Free A Twist of the Knife by Peter James Page A

favourite restaurant, the Corte Sconta, which they always got lost trying to find, every year.
    Some mornings, spent with passion, they’d hop on an early water taxi and drink espressos and grappa on the Lido at sunrise. Later, back in their dimly lit hotel room, they would take photographs of each other naked and film themselves making love. One time, for fun, they made plaster-of-Paris impressions of what Joy liked to call their ‘rude bits’. They were so in lust, nothing, it seemed, could stop them, or could ever change.
    Once, on an early anniversary, they visited Isola di San Michele, Venice’s cemetery island. Staring at the graves, Johnny asked her, ‘Are you sure you’re still going to fancy me when I’m dead?’
    ‘Probably even more than when you’re alive!’ she had replied. ‘If that’s possible.’
    ‘We might rattle a bit, if we were – you know – both skeletons,’ he had said.
    ‘We’ll have to do it quietly, so we don’t wake up the graveyard,’ she’d replied.
    ‘You’re a bad girl,’ he had said, before kissing her on the lips.
    ‘You’d never have loved me if I was good, would you?’
    ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Probably not.’
    ‘Let me feel your oar!’
    *
     
    That was then. Now it was thirty-five years later. They’d tried – and failed – to start a family. For a while it had been fun trying, and eventually they’d accepted their failure. A lot of water under the bridge. Or rather, all four hundred and nine of Venice’s bridges. They’d seen each one, and walked over most of them. Johnny ticked them off on a coffee-stained list he brought with him each year, and which became more and more creased each time he unfolded it. Johnny was a box-ticker, she’d come to realize. ‘I like to see things in tidy boxes,’ he would say.
    He said it rather too often.
    ‘Only joking,’ he said, when she told him she was fed up hearing this.
    They say there’s many a true word spoken in jest but, privately, he was not jesting. Plans were taking shape in his mind. Plans for a future without her.
    In happier times they’d shared a love of Venetian glass, and used to go across to the island of Murano on every trip to see their favourite glass factory, Novità Murano. They filled their home in Brighton with glass ornaments – vases, candlesticks, paperweights, figurines, goblets. Glass of every kind. They say that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and they didn’t. Not physical ones. Just metaphorical ones. More and more.
    The stones had started the day she peeked on his computer.
    Johnny had been a police officer – a homicide detective. She had worked in the Divisional Intelligence Unit of the same force. After he had retired, at forty-nine, he’d become bored. He managed to get a job in the fulfilment department of a mail-order company that supplied framed cartoons of bad puns involving animals. Their best-selling cartoon range was one with pictures of bulls on:
Bullshit
.
Bullderdash
.
Bullish
. And so on.
    Johnny sat at the computer all day, ticking boxes in a job he loathed, despatching tasteless framed cartoons to people he detested for buying them, and then going home to a woman who looked more like the bulls in the cartoons every day. He sought out diversions on his computer and began by visiting porn sites. Soon he started advertising himself, under various false names, on Internet contact sites.
    That was what Joy found when she peeked into the contents of his laptop one day when he had gone to play golf – at least, that had been his story. He had not been to any golf club. It was strokes and holes of a very different kind he had been playing and, confronted with the evidence, he’d been forced to fess up. He was full frontal, naked and erect on eShagmates.
    Naked and erect for everyone in the world but her.
    And so it was, on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, that they returned to the increasingly dilapidated palazzo on the Grand Canal,