Page 34 of Vengeance in Venice
“Did you see him into bed?”
“Mostly. He is not a baby and can look after himself.”
“Didyougo straight to bed?”
“Yes. It was half past one and my father wakes me early in the morning.”
“It is a big house,” Solomon said, “with hardly anyone living here. Would you hear if anyone came in or out?”
“Of course. My father and I sleep near the kitchens, on the ground floor, at the back of the house. I hear both the front and the back doors. They are heavy and the hinges need oiling.”
“Did you hear him go out again that night?”
“No.” Luigi looked him in the eye, and Solomon knew he was lying. “No one went out or came in.”
*
An hour later,they sat on the floor by the window of their drawing room, various pieces of paper covered in Constance’s neat handwriting strewn around them. The candles were lit and the windows closed, but they could still make out the shifting water of the canal and the lights of the boats still passing up and down.
“Why do people lie to us when they need our help?” Constance demanded. “And I’m sure they are all lying about something.”
“They don’t trust us,” Solomon said. “Why should they? We don’t trust them. And unless they know differently, we are more likely to have murdered Savelli than they are. We are the strangers, and I have the best motive of all.”
“And the best alibi,” she reminded him. “The servants here know that neither of us went out again that night. But I think Giusti did. And Rossi. I even think Elena might have. If we don’t know where they went, then it could easily have been the back of the Palazzo Savelli. I wonder if the police know more than us.”
“They can’t know less. I wonder if we can fit in a visit to Signor Foscolo tomorrow.”
“He might well be calling on us.”
Solomon reached out and caressed her hair, the curve of her bent neck. “Shall we go to bed?”
Her eyes softened as she looked up at him. He imagined they glowed, for him. She moved, resting her cheek on his shoulder, her hand comfortable on his thigh.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”
Chapter Eight
Domenico Rossi wasfull of hope and excitement as he walked across the bridges and footpaths that led to the Palazzo Zulian.
His artistic senses tingled at the memory of the English couple’s beauty, but more than that by the pleasing nature of the light and dark side by side. So close that they were almost one, and yet so different. Two sides of the same coin, perhaps, with different aspects of character and strength. Unique experience and pain gazed out of those two young faces, along with irrepressible curiosity and desire for life. He felt drawn them more than to any subject in years.
It was a miracle they were letting him paint them. Such a pity he had been quite so drunk. Perhaps Adriana had been right to try to keep them out and make them come back later, for while he could remember perfectly what they looked like and how he wanted to paint them, he couldn’t remember what they had talked about and what, if anything, they had agreed upon. And the sketches he had made of their heads were terrible. He was ashamed.
This was not good.
Drinking was fun, necessary even, when he had nothing to paint and no desire to look. Melancholy was a curse but he’d begun to think that wine was not the answer. Not when he forgot things.
Something niggled at the edges of his mind. To do with forgetting, and the English couple, and the Savelli portrait. Wasthere a connection there? Savelli had died, stabbed through the heart, they said. Which Domenico didn’t like to think about. Not after his furious, drunken dream when he had…
He refused to think about the dream. And he certainly wasn’t about to tell anyone about waking up on his studio floor the following morning, with his clothes wet and dirty as if he’d swum in the canal and rolled about the street like a dog.
Adriana knew, of course. She’d washed his clothes and called him a drunken pig. But there was nothing to imply the drunken nightmare was more than there. There had been no blood on his clothes—or at least only from his own grazes.
Well, it was a warning, a sign from God, maybe. If He had not given up on him. Rossi would stop drinking, and he would paint the most exquisite portrait of the English couple that would become famous throughout Europe. He might even marry Adriana…
He approached the Palazzo Zulian, the most distinguished building on the canal. Straightening his back, he lifted the knocker.
*
