Isle of the Dead (27 page)

Melania, Contessa di Fattori, had been depraved. Her deviancy had kept her tied to a murderer, her sexuality condemning her.

Possibly that was where Seraphina had inherited her traits. It explained how it was possible for her to be an adulteress and pass off another man's child as her husband's. The young woman Nino had met in London weeks earlier had seemed uncomplicated, charming. Her death had been a shock. But now it was obvious why Seraphina had been the next victim. It wasn't simply because of her relationship to the Contessa di Fattori, but because of her own sexual history.

They were alike, even in the way they met their end. Seraphina had not anticipated hers, but Melania had had a chance to escape – and had chosen not to. The fourth, and last, of the Skin's Hunter's victims, she was murdered and mutilated on 1 January, 1556.

While Nino was considering what he had just read, his mobile rang. He recognised the voice of Seraphina's mother immediately.

‘Have you read the papers, Mr Bergstrom?'

‘Yes,' he said uncertainly. ‘Have you?'

‘Should I?'

‘No, Contessa,' Nino lied. ‘They're of no importance. No importance at all.'

Tokyo, Japan

Jobo Kido wasn't sure why, but the last three times he had gone online, there had been no response from the Vespucci website. Anxious, he had tried at different times of the day, with no success, until finally there was an answer.

There was a long pause before Jobo answered gingerly.

His hands suspended over the keyboard, Jobo hesitated. If he gave Nino away would he be endangering him? But if he didn't give him up, he would lose the Titian. He cursed inwardly. What was Nino Bergstrom to him? Until a few days ago, he had never met the man. Why should he give up such a prize to shield a comparative stranger?

All his life Jobo had been waiting to be at the top of his game. The Titian portrait would propel him into the artistic stratosphere, into that platinum orbit Triumph Jones and Farina Ahmadi inhabited. The portrait of Vespucci was his by rights.

Stunned, Jobo stared at the screen.

Agonised, Jobo stared at the words on the screen. His previous doubts had been annulled, his guilt suspended. And with Nino no longer sitting alongside him, Jobo Kido's greed overrode his conscience.

On that note, the connection was severed.

England

He was watching her and thinking that he had chosen very well. She had an interest in his passion, a mutual connection, and she was young and attractive. Of course she was a whore, but she had to be or she wouldn't be suitable.

The man stared at the photographs he had put on his computer, tilting his head to one side, his gaze tracing the line of her throat. Flaying a body wasn't easy. At first he had presumed that it would be – merely a peeling away. But it hadn't been like that at all. He had had to cut the flesh away from the muscle underneath, and that had taken sharp knives, not your usual kitchen utensils. In the end he had gone to a medical suppliers on Wigmore Street and bought a set of scalpels which had made skinning so much easier. Concentrating, he had sliced into the skin, making a V shape. When he had done that, he had lifted the bloodied flap and, holding it, had continued slicing it away from the body.

It had been very neat.

He had always thought of himself as a non-violent man, so it had been difficult for him to come to terms with what he had to do. But he wanted everything to be perfect – he wanted the homage to be
exact
– so the murders had been copied in every detail. And what he didn't know in fact, he followed in instinct; imagining what Vespucci would do.

After the first killing he found the flaying stimulating, almost as though he had two victims, not one. Of course the corpse was blood-red when he had taken the skin away, but the hide was soft, supple. It rested in his hands, and after he had washed it, it took on a chamois leather, butter-soft quality. Sometimes he even draped it over his bare arms, feeling the dead skin resting on his own.

Sipping a mug of coffee, he relished his memories. He had first come across Angelico Vespucci at school. One of those chance findings in the library where he used to hide out to miss Games. Of course he had had to keep his studious side a secret – girls never went for nerds and his peers only admired the tough boys. It wouldn't do for him, considered very cool, to be revealed as an intellectual.

So instead he studied in secret and polished his glossy outer image until he became more and more removed from his lower middle-class upbringing. His parents might be proud of his brain, but that wasn't what interested him; he wanted to feel something. Feeling had always been difficult. Over the years he had observed his mother crying when the dog was put to sleep, and his father overcome with affection at Christmas, happy with booze and sentimentality. He had
watched them with curiosity. What
was
all this feeling everyone talked about? It was in films, books, computer games – feelings, feelings, always fucking feelings. But not for him. He didn't feel anything.

But while he didn't feel, he
could
mimic. He could replicate any emotion. As a copyist, he was second to none. And no one ever guessed. He left his childhood and slid into his teens without emotion. He attracted a girl and had sex with her, without emotion. He tried cutting himself with a knife, and felt nothing. Nothing he experienced, read or saw touched that hidden nub of feeling. If it was there at all.

But it
was
there. It was just a question of stimulating it. Of finding some trigger which would detonate him into life … His attention moved back to the girl's photographs, then he entered the Vespucci website he had created. His gaze fed off the image of the Italian, the tips of his fingers resting longingly against the screen, tracing the bulbous eyes.

It was easy to remember when he had first heard of The Skin Hunter. The name had jolted him, given him a shift in the stomach, something he had never experienced before. The image, and the legend of a long-dead man, had evoked a
feeling
. A reaction so intense it had been almost sexual. A stripping away of all the dullness, until a waxen world seemed suddenly stained glass.

At last he was responding, and everything he read about Angelico Vespucci spiked his emotions. He revelled in the Italian's murders and the details of the skinning, taking Vespucci's feelings as his own. Somehow a dead killer had
managed to skip the centuries and waken the psyche of a disaffected man.

After that first rush of adrenalin, he was addicted. Angelico Vespucci's victims were not allotted sympathy: they had disappointed the merchant, deceived him, been less than he desired. Committing himself to research, he delved into the archives in Italy and London and on the web, and even visited Venice. His obsession growing, he fancied that Vespucci walked alongside him, taking them through the same dank, restricted alleyways he had once walked, the Italian throwing a shadow behind his own.

He fell in love. Not with Vespucci, but with his crimes.
He fell in love.
Emotion saturated him; he could imagine the smell of blood and the skin of the women, he could feel their flesh between his teeth and climaxed in his dreams.

Two years passed, by which time he considered himself the foremost authority on Angelico Vespucci. Let the fat queer Ravenscourt think he held the crown, he would prove to everyone that
he
was Vespucci's premier admirer and natural successor. So he pleaded for guidance, threw himself on every listening devil, and asked for a way to absorb the Italian. To relive the Italian. To become the Italian. The reply was simple. He was to copy The Skin Hunter
,
in every detail. He would kill on the same dates, choosing the same kinds of women and skinning them as his predecessor had done. But he had to choose victims who had some link to Vespucci.

It was harder than he imagined. Vespucci had been famous in his time, but the Venetians seemed to want to scrub him
from the records, and Italian libraries had little history of their killer. Persistent, he shifted through libraries and papers, and if he discovered a connection with any woman, he took it as a sign that she was to be a victim.

His hatred for the normal world increased. While engaged in research he was patronised by scholars and dismissed by art dealers. His amateur questions provoked scorn in them, their learning waved like an Olympian torch to illuminate his own kindergarten efforts. In all the time he researched Angelico Vespucci he was shown no kindness from the art world. Instead he was made to feel inferior, a common, ill-educated tyro.

As his admiration for Vespucci grew, his loathing of the art world intensified – and an addendum to his original plan took form. He would emulate The Skin Hunter and belittle the art world at the same time. Give them the runaround. Humiliate them as they had humiliated him. But in order to damage his enemy, he knew he had first to get close.

Idly, he touched his victim's face on the computer screen, scanning all the images he had taken of her. She would be the fourth, the last of The Skin Hunter's victims. She would be a masterpiece …

Closing his eyes, he leaned back. Well-spoken, if despised, he had made himself the perfect straight man for some of the biggest egos in the art world. His abuse at the hands of Farina Ahmadi had amused him – yes, he
felt
it, his determination to see her thwarted a direct result of her foulmouthed hectoring.

And then there had been Triumph Jones. Charismatic, knowledgeable, unbeaten Triumph Jones … Driven by some instinct, he had travelled to New York. The art world was a predictable place. The dealers handled fortunes but paid their staff a pittance. So if some personable young man offers to work for even less, he is let in.

Of course he is not seen.

The dealers bob in their shiny bubble immune to the staff.

He is not heard either.

Who notices a pillar?

Who thinks a rug can understand?

In time he becomes indispensably invisible. Silently doing their bidding, without cluttering up their space.

It took him over a year to penetrate the vacuum around Triumph Jones. Twelve months of serving, dogsbodying, eating humble pie like a duke would eat swan. He learnt, because he read the dealer's impressive book collection; he researched, because he was trusted; and no one –
no one
 – expected the diffident Englishman would want to scurry endlessly through the forgotten archives. By the time he left Triumph Jones, he had darned most of the holes in his impressive body of research on Angelico Vespucci.

And then fate – the pretty witch – took an interest. On returning to England he was looking for employment and found it working at a country house. A country house with an old library, and an even older connection to Angelico Vespucci. A family connection, a blood tie.

He was singing, even in his sleep.

When he moved on from Norfolk he was ready, and all the little tendrils he had laid twitched with the music of knowledge. Having impregnated the art world through the thin skin of its belly, he was privy to information on the street. The porters talked. The receptionists gossiped. He heard of the Titian surfacing but did not know who had it. Rumours flourished like mushrooms in muck, Triumph Jones laying a PR trail to whip up a frenzy, an orgasm of desire. And when the American had finished churning up the art world, he resurrected the legend.
When the portrait emerges, so will the man.

It was genius, fucking genius, he thought. It sent a tingle up the spines from New York to London, London to Dubai, Dubai to Venice.
And it let him in.
What better time to copy the works of Vespucci? What better time to bring him back from death? He had an excuse now. He had permission. He had a ready audience. Superstition was potent; even the most stolid could not fail to wonder if some demon had been roused.