The Third Shadow

One

Everyone remembers the photograph.

Like an annoying summer hit, for a while that early September of 2013 it seemed to be everywhere. The national news bulletins both here in Italy and back home in the UK. Splashed across the middle pages of the tabloids and gossip weeklies. Always that same shot, the two brothers framed against the crystalline backdrop of the Ionian sea. Taken only a matter of hours before their disappearance, it became the defining image of one of the most notorious cases of the decade.

On the corkboard above my desk - there amidst the various scribblings, location snaps and photocopied documents I begged and bribed Station Commander Nuzzo to let me have access to - I've also thumbtacked an old newspaper cut-out the shot. It's zoom-edited of course, Sarah Bracewell's full-length original bottom-edged at collar bone. Her husband Sean is to the viewer's left, his arm draped playfully around his younger brother's neck, a clump of meaty, freckled fingers emerging from the opposite shoulder. The pale grey eyes which gleam from the midst of his round face are scored at their outside corners by sprayed deltas of smile lines. Short, sandy hair tends towards ginger over unshaven jaw - a celtic lineage echoed in the lobster-pink sunburn, the loose flakes of skin visible near the tip of his nose. A typical Brit on holiday, whatever the factor of the suncream he was using clearly not high enough.

Lee is meanwhile much darker. Not so obviously English-looking, several of my Italian acquaintances have remarked. Trimmer than his brother, a greater attention to appearance is evident also in the fashionably styled hair, the goatee beard bushed over chin, the flash of a silver chain around his neck. He seems to angle himself slightly away from the fraternal embrace however, his gaze focused off to the side of the camera lens. The curve of his lips is dutiful, forced - a mismatch to the lowered brow. A man with something on his mind perhaps. Distracted, yes. Troubled...

Looking back at that shot now, it's not difficult to understand why the press had loved it so much. The whole story condensed into one neat little rectangle - its mystery, apparent contradictions.

Of theories and hypotheses there were numerous, a media-fuelled frenzy. Not a single one of them, it would turn out, was anywhere near the mark.

That's the thing about the truth. Sometimes it can be as elusive as a stalking shadow on the blackest of nights.

Just too plain damn terrible to ever be glimpsed.

*

My own part in these events began around lunchtime of Monday August the 26th. I'd been living in Puglia for around six months by this point, a period which I can define without any shadow of a doubt as the most physically gruelling of my entire life...

I can still remember the expression on the estate agent's face when I'd told him that the place was exactly what I was looking for. A sense of inner delight, of course, at a quickly wrapped up deal, the juicy commission cut which would come his way. There'd been a barely veiled astonishment too however, the look of one man silently questioning another's mental health. Are you blind? he seemed to be saying. Have you any idea just exactly what a falling-to-pieces hovel you're taking on here?

The bungalow had been a featureless box of cracked, grimy stucco, one which didn't appear to have seen a lick of paint since the days of Mussolini. The previous owner had been an elderly bachelor whose recent death I'd assumed to have been smoke related, this judging from the countless butt ends littered all over the place. A child of the austere inter-war years, he'd obviously considered things such as piped gas and flushing toilets mere fripperies. Though electricity seemed somehow to have escaped his luddite zeal, the wiring was amateurish and potentially lethal. Running water - yes, there was this too, albeit in spluttering surges followed by lapses of several seconds.