9

WITHIN HALF AN hour oblivion descended on Raikes and he slept without stirring. He rose at his usual hour, aware of a slight heaviness in his limbs but clear-headed, with all the details of what he intended to do that day firmly present to his mind.

As soon as he was dressed he got out his diary. This would be one of the last entries. With none of his usual hesitation he put in the date at the top of the page, June 16th, and began.

The Madonna is now completely restored, her whole surface free of corrosion. The first and main consequence of this is that she will have to be sealed with the least possible delay. Naked as she is, she is extremely vulnerable to further pollution. The air of Venice is a killing agent, as Slingsby remarked to me once, and it works with terrifying speed on exposed stone. If she were left for long now, longer than a day or so, even in this drier weather, it would be like curing someone of a fever then stripping off his clothes and turning him out of doors. I am planning to do the sealing later on today, using wax acrylic and a propane burner. That done, my work in Venice will be over.

It is clear to me now, in the light of Wiseman’s information, that this Matteo di Rovereto was Girolamo’s patron, and that the letter from Federico Fornarini which Chiara got for me is – must be – a reply to some previous letter from di Rovereto asking for clemency on Girolamo’s behalf, not on the girl’s, as I first thought. The wording is ambiguous but the real clue is in the Piedmontese connection. Di Rovereto’s wife was a Bernardoni. Natural she should take an interest in him – perhaps it was through her influence that he obtained the commission in the first place. Odd to see a Fornarini cropping up in this earlier period, right at the beginning of the Madonna’s career. But they were numerous enough, I suppose.

If I am right and it is Girolamo that is being pleaded for, the girl’s character acts in mitigation for him, not for herself, so she must be a bad character, and a public bad character in those days must mean a prostitute surely. All this seems reasonable enough. He must have been accused of some crime in connection with the girl. Was she the victim? Disregard for human life, the letter said. Murder then, or serious assault. She was the victim, yes. Is she the drowned girl? In that case the model for the Madonna, the drowned girl, this hypothetical whore, are all the same woman. Yes.

But in that case … She was smiling, though she had died violently. I’m convinced that everything I have seen in these famous attacks of mine has contained some truth, some relevance to the Madonna, even the things I do not understand and perhaps never will. So it must mean something, this smile. Did I make some mistake, get the message wrong? Perhaps I simply transferred the smile from the living face to the dead one – the kind of thing that happens sometimes in dreams. Or could there be a different order of truth in it, something emblematic? Was she smiling because she had been vindicated in some way? Or avenged? And the light that shone from her, from the Madonna. That was the miracle of course, that is what they saw, or had a strong impression of seeing, three hundred years later, in the garden of what is now the Casa Fioret. The light came from her. There is some sort of sexual treachery here too. Hush money to the Bishop. This ‘Cornadoro’, whoever he was, the cuckold, he laid golden eggs – like poor Litsov.

I am at the end of things now. There is only one more thing I can think of doing.

Raikes paused, and the horror descended on him that had never been far away since his visit to the police station the day before, when Litsov’s things had been handed over. It was this, he saw now, that had invaded and darkened his sense of the past, the same stain spread over both, the same elusive presence, everywhere answering, but never sufficiently, to the pressure of his mind, the touch of his curiosity. Like a sponge, he had said. Everywhere you touch it … But dirty liquid, in past and present alike, no pure distillation this, but an ooze of treachery and crime. Everywhere his mind looked there was the same flinch of horror, even in the small details of memory, the half-drowned boat at the landing stage, the groping weeds, the languid crabs against the wall …

He was rescued from this by the appearance of Signora Sapori with his breakfast. He had no appetite but he drank the coffee. With it he took another thirty milligrams of phenobarbitone; and when, shortly afterwards, he left the house, the plastic cylinder went with him in his jacket pocket.

It was early still and cool, though the sky was almost cloudless – a few last wraiths dissolving without stain in the luminous east, over the Adriatic. A thin mist still lay on the water but all the promise was for a hot, clear day. Raikes took a vaporetto to the station, crossed the canal by the Scalzi bridge and began to walk in the direction of the Frari. In the maze of narrow streets south of San Simeone he went wrong twice and had to ask the way. He came out finally on the north side of the Campo dei Frari and found himself by a lucky accident exactly where he wanted to be, immediately in front of the large, square-fronted building which houses the Venice State Archives.

In the little cubby-hole of an office he made a preliminary explanation, in his careful Italian, to a pale, sleepy attendant in uniform. He was asked to wait. After some minutes a youngish, courteous, bald man arrived. He listened carefully, brown eyes mildly intent on Raikes’s face.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is possible to refer to the records. You must have someone with you, unfortunately, devo accompagnarla, since you have no authorization, you understand …’

‘Yes, of course,’ Raikes said. ‘Thank you. It shouldn’t take long.’

‘Is it the proceedings of the Signori di Notte or the Quarantia you would like to see?’

‘I’m not sure about the difference.’

‘It is a murder, you say?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘In that case it would be the Quarantia, almost certainly. They were the higher court. So we must look at the records of the Avogadori di Comun. They presented the evidence in criminal cases. We have no detailed records of the evidence, but we have the notes that were made on completion of the trials.’

They went up three floors in a lift and passed into a long room with tables down the centre, shelves of volumes up the walls, a steady, evenly distributed light from high windows. There was another, much older man working at a small desk, who rose when they entered. After some consultation with his colleague and some manoeuvring of a step ladder at the far end of the room, he took down a thick quarto-sized volume from one of the upper shelves and brought it to them.

‘Each volume covers ten years.’ The younger man smiled. ‘Tanta criminalità,’ he said. ‘A lot of crime.’ He laid the heavy book on the table. ‘Perhaps the Signore would like to sit here?’

Obediently Raikes sat down and drew the book towards him. With the two officials maintaining a discreet distance, he began to look through the pages. These were the original entries of the magistrates, page by page, a bare statement of dates, names, verdicts, punishments. In many cases a brief laudatory phrase had been appended, as if to compensate these unfortunates for the harshness of their fate.

He found what he was looking for quite soon. It was an entry for 6 November 1432 – scarcely a fortnight after the date on Fornarini’s letter to di Rovereto. Girolamo shared the page with two others: a young man named Francesco Natal, apprentice sailmaker, sentenced to three years in the galleys for stealing sacred objects from the church of San Samuele, (giovane dotto et intelligente), and a sixteen-year-old maidservant, burned for arson (galante et bella). Below these, at the foot of the page, Girolamo Satta, stone-mason, age 33, hanged for the murder of Bianca Pellegrino, (e morì valorosamente).

My age exactly, Raikes thought. He felt that oppressed sadness we feel when reluctant suspicions are confirmed. The brevity of the entry, this terse disposal of a human life, appalled him. It had ended here then.

For some time longer he sat there looking at the names, as if they might provide some clue to this remote act of violence. Girolamo Satta, Bianca Pellegrino. Laughter in a sunlit room, water on naked bodies, lines of shadow … This was why no more work had come from the hand of Girolamo Piemontese. No voluntary abdication this, no private failure like his own, but a death in public view. E morì valorosamente, he died bravely. Raikes became aware again of the slight but pervasive heaviness of his limbs, a thick feeling in his tongue, not unpleasant.

He closed the book, stood up, the attentive officials came forward. The mutual courtesies, the descent in the lift, were barely registered in his consciousness. He found himself out in the open again, in the sunshine. The air was full of pigeons, loud with their wings. Something must have alarmed them, he thought. He looked blankly for some moments at the façade of the Scuola San Rocco across the square, then began to walk slowly in the direction of the Grand Canal. At the San Tomà landing stage there was a boat just casting off and he scrambled aboard at the last moment.

The weather in this brief interval had become brilliant. As they passed beneath the Rialto Bridge and rounded the upper loop of the canal, he was forced to squint against the dazzle from the water, the shimmer of pale brick from the celebrated façades on the opposite bank. Venice had paled in this drier air, the reddish tones of damp had gone, colours were everywhere more delicate now, more quiveringly responsive to light.

He descended at San Marcuolo and made his way northwards to where the cleansed Madonna awaited her final seal of wax. He was anticipating this eagerly, the comfort of the cool stone under his hands, the safe enclosure of the cubicle, the hours of physical work and the boon of weariness that would follow them.

However, as he began to cross the campo towards the church, his sense of gaining sanctuary vanished at a stroke: Chiara Litsov was standing alone at the side of the main doorway. He had an immediate, craven impulse of flight; but she was looking towards him, she had seen him, it was clear that she was waiting for him there. Drawing near, he saw that she was smiling. ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ she said. ‘What happened to you last night?’

She leaned her face forward to kiss him. He felt the brief warmth of her lips on his, felt his own unwilling response. Awkwardly he placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ he said, realizing that of course he should have expected it, should have known: responsibility for severance did not rest with him at all; it was she who would not be able to tolerate silence, uncertainty, the thought that something had gone wrong.

Something now in his tone or touch seemed to alert her, she raised her head to look fully at him, seemed about to speak. Then she moved away a little, the smile disappearing. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you glad to see me?’

‘We can’t talk here,’ he said. ‘Come up with me.’

He led her across to the foot of the ladder. The repairs to the church floor had been completed two weeks previously, there were no workmen standing about today to take an interest in her ascent. She went up before him, sure-footed, negotiating the narrow rungs with entire confidence. Then they were standing together in the small enclosure with its odours of dust and sun-warmed plastic – odours of refuge hitherto for Raikes.

He had time to marvel at the resplendent whiteness of the Madonna, work of his patient hands, her face and upper parts radiant in the sunshine; time to remind himself that she was vulnerable still, there was the need to seal her beauty against the aggressive impurities of the air. Then he turned to Chiara and said, ‘I picked up your husband’s things yesterday.’ His tongue felt thick and slow. He looked at her as if in hope that this bare statement would explain all, resolve all. But she was silent still. ‘Then Lattimer had them picked up from my house,’ he went on. ‘Did he bring them to you?’

‘No, he phoned to say he had disposed of them.’

‘Did he say anything about them?’

‘No, what should he say? He said only that he had disposed of them. To spare me pain, he said.’

‘To spare you pain?’ An involuntary twist of a smile came to Raikes’s lips. ‘Chivalrous fellow,’ he said.

She was looking at him narrowly now and it seemed inimically. ‘Why are you speaking to me like this?’ she said.

Of course, he thought, Lattimer would say nothing. Why should he? He was cool, even if he was mad. Slowly, haltingly, looking away from her in shame, sometimes at the dreaming face of the Madonna, sometimes across the rooftops to the glitter of the Lagoon, he told her the stages of his suspicion, of his knowledge.

‘Only you could have phoned Lattimer,’ he said. ‘No one else knew that your husband was set on going to the mainland that night. That was unexpected, wasn’t it? His decision to go, I mean. I could tell from the way you reacted. You and Lattimer were in it together, you were using his moulds to make extra casts, then putting them into circulation as originals. I priced a sculpture at Balbi’s gallery. Litsov was prolific as an artist, wasn’t he? Five thousand pounds a cast would not have been a bad return on no outlay to speak of. Then he got suspicious.’

He looked at her finally. She had turned white but her eyes continued to meet his without wavering. There was a slight frown on her face, a look of what seemed genuine puzzlement.

‘But what has made you think that someone phoned Richard?’ she said. ‘Me or anyone? Why should you think that anyone went to the island at all? The police have said that Litsov was alone, that the death was accidental.’

‘There was only one cufflink,’ Raikes said. He was in the corridors of the nightmare again now, with the fat, shrugging policeman and the brown carrier bag. ‘Only Lattimer would have been capable of doing that,’ he said. ‘He took one of Litsov’s cufflinks after drowning him. He … collects things, you know. I suppose you know, you and Lattimer are obviously on intimate terms.’ He paused for some moments, then added heavily, ‘I have thought and thought about it. There is no other explanation. You must have known it.’

‘Known it?’

The sudden rage in her voice dumbfounded him. He had not envisaged her reactions very clearly, being too much subject to the hideous unease of saying such things to her; but whatever he might have imagined, it was not this voice, not this white face of anger and contempt.

‘Known it?’ she said again. ‘How would I know such a thing? Do you think he would boast of it to me? To you, more likely. It is you who are interested in fetishes, not us, you, all these dirty little boys who cannot grow up. Is it my fault the fool is still in calzoncini corti, what do you say, in shorts?’

‘In short trousers,’ Raikes said.

She had paused for breath, looking at him with no abatement of rage – indeed his correction seemed to make her angrier. ‘Ah, thank you,’ she said. ‘So you are the detective who says who is guilty at the end of the book and everyone is astonished by his cleverness. Tell me, why do you come to me with this talk of a cufflink?’

‘I did not come to you.’ He was nettled by this misrepresentation. ‘You came to me,’ he said.

‘But of course,’ she went on, ‘there is no one else, is there? You will not go to the police because you are not a man for that, and besides it would be useless, you have already lied to the police in various ways. In any case you have no proof at all. What is a cufflink? You can’t even prove he was wearing them both. You are as mad as Richard, with your cufflink.’

‘I lied to help you,’ Raikes said. ‘You asked me to do it.’

‘Shall I tell you why you have spoken like this to me?’

‘I wanted to give you a chance to explain.’

‘To you?’ She made a sudden passionate gesture with the flat of her hand, waist high, as if cutting outwards at something. ‘Why should I? What claim do you think you have on me? I am not accountable to you.’

‘Who then?’ Raikes said. ‘Who are you accountable to?’

‘You don’t see me as I am – how can I talk to you? Because we spent a night together and liked it, that gives you rights over me? You come with that air of reasonable, injured man. “Oh dear, I am disappointed in you, I did not think you were that kind of woman.” What kind of woman? Tell me, please.’

Raikes was bewildered. She had struck him before as reticent, rather. The spate of words, the furious mimicry, were completely unexpected. ‘I didn’t say –’ he began.

‘And all the time,’ she broke in impetuously, ‘the real reason has got nothing to do with Litsov, it is your self-esteem that is hurt, because you think I used you for my safety and had my pleasure from you at the same time and said nothing, all commonplace things, but you had decided I should be your Madonna.’

‘Commonplace? Do you know what you are saying? Those are not commonplace things in my world.’

Even to his own ears this sounded self-righteous and even rather ridiculous. ‘You are quite wrong anyway,’ he added. ‘I was not looking for a Madonna.’ How had he got into this position, how had it come about? She had somehow forced the thing on to the plane of argument, and he was losing. With all the trump cards in his hand, he was being obliged to defend himself. ‘Quite untrue,’ he said.

‘It is true, Simon. You go at once into a dream about women. I knew it from the first time we met. I saw it on your face that day we met on the path and I was planting the seedlings. Simply it was a person doing some work in the garden but that could not be enough for you, could it? I saw you then beginning to make a shape for me. You do it and we are fools and we join in the business. Then again, though by that time I was beginning to like you a lot, I saw that same stupidity, that day in the Campo of the Maddalena, the poetry of Biagi, me vogio êsse eterna, remember?’

‘Of course I remember. It was on that day I first knew I was –’

‘But you are eternal, you said. I saw myself in your eyes and I was pleased because I am a fool too, but then I thought, cosa vuol dire questo Signore? What does he mean? I meant only that I want to live, I want to be alive for ever, but you meant the Eternal Feminine or some such rubbish. Non fare il cretino, Simon, there is no such thing. Now, because I have failed to be the Madonna, you want to turn me into Jezebel, you want to be the Hercules Poirot of Venice and prove everything with the aid of a cufflink.’

She paused for a moment, then said, with an extraordinary, driven vehemence, ‘I am myself, not your distortions. I enjoyed deceiving Litsov. Money, other men sometimes. What other way was there? It was action. Stuck there on the island to assist his talent, cook and clean for him, strip to be his model, stand or sit or lie while he cut me up into fragments, was that enough? It was enough for him. All his sex went into those bits of metal.’

‘Did you and Lattimer sleep together?’ The question, so long in his mind, sprang from him now without premeditation, forced out by her admissions.

‘It is not really your business,’ she said, ‘but no, we didn’t. I need to be strongly attracted before I can do that.’

Raikes struggled to suppress the pleasure these few, almost careless words of hers had given him. He said, ‘You could have left him, couldn’t you? But of course you might have found yourself pushed for money. Well, you are rich now, you have it all.’

‘Simon,’ she said with a sudden change of tone, ‘don’t let us stand here arguing any more. I never intended Litsov’s death, but he is dead. We – you and I – we are alive still. If you are a man you will look at me and see me and take me as I am.’

She had noted his pleasure, he realized, the shameful gratification he had somehow not managed to conceal. She was formidable, he knew it now, as delicate in perception as she was quick in mind; and intent, focused to register his weakness. He cast about in his mind for an answer.

‘That night in the hotel,’ she said, ‘it has never been so good with anyone else, that is the truth, I promise you.’

‘If I am a man?’ he said slowly. ‘You talk as if you had the only notion of what a man is. You are doing the same thing you accused me of.’

‘Why do you talk as if we were in a courtroom? Listen to me, you could sculpt again. It was the great disappointment of your life, you said so. Now you have the choice to make again. You could give up your work at the museum. I could help you.’

‘Help me?’ He looked at her almost incredulously, ‘I should have thought you’d had just about enough of helping sculptors,’ he said. The colour was back in her face now and her eyes were bright. She was serious, he was suddenly convinced of it – it was monstrous, but she was entirely serious: she wanted to take him on, make a sculptor of him. The offer was naive, perverse, delinquent, all at the same time. He looked closely at her face, the delicate bones at cheek and temple, the green-tawny eyes, the wide, sensuous mouth, lips slightly parted in the eagerness of her feelings. He struggled to imagine what her motives might be, and failed. In this moment of uncertainty, he experienced a sudden strong impulse of sexual desire for her. He looked away quickly, in case his eyes betrayed him.

‘I need to believe,’ he said. ‘I need completeness, somehow. I don’t know how to explain it. People call me a perfectionist but that’s not it really. I think it’s partly why I turned away from being a sculptor. I think now I was wrong to turn away. That’s why I wanted the past so much, you know, the complete past of the Madonna. But all I have got is fragments. With you too it’s the same. I don’t understand you. I have looked too hard and I have somehow convicted myself. I don’t know if you can see what I mean. I have corrupted my own feelings about you and about her.’

‘Because of a cufflink?’ she said.

He was silent for a moment or two. Then he said, ‘Because you left him there.’

She had moved closer to the Madonna. For a few moments he saw the two faces together, the vivid flesh and the immaculate stone. Then, with that devastating ability to sense what he might be feeling, she said: ‘The man who made this was different from you, Simon Raikes. He had courage to finish something.’

He remained silent. She waited a moment longer, then turned away and began to climb down the ladder. He made no move to stop her. When she had gone he stood motionless there for several minutes, feeling alone and bereft. In this stricken silence he became aware gradually of the presence and predicament of the Madonna, the mute demand of the vulnerable stone. He would work, he would concentrate, he would shut his mind to everything else.

He had everything he needed, the wax acrylic, the propane burner – these had been in readiness from the beginning. He set to work with devotion, beginning as before with the hem of her gown, using a narrow, house-painter’s brush to apply the preservative, determined to neglect no smallest part of her – anything missed the air would swoop on, deposit its contaminants there, set up once again the process of decay.

He worked unremittingly, the turpentine smell of the preservative in his nostrils, using the brush sometimes, sometimes his hands, working the glutinous stuff into the pores of the stone, stroking it into the complex folds of her clothing. As he settled into the caressive rhythm of the work, he found himself despite all resolutions thinking intently about Chiara again, going over the details of their interview. It seemed to him now that he had taken the wrong attitude towards her; he had assumed the air of a superior being. No wonder she had been angry … Her first anger had not been for him, however, but for Lattimer, anger and contempt – a proof she had not known of that despoiling of the dead? Yes. No reason to think she knew Lattimer would kill him, or even do him physical harm, though she must have had some idea of it, of the possibility of it, otherwise why go to such trouble to establish an alibi? Or was he attributing too much calculation to her? She had panicked, phoned Lattimer, kept away. It was all he could with any certainty accuse her of … She had not had a look of panic, however. He strove to recall her demeanour of that evening. Tense, stimulated somehow. His great mistake, he saw it now, had been to adopt that accusing attitude, give her no real chance to explain. She was cheating Litsov, she admitted that. Still, the way she put it … Energy like hers, pent up and frustrated, might well find an outlet in such a way. Could she really be blamed for it? All his sex went into those bits of metal. He remembered her, on the day of his first visit, standing somehow lost among those fragments of herself. And Lattimer, with his trophy-tufts. Hers not among them. She did not sleep with Lattimer. For some reason he believed this implicitly. She slept with me. I have been too harsh with her, he thought.

All the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon, as he worked on the statue these thoughts continued to revolve in his mind. He felt no hunger. There was still the slight heaviness in his limbs, but his hands obeyed him well. He had reached her face now. With brush and fingertip he coated cheeks and brow, smoothed the wax into her eye-sockets, nostrils, the indentations of her hair, the faint curve of the mouth.

Last of all came the burning. When he was sure, as far as humanly possible, that no part of the Madonna had been left untreated, he played the flame of the burner over her, sealing the whole surface with brief but intense blasts of heat, welding the wax on to the stone to form an unbroken film.

In the late afternoon he stepped back from her, his eyes stinging. She was impregnable, impervious, proof against corruption – for how long, he wondered, fifty years, a hundred? My lifetime at least, he thought. She stood there now as he had envisaged her on his arrival, as he had aspired to re-create her, resplendent in the warm pallor of her stone, her body in tension between reluctance and desire, her dreaming face turned away, that arm held out, guarding.

She was finished, his work was done. He would make his report, the work would be inspected, the scaffolding taken down. Then he would see her as men had been intended to see her, from ground level, thirty feet below. I have been looking from too close, he thought. I have distorted things. No more visions … From the moment of swallowing the first thirty milligrams he had accepted the doctor’s view, he saw now, agreed that there was a lesion in his brain, undetectable but beyond question there, resulting in neural discharge in the form of hallucinations. Perhaps the sense of evil was merely a neural discharge too, that sickening sense of mystery that had come to him the evening before, as he watched the light fade on the water, fingered the trivial, inconclusive object of silver and stone. Yes, he had been looking from too close. I must try again, he thought, I must see her again.

He looked up at the slightly averted face of the Madonna. Something more was needed, some offering, placatory, sacrificial. Of course. He crouched down, groping and peering among the draperies of her robe, behind, where the moulding was a little cruder. Finding an incision deep and narrow enough he took the cufflink from his trouser pocket and inserted it edgeways, pressing down until it was wedged firm, with no part projecting. With his fingers he smeared wax into the crack until it was level. Then he whisked the flame of the burner over, sealing it in.

The Burano–Torcello boat came in as he was descending at the Fondamenta Nuove. Within a few minutes they were heading north, the white walls of the cimitero receding on the left, the shimmering, depthless expanse of the Lagoon opening before them.

He had planned, on arriving at Burano, to find someone with a sandalo who would be willing to take him at once to the house on the island. However, standing on the little quay, distracted by shifting reflections of houses and boats in the harbour water, he experienced a sudden loss of nerve. He needed a drink first. He walked away from the harbour past stalls hung with lace, found a small café on the corner of the square and despite the heat asked for cognac. He was half-way through this when he realized he was in the same café he and Chiara had gone to, where they had had the drink together, when she had said she was returning with him to Venice. Because of the fog, because it was too dangerous … She had made the phone call from here.

The realization, combining with his nervousness, was suddenly too much for him. Again in that oddly automatic manner his hand went to the small cylinder in his jacket pocket. He had intended to take the second half of his dose, if he took any more at all, late that evening before going to bed. Now, however, rapidly and surreptitiously, using the rest of the brandy to help him, he swallowed down a further thirty milligrams.

Making his way back to the quay, negotiating for a boat, he felt no immediate change. He found a man willing to take him and within minutes they were on the way, heading out into the bright waste of the Lagoon. The sun was high now, the day was cloudless, windless. Here and there small groups of gulls floated, looking less like birds than bright buoyant crystals precipitated on the surface by the action of the light.

The boatman stood at the prow, lunging forward with his single oar. He made no attempt at conversation and Raikes was glad of this, glad to let the silence of the Lagoon settle round him. The sun was hot on his face. He narrowed his eyes in an attempt to make out the distant shapes of land; but it was too much of an effort and after a while he desisted, content to watch the water cleaving with their passage, listen to the creak and splash of the oar. A certain torpor was beginning to descend on him; the feeling of heaviness had intensified and he had again become aware of his thick, unagile tongue. It occurred to him that he had been unwise to mix brandy with the barbiturate. He had not eaten much either, he suddenly remembered; in fact he had eaten nothing at all since the day before, with Steadman, at Florian’s. What had Steadman said? Their conversation was remote now, as if it had taken place in some other phase of life altogether. He had spoken of the Madonna cult, yes. The few known facts about Girolamo’s life. The Supplicanti, still nursing their heresy after two hundred years, devising strange sins for the sake of heaven. Contempt for the flesh can take various forms. Among them, murder. Girolamo – could he really have choked the life from the woman who had given him his Madonna?

The Litsovs’ boat was in its accustomed place. The tide was up, water brimmed against the supports of the jetty, covered the seaweed, concealed the algae-line on the shore rocks. He paid the man, thought briefly of asking him to wait, decided against it. He began to climb the steps up from the landing stage.

As he reached the path at the top and began to walk along it, the same familiarity descended on him as before, the sense of passing through stages of intensely significant experience. This had become a landscape of his own shaping, charged with his love, silt and sand and stones of it; clay colour of the path, caked now with heat; detritus of past tides in the nondescript shrub; constant glimmering presence of the water.

He passed the place where he and Wiseman had come upon her gardening, turned the bend in the path, approached the house in its cluster of pine and willow. The nervousness was there still, blunted now by his lassitude and a certain sense of slowness in the movements of his eyes.

No one came in answer to his knocking. He tried the door, found it unlocked and stepped inside, calling her name as once, on a misty morning, she had called Litsov’s. He began to walk down the passage, looking into rooms, calling several times again, experiencing as he did so the vague beginnings of panic.

She was nowhere to be seen. Silence resettled heavily in the intervals between his calls. He passed through the kitchen on to the path at the rear of the house. This led through a grove of listing, etiolated willows to Litsov’s studio. Beyond, the gleaming Lagoon again became visible, absolutely motionless, unbroken to the horizon. His fear grew. There was the boat, the unlocked door – she must be on the island somewhere. She had offered herself and he had rejected her. A woman scorned. And Litsov’s death still in her mind … He remembered the quiver in her voice when she spoke about courage. What had she said? The courage to finish something. He had not answered her, barely looked at her, made no attempt to stop her leaving. It was here, between the trees and the shore, that they had searched for Litsov that day, calling this way and that, rooting about in hollows, in the tangle of shrubs, the overgrown rubble of old houses. But it was in the water they had found him …

When he was through the trees, the full force of the sun struck him. He took off his jacket. He was sweating. The brightness of the light and the effects of the drug combined to make it difficult for him to focus his eyes. Reluctantly, yet with a sense of inevitability, he began to walk towards the water.

He found himself above the small beach of grey shingle on to which, with the distraught tones of Chiara in his ears, he had heaved the drowned man that day. At the water’s edge he saw a white garment, strangely isolated and distinct on the bare pebble, lying as it had been carelessly or hastily dropped. With an immediate leap of alarm he began to walk forward, scanning the water. To his amazement he made out the movements of a swimmer. Someone was swimming there, half lost in glitters of light, performing an elegantly leisurely backstroke not twenty yards from the dark cluster of stakes where poor Litsov had been entrapped.

He heard his name called, saw her wave. The water between must have been too shallow for swimming because she stood up at once and began wading towards him. It seemed to him that she was naked, but his eyes were not focusing well and she was still half concealed in the intensity of the light. The resistance of the water lent her grace; she walked without shrinking or uncertainty, head up, sure of her footing, following a known way among these flats of mud and weed.

Rooted there, immobilized, moisture filming his eyes and slightly blurring his vision, Raikes watched the pale gold, glistening form emerge, saw the bright swirl of water around it, the flashing ripples made by the thrust of the thighs, saw the lineaments of flesh emerge from the heart of light, the straight shoulders, dark nipples, plunging line of the pelvis, black pubic bush. As she stepped out on to the shingle she was smiling.