A Twist of the Knife

Venice aphrodisiac

The first time they came to Venice, Johnny had told his wife he was on an important case; Joy had told her husband she was going to see her Italian relatives.

In the large, dingy hotel room with its window overlooking the Grand Canal, they tore off each other’s clothes before they had even unpacked, and made love to the sound of lapping water and water taxis blattering past outside. She was insatiable; they both were. They made love morning, noon and night, only venturing out for food to stoke their energy. On that trip they barely even took time out to see the sights of the city. They had eyes only for each other. Horny eyes, each greedy for the other’s naked body. They were aware that they had precious little time.

Johnny whispered to her that Woody Allen, whose movies they both loved, was once asked if he thought that sex was dirty, and Woody had replied, ‘Only if you are doing it right.’

So they did it right. Over and over again. And in between they laughed a lot. Johnny told Joy she was the sexiest creature in the world. She told him no, he was.

One time, when he was deep inside her, she whispered into Johnny’s ear, ‘Let’s promise each other to come back and make love here in this room every year, for ever.’

‘Even after we’re dead?’ he said.

‘Why not? You’re stiff when you’re dead, aren’t you? Stiff as a gondolier’s oar!’

‘You’re a wicked woman, Joy Jackson.’

‘You wouldn’t like me if I wasn’t, you horny devil.’

‘We could come back as ghosts, couldn’t we, and haunt this room?’

‘We will!’

Two years later, acrimoniously divorced and free, they married. And they honeymooned in Venice in the same hotel — a former palazzo — in the same room. While they were there, they vowed, as before, to return to the same room every year for their anniversary, and they did so, without fail. In the beginning they always got naked long before they got around to unpacking. Often, after dining out, they felt so horny they couldn’t wait until they got back to the hotel.

One time they did it late at night in a moored gondola. They did it beneath the Rialto Bridge. And under several other bridges. Venice cast its spell — coming here was an aphrodisiac to them. They drank Bellinis in their favourite café in Piazza San Marco, swigged glorious white wines from the Friuli district and gorged on grilled seafood in their favourite restaurant, the Corte Sconta, which they always got lost trying to find, every year.

Some mornings, spent with passion, they’d hop on an early water taxi and drink espressos and grappa on the Lido at sunrise. Later, back in their dimly lit hotel room, they would take photographs of each other naked and film themselves making love. One time, for fun, they made plaster-of-Paris impressions of what Joy liked to call their ‘rude bits’. They were so in lust, nothing, it seemed, could stop them, or could ever change.

Once, on an early anniversary, they visited Isola di San Michele, Venice’s cemetery island. Staring at the graves, Johnny asked her, ‘Are you sure you’re still going to fancy me when I’m dead?’

‘Probably even more than when you’re alive!’ she had replied. ‘If that’s possible.’

‘We might rattle a bit, if we were — you know — both skeletons,’ he had said.

‘We’ll have to do it quietly, so we don’t wake up the graveyard,’ she’d replied.

‘You’re a bad girl,’ he had said, before kissing her on the lips.

‘You’d never have loved me if I was good, would you?’

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Probably not.’

‘Let me feel your oar!’

That was then. Now it was thirty-five years later. They’d tried — and failed — to start a family. For a while it had been fun trying, and eventually they’d accepted their failure. A lot of water under the bridge. Or rather, all four hundred and nine of Venice’s bridges. They’d seen each one, and walked over most of them. Johnny ticked them off on a coffee-stained list he brought with him each year, and which became more and more creased each time he unfolded it. Johnny was a box-ticker, she’d come to realize. ‘I like to see things in tidy boxes,’ he would say.

He said it rather too often.

‘Only joking,’ he said, when she told him she was fed up hearing this.

They say there’s many a true word spoken in jest but, privately, he was not jesting. Plans were taking shape in his mind. Plans for a future without her.

In happier times they’d shared a love of Venetian glass, and used to go across to the island of Murano on every trip to see their favourite glass factory, Novità Murano. They filled their home in Brighton with glass ornaments — vases, candlesticks, paperweights, figurines, goblets. Glass of every kind. They say that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and they didn’t. Not physical ones. Just metaphorical ones. More and more.

The stones had started the day she peeked on his computer.

Johnny had been a police officer — a homicide detective. She had worked in the Divisional Intelligence Unit of the same force. After he had retired, at forty-nine, he’d become bored. He managed to get a job in the fulfilment department of a mail-order company that supplied framed cartoons of bad puns involving animals. Their best-selling cartoon range was one with pictures of bulls on: Bullshit. Bullderdash. Bullish. And so on.

Johnny sat at the computer all day, ticking boxes in a job he loathed, despatching tasteless framed cartoons to people he detested for buying them, and then going home to a woman who looked more like the bulls in the cartoons every day. He sought out diversions on his computer and began by visiting porn sites. Soon he started advertising himself, under various false names, on Internet contact sites.

That was what Joy found when she peeked into the contents of his laptop one day when he had gone to play golf — at least, that had been his story. He had not been to any golf club. It was strokes and holes of a very different kind he had been playing and, confronted with the evidence, he’d been forced to fess up. He was full frontal, naked and erect on eShagmates.

Naked and erect for everyone in the world but her.

And so it was, on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, that they returned to the increasingly dilapidated palazzo on the Grand Canal, each with a very different agenda in their hearts and minds to the ones they’d had on those heady days of their honeymoon and the years that followed.

He planned to murder her here in Venice. He’d planned last year to murder her during a spring weekend break in Berlin, and the year before that, in Barcelona. Each time he had bottled out. As a former homicide detective, if anyone knew how to get away with murder, he did, but equally he was aware that few murderers ever succeeded. Murderers made mistakes in the white heat of the moment. All you needed was one tiny mistake — a clothing fibre, a hair, a discarded cigarette butt, a scratch, a footprint, a CCTV camera you hadn’t spotted. Anything.

Certain key words were fixed in his mind from years of grim experience. Motive. Body. Murder weapon. They were the three things that would catch out a murderer. Without any one of those elements, it became harder. Without all three, near impossible.

So all he had to do was find a way to dispose of her body. Lose the murder weapon (as yet not chosen). And, as for motive — well, who was to know he had one? Other than the silly friends Joy gossiped with constantly.

The possibilities for murder in Venice were great. Joy could not swim and its vast lagoon presented opportunities for drowning — except it was very shallow. There were plenty of buildings with rickety steps where a person could lose their footing. Windows high enough to ensure a fatal fall.

It had been years since they’d torn each other’s clothes off in the hotel room when they’d arrived. Instead, today, as usual, Johnny logged on and hunched over his computer. He had a slight headache, which he ignored. Joy ate a bar of chocolate from the minibar, followed by a tin of nuts, then the complimentary biscuits that came with the coffee. Then she had a rest, tired from the journey. When she woke, to the sound of Johnny farting, she peered suspiciously over his shoulder to check if he was on one of his porn chat sites.

What she had missed while she slept was the emails back and forth between Johnny and his new love, Mandy, a petite divorcee he’d met at the gym where he’d gone to keep his six-pack in shape. He planned to return from Venice a free man.

The Bellinis in their favourite café had changed, and were no longer made with fresh peach juice or real champagne. Venice now smelled of drains. The restaurant was still fine, but Johnny barely tasted his food, he was so deep in thought. And his headache seemed to be worsening. Joy had drunk most of the bottle of white wine and, with the Bellini earlier, into which he had slipped a double vodka, seemed quite smashed. They had six more nights here. Once, the days had flown by. Now he struggled to see how they could even fill tomorrow. With luck he would not have to.

He called the waiter over for the bill, pointing to his wife who was half asleep and apologizing that she was drunk. It could be important that the waiter would remember this. Yes, poor lady, so drunk her husband struggled to help her out...

They staggered along a narrow street, and crossed a bridge that arced over a narrow canal. Somewhere in the dark distance a gondolier was singing a serenade.

‘You haven’t taken me on a gondola in years,’ she chided, slurring her words. ‘I haven’t felt your oar much in years either,’ she teased. ‘Maybe I could feel it tonight?’

I’d rather have my gall bladder removed without an anaesthetic, he thought.

‘But I suppose you can’t get it up these days,’ she taunted. ‘You don’t really have an oar any more, do you? All you have is a little dead mouse that leaks.’

The splash of an oar became louder. So did the singing.

The gondola was sliding by beneath them. In it, entwined in each other’s arms, were a young man and a young woman, clearly in love, as they had once been. As he was now with Mandy Brent. He stared down at the inky water.

Two ghosts stared back.

Then only one.

It took Joy some moments to realize anything was wrong. Then she turned in drunken panic, screaming for help, for a doctor, for an ambulance. A kindly neurosurgeon told her some hours later, in broken English, that there was nothing anyone could have done. Her husband had been felled by a massive cerebral aneurysm. He would have been dead within seconds.

Back in England, after Johnny’s body had been repatriated, Joy’s troubles really started. The solicitor informed her that he had left half of his entire estate, which was basically the house they lived in, to a woman she had never heard of. The next thing she knew, the woman was on the phone wanting to discuss the funeral arrangements.

‘I’m having him cremated,’ Joy said.

‘He told me he wanted to be buried,’ Mandy Brent insisted. ‘I’d like that. I’d like to have somewhere I can go and sit with him.’

All the more reason, thought Joy, to have him cremated. But there was another bigger reason she had been thinking of. Much bigger.

The following year, on what would have been their thirty-sixth wedding anniversary, Joy returned to Venice, to the same room in the dilapidated former palazzo. She unpacked from her suitcase the small grey plastic urn and put it on the windowsill. She stared at it, then at the view of the Grand Canal beyond.

‘Remember what we said to each other, Johnny? Do you? That promise we made to each other? About coming back here? Well, I’m helping us to keep that promise.’

The next morning she took a water taxi across to Murano. She spoke to the same courteous assistant in the glass factory, Valerio Barbero, who had helped them every year since they had started coming. Signor Barbero was an old man now, stooped and close to retirement. He told Joy how very deeply sympathetic he was, how sad, what a fine gentleman Signor Jones had been. And — as if this was quite a normal thing for him — he accepted the contents of the package and her design without even the tiniest flicker of his rheumy eyes. It would be ready in three days, he assured her.

It was. Joy could barely contain her excitement on the water taxi ride back to the mainland. She stopped in St Mark’s Square to gulp down two Bellinis in rapid succession — to get her in the mood, she decided.

Then she entered the hotel room, hung the ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the door and locked it from the inside. She untied the pretty blue bow around the tall box and carefully opened it, removing the two contents.

The first item was the plaster-of-Paris mould she had taken of Johnny’s rude bits, all those years ago, when he had been particularly drunk and even more aroused than usual. The second was the exquisite glass replica, now filled with the grey powder from the urn.

Slowly, feeling pleasantly tipsy from the Bellinis, she undressed, then lay on her back on the bed. ‘Remember, Johnny?’ she whispered. ‘Remember that promise we made each other that very first time we came here? About coming back and making love here in this room every year forever? You were worried, weren’t you, about not being able to get stiff enough for me after you were dead? Well, you really shouldn’t have concerned yourself, should you?’

She caressed the long, slender glass. Hard as rock.

Stiff as a gondolier’s oar.

Just like she remembered him.