Spider - Michael Morley [17]
Orsetta was keen not to let him slip through her fingers. ‘Mr King, the case we want you to look at, it is west of Florence, not too far. If you stay there, I can come and meet you. Please book into a hotel for the night, my office will be happy to pay any costs you incur.’
Jack paused and wondered how he could break the news to Nancy. She would go ape. He decided to do it anyway. The prospect of being involved in an active criminal case was simply too hard to resist.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You’ve got twenty-four hours of my time. I’ll call you when I’ve booked in somewhere.’
Orsetta punched the air. ‘Grazie,’ she said.
As Jack said goodbye, she clicked the phone off and gave one rueful glance towards the house of the friend whom she hadn’t seen for eighteen months, and now probably wouldn’t see again for another year and a half. Still, Orsetta had got her man. As she walked carefully back down Montepulciano’s steep and winding road, she spotted an old woman asleep on a hard-backed chair by an open front door, a red shawl around her neck. Orsetta gently placed the flowers and cherries at her feet and walked away. As she did so, she wondered whether Jack King looked anything near as sexy as he sounded.
15
Sofitel Hotel, Florence, Tuscany
Jack always got Nancy three specific things on anniversaries – something to wear, something to eat and something to read. The three choices were designed to play on her senses of sight, touch and taste, and Jack liked to think he had the imagination to make some pretty interesting purchases. Something to wear was once a pink winter anorak, not too romantic until she put her hand in the pocket and discovered the plane tickets to Sweden and the booking at the Ice Palace where they were to spend the following week. This year Something to wear was red and lacy and he hoped it would awaken the magic of years gone by. Something to eat had traditionally been a visit to a new restaurant, except for the year when the local amateur players were putting on Romeo and Juliet. A flash of his gold shield in the right places had enabled him to hire the set for the afternoon, ship in violinists and pizza and have the two leading cast members perform extracts between the courses. True, it had been more comic than romantic, but it still rated as memorable. This year, well, he was leaving the food side up to Paolo, who had promised to do something gastronomically pornographic with white truffles and Italian brandy. Something to read had always been the easiest. Sometimes it had been a book that summed up their relationship. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus had started the trend and occasionally Nancy had been cheeky enough to put in her own specific orders, asking for works by foreign poets with names he’d never heard of, like Szymborska and Saint-John Perse. This year, Jack had just hurriedly completed his trinity of gifts and was heading into the Sofitel on Via de Cerratani with an English translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He hadn’t really looked inside, but knew Dante was Tuscan and a medieval poet, so he reckoned his lucky find was relevant enough to prove popular.
The Sofitel was located inside a converted seventeenth-century palace and, most importantly, close to the railway station from where Jack hoped to catch an early-morning train back to his wife. There was a chance that she would have calmed down by then.
He fought his way through a swarm of German tourists who were buzzing phrases of mangled Italian at the front-desk staff. Finally he managed to secure a second-floor room looking out towards Piazza del Duomo. Best of all though, it had the kind of deepfreeze air-conditioning that he was used to back home. He clicked the fan on high and raided the mini-bar to make Bloody Marys. The session with the shrink had unsettled him. It had not been the gibberish he had anticipated; it had made sense.
Fenella was right. He was frightened. He was anxious, and