Page 34 of The Venice Murders

Jack denied any knowledge of the town.

‘Nice little place. Great beaches – miles of sand, not the pebble we’ve got here – and the best bed and breakfast in the country. Can’t wait to get away!’

Deciding to forgo the Cipriani ferry to St Mark’s on a new sightseeing trip, they walked to the nearestvaporettostop, passing the Redentore on the way. Jack was keen to take a wander through the huge Palladian church, a sixteenth-century thanksgiving for Venice’s deliverance from the plague.

Flora, though, had no great interest. ‘I don’t think I want to,’ she said. ‘It’s big and cold and very white.’

‘And that’s a problem?’ Jack was laughing.

Looking up at the vast cupola, she was conscious of a movement at the edge of her vision. A figure, there and then not there. It had disappeared through a side entrance to the church. Why the side entrance? Why not up the front flight of steps and through the magnificent Doric pillars? She gave a swift glance around. They were alone, no passers-by, no tourists – they would flock here next month for thefestawhich, with fireworks, celebrated the end of a terrible plague. Maybe the figure had come to pray quietly – that was always possible. It had been the flash of bright blue that triggered memory. That, and a certain shambling stride. A lot of men wear blue shirts, she scolded herself, a lot might walk in that creeping fashion, not just Luigi Tasca. But the fear remained.

‘Well?’ he asked her, still smiling.

Flora made a decision. She was being foolish. She would say nothing. ‘The church feels unfriendly,’ she tried to explain. ‘It’s giving me goose pimples just looking at it.’ Was that the church’s doing or that flash of blue shirt?

‘Can churches be unfriendly?’ he asked, while they waited for the nextvaporetto. ‘That seems a contradiction.’

‘I think they can. But perhaps it’s just that I’ve seen too many. There are over two hundred in Venice alone – which is a terrifying figure.’

‘We’re going to the Vivaldi concert tomorrow,’ Jack reminded her, ‘and it’s to be performed in a church.’

‘That’s different,’ she insisted. ‘Vivaldi’s church is much smaller and it’s where he worked for most of his life.Andit will be filled with wonderful music. Oh, the boat’s here already.’

She nodded towards the little ship wallowing towards them, spray surging around its deck as it plunged through the lagoon on what was an unusually windy morning.

The journey across the Giudecca Canal took no more than ten minutes and, arriving at the Zattere, a wide and wonderful promenade stretched ahead of them. Built as a landing dock hundreds of years previously, the quay was as exposed as it was wide and, despite the wind that still blew strongly, it wasn’t long before they began to feel uncomfortably sticky, the sun beating down from a near cloudless sky. A fifteen-minute saunter from thevaporettobrought them to a corner café that fronted a narrow canal, its blinds offering a welcome stretch of shade. Stopping to cool down, they gazed across the water and realised they were looking at something very special.

Jack consulted the guidebook he’d decided to bring with him today. ‘According to this,’ he said, ‘we’re standing opposite the oldest shipyard in Venice.’

The scene could have been one from two hundred years ago: gondolas being repaired, gondolas being constructed.

‘A hundred different pieces and seven types of wood for each gondola,’ Jack read. ‘It’s a craft handed down from one generation to another.’

‘And such skill,’ Flora murmured, watching as a craftsman slowly sanded one of the many sections of wood that, once shaped, would eventually make a finished boat.

‘For how much longer, though? Will future generations be willing to learn?’ Then, in a change of mood, he gave her arm a squeeze. ‘Could you eat an ice cream?’

‘When can’t I?’

Slowly demolishing their ice creams, strawberry for Flora andmalaga, a kind of rum and raisin, for Jack, they strolled back to the Zattere and along towards the harbour of San Basilio where they found a bench in the shade.

‘You might want to know you’ve a dribble of strawberry on your chin,’ Jack said.

‘And you’ve rum and raisin on your nose. More usefully, do you have a handkerchief handy? I can’t get to mine.’

With some difficulty, he fumbled in his pocket and brought out a large square of linen. ‘You first.’ Grinning, he handed her the handkerchief. ‘Looking like this, we wouldn’t be too welcome on any of those.’ He pointed to the line of expensive yachts berthed in the harbour. ‘Ragamuffins, they’d say. Not a lira to their name!’

‘No money maybe, but far better taste.’

‘What do you mean, no money? We’ll order the yacht tomorrow! In the meantime, lunch calls.’

‘After ice cream?’

‘A miserable gelato isn’t going to feed a man and breakfast disappeared an age ago. There are dozens of bars and restaurants along the quayside and I have my eye on one in particular.’

Their walk back from the Zattere, through Dorsoduro and over the Accademia bridge to St Mark’s, was a fair distance and made beneath the broiling sun of early afternoon. An uncomfortable walk, especially when you were feeling very full, Flora admitted to herself: she’d soon forgotten the ice cream amid a welter of bruschetta and grilled mullet. A splendid lunch.

It was a hot and weary twosome, though, who telephoned the Cipriani for a ride back to the hotel.

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