Though this surely had to be his imagination.

Chapter 53

Hopeless.

His life was over.

Garry Soames was close to crying when he left the interview room and was let out into the prison’s common area, about two acres of anemic grass and sidewalks, largely deserted at this time of day. He walked slowly back to the wing in which his cell was located.

His lawyer, Elena Cinelli, had told him that although the police were considering the possibility that he had been set up as a fall guy for the rape of Frieda Schorel, the magistrate had turned down her request that he be released, even with the surrender of his passport.

This was so unfair!

Elena had told him that two of the best forensic scientists in America, who happened to be in Naples on another case, were assisting with the evidence. But assisting wasn’t the same as proving he was innocent. Valentina Morelli, the girl who’d turned on him so viciously, had been located and had given a statement—subsequently verified—that she had been in Mantua the night of Frieda’s assault. Suspicion had returned once again to him.

What a nightmare this had become…

He was in a strange land, with “friends” who were suddenly wary of visiting him. His parents were still in the midst of making arrangements to fly to Italy (Garry’s younger brothers and sisters had to be sorted out). The food was terrible, the hours of solitude—and despair—stretching on and on.

The uncertainty.

And the looks the other prisoners gave him. Some offered sly, conspiratorial glances, as if they shared a rapist’s inclination. Those were just plain creepy. And then there were the glares—of those who seemed to want to short-circuit the judicial system and dish out fast, uncompromising justice. Several times he’d heard, in stilted English, the word “honor.” Offered like a whip, lashing him for his crime of debasing a woman.

And the goddamn pisser of it all? The reason the night with Frieda on the roof, under the stars of Naples, could not have turned out to be sexual assault?

He hadn’t been able to get it up. Me, Garry Soames. Mr. Ever-ready.

Kissing, touching…and he’d stayed limp as a rag.

Sorry, sorry, sorry…It’s out of my hands. I can’t control it.

A fact he hadn’t dared to share with anyone. The most shameful thing he could think of had to be kept a secret. He couldn’t tell the police, couldn’t tell his lawyer. No one. “No, I couldn’t have raped Frieda, even if I’d drugged her—which I didn’t. No, Old Dependable hadn’t worked that night.”

And now? What would happen—?

His thoughts were interrupted as two men appeared nearby in the prison yard, stepping from the doorway of a wing nearby. He didn’t know the short, muscled prisoners very well, other than that they weren’t Italian. Albanian, he thought. Swarthy and forever unsmiling. They kept to themselves or hung out with a few others that looked somewhat like them. The two, brothers, had never said anything to Garry and had largely ignored him.