“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.”