‘You can’t win every time,’ Farina challenged him. ‘No one wins every time.’

7

Sunnyvale Rest Home, London

Finishing her shift, Sally Egan pulled a coat over her uniform and left by the back exit. Her door keys were in her pocket, her handbag slung over her left shoulder. She was thinking, with some pleasure, of the man she had slept with the previous week, Eddie Gilmore. They had been a bit drunk, but he had still managed to perform pretty well and afterwards he hadn’t hustled her either. Instead he’d made her a sandwich and together they’d pulled the duvet around them and watched a DVD. For the first time in years she had felt comfortable and treasured. At nine they had made love again, with real affection, but at nine thirty Sally’s alarm had gone off and, reluctantly, she had dressed and headed home.

She hadn’t heard from him since.

Briskly pushing open the gate, Sally hurried up to the semidetached house and opened the door. Immediately a woman came down the stairs, dressed in a nurse’s uniform.

‘Your dad’s asleep.’

‘How’s he been?’ Sally asked, taking off her coat and moving into the kitchen to put the kettle on. The woman followed her.

‘A bit het up this afternoon. Asking for your mother, but he calmed down later.’

Pulling out a chair, Jean sat down. For the previous three years she had acted as a part-time carer for Sally’s father, who was approaching the last stages of Alzheimer’s. At times she wondered how Sally coped with her full-time job at the care home and a senile father. How did an attractive, intelligent woman in her thirties take to being an incessant carer? Didn’t she ever get sick of emptying bedpans and listening to interminable stories from the past and long to escape? Weren’t there moments of complete despair as she walked from the care home across the green to the semi where her father was fading, hour by hour?

A couple of times over the years Sally had confided that she had wanted to go to art school. She’d been talented, she said – top of her class. But her mother’s early death and her father’s already erratic behaviour had prevented her from leaving home, and the need for a proper wage had shattered any illusions of pursuing a painting career. So instead of studying Michelangelo, she had started work in a nearby care home for the elderly, shelving Rodin for Radio 4 and incontinence pads.

If there was any bitterness, Sally never showed it. And if Jean had been told about her being a bit the worse for wear in the local pub, who the hell could blame her? Even the rumours about Sally sleeping around she had shrugged off. You had to find comfort somewhere, Jean had told her husband, and that poor cow’s got precious little else going in her life.

‘So he’s asleep now?’ Sally asked, passing Jean a mug of tea. ‘Maybe he’ll sleep through.’

‘You should get someone in at night—’

‘Yeah, right!’ Sally laughed. ‘And how do I pay them? I can just about cover your wages.’

‘You need more help.’

Shrugging, Sally sat down. ‘You know something? I was talking to one of the residents at the home and she said that when she was forty she’d had her first child. Forty.’ Sally gazed across the kitchen. ‘I mean, that was old then, but she did it. And it made me think that I could still have a shot at it … That’s if I ever meet anyone.’

‘You’re good-looking—’

‘That’s bugger all to do with it. It’s not attracting men, it’s getting to keep the right one,’ Sally replied, changing the subject. ‘Anyway, I was looking at Dad yesterday and he looked pretty good. You know, not so thin. Maybe he’s putting on a bit of weight?’

‘I don’t think so, love.’

‘Nah, maybe not. I’m just imagining things. I know he can’t get better, I’m not kidding myself. I know he’s dying.’ She sipped her tea. ‘I just wonder sometimes how long. I mean, I love him …’

‘I know that.’

‘… but I wonder how long it’ll go on. Because you see, I don’t have him. Not my father. I’ve got someone else who looks like my father. And I don’t know who he is, and sometimes, at night, I think about it and wonder if I owe this man. You know what I mean? If my father doesn’t know me, do I have to know him?’ She shook her head. ‘I know I do! I know I have to look after my father for as long as it takes. But I can’t help thinking that every time he deteriorates, a bit of me does too, and I don’t want to be dried out at forty.’

Hurriedly standing, Sally moved over to the washing machine and piled in some dirty clothes. With the light on in the kitchen and the blinds open, she could see her reflection in the window and the image of Jean behind her, and wondered about Eddie Gilmore. About whether he would ever ring.

It never occurred to her that as she studied her reflection in the window someone was also looking in at her. Someone who had watched her laughing, getting drunk, larking about in the pub. Someone who had seen her kissing Eddie Gilmore. Someone who had been about when she left home at seven in the early morning darkness. The same someone who had followed her home across the green that night.

That night, and every other night, for the past three days.

8

Gaspare Reni sat at the table, gazing out into the walled garden of his house. What had served him as an extraordinary home and gallery for over forty years had once been a convent for a silent order of nuns. In among the gloss and activity of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, it had served as a reflective nucleus of a changing world. Wars, the deaths of monarchs and the scandals of empire had passed beyond its gates, while nuns in meditative silence made pleas to Heaven.

Minutes earlier Gaspare had received a phone call from the Countess di Fattori, telling him of the murder of her daughter, Seraphina. He had flinched at the words, thinking of the last sight he had had of her, walking out into the London street, her hand raised, illuminated in the lamplight. Her coat had dried by the time she had left. And she wasn’t carrying any parcel. Not any more. She had left the painting with Gaspare.

He had thought that would be enough to save her. He had been wrong.

And now, here was her mother, an old friend of his, trying to make sense out of the insensible. ‘Her body was—’

She spoke quickly, almost as though she thought he could catch her distress.

‘—the skin was taken off her.’

No! thought Gaspare, taking in a breath. No.

‘They skinned her.’

No.

‘I don’t know why …’ The woman, the mother, paused. Her words came from another place inside her. Raw from the heart. ‘When you saw her, was Seraphina worried about anything?’

What do I say? Gaspare wondered. Confess? Tell an old friend, a grieving mother, that her child had found a painting which had indirectly killed her? How could he tell her that? What difference would it make? Seraphina would still be dead, still in a Venetian morgue with the water lapping at the city’s wooden supports underneath her. And even if he told her mother about the Titian, how would he explain? Talk to her of rumours, old stories long buried? Or maybe he should tell her of The Skin Hunter. Maybe comfort her with the memory of a man who had once terrorised Venice.

‘Seraphina said she had visited you in London,’ her mother continued. ‘I know she enjoyed herself but she was glad to be home, glad to be back with her husband … I wondered if there was anything you had to tell me? Tell any of us? Is there anything, Gaspare?’

He said no.

Negative.

Nothing to tell.

He said no because there was nothing else he could say that would help or give any comfort. But when Gaspare had put down the phone, severed the frail, terrible connection to Venice, he stared out of the window at the walled garden and thought of the portrait he had hidden in the rafters, high above his head. Looking upwards, his gaze scanned the painted ceiling, his pulse quickening.