Fury (12 page)

The police officer takes his time reading the letter before returning his gaze to me. Then he turns on his heel and walks back to the contingent of armed men and women strung out loosely along the barricade and I see him confer with several of them, each person scanning the letter, surprised.

Somewhere behind us, an unwise driver lets loose a few impatient blasts on his car horn, which sets off a bunch of other drivers. Through my open window, I see several of the officers peel away from the roadblock, wending through the gridlocked traffic on foot in search of the jokers responsible.

‘We’re holding everyone up,’ Ryan murmurs, frowning. ‘What’s happening out there?’

The young policeman is nowhere to be seen.

‘Maybe he’s calling that number,’ I reply, more confidently than I’m feeling. ‘Gia had it all worked out, they’ve got to let us through.’

We wait, silently and on edge, the smell of smoke and ashes drifting in through my open window, slowly poisoning the air inside the car.

A flurry of activity at one end of the roadblock draws my gaze. I see cars and vans being shifted around to allow a helmeted police officer on a motorbike to roar through the gap that’s been created. He executes a tight loop around our limo, before pulling up to my open window, engine growling, the front wheel of the bike facing the gap in the barricade. He pushes up the visor of his helmet with one black-gloved hand and I recognise the young officer’s cool, blue-eyed gaze immediately.

‘I’ll escort you to the Villa Nicolin personally,’ he says curtly. ‘Look neither right nor left or you will have cause to regret your curiosity.’

He snaps his visor down and accelerates away from us, and a few seconds later our driver is sliding the car past the hard-eyed policemen and women, past the jumble of blue and white police vehicles.

My hand finds its way into Ryan’s automatically, gripping it tight.

The road rises, winding gently, and Ryan and I take in the tiers of low-rise buildings with terracotta-coloured roofs nestled into the foothills all around us, the late-afternoon sun giving them an almost rosy cast. It’s so incredibly beautiful when we see the lake for the first time, ringed by tall pines and graceful dwellings, the snow-capped peaks of distant mountains rising behind.

‘What do you think he could have meant about not looking around?’ Ryan says wonderingly as we follow the shore of the lake, the road strangely deserted. ‘I’ve never seen a place as beautiful as this, ever.’

But that pervasive smell — of smoke, of ashes — is growing stronger. And I begin to discern patches of darkness in the distant canopy; a strange, dark blot upon the handsome facade of a dusky rose-coloured villa built right up against a curve in the shoreline, far across the lake. As we enter the main street of Moltrasio — a narrow canyon of shopfronts built shoulder to shoulder in cheerful colours — the first thing that hits me is the utter desolation, followed by the realisation that it’s filled with people.

There’s a fire crew still hosing down the smoking ruins of what must once have been a wine shop, because a river of melted glass seems to flow out of it, into a car park filled with the remains of vehicles, similarly rendered down into a kind of metallic tallow. We drive without stopping past the shattered front windows of a burnt-out delicatessen; a photographer’s studio hollowed out by fire that’s missing most of its front facade; a shoe store that retains a front door but is now open to the sky. Our driver has to slow several times to navigate over or past jumbles of semi-liquefied stone and concrete, brick, steel grillework and tile; around dangerous cracks and potholes that have opened in the road.

Through the ruins move ash-covered figures, drifting as if dazed, bending to scrabble through the rubble on the ground as if they’ve misplaced something, or raising their hands to the sky, faces twisted in agony. None of them seem to engage with the uniformed emergency personnel who are struggling to shore up structures on the brink of collapse, their desperate shouts piercing the hazy air.

Moltrasio was only partially destroyed, Juliana said. This scene must be amplified in town after town all along the lake from here to Domaso. I clench my left fist, feeling that old agony rising in me.

‘What
is
that?’ Ryan’s voice cuts across my thoughts.

He draws my attention to a shadowy stencil on a honey-coloured shopfront wall just ahead. It’s a weird kind of graffiti — like the rough outline of a man drawn freehand in a faint, powdery, black substance, like charcoal.

Beside the strange image stands a tall man, bald-headed, slack-faced, his suit, skin, eyes and hair covered in a thick grey dust, no hint of colour about him, not even a rim of pink around the eyes. He might be made from ash — even the whites of his eyes seem ashy. He raises both arms towards me, palms upward, as we pass him in our car, as if pleading for help. And that’s when I see it. The shape of him. The shape of the shadowy stencil rendered on that shopfront wall.

‘Did you see him?’ I whisper to Ryan. ‘The streets are filled with people just like him.’

I turn and kneel up on my seat to look out the rear window at the man standing by the wall, as if anchored there by his pain. His eyes follow our car in numb supplication. I point him out to Ryan, who is kneeling on his seat, too, scanning the war zone we’re leaving behind us.

‘What people?’ he asks. ‘All I can see are search crews. But it doesn’t look like there’s anyone left alive to find out there.’

And then horror seizes me fully and I understand what that man is. What all those drifting, dazed and voiceless people are, so divorced from all the frantic activity around them. They are those that Azraeil had no use for, those who were not blameless. And that mark on the wall? It was the agony of one man’s passing, caught there in his own life’s blood.

It’s a ghost town
, I think, sickened.
As it was in Hiroshima, as it was in Nagasaki.

And it is Luc’s doing, all of it.

I will bring you down
, I hear him say again in that dark and smoky voice that used to play havoc with every sense I possess.
Believe it.

The back wheels of our limo grind and scream uselessly, unable to get traction as the driver crunches the gears, trying to accelerate out of a giant pothole within sight of the towering gates that guard Villa Nicolin.

Our police escort salutes us from his motorbike and roars away.

I pop the lock on my door and tug on Ryan’s hand. ‘Come on,’ I say, jumping out of the shuddering limo, the elegant dresses upon their padded hangers hooked over the fingers of one hand.

The pothole looks recent. When I stare at its clean edges, I imagine that I see the faintest trace of phosphorescence, of melted, cauterised earth. Nuriel must have fought Luc so badly.

Ryan shoulders the daypack and we walk up to black wrought-iron gates. They are at least twenty feet high and set into the centre of a towering stone facade built to resemble the entry to a medieval keep. Dusk is falling, and as we draw closer, automatic sensors flood the area immediately around us with a dazzling light. Four sleek, fine-boned shapes materialise out of nowhere and throw themselves at the gates, thrusting their muzzles at us through the bars, teeth snapping, foaming and yowling.

Ryan yells, ‘Holy crap!’ and leaps backwards, but I remain where I am, watching the light strike the glistening, bared fangs only inches from my fingers.

‘Italian greyhounds,’ I say absently as I turn and press the buzzer on the intercom panel set into the gate. There is no nameplate on it, no address.

A faint metallic chiming sound comes back at us from the built-in speaker. The camera lens that’s set into the centre of the panel swivels minutely in my direction. From the corner of my eye, I see Ryan slip on the fake spectacles, adjust the cap on his head so that it sits low over his eyes.

The intercom speaker suddenly crackles into life. ‘Business?’ a woman’s voice says pleasantly. I place the accent a second later as Irish.

‘Juliana Agnelli-Re sent us with the gowns for Miss St Alban,’ I say smoothly, holding the dresses up in front of the lens.

Ryan and I turn as, with a squeal of tyres, the limo shoots out of the pothole and does a rapid U-turn before burning back the way we came. Ryan runs the fingers of his right hand through the ends of my loose hair, and I give him a stern look, twisting it back into a knot behind my neck with my free hand. It stays there.

He grins. ‘Neat trick.’

‘Focus,’ I reply repressively.

The intercom remains silent, and I look over the heads of the baying, scrabbling dogs at the estate. The wide driveway — paved in smoothly rounded, dark and light stones that mark out an intricate pattern — seems to go for a mile past gently playing fountains and manicured lawns before curving around the side of an imposing three-storey Palladian-style villa with cream-coloured walls and dozens of windows framed by forest green shutters. It’s a house with scores of rooms and chimneys, entered by way of a grand central portico supported by stone pillars. The huge carriage lamps on either side of the front door suddenly come on, as do all of the floodlights lining the driveway. Immediately, the sky seems darker, heightening the impression of Villa Nicolin being a kind of fortress against the outside world.

‘Tomaso will be right with you,’ the woman’s voice says through the speaker.

Minutes later, an olive-skinned man built along the lines of a silverback gorilla, taller even than Ryan, in a sleekly fitted three-piece suit, with short, greying hair and an earpiece, approaches the gate. He looks us up and down expressionlessly, before looking at the dogs going mad at his heels, drenched in sweat.

He drags the dogs away by their collars around the side of the house, then returns and points some kind of remote unlocking device at the gates. They swing away from us almost soundlessly, and as we enter, the man indicates wordlessly that we should submit to a search. He sets the gates closing again with the remote, before pocketing it and patting Ryan and me down individually for weapons, the touch of his hands feather light and impersonal. Beckoning for the dresses, he wrings each one lightly, then rummages through the daypack. Finally, with a jerk of his head, he indicates that we should follow him up the drive.

As we walk along the pebbled roadway towards the villa, we can still hear the faint howling of the dogs. I know they will continue until they are hoarse from screaming, or can no longer sense me. Ryan’s dogs had reacted to me in exactly the same way. It must be my essential inhumanity that they discern, my utter alien-ness.

‘I bet they’re jumpy from the fires,’ Ryan says hastily, but Tomaso doesn’t even turn his head to look at us. Just keeps walking swiftly, almost silently.

It’s almost second nature to me now to try to tune out any trace of mortal energy around me, and little by little I’m getting better at it — I can choose to accept what I wish to accept and discount the rest. But I let myself see, for a moment, how this man must see us. I get no sense of alarm, no curiosity as to why the dogs are behaving so out of character for their breed. He believes we are what we appear to be — troublesome young foreigners on some frivolous errand — and I relax a little as I take in my surroundings.

The villa is set on a steep hill above a vast garden that runs down in immaculately maintained tiers to the lake’s shore far below. The level below the forecourt features a formal parterre garden built around a series of small circular ponds. Below that, there’s a grove of miniature citrus trees scattered with curved stone benches. Below that again, a classical statuary garden filled with the frozen forms of nymphs and satyrs. Running water features cascade down either side of the wide central staircase that leads to the portico of the main house and bisect the top three tiers of the formal garden. There’s also a cleverly concealed winding driveway that connects the main house to a much smaller, sleekly modern one-storey guesthouse of glass and steel at the foot of the hill. A high stone wall with another pair of tall, black, wrought-iron gates set into it separates the property from a narrow street that runs along its lowest boundary.

‘Holy crap!’ Ryan mouths again, looking around. He points out a long, narrow jetty jutting into the lake opposite the lower gates of the property. A large cruiser and a couple of smaller motorised runabouts are moored to it. The jetty had caught my interest, too, almost immediately.

‘Worth checking out,’ I mouth at him behind Tomaso’s broad back.

He nods to show he’s understood, reflected light glinting off the lenses of his fake glasses.

As we step onto the large, complicated, Renaissance-style symbol picked out in polished black and white stones just below the front portico, a slight woman in a long-sleeved white dress and white bib-fronted apron, with curly, jaw-length blonde hair and ruddy cheeks, opens the tall, heavily carved front door to the house. When she sees us, a smile lightens the anxious expression on her thin face. She walks towards us, hands outspread in welcome.

‘Thank goodness you’ve reached us safely,’ she says in her lilting voice. ‘When Signora Agnelli-Re’s office called to let us know you were already on your way, well, I …’ A shadow crosses her face before she adds brightly, ‘Now let me take those from you, you must be exhausted.’

Ryan and I exchange glances. I hoist the hangers in my left hand a little higher.

‘I’m sorry …’ I begin, and pause. ‘Clara,’ the woman says. ‘How rude of me. Clara O’Manley.’

‘Clara,’ I continue smoothly, ‘but I have strict instructions to deliver these personally to Bianca St Alban. Mrs AgnelliRe was quite adamant. As you will be aware, a value cannot be placed on them now. They are museum pieces, you understand.’

Clara’s expressive face cycles through surprise, sorrow, comprehension, then a studied neutrality. ‘Tomaso,’ she says to the silent hulk standing to one side of us, ‘have Gregory call down to the
dépendance
to see if Signorina Bianca is available to receive …’ Now it’s her turn to pause.

‘Ryan Daley,’ Ryan says immediately, his manners impeccable, holding out his right hand. ‘And Mercy.’

‘I have one of those impossible names,’ I add quickly, shaking her hand, too, which feels calloused, cool and dry. ‘Just Mercy will do.’

Tomaso moves around us silently, entering the villa through its open front door. Neither name will ring any bells with Bianca St Alban. She’s never met Ryan, and when she met
me
I was the notorious Irina Zhivanevskaya. But she’s staying in the guesthouse at the foot of the estate, near the lake, and that’s where I want to be. All I have to go on is that terrible dream in which I somehow saw inside Luc’s mind,
was
him as he pursued Nuriel across the dark waters of Lake Como. I need to look at the shoreline from the perspective of the lake itself and maybe then it will become clear what happened to her.

My voice is deliberately casual as I say, ‘We’d be happy to walk the dresses down to Bianca ourselves. We spoke only a few days ago, in fact, at Atelier Re, just before the couture show. That’s the guesthouse, the
dépendance
, down there, I take it?’

Clara nods. ‘You’re friends of hers? She’s been something of a recluse lately …’

I nod. ‘When Juliana told me she needed to get the gowns to Bianca, and we were already headed this way, well, it made sense to stop by. All that business with Félix de Haviland …’ I frown. ‘So shocking, and so, so
sad
.’

Ryan blinks for a moment, struggling to recall where he’s heard the name before.

‘You know, darling,’ I purr, turning to him and putting a hand lightly on his arm. ‘You and Justine were talking about it only the other day, remember?’

Ryan’s face clears. ‘Félix always was an idiot,’ he says disapprovingly.

‘Félix broke her heart,’ Clara murmurs, gazing down at the guesthouse. Light spills from its floor-to-ceiling windows onto the lawns, casting shadows in pretty patterns. ‘She’ll be so happy to see some familiar, friendly faces. Her parents are travelling between board meetings, like they always do this time of year. She was already feeling under siege, so alone, you know? And then all this happened …’

She touches the back of my hand and, for a moment, I get a clear sensation of her terror when she’d woken that night to see strange lights in the sky. The estate had become a kind of island, marooned by a fire that had seemed somehow to be
alive
. She’d watched from her upper-storey bedroom, scarcely able to breathe, as trees and buildings had burst into flame all around the shoreline. Lines of fire had appeared across the surface of the lake, like holy writing, though she hadn’t been able to make out any source. She’d seen the main street of the town burning in the distance and had recited the words of every prayer she’d ever been taught as a child, because she hadn’t known what else to do.

I shake off her touch lightly, knowing it’s imperative I get down to the lake.

‘We’re visiting other friends in the area,’ I say, ‘just to see how they’re getting on. We’ll duck in and have a quick chat with Bianca, drop the dresses, and be on our way.’

‘We’ll be gone before you know it,’ Ryan adds warmly, and he’s so solid and reassuring and boy-next-door handsome in his kooky get-up that Clara can’t help twinkling up at him.

‘Oh, go on,’ she says with a shooing motion. ‘I expect she’ll be glad of the distraction. Head past the little folly to my left there, and you’ll find the start of the driveway that will take you down.’

She waves at us before re-entering the house. As she shuts the door behind her, I hear her call out, ‘Tomaso? Tell Gregory —’

‘For an honest guy, you make a convincing liar,’ I tease Ryan in a low voice as we walk towards the marble and wrought-iron folly — like a miniature rotunda — set on the far edge of the property.

Ryan takes the heavy spectacles off his face, slipping them into his pocket with relief as he rubs at the bridge of his nose.

For a moment, we linger beneath the delicate ironwork canopy of the folly, looking up at the first stars of evening appearing in the sky. Then, by some unspoken consent, we lay our separate burdens down upon a curved marble bench seat within the folly, and Ryan hooks his arms around me from behind, pulling me close into his body. We gaze together across the darkening lake as the wind rises around us, ghosting through the folly, through the pines that tower overhead. The view is astounding. Twinkling lights ring the foothills, mirroring the lights in the sky, as if strings of stars have somehow fallen out of the firmament and come to rest beside the water, just for us. And I’m suddenly filled with an intense gladness, for each light represents at least one living soul, someone who survived Luc’s malevolence, the way I did.

‘I’m glad it’s you,’ Ryan murmurs, ‘that I’m seeing this with.’

‘Don’t ever forget this,’ I reply softly. ‘Don’t ever forget me.’

When he starts to protest, I say fiercely, ‘It happens. Memories die, they can be twisted, shattered, stolen forever. I’m proof of that. Remember this, Ryan. That we managed to find each other. That we were together, here, just for a little while.’

That I love you
. I’m too much of a coward to say the words.