The Painted Altar

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Plot reminder: Over dinner Mary's father works out the possible identity of one of the men who had waited in murderous ambush for Ettore Lo Bianco, a name which in turn leads her to conclude the identity of Irene's murderer. After composing another anonymous letter to Inspector Kubič she summons the courage to knock on the door of Lucio's hotel room...

~~~~~

We awoke several hours later to a bright and auspicious dawn, kissed each other from our slumbers. Giggled like teenagers as Lucio craned his neck out of the door, with a rolling hand gesture indicated that the coast was clear and that I could dash back along the corridor in my nightie without suffering public ignominy.

Breakfast was a blissful affair, our mutual gazes incredulous, almost inebriated, our juice glasses and coffee cups and spreading knives wielded awkwardly in one hand, the other stretched out across the table, our fingers entwined. This I thought. All those songs and poems, all those sprawling Victorian novels with their obstinate and courageous heroines, the Catherine Lintons and Tesses and Jane Eyres... This was what they were about - that skipping unprececented floatiness of my heart. The night just passed, it seemed in its giddy tumble and roll to have regaled me some breathtaking new sense of perception. A colour-blind person slipping on corrective glasses, for the first time experiencing the true vivid depth of the world which surrounded them.

That kind, bookish man there across the table, I had to hand it to him. Quite some trick he'd managed to pull off.

Finally, regretfully, he unlinked fingers from mine, checked his watch.

"Come Mary," he murmured sadly. "You'll miss your plane."

*

The flight was over in a finger-click, two hours reduced to a second, one of those temporal mind tricks provoked by deep and necessary slumber. It was the invasive ding of the seatbelts on bell, the rasp of the pilot's voice announcing the beginning of landing procedure, which dragged me back into the here and now. Outside the window, the East Anglian fields lay drab and sunless; far from a welcoming smile they seemed more to darkly scowl. Every one of those thousand miles which had just jet-engined by, I could feel them like jabbing pin pricks in my heart. Further, ever more distant, from the one place in the world I longed to be: right there by Lucio's side.

I bought a first class stamp from the newsagents in arrivals, stuck it to the lilac envelope addressed to Inspector Kubič as I stopped for a quick coffee. The overstay charge at the carpark proved eye-poppingly excessive, but I found myself handing over my credit card to the woman behind the desk with barely a half-hearted whimper of protest. Maybe that was what it meant to be in love, I reflected as I fitted ignition key into the slot. That you had a healthy sense of perspective, were able to roll with the punches.

About half an hour south out of Stanstead I took a slight detour off the main road, stopped briefly in the first random commuter belt town I chanced upon. The slipping of the letter into postbox felt disconcertingly casual somehow. I almost wished I was of a religious persuasion, could have projected some articulately worded prayer to the Lord. That letter, it represented my mother's only chance of justice. And although on an official level that first long-ago victim would remain unidentified, in many ways it represented Ettore Lo Bianco's only chance of justice too.

It was late afternoon by the time I made it home, the act of opening up front door hampered by half a week's worth of accumulated mail. The Mary Rice who stepped over the threshold was a profoundly different one, I realised, to that which had closed the door behind her just four days earlier. No longer that unbound entity darkly riding the turbulence, but once more grounded, comfortable in her own skin.