‘Hi, guys! How’re you all doing? I can see you’re a few drinks ahead. Let me catch up – the drinks are on me.’
‘Don’t waste your money, fella,’ Sidney told him kindly. ‘None of us are talking to the press today.’
‘Don’t be so suspicious,’ Frank Wiltshire reproached him. ‘What story do you think I’m after? And I thought we were buddies.’
‘You’ve never had any buddies, Frank. You know that. You only have victims and targets, and we don’t intend to be either so stop trying to con us.’
Frank glanced up at the TV over the bar. ‘You been watching that?’ His eyes skimmed back to catch any betraying expression on their faces, but nobody answered or even looked at him.
Unsurprised, he went on, ‘I’ve always wondered how much fire there was behind all that smoke. Did Sebastian have an affair with the girl? Did Clea find out about it? How did Clea die, exactly? The inquest just skated over the surface, didn’t it? All the real questions never even got asked, let alone answered.’
Sidney slid off the bar stool. ‘Got to go. Ciao.’
The others said, in a confused mutter, ‘Ciao,’ and wandered away without looking back. Frank Wiltshire ordered another drink and sat alone for a while, contemplating just how to write the story.
Across the water, in the old city, others saw the news item too. In a high-raftered room on the first floor, a man in grubby dungarees and an old
rust-coloured T-shirt turned, a small, delicate chisel in one hand, a matching-sized hammer in the other, to glance at the TV screen through the protective goggles he wore.
As the newscast ended, a door creaked open behind him and a woman walked in. She paused to look at the television, which was now showing a series of adverts. Chuckling children lifted spoonfuls of cereal to their mouths while a mother beamed approvingly behind them; then a cartoon mouse began to caper across the screen. The woman walked over, feet scrunching on flakes of chipped stone, and switched off the TV.
‘You saw?’
‘Sebastian on the news? Yes. Well, we knew he’d been nominated, didn’t we? It was on the cards he would come. He was bound to come back here one day. I’m surprised it wasn’t sooner.’ The man turned back to his work, the muscles in his arm rippling visibly as he tapped the hammer against the chisel. ‘Who’s this Laura Erskine? Her face seemed familiar. Actress?’
‘You know as much about her as I do – you heard what that girl on TV said. She was in one of his films. There were rumours that they’d had an affair, not long before his wife killed herself. Maybe that was why. She had to have a reason for throwing herself out of that window – or getting pushed out.’
The man frowned behind his goggles. ‘You can’t really suspect Sebastian of murder?’
‘It’s in his blood, treachery and cruelty.’ The woman walked to the window, which ran from ceiling to floor and could be closed off with ancient, cracking wooden shutters from which the paint had long since peeled, stared out at the blue sky, her back to her son. Watching her, he thought how depressing it was always to see her in black. Didn’t she ever yearn to wear something else? The world was so full of colour and yet she shut it all out, quite deliberately. It was an affront to God, rejecting the wonderful gift he had given the world.
‘Oh, everyone is capable of cruelty. Even you, Mamma.’
She picked up the coldness in his tone, turned and stared at him. ‘Don’t say such things, even as a joke, Nico.’
His blows on the stone in front of him were light, quick, carefully controlled; he knew precisely what he was doing, what effect his chisel would have, where to strike, with what force, and what would happen in consequence. Sculpting was a science as much as an art: you had to understand stone to work with it, and he had chisels and hammers of every size and shape, lined up with great precision on a table behind him. As far as his tools were concerned, he had a passion for order.
A shape was emerging from the block: where once there had been simply a featureless square of stone you could now see a long, thin nose, angled cheekbones, hollowed eye sockets.
He stood back and pushed up his goggles to get a clearer view of what he had just done, blinking at the reflection of blue water rippling along the walls in dancing patterns of light. The sky outside was turning almost purple in the heat.
‘It wasn’t a joke, Mamma,’ he said, absently. ‘All human beings are capable of anything. That doesn’t mean we’ll do what we’re capable of, merely that the potential exists inside us.’
A long silence followed. Then his mother said, ‘That girl, the actress, her hair … did you notice? The same colour as his mother’s.’
‘Titian red. Of course I noticed. Gina had wonderful hair – I’ve never forgotten it, like fire in sunshine. The girl’s bone structure is similar, too.’
Standing back, his head on one side, he ran a hand tenderly over the face he was carving, watching the way the strange light from the water flickered over it, making it look as if the mouth moved in a smile. He had read somewhere that Phidias, the Greek sculptor, had been able to carve stone so that it looked alive, real flesh that you could swear would move under your fingers. God, to be able to get that effect! ‘Strange, what happens inside our heads, isn’t it?’ he thought aloud.
‘What are you talking about now?’ His mother watched him, frowning, her olive skin pale.
‘I think we should invite Sebastian here while he’s in Venice.’
‘No!’ The word came in a high sound, like the shriek of one of the gulls outside in the sky.
He pulled down the goggles over his eyes and lifted his chisel and hammer again. ‘Of course we must. Don’t be silly, Mamma. Will you ring his hotel? While you’re at it, invite that girl, too.’
‘I won’t have either of them under my roof!’