The Lizard's Bite nc-4

by David Hewson

  Tosi had greeted her as if she were some visiting academic, an honoured guest in his humble premises. It was all a little—and Teresa was shocked to find this word entering her head—creepy. Not because it was a morgue. Morgues were places she could walk into any day without a second thought. The problem lay with Tosi, a stiff, erect pensioner type with half-moon glasses and a white nylon coat so bright it must have been changed every day, and the waiflike girl, no more than twenty-one, surely, and similarly dressed, though with John Lennon spectacles, who acted as his assistant. The two of them were inseparable. More than that, they seemed almost to operate as one, exchanging thoughts and ideas in a random, open way, answering questions in turn like identical twins testing out their telepathic powers.

  Then, in response to her questioning, Tosi revealed the secret. Anna was his granddaughter. This small operation—most of the work went to a bigger place on terra firma, Tosi said—was a family affair. Its big brother in Mestre was, naturally, run by his son, Anna’s father. Teresa was, briefly, speechless. The Tosis seemed to be running their own pathologists’ guild, taking upon themselves the role of sorting and categorising the region’s dead, then passing the task on to their offspring. She had to ask the old man, even though she knew the answer. His father had been a pathologist too, and his grandfather a surgeon in the city who specialised in postmortems before the job of pathologist became official.

  Venice, she thought, then forced her mind to focus on the task at hand.

  “I don’t wish to intrude,” she insisted, sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair opposite the two of them, both perched birdlike next to each other behind a large shiny desk.

  “You’re not intruding,” Tosi replied with a smile.

  “Not a bit,” added the granddaughter. “It’s a pleasure.”

  “An honour,” Tosi added.

  Teresa silently cursed Leo Falcone for talking her into this.

  “It’s just that spontaneous combustion . . .”—it was hard even to say the words—“ . . . seems such an unusual finding.”

  “Unheard of,” agreed Tosi the elder.

  “Hereabouts,” junior corrected him. “There are plenty of antecedents.”

  “Anna . . . ?” he wondered. “Could you possibly show Dr. Lupo the computer?”

  He spoke the word with near-religious veneration.

  The girl got up and walked across the office to the single old and very dusty PC that sat on a tiny, cheap desk.

  “That contraption is quite astonishing,” Tosi revealed. “I expect you have more than one. Here . . . it’s not necessary. Wasted expense and we never spend more than is absolutely necessary. Mind you, I don’t know what we’d do without it. Did you know that in Milwaukee in 1843 there was a documented case of spontaneous combustion in an iron foundry? Very like our own.”

  “People catching fire in foundries . . .” She didn’t want to annoy the old man. He’d surely clam up if that happened. “It’s not that hard to fathom really, is it?”

  “These cases are,” Anna interjected, tapping slowly at the keys with one short, slender finger. “For instance, in Arras, northern France. October 1953. A private house, body on the floor, no sign of fire elsewhere. Same in London, six years later . . .”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Teresa said, fighting back her temper. “Details I can read for myself anytime. Can you just zip those files and e-mail them to me?”

  Two very young, very innocent eyes blinked at her from behind the anachronistic round glasses.

  “Zip?” Anna repeated.

  “Watch me.”

  Teresa pulled her chair up to the desk, elbowed the girl out of the way, hacked manically at the keys with her stubby fingers, bundled the pile of documents the girl had there into an attachment, then forwarded the lot to her own private e-mail address, one she could access later through Nic’s computer, Peroni being as allergic to the things as Tosi elder apparently was.

  The Tosis glanced at each other in awe, as if a creature from the future had walked into the room.

  “Bodies,” Teresa declared firmly, wishing she’d never given up smoking as part of the if-it-hurts-it’s-bound-to-make-you-pregnant routine. “I can’t think without seeing one. Can we start there, please?”

  “Whatever we have is yours to behold,” Tosi elder avowed, and got up after he’d finished scrawling a single word on his notepad: Zip!

  They walked along the corridor, into a tiny white room with a single shining table and a collection of equipment so old most of it belonged in a museum. Teresa wondered if she couldn’t get rid of the Tosis for a while, maybe by entering them for a game show called “Name That Century.” She didn’t want to try to think straight under the gaze of the pair.

  “What about forensic?” she asked.

  Tosi smiled.

  “Let me guess,” she sighed. “Mestre.”

  “They have things there . . .” he said, wide-eyed.

  “What did those things tell you?”

  Anna went to a tiny wooden desk and took out two reports which were, if Teresa’s eyesight wasn’t playing tricks, typed.

  “Nothing much about Bella Arcangelo,” the girl declared, spreading three pages on the tabletop. “There wasn’t a lot to look at really.”

  “Remains,” Tosi senior mouthed gloomily, walking to one of the refrigerated compartments, then pulling it open to reveal a box—a cardboard box no less—marked “Arcangelo, Bella.” “What can you do with remains?”

  Usually lots, Teresa thought, then stared at the skull, with its tapering stump of spinal cord. It sat on a bed of surgical cotton wool, surrounded by a few unidentifiable objects. She ran through the report. Plenty of traces of bone fragments, shattered by the heat, incapable of analysis to show how the woman died. A small amount of gold. No other metal. Nothing else at all. Maybe Tosi was right.

  “How hot does a glass furnace run?” she asked. She was unable to take her eyes off the familiar shape, burnt a bleached-out white.

  “At that time of the morning . . .” Tosi mused. “Say fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred centigrade. Around what you’d find in a modern crematorium. It’s a fascinating process. I’ve studied it a little. You should see a glass furnace for yourself sometime. I could arrange that. A modern one, though, not the ridiculous antiques the Arcangeli insist on using. Gas and wood, for pity’s sake . . .”

  “Why was just the skull left, not . . .” she began to ask.

  “It was in a cooler part of the chamber,” Tosi replied quickly, proud he could second-guess the question. “If the woman was placed in the furnace headfirst . . .”

  He held up his hands, mimicking the movement of sliding an object off a trolley or the wheeled table Falcone said was there.

  “ . . . that’s what would happen. The hottest part is in the centre. The head would surely fetch up at the edge, where the temperature would be lower in a furnace of that age and nature. I spoke to our local crematorium. They think a woman of this size would reach such a state of dissolution in an hour, possibly less, at this temperature. Am I doing all right so far?”

  She gave him a smile that was meant to say: impressed.

  “Exactly the conclusion I would draw,” she admitted, and meant it too. Calling up the crematorium to get some practical knowledge was precisely what she’d have done herself. “But since I lack your knowledge of glassmaking, I imagine it would have taken me longer.”

  Tosi waved a hand in her direction, smiling. “Romans,” he said. “See, Anna. So self-deprecating. No matter what people say . . .”

  Teresa looked around the room. There was no sign of any other work. The Tosis had all day to chat about their wonderful discovery. Presumably everything else was getting shipped off to Mestre.

  “You’re too kind. Now the man.”

  Anna went to a second compartment and slid out the drawer. Teresa Lupo took a very good look at what lay there and wondered if, perhaps, she wasn’t going crazy.

  Uriel Arcangelo was half cada
ver, half charcoal stump. From the waist down the man looked like someone who’d been dumped in a giant inkwell, then left to dry. The fabric of his clothing—suit trousers and what looked like the remains of a work apron—was charred. Most of the flesh beneath, revealed by some of the Tosis’ exploratory incisions, seemed unexceptional, not that it would have much to tell. But above the belt the man had been transformed. The entire upper half of his body had been consumed by fire, incinerated into a black mass, shrunken in on itself, composed principally of bones and a few carbonised pieces of flesh. His skull was now turned to one side, the mouth open in that familiar expression of agony, one which, on this occasion, was doubtless warranted. Teresa Lupo was familiar with fire victims. Either half of Uriel’s body fitted the picture she recognised. People were consumed, or they died asphyxiated, little marked by the fire itself. It was unheard of for a corpse to share both characteristics.

  “Now let me get this straight,” she demanded. “You’re saying there was no direct combustion on the body? Everything from the chest up somehow happened without the application of any external flame whatsoever?”

  “That’s what we understand from the fire department,” Tosi confirmed. “He was a good five metres from the furnace.”

  “Photos?” Teresa asked.

  The girl walked over to a filing cabinet and withdrew a file. There were just five, Teresa was astonished to learn, pretty poor quality too, as if they came from an instant camera. The prints depicted Uriel Arcangelo’s corpse surrounded by what appeared to be a black pool of charred material. Teresa looked more closely. The heat around the upper torso had been so strong it had actually burned a space in the wooden flooring beneath the man.

  “What’s this hole?” she wondered. “How big was it? What kind of condition was the floor in?”

  Tosi appeared bemused. “I didn’t actually go to the scene. The police took notes and those photos. Then we sent an attendant for the body.”

  She bit her tongue. The lack of care, of any kind of formal procedure, was astonishing. It was, she guessed, a question of supply and demand. Venice was a small place, more a receptacle for passing tourists than a real, living city. Tosi clearly had little experience of dealing with violent death. And, she reminded herself, there was the assumption all along that they were dealing with an open-and-shut case.

  “There has to be more,” Teresa insisted. “What about the autopsy?”

  Tosi sighed. “What you see is what we have.”

  “Analysis . . . Don’t tell me. It’s in Mestre. Is there nothing more?”

  “Such as what?” Anna asked.

  “Such as how a man can die like this! Even in a furnace, it’s not . . . possible.”

  “Spontaneous combustion,” Tosi declared resolutely. “As we said.”

  “But how?”

  Tosi smiled and nodded at his granddaughter. “There are various theories,” the girl said. “The most promising seems to be that, at a certain temperature, perhaps under prolonged external heat, the abdominal fat may ignite. The deceased was somewhat overweight. Not much. But perhaps it was enough.”

  Teresa shook her head, unable to accept they could believe this. “Enough to consume half his body? Then burn a hole in a timber floor?”

  “Apparently,” Tosi observed, and displayed, for the first time, a little impatience with her doubts. “Do you have an alternative explanation? I would, naturally, like to hear it.”

  “His clothing,” she suggested. “What did forensic make of that? Was there something flammable there? Gasoline perhaps? Alcohol?”

  Tosi glanced at the lower half of the corpse. “The fire crew used an astonishing amount of foam. It was everywhere. It’s not easy trying to extract material in those circumstances. Besides . . .” His old creased face wrinkled even further with displeasure. “I hate trying to do the work of the police, as I’m sure do you, Dr. Lupo. One would have to ask oneself, though. What kind of a man would walk into an overheating foundry with gasoline on his clothes?”

  An idiot. A drunk. Someone suicidal because he’d murdered his wife an hour before, shoved her in the furnace, and started to get maudlin. There were plenty of alternatives. It was just that this pair didn’t want to look for them.

  “It is,” Tosi added, “difficult to accept that a human body may burn of its own accord. But consider the idea that we may, in fact, be candles inside out. A candle has the wick in its centre and draws the fuel to it as it burns. A body such as Arcangelo’s may be considered to have sufficient fat to act as fuel, and clothing as an external wick. Once the clothing catches fire, the fat is drawn to it and continues to feed the flames. This is not strange science, I feel. Rare, but not implausible.”

  So one fine day you drop a match on your shirt and burn up from the inside. It was a theory, Teresa thought. Along with alien abduction and the idea some poor bastards got reborn as aardvarks.

  “Unless, of course,” he finished, “you have other ideas.”

  “Not really,” she said. “I don’t have problems with the combustion. It’s that spontaneous part I’m struggling with. But I would like to think about it. I’m sorry. I should have asked. Does this bother you?”

  Tosi’s thin mouth creased in a modest smile. “To have a famous Roman pathologist sit in on our work? Of course not. But I’m under some pressure. The police don’t wish to sit on this case forever. I must wrap up everything by Tuesday. One way or another. I’m under no illusions there.” For a moment he looked troubled. “None at all.”

  Maybe Alberto Tosi wasn’t as batty as he looked. He knew it was a strange incident. It was just that, in the circumstances, he hadn’t got much else to say. And, it occurred to Teresa, he was being strong-armed to close down the case too. Just like the rest of them.

  “Medical records?”

  The Tosis glanced at each other, a mutual measure of concern on their faces.

  “I’m not sure we’re authorised . . .” Anna murmured. “They only arrived this morning. There are issues of confidentiality.”

  “Understood,” she said. “So Inspector Falcone hasn’t seen them either? Perhaps I should mention them to him. I’m sure he’d like to know what’s there. He is, of course, entitled to see them.”

  The prospect of a return visit by Falcone tipped the balance. One minute later Teresa Lupo was going through two sets of comprehensive handwritten records from the family doctor who looked after both Uriel Arcangelo and his wife.

  She made a few notes, then placed her pad in the bag, sniffed, and knew it was time to go. Tosi was eyeing her from across the desk, looking decidedly shifty.

  “I would have told your inspector,” he said finally. “As Anna said, we only received the reports this morning.”

  “Of course.”

  It wasn’t the kind of detail any pathologist could keep hidden. And it had a certain personal resonance for Teresa Lupo too, one that reminded her of the conversation she’d never had with Gianni Peroni the night before.

  “It’s always shocking to make such a discovery,” Tosi said. “One would have thought the family . . .”

  But the family didn’t know either, or so Teresa was guessing. And that, perhaps, could give Falcone his motive after all. At the age of forty-four, Bella Arcangelo was six weeks pregnant. All the comprehensive tests that had been carried out on her husband over the years made it absolutely clear he could not be the father. Uriel was, and always would have been, firing blank bullets, with a certainty Teresa understood completely, on both a medical and personal basis. He also had another interesting medical condition, the result of an accident while working in the furnace. Uriel had suffered a fracture of the skull in a small gas explosion. As a result, he had diminished hearing and had complained of an impaired sense of smell.

  She filed away these facts, then thought of the remains inside that scorching oven. Nothing that remained of Bella could be used to prove the paternity of the child that died with her. It was the fire. That was one reason a decent old man l
ike Alberto Tosi was reaching out for bizarre theories on spontaneous combustion. So much real evidence had disappeared in those vicious, transforming flames. Its loss left everyone—Falcone, Tosi, Teresa herself—clutching at straws, trying to rebuild some kind of truth from all those deconstructed atoms.

  “Would you like me to pass this on to Inspector Falcone myself?” she asked, noting, with some satisfaction, the sudden relief in the old man’s face.

  “That would be kind. This isn’t our sort of work.” Alberto Tosi said it with an expression of marked distaste. “Not the kind of case we see in Venice at all. And your inspector is such a . . . persistent man. To be honest, Dr. Lupo, a part of me wishes I could pass everything over to you and go back to signing off on a few expired tourists. For a Roman this may be normal . . . .”

  Actually, she ruminated, for a Roman it was still pretty damn weird too.

  “You’re doing just fine,” she answered, then rustled the medical reports in front of her. “Family tragedies are sometimes . . .”

  “ . . . best swiftly buried,” Tosi interrupted. “I couldn’t agree more.”

  THERE WAS A PICNIC AREA AT PIERO SCACCHI’S FARM. They sat outside at one of the three tables, listening to the man tell his tale, slowly, with conviction and plenty of detail, as if he’d practised everything beforehand. There was little here that was new to them. Scacchi’s recollections matched pretty much everything he was reported to have told the officers who first interviewed him. If anything, Costa thought, Scacchi had it all down a little too pat, as if he were trying to second-guess what they wanted to hear in the hope they’d nod, say thanks, and then be gone, leaving him to go back to his fields and the dog which had sat, alert between Scacchi and Peroni, throughout their discussion.