Isle of the Dead (12 page)

It was chilling.

Nino paused, picking up the images of the glorious Larissa Vespucci. She
had
been an opulent beauty, full-fleshed, redhaired, her mouth tilting up at the corners. He could see at once why Angelico Vespucci would have fallen in love with her. And why he might well have been possessive. How could he not have been? She would have drawn attention anywhere. How difficult would that have been for a unprepossessing man like Vespucci to endure?

Stretching his arms above his head, Nino yawned, then finished his coffee. Outside it was now fully dark and he drew the curtains, locking the doors front and back before returning to the notes.

Sighing, Nino reached for the second volume. The writing picked up immediately from where the first had left off, only this time the notes were different – short, without the conversational tone. It was as though Johnny Ravenscourt was trying to distance himself in his writing.

Thoughtful, Nino put the portraits of Claudia Moroni and Larissa Vespucci side by side. There were no physical similarities between the two women, the unremarkable Claudia looking more like a housewife than an adulteress. Stretching across the table, Nino then placed the images of Seraphina and Sally Egan above the two murdered Venetian women. Again, no similarities, not obvious ones anyway. Disappointed, he frowned. Perhaps there wasn't a connection between a killer in the sixteenth century and another in the twenty-first century. Perhaps it was just coincidence.

And then again, perhaps it wasn't.

Taking a deep breath, Nino read on. Outside, it grew dark. In its shrine, the figure of Christ bent His head to the traffic, and as the lights changed on Kensington High Street a plane came in to land at Heathrow Airport. It carried one hundred and seventy-five passengers.

And one of them was a killer.

Six o'clock and the tide was in, nuzzling the Thames Embankment, as Triumph Jones sat on one of the benches overlooking the river. He had felt compelled to come to London, his guilt forcing his hand. Such vanity, he thought – how could he have had such vanity? His eyes closed momentarily, then opened again, stinging in the December wind. His ego had overridden his sense, his morals, and now the plan he had set in motion had spun out of control.

Leaning forward, he watched the river, remembering how, days earlier, he had taken a taxi and asked to be dropped off at Grosvenor Bridge. There he had paused, looking around and waiting. Finally he spotted a woman a little way off, and ducked behind one of the struts of the bridge to avoid being seen. He waited, certain that she was coming closer, then threw the portrait of Angelico Vespucci over the railings and into the ebbing tide. It hit the water with a hefty splash, the woman turning as Triumph watched.

He knew it had still been something of a gamble. What if there had been some alteration in the flow? Or some boat
causing a wake that spun the Titian away from the bank? Or worse, what if it had remained in the water and been irrevocably damaged?

Still hiding, Triumph had seen the woman react. Surprised, she looked into the water, the Titian following a sudden push of tide and washing up on to the shingle. Relieved, Triumph had then seen the slight figure scramble down the grit towards it. Once she nearly lost her balance on the wet silt, but she recovered and, after looking carefully at the package, had picked it up.

Exhaling, Triumph had walked off in the opposite direction. His plan had been set in motion. Let the games begin …

Taking in a breath, he clasped his hands together, trying to stop them shaking. It had been a ploy to excite the interest of the art world, to push up the price of a notorious painting. A painting which had come his way via a thief in Madrid and a forger in San Francisco. A Titian everyone would be after. What better way to get a notorious work back on to the market than to have it found
by accident
? How much publicity could be generated by such a story?

Like many in the art world, Triumph had known about
The Skin Hunter
and was now relying on its gory reputation to start up a media scramble. Everyone knew that serial killers sold copy.

It hadn't mattered to Triumph who found the portrait or where it had ended up. The fact that it came to rest with Gaspare Reni was a bonus, unexpected but irrelevant. He
had calculated that whoever found the Titian would sell to a gallery or put it in an auction –
where he would buy it
. It might cost him more, but after a little while he would sell it on and make an impressive profit while bolstering his own reputation at the same time.

Of course he had known that it could go another way. But if anyone tried to organise a sale illegally, Triumph would hear of that too. He hadn't earned his sobriquet by relying on the good nature of mankind. Over the years he had employed staff to run his gallery and his home, and hired a few others who lurked in the swamp of the art world, privy to unsavoury and dangerous secrets.

It should have been so simple.

And then Seraphina Morgan, aka Seraphina di Fattori, was murdered and flayed. The woman who had found the painting was dead – and the portrait was gone … Triumph hadn't believed what Gaspare Reni had told him. The old dealer would never have destroyed a Titian. What he
hadn't
expected was that Gaspare would keep it and hide it. Far from the portrait coming on to the market in a blast of notoriety, it had been concealed again.

Worse was to follow. Having set someone to watch Gaspare's gallery, his scrutiny had been too late. Gaspare Reni had already been admitted to hospital, after ‘a fall'. It wasn't difficult to read the subtext. Somehow Triumph had been outwitted; before he could buy the Titian from Gaspare Reni the picture had been stolen. And worse, in a matter of days another woman had been killed. Another woman murdered in exactly the same manner as the first.

No one had to tell him that there was a connection.

For the first time in his life, Triumph Jones felt cursed. Everything he had wanted, he had achieved. The art world was becoming giddy with the leaking news of the Titian. How long before it was common knowledge? He had wanted that, but not what followed. How long before some hack made the front page by pairing the legend of The Skin Hunter with the deaths of Seraphina Morgan and Sally Egan?

And it was
his
fault. He'd built up the rumour, nourished the seed. There
had
been a killer called Angelico Vespucci, and a legend. Along with a shattering threat –
when the portrait emerges, so will the man
. That had been Triumph's plan, to utilise the fable when he had the cursed painting in his possession.

Ashamed, he thought back. God, he had hardly been able to believe his luck, that the infamous portrait should end up in his hands. But then greed had entered the equation. How could he ensure that the picture got on to the front pages, his coup publicised globally, adding another victory to his roll-call of triumphs? And so he resurrected a legend. Polished, embellished, refined, the tale taking its time to marinate, so that its revelation would be all the more newsworthy when the portrait came to light …

Shivering, Triumph wrapped his coat around him, still staring into the water. What had he done?
What had he called up?
The thought unnerved him. Of course Angelico Vespucci couldn't come back from the dead. It was absurd. And yet two women had been murdered by the same means The
Skin Hunter had employed over four hundred years earlier. So
something
had happened. Triumph's actions had triggered something.

Unsettled, he grabbed at the comfort of a human villain. Maybe a killer copying The Skin Hunter? It was possible, Triumph thought, God knows, it was possible.

But it was still his fault. Two young women were dead. And his conscience floundered under the weight of their deaths.

Narita International Airport, Tokyo

Harriet Forbes came off the 18.06 flight from London irritable and tired. A bad journey hadn't improved her temper and the thought of having to check into her hotel and then return a list of phone calls depressed her. What, she asked herself, was the point of promoting yet another nail polish? What the shit did anyone need with another varnish? She waited for her luggage, tapping her foot impatiently, her short hair greasy, her face sullen with bad temper and lack of sleep.

Of course, if she had had the guts, she would have got out of PR years ago. But now she was forty-six, at the top of her game, and earning impressive amounts of money. Her friends were envious, coveting the first-class flights and the goodie bags dished out at every promotional event. Goodie bags worth more than a week's wage for most people. And all in the name of eyeshadows and lipsticks.

Harriet had grown bored with the lotions which had undergone intensive, ground-breaking scientific research
and promised superb results. They never delivered, of course. But she promoted them because she was paid to. Paid to keep her own make-up pristine, her urchin face and figure perfectly in tune with the fashion, her clothes following the messianic dictates of Dolce and Gabbana and Vivienne Westwood. She wore Rouge Noir on her nails, until it was commonplace, then switched to Jade. Her perfume depended on which launch she was attending, her scent in tune with whichever paymaster was signing off her expenses that week.

It was all so very chic. So very covetable. But all so very anodyne. As her friends had married, had children or divorced, Harriet had spun like a gadfly around the continents. She didn't see that she had aged until it was too late. She didn't notice that she was lonely until she realised it was three years since she had broken up with Arlene. And all that had been kept a secret, because a lesbian wasn't supposed to know about fashion and beauty. And because, if she was honest, Harriet didn't like being gay. The fact that she was attracted to women had been an embarrassment to her, only made acceptable when she entered a secure, long-term relationship with Arlene. But when that broke up, part of Harriet's self-image broke too. Suppressing her lesbian feelings, she found it easier to stay busy and deny herself any close relationship.

Reaching for her luggage, Harriet pulled the case off the carousel, moving away when she saw a man watching her. It was strange how much attention she received from men. It was ironic how many were attracted to her, never
suspecting her inclinations … Sighing, she made for Customs, passed through and then paused, deciding she would go to the Ladies before she left the airport.

Entering the door marked with the Japanese symbol for toilet, Harriet walked in. Nodding to two uniformed cleaning women, she moved into a cubicle and relieved herself, taking a moment to straighten her clothes before she washed her hands. Her image in the mirror annoyed her and after fiddling with her hair for a few moments she lost patience. Then she found, to her amazement, that she was crying.

The sobs came deep and low as Harriet sat on her suitcase and clenched her fists. What had she done? Why had she wasted her life? Not taken enough time to think it out, to plan. She was meticulous, clever, practical in her work – why had she been so casual with her life? It was all so much waste. Days, weeks, months spent talking about foundation and primers, discussing the subtleties of colours which few customers would even notice. Why did it matter if the lipliner was taupe rather than bisque this year? It was all so fucking stupid, so small, so pointless. So undemanding.

Her hands clenched even tighter, nails scraping her palms. When she started she had had such ambition! A few years in fashion and beauty, then set up her own PR company and move on to health and lifestyle. She had imagined that she would then progress into interior design, investigating how a person's mood could be altered by a colour or a painting. Then, finally, she would enter the world of antiques. She had so much knowledge about art. Had, for a time, been
fixed on the idea of working in an auction house. But in the end she had changed tack – and all her culture had been wasted. She had fallen for the almighty dollar, then the almighty yen.