The Lizard's Bite nc-4

by David Hewson

  Nothing short of bankruptcy, he thought.

  “And you?” he asked.

  She turned to face him, frank, wise, concerned. “I don’t know. What do you suggest?”

  The question threw him. “You can do what you want, surely?”

  “I can,” she replied, nodding. “For the first time in my life. And yet . . . I don’t know. I’ve spent so long trying to hold the family together on that damned island. Now it’s gone. I’m free. The trouble is freedom doesn’t feel quite how I expected.”

  The boat had arrived. Her brothers were getting ready to board, not even bothering to look back.

  “Let’s catch the next one, shall we?” she said, watching them. “They don’t need me anymore. Or that’s what they think.” A thought occurred to her. “I could travel, I suppose.”

  “Will you?”

  She was staring at him again, a look that made Leo Falcone restless, unsure of himself. “Probably not. I . . .” This seemed difficult for her to say. “I’ve been trying something new,” she confessed. “Thinking about myself for a change. Not them. Not the island.”

  “You make it sound a crime. It isn’t.”

  “I know that. But it still prompts awkward thoughts.”

  Her dark eyes seemed torn between watching for his reactions and being afraid of what he might notice. “I realise now that I’ve never been wanted. That’s all. Never on the island. There was nothing there for any of us but duty. Not love. None of us ever had that, even in the beginning, I think. We were part of Angelo’s dream, a dream that was about him alone. About making the Arcangelo name immortal somehow. He was a stupid, cruel old man. I know I shouldn’t say that of my own father, but it’s true. He was willing to sacrifice our lives for his. And look where it got us. Michele and Gabriele still chasing some phantom. Me an old maid.”

  He had to laugh. It was such a ludicrous idea. “I don’t think anyone would describe you as that.”

  “I wasn’t talking about how people saw me,” she said immediately. “I was talking about how I view myself.” She hesitated. “I want to be wanted, Leo. I want to be loved. Just for me. Nothing else at all. Now that’s selfish.”

  He grimaced. “I’ve never been much of an expert at love,” he confessed.

  “That makes two of us,” she said.

  There was a faint hue on her cheek. Makeup perhaps. Or the hint of a blush.

  “You’ll need help,” she pointed out. “You may not like that idea but it’s a fact. I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ve never seen much of Rome. I certainly don’t want to stay here. We could just call it friendship. Nothing more. Unless . . . People change with time. Who knows?”

  It was a temptation, more enticing than any Hugo Massiter could ever have thrown on the table.

  But the child’s screams rang around his head.

  “You could go back to university,” he suggested. “You said you loved Paris.”

  “I did,” she answered, blushing openly now, worried, perhaps, she’d overstepped the mark. “Not now. University is for the young, I think.”

  “But what a person learns . . .” he mused. “That stays with you. All your life.”

  It was criminology in his case. Leo Falcone had never been in any doubt about his own future career.

  “You studied chemistry, I believe?” he asked.

  The question took her by surprise. “Did I tell you that?”

  He spoke to the child inside him, then waited, satisfied by its sudden silence.

  “No,” Leo Falcone said. “I checked. It’s easy to discover facts about people. The difficulty lies in understanding what they mean.”

  She gazed down at him, puzzled, a little annoyed perhaps by the way he’d turned the direction of the conversation.

  “You have so much spare time at the moment, Leo. I’m flattered you should spend some of it on me.”

  “Was it an easy career choice? I can’t quite see you as a chemist.”

  “I was an Arcangelo,” she said. “We were all supposed to be a part of my father’s plan. I would have preferred to have studied literature. He was implacably opposed, naturally. What use are books or poetry when you’re staring into a furnace?”

  “You were a good student, I imagine. A conscientious one. A talented one too.”

  She nodded, flattered. “I’d like to think so. But I never completed my degree. Paris was expensive. The money wasn’t there. Why are we discussing this? Is it relevant?”

  “I think I know how your brother died,” he said. “Would you like to hear?”

  She stared at him, mournful, disappointed. “Haven’t we given the grave enough of our time today?”

  “It won’t take long.”

  “Fine,” she snapped. “But if we’re to speak about the dead, let’s at least allow them to hear for themselves.”

  Before he could protest, she took hold of the wheelchair handles and propelled him back toward the graveyard, beyond the line of cedars, rapidly reaching Uriel’s plot, with its too-white marble headstone.

  The place was deserted. There was not so much as a single grave-digger working on one of the neat brown plots. Falcone recalled what she had said about the vaporetti. The service stopped at the end of the afternoon. The cemetery island had no need of night visitors.

  TERESA LUPO SAT AT THE BATTERED TABLE FEELING cold and stupid. They’d been all over the island. Hours of searching, calling, hoping. Now they were back where they always started: Piero Scacchi’s deserted and depressing picnic area. And for what?

  For a dog. An animal that thought it could swim the breadth of the lagoon to escape the madness on the Isola degli Arcangeli. Only, if it survived, to find its master missing, missing for a long time, it seemed to her. There were, as far as the papers appeared to know, no extenuating circumstances, no mitigation Scacchi could plead. A matto from the lagoon had shot dead one of the city’s leading citizens at the moment of his apotheosis, with half of Venice’s prosecco-swilling glitterati looking on. It was impudent. Downright bad taste. Scacchi, being a lunatic from the edge of the lagoon, would be lucky to see fresh air in less than ten years, however much the young couple, Daniel Forster and Laura Conti, pleaded on his behalf. At least they seemed to have escaped prosecution. Teresa was glad about that. They looked like people who’d suffered, unjustly for the most part. From what she’d read they’d never recover what they’d lost. Massiter’s lawyers had seen to that. But no one seemed much interested in activating the warrants that had been issued for their arrest. That would upturn too many old stones long settled into the dirt, with plenty of unwanted creatures lurking underneath. The pair were, at least, free to start their lives anew.

  “Dog! Dog! Xerxes!”

  Peroni was muddied up to his knees from wandering through the fields and the marshy land, bellowing for the animal. She wondered what he expected might happen. Would the creature suddenly march out of the lush grass wilderness at the lagoon’s edge, wagging its tail?

  He did some more yelling, then came and sat down opposite, grim-faced, cross with himself.

  She patted his big hand. “Gianni. It’s been more than a week. If he survived the water—and that’s a big if—he could have starved to death here. We know the locals haven’t been feeding him . . . .”

  They’d talked to plenty. Farmer and fisherman alike, none of whom looked as if they’d be much inclined to provide for anything that wasn’t part of their own household. Nobody had even seen a small black spaniel, thin and hungry-looking, lost, puzzled why the little shack where it lived was deserted, day after day. Nobody, if she was honest with herself, much cared. Except for Gianni Peroni, who hoped to care enough to make up for everyone else.

  “He’s here,” Peroni insisted. “I just know it.”

  “Here we go. Instinct again. Be realistic, will you? The poor thing probably drowned.”

  “No! You don’t know dogs. Spaniels love the water. He could swim to the city and back if he wanted.”

  “Now tha
t I find hard to believe.”

  “Believe it,” he said, then turned to the reedy little rio nearby and starting shouting again, bellowing the dog’s name over and over.

  She waited for him to pause for breath, then held his hand more tightly. “Has it never occurred to you, dog person that you are, that the blasted things sometimes only come when called by someone they know?”

  “That’s not true! We had a dog when I was a kid. He came for anyone who knew his name.”

  She thought about this. “What was he called?”

  “Guido!”

  “Fine. Listen to a little animal psychology. Dogs rely on syllables. Clearly differentiated chunks of language. Guido—Gwee-doh—is an excellent name because it has two very identifiable syllables, the ideal number for something with a brain the size of a modest potato. Furthermore, these syllables are separated—and this is important—by a hard consonant, one pronounced when you move the middle of your tongue downwards, away from the roof of your mouth.”

  He glared at her. “I don’t think dogs understand hard consonants.”

  “You’re wrong. Don’t ask how I know this—it was a very long time ago—but they do. A dog with a good name like Guido knows when it’s being called, even by a complete stranger. Whether the thing obeys is another matter, of course.”

  “This is going somewhere?” he demanded.

  “Straight to the point. Guido is good. Xerxes—think about it when you say it, Zer-ke-sees—is terrible. No hard consonant. Three messy syllables. The dog will have heard it over and over again from Piero and understood what it meant from the repetition and the intonation of his master’s voice. From anyone else it just sounds like mush. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes! So what do I do?”

  “You come home with me. Then tomorrow we go back to Rome and attempt to resume lives which are as close to normality as our dysfunctional personalities will allow.”

  “And the dog?”

  She let go of his hand and wagged a finger in his face instead. “You can’t save everything, Gianni. It’s just not possible. At some stage you—and Nic, and Falcone—have to accept that there are casualties in this world. Besides, even if by some miracle you do find it, what the hell do you do next?”

  She saw the guilty, furtive expression in his face and suddenly wished she’d never asked that question. A man who habitually rescued things always knew a place to put them afterwards.

  “No. Don’t tell me. It’s the cousin in Tuscany again, isn’t it?”

  “Not quite,” he answered, and pulled some crumpled papers out of his jacket, placed them on the table and smoothed them out. One was a faxed memo from the Questura in Rome. The second was a couple of sheets containing bad colour photos of a little farmhouse, not much bigger than Piero Scacchi’s shack, the kind of papers you got from a property agency.

  “I was meaning to bring this up. They’ve offered us a career break. Me, Nic, Falcone. Career breaks are very much the in thing in Rome just now. Refreshes the mind. Or something like that.”

  She’d heard they’d been going the rounds, usually in the direction of people the boss class didn’t know what to do with. The very idea filled her with suspicion.

  “This would be the we-don’t-get-to-pay-you-any-money-but-you-piss-off-and-stay-out-of-our-hair kind of career break?”

  “The job’s still there if you want it,” he said. “You just disappear. Six months. A year. More if you like.” He paused, licking his lips. “Maybe forever. My cousin Mauro’s got this spare farm of his. Pigs. He can’t sell it. I could get it for free for a while. See if I can make a go of things.”

  She took a deep breath. “You’re leaving me? For pigs?”

  “No!” he objected, shocked by the accusation. “I’d only go if you could get a career break too. Wouldn’t be hard. I know a few people . . .”

  “Read my lips. I am not raising pigs.”

  “They need doctors everywhere,” he said, shrugging. “You could get a job at the surgery in town. They’re nice people.”

  “You checked this?”

  “Kind of. But not in a committed sort of way. Not . . .”

  He sighed and squeezed her fingers. Fat fingers. They were both very alike in some ways, he and she.

  “I thought perhaps it was time to try something different. Leo’s going to be out of it for a few months. Nic’s got ideas too.”

  No bodies. No morgue. No budgets. She could rent out the apartment. She could go back to dealing with living people for a while. There were attractions. The trouble was it would take a kind of courage she was unsure she possessed.

  “It was just a thought . . . . I should have discussed it with you before I asked for these papers,” he admitted. “I’m sorry. It was stupid.”

  “If it worked, Gianni, you know what it would mean? We might never go back. No more Rome. No more Questura. No corpses. No fun.”

  “This has been fun?”

  “Sometimes. We got one another out of it, didn’t we?”

  “Well, yes, but . . .”

  “But what? We’re good at this. All of us. It’s just that you three don’t know when to stop. You just walk straight in and take it all head-on. This habit must cease.”

  “Maybe we don’t know any other way.”

  “Then perhaps it’s time to learn!”

  He didn’t object. Peroni was always willing to consider alternatives. It was another of the unpredictable qualities that got to her.

  “And if I do that we can both go on a career break?”

  She looked into his battered face. “Is that what you really want?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “What do you think?”

  “I think we should find the dog.”

  “You said he was dead!”

  “He probably is. But try this thinking-round-problems idea. You haven’t asked the right question. Even though you know and, more to the point, I know it, since you’ve told me every last thing about the animal already.”

  He sat there, mute, puzzled.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” she sighed. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Teresa Lupo got up and set off for the little shack. She doubted it would be locked. She doubted Piero Scacchi was a man who failed to keep a backup for anything that was important to him.

  Gianni Peroni waited obediently at the table, watching her return, enlightenment dawning in his eyes.

  When she came back, she placed the old, grubby shotgun in front of him, and kept the box of cartridges she’d found on her side of the table.

  “Don’t kill anything on my account,” she said.

  THERE WAS A SUBSTANCE ON THE APRON,” FALCONE explained. “An industrial solvent. One used in laboratories everywhere. And in some manufacturing processes too. Sometimes in glass foundries. It’s called ketone. Have you heard of it?”

  She shook her head. “It’s been a long time since I dealt with chemicals.”

  “There must be an inventory for the foundry. We could look.”

  Raffaella Arcangelo glowered at him. “Why? Uriel and Bella are dead and buried. The world thinks it knows who killed them. Aldo Bracci. Nic has other ideas. He believes it was Hugo Massiter, and feels he knows Massiter’s reasons too. Either way . . .” She shrugged. “They’re beyond us all now.”

  “Undoubtedly,” he said, nodding in agreement. “Nevertheless, think of those reasons. Bella was pregnant. Not by her brother. I don’t believe that for a moment. It was Massiter. At least Bella thought so, and she was probably causing trouble for the Englishman. Blackmail, I imagine. Threatening awkwardness over signing the contract. I have the impression Bella knew a man’s weak points.”

  She nodded. “You’re right, as usual.”

  “Thank you. But it’s the means that matter. Bella was killed, or at least rendered unconscious, in her own bedroom by simple force, then dragged to the furnace for disposal. Brutal, but scarcely unusual. Uriel on the other hand . . .”

  He stared
down at the grave. She folded her arms and looked at him.

  “I don’t understand the first thing you’re talking about.”

  “It’s as if we have two different crimes by two different people. Uriel’s death, that tainted apron, is tentative, halfhearted, almost as if it weren’t quite deliberate. From what I’ve read of Teresa’s notes it had only a slim chance of succeeding in any case. Even with the burners to the furnace locked so that the temperature was unnaturally high, the chances of fabric impregnated with that substance actually igniting were slim. Uriel was deeply unlucky there. It’s possible the presence of alcohol precipitated what happened. We’ll never know. Nevertheless, it’s as if whoever perpetrated that act was unsure whether he wanted to commit the crime in the first place. He was leaving it to chance, letting fate decide whether to ignite the apron and condemn the person locked inside the room to what could, from external appearances, be seen as an accidental death. Had that actually occurred and Bella not been killed also . . .”

  “Then?”

  “Then it would have gone down as an industrial fatality. No doubt about it. Which was why, in the beginning, I believed Bella must have been complicit in some way. All the same . . .”

  He’d worked so hard to try to understand. Even now he was still struggling to grasp every last detail. Leo Falcone was aware that his mind no longer worked as efficiently, as ruthlessly, as it once had.

  “I don’t see the problem,” Raffaella said.

  “The problem is that the contrast with Bella’s actual death could scarcely be greater! That was swift, decisive and bloody. Deliberate, predictable. Normal, if such a word can be used of murder.”

  She glanced back towards the exit. “We don’t want to be left here. Will this take long?”

  “No.”

  “Good. And your solution?”

  “It was simple, once I thought about it. All those keys. All those ribbons. You’re a family that misplaces items. People who pick up one thing when it belongs to another.”

  “We’re human,” she said pointedly.

  “Quite. And, being human, Uriel took the apron meant for Bella that night, and she his. Which she wore in the furnace, wondering why the place was so hot and the burners so difficult to control. Coming to no harm whatsoever, not until she returns to the house, puzzled, sensing, I imagine, that something’s wrong.”