Michael Morley - The Venice conspiracy

He finally twigs. This is about emotion. Feelings. Communicating. Building a relationship. The spiritual side. The very thing he should be good at and is now blundering around at. 'I'm sorry. I guess I'm spectacularly poor at this.' He pauses and makes sure she's looking at him, staring straight into his eyes, the proverbial windows of the soul. 'Sleeping with you-' he corrects himself: 'Having sex with you – is something I'll never, ever forget.'

'Of course you won't. No one does.'

'No. Not because it was my first time, that wasn't what I meant. I didn't rush out of the church and think, whoopee, now I can have sex. It wasn't like that.'

She's taken aback, reaches for a glass of water rather than her wine.

'I'll never forget it because I felt closer to you at that moment than I've ever felt to any human being. Never mind the rush, the adrenalin, the desire. There was all that. And more. And thank you, God, for the intensity of it all. But there was more.'

Tina feels embarrassed. She'd raised the topic to be playful, to tease him, to spice up the dinner. Now she's somewhere she hadn't expected to be. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be crass, earlier.'

Tom smiles; the inquisition is over. He picks up his glass again. 'You weren't.' He takes a calmer sip this time. 'Talking about it was good. The right thing to have done. So what now? What happens next?'

Next? Tina had never thought about next. She disguises her shock by looking away. Now she reaches for the wine and she hopes there's no panic on her face when she turns back to him. 'Don't expect too much, Tom. Please don't. I have an awful habit of letting people down.'

Isola Mario, Venice The historic mansion on the private island owned by reclusive millionaire Mario Fabianelli is in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Formerly a respected seat of Venetian grandeur, it is now a hippy commune. Its manicured lawns are overgrown and neglected, and the only hint of affluence comes in the presence of the black-uniformed security guards who patrol the perimeters.

The guards are in good spirits as they end their shift inside an ugly grey Portakabin surrounded by a crop of cypresses at the rear of the mansion.

'Another day over – another cheque in the bank.' Antonio Materazzi slumps against a door-jamb and lights a cigarette. The four guys in the locker room, including their supervisor, think he's an out-of-work bouncer from Livorno. None of them have a clue his real name is Pavarotti or that he's an undercover cop. Luca, the supervisor who gave him the job, is a big friendly guy who's taken a liking to him – maybe even sees a bit of his old self in the well-muscled kid. 'Antonio, come eat with us,' he shouts as he struggles to tie his laces beneath the heavy sagging stomach that's he's keen to fill. 'Spumoni makes the best tortellini in Venice, come with us.'

Antonio blows out cigarette smoke and waves him gently away. 'Another time. Thank you for asking me, but today I promised my new girlfriend-'

Marco, the unit's weasel-faced number two, wags a long finger and leers. 'Haah! We know exactly what you promised your girlfriend!' He slaps a tattooed hand on his bicep and snaps his arm upwards. 'Why should you be eating pasta with old dogs like us, when you can be at home eating young pussy, hey?'

'Enough, Marco! You're a fucking pig.' Luca glares at him, a supervisor's stare of death. He turns towards Pavarotti and adopts a more fatherly look. 'Another time, 'Tonio. Remember, you're working mornings – twelve on, twelve off for the rest of the week, okay?'

'Si. Va bene. I'll remember.' Antonio gives his boss the thumbs-up and focuses his attention on his cigarette until they all head off for the waiting water taxi.

The commune is set in the middle of the island with four major landing stages for boats, the main one being close to the guard house. Water from the lagoon has been channelled in various tributaries around and through the island. Numerous bridges arch decorously over waterways that lead to footpaths and forests planted centuries ago.

The undercover cop watches the water taxi head across the lagoon, flicks the dog-end of his cigarette into a metal bin and begins to amble around the mansion's northern perimeter walls. If he's right, Fernando, the exterior night guard is now exactly at the opposite end of the island. He's got a good half-hour to do his snooping before they're likely to bump into each other.

Antonio's already noted that the walls are covered with anti-vandal night cameras and anti-glare high-def day cameras. An introductory shift designed to teach him how to monitor the feeds and archive video from the hard drives was enough for him to spot several weak areas. Nothing wrong with the system, nothing at all. The German-made Mobotix IP high-res set-up is one of the best in the world. But the flaw Antonio has found is a human one. It hadn't been fitted by Mobotix, it'd been installed by Mario's own team and they hadn't quite got all their angles right. Forty overlapping camera views cover four long walls and any nearby internal and external activity. But the video sweep on the south wall, the one opposite the guard's complex, seems to his expert eye to have been poorly rigged. It lazily misses a whole section of the mansion's grounds. Well, to be precise, it's not so much the grounds it misses as the waterway access and the building that lies behind it – the area they've been told is strictly out of bounds – the boathouse.

Antonio sticks close to the wall. As close as the climbing ivy that's bound its pink tendrils into the whitewashed mortar. The boathouse is top of his list of places to check out. If drugs are being run in and out of the island, then this place is going to be the centre of activity.

By the time he reaches the slipway he realises prowling around isn't going to be as easy as he thought. He glances up at the walls. The night cameras are out of view. Good. If he can't see them, they can't see him.

But that's not the problem. Running out from the wall – outwards and upwards – is a vast wire-mesh fence, topped and edged with razor wire.

He weighs it up. Even if he could climb it and swing his family jewels over those slice-happy jaws of sharpened steel, then he still has to drop at least twelve feet on the other side into the water. Dangerous. At least break-your-ankle dangerous. Maybe worse.

Going round doesn't look an easier option. To do that, he'd have to walk maybe a mile to the edge of the island, then dive into the lagoon and swim underwater and unseen up the slipway. In a wetsuit and properly prepared he'd happily give it a go. But not fully dressed, not unprepared, and not right now with one of his security-guard colleagues about to arrive on his tail.

Antonio moves his attention to the large wooden doors of the boathouse.

They're going to be locked as well.

Even if he manages to get to them, those big old wooden slabs are going to give him problems. They're padlocked from the outside and possibly even bolted on the inside. Hopeless. Absolutely hopeless.

He turns and starts the walk back in the gathering dusk. He can just make out Fernando in the distance, a distinctive bow-legged walk, his pace slow and casual. In another hour the last dregs of daylight will have drained away and he'll be making the last of his rounds with a flashlight.

Way beyond the vicious razor wire and high above the weathered old doors a rusty weathervane gently spins, kicked into life by a gathering westerly wind. A closer look – perhaps through binoculars – would have revealed that the iron head of the cockerel was a twenty-four-hour camera with night-vision lens, routed not to the Mobotix control room but to a smaller and more private panel of monitors and recorders at the back of the boathouse. A panel now controlled by the man who killed Monica Vidic.