Johnny whispered to her that Woody Allen, whose movies they both loved, was once asked if he thought that sex was dirty, and Woody had replied, ‘Only if you are doing it right.’
So they did it right. Over and over again. And in between they laughed a lot. Johnny told Joy she was the sexiest creature in the world. She told him no, he was.
One time, when he was deep inside her, she whispered into Johnny’s ear, ‘Let’s promise each other to come back and make love here in this room every year, for ever.’
‘Even after we’re dead?’ he said.
‘Why not? You’re stiff when you’re dead, aren’t you? Stiff as a gondolier’s oar!’
‘You’re a wicked woman, Joy Jackson.’
‘You wouldn’t like me if I wasn’t, you horny devil.’
‘We could come back as ghosts, couldn’t we, and haunt this room?’
‘We will!’
Two years later, acrimoniously divorced and free, they married. And they honeymooned in Venice in the same hotel — a former palazzo — in the same room. While they were there, they vowed, as before, to return to the same room every year for their anniversary, and they did so, without fail. In the beginning they always got naked long before they got around to unpacking. Often, after dining out, they felt so horny they couldn’t wait until they got back to the hotel.
One time they did it late at night in a moored gondola. They did it beneath the Rialto Bridge. And under several other bridges. Venice cast its spell — coming here was an aphrodisiac to them. They drank Bellinis in their favourite café in Piazza San Marco, swigged glorious white wines from the Friuli district and gorged on grilled seafood in their favourite restaurant, the Corte Sconta, which they always got lost trying to find, every year.
Some mornings, spent with passion, they’d hop on an early water taxi and drink espressos and grappa on the Lido at sunrise. Later, back in their dimly lit hotel room, they would take photographs of each other naked and film themselves making love. One time, for fun, they made plaster-of-Paris impressions of what Joy liked to call their ‘rude bits’. They were so in lust, nothing, it seemed, could stop them, or could ever change.
Once, on an early anniversary, they visited Isola di San Michele, Venice’s cemetery island. Staring at the graves, Johnny asked her, ‘Are you sure you’re still going to fancy me when I’m dead?’
‘Probably even more than when you’re alive!’ she had replied. ‘If that’s possible.’
‘We might rattle a bit, if we were — you know — both skeletons,’ he had said.
‘We’ll have to do it quietly, so we don’t wake up the graveyard,’ she’d replied.
‘You’re a bad girl,’ he had said, before kissing her on the lips.
‘You’d never have loved me if I was good, would you?’
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Probably not.’
‘Let me feel your oar!’
That was then. Now it was thirty-five years later. They’d tried — and failed — to start a family. For a while it had been fun trying, and eventually they’d accepted their failure. A lot of water under the bridge. Or rather, all four hundred and nine of Venice’s bridges. They’d seen each one, and walked over most of them. Johnny ticked them off on a coffee-stained list he brought with him each year, and which became more and more creased each time he unfolded it. Johnny was a boxticker, she’d come to realize. ‘I like to see things in tidy boxes,’ he would say.
He said it rather too often.
‘Only joking,’ he said, when she told him she was fed up hearing this.
They say there’s many a true word spoken in jest but, privately, he was not jesting. Plans were taking shape in his mind. Plans for a future without her.
In happier times they’d shared a love of Venetian glass, and used to go across to the island of Murano on every trip to see their favourite glass factory, Novità Murano. They filled their home in Brighton with glass ornaments — vases, candlesticks, paperweights, figurines, goblets. Glass of every kind. They say that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and they didn’t. Not physical ones. Just metaphorical ones. More and more.
The stones had started the day she peeked on his computer.
Johnny had been a police officer — a homicide detective. She had worked in the Divisional Intelligence Unit of the same force. After he had retired, at forty-nine, he’d become bored. He managed to get a job in the fulfilment department of a mail-order company that supplied framed cartoons of bad puns involving animals. Their bestselling cartoon range was one with pictures of bulls on: Bullshit. Bullderdash. Bullish. And so on.
Johnny sat at the computer all day, ticking boxes in a job he loathed, despatching tasteless framed cartoons to people he detested for buying them, and then going home to a woman who looked more like the bulls in the cartoons every day. He sought out diversions on his computer and began by visiting porn sites. Soon he started advertising himself, under various false names, on Internet contact sites.
That was what Joy found when she peeked into the contents of his laptop one day when he had gone to play golf — at least, that had been his story. He had not been to any golf club. It was strokes and holes of a very different kind he had been playing and, confronted with the evidence, he’d been forced to fess up. He was full frontal, naked and erect on eShagmates.
Naked and erect for everyone in the world but her.
And so it was, on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, that they returned to the increasingly dilapidated palazzo on the Grand Canal, each with a very different agenda in their hearts and minds to the ones they’d had on those heady days of their honeymoon and the years that followed.
He planned to murder her here in Venice. He’d planned last year to murder her during a spring weekend break in Berlin, and the year before that, in Barcelona. Each time he had bottled out. As a former homicide detective, if anyone knew how to get away with murder, he did, but equally he was aware that few murderers ever succeeded. Murderers made mistakes in the white heat of the moment. All you needed was one tiny mistake — a clothing fibre, a hair, a discarded cigarette butt, a scratch, a footprint, a CCTV camera you hadn’t spotted. Anything.
Certain key words were fixed in his mind from years of grim experience. Motive. Body. Murder weapon. They were the three things that would catch out a murderer. Without any one of those elements, it became harder. Without all three, near impossible.
So all he had to do was find a way to dispose of her body. Lose the murder weapon (as yet not chosen). And, as for motive — well, who was to know he had one? Other than the silly friends Joy gossiped with constantly.
The possibilities for murder in Venice were great. Joy could not swim and its vast lagoon presented opportunities for drowning — except it was very shallow. There were plenty of buildings with rickety steps where a person could lose their footing. Windows high enough to ensure a fatal fall.
It had been years since they’d torn each other’s clothes off in the hotel room when they’d arrived. Instead, today, as usual, Johnny logged on and hunched over his computer. He had a slight headache, which he ignored. Joy ate a bar of chocolate from the minibar, followed by a tin of nuts, then the complimentary biscuits that came with the coffee. Then she had a rest, tired from the journey. When she woke, to the sound of Johnny farting, she peered suspiciously over his shoulder to check if he was on one of his porn chat sites.
What she had missed while she slept was the emails back and forth between Johnny and his new love, Mandy, a petite divorcée he’d met at the gym where he’d gone to keep his six-pack in shape. He planned to return from Venice a free man.