voices. Spotting Max approach, a rangy young woman with fire in her eyes appealed to him in accented English, “Tell her she wait like all of us.”
“You have to wait,” said Max, without breaking his stride or even turning to identify the culprit.
His indifference was rewarded with a bank of baleful glares and a couple of mumbled curses in Maltese. He ignored them, too numb to care.
He was still trying to process the information sprung on him by Freddie in the mortuary. Whichever way he came at it, it spelled big trouble. Freddie had taken a certain amount of persuading to keep his latest findings to himself, at least for a couple of days. It would give Max time to think the matter through properly, make a few inquiries. What those might be exactly, he