‘I could see it in her eyes. The way they darted all over the place when I was speaking to her. I was over there today, and she could hardly focus on what I was saying. I was telling her how we’re trying for a baby.’
He smiles. ‘Well, you know how uninterested Jill is in babies.’
‘I know. But… she just seemed scared. And Ramirez– why isn’t he letting it go? What was he doing at the memorial yesterday?’
He puts the magazine down on the bed. ‘What are you getting at, Lara?’
‘Jill seemed really rattled to see him there.’ She adds uneasily, ‘I’m worried about them.’
‘Well, you don’t need to be. They didn’t do anything wrong. They’re not that kind of people.’
But Lara’s not so sure.
Ted has to figure out what to do about John Burnley. But he is distracted by his wife, who is visibly agitated. He needs her to calm down so that he can think. John has evidence. John is a real problem. He must deal with him soon, and he needs to figure out how to do it, and how to get away with it. But he can’t think with Jill in such a state. She’s pacing back and forth in their bedroom, wringing her hands, her face a mask of distress.
Perhaps a change of scene would do them both good. Away from here, where they found the hidden cameras, away fromJohn Burnley. Jill would calm down, and he would be able to come up with a plan. He’s given himself a week to figure out how to deal with that bastard. That’s not much time. He needs a clear head. He watches Jill pace and reflects that perhaps she is not really cut out to be a murderer after all. ‘Why don’t we go away?’ he suggests.
She stops and turns to look at him, seems tempted. ‘Can we?’
‘There’s nothing keeping us here. We’re allowed to travel. You can take a few days off work, can’t you? And we could put all this out of our minds for a few days, regroup.’
‘Maybe we should,’ she says. ‘I can get the time off.’
‘How about Venice?’ he suggests. They both love Venice. It’s where they went for their honeymoon. That seems so long ago now. They almost seem like different people. Perhaps they can recapture what they had then. They will take a private gondola ride down the Grand Canal, visit the Guggenheim; he’ll take her to Florian’s– she loves Florian’s. They will have romantic meals. He’ll buy her something nice. And the art will distract her; Venice has so much art. He can think about how to get rid of John Burnley while they spend hours walking quietly through galleries. She doesn’t have to know what he’s thinking about.
‘Sure, Venice,’ she agrees.
He fetches his laptop off the desk in the bedroom and climbs back into bed and turns it on. He starts looking at flights to Venice, and possible hotels. ‘How about going back to the Gritti Palace?’
‘Yes,’ she says. But she seems distracted.
He spends some time making the bookings, hoping that getting away will do her good. That it will do them both good. Andthen they will come back, and he will deal with this problem once and for all.
Jill is wide awake again. She has been wakened by a dream, and now she sits up gasping for breath.
She was drowning. She was in the sea, that same stormy sea, being tossed around by the waves, struggling to survive, and then something was pulling her down below the surface. A hand was grasping her leg, and she tried to kick free. She opened her eyes wide underwater and tried to fight off her attacker. It was Greg– but Greg ravaged by death and time in the water. There was seaweed in his hair, and holes where his eyes used to be; his skin fell in tatters from his skull and floated like ribbons in the water. And just as she was about to open her mouth to scream and let all that water in to drown her, she saw that it wasn’t Greg any more, but Ramirez. And he was alive, and smiling at her, his eyes wide open in the water, as he held her down beneath the surface, waiting for her to die.
She’s panting, trying to push the dream out of her mind. She glances down at her husband, snoring loudly. She can’t stay here beside him any longer.
Now she is wandering around the house in the dark. There is no moonlight coming through the skylight tonight, so she uses the flashlight on her cell phone to light her way up and then down the elegant staircase. The solidity, the grandeur, of her house is no longer a comfort. She is terrified of being arrested– could her dream have been any clearer? Her stoicism has left her, her courage has fled. She is like Lady Macbeth, so changed; from the wife urging her husband on to murder, to the lostwoman seeing blood on her hands that she can’t wash out. Jill doesn’t see blood on her hands, although it’s there; no, she keeps seeing the tiny glinting eye of that camera in the bookshelf that captured their confessions.
Chapter Thirty-Four
VENICE IS Amysterious place, a maze of cobbled streets and fairy-tale bridges; it is so easy to get lost, Jill thinks. All the dark twists and turnings, sudden little squares, and always the canals, water ceaselessly lapping against stone like a tongue. Farther out, the lagoon.
On their honeymoon, Jill had found Venice romantic. Now it seems so strange to her that it is almost surreal, like the paintings they saw yesterday in the Guggenheim Collection. All it needs is a little exaggeration, a slurred perspective, and it would tip into something else, something nightmarish and unreal. It’s not hard to imagine a troll leering beneath the arch of a stone bridge, a giant’s dark shadow looming over them and across the square, unspeakable creatures lurking beneath the surface of the lagoon.
It’s easy to lose your bearings in Venice, she thinks anxiously. Is the Grand Canal on the left or the right? Did we just pass through here or not? Is that the same skinny black cat we sawa few minutes ago or a different one? She has never had a good sense of direction, is not particularly adept at reading a map. Maps are more Ted’s thing. Now Ted is deliberately studying his phone, while she waits, absorbing her surroundings as night begins to fall.
‘Do you haveanyidea where we are?’ she asks. She wants to get back to St Mark’s Square, its familiar, wide-open spaces, where people sit at tables and play chess with recognizable chess pieces, black and white. If she can get back to St Mark’s Square, then she will know where she is. She doesn’t like this Alice in Wonderland feeling, this sense of tilting, of falling. But her husband is in no hurry; he is looking for a particular restaurant they’d thought would be interesting, and he is willing to invest considerable time and effort into locating it. He will not be rushed.
‘We could go back to that little restaurant just off St Mark’s that we like,’ she suggests.
‘No, I can find it. Just give me a minute.’
She sits on a bench and waits, chilled to the bone. The mist is damp, clinging to her. She thinks that maybe Venice was a mistake. They’d flung some clothes into their bags and left on Thursday morning, after having discovered the cameras on Tuesday, and having spoken to Nadya and John Burnley on Wednesday– a frantic time. They arrived in Venice late Thursday; it is now Saturday evening. They have spent their time in gondolas, galleries and restaurants. Ted has tried to coax her out of her disturbing reveries. But her thoughts have turned increasingly dark and feverish.
Ted has been quiet. She knows what he has been thinkingabout; she has been thinking about it too. But it’s not that easy to plan a perfect murder. Look how well they did the first time.
