Deep and Silent Waters

by Charlotte Lamb

Genres: Romantic Suspense

Synopsis

Infatuation can make you do the stupidest things. Like risk your very life . . . Laura would never have gone to Venice if she had known she would meet Sebastian Ferrese there - the enigmatic film director that she has been fighting her attraction towards. However, her nomination for an award at the Film Festival proves too much of an enticement, and when Laura sees Sebastian, she finds herself swept up in his overwhelming magnetism. But death seems to follow Sebastian around - and by the time Laura begins to suspect that he is no innocent bystander she might just be in too deep . . .

Release date: March 28, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 384

Sample

Venice 1968

He walked out on to the little wooden jetty, shivering in spite of the woollen jacket and trousers he wore. A few flakes of snow blew against his chilled face. The wind was raw, and laden grey clouds sagged like a damp tent roof low above Venice. Mist veiled the horizon so that he could not even see the baroque dome of the church of Santa Maria della Salute, his usual landmark, only a short distance away down the Grand Canal.

Venice in February could be a cold, depressing city; dangerous, too, for a six-year-old boy who had not yet learnt to swim. Sebastian was forbidden to go out alone: it was easy, Mamma warned him, to get lost in the maze of alleys leading off the Grand Canal, or fall into the sluggish, oily waters and drown, not that he had needed to be told. He often saw dead things in the water: cats, dogs and birds floating past, pathetic and frightening because they were not alive – you felt it as much as saw it, the absence of life in them. Once he had seen a dead man bob up with a horrifying gurgle, as if the breath had just come out of him. The face lived in his dreams: bloated and shiny with nothing human about it, the eyes opening suddenly staring at him, then the hands reaching, grabbing.

‘Sebastian!’

Her voice made him start: for a second, he had half believed that the dead man had called his name. But it was his mother. He looked round, face brightening, as she came towards him, snow flying around her, clinging to her hair and clothes.

Behind her, inside the palazzo, a movement caught his eye. A cold, stone face showed at an upper window, between the ranks of tall marble archangels massing along the façade, as though one of them had got inside and could not get out again.

Sebastian stood frozen, staring, but realising he had seen her, the woman inside smiled and waved to him. Uncertainly he waved back: the Contessa was kind whenever he saw her. Sebastian, though, was a shy, sensitive, intuitive child, who found it hard to respond to others. He lived inside his own head, where he had invented for himself a world and space he would never have been able to articulate and which he preferred to the everyday world others inhabited.

Seeing him gaze upwards his mother turned her head and looked up, too. He could not see her expression, only that her face was pale and grave. Something had troubled her lately: he had no idea what it was but it disturbed him to see that look in her eyes. ‘Mamma, what’s wrong?’ he whispered, tugging at her hand.

She glanced back down at him, brushed a lock of his dark hair from his face with a tender gloved hand. ‘You should be indoors. It’s much too cold for you out here. I don’t want you catching a chill.’

‘I wanted to watch you leave.’ She was going to a party in one of the palazzi along the Grand Canal; the American who rented the house was giving a carnival party, and Mamma was wearing a costume that made her look like a boy in a Renaissance painting, one of those she had so often taken him to see in the city art galleries.

Mamma was passionate about art. Before she had married his father she had spent three years at art school and still painted every morning, once she had finished her domestic routine. First she checked that the servants were doing their jobs, went to the local market to buy vegetables, fish and meat, then discussed with the cook what they should have for lunch and dinner. Painting took second place, which Sebastian thought was stupid. She shouldn’t have to do boring chores like shopping: it was like asking one of the angels on the front of the palazzo to sweep the rooms or lay the table.

His mother was a brilliant painter, and he loved to study the colours in her canvases. Gay and bright as sunlight, wild and strong as a gale at sea, they told him so much about her. It was like looking through a window into her head.

He wished she wasn’t going out without him – he hated it when she was somewhere else and he wasn’t with her, he always felt afraid for her, although he couldn’t put his fear into words. He only knew that each time she left he felt panic welling up inside him. He was afraid she might never come back, but he didn’t want to put the fear into words – that might make it happen.

‘Do you have to go?’ he pleaded, eyes brimming with anxiety.

She ruffled his hair gently. ‘Yes. Be a good boy for me, go to bed and don’t quarrel with Niccolo.’

His mouth turned down at the edges. ‘He quarrels with me.’

‘Well, try not to quarrel back.’

That was stupid. Once Niccolo was in one of his rages you could only run away. He was crazy, a lunatic, and dangerous, Sebastian’s dark eyes said, and she laughed. ‘Well, try to keep out of his way, then.’

Mamma always understood: you didn’t have to use words to explain, she heard what you weren’t saying.

She gestured at herself now. ‘How do I look?’

Sebastian had gone with her to the most exclusive costumier in the city, a small shop crowded from ceiling to floor with elaborate, expensive creations, which the assistants reached down from the racks with long wooden poles ending in black iron hooks. Mamma had looked at dozens; it had been Sebastian who had made the final choice.

When he saw the page-boy’s outfit, fifteenth-century in style, he had said, ‘Oh, Mamma, that one, that one!’ He would have loved to wear it himself; he ached to have one just like it.

Mamma had tried it on in the tiny fitting room and come out to show him and the assistants, who all exclaimed, ‘Si, si, bellissima!’

It was perfect on her: the black quilted-velvet jacket that clipped her tiny waist, its fat sleeves and their tight cuffs, the white ruff around her throat, the dark red silk tunic, which ended well above her knees, the tight black wool stockings. Oddly, it did not even look out of place in 1966: girls were wearing very short skirts and often dressed as boys did, in jeans and knee-high patent-leather boots.

‘You look wonderful,’ he said now, as he had said the first time he saw her in it. She smiled. ‘Thank you, my angel.’ She often called him that. Was it because they lived in the house of angels? Or because, as she had told him many times, he had lived with the angels before he was born, and was still, Mamma said, very close to them? Sebastian sometimes thought he could hear their wings, catch a glimpse of them, shimmering white creatures of feathers and shining skin.

Gina Ferrese was thirty that year, a slender, beautiful woman with red-gold hair pinned up at the back of her head, her long white neck swanlike as she bent to kiss her son.

‘I’ll be back late so don’t try to stay awake. Sleep well. I’ll see you tomorrow morning to walk to church.’

An engine started up in the boathouse adjoining the palazzo; mother and son watched the launch emerge and move towards them through the blowing snow, until it was bobbing beside the jetty. The man steering held out a hand and Gina Ferrese, in her boy’s costume, took it and stepped in.

‘Ciao, Sebastian,’ she called, her words echoed by the man standing beside her, his black hair wind-ruffled. ‘Ci rivedremo presto.’

Neither of them looked up at the palazzo, but the face still showed at the window, an oval as blank as a cameo, and when Sebastian glanced round he saw the Contessa smiling down at them.

The boat moved away, slowly at first, with Gina waving at her son, until the engine note picked up and they vanished rapidly into the curtain of white flakes now veiling the canal. It could still be heard when all sight of the boat was lost: sounds travel a long way over water.

That was why Sebastian could hear the other boat zooming along in the white mist of snow. He could see nothing but he heard the terrible crash, screams, the sound of people being flung into the water, struggling, crying out, and an engine revving away past him, heading out towards the mouth of the canal and the invisible lagoon.

He stood there, mouth open on a soundless cry of anguish, trembling like a terrified animal.

He knew before they told him, an hour later, after the police had been out to search through the blizzard, that his mother was dead, had drowned out there in the deep and silent waters while he stood listening.

London, 1997

Laura would never have gone to Venice if she had known she would see Sebastian Ferrese there.

Although it was three years since she’d last seen him she still dreamt about him from time to time. But that didn’t mean she wanted to see him again. Whatever her dreams betrayed, Sebastian frightened her: his aura was of darkness and death.

When her agent told her that she had been nominated for an award at the Venice Film Festival Laura’s immediate response was, ‘You’re kidding? Me? I can’t believe it.’ Then she asked huskily, ‘Was Sebastian nominated too?’

‘Who knows? He’s not my client,’ Melanie said, irritated. ‘Forget him, for God’s sake, will you? You got a nomination for best supporting actress, that’s all that matters. It was the poster – that was what did it.’

‘It made me look like a hooker.’

‘It pulled the audiences in, dummy! Put bums on seats.’

Melanie’s expression said, What else matters? She had a strictly cash mind, and would never have allowed Laura to accept the role in Goodnight, World, and Goodbye, a low-budget film for which she’d earned just enough to keep body and soul together, if there had been any alternative. But Laura wasn’t being offered many parts. Her name had no pulling power, so Melanie shrugged and told her to take it just for the sake of the experience. Better to be in work than out of it.

‘Bread on the waters, darling,’ she said. ‘And it could be fun.’

It was the best fun Laura had ever had. She had learnt a lot from working in an ensemble cast of unknown names, a cheerful, friendly group with not a single star among them. None of them, cast or crew, had believed the film would make any money, let alone attract any awards, but they had all loved working on it and become great friends. Laura still saw them whenever she was in London.

When she first saw the posters she had been amazed to find that she dominated the foreground: sexily posed in black lace bra and panties, her legs looking even longer than they were in real life, her breasts like melons, her green eyes slanting and cat-like, hair a blaze of flame around a face they had made somehow sultry and sensual. Laura had been deeply embarrassed. She had had no training as an actress, and was always afraid of being exposed as a know-nothing fraud. Her professional insecurity was mirrored by her lack of self-confidence in every other direction, all of which sprang from being too tall; since she was a schoolgirl she had felt like a giraffe in a world of pygmies.

Melanie had been her agent since she was offered her first film; but they were friends, too. Laura needed someone to talk to, someone she could trust. She couldn’t confide in her showbiz crowd: they loved to gossip and would pass on anything she told them. She certainly couldn’t talk to anyone back home, her parents, her sister or her old friends. Not about Sebastian. They would have been so shocked. She couldn’t tell them about her pain and grief, the longing she could not suppress although she had tried to forget him, the shameful jealousy of his wife. Rachel Lear was a legendary star, a cinema icon, an ice-blonde with a body men dreamt about, while Laura was just a skinny little red-headed nobody.

Melanie, though, was a tough, sophisticated city dweller, used to the muddle and confusion of people’s lives. Nothing Laura had told her came as any surprise, nor had she been shocked. She had simply said, ‘Use your head, lovey, forget him and get on with your career,’ and Laura had been trying ever since to take that advice.

‘I won’t win this award, so I won’t bother to go,’ she said now.

Melanie knew what was on her mind. ‘Look, he’s out in the jungles of South America, shooting some weirdo film about a lost tribe. He’ll be so late finishing it he can’t possibly make it to Venice by August.’

‘He was nominated, though, wasn’t he? For Instant Death?’

Pulling a face, Melanie admitted, ‘Yeah, he got a best director nomination for that. Thought it was a pretty crappy film, myself, too arty-farty for me. And it didn’t do well at the box office – the public obviously agreed with me – but it has a cult following. So I’m told.’

‘I thought it was brilliant.’ Laura had seen it three times. She saw all his films, had got them all on video and had watched them so often she knew them frame by frame, every word, every look, every gesture. She always hoped they would help her to understand him. There was a darkness in them that reflected the dark centre of Sebastian’s mind, a sexual energy, a deeply sensual force.

‘Yeah, but you’re one of his fans, aren’t you, darling?’ Melanie said cynically. Melanie detested anything that smacked of elitism. She called herself a socialist, but the truth was that she was one of life’s awkward squad, always out of step and spoiling for a fight. Luckily her prejudices happened to coincide with public taste, which made her a wonderful litmus paper for anyone trying to guess which way an audience might jump.

Laura reacted hotly. ‘Sebastian is one of the best directors in the world, Mel! He’s a genius.’

‘You mean he’s crazy, always goes over budget, is completely unreliable, spends money like water, won’t take advice. Is that what you call being a genius? He needs to do huge business at the box office to make up for all that.’

‘And he does!’

‘Huh!’ snorted Melanie.

‘With a lot of films he makes big money, Mel. He can always find somebody to bankroll him for his next film.’

When he chose, Sebastian had the charm of the devil. He could hypnotise hard-headed businessmen into believing every word he said, and he had the same effect on women, especially actresses, Laura thought bleakly. He got good performances out of them by focusing those dark eyes on them and making them his creatures. She had been mesmerised while she worked with him – they had been cocooned together in an intimacy so strong that she had thought she knew Sebastian better than anyone else in the world ever had. Only later did she begin to question that belief.

‘God knows how he does it.’ Melanie grimaced. ‘Whatever you say, I don’t believe Instant Death has a prayer. It’s up against films that have broken box-office records worldwide – and, anyway, he’s running so late on this South American film that the word is the backers might pull out before he shoots the last reel.’

‘That’s crazy! Why can’t they let him finish it first?’

‘Apparently they haven’t even seen any rushes yet. They keep demanding that Sebastian send over some of the stuff he’s shot but he ignores them. A couple of the stars have been taken ill – the food is terrible in those places – and they’re plagued by mosquitoes. Some of the crew have gone down with malaria.’ Melanie shuddered. ‘I hate places like that. Insects and dirt and bad food. Give me a city any time.’

Laura laughed. ‘Sebastian would agree with you, he hates working in remote places. Most of his films have been shot in cities – London, New York, San Francisco.’

A shiver ran down her spine as she remembered a recurring dream she had whenever she was strained. She could never recall how it began, but it always ended the same way. She was in a shadowy hotel room, impersonal, comfortable, characterless, and she and Sebastian were quarrelling, although she could never remember what about. Suddenly, his hands would shoot out towards her throat which made her back away, aware of an open window behind her, the familiar noises of a city street far below. Then he would give her a violent shove, and she would fall backwards, out of the window, down, down, through empty air, screaming. She always woke up before she hit the ground. For hours afterwards she would sit up in bed, shivering and icy cold.

It had never happened, of course, not to Laura. It had been his wife who had fallen out of a window. Why did she always dream it had happened to her?

Guilt, Laura thought bleakly, because she had been jealous of his wife. She had bought every newspaper that covered the inquest and read every word over and over again. Witnesses had talked of his wife under pressure on her most recent film, arriving late on set, losing her temper, turning nasty when she forgot her lines, or stumbling around so drunk that she kept banging into scenery. A post-mortem had shown that she had been drunk the day she died. She could easily have lost her balance and fallen out of the open window which had a waist-high sill – a dangerous window, the coroner said, and added that her husband should have kept her away from it. His criticisms were mild, though, because another witness had been present, Sebastian’s assistant, Valerie Hyde, who claimed that he had been nowhere near his wife when she fell. Rachel Lear had opened the window and leaned out too far.

A thin, brisk, down-to-earth woman, with a direct way of looking at anyone she spoke to, Valerie made a convincing witness. But Laura knew something that the coroner could not have known: Valerie Hyde would go to the stake for Sebastian; would cheat or steal for him. She might have been telling the truth, of course, but she would not have hesitated to lie.

Melanie said abruptly, ‘You must go to Venice, Laura – this is your first nomination, you have to be there.’

Laura shook her head. ‘Who am I up against?’

Reluctantly Melanie told her the names, and Laura threw up her hands. ‘Well, there you are! They’re all better actresses than me, and better known, too. I don’t have a chance.’

Furious, Melanie said, ‘Well, if you don’t go, I can’t. I’ve never been to the Venice Film Festival and I’m dying to. It’s a great excuse to buy a really stunning new frock on expenses. It’s not often I can do that. And you can’t wear just anything to Venice – it’s supposed to be even more glamorous than Cannes.’

Melanie loved clothes, far more even than films or plays. Her whole face lit up when she talked about them. She should have become a dress designer, but she had missed her chance, early on, by getting a job as a secretary to a theatrical agent instead of going to college to study art and textiles. Her Russian-Jewish father had been in the rag trade in the East End, and as a child, Melanie had been dressed like a little princess. It had left her with a passion for style and cut, and a taste for the exotic, which perfectly suited her long, straight black hair and huge leonine gold eyes.

Her skin was either olive or golden, depending on her health and mood, and Melanie needed colour to bring to life the beauty buried in her generously endowed flesh. She was larger than life, in every sense of the word, lion-hearted, a fighter, voluble and open-handed. She fell in and out of love with the same fierce concentration.

Over the last three years, she had built up Laura’s career with that same intense commitment, but it had been Sebastian who had made Laura an actress. Indeed, it had been Sebastian who had told her she needed an agent, when he first offered her a contract, and who has suggested Melanie, saying he had heard she was good. She didn’t have many clients yet, but would work harder for Laura than someone whose books were already full of stars. Some actors might have suspected a secret deal between Sebastian and Melanie, but they would have been wrong. Far from conspiring with him, Melanie couldn’t wait to get Laura more money from someone else. She had never had much time for Sebastian, and he knew it. That, to Laura, was testament to his integrity: he had picked Melanie as the best agent for her, in spite of knowing Melanie didn’t think highly of him.

Sighing, Laura said, ‘Mel, I really don’t want to go. It’ll be a nightmare – those occasions always are, noisy, overcrowded, flashbulbs going off all the time, hordes of people grabbing at you, … like going for a swim in a tank full of piranhas.’

‘You’re an actress, for heaven’s sake. How can you be afraid of an audience?’ Mel had never been shy or nervous in her life.

‘I’ve never been on a stage – you know that! Or had any training,’ Laura protested. ‘I’m not scared of cameras or film crews. They’re always too busy with their own job to have time to stare at me, and if I mess up or fluff a line I can always do it again. But on a stage it’s live. It can go wrong in front of hundreds of people. You can make a fool of yourself.’

She had learnt her trade by working at it, had picked it up as she went along, by making friends with the camera men, sound men, lighting men. She listened to everything they said and related it to what she already knew, watched them work with such open fascination that they were happy to suggest how she should pitch her voice, how she should move, and to show her how little she needed to do to make an effect. A sideways flick of the eyes could show fear, suspicion, jealousy without a word being spoken.

Melanie changed tack. ‘You won’t have to act, lovely, just stand there and smile, and say thank you if you win – and winning is a long shot, remember. But you’ll see Venice – and it’ll blow your mind. Sebastian was born there, wasn’t he? I read that somewhere. Born in Venice, but brought up in California, wasn’t it? They said he was born in a palazzo on the Grand Canal.’ She gave her cynical little grin. ‘I always said he was a fantasist, didn’t I?’

Had it been fantasy? When Sebastian talked about his childhood Laura had believed him. It had seemed the perfect place for him to have been born: a Renaissance palazzo in the most beautiful city in the world. Only later, when death had entered the equation, did she begin to doubt him.

During the months they were working together she would have refused point blank to believe Sebastian capable of murder – but after Rachel’s death she no longer knew what she believed. How much truth had he ever told her? she wondered and she kept thinking that once you have admitted one doubt you find more hidden inside you, which multiply like flies on summer evenings, becoming a buzzing, stinging multitude in your brain, driving you mad.

‘Venice is one of those experiences that change your life,’ Melanie said. ‘Once you see it, you’ll never be the same again.’

That was what Laura was afraid of. She was uneasy about going to a place that had been so important in Sebastian’s life. She remembered everything he had said about his childhood in the golden palace on the Grand Canal, with its marble floors and walls, hung with ancient, fading tapestries that made the rooms whisper and echo as they stirred in the chill breeze. Sebastian had talked of long, dark corridors through which you had to find your way, like Theseus in the maze, from room to room, and out at last into the garden full of orange and lemon trees five foot high, in great terracotta pots padded with straw to keep the chill of winter at bay.

It was based on a geometric pattern, he had said, narrow gravel paths between low box hedges within which stood paired statues of Roman gods: Jupiter and Juno, Mars and Venus. In the centre, standing on one winged foot, the other pointing backwards, stood Mercury, his staff angled at the window of one room from which over the centuries, family legend said, several members of the Angeli family had fallen to their deaths.

‘Murdered?’ she had whispered, ready to believe him if he said yes. Everyone knew about Renaissance princes who bumped off their enemies – the Borgias, the Visconti, even the Doge of Venice himself.

‘Perhaps, or perhaps they jumped of their own accord.’

She remembered shivering at the cool, dispassionate voice but she had had no glimpse into the future. Rachel Lear had not fallen from that hotel window for another year.

‘Why would they kill themselves?’ she had asked.

He had shrugged. ‘Why do people ever kill themselves? They had their reasons, no doubt.’

At the time, she had listened like a child being told fairy stories. Now she had dozens of questions she wished she had asked. If he had been born in such a house why had he and his father ever left? Who else had lived there with them? He had never mentioned anyone. Why had they never been back to Venice? Why had he said that the family in the palazzo had the surname Angeli when his was Ferrese? Why had Sebastian so little to say about his family? Especially his mother. It was clear that he had loved his father, Giovanni Ferrese, but he had told her nothing about his mother, except that she had died when he was six. When she had asked what Giovanni had done for a living he had said curtly, ‘He had his own business.’ And when Sebastian’s dark eyes chilled, as they had then, you were wise to stop asking questions.

‘You owe it to yourself to go, you know. It’s a great honour,’ Melanie said.

And she might find the answers to some of those questions, Laura thought. She would look for the palazzo where Sebastian had been born: if it existed, it might tell her a lot about him.

That night she dreamt about him, not the nightmare but the wild sexual dream she had also had so many times. She was back again in the caravan she had used on that first film. Sebastian was with her, talking about the scene they would shoot next day, watching her take off her makeup in front of the scrappy mirror on the dressing table. Laura avoided his eyes, kept her attention on her face, her skin shiny with cream.

She looked like an awkward schoolgirl, like the girl her friends had once called Lanky and made fun of whenever she tripped over her own feet or had to stand up in class, looming over them all. She hated Sebastian watching her: compared to his beautiful wife she was ugly and clumsy. Hurriedly she wiped off the cream and picked up her normal makeup bag, but Sebastian took it from her and tossed it back on the dressing table.

‘Don’t put anything on your lovely face. Nothing ruins the skin faster than plastering it with makeup day and night. Clea has destroyed her skin with that stuff. It’s like orange peel now. Only wear it when you have to, in front of the cameras.’

He called Rachel by a nickname her brother had given her when he was beginning to talk, lazily running her two names together. She preferred Clea to Rachel and even the press often used it now.

‘I’ll feel naked!’

‘There’s a thought,’ he said, his dark eyes teasing, and she felt her mouth go dry. His face changed; he leaned forward and kissed her softly. She shut her eyes, breathless, her whole body shaking.

In her dreams that was the moment she relived: the hunger and need that flared up between them then. Her arms round his neck, they had clung together as if they were drowning.

‘I want you so badly,’ he had groaned, his hands moving down her body, caressing her breasts, stroking her buttocks, pressing her even closer.

They had never been to bed together, but the intense attraction between them would have led to that before long if Clea had not caught them.

The caravan door had opened and a cold wind had blown over them.

‘So it’s true! You are screwing the little bitch,’ a hoarse voice screamed. Sebastian stiffened, his head lifting. He let go of Laura, moved away from her, his face dark red.

Laura wanted to die. She did not dare look at the woman in the doorway.

‘How long has it been going on?’ the famous whisky voice sneered. ‘Did you audition on the couch, darling? How many times did you have to satisfy him before you got the part?’

‘If you’re going to make a scene, make it at home, not here, with fifty people listening outside,’ snapped Sebastian.

‘Do you think they don’t all know what’s been going on?’

‘Get out of here,’ Sebastian muttered to Laura, who ran, hearing Clea yelling, swearing violently, and Sebastian shouting back at her. Crew and cast pretended to be busy doing something else but Laura felt their curious, amused, knowing eyes on her.

A few days later the film had wrapped and she had left for home, to stay with her family. She hadn’t been alone with Sebastian in those last days; nor had she heard from him since. When she first heard about Clea’s death she had been so shocked she hadn’t eaten or slept for several days. Haunted by guilt, she had been desperately afraid that Sebastian had killed his wife. She still was.

Venice, 1997

Melanie got her way. They flew to Venice on one of those August days during a heatwave when the temperature had climbed so high that people wore less and less each day and became more and more irritable. At the airport, everyone was flushed and perspiring. It was so overcrowded that people had to fight their way through, using their elbows, losing their tempers. Most men were in shirtsleeves, girls wore tiny shorts and even tinier cropped cotton tops.

Laura had put on a wickedly simple but expensive black linen tunic from one of London’s hottest young designers. Although it left her arms and most of her long, slender legs bare, it hadn’t kept her cool during the flight.

So many of the most famous faces in the film world were arriving at the airport that the paparazzi had the satiated expressions of sharks that had fed for days on the bodies from a great shipwreck. A few recognised . . .