Days Without Number (42 page)

mind dwell on the moment, far off though it was, he would retrieve the words. He felt sure of it. There. He nearly had them. So very nearly. All he had to do ...

'Ten. You remember nothing except that you remember nothing. You haven't forgotten. It simply hasn't happened. Nine. You aren't so deeply asleep now. Your limbs are lighter. Eight. The world is returning to you and you to it. It's easy. It's what you want. Seven. You are beginning to sense your surroundings, to hear other things than my voice. Six. You're aware of yourself and where you are. Five. You feel comfortable. Refreshed. Happy. Four. You're beginning to wake up. Light is seeping through your eyelids. Three. You're nearly awake. You have only to open your eyes. Two. You are awake. One. You open your eyes.'

Nick blinked and looked around. He was alone. The room was empty. There was a click as the tape recorder switched itself off. He stared at the machine, wondering how long had passed since Emily had gone, leaving him to obey her recorded instructions. She had not told him this was her intention, though perhaps another deception was only to be expected. He looked at his watch, but, since he did not know when he had entered the trance, calculating precisely how long it had lasted was impossible. Half an hour or so was his best guess, though it felt to him as if only a few minutes had passed, as if she had asked him nothing, as if she had merely hypnotized him and then immediately reversed the effect. But he knew that was not true. He knew she must have asked him many questions and he must have answered them.

The briefcase had gone, along with the syringe and the pen-torch. Emily had gone too, along with Demetrius. The house was filled with silence. Nick could hear the sound of his own clothing sliding across his skin as he stood up. He felt slightly woozy, as if the tranquillizer was still affecting him. He looked down at the tape recorder. Emily had said she would record what he said under hypnosis. But they must have taken that tape with them. This was a different 351

tape, recorded beforehand. Everything had been planned meticulously. And everything, apparently, had gone according to plan.

What about Basil? The urgency of the question burst suddenly on Nick's mind. Had he given them what they wanted? Had he done enough to save his brother? He stumbled towards the door.

That was when he noticed the blood - irregularly spaced blotches of it across the pale carpet, bright red and recently shed, leading in a meandering arc from the table to the door. He stopped and stared for a moment, struggling to comprehend what he saw. Then he moved to the door and pulled it open. Light flooded into the room, momentarily dazzling him. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw a man lying on the floor about halfway along the hall, close to the wall. There was a pool of blood around him, wine-red against the polished white of the marble. A gun was cradled in the upturned palm of his right hand.

Nick took the few steps it needed for him to see the man's face. It was Mario. His dark shirtfront was wet with blood. There was a smear of blood on the wall above him too, as if his left hand, which was splayed across his chest, had touched the wall as he fell. His mouth was open. His eyes were staring. He looked as if surprise had been the last thing his brain had registered.

Nick looked to his left, through an open doorway, into a room kitted out as a study, with desk, bookcase, filing cabinet and computer. Something on the desk, of which he could only see one corner, caught his attention. He struggled for a few seconds to identify it. Then he realized he was looking at the fingers of a man's hand. There was a signet-ring on the little finger, a ring Nick felt sure he had seen before.

As he edged clear of the pool of blood and stepped cautiously into the room, recognition stirred. It was Demetrius's ring. Nick craned round the edge of the door and saw Demetrius Constantine Paleologus lying dead across the desk, his left hand stretched out as if he had been trying to 352

reach something. The telephone perhaps. It was upended on the floor. But the jackplug had been pulled from the wall. The howler was silent.

Demetrius's head was turned towards Nick, his right cheek flattened against the desk. His face was slackly twisted. There was blood beneath and around him, a dark meniscus of it pooled across the pale-brown wood. As Nick stared at the scene, a drip of Demetrius's blood formed and fell from the rim of the desk, plopping softly on to the carpet to join another, smaller pool, just beyond the edge of which lay a knife, its narrow blade and much of the handle red with yet more blood.

Nick began to tremble. He licked away some sweat from his upper lip. How could so much have happened without his being aware of it? Was he still unconscious, perhaps? Was this a dream? The trance had weakened his hold on reality. And it weakened still further in the face of so much blood. Two men were dead. But where was Emily?

He moved back into the hall, averting his gaze from Mario's body, sprawled close by. There were drops of blood on the floor at intervals between him and the front door. He walked carefully between them, his nerves and senses straining. As he reached the door, his ears detected a sound from outside. A low, thrumbling note. He eased the handle down and edged the door open.

The sound was louder now and more distinct. It was a car engine, in idling mode. He could smell its exhaust fumes. He peered round the edge of the door.

A small white Fiat was parked in front of the Lancia, its bonnet pointing away from the villa, a haze of exhaust rising behind it. The driver's door was wide open. And Emily was sitting at the wheel.

Nick rushed out and down the steps. He rounded the car and met Emily's gaze as she looked up at him. Her face was grey, her hair streaked with sweat. Her left hand was on the steering wheel, her right clutched to her stomach. Blood was oozing through her fingers and dripping down from the seat to 353

the door sill and the gravel below. The briefcase lay on the passenger seat, blood smeared round its handle. A gun was wedged between the case and the back of the seat. There was blood on that too.

'Hello, Nick,' Emily murmured. 'It's . . . strangely good to see you.'

'What happened?' He knelt beside her.

'Things didn't quite . . . work out.'

'I'll phone for an ambulance.'

'Don't.' She let go of the steering wheel and clasped his arm. 'Please don't.'

'We've got to get you to a hospital.'

'I don't think so.'

'For God's sake, Emily--'

'Listen to me. While you still can. Demetrius sent the launch to pick up Basil. He'll be free by now. I waited until I was sure of that. . . before I made my move. Demetrius never saw the double-cross coming. He thought I really had sold out to him.' She laughed, inducing a grimace of pain. 'He underestimated me. But I underestimated him too. He had a knife. And I simply wasn't quick enough. Nearly. But not quite. Clever. But not clever enough. Story of my life.' She smiled through gritted teeth. 'And my death.'

'You're not going to die.'

'Clean away or nothing: that's the deal. I'm not prepared to spend the next couple of decades in prison. Let me go, Nick.' She tried to smile again. 'You're better off without me. Everyone is.'

'Where's your phone?'

'Didn't bring one.'

Nick stretched across her to reach the case. Her rapid breaths fanned his cheek as he prised at the catches. They would not budge.

'It's combination-locked.'

He looked round at her. She shook her head. She would not tell.

'Better this way. Believe me.'

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'I'll phone from the house.' He ducked as he moved back out of the car. Her grip on his arm tightened.

'It was some secret, Nick. Quite some secret.'

'What?'

'You told me. There was no tape. Except the one I ... pre-recorded ... to bring you out of the trance . . . after I'd gone. So, with Demetrius dead, I'm the only one who knows. I'm the only one who can tell you . . . what it is.' She winced. 'Don't you want to stay . . . and find out?'

'We can talk later.'

'There won't be a later.'

'Yes, there will.' He lifted her hand off his arm as gently as he could and laid it in her lap. She had no strength left. Except where it mattered. 'I'll be back in a few minutes.'

'OK.' She closed her eyes. 'Have it your way.'

He ran towards the villa, his feet crunching on the gravel. Two strides carried him to the top of the steps. He flung the door open and rushed into the hall.

And then he heard the shot.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The vaporetto was halfway across the lagoon on its run from the Lido to the Grand Canal when Nick saw the police launch heading fast in the opposite direction. He had dialled the emergency number on the first payphone he had come to after leaving the villa and repeated the same message through a jabber of questions. lTre morti. Villa Margherita. Via Cornaro, il Lido.' It was all he could say and all he could risk saying, however good his Italian. Emily was dead. Nothing could alter that. And nothing could wipe from his mind's eye the sight of how she had died. 'Tre morti. Villa Margherita. Via Cornaro, il Lido.'

Nick swallowed hard and gripped the rail tightly as he watched the bouncing shape of the launch diminish as it sped on towards the Lido. The police would make their own sense of what had happened. It would be a long way from the truth. Emily had shot Demetrius and Mario and then herself. Those were facts. But they were facts that explained nothing. Only Nick understood the cause and effect of them, dearly though he wished he did not. Tears filled his eyes as he stared after the launch. The vaporetto was rolling in its wake now. The discovery was not far off. Three deaths at the Villa Margherita were about to become public property.

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Emily had said Basil was safe. But Nick needed to see him to believe it. Until he did, he could not afford to let himself be overwhelmed by the images flashing up in his mind: Mario's blood on the marble tiles of the hall; Demetrius's dead, frozen scowl; and the splatter of brain and bone across the gravel, where Emily had half-fallen from the car.

Nick closed his eyes and rewound the sequence of events that had led to the moment of Emily's death. He could have acted differently at every stage. But still, he suspected, she would have engineered her own destruction. 'Have it your way,' her last words to him, sounded now like an ironical farewell. He could not have chosen to save her. She had already chosen not to be saved. He could only have chosen to stay and to listen and to learn at last the secret locked in his memory. Instead, he had turned away.

Part of him was glad of that. What did the secret matter, after all? What secret could matter in the face of so much death? He no longer cared what it might be, nor whether he would ever find out. Curiosity had been burned out of him. All he cared about now was Basil.

By the time the vaporetto reached Ca' d'Oro, more than an hour had passed since Nick's phone call to the emergency services. The police would have started their investigation by now. But it would take them several more hours at least to question the workmen at the Palazzo Falcetto and start looking for the Englishman who had visited Demetrius the day before. They might not even look at all, once they had established Emily's identity and probable motive. For the moment, Nick was in the clear, though he felt anything but.

From the Ca' d'Oro stop, he hurried north by a route he now knew quite well to the Zampogna, hoping and praying he would find Basil waiting for him there.

Carlotta greeted him from her cubby-hole with a leer that might have been intended as a smile and an incomprehensible announcement that Nick desperately wanted to believe meant Basil had turned up.

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'Signer Paleologus? My brother? Is he here?'

'C'� qualcuno qui per lei.'

'What?'

'Con Luigi.'

'The last word he understood. He rushed straight out and into the bar next door.

'Signor Paleologus,' boomed Luigi. 'You have more relatives in Venice than me. Here is another.'

But the bulky figure propped at the counter was not technically any kind of relative. Nor did he seem pleased to see Nick. Satisfaction of a sort crossed Terry Mawson's face as he swivelled his neck, but of pleasure there was no sign.

'Terry?'

'Surprised to see me?'

'Yes. I mean . . . what . . .'

'We need to talk.' Terry's tone suggested that the talk he had in mind was in no sense optional.

'Have you seen Basil?' No sooner were the words out of his mouth than Nick regretted them.

'No. Should I have?' Terry stood upright and glared at Nick. 'I want to know what the bloody hell you're up to.' Luigi rolled his eyes and stated polishing a glass. 'You can start with telling me where I can find Harriet Elsmore.' The glare hardened. 'Well?'

With some difficulty, Nick persuaded Terry to put his questions on hold until they had reached the spartan privacy of Basil's old room in the Zampogna. Half of Nick's mind was focused on the need to find his brother. Most of the other half dwelt on memories of Emily - the bitter and the sweet. There was little left over for Terry.

'Is this dump the best you can do?' Terry asked as he recovered his breath from the short climb up Carlotta's steepling stairs.

'It's where Basil was staying.'

'Where is he now?'

'Never mind. Why are you here, Terry?'

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'Why do you think?'

'I don't know.'

'Irene said you'd come here to find Basil. That creep at the Consulate gave me the same story. But I don't buy it. You're here because Harriet Elsmore's here. That's it, isn't it?'

'No. That isn't it.'

'Tell Kate the truth. That was your brilliant idea, wasn't it? That was your considered advice.'

'She has to know.'

'Yeah? Well, she does now. I told her. Like you suggested. And now she blames me for Tom's death. She won't speak to me. She won't listen to me. There's no communication. She's cut me off.'

T'm sorry.'

'Not as sorry as I am. I figure the only way I can repair the damage I've done - yeah, I admit it, the damage I've done - is to get the people who pushed Tom over the top. I caught up with Farnsworth, no thanks to you. I applied some pressure. It didn't take much. Mentally, he can go the distance and then some. Physically, it's a different story.'