Читать книгу Wounds Of Passion - CHARLOTTE LAMB - Страница 5

TWO years later, Patrick was still having nightmares about what had happened to him over the hours that followed. Not every night, just whenever he was tense over something, worried, upset. On a night like that he would find himself back there, in that time, dreaming it over and over again, in slow, terrifying sequence.

The brigadier had left one of his younger officers in the room to watch him dress, and Patrick had instinctively hurried, putting on the first clothes that came to hand—clean underwear, clean jeans, a crisp blue T-shirt, socks, and another pair of trainers since the police had removed the sandals he had been wearing last night. He had needed to go to the lavatory urgently, been allowed to do so after the brigadier was consulted, had washed his hands and face and combed his hair, but he had had to leave the bathroom door open, and the officer had stood outside and watched him out of the corner of an eye.

‘Do you have to stand there?’ Patrick had burst out, and the man had nodded.

‘Orders, my orders,’ he said in thick English.

All that had been mere pinpricks; yet already Patrick felt uneasy, off balance; he was sweating, and yet he didn’t know why.

He knew he was innocent, after all. He hadn’t done anything to that girl. Yet his stomach was queasy, he felt his nerves jumping, and his mouth was dry. And his head buzzed with questions.

Why had she given them his description? What was going to happen now? Where were they taking him? What ought he to do?

‘OK, let’s go!’ the young officer said, grabbing his arm as he came out of the bathroom, pushing him towards the stairs. As Patrick stumbled he thought he heard the other man mutter, ‘Mi dispiace molto per lei!’ and only later understood what the officer had said—I’m sorry for you!

Patrick wasn’t sure what he had meant and couldn’t ask, but it had not been a friendly remark. It wasn’t pity or compassion he meant; there was hostility, distaste, in the young man’s eyes. It had been a veiled threat, meaning Patrick was going to be sorry for himself.

Self-pity wasn’t what Patrick was feeling, though. He was worried, he was frightened, but most of all he was angry; blazingly angry.

He hadn’t done anything—so why was this happening to him?

As he was hustled through the villa they passsed one of the main rooms of the house, a huge marble-floored lounge hung with cartoons, modern paintings and mirrors, where Patrick had sat earlier, talking to Rae before the party began, drinking chilled white wine.

It was full of people now—the guests from the party, he imagined—all seated, none of them talking. Faces turned towards the door; he recognised some of them, couldn’t put names to them. They stared at him, and he felt himself go dark red, in spite of knowing he was not guilty. Their eyes made him feel guilty.

That was when he realised they believed he was guilty—and the cold sweat sprang out on his forehead.

Alex Holtner was there, a jacket round his shoulders as if he was cold, sitting on a stool, looking pale and haggard. He stared across the room, and his eyes were full of loathing. He glared, clenched his fists on his knees as if longing to hit Patrick, then half rose as if to cross the room to get him. Susan-Jane Holtner was curled up on the floor next to her husband, leaning on him; she put her hands over Alex’s, whispering something, and Alex looked down at her, subsiding again.

A second later Patrick was past, being rushed towards the open front door. It was night, yet the front of the villa was ablaze with light. The police had set up floodlights; there were police cars parked everywhere; policemen moved to and fro, absorbed in whatever they were doing. But they all looked round as Patrick came out of the front door, froze, staring. He was pushed into the back of a police car just as another drove away, past him; and with a pang of shock he saw Rae in it. Her face was chalk-white, her eyes like bruises in her skin. She saw him at the last moment, turned her head to stare back, her pale lips parting, her eyes urgent, as if trying to say something to him.

Did she, too, believe he was guilty?

She knew him, for God’s sake! Patrick thought. She couldn’t possibly believe he would do something like this, surely? Surely.

He wished he could have talked to her, told her... But would she believe him? She looked so shocked. He felt sick. If even Rae believed he had done it! He was almost coming to believe he had, himself! It was the way people looked at you, the waves of hatred coming from them.

* * *

Years later, dreaming about it, he had the same disorientating impression of being trapped in a living nightmare; he kept hoping he was asleep and dreaming, that this couldn’t really be happening to him.

The difference was, years later, that he did wake up.

At the time, there was no escape for him. He had to go where they took him, helpless in their hands.

As the car drove out of the villa the policeman sitting in the back with him grabbed the back of his neck with one large hand, pushed his head down, and held it there. ‘Paparazzi!’ he grunted in explanation, and Patrick was feeling so dazed that for a moment he didn’t get the point.

Then, as the car slowed to turn out into the road, he heard an outburst of noise: people pressing around the sides of the car, pushing and rocking it, hands banging on the windows. Flash bulbs went off, the car was full of brightness exploding like lightning, people shouted and yelled; then the car shot forward at great speed and he was thrown forward too, and hit his head with a thud on the back of the seat in front. The policeman beside him hauled him up by the slack of his shirt, almost tearing it. Patrick felt dizzy, and his forehead hurt, throbbed. He would have a bruise there tomorrow.

The drive was a short one, and he was forced to go through the same humiliating procedure of crouching down out of sight as the car shot into the police car park, then the officers put a blanket over his head and ran him into the building.

The first person he saw was a man in a white coat who seemed to be a doctor. He told Patrick to strip again, then gave him a medical examination in great detail. To Patrick it felt as if the man was crawling over his body with a microscope; every orifice was examined, every pore in his skin, every hair on his head, it seemed. Samples of his blood, urine, even his perspir ation, were taken.

Swabs were taken, too, from under his nails, in his mouth, and other places, while Patrick suffered it, white-faced and dark-eyed with humiliation.

By the time he reached the brigadier’s office he was even angrier, and he was thinking coherently again. The first shock had worn off; he was fighting back.

‘I want a lawyer,’ he said as soon as he saw the senior officer again. ‘I’m entitled to a lawyer; you can’t refuse to let me see one—an English-speaking one—and I think I’d better speak to the British consul first and ask his advice on who should represent me.’

‘All in good time. It’s your right, of course, but this is only a preliminary interview—we aren’t charging you yet—so first we have to establish that you are going to need a lawyer, surely?’ The black eyes were shrewd, watchful, hard. ‘Or are you admitting your guilt?’

‘No!’ The word exploded. Patrick paused, flushed and tense. ‘No,’ he said more calmly. ‘I haven’t done anything to be guilty about.’

‘Well, then, no need for lawyers and consuls,’ smiled the brigadier bluffly, and Patrick almost began to feel easier, then the man added, ‘Yet!’ and the fear kick-started into life again.

‘Sit down, Mr Ogilvie,’ the brigadier said. ‘I am going to have some coffee—would you like some?’

Patrick nodded.

‘Black? Milk? Sugar?’

‘Black, sugar,’ Patrick said, and the brigadier lifted a phone, gave an order, leaned back in his chair, and tapped a pencil on the desk in front of him.

‘This interview is being recorded...’ he began. ‘Those present are...’

There were two other men, as well as the brigadier, one in uniform, one in civilian clothes. Their names were given; Patrick didn’t ever consciously remember them later. He remembered their faces, most of all their eyes, watching him.

Patrick was to spend hours in that room that night, endlessly going over the same ground. The brigadier was a thorough man, patient and obsessed with detail.

He kept coming back to Patrick’s behaviour at the barbecue, asking him why he had stared at the blonde girl.

‘It was noticed, the way you couldn’t take your eyes off her. We have lots of witnesses.’ He picked up a pile of typed pages; the leaves of paper fluttered as his fingers riffled them.

‘All these people saw you staring fixedly at her. Why were you staring, Mr Ogilvie?’

It was the one point on which Patrick felt any guilt. He was uneasy every time they went back to that. Half sullenly, he muttered, ‘I told you—she reminded me of someone.’

‘Who?’

Patrick’s upper lip was sweating. ‘A girl I know.’

The brigadier watched him relentlessly. ‘Miss Laura Grainger?’

It was like cold water in the face. Patrick sat still, white. ‘I never told you her name. Who told you...?’ Rae, he thought; Rae told him. Did Rae see me staring at that girl? Did Rae pick up that haunting similarity, the shifting, fragmentary likeness to Laura which had deceived him for a moment? One minute it had been there, the next it had gone, dissolving like a reflection when a hand broke the still surface of the water, yet leaving ripples and broken particles where it had been.

What had Rae thought when she saw him staring at the girl? What had she thought when she heard the girl had been attacked, that the girl had given Patrick’s description to the police?

Was that why she had told them about Laura? Did Rae think he was guilty, that he had attacked that girl because she reminded him of Laura?

And that was the core of his uneasiness: that in his mind now he was confusing her with Laura. He had to keep reminding himself that it wasn’t Laura who had been attacked, but some other girl, a stranger, someone he didn’t even know.

He tried to stop muddling them up like that, but as the night wore on and he got more and more tired he kept forgetting. His mind blurred their images; they merged inside in his head—pale, slender girls with long gold hair and lovely bodies. They danced in his mind like candle-flames; dazzling and blinding him, making it even harder to think clearly, to keep his attention on the questions being asked.

‘You were very distressed by the ending of your engagement to Miss Grainger,’ the brigadier softly insinuated. ‘Angry and humiliated. Any man would be—to lose his woman to another man! You must have wanted to kill them both.’

His face tightened, white and bitter. He had. Of course he had. Not Laura! he thought quickly; he would never have hurt Laura. But Kern. He could kill him, and feel no flicker of regret.

‘And then at this party you saw a girl who reminded you of the woman you loved, the woman who had betrayed you, rejected you. How did you feel, Mr Ogilvie? What were you thinking as you stood there staring at her so fixedly?’

He had thought it was Laura; for one crazy, terrible second he had thought she had followed him to Italy, had come to say she had changed her mind, that she had realised she loved him, not Kern, after all.

All that had gone through his head in a flash as he stood there staring, and then she had turned and he had realised his mistake. He had fallen from a great height at that moment: all the way from heaven to hell.

He stared at the brigadier, not really seeing him.

‘You had a strange expression on your face, some witnesses say,’ the policeman said, flicking through the reports again, without taking his eyes off Patrick. ‘You turned away, and then the girl walked over to you—what did she say to you, Mr Ogilvie?’

‘She asked if I wanted to dance,’ Patrick absently said, had already told him a hundred times. Sometimes Patrick almost invented something new to say, simply to break the monotony; but he wasn’t crazy enough, yet, not stupid enough, yet. Once he did that he was lost.

‘Is that all she said?’

Patrick’s temper snapped again; his mouth writhed in a sneer. ‘Surely your observant witnesses have told you that!’

The brigadier gazed stolidly at him. ‘If you would bear with me, Mr Ogilvie. I have to be certain about details. So, Miss Cabot came over to you—’

‘Cabot?’ It was the first time the girl’s name had been mentioned; Patrick couldn’t help the startled question.

The brigadier waited, watching with the patience of a fisherman who thought he might have got a bite on his line.

‘That’s her name?’ Patrick asked.

‘Antonia Cabot,’ the brigadier told him, and there was a strange echo inside Patrick’s head, as if he had heard the name before; and maybe he had, from Rae, or the Holtners, when they had spoken about Alex’s niece, the art student, coming from Florence.

‘Antonia Cabot,’ he said huskily, aloud, and shivered. It was a beautiful name and she was lovely—what had happened to her last night?

The brigadier watched him shiver, his eyes narrowing.

‘A beautiful girl,’ he said softly. ‘Young, blonde, desirable...’

Patrick thought of her as he had first seen her, dancing with another man, her body moving sensually, lightly, with gaiety.

She had come over to him, smiled at him, with that shy, unconscious invitation; and he had been bitterly angry because she looked so much like Laura, but wasn’t Laura, and because...

He swallowed, feeling sick, perspiration on his face.

‘You wanted her,’ the brigadier said, and the words echoed what he had almost thought just now, what he wished he could pretend he had never thought.

He almost screamed, Yes! because it was true, although he wished it weren’t. Yes, he had wanted her. He had looked at that lovely face, that lovely body, and wanted her, but she wasn’t Laura, and he wasn’t interested in a one-night stand with some unknown girl just because she looked like Laura, so he had turned his back and walked away.

Why had she told the police that the man who had attacked her looked like him?

Or was him? Had she actually said it was him? Why would she say that? Had she lied? Or simply been confused? The questions ran round and round inside his head.

‘Why won’t you tell me exactly what happened?’ he broke out. ‘You keep asking me questions, but you never answer mine. Was the girl attacked at the party? In the gardens? In the house? Didn’t anybody see, hear, anything? There were all those people around; surely somebody must have seen something?’

‘They saw you, Mr Ogilvie,’ the brigadier said, ‘walking down through the gardens, to the beach. They saw you. She saw you go, too, the girl, Antonia Cabot. She was sorry for you. She thought you looked unhappy, and her uncle later told her about your broken engagement. So she followed you, down to the beach, with some idea, I suppose, of talking to you, comforting you. She saw the trail of your footsteps along the sand and followed them, fitting her own feet into them, she said; it was some sort of game, I gathered.’ The brigadier looked faintly indulgent. ‘She is very young. And then suddenly someone jumped out at her from behind a boat; she caught a brief impression by moonlight of a face, light brown hair, a T-shirt, jeans. She thought it was you, playing a trick on her; she began to laugh.’

‘It wasn’t me; I never saw her on the beach!’ Patrick said.

The brigadier just watched him, then went on, ‘Then something hit her on the head, and she lost consciousness. She doesn’t know how long she was out, but when she came round she had been gagged with sticky tape; she couldn’t scream, and her attacker had taped her eyes, too, so she couldn’t see him, but he spoke to her, she said. In English; it was an English accent. She said it sounded like your voice.’

‘I only spoke to her once; I said one sentence to her! How could she possibly know what I sound like from that?’

‘You were on the beach, Mr Ogilvie?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Your clothes were covered in sand and salt water.’

‘I sat down on the sand for a long time, but I didn’t see that girl, and I did not attack her!’

‘Tell me again why you went down to the beach, Mr Ogilvie,’ the brigadier began again, and Patrick felt as if his head was going to explode.

‘I’m tired; I need sleep,’ he said wearily. ‘You can’t keep me here all this time without letting me see a lawyer. I insist you let me make a phone call to the British consul.’

‘We have telephoned a lawyer on your behalf and he will be coming to see you quite soon,’ the brigadier promised. ‘And the British consul will see you in the morning. After the identity parade.’

Patrick froze. ‘Identity parade?’

‘Miss Cabot is in hospital tonight, but I’m told she is prepared to see if she can identify you in a line-up tomorrow. She is a very brave girl.’

* * *

Patrick saw an Italian lawyer, small, thin, dark, and red-eyed from being woken up in the middle of the night, who had a thick summer cold, which made him sneeze constantly and depressed him.

‘The girl’s evidence is bad news, Signor Ogilvie. She identifies you almost certainly, by sight, and by sound, places you on the spot at that time, as do a number of other witnesses, and you yourself admit you were there on the beach at that time. Nobody else from the party was down there on that part of the beach. They all have alibis; they were all with other people at the relevant time. And you had recently broken up with your fiancée, which makes the police feel they can prove motive as well as opportunity.’

‘I didn’t do it!’ Patrick hoarsely said.

‘Of course,’ the lawyer said, smiling indifferently. ‘They haven’t yet got the forensic results—the various tests on you and the girl. They will come in tomorrow or the next day. The problem is...the attacker was scared off before he actually raped the girl; apparently he heard voices, people coming towards them, and ran off, and then the girl ripped off the tape on her mouth and eyes, and crawled into the sea—’

‘Why on earth did she do that?’

The lawyer looked coolly at him. ‘Common behaviour pattern in these cases. She felt dirty; she wanted to wash herself clean; the sea was the nearest place. She says she swam for some time. She may have been feeling suicidal, of course. The police didn’t mention that, but I’d say it was on her mind.’

Patrick leaned forward, feeling sick, dropping his head into his hands. ‘And I thought I had problems,’ he muttered. ‘God, what a mess.’

His lawyer said quietly, ‘Unfortunately, she practically wiped out most of the forensic evidence—which would be good, if you were guilty, because it would mean they couldn’t prove it, but as it is our case that you are innocent it makes our job harder as we can’t prove you didn’t!’

‘Are you saying it’s hopeless?’ asked Patrick, and the lawyer shook his head.

‘Of course not. No, but let’s hope she doesn’t pick you out at the identity parade.’

‘She will,’ Patrick said with grim certainty.

‘Be careful—that sounds like a confession,’ his lawyer quickly said.

‘I can’t help what it sounds like—I can only keep telling you, I didn’t do it. But she thinks I did. I told you what happened at the party. I wouldn’t dance with her; I turned my back on her and walked away. She’ll pick me out.’

The lawyer looked shocked. ‘Are you saying that she lied to the police? That she knows it was not you, but has accused you of it, deliberately, just because you wouldn’t dance with her? I find that very hard to believe, Mr Ogilvie, and so will the police.’

‘Women do unbelievable things,’ said Patrick bitterly. ‘You can’t trust them or rely on them. She’ll pick me out, you’ll see.’

She did.

Patrick stood in a line of other men of roughly his build and height and colouring, staring straight ahead. First of all, the girl must have looked at them through a two-way mirror on the wall opposite—then after a few moments some policemen and two policewomen came out of a door, and she was with them, walking slowly, unsteadily.

Partrick kept his eyes ahead, as he had been ordered to do; she walked along the line and looked at the men one by one. Patrick’s heart began to beat hard and thickly as she came nearer, then she was in front of him and he looked straight at her.

She was deathly pale, her gold hair tied back starkly from her face, dark glasses on her nose, hiding her eyes. But he saw the evidence of what had been done to her, and his stomach clenched in sickness. There were bruises like blue stains on her cheekbones, under her eyes, around her puffy, discoloured lips, and bite-marks on her neck above the high-collared cotton sweater she wore.

There was a heavy silence; the policemen all looked at Patrick. She looked at him, too, her eyes hidden by the dark glass shielding them.

Then she put out a hand that shook visibly, almost touched his shoulder, then turned away so fast that she almost fell over. A policewoman put an arm around her and helped her out, her body limp and trembling.

‘I didn’t do it!’ Patrick called out after her; but he was grabbed, hustled back to the cells, and locked in until the brigadier was ready to talk to him again.

Patrick spent another day in custody, of relentless questioning, while they waited for the forensic evidence to be analysed. Halfway through the long, long evening, when his eyes were drooping and he was shaking with exhaustion, the brigadier was called out to take a phone call.

He came back looking shaken. He stood in front of Patrick, staring at him, very pale, while Patrick, even paler with nervous dread by then, stared back at him.

‘What?’ he broke out. ‘What’s happened now?’

The brigadier took a deep breath and said rather stiffly, ‘Mr Ogilvie, it is my duty to offer you a most sincere apology on behalf of myself and this company of Carabinieri. We accept your innocence of the charge, and you are entirely free to leave.’

Patrick was so tired that for a minute he didn’t understand. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You are free to go, Mr Ogilvie,’ repeated the brigadier. ‘The man who attacked Miss Cabot is in custody in San Remo—he raped another girl, there, last night, and was caught, and, during interrogation, confessed to having tried to rape Miss Cabot. When his hotel room was searched certain objects were found, which had been taken from Miss Cabot during the attack; a ring and some underwear. There is no doubt—he was the man.’

Patrick sat as if turned to stone. ‘Was he English?’

The brigadier nodded. ‘I gather he does have a superficial resemblance to you, too. The same colouring, build, height. That must have been what deceived Miss Cabot into believing it was you.’

Patrick did not believe that. She had described him to the police because she had resented the way he walked away from her after she asked him to dance. Oh, it might have been an unconscious response; but Patrick did not believe it was pure coincidence.

‘We will be happy to drive you back to the villa in a police car, right away,’ the brigadier said.

Patrick shook his head. ‘Am I free to leave Italy? I would rather return to my hotel in Nice immediately, if that is OK with you. I don’t want to go back to the Holtner villa. Could my belongings left there be sent on to me? Could you arrange that? I don’t want to see any of those people again. If you need my evidence later, of course, I’ll come back, any time.’

The brigadier was eager to cooperate, to do as he wished. A car took Patrick over the border that night, back to his hotel in Nice. He stayed there a few more days, mostly alone in his room, lying on his bed, sleeping and waking, obsessed with the events of those days and nights.

They never did call him to give evidence; Patrick read about the case later, in the Italian papers, and discovered that the arrested man had been convicted of a series of rapes along that coast that summer. Antonia Cabot’s name was only one among many and she had not even been called to give evidence.

Rae came to see Patrick in Nice a few days later. She had rung first, found him out, and left a message to say she was coming. He was waiting.

They went for a walk through the narrow, labyrinthine streets of the old town, with its medieval houses and street markets, crumbling plaster on walls, geraniums tumbling down from pots on balconies and ancient shutters with cracked and blistered paint, and made their way up alleys and through tiny cobbled squares.

‘I don’t know what to say; it’s been terrible. It must have been a nightmare for you,’ Rae told him, giving him uncertain, nervous sideways looks.

‘Yes,’ said Patrick grimly, unsmiling.

‘They questioned me about you for hours,’ Rae said.

He had guessed that, guessed where the brigadier was getting all his inside information from, who was giving them clues about his mental condition, his possible motive for attacking a woman. There was only one person who knew all about Laura, all about Patrick’s moods since his engagement was broken off.

Rae stared at his hard profile, burst out, ‘Oh, Patrick, I’m sorry. I feel so badly about this. I never thought you did it; I know you better than that! But...but...they seemed so sure; they said she had identified you, and you were in such a strange mood, you were angry over Laura, you were upset—I didn’t know what to think.’

He stopped, his hands driven deep into the pockets of a black linen jacket he was wearing over black jeans, and stared broodingly over the steep streets of old Nice falling away below them.

‘What do you want me to say, Rae? That I understand? That I forgive you for believing I could have tried to rape a young girl?’

‘I didn’t believe it, Patrick!’

He turned and looked at her directly, his face bleak. ‘Oh, yes, you did, Rae. I saw your face when they were driving you away. That girl identified me, God knows why. You believed her, although you’ve known me pretty well for a long time, and you fed the police with the sort of evidence they needed to convince them I had a motive, too. If it wasn’t for sheer damned luck I might be waiting trial now, on that charge, with very little hope of getting off. So if you’re expecting me to say I forgive you and it doesn’t matter that you believed I was a vicious rapist, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.’

She bit her lip, very pale. ‘Of course I know how you must feel—’

‘I doubt it! A month ago I would have described myself as a very happy man—I was about to marry the woman I loved, I was doing work I found exciting, I had friends I thought liked me, cared about me. And then it all fell apart. I found myself in a police cell, my engagement off, Laura gone, being accused of attempted rape, and finding myself suddenly without any friends, not even you, Rae. No, I don’t believe you have a clue how I feel.’

Rae looked uneasily at him. ‘You’ll get over this; work is what you need to help you forget. Maybe you should start work on the next set of illustrations sooner than we planned?’

‘No,’ Patrick said with force. ‘I’m not working with you any more, Rae.’

‘Don’t be too hasty about this; you’ll feel differently when you’ve had a few weeks to get over the shock.’ Rae was still trying to tell him what he felt, what he thought.

He looked coolly at her. ‘No, Rae. I have made up my mind.’

She went red then, angry and flustered. ‘You can’t break our contract, Patrick! The publishers wouldn’t let you walk away. You have a legally binding contract for this series, remember!’

‘If I had gone to prison for attempted rape, would you still have wanted me to illustrate your books?’ he bit out. ‘Would the publishers talk about legally binding contracts? Or would you all get the best possible lawyers to find a way of breaking our contract?’

Rae stared at him without answering. She didn’t need to reply; they both knew what would have happened if he had been convicted.

‘Goodbye, Rae.’

He turned and walked away, down the alleys and winding streets of Old Nice, towards the blinding blue of the Baie des Anges. He didn’t know what he would do now. His future was utterly empty—without a job, without Laura, without any clear idea of what he wanted to do. All he knew was that he was angry; very angry. With Laura, with Rae, with fate, but most of all with that girl, Antonia Cabot.

He hoped he would never see her again, because if he did he wouldn’t be responsible for his actions, and, just though he felt his rage to be, the girl had been through a terrible ordeal, too. Whatever her reasons for accusing him, whether it had been conscious resentment or unconscious hostility, she had suffered enough; he had to walk away and just shrug off his anger with her, which did not make it any easier to bear.

Bottled up and suppressed, his rage simmered inside him for the next two years, fed by his nightmares, by his new realisation of just how fragile was the identity, how easy to break.

He drew on the savings he had, studied art in Rome for a year, and then moved on to Florence to study there, living in the cheapest student accommodation, eating bread and cheese and fruit, drinking rough cheap wine, and earning some money at weekends by working in a bar at night, painting portraits of tourists in the streets by day.

One of his tutors got him a job each summer, during the vacations, in Venice, as a courier with an international holiday company, shepherding tourists around the city, helping them find postcards, and presents to take home, finding them when they got lost, and getting them where they had to be each day.

And then one day as summer ended, before art classes began again, he was on a vaporetto crossing the Grand Canal, from St Mark’s square to the Accademia, where he meant to sit for an hour in front of the work of Giovanni Bellini, the artist he was concentrating on that week. He had his sketchpad under his arm, pencils, charcoal and crayons in his pockets; his mind was full of his favourite Bellini, the Virgin and child.

There was a little huddle of people on the riva, waiting for the vaporetto to arrive. Patrick idly glanced at them and then went rigid, staring.

Among them was Antonia Cabot.

There was no doubt about it, although she had changed. She didn’t look so young any more; she didn’t dazzle like a candle-flame. She was subdued, snuffed out, in a dark blue dress, cotton, a simple sleeveless tunic, and over that a short black cotton jacket.

Her pale gold hair had been cut very short, giving her the head of a boy; she had lost a lot of weight, was skinny, almost fleshless, and although this was a very hot summer she was pale, as if she rarely went out.

She was staring at the reflections on the water—the shimmering dancing images of churches, palaces, houses, rose-pink, aquamarine, cream.

As the vaporetto chugged slowly into place she stiffened, staring down at the reflection of it swimming towards her, the reflections of the faces of passengers. Of Patrick. Slowly, Antonia Cabot looked up, straight into Patrick’s brooding eyes.

He grimly watched the last vestige of colour drain from her face, the stricken look come into it, the darkening of her sea-coloured eyes, the trembling of her generous mouth.

Then she turned and fled, away from the Accademia, up a side-street, her small black shadow running ahead of her on the painted walls.

Patrick had to wait until the vaporetto had docked and the barrier had been raised before he could jump ashore and set off after her.