by David Hewson
There was a noise from behind. An animal, perhaps. A large one. So distinct was the sound it stopped her dead at that moment, made her mind go blank, fighting for rationality, for some response or explanation.
Teresa crouched there, turning towards the source, flicking the torch in that direction too. The beam was broad and, in the space of a few steps, tall enough almost to reach the ceiling.
A man stood there. He wore the uniform of a medieval soldier, one she recognized. One she now realized she probably saw close to the little carnival band in the street beyond the waterfront, following in the wake of the woman with the xylophone and the costume of a princess. Except for the hat with the feather she’d seen outside by the door.
The bow in his hands was fully drawn, the arrow tight to his cheek. A golden wig of flowing curls fell around his shoulders yet the curve of his body, as taut and as powerful as the straining bend of the bow, meant that his face remained out of sight, just as it had in that final painting in Room XX at the moment the mythical Ursula was meant to die, on her knees, praying.
‘Who are you?’ she asked simply.
‘Who do you want me to be?’
There was no reply to that. None she could imagine.
‘Kneel,’ the archer ordered.
Teresa didn’t obey, just stayed as she was, crouching.
Her right arm was wrapped round the base of the wooden lectern. Her left was close to the bag with the tools in it. She could just touch the torch on the floor with her foot if she wanted.
Both doors were open behind the erect, tense figure of the archer. She could see nothing there but she could feel the icy breeze working its way into the building like an inquisitive thief allowed entrance to a place that had kept its secrets for years.
The wind brought with it the smells of the lagoon. Salt water and the faint stink of diesel. They mingled with the aromas of death and damp and decay, making her head swim a little, blurring the figure in front of her in the yellow light of the torch.
She could just make out a single gleaming eye behind the golden wig. It was focused on her entirely, alert, sombre and quite devoid of any emotion.
‘Kneel,’ he said again, and stretched the bow to its fullest extent.
By his side, she now saw, there was a sword, bright and gleaming, tucked beneath the belt. One arrow wasn’t much of a weapon in a fight with a woman. He needed something else.
She listened to the sound of the wood arching, the string straining, and said, ‘Do I have to pray too? If I don’t, does that break the spell? The magic?’
He didn’t utter a word. She wanted to launch herself at him. Tear the beast to pieces.
Instead she asked, ‘Or do you just require belief on your own part? Say something. I’m interested.’
‘I told you what I want. Now do it.’
His accent was unidentifiable. Not northern. Not southern. Simply flat. He might even be a foreigner who spoke Italian well.
In the darkness her fingers clutched the lectern more firmly.
‘I don’t kneel for a man who kills a defenceless woman,’ Teresa Lupo said, shaking her head, watching the angle of his arms, the power there. ‘I don’t pray for some cowardly animal who takes pleasure in the pain and terror of others.’
She gripped the wooden support of the lectern in her fingers. Its fierce beaked head was silhouetted against the corona the torch made as the beam flooded the room.
‘I don’t . . .’
Afterwards she’d no idea whether it was luck or reaction. Whether she heard or felt or saw something on his part or simply guessed the moment, dragging down the lectern in front of her, screaming, screeching, not words, just sound. Fury and fierce emotion released like a fire from within.
There was a frantic, violent rushing commotion through the air, like the swooping of an enormous invisible bird of prey. As she dragged the heavy wooden structure forward, finally feeling it begin to tip beneath its own weight and momentum, she turned herself, falling to one side, scrabbling for the bag of tools, the hammer, the crowbar, fingers clawing, hunting for bare, hard metal.
The arrow struck and its power was so great that she screamed in pain at the impact, wondering where the thing had hit her, what it had done.
Then the noise. Almost musical, a thrumming, vibrating sound like the song of a gigantic vocal insect.
It had hit the lectern as she’d planned, was rattling under its own momentum as it bit somewhere into the wooden structure she’d pulled down around her as a shield. The eagle stared her in the face. The arrow, with its flight of black feathers, was buried deep in its dead eye.
Now, she thought, aware of movement ahead. She arched her arm back and launched the hammer from the floor, rolling sideways, clutching the crowbar to her chest, fighting to get upright on the splintered, fragile boards.
He screamed. She liked the sound of his pain. When she found her feet he was half in the torchlight, half out of it, waving the sword around wildly, yelling obscenities, Italian, English, some language she didn’t know.
She retreated further into the darkness beyond the beam of the torch, trying to make herself invisible, fighting for reason, trying not to breathe or move, aware any sign of life might betray her.
Then there was another light. It was narrow, like a long yellow pencil, focused, hunting. As her eyes adjusted to its anxious searching finger of brightness she understood. On his forehead, beneath the golden wig, he had one of those torches that walkers and mountaineers used, strapped to a headband so that it went whichever way he turned, leaving his hands free for other work. On his forehead, close to the source of the beam, she could just make out something dark and liquid. Blood. The hammer had hit him, a glancing blow perhaps, but it was something. He was hurt.
The archer took one step forward, bellowing threats and curses. The little beam of his head torch flickered from side to side, never quite reaching far enough. He raised the sword in both hands and slashed away at emptiness.
Angry people lose perspective. Angry people make mistakes. She knew this instinctively. She was one of them.
Very carefully, with the gentlest, slightest of movements, Teresa reached into her jacket pocket with her free left hand and drew out a few small coins. His narrow beam was on the still corpse tethered to its stake now. She still couldn’t make out his face. The wig was too long, too full for that. But from the way he stared down at the dead woman there, nodding, she guessed he was proud of his handiwork.
Anger, she thought, stemming the emotion.
She threw the coins across the room, away from him, into the furthest distant corner. Then she watched as he turned to follow them, aiming the narrow torch beam into dust and cobwebs and what looked like some once-grand fireplace surmounted by an ancestral shield rotting into nothing but mouldy plaster.
Thirty-six years old. Average height. Average weight. Average looks on a good day. She didn’t have any illusions. But she was stuck in this place with a man who’d slaughtered someone. Sofia, perhaps.
She had a crowbar too.
Teresa Lupo tiptoed up behind him, holding her breath, getting ready to swing the heavy lump of iron gripped tight in both her hands. He didn’t hear too well, perhaps. You get that with wigs.
She stole in close, raised the crowbar, moving it behind her head to get some swing, started to bring the weapon down with all the force, every muscle, she could bring to bear.
It crashed into something on the way towards him. The blow was blocked. She heard the sound of glass tinkling, shattering, felt a light, hard rain on her face.
The chandelier.
The archer was reeling round as she recovered. She got in an uncertain half-blow that couldn’t have hurt much, then another. By that stage he was screaming too and it wasn’t anger this time. It was pain. There was a spatter of blood on the wig and the flash of skin she saw on his temple showed she’d hurt him more than she thought.
The crowbar swung easily through the air, low and certain. It c
aught his hands. The sword cartwheeled out of them as the black iron fetched against the hilt.
No weapon.
She moved closer, arcing the bar in front of her, flailing the thing crazily, spitting meaningless words at the figure retreating into the darkness that had, just a few moments before, hidden her.
‘Bastard!’ she shrieked, and more, so many words, so many curses they streamed out of her without a second thought.
The pencil beam disappeared, turned off. She was out of the pool of the torch she’d set by the dead woman in front of the makeshift altar. Scared suddenly, trembling, aware of the aftershock of that sudden rush of adrenaline and emotion.
Teresa edged back towards the centre of the room, clutching the crowbar to her chest, sweating, panting, waiting for the attack. When she got there she swept her feet across the floor until she found the torch, grabbed it, skimmed the beam across the space ahead of her anxiously, screeching at him still.
She wasn’t ready any more. The fight was gone. All the anger and pain and strength. There was just fear left at that moment.
The torch swept the room, right to left and back again. She was alone with the tortured corpse tied to the stake. Still holding onto the crowbar she walked forward to the door, checked there, checked the narrow hall running the length of the front. The hat stand was tipped over. The feathered cap was gone. The front door was open. Sleety rain was issuing in from the black night along with the salt smell of the sea.
She flicked the torch towards the rickety bridge and the waterfront. No one.
‘Bastard!’ she shrieked again, this time out into the endless empty night.
Exhausted, unable to think straight, she leaned back against the wall and knew that, at that moment, she’d have given anything for a cigarette, though one hadn’t touched her lips in more than a year, not since she’d come to that deal with Peroni: I’ll look after myself a little, if you’ll just do the same.
‘God, I wish you were here,’ she murmured.
It took her a couple of minutes to find enough composure to make the call. Then she phoned Paola Boscolo, expecting that she’d have to make a fulsome apology for interrupting whatever cosy dinner the young Venetian woman would be enjoying with her family.
Instead she heard the busy buzz of an active police room behind the officer’s anxious voice.
‘Why do you not answer your phone?’ Boscolo demanded immediately. ‘How am I supposed to help if you’re impossible to reach?’
‘I needed a little privacy,’ Teresa replied. ‘I didn’t think you’d be so interested . . .’
‘What? What? Do you think we’re fools? Much has been happening. It’s important we speak. When can you come into the Questura?’
‘I think you’d rather pay me a visit,’ Teresa said.
It took a little while to describe what she’d found, what had happened, as succinctly as she could.
‘You could have been killed,’ the policewoman spat at her.
‘So it appears. Are you coming?’
Ten minutes, Boscolo said. That was all it would take for them to get there, by launch and on foot.
It was enough.
Teresa went back into the derelict palace, back to the dread room with the smell and the dead woman in her ornate, archaic dress. Returned to what she was about to do before a man dressed as a medieval archer tried to shoot an arrow through her chest.
Like the figure in the Carpaccio painting in the Accademia.
Something jarred. That was wrong. In the painting the archer was about to fire the arrow. He was in the process of murder, not the act.
Tenses mattered. She just didn’t quite comprehend how.
With the utmost care, in the light of the torch, she bent down over the corpse there, removed the mask and looked at the face beneath.
Then she sat down on the hard cold floor, amidst the sharp wood splinters and the fragments of broken glass, and began to weep.
By ten in the evening the deserted building Alberto Tosi knew as the Casino degli Spiriti, the House of the Spirits, was bathed in floodlights inside and out, surrounded by police launches, crowded with officers and forensic staff walking around quietly in white bunny suits.
Teresa sat on the old chair she’d found in the main room, not far from the body. She watched, envious of their detachment, wishing that she might have access to the secrets that surely lay in this cold, deserted place set above the shifting waters of the lagoon.
The lights made it a little warmer. That only served to make the smell worse.
She’d insisted on being interviewed there. It was important to get the sequence of events straight in her head, and that could only happen in the light, in the place where everything had occurred.
‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ Paola Boscolo said when she, and a duty inspector, had listened to Teresa’s story.
‘I imagine so,’ Teresa replied.
Beneath the police floods she could see more clearly the lectern with the arrow in the eagle’s eye. It was close to the edge of the bird’s body. The wood there was so thin the point had burst through to the back of the head. Another few centimetres to one side and it would have hit her with a penetrating, deadly force.
‘Why did you come here?’ asked the inspector.
‘As I told you . . .’
She’d mentioned the address she’d found for Sofia when she first lived in the city, though she hadn’t revealed where it came from. The resemblance of the building to the palace in the story was something she didn’t care to talk about. It seemed pointless. Even if they believed her they wouldn’t understand, any more than she did.
‘I don’t believe Sofia actually lived here,’ she added.
‘The building is owned by the Church,’ Paola Boscolo told her. ‘It’s supposed to be closed to the public.’
‘They obviously don’t check too often, do they?’ An idea struck her. ‘If I can help with the forensic investigation— ’ she began.
‘No,’ the inspector cut in. ‘That would be inappropriate.’
‘Inappropriate,’ she echoed.
Teresa Lupo despised that word, and the way it was used as some kind of talisman against original thought.
‘I’m sorry about Sofia,’ the policewoman said. ‘Let me organize a launch to take you home. We should talk in the morning.’
‘About what?’
‘About anything else you remember.’
Teresa Lupo stood up and looked her in the eye.
‘Paola,’ she said. ‘I’ve been trying to tell you there was something strange about my aunt’s disappearance for days now. It takes this . . .’ Her hand swept the room. ‘ . . . for you to treat it seriously. And now you expect me to turn up at the Questura for an appointment. At your convenience . . .’
‘I know this is a stressful time . . .’
‘It’s not Sofia!’
Teresa’s voice was a little shrill. She regretted that. Even more when she realized that Paola Boscolo was not in the least surprised by what she’d just said.
‘You knew already?’ Teresa asked, trying to fight back the anger.
‘I meant I was sorry we haven’t found Sofia. I knew this wasn’t her the moment I looked at the woman. I told you on the phone. We were trying to get hold of you. When you sent me that passport photo. And the picture of the Englishman . . .’
Teresa had expected that Boscolo would put it to one side for another day. She was wrong. The young policewoman explained succinctly what had happened next. The Questura had checked its file of missing males, and the photo log there. Very soon they came up with the name of Massimo Gabrielli, a truck driver from Bologna who’d failed to turn up for work the previous Friday. Gabrielli’s picture matched. The Bologna police had checked his apartment and discovered his wife, Fiorella, was also missing. Talking to neighbours they’d come to the conclusion that Gabrielli had a sideline pimping his wife using sex lines and small ads in newspapers across northern Italy. The two hadn’t been seen
since the previous Wednesday. Their computer showed a booking for train tickets to Venice and an exchange with a potential client on an adult website.
Teresa glanced at the body, which was still kneeling on the floor.
‘Fiorella Gabrielli?’ she asked.
‘Without a doubt,’ the inspector said. ‘Massimo was an opportunistic little man. His neighbours said they’d never seen him so happy. Fiorella was no innocent. She had convictions for soliciting. From what they told the neighbours the two of them thought they’d struck it rich. Some wealthy foreigner here for the carnival wanted company.’
Teresa recalled the figure on the ledge of the campanile in the Piazza San Marco. His reluctance when it came to firing at the disappearing figure of the starlet.
‘What kind of couple were they?’
‘The loving kind,’ Boscolo said with a shrug. ‘In spite of everything. You mentioned the idea of pressure . . .’
What could make a man try to murder, then kill himself when he fails?
It was against Teresa’s principles to guess, but the answer seemed so obvious.
‘He told Gabrielli that if he shot the girl his wife would be safe,’ she said. ‘Gabrielli couldn’t do it. It’s a long way from a pimp to a murderer. He couldn’t have escaped anyway. Besides . . .’ She thought of what she had seen. ‘The woman was dead already. He probably knew that.’
‘All this is conjecture,’ the inspector responded. ‘We can’t work with—’
‘Hunches?’ Teresa suggested.
‘Precisely.’
‘What do you have?’
‘Signora,’ the man said grumpily. ‘That’s our business.’
‘The purpose of what happened in the piazza,’ she went on, ‘was to convince you Jerome Aitchison was dead. So that you’d stop looking.’
He edged a little closer. ‘Well, we’re looking now. We have your photograph of him. We’ll talk to the English police and get more. This is a priority.’
‘At last,’ she said, and looked him in the eye.
She thought of the conversation she’d had with the officer in Cambridge, Detective Inspector Postlethwaite.
‘There’s a problem there, you understand,’ she added. ‘Whoever this man is, he is familiar with the city. He’s been coming here for a long time. At least sixteen years if he knew Sofia here. If he was the father of her child.’
