by Riley Banks
Behind the bed was a walk-through closet bigger than Charlotte’s entire London apartment and next to that an ensuite bathroom with full size granite bath, private jacuzzi, sauna and a shower large enough for a whole football team to shower at once.
‘You’re kidding right? I’m not really staying here, am I?’
Damon’s look was quizzical. ‘Why would I be kidding?’
‘Are you staying here too?’
She eyed the bed with new meaning, wondering if that was what he intended, to get her alone and have his way.
Yesterday she would have been horrified by the thought but now she’d rather that than the alternative - being alone.
‘My room is just down the hall.’
He turned to leave but panic clawed her throat.
‘Wait. Don’t go.’
‘What is it Charlotte?’ His look was more shocked than expectant.
‘I don’t want to be alone right now.’
It was never meant as some sleazy pick up line. Charlotte was afraid. It had been less than twenty four hours since she had almost died and now they were scurrying away to Portofino because the man who had tried to kill her had somehow gotten free. He could be on this boat right now, waiting to finish what he had already started.
And thankfully, Damon got it.
He pulled her into a calming embrace. ‘I’m really sorry any of this happened to you,’ he said, his voice full of guilt. ‘I should never have let it happen.’
Charlotte didn’t understand.
She had led Wilson on. She had used him and made him angry. His anger had grown – far more than Charlotte ever could have predicted.
None of that was on Damon.
‘How could it possibly be your fault?’
He didn’t speak for a long time but he wasn’t ignoring her. He was struggling with something. She could see it in his face.
After a lifetime, he met her gaze and his eyes were pained.
When he did speak, she understood why he thought it was his fault.
‘You never would have kissed him if I had just walked away sooner.’
Campagni reached up and touched the 9mm Beretta holstered beneath his thick, winter coat, feeling naked without his trusted MP5K.
But this particular job required subtlety. The Beretta was backup and wasn’t to be used on the target.
With all the curtains closed, the interior of the house was dark, the eerie flickering glow from an open fire the only light.
Sticking to the shadows, Campagni moved through the darkness, weaving his way through the large house until he was behind the target.
A gust of wind caught the front door, forcing it open as it slammed against the wall, startling the target out of his seat as he scurried off to investigate, leaving his glass on the side table.
Campagni crept closer, pulling a small vial from under his coat. He unstopped the ampule, pouring the contents into the whisky glass. He then moved back into the shadows.
Jacobs came back into the room, muttering and cursing under his breath. He sat back down before the fire, taking the glass in his shaking hands as he gulped back the smooth liquor.
The effects were instantaneous – the potent poison stopping the old man’s heart. The crystal glass clattered against the slate, bouncing once before it shattered.
Jacobs clutched his chest, gasping as he struggled to inhale. He was dead before Campagni reached the front door.
Heading back out into the snow wet winter air, Campagni climbed back into the car, driving back to the airport at Interlaken, where the plane waited to take him to Italy.
‘One down, one more to go.’
Pieter could feel another headache coming on.
Ever since the Harvey press trip had arrived at Torre del Morino on Giudecca Island – a day early he might add - he’d had one drama after another, reshuffling paying guests to accommodate the journalists, upgrading three of his most important business guests to penthouse suites to soothe their ruffled feathers.
The three-page double-sided fax he gripped in his hand sent his headache spiralling into the stratosphere.
‘How long has this been sitting here?’ he asked, waving the document around like a red flag before a pack of bulls.
Irina shrugged her shoulders. ‘No idea,’ she said, returning her attention to the five female journalists wanting directions to St Mark’s Basilica.
Angeline was issuing gym passes to three male journalists and didn’t even bother acknowledging him, batting her eyelids at the handsome men like the flirtatious tease he knew her to be. He’d fire her if she weren’t his cousin’s daughter.
‘What is it?’ Gasparo said, loading a pile of bags onto his bellboy’s trolley.
‘A rider,’ Pieter said.
That got Angeline’s attention. Riders usually meant a celebrity was rolling into town and Angeline was always quick to shower them with attention in the hopes they’d overlook her hooked nose and beady eyes and screw her anyway. ‘Whose rider?’
‘BJ Harvey.’
Pieter had managed the Torre for three years. In that time, he’d catered to the needs and desires of the rich, the famous and the infamous.
He also catered to members of the Harvey family, the family privilege extending to even the most distant cousin.
Without exception, they all had their peculiar requests – all bar Damon who only ever requested a decent coffee, a selection of newspapers and a few favourite foods.
Pieter was disappointed to hear Damon had cancelled his stay in Venice but thankful that he had chosen Anita to replace him.
She was almost as easy going as her brother with just a few tweaks on his requests. The kitchens had to be restocked with ethically caught seafood, Almas caviar, Fritz Knipschildt chocolates, Bling h2O, and pasta handmade by Venice’s most famed chef. In her room, she wanted Charlotte Thomas linen, fresh flowers, feather pillows, a personal masseuse, Luciano Sandrone Barolo wines, and audiences with her favourite designers, all only too happy to shower Anita with their latest designs.
It could have been far worse. It could have been Carl with his drunken tantrums and destructive ways.
Or Bill whose most bizarre request to date was a demand to repaint the penthouse suite black, bolt six inch iron rings into the walls at strategic points and order a collection of painful sexual devices from a BDSM store in Paris, turning the beautiful suite into a virtual dungeon.
Pieter didn’t even want to think about what he’d got up to in there, or who had been his unfortunate victim.
Yet none of their demands held a candle to BJ.
The man wasn’t just a diva. He was a royal pain in the ass, throwing the careful planning of the hotel into total disarray.
Pieter scanned the rider.
Just as he suspected, BJ insisted on taking the top three floors of the hotel for himself, refusing to be located near anyone not in his immediate party, with the exception of one journalist – Charlotte Burke, who was to be accommodated in the room alongside BJ’s.
Fuck. That meant Pieter would have to relocate his business guests again, possibly to another hotel.
He’d offer them a complimentary stay at a time of their choosing, of course, but after the balls-up, he wouldn’t blame them if they never returned to the Torre.
And yes, BJ wanted his usual Vividus mattress dragged out of storage.
At almost $60,000 it was the most expensive bed in the hotel and would have made a great selling feature for the penthouse suite if BJ didn’t insist it only be made available to him.
There was just one problem. BJ was only in town for six days a year, during Carnivale and the Venice Film Festival, meaning for the remaining 359 days, it collected dust in the basement.
‘Irina, get on the phone and order a case of Kona Nigari pronto. Tell them we’ll pay extra if they can have it here by the morning.’
The desalinated water was collected from two thousand feet below the waters of Hawaii and purported to have a number o
f health benefits.
Would bloody want to at more than $500 a litre.
Too bad BJ didn’t read the label. The highly concentrated water was supposed to be diluted with regular water, not drunk straight.
With any luck, the excess minerals in his system would have the opposite affect.
If there was one small consolation Pieter could take from BJ’s latest rider it was that BJ had started flying his own staff in. Private chefs, security personnel and bodyguards, waitresses, hairdressers, tailors, chauffeurs, a physiotherapist, even his own maids.
After all, he couldn’t trust just anyone to turn down his sheets and collect his dirty laundry.
The flip side to that coin was that each staff member had a list of demands almost as long as their diva boss. Everything from the brand of toiletries they needed to the wattage of lighting in the room, to the times the gymnasium and pool were to be made available to BJ and his party – and hence, unavailable to other guests.
If that wasn’t bad enough, BJ also travelled with his friends, though friend was a very loose interpretation of the word.
Leeches was more appropriate.
BJ and his entourage spent most of their time partying and screwing in inappropriate places, causing general upheaval for Pieter’s employees and the paying hotel guests.
Pieter scanned to the last page, wondering what time the freak show arrived.
6am tomorrow morning.
Good. He had eighteen hours of sanity left before the locusts descended.
Chapter Twenty-Seven:
Charlotte couldn’t meet Damon’s knowing blue eyes. They both knew there was an element of truth to his words.
But Damon had no idea why she had feared his approach.
It had more to do with her past than any threat he posed to her safety, the demons of her childhood reaching out, trying to strangle off her hard-fought-for contentment, driving her to act impetuously, to react rather than think.
The end result was the same.
Her fear had caused her to kiss Zac.
Now they were still suffering the ramifications of that ill-thought action.
Had she seen the last of Zac Wilson?
Or would he become another ghost to watch over her shoulder for?
The walls closed in, making the enormous room seem much smaller than it was.
‘I need fresh air.’ She threw open the double doors that led onto her private balcony, stepping outside.
The balcony was larger than it first looked, wrapping around the stateroom like a warm embrace.
She walked to the prow, resting her hands on the railing. Spinner dolphins performed an acrobatic dance in the ship’s wake far below, ducking and weaving as they raced the speeding vessel.
‘Are you okay?’
She nodded but it felt hollow.
‘Do you want me to leave?’
Again the sense of panic at being alone. ‘No. Please stay.’
He smiled, his teeth chattering together as he did. ‘It is freezing out here. Wouldn’t you prefer to go downstairs? We could get a bite to eat or watch a movie.’
‘Can we just stay here? It’s so beautiful…’ Her voice trailed off as the dolphins tired of their game.
‘Okay but at least let me turn on the heaters and order some food. I’m starving.’
He returned a moment later with a thin blanket that he draped around Charlotte’s shoulders.
They stood there for a long time, close but not touching, staring out at the sea, each lost in their private thoughts, only moving when a uniformed attendant approached with a tray of fresh bruschetta and a bottle of Le Petit Cheval in hand.
They sat side-by-side on one sunbed, the tray of bruschetta in front of them.
Damon opened the wine, pouring it into two ballooned glasses, frowning just before he handed her one. ‘Sorry, I should have asked if you like red. If you don’t, I can order something else.’
‘Red is fine,’ she said, but on first sip, she realised what a gross understatement fine was.
The wine was the smoothest Charlotte had ever drunk, caressing her tongue and warming her from the inside out.
After one glass, Charlotte was relaxed enough to realise how wrong she had been about other things too.
Damon for instance.
When she first met him, she had convinced herself he was a spoiled, conceited brat; another rich wanker who trod on the little people to get ahead in the world.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
He was nothing like that. He was a true gentleman. One of the good guys.
And, as Miranda had pointed out on more than one occasion, very easy on the eye.
She glanced across at him. His eyes were closed, his face tilted up, enjoying the warmth that radiated from the patio heater.
He had a strong, masculine face with angular cheekbones and just a hint of five o’clock shadow.
Yet his masculine features were in sharp contrast to his long, almost girlish eyelashes and the soft fullness of his lips.
She didn’t realise she was staring at his lips until she saw them turn up in a smile. Sometime during her quiet contemplation, he had opened his eyes and noticed her staring.
‘What are you smiling about?’
‘What were you thinking about?’ he asked, returning her question with one of his own.
Her cheeks grew warm and not from the wine.
How could she tell him that she had been imagining what it would be like to kiss his lips?
The tarmac at Kingsford Smith International Airport was as hot as a fucking oven. Sweat beaded on Baker’s upper lip, as much from the heat of the summer sun as from his nerves.
He had a forged airport badge pinned to his chest and a matching counterfeit passport in his back pocket; the picture on both now matching his altered appearance – hair darkened and cut military style, coloured contact lenses altering his brown eyes to green. He hadn’t shaved in days and, while the feeble growth on his chin could hardly be called a beard, it did help to distort his features. A Sydney Airport cap, pulled low on his head to shade his eyes, rounded out the disguise.
He stood back from the action, watching, as the ground crew loaded packed crates into the open mouth of the converted Airbus A330.
‘Okay, you know the drill?’ the tattooed man beside him said.
It was the first time they had met. Baker knew nothing about the man other than the fact that they shared a mutual friend on the inside. They both agreed it was best they didn’t exchange names.
Names always complicated things.
‘Yeah, I think so,’ Baker said, wiping his upper lip. ‘What about customs?’
‘Don’t worry about that. It’s already been handled.’
‘And the crew on board?’
‘You’re just a new crewmember. But, with your picture circulating through the papers, keep to yourself as much as possible.’
That picture was the reason he couldn’t use commercial airlines, even with the fake passport and makeover. It was too risky.
‘Okay. Thanks again for everything,’ Baker said, shaking the man’s ham sized hand.
The guy grunted and walked off, leaving Baker to make his way towards the crew entrance of the big, bland bird.
The plane was the same make and model as many passenger aircraft but it had been heavily modified to fit its role as a freight airliner – no windows and a tiny passenger compartment with the rest of the bulk utilised for cargo storage.
Swallowing hard, Baker walked towards the plane, knowing that the real difficulty would start at the other end.
Miranda was in Venice, arguably one of the most beautiful cities on earth, yet she had seen nothing beyond the four walls of her hotel room.
She might have been locked in an airless cubicle rather than a sumptuous suite at the Torre del Morino for all the notice she paid to the landmarks arrayed like a painter’s canvas from her balcony; the postcard beauty of St Mark’s Square with its domed, Byzantinian basilica or the
sweeping grandeur of the Palazzo Ducale di Venezia.
All she could think about was the thinly veiled rage she’d seen reflected in Anita Harvey’s face as she explained her theories.
Of course, Ms Harvey tried to keep the anger hidden and it was never aimed at Miranda herself, but it was enough to convince her she was on the right track.
Enough to convince her to stay in her room and work through the afternoon.
The girls were disappointed that she didn’t want to explore the city with them, and downright pissed off when she refused to come down for yet another cocktail party, not understanding why she’d rather work than party.
Her only break came when she ran a hot bath, immersing her tired, sore body in the sudsy water.
Afterwards, she dressed in her favourite nightie and ordered room service but was distracted by her work before she got around to eating.
The silver tray of cold food still sat by the bed.
It’s here. I know it’s here somewhere. I wish I understood this mindless medical jargon.
A copy of the autopsy report lay open on the desk next to her laptop.
How did Anita Harvey make the jump so fast?
She kept coming back to the question and it troubled her that Anita had accepted her theory so readily, almost as if she already suspected it.
If that’s the case, then maybe she knows who did it?
You are so far out of your depth, girl.
Miranda needed Charlotte and she didn’t think she could wait another two days until they met up in Portofino. Dialling her friend’s number, she waited anxiously as the phone rang out. After trying two more times, she sat down to write an email, attaching the file first as was her practice.
Hey Charl, need your help deciphering these docs on J.Harvey death. Attaching files for you to look through. Some troubling discrep-
Someone knocked on the door, interrupting her train of thought. Miranda got up, her impatience bubbling over.
‘I asked not to be disturbed,’ she said, opening the door.
A man stood in the doorway.
He wore well-cut black slacks and supple, black leather loafers; a cool, white shirt open to reveal a large portion of his muscly chest. His blonde hair was swept back off his face, and designer stubble hid a sly smile.
