Overture in Venice

by Hester Rowan

  Despite the heat I felt myself shudder. The prospect of having to stay here with nothing but a shrub for shelter while a storm burst over me was far from exhilarating. I wasn’t frightened, of course not – but I scrambled down to the edge of the water and strained my eyes for Guy’s boat.

  And then I heard it, the welcome splutter of the engine as a small motorboat skimmed round the southerly point, and I saw it slow as the driver checked to get a bearing.

  Overjoyed, I jumped up on to a rock and waved both my arms in a welcoming semaphore. ‘Guy!’ I shouted as loudly as I could, ‘Guy – over here!’

  The boat turned towards me, coming in fast. I slid off my rock and waded recklessly into the lake to meet it. I was over my knees in water, uncaring, laughing with slightly hysterical relief as he cut the engine and drifted the boat alongside.

  ‘Thank goodness you’ve come,’ I cried, stretching out to meet his reaching hand. He caught my wrist, and at the same time I saw the face behind the windshield.

  My rescuer wasn’t Guy at all.

  Chapter Sixteen

  My laughter died abruptly. I stood still, hardly noticing that my dress was sopping up water, and stared at Henry Lang. He was smiling, his handsome face giving out messages of reassurance.

  ‘Where – where’s Guy?’ I asked uncertainly.

  ‘He’s driving south towards Gardone, hoping to give your followers the slip,’ Lang said easily. ‘He stopped at the hotel just long enough to say that he’d left you marooned along the coast here and I volunteered to fetch you. Come on now, get aboard.’

  He pulled me towards the boat. I was reluctant, unsure of him; but the thunder was rolling nearer and I felt one or two heavy plashes of rain.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘Back to the hotel at Gargnano, where else? Isabel’s still there, and Guy will be back as soon as he can. Come along, Clare, we don’t want to be caught in the storm.’

  I would have been prepared to stay and face it but his grip on my hand gave me no option. He drew me into the boat, turned its bows out towards the middle of the lake and opened the throttle.

  Away from the shelter of the shore the water was less calm than it had looked and the small boat slapped up and down as it skimmed the heavy swell. I sat clinging to the cockpit rail, glad to be heading for safety and glad too that the noise of the engine made conversation impossible; there was nothing I felt able to say to Henry Lang, and I hoped that he had nothing to say to me.

  We were two hundred yards from the shore when he began to close the throttle. At first I thought he was merely reducing speed to cut down the buffeting and I was glad; but then he slowed until we were barely making way through the ominously dark water. We were heading, I suddenly realized, not south towards Gargnano, but north.

  ‘I think,’ he said conversationally, ‘that this is a good time and place for us to come to an understanding. Don’t you?’

  I shivered. A wind had sprung up, temporarily holding off the rain, and the water round us smelled deep and deathly cold. The skirt of my dress clung to me in clammy folds, my teeth were chattering.

  I tried to smile, hoping not to show that I was frightened.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be more sensible to wait until we get ashore?’ I said. ‘There’s going to be an almighty storm in a minute.’

  He nodded, regretfully. ‘So it seems. These lake storms are very fierce, you know. A good many people have been drowned in Garda.’

  He was watching me, smiling all the time, the lurid light making his teeth and the whites of his eyes glitter unnaturally.

  I tried to swallow down my nervousness. ‘You know the lake, then?’ I said, playing for time. ‘You’ve been here before?’

  ‘Oh yes. I know the district well,’ he said.

  ‘And I suppose you speak Italian?’

  ‘Almost as well as German, my mother-tongue in Switzerland. But then, I think you may have overheard me?’

  ‘Yes, in the lakeside restaurant. So you’re not from Brazil?’

  He laughed. ‘Wrong, my dear. I’ve been a Brazilian national for many years. But I still have considerable – er – business interests in Switzerland.’

  ‘But you’re not a geologist?’

  ‘Not professionally, perhaps. Shall we say a very enthusiastic amateur?’ He chuckled as though he had made a joke.

  ‘And what about Isabel?’ I demanded. ‘Does she know what you’re after?’

  He raised his eyebrows. They were still black despite the handsome silver of his hair. ‘What am I “after”, Clare? Tell me that and then I shall be able to answer your question.’

  I hesitated, unwilling to offer my guess when there were still basic facts to be unravelled. ‘About Isabel,’ I persisted. ‘She isn’t your daughter, is she?’

  He seemed to be enjoying himself, turning in his seat to watch me floundering through my questions. ‘Now you come to mention it, no. Isabel is a young lady of Brazilian origin.

  I met her in Sâo Paulo – the art gallery where she works is a very convenient place for doing business. But she makes a very beautiful daughter, don’t you think? A respectable companion for me and a welcome distraction for a young man like Guido.’

  ‘I like Isabel,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe she knows the half of what’s going on. She didn’t know Zecchini, did she?’

  ‘No of course not. I hadn’t met her when I last worked in Venice.’

  ‘You worked with Zecchini?’

  He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Wrong again – I wouldn’t dream of working with such a man! We were – shall we say business rivals? But you must answer some of my questions, Clare. Tell me, how do you come to know Zecchini? I had thought, you see, that you were an innocent bystander. Perceptive, yes. Too perceptive for my comfort, perhaps, but innocently spending a holiday with friends and unsure of your ground. But now it seems that you know one of the biggest operators in Venice! Could you, by any chance, be another of my business rivals?’

  His voice softened, was hardly audible against the grumble of thunder from behind the mountains. The wind was rising, rocking the fragile boat so that he was obliged to concentrate for a moment on the controls and increase speed to prevent our being swamped.

  I took a firmer grip on the rail. ‘It was all a mistake,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I happened to get in his way in Venice and he thinks that I know more than I do. A lot more. I don’t know why you should think that I could possibly be a rival – I happened to overhear you at the lake, that’s all, and I guessed that you weren’t what you pretended to be. I don’t know what has brought either you or Zecchini here and I really don’t want to know. Look, can’t we go back to land? We’re going to be drenched at any minute.’

  He shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, no. You see, Clare, whatever you know is now too much.’

  He shifted his weight suddenly, deliberately rocking the boat. I gasped involuntarily, clutching with both hands at the rail. I knew now that he was deadly dangerous, that I had to keep him talking as long as possible. Being caught in the storm would be nothing as long as I was still in the boat with him; if he threw me in the water, I knew that I wouldn’t last five minutes.

  ‘I know hardly anything,’ I protested. ‘All right, you’re not Isabel’s father, I guessed that. But you’re still an old friend of Guy’s father –’

  ‘Hardly, my dear! True, I heard of him during the war. We were both fighting up in the mountains round Trevalle – but our causes were rather different. However, when I found that fool of an old man guarding the valley with a rifle, and heard in the town that he was a friend of the family of the late lamented Signor Lombardi, I took what I thought would be a good opportunity of getting past the old man. Of course, I scouted round the villa first to find out something about the family before introducing myself.’

  ‘You visited the hotel down by the lake, I suppose, and talked to Maria?’

  ‘Oh, she was very forthcoming. I paid her well and she promised faithfu
lly not to mention my enquiries to anyone. It was unfortunate that she should be helping at the villa the very night that we arrived.’

  ‘I guessed it was something like that. But look, I still don’t know what you’re after in the valley and I’m really not interested – after all, it’ll be empty this evening and you can do what you want there. And I know you’re not a violent man, otherwise you’d have eliminated poor old Giorgio, regardless of his gun. So why can’t we just get back to the shore –’

  Lang sighed, a long gusty sigh that was lost in the wind. ‘You’re right, I’m not by nature violent. Zecchini and I have that much in common. You see, we’re both businessmen. It would be distasteful to me to shoot an old man – and besides, with so many workmen in the valley it might have been difficult for me to get out again! No, I preferred to take an easier way if possible. But a drowning, my dear Clare, would be far less difficult to arrange.’

  My throat was so tight that I could hardly speak. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ I said, without any conviction at all.

  The wind had dropped as suddenly as it had risen and the rain began to fall in heavy pounding drops. Thunder rolled round the sky and the tops of the nearest mountains were briefly illuminated by a stab of lightning. Ahead of us the lake was quite empty. I looked round desperately, as Lang concentrated on the bucking boat, trying to gauge my distance from the shore. He raised his voice to make himself heard.

  ‘It could happen so easily, you see, in a storm like this. You might quite well have been swept off that little piece of shore. And when I came out by boat to rescue you, I searched and searched and found nothing. Your friend Guido will be distraught – but how could he possibly blame me? And while he is searching for your drowned body, I can go up to Trevalle and get what I came for –’

  He lunged at me suddenly, catching my shoulder in a vicious blow that spun me sideways in my seat, but despite the shock of pain my grip on the rail held. I stood up, bracing myself, clinging to the rail with both hands. He laughed at me, took one of his hands off the wheel and brought it down in a sideways chopping motion against my wrist. I saw the blow coming and shifted my grip, and as he swore with the pain of smashing his hand against the chrome rail, I leaned forward and grabbed the wheel, pulling it hard round towards me.

  The boat heeled wildly. For a terrifying moment I thought that it would capsize, trapping both of us, but Lang shouldered me off, slowed the engine and fought to steady the boat. I took a firmer grip of the rail and straightened up, peering ahead through the driving rain on our new south-easterly course. I knew that I had only a few seconds before he had the boat under control and forced me over the side by sheer strength. My only hope of surviving in the water for more than a moment or two lay in entering it my own way. I seized the top of the windshield, let go of the rail and stood up on my bucking seat.

  Lang glanced up at me, incredulous. ‘Jump, then,’ he howled against the thunder. ‘You’ll save me the trouble!’

  I flung one arm high in the air. ‘Help!’ I screamed into the stabbing rain. ‘Help!’

  Lang bared his teeth with amusement at my futile words. I took a gulp of air and jumped. The cold black water, unimaginably deep, closed over my head.

  The wash of the accelerating boat caught me as I surfaced, tossing me in choking white foam. I spluttered for air, my lungs straining, trying to tread water while the rain battered me down, and I knew that my estimate of the time I could last in the lake had been wildly optimistic. I tried to keep my head, to turn and swim calmly with the waves, but the swell was far too strong for me. My nose and ears filled with the water of the Alpine lake, my vision blacked, my head seemed to swell, my lungs were ready to burst …

  And then, just before I lost consciousness, strong hands caught at my clothes, arms raised me, there was an intolerable rhythmic pain in my chest. I came to, coughing and retching, to find myself face down on the wooden planks of a small boat, and then I was picked up gently and lifted aboard the lake steamer.

  The next few minutes were a confusion. Faces swung in and out of my vision, voices babbled, hands touched me. And then a burly sailor with a face like a superannuated boxer enveloped me, tenderly as a baby, in a blanket and carried me down out of the rain to the light and warmth of the saloon.

  Here the sailor propped me on one of the padded benches and relinquished me to the care of an avuncular steward, who held a glass of colourless liquid to my lips. The unfamiliar spirit hit the back of my throat and brought me up with a jerk, coughing, eyes watering, shaking my head as my senses reeled. And then everything steadied; a wonderful glow suffused my body and I gave a deep relaxing sigh.

  The steward sat with me, tucking the blanket round me and trying to fend off sightseers. My dramatic rescue had obviously been a highlight of the journey and an inquisitive semi-circle of jostling passengers of assorted nationalities had formed in front of me. Questions, in a babel of tongues, filled the air.

  I found my voice. ‘I’m English,’ I said and immediately there were half a dozen offers of advice and assistance. The steward left me, the passengers of other nationalities wandered away, their excitement over, the English holidaymakers pressed forward and I tried to give them a coherent story. But not the full one: the idea of accusing Lang of attempting to murder me, without a shred of supporting evidence, and the subsequent prospect of being escorted by a contingent of indignant fellow-countrymen to the nearest police station where I should have to try to unravel an infinitely complicated story to an assembly of sceptical Italian policemen was too much. I had to tell Guy first.

  I drew a deep breath. ‘My name’s Clare Lambert, I’m staying with some Italian friends. I’d been – er – sunbathing by the lake and the storm blew up. One of the other guests came in a boat to pick me up, but we had an argument. Well, a row. I’m afraid I lost my head and jumped overboard to get away from him. I’d seen the steamer coming across the lake, you see, and I turned the boat towards it so I was pretty certain of being picked up. Yes, I know that it was a stupid thing to do … yes, I might well have been drowned. Will someone please be kind enough to tell the captain how very grateful I am to him and his crew?’

  My uncle-of-the-year steward reappeared with a mug of hot soup which I drank gratefully, and a towel so that I could dry my hair. Someone kindly lent me a comb. The steamer was apparently due to reach Riva in an hour’s time and I asked if a radio message could be sent to the Hotel Regina Vittoria at Gargnano telling Guy where and when to meet me. And then, quite suddenly, I fell into an exhausted sleep.

  By the time we approached Riva, the storm had gone. The sky was pale, clear, washed-out, the air was fresh, the lake an innocent blue. I stood on the deck feeling weary and a little light-headed, dry but hopelessly bedraggled.

  Guy was there, waiting. My heart lifted as I saw him pacing the quayside. As the steamer neared he shaded his eyes and then raised his hand as he saw me.

  ‘Clare!’ he called across the narrowing gap of water. ‘Are you all right?’

  I waved in acknowledgement, then shook hands with the steward and my sailor rescuers. The gangway was heaved into position and the other passengers considerately stood back to let me off first. Guy came forward eagerly.

  For a wonderful moment I thought that he was going to take me in his arms. Instead, he stood back and looked me up and down, his eyebrows censorious.

  ‘Another dress ruined,’ he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘So what happened?’

  We were in the Fiat, heading up the mountainside towards the villa. ‘It’s a long story,’ I said slowly. ‘First of all, where are the Langs?’

  ‘Out looking for you! I’d just got back to the hotel after giving Zecchini the slip when Lang brought the boat back to Gargnano saying that you were nowhere to be found. He insisted on dashing off again immediately with Isabel to hire a car and search along the coast road for you, despite the fact that it was at the height of the storm.’

  ‘Nice of him,’ I m
uttered drily. ‘When did you get my message?’

  ‘Soon after the Langs left. I was going to drive to where I knew I’d left you, but this wretched car had developed a flat tyre. I was just changing the wheel when I heard the porter calling my name. I left a message for the Langs to meet us back at the villa, of course.’

  ‘Of course. But I very much doubt that they will.’

  ‘Why not?’ Their things are still there, and the car they hired from Venice. They’re bound to come back.’

  ‘I doubt if they’ve left anything really important. I really don’t think that we shall be seeing them again.’

  I told him my story – everything, from the moment I visited the lakeside restaurant. For once he listened to me without interruption or argument, and when I reached the part about Lang’s threat to drown me, Guy stopped the car dead in the middle of a hairpin bend – fortunately there was no other traffic on the road at the time – and stared at me in an appalled silence, until I had finished.

  The sound of an approaching engine set his hands and feet in abstracted motion and he drove on shaking his head and muttering: ‘My God! The scheming, murderous – but good grief, Clare, why didn’t you tell me! Why didn’t you say you suspected him?’

  I shrugged wearily. ‘Because I had no evidence. Besides – besides, it was difficult when you were so obviously taken with Isabel.’

  He snorted. ‘Oh for goodness’ sake! Certainly I liked Isabel – is she involved in all this, do you think?’

  ‘Only in the deception, I think – the pretence that she was his daughter. She probably knows what he’s after, but I’m sure she wouldn’t be a party to murder. I liked her too, that was one of the reasons why I found it so difficult to say anything to you.’

  ‘I only wish you had! All right, I found her very attractive. But her over-riding merit was simply that she didn’t happen to be spoken for by my best friend … What do you suppose Owen’s going to say about all this?’