Spider - Michael Morley [7]
‘Good morning, Mrs King,’ said Maria Fazing. Her grumpy American owner had banned her from using her native Italian. Nancy insisted that as foreign tourists were their main target customers, she should always begin conversations in English. Maria put up with it because one day she would enter Miss Italia, then Miss World, and would eventually be grateful to have been forced to learn English. Or at least that’s what she told herself.
Nancy checked the computer, then the answer-phone, and updated the list of room bookings. She also added four more people to that evening’s dinner reservations and then checked their own website for e-mail enquiries. There were some requests for menus, a couple of letters in Italian that Nancy printed off for Maria to reply to, and someone wanting a quote for a fifth-wedding-anniversary dinner.
Maria was on the phone to some potential guests so Nancy had to wait to hand over the e-mail print-offs. She glanced down at a copy of La Nazione. The front-page headline screamed ‘Omicidio!’ and carried a photo of a pretty dark-haired young woman called Cristina Barbuggiani. Nancy had also seen the girl’s picture on TV bulletins and had heard staff talking about how her body had been chopped up and thrown in the sea. She turned away, letting out a long sigh, sad to realize that even here, in the most beautiful place she had ever lived, there was no escape from murder.
8
Florence, Tuscany
Jack stepped from the silence of the empty train into the noise and swelter of midday Florence, a broiling city of bustling bodies and blaring traffic. His mind was still clogged with the dregs of his nightmare when he reached the office of Dottoressa Elisabetta Fenella. The building stood just off Piazza San Lorenzo in the city’s most famous market district and was overlooked by the majestic stone presence of the Basilica di San Lorenzo, a frontless fourth-century church, rebuilt by the Medicis.
Jack slipped from the scorching sunlight of the street into the cool shade of the building’s entrance-way. He took a cramped, old-fashioned, iron-gated lift to the third floor and was ushered by a demure receptionist into a marble-floored, high-ceilinged consultation room. Overhead, two fans that probably predated Florence itself spun gracefully but pointlessly, batting currents of hot air from one side of the room to the other but doing nothing to cool the place. An antique oak desk squatted in a far corner, overlooked by a crucifix on the far wall and weighed down by papers and silver-framed photographs of a large extended family. Jack picked one up and studied a glamorous dark-haired woman in her late thirties, shoulder to elegant shoulder with a much older man.
The door behind him opened and the woman in the picture frame looked startled to find him at her desk.
‘Signore King?’ she asked, her voice betraying her disapproval of his nosiness.
‘Yes,’ answered Jack, embarrassed at being caught snooping. ‘Forgive me, old police habits die hard.’
‘Please.’ She gestured towards two creamy cotton settees arranged either side of a square glass-topped coffee table.
‘Thanks for seeing me at such short notice, I appreciate it.’ Jack offered his hand and as she shook it he noticed a gold and diamond wedding ring that would cost an FBI field officer three months’ salary.
‘You’re welcome. I’m afraid it was either today, or I wouldn’t have been able to fit you in for several months.’ Elisabetta Fenella put a brown file down on the coffee table and Jack noticed his name. He was on file.
No doubt the FBI had shipped it to her, FedExed her all the gory details about his burnout, his failure to cope with the pressure of his workload, and she’d had it waiting there, gathering years of dust but ever ready for the moment he inevitably cracked up and came calling.
The thought slapped the wind out of him.
Dottoressa Fenella cut to the chase. ‘Your office called me, what – something like two years ago? So, why did you choose now to ask to