As the lift rushed upward Laura leant against the wall, trembling. She had seen him. He had touched her. Nothing had changed.
Melanie watched her worriedly. ‘That was bloody bad luck. Don’t worry, I’ll be around while we’re here. Just don’t let anyone into your room until you’ve checked through the spy-hole, don’t answer the phone, and don’t go anywhere without me, okay?’
Laura didn’t answer. Her face was white, her green eyes jagged with fear, shards of broken glass.
‘Did you see the way people were staring at him?’ asked Melanie. ‘And those who didn’t look made it just as obvious. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. They all think he did it, Laura. He’s got away with murder and the whole world knows it.’
The lift stopped, they got out and walked down to where the porter had unlocked their adjoining rooms and was waiting with their luggage.
‘I never thought I’d say this … but any other time or place I’d have been thrilled to have TV people interested in you, but not if it means you getting mixed up with that bastard again.’ Melanie sighed. ‘Oh, well, there are so many big names here, it probably won’t make it on to the screen.’ She paused. ‘You believe he killed her, don’t you? You wouldn’t be so scared of him if you didn’t.’
‘I didn’t say I was scared of him.’
‘You didn’t need to. You looked terrified.’
Because I was, but not because I think he’s a killer. I was terrified because I wanted him so badly, thought Laura, and walked into the room at whose open door the porter stood.
He asked, ‘Please, your case, which?’
‘That one,’ Melanie told him, pointing. He carried it to a stand at the end of Laura’s bed, talking all the time in his broken English, telling them how to switch on the television, operate the air-conditioning, where to find the minibar.
Melanie stood at the door, her face clouded. ‘Are you going to be okay? Do you want me to stay?’
‘No, I’m fine.’ Laura managed to hold her voice steady.
‘Are you sure?’
Laura gave her a brief look. ‘Yes.’
Reluctantly Melanie moved away. She called back, ‘Have a shower, rest on your bed for half an hour, then we’ll have a trip over to the city and do some window-shopping and sightseeing, okay?’
Laura tipped the porter, who bowed and murmured, ‘Grazie tante, grazie,’ before leaving to show Melanie into her room next door.
Alone at last, Laura walked slowly to the window to gaze out at the sunlit view. Heat made the horizon dance, dazzling her eyes, making her head ache.
Her mouth was dry, her body burning; passion and fear darkened the sea and sky for her, blotted out the sun.
If she had known he would be here she would never have come to Venice.
When she had met Sebastian, Laura was working in London as a model and living in a flat in Islington, a large, northern suburb of the city. Her parents still lived in the old grey farmhouse just below Hadrian’s Wall, which she missed intolerably in the cold, grey, dirty streets of the city. Her mother and father had not approved of her becoming a model: they had wanted her to go to college or get married, like her sister, Angela, who had trained as a nurse before she married Hamish, a doctor working in general practice in Carlisle. Somehow Angela managed to fit having children and running a home into a busy life as one of the nurses in the health centre Hamish worked for, and that was the sort of useful, satisfying life John and Lucy Erskine had wanted for Laura. A life much like their own.
She might well have ended up as they hoped, except that during Laura’
s last year at school she had met a man … As Bogart says in Casablanca, ‘How many stories start with that?’
I met a man when I was young … Immediately you have forebodings, don’t you? You imagine seduction, rape, the ruin of a life. But you would be wrong. Laura had met Bernie Piper on the Roman wall one bright spring day. She was there with a group from school, doing a sponsored walk to raise money for new computers for the science lab. Bernie lived in London, a busy, successful fashion photographer, but he was on holiday that week, exploring the architecture on the wall, since Roman history was one of his many interests.
Laura and her classmates walked past him in a brisk crocodile following the up-hill down-dale path while Bernie stood above the path, watching. He began to follow the girls, staring at Laura.
‘Dirty old man,’ her best friend, Ellen, said, loudly enough for him to hear, and the other girls giggled.
Laura turned salmon pink, as his eyes wandered from the top of her head, where her long red-gold hair was pinned in a neat bun, down over her distinctly skinny body to the legs that she privately thought looked like the roots of a plant, long and thin and pallid after the winter.
She was five foot nine, taller than anyone else in her class. Her height put boys off: who wants to go out with a giantess? Laura knew she was ugly and clumsy; she would have given her eye-teeth to be a demure five foot three, with a sexy, curvy figure.
The teacher shepherding them turned to give Bernie a cold, reproving look, and he pretended to be taking pictures of the view, his expensive camera raised, while the girls continued their walk for another half-hour before stopping to eat the packed lunch each had brought.
Breathless and overheated, Laura undid the top buttons on her shirt and tucked the hem into her bra to let the air get to her bare midriff. She was lying back, eating a cheese and tomato sandwich, when her friends nudged her. ‘Hey, look – it’s him again! He followed us. Well, followed you, anyway.’