Read Online Mapping the Edge by Sarah Dunant - Free Book Online

stationery on the desk. Not a thing, in fact, to identify this as a real hotel at all. Even the walls were bare. So was the back of the main door. No framed room charges or fire instructions. And when she turned the handle it didn’t open. Whatever lock was in operation, it wasn’t on the inside.
    The discovery made her frantic. She sifted through the clogged debris of memory and came up with the syrupy coffee followed by sudden nausea and the need to sleep. She saw his face smiling across at her, reassuring, concerned. It couldn’t be . . . it wasn’t possible. Her mind short-circuited to bizarre stories of kidnap, Italian-style; rich magnates or their children held in cellars and losing bits of their anatomy to prod their relatives into vast ransoms. It didn’t make any sense. Why would anyone in their right mind want to kidnap her, an anonymous tourist and single mother with no family and no money? It was all some grotesque mistake.
    She threw herself at the door, smashing on the wood with the palms of her hands and shouting at the top of her voice. How long had she been unconscious? She felt sick again and she was sweating heavily. She stopped to look at her watch, but the face was splintered and the time behind it was forever ten to nine. Now it was the middle of the night. But which night? How long had she been there?
    She went back to the door with renewed panic, using her fists this time and carrying on until the pain in her head forced her to stop. No one was listening, or if they were, they were choosing not to hear. She was suddenly greedily thirsty. She went into the bathroom and drank more water. She grabbed one of the plastic bottles sitting on the side. Green shower gel, “made in Milan,” bottled by the thousand for any number of hotel chains. Where was she? She felt dizzy. She moved back to the bed and sat heaving, staring at the door, taking deep breaths.
    Around her the silence was profound, deeper than the room, deeper than the building. She felt sick and clammy. She lay back and pulled the covers over her. From a vent in the room the air-conditioning kicked in, a low mechanical hum, like a hotel. Like a hotel. At least it wasn’t a cellar. This was the last thing she remembered before she fell back to sleep.

Away—Friday A.M .
    A NNA WAS SITTING by the window in a large chair, so deep that its wings seemed to envelop her, cutting her off from the rest of the room, its arms wide enough to use as a table. A glass was balanced on one of them, the liquid alive with bubbles, and there was a towel thrown on the floor nearby.
    She was naked, her legs curled up under her, her hair wet, pushed back from her face. Her skin was clear, no makeup, washed clean and shiny like a child’s. She looked tired but composed. She seemed to be staring out at something through the half-open window, but there was nothing to see. In the middle of the night even the city was still. Florence lay below them in the valley, its night-lights like a constellation of stars in distant space. She moved her right leg slightly and her skin made a small sucking sound as the thigh pulled away from the back of her calf. She slid her fingers down the inside of her leg, feeling the sweat that had gathered there. The surface of her skin was alive to the touch. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been so aware of her body. No, that wasn’t true. She could remember quite clearly.
    Anna saw herself five weeks earlier, returning home to Lily after their first encounter. They had said good-bye to each other in the hotel room in Central London and she had driven back across the Westway in the silence of an early morning, much like tonight’s, hers one of a handful of cars still on the road. She had come into the house quietly: Patricia was asleep upstairs in the spare room, Lily was in her bed. She had been desperate to see her daughter again. Not to assuage any sense of betrayal or