Damiano's Return

CHAPTER ONE

EDEN was in the changing cubicle pinning up the hem on a customer’s skirt when she heard the shop door open.

‘You’re always very busy,’ the older woman commented. ‘I suppose people just don’t have the time to do their own alterations these days.’

‘I’m not complaining.’ With a rueful smile, Eden eased the last pin into place and rose upright. Five feet four inches tall and slightly built, she wore her thick golden hair twisted up into a clip. Her heart-shaped face was dominated by her clear green eyes.

Emerging from the cubicle, she looked in some surprise at the two men in business suits, who in company with a young woman were talking to her middle-aged assistant, Pam.

‘These people are looking for you, Eden.’ Pam could not hide her curiosity.

‘How can I help you?’ Eden asked.

‘Eden James?’ The older of the two men double-checked.

Conscious of the keen appraisal she was receiving from the trio and also of the indefinable tension they exuded, Eden nodded slowly.

‘Is there somewhere we could talk in private, Miss James?’

Eden’s eyes widened.

‘Perhaps upstairs in your apartment,’ the young woman suggested briskly.

She both looked and sounded like a police officer, Eden reflected, her anxiety increasing. But usually the police identified themselves first. Aware that her two employees and single customer were a captive audience, she flushed and hurriedly opened the door that led into the short passage which gave entrance back out onto the street.

‘Could you tell me what this is about?’ Eden prompted tautly then.

‘We were trying to be discreet.’ The older man now extended an official identity card for her inspection. ‘I’m Superintendent Marshall and this young woman is Constable Leslie. This gentleman with me is Mr Rodney Russell, a special advisor from the Foreign Office. May we go upstairs to talk?’

Somehow, Eden found herself responding automatically to that calm note of command. What did they want? The police? A senior policeman too. The Foreign Office? The Foreign Office? Her mind blanked out with sudden horror and her hand started to shake as she stuck the key into the lock on her front door. Damiano! For so long, she had waited for such a visit but here it was catching her totally unprepared. When had she stopped fearing every phone call, every ring of the doorbell? When? Guilt-stricken dismay at that discovery about herself froze her to the spot.

‘It’s all right,’ the female police officer asserted, contriving to gently urge Eden out of her paralysis and over the threshold. ‘We haven’t come here to break bad news, Mrs Braganzi.’

Mrs Braganzi? The name she had left behind when the cruel spotlight of press intrusion had become more than she’d been able to handle. So many reporters had wanted to ask her what it was like to be the wife of an important man who had simply disappeared into thin air. Refused those interviews, tabloid interest in Eden Braganzi had taken a nastier turn.

Not bad news? Eden blinked, mind briefly focusing again. How could it not be bad news after five years? There was no good news possible! And then natural common sense exercised its sway and steadied Eden a little. Was this yet another official courtesy call; was that it? Just letting her know that the case was still open but unsolved? It had been some time since anyone official had requested actual face-to-face contact with her. She herself had gone long past the stage where she continually phoned them, pushing, pressuring, finally hysterically begging for some action that she had only gradually come to appreciate they could not offer her. And only at that point had she begun finally to give up hope…

After all, Damiano’s brother, Nuncio, and his sister, Cosetta, had given up hope of his survival within a month of his disappearance. Damiano had been in the South American republic of Montavia when a military coup had taken place. In the street violence which had followed in the capital city that day, Damiano had simply disappeared. He had checked out of his hotel and climbed into a limousine which should have taken him to the airport and his flight home. But that had been the last reliable sighting of him alive. The bodyguards in the car behind had been blown off the road by an explosion. Unhurt but with their vehicle wrecked, they had lost the limousine. Damiano and the limo and the driver had all vanished without trace.

During the subsequent enquiries, the new dictatorship had not been particularly helpful, but then by that time opposition to the coup had been spreading and a full-scale civil war had been threatening Montavia. The overstretched authorities had had little interest in the disappearance of a single foreign national and had pointed out that, during the fighting which had raged a full week in the city, many people had died or disappeared. There had been no trail to follow and no witnesses had come forward. But neither had there been any evidence found to actually prove that Damiano had been killed. It had been that appalling lack of proof of any kind which had tormented Eden for more years than she could bear.

‘Please sit down, Mrs Braganzi,’ some one of the three prompted her.

Didn’t the police always ask a person to sit down when there was a nasty shock coming? Or was that only how actors portrayed the police in television productions? Still finding it impossible to concentrate, but slightly irritated at being ordered around in her own home, Eden sat down in an armchair and watched the two men settle themselves on the small couch opposite. The frown-line on her brow deepened. Their faces were taut, flushed, almost eager.

‘Constable Leslie was telling you the truth, Mrs Braganzi. We’re not here to break bad news but to give you extremely good news. Your husband is alive,’ the police superintendent informed her with firm emphasis.

Frozen within the armchair, Eden stared at him in shaken disbelief. She parted dry lips. ‘That’s not possible…’

The other man, Russell, from the Foreign Office started to speak. He reminded her that at the outset of Damiano’s disappearance a kidnapping had been suspected. But only along with every other possible crime or reason under the sun, Eden recalle

d, her dazed mind momentarily straying back five agonising years.

‘After all, your husband was…is,’ Russell corrected himself at speed and continued, ‘a very wealthy, influential man in the international banking fraternity—’

‘You said alive…’ Eden broke in shakily, her face stricken as she surveyed the men in instinctive condemnation that they should dare to try to raise hopes she did not believe she could stand to have resurrected. ‘How could Damiano still be alive after so many years? If he’s alive, where has he been all this time? You’ve made a mistake…a dreadful, dreadful mistake!’

‘Your husband is alive, Mrs Braganzi,’ the superintendent spelt out with measured care and confidence. ‘Naturally coming out of the blue as it has this is a considerable shock for you. But please believe what we are telling you. Your husband, Damiano Braganzi, is alive and well.’

Eden trembled, searching their faces and then suddenly shutting her eyes tight. She was struggling to overcome disbelief and simultaneously offering up a prayer of desperate hope to God. Let it be true, let it be real, please don’t let me wake up if it’s a dream—for over the years there had been many such dreams to torment her.

‘Your husband surfaced in Brazil almost two days go,’ the Foreign Office advisor divulged.

‘Brazil…’ Eden echoed shakily.

‘He has spent over four years in prison in Montavia and on his release he had the good sense simply to slip quietly out of the country again.’

‘P-prison?’ Eyes shattered, Eden stared at the younger man with ever-mounting incredulity. ‘Damiano’s been in prison? How…why?’

On the day on which Damiano had disappeared, he had been kidnapped and taken to a military camp in the countryside. A military camp? She frowned at that unexpected information. A few days later, with civil war raging through the tiny republic, rebel forces had attacked the camp and in the ensuing battle Damiano had received serious head injuries. Finding a wounded prisoner in the aftermath, the rebels had quite naturally assumed that he was one of their own.

‘Your husband is a fluent Spanish speaker. That and his quick thinking saved his life. He received treatment at a field hospital in the jungle. He was only just beginning to recover when he was picked up by the government soldiers, cleaning up the last pockets of resistance. He was imprisoned for being a member of the guerrilla forces.’

Damiano was alive…Damiano was alive! Eden was beginning to put faith in what she was being told although still every sense screamed at her to be cautious. She was fighting so hard to concentrate but she found that she just couldn’t. She felt stupid, numb, disbelieving.

‘Naturally you are wondering why your husband didn’t immediately identify himself when he was captured,’ the bland-faced Russell continued. ‘He believed that admitting his true identity would be signing his own death warrant. He was aware that he had originally been kidnapped by soldiers loyal to the current dictatorship in Montavia. He knew that the kidnapping had been bungled and that, from that point, there had never been any intention of letting him go alive…’

Eden blinked, struggling to focus on the Foreign Office advisor and absorb what she was being told. Her blood was chilling in her veins, her tummy turning queasy. Damiano had been kidnapped, hurt… Her own worst imaginings had come true.

‘Appreciating that his survival would be a severe embarrassment to the Montavian government, your husband decided that he would be safer retaining his assumed identity and accepting the prison term. On his release, he headed for the border with Brazil and from there to the home of a businessman called Ramon Alcoverro—’

‘Ramon…’ Eden whispered, slowly shaking her pounding head, lifting her hand to press her fingers against her damp, taut brow as if to aid her thinking powers. ‘Damiano went to college with someone called Ramon.’

‘About an hour from now, your husband will be landing on English soil again and he is keen that his home-coming should be kept from the media for as long as possible. For that reason, we have been discreet in our approach to you.’

Damiano alive, Damiano coming home. Home? To his family, of course, but not to her! In sudden, raw, shaken turmoil, Eden sat there, experiencing simultaneous joy and agony. These people had come here to make their announcement because she was still legally Damiano’s wife and next of kin. But Eden was painfully aware that her marriage had virtually been over by the time of her husband’s disappearance. Damiano had never loved her. He had married her on the rebound and lived to regret the impulse.

When had she forgotten that reality? When had she begun living in her own imagination? For Damiano would never return home to her. Had circumstances not cruelly intervened, he might well have come home to ask her for a divorce five years ago. Hadn’t his own brother suggested that? And now, after the ordeal he had suffered, he would be anxious to get on with his life again. Indeed, in all likelihood, after hearing what had happened during his absence, Damiano would make no attempt to see her and any contact made would be through a divorce lawyer.

‘Mrs Braganzi…Eden, may I call you Eden?’ the superintendent enquired.

‘His family…the Braganzi, his brother and his wife, his sister…’ Eden framed dully. ‘They must be overjoyed.’

The senior policeman’s face stiffened. ‘As far as I understand the somewhat limited information that I have received, your husband’s family received a call from Ramon Alcoverro and immediately flew out to Brazil on their private jet.’

Eden froze at that disconcerting news, what colour remaining in her cheeks draining away to leave her deathly pale. Damiano’s family had already flown out without even bothering to contact her and give her the news of his survival? She dropped her head, sick to the stomach at such cruelty.

‘At times such as these, particularly where families have become estranged, people can act very much without thought,’ the older man commented in the taut silence. ‘We only became aware of the situation when the embassy in Brazil contacted the Foreign Office. They required certain information before they could issue a replacement passport to your husband so that he could travel home.’

Eden still said nothing. She was studying the carpet with eyes that ached. Nuncio had probably already told Damiano why he had not brought Eden out to Brazil with him. Those dreadful lies that had been printed about her in that newspaper only three months after Damiano had gone missing! The scurrilous gossip and opprobrium that had finally broken her spirit and forced her to leave the Braganzi home for the sake of her own sanity.

Rodney Russell took up the explanation in a brisk tone. ‘By that stage, your husband was demanding to know why you had not been informed, unaware that his own family had failed to keep us up to date on developments.’

Eden blinked and looked up very slowly. ‘Really?’

The superintendent gave her a soothing smile. ‘I gather Damiano made it very clear that he can’t wait to be reunited with his wife—’

Eden studied him with strained eyes of disconcertion. ‘Damiano can’t wait to see…me?’ she whispered in faltering interruption, certain she must have misheard him.

‘He’s flying into Heathrow at noon and then he’s taking a helicopter trip to an airfield just outside town. We’ll convey you there. Obviously the hope is that it will be possible to evade any media attention.’

‘He wishes to see me?’ An almost hysterical little laugh escaped Eden’s convulsed throat. She twisted her head away and lowered it, feeling the hot, stinging rush of tears hitting her eyes.

She wanted privacy but instead she had strangers watching her every reaction. Strangers who had to be well aware just what a charade her marriage had become by the time Damiano had gone missing. She ought to be used to that reality now, the knowledge that nothing had been too sacred to commit to an information file somewhere. But then the behaviour of Damiano’s family in recent days spoke louder than any volume of words.

Nonetheless, after Damiano had vanished, there had been a full-scale investigation by both

the British and the Italian authorities. Financial experts had gone in to check that the Braganzi Bank was still sound. They had looked for fraud or evidence of blackmail or secret accounts. They had even looked for links between Damiano and organised crime syndicates. Then they had turned their attention to his own family circle to see if anybody there might have employed a hitman to get rid of him while he was abroad.

No stone had been left unturned. No opinion had gone unsought. No question had been too personal or too wounding to ask. Damiano had been too rich and way too important to just disappear without causing muddy ripples of suspicion to wash over everybody connected with him. And nobody had suffered more than Eden, the wife his snobbish siblings had secretly despised, the wife who had swiftly become the target of their collective grief and turmoil. Nuncio and his sister, Cosetta, had turned on Eden like starving rats on prey. She had even been blamed for the fact that Damiano had gone to Montavia in the first place.

‘In situations such as this, we normally arrange specialist counselling and a period of protective isolation for the victim,’ Rodney Russell remarked, ‘but your husband has categorically refused that support.’

‘I believe Damiano said he would prefer prison to counselling,’ the superintendent said with wry amusement.

A cup of tea was settled on the low coffee-table in front of Eden. ‘You’ve had a major shock,’ the female constable said kindly. ‘But you’re going to be reunited with your husband this afternoon.’

At that staggering reminder, Eden rose in one jerky motion and walked into her bedroom several feet away. She closed her eyes again, fighting for some semblance of composure. Damiano was alive; Damiano was on his way home. To her? She scolded herself for letting her thoughts slide once again in the wrong direction. A selfish direction. If Damiano wanted her now, she would be there for him. Naturally, obviously. In fact, if Damiano had asked for her, nothing would keep her from his side!