Page 31 of The Venice Murders

‘Now we must run,’ he warned, disentangling himself. ‘Or we’ll be in trouble.’

Piero Benetti was waiting for them on the quayside and, though he wasn’t exactly scowling, neither was he full of joy. Sensing that she couldn’t make him more despondent than he was already, Flora decided to have the conversation she’d been wanting since they’d first boarded theMirabelle.

Laying the posy carefully to one side, she walked unsteadily over to the man at the wheel.

‘Will you be seeing Bianca this evening?’ she began.

‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘Why you want to know?’

‘Only to pass on our good wishes. She seemed a little upset when we met her the other day. She told me there had been a problem – with her fiancé.’

‘That man.’ He muttered something inaudible and probably highly offensive.

‘You didn’t like Franco Massi?’ It was a fairly good guess.

‘Like him?Una merda!’

Jack’s eyebrows rose. Itwasoffensive.

‘He is all smart, the big man one day. He make promise, he take money, but then…pah!’ He threw his hands in the air.

Money? What money? Flora was desperate to ask but knew that, if she did, Benetti would stop talking. Instead, she said, ‘Do you know why Franco changed his mind?’

‘Why he left mybellaBianca? For his family, he say. For his mother, his father, his brother.Spazzatura!’ There was a pause while he glared ahead, silently shaking his head from side to side. ‘A bad day she go to England.’

‘She met Franco in England?’

‘No, no. She met here. Venezia. He goes to the Minerva, this is hotel where she work.’

‘And he met Bianca there?’

There was another inaudible mutter.

‘I’m not surprised they became friends,’ Flora said, but garnered no response. ‘They’d have so much to talk about,’ she persevered. ‘Both of them having worked in England.’

‘Bianca, it is bad she go there. England very bad. It mean trouble.’

‘Really? But it must have been exciting for her to work abroad for the first time. And it was inVenicethat she met Franco.’

‘It give her bad idea,’ he growled, and without another word thrust the tiller roughly forward, sending theMirabelleshooting across the lagoon.

12

‘That is one angry man,’ Jack observed as they walked up the path to the hotel foyer.

‘Angry enough to push Massi to his death?’

‘I don’t see why not. He was angry enough to come here and harangue the reception staff – risking any business the hotel might give him in the future. And it seems he had more than one reason to be furious.’

‘The money, you mean. That surprised me.’

They were walking up the marble staircase to their first-floor room and Jack put a finger to his lips. It was better to keep the discussion for the bedroom and she agreed.

As they walked into the apartment, Flora caught sight of her face in the crystal-framed Murano mirror. More freckles, she mourned, but at least her arms and legs had turned a satisfying colour and she felt extraordinarily alive.

‘You look quite beautiful, you know.’ Jack wrapped both arms around her and bounced her on to the sofa that faced the long windows leading to their balcony.

Laughing, she landed half on and half off the seat. ‘You’ve obviously enjoyed today!’

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