Lucifer's Shadow

64 The edge of the lagoon

Daniel Forster had not fought the charges with much enthusiasm. Two police officers were dead. Large sums of money had been elicited by fraud from several well-known musical institutions around the world. The true perpetrator was Hugo Massiter, as the public and the prosecutors knew. But Massiter was gone, vanished from the face of the earth the night Giulia Morelli and Biagio died. Daniel remained, willing to admit his supporting role in some of Massiter’s misdeeds, the only culprit a vengeful criminal system could find. Unable to charge him in relation to the murders, the prosecutors had raised the stakes on the embezzlement case and succeeded in winning a three-year jail term, which Daniel, much to their fury, accepted with a humble shrug of the shoulders.

He found no cause to argue. Some desire for atonement nagged him constantly. He wished for time to think too. In the small, modern cell in Mestre which he shared with an engaging Padua gangster named Toni, Daniel began to construct some explanations for the events which had engulfed him that long, dangerous summer. He was a popular prisoner, teaching his cell mate English, striking up a strong friendship which would, both men knew, survive their release. There were individuals in jail there who were of use to him too. They confirmed what Giulia Morelli had already told him. Scacchi owed money to no one. The house, which was now his, was free of debt. With the balance of Scacchi’s estate, he became a man of a little means, even after the fines the court had imposed. Within four months, when it was clear to the prison authorities that he had no intention of trying to run away, he was increasingly allowed out of the jail to spend days in the city to further his education. They were not to know that he would soon abandon his now tenuous links with Oxford for a different sphere of research.

The property had been his first focus of attention. He had sold the near-derelict adjoining warehouse to raise money to pay for the main building’s restoration. Within the space of a year, Ca’ Scacchi was neighbour to three smart apartments, two of them American-owned, served by a renovated bridge across the rio. As he supervised the building work, and the refurbishment of the cellar where he and Laura had found the manuscript, his interest was drawn increasingly to the question of the concerto’s authorship. The work was fast becoming a standard item in the orchestral repertoire, performed around the world. The infamous mystery which surrounded its appearance in Venice did the takings no harm at all. All the same, Daniel never once doubted the work deserved its acclaim. It had its lighter flourishes and occasionally stooped to some shameless fireworks in order to dazzle the listener. Yet there were such depths, too, and they continued to astound him even though he now felt he knew every note.

With the help of the supportive prison governor, he had gained an unlimited reader’s ticket to the Archivio di Stato, the archives which contained every last surviving document of the Venetian Republic. The building was behind the Frari, a stone’s throw from San Rocco. He spent months there, poring over the thousands of pages the city’s clerks had scribbled throughout 1733. For weeks it seemed a fruitless task. Then, half a year after he was sentenced, he stumbled over a fragment of a report from the Dorsoduro night watch. Most of the document had been destroyed by damp and mould. A single paragraph remained legible in its entirety, but it was sufficient. There was a clear reference to the “mysterious concerto” and a death connected with the work. There was also a name, that of an Englishman who was, the report confirmed, the undoubted author of the piece, and the revelation that all papers connected with the piece had been destroyed after its composer’s death, for unknown reasons. There was no clue why the original should have been hidden behind the brickwork in Ca’ Scacchi, though it seemed likely that one of Scacchi’s ancestors might have been hired to print the original scores.

Much enjoyable research remained before this single scrap of information could be turned into something resembling fact. Every weekday, he was released from the prison and took the bus to Piazzale Roma, then walked to the archive, trawling its miles of shelves for more evidence. The name Delapole was mentioned elsewhere, though never in connection with music. There were, as the night watch reported, debts. A few fragments of private papers also made comments on the man’s character, which was, by all accounts, cultured and charming. Over the weeks, Daniel assembled every last scrap of information he could find about Delapole. When he wanted to think, he would walk round the corner and sit in the upper hall of San Rocco, beneath Lucifer’s shadow, and let these facts roam around his imagination, trying to see where they might fit alongside one another.

After ten months he had assembled a story of a kind and come to realise that it could be complete only if he were to tell another tale: that of how the lost concerto came to be found. So, alongside the tragic account of Oliver Delapole, another emerged from his mind: of Hugo Massiter, an act of deception, and a wily friend named Scacchi who came to pay for his cunning with his life. There were lacunae in this account, as several interested publishers were anxious to point out. But Daniel was adamant: this was fact, not fiction. It could have no cosy, rounded closing act. Mysteries would always remain in the story, and he was unsure that even Hugo Massiter, were he ever to reappear, could explain them all.

A deal was concluded. A book made its way into print with a rapidity Daniel found surprising. The anonymous concerto, as it was now becoming known, continued to create a stir around the world. No publisher wanted to miss the bandwagon. By the time he qualified for early release, twenty months into his sentence, Daniel Forster’s book was an international success. He was mildly wealthy, with his own mansion in the heart of the city and the promise of a continuing career as a writer. A return to Oxford never entered his head. There remained a more important task.

One Monday in September, Toni called. He had an address and also a suggestion. He had been looking for many weeks and remained unsure. People changed. There were no recent photographs. It made sense to see her first, in public, before risking the embarrassment of visiting her at home.

The following day Daniel sat on the number one vaporetto as it crawled across the lagoon towards the Lido. He thought of his first voyage on these flat, uncertain waters, just over two years before in the good ship Sophia, captained, for a while at least, by a dog named Xerxes. No one noticed him. He now wore a thin moustache, and his hair was more closely cropped. This change in his appearance helped keep the curious away.

He watched the jetty bob towards him, unsure of his own feelings. Once ashore, he turned south for a mile, towards the residential area where the market was held. This was another side of Venice, more ordinary, more like the outside world. The Lido had cars and buses. The stink of diesel sat alongside the perfume of oleander bushes.

He crossed the canal that led to the Lido casino, then followed a broad, tree-lined avenue which ran to the shoreline. The city hung low in the distance across the lagoon, a tantalising horizon dominated by the campanile in the square. The street was now given over to a busy market. Daniel put on a pair of sunglasses, then strode forward and soon found himself lost in a pushing, grumbling mass of people arguing vigorously among stalls of clothes and vegetables, fish and cheese.

It took only minutes to find her. Laura stood at the counter of a van near the exit, haggling over a vast chunk of Parmesan. She wore the white nylon housecoat. Her hair was tied back as before. She seemed not a day older. He could remember the smell of her, the touch of her skin. Then she was gone, out towards the main road. He followed, but she had already caught one of the orange buses that meandered along the long main drag of the Lido, from the little airport in the north to Alberoni at the opposite tip of the island. Shaking, he pulled out the address Toni had given him, went outside, and caught the next bus south.

It took ten minutes to reach Alberoni. He had never travelled this far in the lagoon. There were low fields of vegetables and marram grass, some small restaurants and hotels, a handful of shops. The houses were rural villas set behind their own fences. They had orange shutters and front gardens with roses in them.

He asked directions of a young woman with a child in a pushchair. The house was down a cul-de-sac leading to the sea side of the narrow spit of land. He walked down the dusty, potholed road and saw the white housecoat again. She was behind a double iron gate freshly painted green. A young man with blond hair was with her. He wore a white cotton T-shirt and jeans and seemed handsome, with a finely chiselled, tanned face. Daniel guessed that he had been gardening, cutting the elegant rosebushes which formed an ornamental shape behind the gate. She had arrived with her shopping. They had been talking. Then the young man bent down, kissed her on both cheeks, and took her groceries.

Daniel’s mind was spinning. He stopped in the middle of the road and stared at them. The man turned, bags in hand, and looked at him, puzzled. Then Laura turned too. He was too distant to see her expression. He walked forward until he was no more than six feet away, separated from them by the gate. Her hand went to her mouth. The man said something inaudible, in an accent which sounded American. Another figure appeared, shorter, dressed identically to the one who had kissed Laura, but much older, and with pebble-thick glasses. He stared at Daniel and opened the gate, beckoning. Daniel walked into the grounds, unable to take his eyes off her.

“Guess it’s time to be out of here, John,” the younger man said carefully, placing an arm around the other. “Laura’s got a guest.”

“A man?” the older man asked.

“Seems so. You got a name, friend?”

“Daniel,” Laura interrupted. “We haven’t seen each other in a while. This is John. And Michael.”

“First fellow I’ve seen here,” John said, somewhat baffled. “Oh, well. Had to happen. Are we going to that première or what?”

“Sure. Any minute. The film festival,” Michael added by way of explanation. “We’re kind of in the business.”

John waved a set of car keys. “Then let’s leave these young people to themselves. You drive. I’m going to drink.” With that he wandered off towards the garage. A white Alfa stood outside, pristine, gleaming.

“Hey, Laura,” Michael said wryly. “You can take him inside. It’s OK by me. I won’t count the candlesticks when we get back.”

She cast him a cross glance, which Daniel recognised instantly, then said, “Come!”

He carried the shopping bags. They heard the gruff roar of the Alfa as they entered the door. She led him into a large open room with a sparkling Bechstein grand by the window, then sat down in an armchair, put her feet on the coffee table, and stared at him. He perched on the piano stool opposite.

“You look older,” she said.

“You look just the same.”

“Flattery. I’m going to seed.” She reached behind her head and unfastened her hair, then shook it free. “Aren’t I?”

Now that she had let down her hair, he could see it was much longer. “Not that I’ve noticed.”

Beyond the full-length windows was an ornate garden in the English style, with rich herbaceous borders of pink, white, and blue, a sundial, and a colonnaded pergola covered with red roses. Daniel admired it, then asked, “Where do you find them, Laura? It’s like Scacchi and Paul all over again.”

“Nonsense,” she replied firmly. “John and Michael are quite different. Michael is a film producer. And John…helps. They have money. They have taste. They’re honest. Most of all, they’re absent for most of the year, leaving me here to look after this place on my own.”

“And you enjoy that?” he asked, wishing he could erase the note of disapproval from his voice. “Being alone?”

She looked at him, not offended as he had expected. “Daniel. I’m deeply sorry for what happened. I read about you being in jail, and it made me furious. Why didn’t you argue? I think we all went a little crazy that summer. I went a lot crazy, but then you know that. You saw me. All the same.” She hesitated. Her eyes went to the garden. “I didn’t wish to see you again,” she added. “I didn’t want you to find me. I wish you had not found me now.”

“I see,” he said softly.

“I’m sorry. I have this new life. I don’t wish it disturbed.”

“Of course.”

Her nose flared, another familiar gesture he recognised. “Well then,” she said quietly. “That’s that, it seems. You have your career. Your writing. Ca’ Scacchi.”

“I didn’t want Ca’ Scacchi, Laura. Half of it’s still yours. All of it, if you like.”

“Hah! That’s why you come! To bribe me!”

He laughed and watched her try to stifle the amusement in her face. “Not at all. I came to make you cross. It struck me that you may not have had the opportunity for this in a while. You seemed to enjoy it so much once.”

She pushed back her chair until her face was in the shade. “Please don’t play with me, Daniel. I want nothing of Scacchi’s. I want nothing of yours. That part of my life is over. Leave me alone.”

“I will,” he said, “but you must do something first.”

“What?”

“Play for me. Play the Guarneri. You must have it. The music too. I had so much time to think in that prison. Play, please.”

Her face came out of the shadow. “Are you insane, Daniel? What are you talking about? I play nothing. I’m a maid.”

“No,” he said firmly. Daniel took the old newspaper cutting out of his pocket and placed it on the table between them. She did not look at the story, with its garish headline and the photograph of the girl. With her longer hair, the resemblance between Laura and the teenage Susanna Gianni was striking but by no means undeniable. Yet he could understand why Scacchi kept Massiter from the house. “You pretend to be a maid, but I know who you are — Susanna Gianni. Whom Hugo Massiter tried to possess and almost killed, twelve years ago. Who has been hiding ever since and now is determined she should be alone because she wrongly believes there’s no other way to survive. Perhaps to protect me also. You’re like Scacchi — always deceiving in order to protect. That’s why you pushed Amy at me, against my wishes. You wished to save her from Massiter too. It’s a mistake, Laura. We all need the chance to choose, the opportunity to learn from time to time.”

“Daniel!” Laura shook her head and stared at him. “What are you talking about? This girl is dead!”

He remembered the day it came to him. He was in a café near the Frari, wondering about the missing violin and Massiter’s hunger for it. “No. It’s the only possible answer. Giulia Morelli suspected as much, too, and tried to tell me before she died.”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

He had this in his head, as clear as the tale of Oliver Delapole. “Massiter fooled me into thinking it was the Guarneri he sought. But he’d no interest in musical instruments. He didn’t even own one. People were what mattered most to him. He’d always found something odd about Susanna’s supposed death. He knew he didn’t kill her. He told me so himself.”

She did not flinch and simply sat there, arms folded, looking at him as if he were mad.

“That was why he ordered Rizzo to supervise the opening of the grave,” he continued. “He could not be there in person, naturally, since it would draw attention to him. Yet he needed to satisfy his curiosity that Susanna was really dead. He’d no idea the Guarneri was in the coffin or, to begin with, that his lackey had stolen it. But as soon as the fiddle came on the market, he saw his opportunity. He knew that if he could acquire it and recognise it for the one he’d bought a decade before, then perhaps you were alive and wished to sell it out of necessity. And from that point on, he would seek you out again and reclaim what he thought of as his.”

She raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Your next work will be one of fiction, I presume?”

He ignored the taunt. “Moreover, Scacchi understood the peril of the position immediately. He knew the fiddle was inside the casket, because he had, I suspect, reluctantly placed it there at your insistence. He discovered the coffin had been lifted early, with an authority Massiter had forged. Scacchi’s purpose in acquiring the instrument from Rizzo was not for medical treatment or to pay off some gangsters, as he wanted us to believe. It was twofold. To protect you, as he had been doing for a decade. And, at some stage, to restore you to yourself. I believe that last part was imminent when Massiter killed him. You said on the day of the eel contest that Scacchi was about to share his secret with you. What else could it be but the violin? He knew you, Laura, and loved you. He didn’t want you to hide behind this disguise forever.”

She cast him a withering look. “This is rubbish, Daniel. Did you lose your sanity in that institution?”

“Not at all,” he replied. “I found it. Scacchi’s ruse would have worked, too, were it not for Rizzo. Massiter discovered his treachery and probably tortured the entire truth out of him before he died. At that point, Hugo knew that Scacchi had the instrument and no intention of selling it. Why would a man like Scacchi do such a thing? There could be only one explanation. He knew Susanna lived and wished to keep her identity hidden. That was why Massiter visited Scacchi and Paul that night, to extract the truth out of them. And that’s why they died. To save you.”

“You do a disservice to their memory,” she said flatly. “These are such sad fantasies. Besides, if I’m that poor dead girl, whose body was in the coffin?”

He smiled. She had struck at his weak point immediately. “I don’t know. I asked Piero last week—”

“Piero?” she asked, outraged. “Why pester that simpleton with your daydreams?”

“I asked him what had happened, and whether he had by any chance kept some items of Scacchi’s for safekeeping. He blustered and pretended to be angry with me, naturally. As you’re doing now.”

“Piero’s soft in the head!”

“No,” Daniel insisted. “That’s a game you play. He’s a good and loyal friend and has been from the beginning. What I believe happened — you may correct me if you wish — is that he put you in Scacchi’s care the same night Massiter attacked you. Perhaps he found you. Perhaps you found him. I don’t know. Scacchi listened to your story. He knew Massiter for the man he was, knew that he wouldn’t desist from pursuing you. I think also…”

He paused, not wishing to hurt her unnecessarily.

“This tale grows ever more fantastic,” she said sourly. “Do go on.”

“Your mother died a year after this happened. I don’t wish to add to the pain.”

She looked at him, wide-eyed, a little frightened now, he thought. “What do you know of my mother?”

“I suspect she believed you should have gone along with Massiter. You were poor. She saw this as some happy accident, perhaps. Your own feelings were secondary. The fact that Massiter appalled you, that he was violent and wished to make you one of his possessions, meant nothing to her. He tried to ensnare Amy through her parents. Much the same trick.”

“Theories! Fairy stories! You are trying to deconstruct the past like it’s something out of that book of yours. And there’s still a dead girl in the coffin.”

“Of course,” he agreed. “Piero provided the body. He worked in the morgue, after all. I went through the papers from that time. A small boat carrying illegal immigrants from Bosnia capsized off the lagoon the same weekend. Two people died, a girl in her teens and a young boy. Scacchi could manipulate people as much as Massiter when he felt like it. With Piero’s assistance, he would have had no difficulty organising the paperwork so that the corpse of a foreigner found its way into the rio instead of the crematorium. Then, conveniently, he would identify it as Susanna Gianni. I saw his powers myself.”

“Hah! And you think the police would be fooled by that?”

“Not for long. But that is where Massiter’s nature worked in your favour. When he feared his attack would be discovered, he exerted all his influence to shift the blame, finally inculpating that poor conductor to bring the investigation to an end. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone looking too closely at that corpse. There might have been some physical evidence there which would have led to him.”

She was silent. Daniel’s mouth felt dry. He had laid out his evidence just as he had carefully planned over the months he had spent assembling it. Yet if Laura continued to deny everything, there was little he could do.

“I don’t know if you were his lover before that night,” he continued tentatively. “As Amy was. But I’m sure that something happened that evening, more than his beating you. Something so evil that it made you wish to become another person, to divest yourself of your entire identity, even to the point of insisting Scacchi bury your instrument in the coffin.”

Her eyes were on the garden, her face turned away from him.

“You must realise that Scacchi had second thoughts on that last matter,” Daniel said. “He was not simply keeping you hidden from Massiter by purchasing the Guarneri. At some point he hoped, I believe, that you would resume at least part of your true identity. I think…”

He hesitated again, seeing from her posture that she was retreating further into herself.

“My love,” he said firmly. “I’ve been to that place. I’ve walked down that tunnel, stood in that room beneath the earth. I’ve seen the paintings and all his other possessions. I’ve looked at that low bed in the corner—”

“Stop!” Laura’s head was in her hands. He rose, walked across the room, knelt in front of her, touched the warm, soft skin of her fingers.

“I’m sorry.” He said it quietly. “I don’t mean to torture you. Only to say that I, too, have seen inside Hugo Massiter’s head. I know what lurks there.”

She pulled away her hands and stared at him, an older person now, one who had witnessed something he had been spared. Daniel felt guilt for inflicting such pain upon her. “You know nothing. You haven’t the faintest notion what it’s like to be devoured by that man and see no escape.”

“I’ve some idea,” he replied. “I saw it in Amy’s face.”

“And she’s free,” Laura said, half-amazed. Her hand ran through his hair, gently touched his moustache.

“Perhaps,” he replied. “As free as one gets. I wonder if any of us escapes him completely. He no longer owned you, yet he marked your life, so much that you became another person and withdrew from the world into Ca’ Scacchi.”

She gave him a cold look. “Did I? Is that what you want from me, Daniel Forster? A confession?”

He said nothing, feeling foolish.

“If this is all true, Daniel, what business is it of yours?”

“You know why it’s my business.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t have it. This is the past, and one shouldn’t return to it. You’re such a clever one, Daniel. Why could Scacchi not have chosen a fool?”

“We can deny what’s happened, Laura. We can’t erase it.”

“Really?” she replied. “So you think Piero and I should remind each other constantly of a night when he found a naked and half-dead teenage girl and saved her life? And whenever I see a frail old man, I should think of Scacchi when he lay there in his chair, and this crazy stream of words coming from him about the fiddle and Massiter and you, with Paul dead and you asleep in my bed at that moment?”

He tried to speak, but there were no words, though his head felt as if it might burst.

“I hate your hair like this,” she said. “It’s too short, too spiky. How can a woman run her hands through that? The moustache must come off too. In some ways you have extraordinarily bad taste.”

“Thank you,” he said, smiling.

“Where did this idea arise, Daniel?”

He recalled that as precisely as the moment he first understood Massiter’s true motive for seeking the Guarneri. It was in his prison cell, late one night, when he was unable to push the memory of her from his head. “I thought about the day I went on Hugo’s boat. I sat there, with Massiter and Amy. As we left the quayside, I looked back, into that little park. You were wearing jeans and a red T-shirt. And sunglasses, as you usually did outside. You couldn’t stop looking at the boat. At the time I thought it was me…”

“Men!” she objected. “Everything revolves around themselves.”

“Quite. But it was Massiter, naturally. You wished to see him from afar, to convince yourself his presence remained as malevolent as you remembered.”

“I wished to walk onto that boat and tear his eyes out. I didn’t like having him near you. But I was afraid. I am afraid.”

“You were going to see your ‘mother,’ or so I believed.”

“Ah,” she said, giving nothing away.

“In prison, when I was bored, I would imagine your life, Laura. I would try to dream what you were doing at any particular time. And what you had done that summer when I wasn’t with you. Those visits to Mestre, for example.”

“I confess,” she said swiftly. “I had a lover. He was a lorry driver with horny hands and bad breath. It was merely a sexual infatuation.”

“Rubbish!” he exclaimed. “I imagined it precisely. You wouldn’t play in Ca’ Scacchi, for fear of troubling the old man. So there was some small musical gathering in Mestre. A string quarter, perhaps. You borrowed a cheap violin. You played beneath your capabilities. But you played, and that was what mattered.”

Her green eyes narrowed. “I’m not fond of your talent for imagining, Daniel Forster. It’s unnatural.”

“I apologise.”

“You still apologise too much as well! And there was a lover. Once. I’m not some blushing virgin.”

Daniel touched her cheek, then gently, nervously ran his fingers through her hair. “You have a lover now,” he said.

“Oh, Daniel.” Abruptly she turned away, but not before he saw the sudden change in her demeanour.

“Please play for me, Laura. I’ve waited a very long time to hear you.”

She reached forward, kissed him briefly on the forehead, ruffled her hand through his short, cropped hair as a reproach, and left the room. Ten minutes later, a period of time which seemed to last forever, she reappeared. The white housecoat was gone. She wore a red cotton shirt and cream trousers. A silver necklace glittered at her throat. Her long hair was now on her shoulders, just as it was in the photograph in the newspapers. In her hand was the fat brown Guarneri he had once touched, a lifetime ago, in a warehouse in the Arsenale.

He was lost for words looking at her. It was as if she were some new, changed person. As if Susanna Gianni had slipped out from beneath Laura’s skin.

“I don’t always wear a uniform,” she said in return. “I’m not a nun. Stop doing that fish thing with your mouth, Daniel. It’s unattractive.”

“I’m—”

“No! Just sit, please, and listen.”

Laura stood by the piano, straight-backed, with a determined poise. There was no music. She lifted the fiddle to her neck, tucked it beneath her chin, then brought the bow down on the strings. She chose the most difficult section: the virtuoso finale. Daniel closed his eyes and listened to her play, let the full, bold sound of the Guarneri rise to occupy every last inch of his consciousness.

Amy had performed this magnificently, but she was, next to Laura, a child. Now the piece had an added intensity, a wild, mature beauty it had never before possessed. This was how the work was meant to be played. She had mastered every last cadence and harmony until there was nothing left to change. It was perfection, of an ethereal, almost supernatural kind.

When she finished, Laura raised an amused eyebrow at his silence. “Why do you look so surprised? I can practise here, Daniel. I don’t have to run and hide in Mestre every time I feel like taking out the bow. How do you think I spend these long months of solitude the masters of the house allow me?”

He stood up and, with her permission, took the Guarneri. The instrument was curious: a workmanlike piece of extraordinary size. Yet the sound it made… Daniel gave it back to her. He recalled that day on the Arsenale and some sudden flash of colour in his head. Rizzo feared the fiddle. In a way, he did too.

“Did I perform well?” she asked.

“You were magnificent.”

“Thank you! Do you really think that an Englishman wrote such a lovely piece of music? I read your book.”

Daniel bristled. “All the evidence points to such a conclusion. Why shouldn’t an Englishman have written it?”

Laura laughed. “Don’t be so touchy. It just sounds… wrong. I’ve a fancy it was written by a woman.”

“You mean for a woman?”

“No. By. I feel that when I play. You’re the historian. Tell me it’s nonsense.”

“It would certainly be… unusual, let us say.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes I dream too much. Do you?”

“Only of you,” he replied. “I should like to hear you play in Ca’ Scacchi, Laura.”

Her face fell. “I can’t. Think. You must know why.”

“For the life of me I don’t. I have a house we both adore, one that feels empty without you. As does my entire existence. From the moment on Piero’s boat, I think I knew as much, but I was too stupid to realise it.”

Her face fell onto his neck. He felt her arms move around his waist, then the warmth of her tears touched his skin. Laura’s voice whispered in his ear.

“Scacchi once told me we were all born hurtling towards Heaven, Daniel. I denied it for both our sakes, but since we met, I have always felt I was born hurtling towards you. I don’t know why. It terrifies me that I understand so little about these feelings.”

“Then we’re the same—”

“No,” she insisted. “It cannot be. You don’t appreciate that man for what he truly is. A devil. Nothing less. He lives. He waits. He’ll come for us one day. He’ll devour us because he believes we have given him the right.”

“Massiter’s gone,” he said firmly. “No one knows where.”

“He sees us, Daniel. You in particular. With your riches and your book and your fame. Haven’t you considered that? You’ve profited from Massiter more than anyone.”

Daniel’s train of thought, so carefully organised beforehand, stumbled. “For what reason would he return? Revenge?”

“No! Don’t you understand anything? To possess us, Daniel. To own every last part of us. Even our souls.”

Beyond the window, above the distant horizon of the Adriatic, the sky was perfect, cloudless.

“You could have killed him.” There was a note of accusation in her voice. “I read it. Why did you choose otherwise?”

It was a question he asked himself from time to time, and one it never took long to answer. “Because if I had, I would have become like him. Joined his hell. And I would have lost you forever, and deserved to.”

She was unmoved. “That devil will seek us out, Daniel. It’s in his nature.”

“And what if he does? He has no power unless we give it to him. If we possess each other more fully than Hugo Massiter could begin to comprehend, what’s left for him to own? What space will our lives allow him to occupy?”

Laura took her hands away and refused to meet his gaze. “Still, he will come,” she said softly. “One day.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted. “But if I leave here without you, I don’t care in any case.”

A light fired at the back of her eyes. “And is that the kind of blackmail you hope will win me, Daniel Forster? Walking in here with your scrawny moustache and your spiky hair?”

“I’d rather hoped as much,” he said lamely.

“Pah!”

She turned and was gone, out into another room — the kitchen, he imagined. He went to the window and admired the view. A formation of wild ducks crossed the sky in a squawking vee, heading northwards for Sant’ Erasmo and, if they were unlucky, the jaws of a certain black dog he knew. There were worse places than Alberoni. It was, at least, the lagoon.

He heard her cough. Laura stood holding two glasses of bloodred liquid. He smiled and held out his hand.

“Wait,” she ordered.

In the corner of the room a small ornamental clock struck six. When it had ended, she handed him his glass.

“Spritz!” Laura said, smiling. “Timing is important, Daniel Forster. I like my days divided in an orderly fashion. Not running backwards and forwards as they fancy. You should know this about me.”

“Spritz!” he replied, raising his glass. “I had guessed that, to be honest.”

“Good. Is there something I should know about you?”

“Only that I’ll never cease to love you, whatever may happen. And I’ll never leave you, because that would be like leaving myself.”

She cocked her head to one side, thinking.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I was remembering the last time you kissed me. You smelled of eel.”

Daniel was surprised. It was one memory which had eluded him. “No. That was the first time I kissed you. The last was some hours later.”

He fell silent. She was staring at the room as if about to take her leave of it. She seemed serene at last. At this moment he could almost convince himself that every last painful act of the recent past was justified by their reunion.

She turned and wrapped her arms around him. She was shivering in the dying heat of the evening. Their bodies locked together, like two pieces from the same puzzle.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Of us. Of how I feel when we are together. Of what lies ahead.”

He gazed beyond the glass at the low, flat marshland and the empty grey horizon. As he watched, a solitary figure walked slowly across the pebble beach, in the distance beyond the dunes, then passed behind a hummock of marram grass and was gone. There would always be shapes in the shadows. She saw them too.

They held each other tightly.

The doorbell sounded and she trembled in his arms.

Daniel strode to the front of the house. A boy of no more than nine stood there selling apples and pears fresh from the orchard. Daniel gave him some notes and took a few apples. The child disappeared down the drive, half running. When Daniel turned, she was standing in the hall holding a small kitchen knife. He walked up to her, took the blade out of her hands, and said, “Come with me, Laura. Please.”

“Of course,” she said nervously, and quickly removed the silver chain, then began to tie up her hair and fumble in her bag for the sunglasses. He waited, wondering if she would seek out the white housecoat too.

“No,” he said, taking her hands. Overawed by her beauty, he gently pulled forward her auburn hair until it sat over her shoulders again.

Daniel walked over the threshold of the villa, breathed the late-summer air, and led her outside. Arm in arm, slowly, not speaking, they walked to the small modern promenade, past the restaurants, past the little hotels, then sat by the water’s edge.

The lagoon mirrored the gold of the sky. It was a perfect evening. The last of the season’s swallows darted above their heads. Families played on the narrow strip of beach. Couples walked hand in hand along the concrete path. In the distance stood the outline of the city, shimmering in the haze on the horizon.

Laura’s head fell on his shoulder. He felt the moist warmth of her lips on his skin.

“Who are we?” she asked.

“The blessed,” Daniel said, and knew at that moment that nothing, not even Hugo Massiter, would part them again.