reached the stage of choosing a wedding dress?’
Berta needed no encouragement to talk about her fiance. Holly smiled but this was a hard conversation for her. Only recently she too had been planning a wedding to a man who made her pulses race, a man she thought she would adore all her life-until he betrayed her in the most brutal, selfish manner.
He had never loved her, she knew that now. Instead he had laid a cynical trap for her, and she had fallen into it without the slightest caution.
Where was he now? What was he doing? Would she ever see him again?
Matteo was there at supper. Several times she caught him watching her curiously, and she began to feel that something had gone badly wrong. Her fears seemed to be confirmed when he rose from the table and spoke to her quietly.
‘When Liza is asleep, please come to my study, no matter how late it is.’
It was a couple of hours before she was ready to leave the child, but when Liza was breathing regularly she crept out of the room and downstairs to the study.
When there was no answer to her knock she pushed open the door gently. She couldn’t see him, but she decided to go in anyway.
The lights were low and she had to look around to be sure he wasn’t there. When there was no sign of him she looked around as much as she could, and that was how she noticed the newspaper on the desk.
It was lying open under the only bright light, the desk lamp. At first she saw it upside down and the only word that registered was Vanelli.
A name she knew, to her everlasting bitterness.
Moving as in a dream, she lifted the newspaper and fought to read through the words that danced before her eyes. Only the gist of it reached her.
Valuable miniature-worth millions-replaced by a cheap copy-duo of thieves, Sarah Conroy and BrunoVanelli- Vanelli arrested but escaped-no trace of the woman…
She sat down suddenly, feeling the breath knocked out of her body.
It had been bound to happen. She’d been living in a fool’s paradise, but it couldn’t last. The brutal truth had caught up with her. At best she would be thrown out. At worst she would be arrested. She must run. But where? There was nowhere to run to.
There was a photograph of Bruno in the paper. Not knowing why, she ran her fingers over the handsome, wilful face. It was just as she had first seen it, the charming quirk at the corner of the mouth, the roguish glint in the eye. How she had loved it when that glint had been turned on her. How her heart had thundered!
She touched the picture again, feeling the dead paper beneath her fingers, trying to conjure him up as he had first appeared to her. But that dream was dead. Tears stung her eyes and began to slide down her cheeks.
‘Is it a good likeness?’
The judge was standing there, watching her, as he must have been for the last few minutes. Hastily she brushed the tears away.
‘Yes, it’s a good likeness,’ she whispered. ‘You didn’t leave this here by accident, did you?’
‘Of course not. I had to know.’
‘Now that you know, what are you going to do?’
‘I’m not sure. There’s a lot I need to understand first.’
‘You mean, like-am I a crook? If I deny it, will you believe me?’
‘I might.’
‘And if you don’t-what then? What of Liza?’ she asked.
In the poor light she saw him flinch.
‘I’ve been talking to her,’ he said. ‘She has much to say about you, especially about your mother.’
‘My mother? What does she have to do with this?’
‘She could have a lot to do with it. I understand that she was ill, and you had to look after her.’
‘Yes. She had a wasting disease. I knew she’d never get better. For the last ten years of her life she needed constant attention, so I stayed at home to care for her.’
‘There was nobody else? Your father?’
‘I never knew him. My parents weren’t married, and when she became pregnant he just vanished. I never knew anyone from his side of the family. I didn’t know much of my mother’s family either. I think they were ashamed of her, and they never helped.
‘So for years it was just the two of us, and we were happy. When I showed a talent for drawing she arranged for me to have special lessons, although they were expensive. She took on two and sometimes three jobs to make the extra money. She dreamed of sending me to art college even more than I dreamed of it, but before I could go she was already showing signs of illness. So I did a teacher training course instead.
‘When I finished that, I got a job in a local school, but I was only there two terms before I had to leave to be with her.’
‘That must have been hard on you, having your life swallowed up.’
‘I never saw it like that. I loved her. I wanted to be there for her as she’d been there for me. But why am I telling you all this? What does this have to do with-?’
‘Just answer my questions,’ he said curtly. ‘I’m beginning to get the picture. It must have been a very restricted existence. Did you go out, have boyfriends?’
‘Not really. Boyfriends didn’t want to know about Mom.’
‘How did you come to be visiting Portsmouth?’
‘I had a friend who lived there. I met her when I was on my course. She used to invite me every year and Mom was determined I should have a holiday, so she insisted on going into respite care to let me have a break.’
‘And how long did that last?’
‘Until last year, when she died.’
Her voice shook on the last words and she fell silent. He was silent too, not offering sympathy, which could hardly be genuine, and which she would have found it hard to cope with, but letting her take her time.
‘And then?’ he asked at last in a voice that was quiet, and almost gentle.
‘I took a refresher course so that I could start teaching and that’s when I met-’
‘Bruno Vanelli.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you fell for him because you’d never learned to be worldly-wise. I didn’t understand that until I spoke to Liza, and discovered that your life had given you little experience of the world, and of men. But why didn’t you tell me yourself?’
‘Didn’t we agree that the less I told you the better?’
‘True.’
She gave a brief, mirthless laugh. ‘Anyway, there isn’t much to tell. He sought me out. He was good-looking and I was flattered. And it seemed so romantic that he was Italian. That’s how stupid I was.’
‘Ah, yes, we have that image,’ he murmured ironically.
‘If I’d been a bit sharper I’d have known that the truth is different-nothing to do with amore.’
‘And what do you think the truth is?’
‘It’s a stiletto,’ she said bitterly, ‘a slim dagger, small enough to be concealed until the last moment. And then it slides in so smoothly, so easily, so cruelly. And the victim never sees it coming until it’s too late.’
Matteo gave a crack of laughter that, had she been in the mood to notice, matched her own in bitterness.
‘That may sometimes be true, signorina, but not always. It can be the poor, crazy Italian who is deluded, and the English enemy who deceives and tortures. The blow is so unexpected that it seems to come out of the sunshine, but afterwards there is only darkness. Where we use a stiletto, you use a bludgeon, but the destruction is just as final.’
Holly stared at him as it dawned on her that this was no idle speculation. He was speaking out of a savage misery as deep as her own.
‘Do you have an English enemy?’ she asked.
She saw him stop, tense and control himself before saying, ‘Go on telling me about Bruno Vanelli.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-’
‘I said go on.’ His voice was harsh.
