He opened his eyes. It wasn’t one of his parents. It took him another second or two to take in the man standing there. Ben didn’t know who it was and couldn’t work out the expression on the stranger’s face, either, one of regret, or like someone about to break bad news.
Their eyes met. Confused, Ben reached up to take off the headphones. The stranger lifted his arm swiftly at the same time, and the headphones were still in place, the music still pounding, when Ben felt something hit him hard on the head.
That was the last thing he felt, because Ben Hatto had just become a statistic in a subgroup almost entirely his own, seventeen-year-old boys killed in their own homes by professional hit men.
The killer made his way back down the stairs, bypassing the kitchen where Pamela Hatto lay on the floor in front of the open dishwasher, her blood speckled across the freshly rinsed dishes she’d been stacking.
He passed through the hallway, stepping carefully over the pool of Mark Hatto’s blood that had crept and expanded across the tile floor in the few minutes since he’d shot him. He eased the front door shut behind him, got back in his car, and drove away.
The house he left was silent, the only noise the faint tinny racket of Ben’s headphones, a false life sign, like the lights that were on here and there around the place. From the outside that’s how it looked, like nothing was wrong, an affluent family home at peace on a summer’s evening.
That affluence was visible too in the distance between the Hattos’ house and those of their neighbors, the growing number of lights isolated from each other in the lightly wooded garden landscape. This wealth was private, unobtrusive, the kind that would leave the deaths unnoticed for the night, the dead undisturbed.
But an earth tremor had taken place here, and however slowly, the shock waves would ripple out from the epicenter of the Hatto household, undermining the stability of people’s lives at ever greater distances.
A few hundred yards away their immediate neighbors were going about their own business, oblivious of the ghoulish adrenaline rush that would sweep them all up in the next twenty-four hours as the legion of TV crews, journalists and photographers would make this quiet neighborhood its own.
Further off, but still less than two miles away, the Shaw family was enjoying a barbecue with friends. Alice was there; happy, a little drunk on red wine, unaware that her feelings for Ben Hatto, confused as they were, would soon take on a lifelong significance, a mantle of sadness and regret and lost opportunity.
Five miles away in the nearest town, the CID unit had no idea they were about to have their first murder case in two years. Nor could they yet know who’d been living among them, or that within twenty-four hours they’d be announcing to the media that Mark Hatto’s business affairs had been “complex,” a shorthand way of telling the public not to worry, that this guy had brought it upon himself.
And thousands of miles away, in a small town in Italy, the place where the true force of the tremor would be measured, a daughter, a sister, someone the police would need to contact to break the tragic news. And too late, it would be the detective who turned off Ben Hatto’s music who realized that perhaps the boy’s sister was also in danger.
He’d stand there dwelling on the pointlessness of it, the fact that the kid clearly hadn’t disturbed anyone, that the killer had known he was there, sought him out. And he alone would realize that this feud was total and that Ella Hatto, wherever she was, if she was still alive, was perhaps in as much danger as if she’d been in this house herself.
2
They were people watching, sitting on either side of the small table but with their chairs turned facing the street. There was plenty to look at, people sitting outside the other bars and cafés across the way, the passaggiata in full flow along this and the other main streets.
Every now and then Chris would point out someone in the crowd, a classic medallion man or a woman dressed like a hooker or transvestite, and they’d laugh about it. For the most part, though, they didn’t talk, satisfied with watching, sipping at their drinks, winding down after the heat and hassle of the day.
The last few days had been hectic—Rome and Florence—but even so, Ella was pretty happy with the way things were going. Thailand with Susie the previous year had been a nightmare, and a few people had warned her that traveling with a boyfriend was a classic recipe for a bad holiday and a wrecked relationship.
So far, though, things had gone well, and she was glad she was there with him. If she’d gone with anyone else she’d have spent the whole time wishing Chris was with her, anyway. She looked at him now, hair unkempt, his skin already tanned. He turned to meet her gaze, a quizzical smile on his face as he said, “What?”