anger.
‘You’re alive …’ He couldn’t believe it. His eyelids felt hot and as if they were full of sand. He bent closer, put out a hand to stroke her cheek.
She shrank away, and he read fear in those glowing eyes.
The Carabinieri saw it, too. One of them took his shoulder and pulled him to his feet just as the ambulance boat tied up and the men on board leapt out.
‘Dr Garrieri? They didn’t say you were here. That was lucky. How bad is she?’ Someone asked a grey-haired man in a camel-hair coat.
Sebastian strained to hear the reply but the doctor lowered his voice, conscious of the listening crowds.
A stretcher had been set up, the two ambulancemen lifted Laura gently on to it and covered her with warm red blankets. Then, each took one end of the stretcher and carried it to the boat swaying on the water.
‘I want to go with her.’ Sebastian tried to free himself but the policeman’s grip tightened.
‘No, I’m sorry, Signore. No.’
The other policeman was using a walkie-talkie, his head turned away so that Sebastian couldn’t hear what he was saying. When he had finished, he turned back and said politely, ‘We would like you to come to the station with us, Signor Ferrese. There are some questions we need to ask.’
Sebastian saw in their eyes that they wouldn’t let him refuse. He saw, too, that they thought he had done it. They’d seen her fear and drawn their own conclusions.
His mouth twisted. Of course, they would start by suspecting him. He had been here before. Here we go again. The same old merry-go-round. Questions, answers not believed, long, frozen silences, more questions, more disbelief. Guilty, even if they can’t prove it.
Sidney had arrived, still panting, his face red from the exertion. ‘Is she … How is she? Did she say anything? Tell you who did it?’
‘Go with her in the ambulance,’ Sebastian curtly told him. ‘You know my mobile number. Ring me at once if – if anything happens.’
The story led the late news on television that night. Nico saw it in his studio where he was working on a clay model with blown-up photos of Laura propped in front of him. He rarely watched TV, but tonight he had switched on just in time for the news. He missed the first few words, but caught the end of the sentence.
‘… attempted murder of film star Laura Erskine …’
His fingers skidded down the soft, moist clay. Attempted murder?
He wiped his hands automatically on a damp cloth, intent on what the announcer was saying.
‘Film director Sebastian Ferrese is helping police with their enquiries …’
Nico could hardly believe his ear. They’d arrested Sebastian. He picked up his mobile phone and rang the hospital, but the operator told him curtly that Laura had only just left the operating theatre. There was no news yet.
‘How badly hurt was she? Is she going to survive?’
‘We cannot give any further information,’ he was told, before the operator cut him off.
In her private sitting room Vittoria d’Angeli saw the same news broadcast, her plump hands laid on her black-skirted lap, small feet planted close together, stiff-backed, bolt upright, on a shabby, faded, but still elegant eighteenth-century cream brocade sofa, whose design made it impossible to slouch.
The newscaster hadn’t said the girl was likely to die.
She must. Vittoria’s fingers clenched. She couldn’t bear to have her under the roof for even one night, sleeping in that room, with him … their moans of pleasure, of echoes the same sighs and groans, the smooth flesh sliding together, thigh on thigh, rising and falling, those sounds …
She bit the fleshy mound of her thumb. Everything came back, like the dead on the Day of Judgement, the drowned faces floating up from the dark waters of Venice, green and white …
Green eyes, cloudy red hair, that full, sensual mouth, the white skin … reminding her of what she longed to forget. Was there never any peace?
The police had been quick, arresting him. How had they done it so soon? And on what evidence? Of course, they had a reputation at stake. Murder was rare in Venice. Venetians were proud of their city being called the safest in Italy – and it probably was, for all sorts of reasons. Surrounded by water, and without any roads, it was hard for criminals to make a fast getaway, and the local population knew each other too well for anyone to get away with crime for long. The city was full of eyes and ears, awash with gossip.
Vittoria had had to learn to live with gossip, to accept that people she scarcely recognised, or might never even have met, knew her private life as intimately as she did – better, at first, because she had been naïve. She hadn’t guessed, suspected, understood anything. When you’re young you can be deceived by surfaces; you believe what you see.
It had been one of the gossiping, treacherous friends of the d’Angeli family who had told her – one of the worst moments of her life. She had sat there smiling, while inside she ripped apart. She had wanted to die of pain and humiliation. For a time, she had thought of throwing herself into the Grand Canal from one of the upper windows of Ca’ d’Angeli, as others had down the centuries. But she was made of tougher stuff. She had learnt to survive however hard the struggle, to plan however remote the future seemed, and Vittoria had vowed calmly to take revenge. One day she would make them pay.