LUCY GORDON: The Italian’s Miracle Family

‘He’s the man over there, scowling.’

She saw where he pointed. Her first impression of Drago di Luca was of darkness. His hair was dark, and so were his eyes, which mysteriously managed to be piercing at the same time. Yet it wasn’t just a matter of appearance. This darkness was there inside him-in his mind, his heart, even perhaps his soul. Alysa shivered slightly.

His face seemed to be made from angles, with no roundness or softening anywhere. The nose was sharp and distinctive, the mouth and jaw firm, the eyes ferocious, even at this distance. The whole effect was one of hauteur, as though he defied anyone to dare speak to him.

‘You wouldn’t want to get on his wrong side, would you?’ the young man said. ‘Mind you, he’s got a lot to scowl about. His wife died here, and the grapevine says she’d left him for another man.’

It took a moment before Alysa could answer. ‘The grapevine? Doesn’t anyone know for sure?’

‘She was a lawyer, and the official story is that she was on a trip to see clients. If anyone dares to suggest otherwise di Luca comes down on them like a ton of his own bricks. He’s a builder, you see, takes on big projects-new stuff, restoring ancient buildings, that sort of thing.’

She looked again. Di Luca was tall and powerfully built, with broad shoulders and large hands, as though he personally constructed his projects.

‘I can see that people could find him scary,’ she mused.

‘I’ll say. He’s a big man in Florence. Someone suggested that he stand for the council and he laughed. He has all the influence over the council that he needs without spending time in meetings. They say he has the ear of every important person in town, and he pulls strings whenever it suits him. I tried to speak to him earlier and I thought he was going to kill me.’

She took a last look at Drago, and was disconcerted when he seemed to be looking back at her. Impossible, surely? But for a moment the surroundings faded to silence and all she could hear was a call that he seemed to be sending to her.

Stop being fanciful, she told herself.

‘I must be going,’ she told the journalist.

She drifted away, managing to keep Drago di Luca in her sights. She knew his face from a hundred obsessive searches of the internet. James had accidentally let slip that his new lover was called Carlotta. Then he’d clammed up.

Three weeks later the tragedy at the Pinosa Falls, near Florence, in Italy, had hit the headlines and she had learned from a newspaper that he was dead. Going through the list of names, she’d discovered Signora Carlotta di Luca, a young lawyer of great promise. Searching the internet, Alysa had discovered several articles about her, and some photographs.

They’d revealed a dark-haired, vivacious woman-not beautiful, but with a special quality. One picture had showed Carlotta with her husband and child, a little girl about four years old, who bore a strong resemblance to her mother. The man with them had been in his late thirties with a face that Alysa hadn’t been able to read-strong, and blank of emotion.

Was he also a brutal husband whose unkindness had driven his wife into the arms of another man, and so to her death? Seeing him today, she could believe it.

The internet had also contained depictions of the accident that no newspaper would have dared to publish-intimate, shocking pictures taken by mercenary ghouls, showing smashed bodies in terrifying detail. One had showed Carlotta and James, lying dead on the ground. James’s face had been covered with blood, but Alysa had recognised his jacket.

They’d still been in the chair, leaving no doubt that they had travelled together. She’d just been able to make out that in the last moments before death he and Carlotta had thrown themselves into each other’s arms.

Now it was over, she told herself. Ended. Finished. Forget it.

One night, as she’d stared at the computer screen, she’d felt shafts of pain go through her like knives. What had happened then had been too fast for her even to call for help. Stumbling to the bathroom, she’d collapsed on the floor and fainted. When she’d come round, she had lost James’s child.

Afterwards she’d been glad that she hadn’t confided in anybody. Now she could weep in privacy. But the tears hadn’t come. Night after night she’d lain alone in the darkness, staring into nothing, while her heart had turned to stone.

After giving the matter some rational thought she’d decided it was for the best. If she couldn’t cry now she would never cry again, which was surely useful. When you loved nothing, feared nothing, cared for nothing, what was there to worry about?

With that settled, she’d embarked on the transformation of her life. A shopping trip had provided her with a collection of trouser suits, all stunningly fashionable and costly. Next she’d lopped off the extravagant tresses that had marked her earlier existence. The resulting boyish crop was elegant, but she cared little. What counted was that it marked the end of her old life and the start of her new one.

Or just the end of life?

Her face too had changed, but in ways she couldn’t see. It was tense, strained, so that every feature was sharpened in a way that would have been forbidding if her large eyes had not softened her appearance. They were now her main claim to beauty, and more than one man had admired them, only to find them looking right through him.

She’d thrown herself into her career with renewed fervour. Her bosses were impressed. The word ‘partnership’ began to be whispered. A year after James’s death, she should have completely moved on. And yet…

She wandered slowly back to the water and looked up again to the place where James and Carlotta had swung up high, moments before the cable had snapped.

‘Why am I here?’ she asked him. ‘Why haven’t I managed to forget you yet?’

Because he was a ghost who haunted her even now, and in this place she’d planned to exorcise him. Foolish hope.

‘Leave me alone,’ she whispered desperately, closing her eyes. ‘In the name of pity, leave me alone.’

Silence. He wasn’t there, but even his absence had a mocking quality.

Beneath a huge tree a stone had been erected, bearing the names of the dead, with James near the bottom. She knelt and touched his name, feeling the stone cold beneath her fingers. This was as close to him as she would ever be again.

‘Sapevi che lui?’

The voice, coming from behind her, made her turn and find Drago di Luca towering over her, glowering. He looked immense, blotting out the sun, forcing her to see only him.

‘Sono Inglese,’ she said.

‘I asked if you knew the man whose name you touch.’

‘Yes,’ she said defiantly. ‘I knew him.’

‘Well?’ He rapped the word out.

‘Yes, well. Very well. Is that any business of yours?’

‘Everything concerning that man is my business.’

She rose to face him. ‘Because he ran off with your wife?’

She heard his sharp intake of breath and knew that he would have controlled it if he could. His eyes were full of murder. Much like her own, she suspected.

‘If you know that-’ he said slowly.

‘James Franklin was my boyfriend. He left me for a woman called Carlotta.’

‘What else did he tell you about her?’

‘Nothing. He let her name slip, then refused to say any more. But when this happened-’ She shrugged.

‘Yes,’ he said heavily. ‘Then every detail came out for the entertainment of the world.’

The crowd jostled her slightly and she moved away. At once he took her arm, leading her in the direction he chose, as though in no doubt of her compliance.

‘Are you still in love with him?’ he demanded sharply.