Spider

8

Florence, Tuscany Jack stepped from the silence of the empty train into the noise and swelter of midday Florence, a broiling city of bustling bodies and blaring traffic. His mind was still clogged with the dregs of his nightmare when he reached the office of Dottoressa Elisabetta Fenella. The building stood just off Piazza San Lorenzo in the city's most famous market district and was overlooked by the majestic stone presence of the Basilica di San Lorenzo, a frontless fourth-century church, rebuilt by the Medicis.

Jack slipped from the scorching sunlight of the street into the cool shade of the building's entrance-way. He took a cramped, old-fashioned, iron-gated lift to the third floor and was ushered by a demure receptionist into a marble-floored, high-ceilinged consultation room. Overhead, two fans that probably predated Florence itself spun gracefully but pointlessly, batting currents of hot air from one side of the room to the other but doing nothing to cool the place. An antique oak desk squatted in a far corner, overlooked by a crucifix on the far wall and weighed down by papers and silver-framed photographs of a large extended family. Jack picked one up and studied a glamorous dark-haired woman in her late thirties, shoulder to elegant shoulder with a much older man.

The door behind him opened and the woman in the picture frame looked startled to find him at her desk.

'Signore King?' she asked, her voice betraying her disapproval of his nosiness.

'Yes,' answered Jack, embarrassed at being caught snooping. 'Forgive me, old police habits die hard.'

'Please.' She gestured towards two creamy cotton settees arranged either side of a square glass-topped coffee table.

'Thanks for seeing me at such short notice, I appreciate it.' Jack offered his hand and as she shook it he noticed a gold and diamond wedding ring that would cost an FBI field officer three months' salary.

'You're welcome. I'm afraid it was either today, or I wouldn't have been able to fit you in for several months.' Elisabetta Fenella put a brown file down on the coffee table and Jack noticed his name. He was on file.

No doubt the FBI had shipped it to her, FedExed her all the gory details about his burnout, his failure to cope with the pressure of his workload, and she'd had it waiting there, gathering years of dust but ever ready for the moment he inevitably cracked up and came calling.

The thought slapped the wind out of him.

Dottoressa Fenella cut to the chase. 'Your office called me, what – something like two years ago? So, why did you choose now to ask to see me?'

It was a good question. And he wanted to give a good answer, wanted to come right out and say that he needed her intervention, needed her skills to hold back the evil that drowned him every night. But he couldn't. The words simply wouldn't come.

'Let me help you, Jack.' She saw his eyes fall on the file again. 'Read it if you like.' She pushed it towards him. 'I'm sure there's nothing in there that you don't already know.'

Jack stared at the file but didn't touch it. It was a test of strength and trust. She would hold nothing back, providing he was strong enough to do the same.

But was he?

A white flash went off in his head, as white as the tiles of the morgue, as white as the drained skin of more than a dozen dead women.

'Okay,' said Jack. 'Let's get on with this. I've wasted enough of your time already.'