senior policeman’s face stiffened. ‘As far as I understand the somewhat limited information that I have received, your husband’s family received a call from Ramon Alcoverro and immediately flew out to Brazil on their private jet.’
Eden froze at that disconcerting news, what colour remaining in her cheeks draining away to leave her deathly pale. Damiano’s family had already flown out without even bothering to contact her and give her the news of his survival? She dropped her head, sick to the stomach at such cruelty.
‘At times such as these, particularly where families have become estranged, people can act very much without thought,’ the older man commented in the taut silence. ‘We only became aware of the situation when the embassy in Brazil contacted the Foreign Office. They required certain information before they could issue a replacement passport to your husband so that he could travel home.’
Eden still said nothing. She was studying the carpet with eyes that ached. Nuncio had probably already told Damiano why he had not brought Eden out to Brazil with him. Those dreadful lies that had been printed about her in that newspaper only three months after Damiano had gone missing! The scurrilous gossip and opprobrium that had finally broken her spirit and forced her to leave the Braganzi home for the sake of her own sanity.
Rodney Russell took up the explanation in a brisk tone. ‘By that stage, your husband was demanding to know why you had not been informed, unaware that his own family had failed to keep us up to date on developments.’
Eden blinked and looked up very slowly. ‘Really?’
The superintendent gave her a soothing smile. ‘I gather Damiano made it very clear that he can’t wait to be reunited with his wife—’
Eden studied him with strained eyes of disconcertion. ‘Damiano can’t wait to see…me?’ she whispered in faltering interruption, certain she must have misheard him.
‘He’s flying into Heathrow at noon and then he’s taking a helicopter trip to an airfield just outside town. We’ll convey you there. Obviously the hope is that it will be possible to evade any media attention.’
‘He wishes to see me?’ An almost hysterical little laugh escaped Eden’s convulsed throat. She twisted her head away and lowered it, feeling the hot, stinging rush of tears hitting her eyes.
She wanted privacy but instead she had strangers watching her every reaction. Strangers who had to be well aware just what a charade her marriage had become by the time Damiano had gone missing. She ought to be used to that reality now, the knowledge that nothing had been too sacred to commit to an information file somewhere. But then the behaviour of Damiano’s family in recent days spoke louder than any volume of words.
Nonetheless, after Damiano had vanished, there had been a full-scale investigation by both the British and the Italian authorities. Financial experts had gone in to check that the Braganzi Bank was still sound. They had looked for fraud or evidence of blackmail or secret accounts. They had even looked for links between Damiano and organised crime syndicates. Then they had turned their attention to his own family circle to see if anybody there might have employed a hitman to get rid of him while he was abroad.
No stone had been left unturned. No opinion had gone unsought. No question had been too personal or too wounding to ask. Damiano had been too rich and way too important to just disappear without causing muddy ripples of suspicion to wash over everybody connected with him. And nobody had suffered more than Eden, the wife his snobbish siblings had secretly despised, the wife who had swiftly become the target of their collective grief and turmoil. Nuncio and his sister, Cosetta, had turned on Eden like starving rats on prey. She had even been blamed for the fact that Damiano had gone to Montavia in the first place.
‘In situations such as this, we normally arrange specialist counselling and a period of protective isolation for the victim,’ Rodney Russell remarked, ‘but your husband has categorically refused that support.’
‘I believe Damiano said he would prefer prison to counselling,’ the superintendent said with wry amusement.
A cup of tea was settled on the low coffee-table in front of Eden. ‘You’ve had a major shock,’ the female constable said kindly. ‘But you’re going to be reunited with your husband this afternoon.’
At that staggering reminder, Eden rose in one jerky motion and walked into her bedroom several feet away. She closed her eyes again, fighting for some semblance of composure. Damiano was alive; Damiano was on his way home. To her? She scolded herself for letting her thoughts slide once again in the wrong direction. A selfish direction. If Damiano wanted her now, she would be there for him. Naturally, obviously. In fact, if Damiano had asked for her, nothing would keep her from his side!
Had Nuncio kept quiet about her supposed affair, after all? Yet if he had, what excuse had he given Damiano for his failure to bring Eden out to Brazil with him? And what was Damiano likely to say when he came back? How was she to explain why she had left the Braganzi family home? Shed his name to hide behind another name? Built a new life far from what had so briefly been hers?
Struggling to suppress her mounting fears, Eden focused on the framed photo by her bed. Damiano smiling. All sleek, dark good looks and cool Italian charisma. It had been taken on their honeymoon in Sicily. But they had only been together seven months in total. Long enough though for her to see him withdraw from her, for her to stop expecting the connecting door between their bedrooms to open again, for him to start spending more and more time abroad on endless banking business. Long enough to break her heart. Love like that didn’t go away. Love like that just hurt.
A light knock sounded on the ajar bedroom door. ‘Are you all right?’
Mastering concerns which were pushing her close to panic at what should have been a most ecstatically happy moment, Eden turned a pale, tear-wet face to the young female officer. ‘What now?’
‘We’ll leave for the airfield in half an hour. If I were you I’d shut up shop for the day and just think about what I wanted to wear.’
Wear? Eden swallowed a shaken laugh. Damiano… Damiano. What had he suffered? Kidnapped, his life threatened, seriously injured, locked up in some primitive foreign prison. Damiano, whose life had not prepared him in any way for such an ordeal. Damiano, born to wealth, command and supreme privilege. Once he had liked to see her in green. That thought just popped up out of nowhere and spawned a second, no less trivial recollection. Green had been his favourite colour.
She ransacked her wardrobe with suddenly frantic hands. Maybe he only wanted to see her to say, ‘Hi, I’m back but…’ without his precious family hanging around in the background. And Annabel, his first love, his true love. How could she have forgotten Annabel? Annabel Stavely, Damiano’s ex-fiancée, who in the years since had had a child by a father she had refused to name but who remained single. Eden raised her hands to her face. Her hands were shaking, her palms cold and damp. She was a basket case with an out-of-control mind and the most desperate crazy desire to shout and scream with excitement and fear at one and the same time…
The phone rang barely a minute before Eden and her escort left the apartment.
‘Eden?’ It was Damiano’s younger brother, Nuncio.
Shaken that her brother-in-law should finally call her after so many years of silence, Eden literally stopped breathing. She was instantly afraid that he was ringing as his brother’s messenger to say that Damiano would not, after all, be flying on to see her and she whispered strickenly, ‘Yes?’
‘I
