Michael Morley - The Venice conspiracy

A bubbling.

Like hunger. Only different.

She puts her hands across the bulge. Unless she's mistaken, even her child seems pleased that she's finished.

She covers the tablet with cloth and starts to chop fruit for breakfast. It makes her remember how usually when someone is ill neighbours bring small gifts as gestures of goodwill to speed a full and fast recovery. Fruits, cheeses, juices, or even talismans. But none have been brought for Teucer. No one has even visited.

Sharp shafts of sunlight begin to flood the hut and come to rest on Teucer's face.

Eventually the warmth wakes him.

He drags himself upright and instantly reaches out for his wife. 'Tetia!' There's a hint of panic in his voice.

'I'm here.' She goes to him and strokes his matted hair. 'Are you feeling better? You have slept long and deeply. Had you not been making the grunts of a bear, then I may have taken you for dead.'

He smiles and puts his hands to his head, close to where she's been touching him. 'I do feel a little stronger.' The bandages are all loose and the poultice has fallen off. 'Though my eyes feel as though they are full of sand.'

Tetia can see that his dressing has slipped, his pupils are uncovered. He's looking straight at her.

But he can't see anything!

She steps closer. Looks for a flicker of recognition.

Nothing.

Teucer senses something. Perhaps it is her silence. Perhaps he somehow picks up her thoughts. 'What are you doing?'

She swallows hard. 'Nothing, my love. I had mislaid your things. Lie back down and I will change those dressings for you.'

Teucer lowers his elbows and lies back.

Tetia pours water into a bowl and uses ram's wool to gently wipe away crusts from his eye lashes and sockets. She sits astride his thighs, and for a moment both of them think back to when they last made love like this. He smiles up at her and she feels him harden beneath her. He reaches out so his fingers touch the falling curtains of her hair. 'Thank you, my sweetness. Thank you for being here with me and for not deserting me. I thought the other day that you had decided that if the gods had abandoned me, then so should you.'

'Shush!' She puts a finger to his lips. 'Don't say such things.'

Teucer falls silent, his fingers frozen like icicles in the soft waterfall of hair.

She bends her face low to kiss his dry lips. She moistens them with her tongue and feels a soft moan stirring within him.

Gently she removes her clothes and kisses his chest and penis. She'll make love to him. Slowly. Caringly. Then she'll tell him. Tell him she has to go to Pesna.

Present Day Hotel Rotoletti, Piazzale Roma, Venice Lieutenant Valentina Morassi picks Tom up at his own hotel a little after 8 a.m. She'd left a message there the previous night, and also at the Luna Baglioni.

The weather's cooler than it's been for some time, and Valentina is dressed in brushed-cotton, black Armani jeans, a short jacket of soft red Italian leather and a grey cashmere jumper over a long-collared white blouse. She has a weakness for clothes. More of her money goes on them than on food, which she thinks is probably a good thing, given that if it was the other way round she'd never fit into any of the stuff she likes to wear. It follows, then, that when Tom appears she instantly notices he's still wearing the same jeans, grey tee and grey hooded sweat-top that she first saw him in.

'Buongiorno!' he chirps, as he gingerly steps on to the deck of the Carabinieri craft. 'I'm not a seafarer, I'm afraid. My legs prefer a little terra firma.'

'And you an LA guy?' Valentina teases, steadying his arm as he lurches on to the back of the boat where the Italian flag flutters in a fresh breeze. 'I had you down as a Californian who'd spent most of his teenage years in the ocean.'

Tom flinches. 'You're way off the mark, Lieutenant. Truth is, I can barely swim. I'm almost phobic about it, actually.'

She looks at him quizzically, not sure whether he's toying with her. 'Come inside, I've got some coffee.'

Tom has to almost fold himself double as he follows her through a tiny door into a long, narrow cabin at the back of the wheelhouse. 'My best friend got killed by a jet ski at Malibu when I was a kid. I was in the water with him at the time.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Thanks. We got far to go?'

'Five minutes. Maybe ten. Depends on the traffic.' She undoes a steel Thermos flask and pours black coffee for them both.

Tom's amused by the idea of a traffic jam on the water. But as they make their way out from the midst of water taxis, gondolas and work boats around the Piazzale, he can see what she means.

'Major Carvalho and the medical examiner, Professore Montesano, will meet us there.' She thinks about mentioning his clothes, especially his lack of fresh ones, but checks herself. 'Have you been in a morgue before?'

Tom nods. 'Unfortunately, several times. Not for crime investigation reasons, but to accompany relatives of the newly deceased. Sometimes to identify a dead gangbanger or gutter bum who had no one else to stand for them.'

She smiles apologetically. 'I'm sorry. The morgue is really not a good place to start your day.'

Tom shrugs. 'I'd rather not go to one at all, but if I have to, then I'd prefer to start the day there than finish it there.' Twenty minutes later the words come back to bite him.

Gowned up and standing alongside the bleached body of fifteen-year-old Monica Vidic, he feels almost as low as the night he killed the two street punks in LA.

He's heard what Major Carvalho has just said. Understood it very clearly. But he still has to ask the question. 'Someone cut out her liver?'

Valentina looks guilty. 'Si. I'm sorry I didn't tell you about this earlier. It seemed more appropriate to wait until you came here.'

'Are you all right, signor?' says the ME, registering the distress on his face. 'Perhaps we take a little break?'

Tom shakes his head. 'No. No, I'm fine. Let's get this over with.' He glances at Valentina, who looks away as if she knows he's remembering her comment that after this meeting the Carabinieri would be finished with him – completely finished. Well, it doesn't feel like that any more. Far from it. It feels like they are only just getting started.

Riva San Biagio, Venice The early-morning sun is masked by cloud as Antonio Pavarotti guns up the old family motorboat moored near Riva San Biagio and sets out for Isola Mario. A glance at his watch tells him he'll arrive about twenty minutes early, long enough to stray a little and get a water-level view of the boathouse. He throttles up as he eases his way into one of the lagoon's well-defined navigation channels.

The boat's an old twenty-seven footer, bought by his father Angelo almost twenty years ago and gifted to his son on his twenty-first birthday. It's been cherished over the decades and in recent years almost completely overhauled by Antonio. His latest labour of love was fitting new windows and reconditioning the trusty old diesel engine. Next on his list is another repaint of the ever-needy blue hull that's now bouncing over some particularly choppy waves. He soon sees the reason why. He's following in the wake of the Number 41 waterbus heading out to Ferrovia and Murano. Get caught in the tracks of one of those and it's about as comfortable as being pulled naked across a ploughed field by your ankles.

Antonio opens a flask of tea he's brought with him and sticks it in a holder at the front of the wheelhouse. It's a beautifully restored and fully covered area, resplendent in French-polished wood and freshly cleaned brass. It opens up into a good-sized galley kitchen complete with a temperamental gas oven and two-ring burner that in their time have heated up a lot of his mamma's home cooking. At the rear is a seating area that doubles as a bunk or two.