The Lizard's Bite (35 page)

Silvio Di Capua was eyeing the object in the water confidently. “You could put that in a drawer for the next twenty-five years as it is and we’d still be able to get DNA out of it. And in twenty-five years…”

“Heel, boy,” Teresa cautioned.

Silvio couldn’t stop babbling. “More than that too. If this was part of the killing, you can bet there’s evidence on there we can’t even see either. Sweat from his hands. Saliva. We can get them both.”

“Both?” Raffaella asked, blinking.

“Oh, you bet!” Silvio went on, eyeing the shirt greedily. “If that doesn’t ID the victim
and
the culprit, it’s going to be very unusual indeed.”

Teresa had to leap forward to stop Silvio from snatching the wet shirt from the bowl. She got a grumpy glance for her pains.

“Let’s deal with this one step at a time,” she said firmly. “Can you show me where you found this, please?”

They went up one flight of stairs and followed her down one of the mansion’s dark, dank corridors, to a large bedroom that must once have seemed regal. Now the wallpaper was old and peeling, the bed still roughly made from the last time anyone had slept in it.

“I haven’t been able to get round to doing anything in here,” Raffaella told them. “It didn’t seem right somehow… .”

“That makes it all the better for us,” Teresa replied, walking round, staring at the walls, checking the old raffia laundry basket that was now empty.

She stopped by the window, which looked out onto the rusting corrugated iron roof of one side of the foundry. Then she reached for the latch, threw up the glass, let some welcome air into the room and leaned as far out over the windowsill as she dared.

With one hard push she got herself back inside and turned back to look at the adjoining wall. In an ordinary investigation this would have been the first place to start. But this case was closed before anyone got round to opening it. Even Leo hadn’t seen fit to take a closer look, but perhaps he was distracted by other matters, personal and intellectual.

“Here…”

She pointed at some faint, tiny mark on the wall, something so indistinct Silvio and Raffaella had to come close and squint to see it.

Then Raffaella gasped, fell back onto the bed, hands to her mouth, eyes filling with tears and shock.

“Don’t pass out on me, please,” Teresa pleaded. “I need you. This is very standard minimal blood spray consistent, at this height, with a single blow to the head. Hard instrument, maybe a small hammer. My guess is…”

She moved Silvio in front of her, mimicking, in her own mind, the position she believed Bella must have taken when attacked.

“… Bella was here, standing, when he came for her. One powerful blow to the skull.”

She swung the imaginary weapon with her hand, landing it softly on the side of Silvio’s head where fringe met bald scalp, just behind the ear.

“If he hit her repeatedly, we’d have had much more blood than this. One would be enough to render her unconscious anyway. If he did it well, there’d be no noise either. Who else was in the house?”

Raffaella raised her head, her eyes wet with tears. “I was here all that night. Michele and Gabriele too. It’s not possible. We would have heard something. We would have woken up.”

“Everybody thinks that. You’d be amazed how often people in the next room sleep through murder. If there’s no fighting, no gun…” This was a big, old cavern of a place. Dark, with plenty of places to hide. He could have waited for her in the bedroom, pounced with that one crashing blow, then carried her downstairs without anyone knowing. It wouldn’t have been hard. “If he planned it, everything could have happened very quickly. Without a struggle, or there would have been signs. Then he moves on to Uriel and finds himself a scapegoat.”

“All the same…”

“Trust me,” Teresa insisted, then went back to the window. “You need a ladder, Silvio. Out there, at the very end of the corrugated iron, you’ll find some kind of tool. I can’t work out what it is. Something from the furnace, I guess, some kind of spike or maybe a hammer. He must have thrown it through the open window thinking it would reach the water. It was dark. He had no way of knowing it never got there. Now let’s look at that shirt.”

They followed her back to the kitchen. Teresa Lupo went to the sink and carefully poured off the liquid, leaving the fabric lying in a damp, wrinkled heap in the base of the bowl.

Then she looked at Silvio. “I want you to take this and the hammer, or whatever it is, over to the lab in Mestre straightaway, tell them to drop everything else and run rapid DNA tests on anything they can find. Not just blood. Sweat. Saliva. Urine. Anything. And you stay there breathing down their necks until there’s an answer. I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care who you have to yell at.”

“The pleasure’s all mine,” he said.

“It will be, once you’ve been up on that roof. And after that,” she continued, glancing at Raffaella, “you and I are going to visit Leo. He should be out of that machine by now. I can probably get a sneak look at the scans.”

She was unravelling the damp material with a slow, surgical care. Then she stopped.

Men were arrogant bastards sometimes. They were like dogs. They felt they had to leave their mark on everything.

On the pocket of the shirt — a fine cotton one, she now noted — were two initials, sewn into the fabric as a monogram: HM.

H
E WISHED HE COULD SCREAM. HE WISHED HE COULD move, and tried to will some life into his fingers, tried to believe something, a single nerve, the flicker of a muscle, answered in return.

Before him, the shifting, glassy door changed shape, became transparent, and Leo the boy was silent, recognising the face that peered back at him.

It was his older self, the now-familiar walnut tan, a sleek, shiny bald head, damaged, cracked, showing bloody fault lines, like those on Humpty Dumpty after the fall. The face of a man, unsure whether he was alive or dead, or simply somewhere between the two.

“Little Leo,” his elder self pleaded. “Look and think, for pity’s sake.”

The pained brown face faded. Leo could see beyond now, into the bedroom, the forbidden bedroom, the place where so many mysteries seemed to breed.

“You knew this was happening all along,” the older Leo said. “And, being a child, you did nothing. Yet you understand now, Little Leo. You can stop it. Not in the past. But now. In your head.
Our
head. Just by seeing. Just by being there.”

“Afraid,” he whispered, hearing the same voice, noting the mutual frailty there.

“Leo.” The voice was so feeble, so ghostly, it terrified him more than anything. “You
have
to.”

The thing hovered there in front of him, shaking manically with the racket beyond the door, and the clatter of the unseen machine outside this coffin of wood and glass.

“Afraid of the key.”

“Which exists in order that… ?”

It was wrong to mock a child, even an unreal man-child.

He peered apprehensively through the transparent door and watched the kicking and the blows, watched how she rolled to lessen the pain, glancing in desperation at the door, staring straight at him, begging, asking why.

“To keep her in!” the child screeched. “I told you, I told you, I told…”

The man was there again now, obscuring the view of his parents, for which he was thankful. Except his tanned head looked worse now, the cracks seemed to have multiplied, blood eased through them, seeped down the walnut skin, ran into the bright, white eyes, began to form all over this dying man’s skull like a spider’s web, ensnaring him, tightening, squeezing out what scraps of life remained.

“I hear your thoughts,” the fractured man whispered. “I read the same fairy stories. Remember, Leo?”

“Humpty Dumpty…” murmured the dying man. “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’”

He was in agony, struggling for the strength to carry on.

“‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’”

His vision was changing, fading. These were the last moments.

“Facts are like words. We’ve learned that over all these years. They’re open to interpretation. It is, in the end, simply a matter of who will be their master.”

The boy Leo looked at the figure before him and understood that, at this moment, he was seeing the saddest man in the universe, a man of bleak, worn-down emotions, though a being filled with knowledge too, possessed of an important secret the boy now understood implicitly, shared since it came, in the end, from both of them.

“The key…” said the fading face.

“… is there
to keep me out
!” the boy Leo roared. “
The key is there to keep me out! Out! Out! Out
!”

Somewhere beyond his imagination the metal beast screamed, a cacophony of gears, dying iron, settling, its work finished.

The boy reached out, held the key, turned it, saw in amazement the way the door became a real door now, the wood that he remembered from his childhood, the old metal familiar in his hand.

It was the worst year. The one where his family fell apart, descended into divorce and hatred, a cold, hard place in which a small boy could do nothing except retreat into his shell, hardening that brittle armour that kept the harshness of the real world at bay. He remembered everything now, everything his mind had blocked out over the years, about that dreadful holiday in the mountains, with the two of them locked in that distant, forbidden room, thinking their screams never found their way beyond the walls to reach a frightened lonely child lost for words, lost for action.

The wood disappeared. There was only light. And Leo — who was, he understood, both boy Leo and man now — found himself propelled forward, into the bedroom from which he was forever banished, forced his way between them, pushing back the dead old dusty figure that, in some dark, damaged part of his head, represented what was left of the memory of his father.

He looked into the heartless face, enjoyed the surprise he saw, and said the word, the dread forbidden word, the boy Leo had never dared utter to him in his lifetime.

LEO FALCONE OPENED his eyes — his real eyes, he noted — and found that he was in a bright clinical room with the cloying harsh smell of a medical ward. He lay on a bed which was now being withdrawn from a large white barrel-like object, one he faintly recognised from hospital scenes in the movies.

A pretty young nurse, with glossy black hair tied back in a bun and sparkling, happy eyes, peered down at him, grinning.

“Welcome to the world, Inspector Falcone,” she said in a pleasant southern voice. “It’s been a long time.”

“How long?” Falcone snapped. “And where the hell are my men?”

A
N OLD MONASTERY, HIDDEN INSIDE A CHURCH BY THE gasworks in Castello, no more than three minutes on foot from where Peroni and Nic had been staying for the last eight months. Neither of them had a clue it existed. For anyone trying to hunt down Gianfranco Randazzo, this was surely the last place to look. They would never have found it if Peroni hadn’t called in one last favour from Cornaro, the one officer in the Castello Questura who hadn’t treated the pair of them like lepers.

Gianni Peroni smiled at the pleasant monk in the brown habit who had greeted them, baffled, and seemingly incapable of anything that might pass as assistance.

“We need to speak to Commissario Randazzo,” Zecchini said again, his face beginning to grow red with exasperation. “Now, please.”

“This is a police matter. And a Carabinieri one too,” Peroni added.

The monk shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “Then it must be very important indeed. But I was told Signor Randazzo was not to be disturbed. He is here, as I understood it, for the sake of his health. A man of a nervous disposition…”

That seemed to be pushing things a little far, even for an unworldly monk.

“He’s on his own?” Peroni asked.

“No. Normally there are men with him.” The monk frowned and, for a moment, looked like someone who inhabited the world Peroni knew. “Two ugly men in particular. Police officers, I believe. Not the kind of people we get in here very often. That part puzzles me, I admit. But we’re here to do service. Not to ask questions.”

“Who’s in charge in this place?” Zecchini demanded.

“No one at the moment. Administratively we are in what one might term an interregnum.”

As someone down at the Questura doubtless knew, Peroni thought.

“Father,” he said, and saw from the look on the man’s face that he had somehow picked the wrong word, “it’s important we talk to Randazzo.”

“We have a
warrant
.” Zecchini brandished a piece of paper.

The monk stared at the document. “A warrant? What’s that?”

“It’s a piece of paper that says you’ll damn well bring him to us whether you like it or not!” Zecchini yelled.

The curses he added rang around the bright, sunlit cloister, sending a flutter of doves scattering for the cloudless sky.

But nothing dented the monk’s composure. He simply folded his arms and kept on smiling, silent. Peroni couldn’t stop himself from casting a sour glance at the Carabinieri major.

“We don’t want to search a monastery,” he told the monk calmly. “And I’m sure you don’t want that either. There would be so many officers. So much disruption. And noise.”

The monk didn’t like noise. Peroni had watched the way his nose wrinkled when the volume of Zecchini’s voice rose.

“No one wants noise,” the big cop added, craftily.

The monk laughed, and Gianni Peroni was surprised to realise the man was laughing at them. And that there was precious little between a smile and sneer on his face.

“He’s not here. They went out for lunch. And no…” — the answer came before the question — “I don’t know where and I don’t care. This is a small and quiet community, gentlemen. When we’re asked to help the city, we do so, without asking questions. We trust our betters. Do you?”