“Maybe it’s a work trip or something personal, but the boss thinks it’s odd.”
“Do we know where she went?”
“I thought you might ask. I did some checking. She boarded a flight at Stanstead an hour ago; she’s due to land in Italy in forty minutes.”
“Where in Italy?” Clio felt the buzz she got when the pieces of an investigation began to slot together, even if she couldn’t see the big picture yet.
“Verona.”
“Huh,” Clio said.
“Also, the boss wanted to know what we looked at in the evidence room. He was being weird about it.”
“What did you tell him?” Clio held her breath.
“I told him we signed everything out, but didn’t have a chance to examine it before he called to let me know I was off the case.”
“Thanks.”
“He let slip that he already knew how long we’d had the evidence out for. He’d checked.”
“Do me a favor, Izzy, keep your head down, don’t change that story, and don’t show any interest in that case. You need to be deaf, dumb, and blind around it, okay?”
Izzy was silent for a beat, then spoke softly, “Understood.”
“You and I should stop speaking, for now. If anyone knows we talked tonight, tell them I was calling to get advice on joining the criminal investigations division.”
“But—”
“Just tell them that, Izzy. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“And watch your back.”
Clio hung up. The murky light in the flat seemed electric, suddenly, charged with danger.
After a few minutes thinking, she went back online and booked herself a flight to Italy first thing in the morning.
Chapter Fifteen
Anya
I woke early in the bedroom at the back of the apartment we’d rented in the heart of the ancient city of Verona. I’d slept surprisingly well, but I felt disoriented, and my nerves were humming.
Sid was already up, opening the shutters at the front. The apartment was on the second floor of an old palazzo, overlooking a cobbled pedestrian street not much wider than the Roman carriages it was designed for. Its ceilings were twelve feet high, the floors parquet. A balcony with a chunky stone balustrade ran along the front of it.
We opened the French doors and stepped out to take in the view of the shops and cafés, saw how the pavements were made from huge slabs of creamy and pale coral marble, softened and shined by centuries of footfall. Generous windows and handsome balconies ornamented the shoulder-to-shoulder buildings, life spilling from inside out on multiple levels, exactly as it must have done for centuries. The city felt brimming with life and style and wore its history in mellow colors: ochre and peach, dusty yellow and terra-cotta, shutters in greens and soft grays.
I turned to Sid. His eyes were shut, his face turned toward the rays of early sunshine.
“We definitely can’t afford this place,” I said.
He shrugged.
I set up at the kitchen table. I had my laptop to type the translation into and Sid’s beside it, with the Voynich up on his screen. I also laid out the fragments of the glossary and pieced them back together.
We kept the internal door to the apartment double locked and fell quiet whenever we heard the scrape of feet on the stairwell or across the landing, breathing again when no one paused outside our door or knocked on it, but I left the French doors to the balcony open, because it made me feel part of the city. My senses absorbed its sounds and smells as I worked; I was breathing in the same air as Isotta Nogarola had.
