Free The Abomination by Jonathan Holt

said. “I’ll go this way.”
    She kept as close to the windows as she could. The rooms smelt of woodsmoke and burnt paper. A thump upstairs, echoing on bare floorboards, made her jump. Just a pigeon, hopefully. Everywhere there was more debris – almost, she thought, as if the place had been ransacked rather than merely abandoned. Glass crunched under her feet. Strange pieces of electrical equipment, built with the solidity of a different age from Bakelite and brass, lay abandoned in corners.
    Then she rounded a doorway, and her heart leapt into her mouth.

Eight
    DANIELE BARBO TOOK a motoscafo , a water taxi, back to Venice from the mainland. He had said nothing to the small but persistent group of journalists and supporters who’d gathered to see him emerge from court. The verdict was “Guilty”, just as he’d expected. Sentencing had been deferred for five weeks, to allow the court to carry out a psychological assessment that would determine whether he was fit to be imprisoned. It was a stalling tactic on the part of his lawyer, no more. If he was deemed incapable of coping with a normal prison, he would be sent to a psychiatric institution instead, from which he would be released only after the doctors pronounced him fit to go to jail. It was a classic Catch 22, an administrative closed loop of the sort in which Italy’s legal system excelled. Once embroiled in it, he knew, he would find it all but impossible to extricate himself.
    A large fine was, on the face of it, a better option. To the outside world Daniele Barbo appeared to be fantastically wealthy, the sort of person who could pay a million-euro penalty without thinking about it. Few people realised – and none of the journalists who had written profiles on him had ever bothered to discover – that he was actually almost penniless. His father had invested all his money in modern art, then left the artworks to a charitable foundation set up in his name. The shares in the family business, meanwhile, had been diluted by re-issue after re-issue, none of them instigated by Daniele. He was allowed to live in Ca’ Barbo, the family palazzo , but only under strict conditions: the building itself was entailed to the Foundation. He was only at liberty now because the Foundation’s trustees, men he distrusted and loathed, had agreed to stand bail.
    That his father had believed this arrangement was for his son’s ultimate benefit, Daniele didn’t doubt. His troubled teens, and his involvement with the nascent computer hacking scene, had exacerbated the guilt his parents felt about his kidnap and mutilation, convincing them that he was too withdrawn from the world to manage his own affairs. But he also knew his father had been advised that this was the most effective way to ensure Daniele could never sell any of his art. When presented with what was, at heart, a choice between keeping his precious collection intact or passing it on to his son to do with as he wished, Matteo Barbo had chosen the former.
    Now, of course, that son was known as an internet entrepreneur, something his parents could never have foreseen. The website Daniele had created, Carnivia.com, actually had considerably more than the number of users Wikipedia claimed. But to call it a business was a misnomer. Unlike Google or Facebook, its data was never used for marketing purposes or sold to big corporations. It downloaded no adware or cookies, surreptitiously, onto your computer, nor did it track which sites you went to when you left. Over the years numerous would-be investors had approached him with proposals for making money out of it. He had always refused.
    The boat pulled up at Ca’ Barbo’s private jetty. As Daniele stepped onto the damp wooden boards he couldn’t help glancing upwards at the four floors of Gothic and arabesque splendour soaring above him. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin had called Ca’ Barbo “the most