Angels of the Flood Read Online Free Page A

died.’ Kate was melting butter in a shallow pan. She crushed two cloves of garlic into a smear of salt with the flat of her knife, then chopped it quickly into a paste. She was working faster, more intensely than her usual leisured style of cooking, all her nervous energy funnelled into the task.
    ‘There was an inquest, wasn’t there?’ asked David. ‘So the details would have been public knowledge.’
    ‘Then why drag it all up now?’ Kate tipped the garlic and tomatoes into the pan and pushed them around in the melted butter. She ground some black pepper over them, then crumbled in some feta cheese. ‘Why go to all the trouble of altering those pictures and then send them to me, just so I get to put them back how they were?’
    ‘Maybe it’s two different people,’ said David. He inhaled deeply. ‘Mm, that smells fantastic. Look, just suppose there’s one person who changes the paintings, and another person who doesn’t want them changed. That’s the person who sends them to you to have them put back how they were.’
    ‘Maybe.’ The tomatoes were melting into the butter and garlic, their delicate coral flesh marbled white with the feta. Kate remembered how Deceptions pale throat had been necklaced with acrylic blood. But it was the other picture, those two little creatures, superficially as innocent as characters from a cartoon, which haunted her most. What was their significance? Because there was a significance, she knew. The answer was inside her skull, hidden deep in her memory, but she didn’t know how to access it. More to the point, she wasn’t convinced she wanted to access it.
    ‘Once you know who’s been sending the paintings, my guess is you’ll have the answer to “why”.’
    ‘Maybe it’s best not to know.’ Kate emptied half a packet of penne into a pot of boiling water and stirred vigorously.
    ‘Do Francesca’s family still live at the Villa Beatrice?’
    ‘It’s been turned into some kind of foundation for the arts, apparently. The Bertoni family are connected with it, I think.’
    ‘Sounds like that would be the place to start asking questions, then.’
    Kate turned to him, appalled. ‘You mean go back to the Villa Beatrice?’
    ‘Why not?’
    She shook her head in disbelief, then went back to her cooking, tearing the smoked salmon into strips and mixing it with the tomatoes and feta. David made it sound like such a simple task: why don’t you just go back to the Villa Beatrice and find out what’s going on? Did he have any idea what he was suggesting? ‘I won’t go because I don’t like being manipulated,’ she said, ‘Just because some freak’s got nothing better to do with her time than stick graffiti on perfectly good paintings, then send them off to me, doesn’t mean I have to go charging halfway across Europe. Why should it bother me anyway? All I have to do is clean it up and send my bill.’
    ‘You said, her time.’
    ‘Did I? It could be his.’
    ‘But you think it’s a her. Which implies you’ve got a hunch who’s doing it.’
    Kate didn’t answer. She poured some cream onto the sauce, then got salad out of the fridge and put it in a bowl. ‘We can eat,’ she said.
    ‘Here, let me.’ David intercepted her, hefted the saucepan off the stove and began pouring the pasta into the colander in the sink. Thick steam rose up to fill the air between them. ‘So who do you think might be sending you the paintings?’ he asked.
    Kate didn’t speak. David had stretched out his arms stiffly and drawn back his head to avoid the steam as the boiling water sloshed from the pan. For a moment his upper body almost disappeared behind dense vapour. Kate was seized with a plummeting sense of dread, a memory of figures seen through glass but obscured by a veil of—of what? Mist? Spray? Dust? There was a sense of movement, and the half-seen figures were scurrying about in panic, the way ants do when their nest is disturbed. And all the time the terror was