‘Come in, my little pretty one,’ he said. ‘Make yourself comfortable. Has my friend Pandarus told you what you must do?’
I curtsied. ‘Yes, sir. He told me you might have a position for me, but that you only conduct interviews at night.’
Angelo laughed. ‘He’s a fine dissembler, my Pandarus. But in that, he is not all wrong. I do, indeed, have a position for you.’
With this he moved towards me, and I felt his lizardlike hand caress my cheek. I should have drawn back, I know, and at that moment told him who I was and why I was there, but something in me, some innate curiosity compelled me to continue my deception.
Angelo led me slowly to the bed and bade me sit, then he sat beside me and began his caresses again, this time venturing into more private territory than before. I took hold of his hand and moved it away, but he was persistent, growing rougher. Before I knew it, he had me on my back on the bed and his hand was groping under my skirts, rough fingers probing me. I struggled and tried to tell him who I was, but he put his other hand over my mouth to silence me.
All the time he manhandled me thus, he was calling out my name. ‘Isabella… Oh, my beautiful Isabella! Do it for me, Isabella. Please do it for me!’ At first this confused me, for I was certain he hadn’t recognized me. Then I realized with a shock that he didn’t know who I was, but that this must be what he said to all his night-time visitors. He called them all Isabella.
And then I understood.
The whole thing, the re-creation of the exact same conditions as the night I was to visit him in exchange for Claudio’s life – the hour, the insistence on absolute darkness. Though Mariana had gone to him in my stead, Angelo either refused to believe this, or thought that by duplicating the trappings he could enjoy the treasures of my body time after time in the darkness of his vile imagination.
As we struggled there on the bed, disgust and outrage overcame any simple desire I harboured for justice, and I knew then what I had been planning to do all along. Angelo’s behaviour just made it all that much easier.
I slipped out my dagger and plunged it into his back with as much force as I could muster. He stiffened, as if stung by a wasp, and reared back, hand behind him trying to staunch the flow of blood.
Then I plunged the dagger into his chest and said, ‘This for Mariana!’
He croaked my name: ‘Isabella… my Isabella…’
‘Yes, it’s me,’ I said, ‘but I’m not yours.’ And I plunged the dagger in again. ‘This is for me!’ I said, and he rolled to the floor, pleading for his life. I knelt over him and plunged the dagger in one more time, into his black heart. ‘And this is for not being able to tell us apart in the dark!’
After that he lay still. I didn’t move for several minutes, but knelt there over Angelo’s body catching my breath until I was sure that no one had heard. The house remained silent.
Knowing that Pandarus was probably still lurking by the garden gate, I left by the front door and hurried home through the dark streets. Nobody accosted me; I saw not a soul. When I got home, in the light of a candle in my chamber, I saw that my clothing was bloodstained. No matter. I would burn it. As soon as that was done and I was washed clean of Angelo’s blood, all would be well. Mariana might shed a tear or two for her miserable, faithless husband, but she would get over him in time and he would never hurt her or anyone else again.
And as for me, as I believe I have already told you, there are many advantages to be gained from being the duke’s wife, not the least of which is the unlikelihood of being suspected of murder.
GOING BACK
1
Banks pulled up outside his parents’ council house and parked his Renault by the side of the road. He wondered if it would be safe left out overnight. The estate had had a bad reputation even when he grew up there in the sixties, and it had only got worse over recent years. Not that there was any alternative, he realized, as he made sure it was locked and the security system was working; his parents didn’t own a garage.
He couldn’t very well remove the CD player for the weekend, but to be on the safe side he stuffed the CDs themselves into his overnight bag. He didn’t think any young joyriders would want to steal Thelonious Monk, Cecilia Bartoli or the Grateful Dead, but you couldn’t be too careful. Besides, he had a portable disc player now, and he liked to listen to music in bed as he drifted off to sleep.
Banks’s parents’ house stood near the western edge of the estate, close to the arterial road, across from an abandoned factory and a row of shops. Banks paused for a moment and took in the red-brick terrace houses – rows of five, each with a little garden, low wall and privet hedge. His family had moved here from the tiny, grim back-to-back when he was twelve, when the houses were new.
It was a Friday afternoon near the end of October, and Banks was home for the weekend of his parents’ golden wedding anniversary that Sunday, only his second overnight stay since he had left home at the age of eighteen to study business at London Polytechnic. When that didn’t work out, and when the sixties lost their allure in the early seventies, he joined the police. Since then, long hours, hard work, and his parents’ overt disapproval of his career choice had kept him away. Visiting home was always a bit of a trial, but they were his mother and father, Banks reminded himself; he owed them more than he could ever repay, he had certainly neglected them over the years, and he knew they loved him in their way. They weren’t getting any younger either.
He took a deep breath, opened the gate, walked up the path and knocked on the scratched red door, a little surprised by the loud music coming from the next house. He saw his mother approach through the frosted-glass pane. She opened the door, rubbed her hands together as if drying them and said, ‘Alan, lovely to see you. Come on in, love, come in.’
Banks dropped his overnight bag in the hall and followed his mother through to the living room. It stretched from the front of the house to the back, and the back area, next to the kitchen, was permanently laid out as a dining room. The wallpaper was a wispy brown autumn leaves pattern, the three-piece suite a matching brown velveteen, and a sentimental autumn landscape hung over the electric fire.
His father was sitting in his usual armchair, the one with the best straight-on view of the television. He didn’t get up, just grunted, ‘Son, nice of you to come.’
‘Hello, Dad. How are you doing?’
‘Mustn’t complain.’ Arthur Banks had been suffering from mild angina for years, ever since he’d been made redundant from the sheet-metal factory, and it seemed to get neither better nor worse as time went on. He took pills for the pain and didn’t even need an inhaler. Other than that, and the damage booze and fags had wreaked on his liver and lungs over the years, he had always been as fit as a fiddle. Hollow-chested and skinny, he still sported a head of thick dark hair with hardly a trace of grey. He wore it slicked back with lashings of Brylcreem.
Banks’s mother, Ida, plump and nervy, fussed a little more about how thin Banks was looking, then the kitchen door opened and a stranger walked into the room.
‘Kettle’s on, Mrs B. Now, who have we got here? Let me guess.’