The Lizard's Bite (41 page)

“So that’s my contribution out the window,” Emily remarked. “Is there anything left?”

“There’s what we had to begin with,” Teresa suggested. “Bella and Uriel Arcangelo. And now this…”

She reached into her large black leather bag and took out the digital camera she always carried these days. On the bright screen was a photo of the monogrammed cotton shirt they’d found in Ca’ degli Arcangeli. “It’s safe in a private lab in Mestre. Silvio’s there working on it.”

“What does it tell us so far?” Costa asked.

“The blood’s Bella’s. And that piece of cloth belongs to Massiter, surely. Who we also know slept with Bella on more than one occasion on his yacht in order to get closer to her family. Incontrovertible proof, solid DNA. All the stuff you people love these days. Perhaps…”

She stopped, seeing the disappointment on their faces.

“What about the apron?” Peroni asked. “I thought you’d got evidence it had been messed with somehow?”

“It’s been contaminated by Tosi’s lab in Mestre. It could be weeks before we get a proper report.”

“We can’t make an arrest out of that,” Zecchini said with a grimace.

“Why not?” she demanded. “Think it through. Bella’s pregnant. She’s screaming at Massiter to own up to being the father. Perhaps she wants to ditch Uriel and move in with the Englishman. He could have set out to kill her in the house, then murdered Uriel and made it look like he was responsible. Does anyone have a problem with that?”

“In principle, no,” Costa said. What they knew of the facts seemed to support the idea. Just as importantly, it seemed to fit with what Costa understood of Hugo Massiter’s personality. Greed, sexual avarice, ruthlessness… and an agile facility for escaping the blame, pushing it onto others, just as he’d done with Laura Conti and Daniel Forster. “But it’s supposition. There’s not enough hard evidence.”

“What?” she screeched. “To hell with deduction, let’s rely on good old-fashioned chemistry. Bella’s blood is on Massiter’s shirt. If that’s not evidence, I don’t know what is.”

“It’s a shirt that seems to have belonged to Massiter,” Emily pointed out evenly. “Bella could have taken it herself from his yacht. We know she went there. He keeps that apartment in the palazzo too. Even though he only uses it during the day at the moment, he must have clothes there. If you stood up in court and tried to use the shirt as evidence of Massiter’s involvement, you’d get torn to shreds. With good reason. It proves nothing.”

“It’s going to prove everything!” Teresa yelled. “Just wait.”

“What do you mean?” Costa asked.

“I didn’t tell you this. I can’t fit it into the time frame you have, so it seemed irrelevant. But Silvio’s found other evidence on the shirt too. We think there’s DNA from the perpetrator. Sweat, by the looks of it.”

Emily brightened suddenly. “And it’s Massiter’s?”

Teresa didn’t look any of them in the eyes at that moment. “Things aren’t as simple as that. Blood’s really easy to extract. This is a lot harder. Even so, I’m pushing to get some results.”

“When?” Peroni demanded.

She swore quietly, then walked over into a dark corner, leaving the four of them staring at each other in silence, listening to Teresa alternately bullying and wheedling on the phone.

When she came back she looked distinctly downcast. “Even if Silvio pulls out all the stops, the soonest we could get confirmation would be around seven this evening. Chemistry’s like that. It doesn’t lend itself to shortcuts. Sorry…”

“Seven’s too late.” Zecchini stared at the two cops. “Massiter’s safe by then.”

“Then perhaps we just have to accept that he’s won,” Emily said with a marked reluctance. “That this is as good as we’re going to get. Leo will live. We can quietly pass this evidence to the right people at the right time. A few months down the line they could do something with it. Or hand the information on to the media and let them start working.”

“This is a job for us,” Costa said firmly. “Or the Carabinieri. No one else. And either it happens now or it doesn’t happen at all. We all know that.”

Emily smiled. “There. You see? He’s got you too. That’s the way Hugo works. It’s what makes him tick. Not the money. Not the property. It’s the fact that he has a hold over people. He
owns
them. More people than ever. Us too, now. And we’ll get a call one day. A little favour from him. A little something in return.”

Peroni looked baffled. “Why the hell would any of us go along with it?”

“Because he’d be offering something we wanted!” Emily insisted. “For you two, maybe a lead. For me, some work. Who knows?
That’s how it begins
. We mustn’t let this man get any further into our lives, Nic. If he knew we were here… trying to come up with some conspiracy to bring him down, and failing, do you know what he’d feel? It would make him happy. He’d feel validated. He’d know he was
inside
us.”

Costa caught her eye then, wished there were more you could say with a glance. Hugo Massiter was inside her life already. Costa had invited him there.

“So he signs at six,” he said. “And an hour later we get a report that puts him at the murder scene, one no one in their right mind will want to read. Teresa, there has to be a way…”

“No! No! No!” she screeched. “I know what you’re going to say and it’s not possible. I can’t change the laws of physics. Silvio’s stretching everything to the limit as it is.”

They sat in silence. Except from Luca Zecchini, who rocked back and forth on the bench and glowered at each of them in turn. Then, half astonished, half furious, he demanded, “So is that
it
?”

The rest stared at him.

“That’s it,” Costa conceded eventually. “We’ve nothing left.”

“
What
? Leo said something about how you never gave up,” the Carabinieri major complained. “Leo said you could always come up with something.”

“Leo’s not around, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Teresa objected bitterly.

“He told me he didn’t need to be. Maybe I should go round to that hospital room of his, wake him up and tell him how wrong he was. If there’s nothing better to do…”

It was Peroni who spoke next. “There are only so many times we can bang our heads against this wall, Luca.”

Nic Costa’s thoughts kept returning to the couple across the lagoon, and the promise he’d made. He remembered the terror in Laura Conti’s eyes when she believed he’d come from Massiter. Emily was right, as usual. Massiter’s power was that he stayed with those he’d touched, like a virus in the blood. Emily had been closer to Massiter than the rest of them. She’d felt that power, just as Laura Conti and Daniel Forster had. The damage it caused was deep, something to be resented and feared. But with that fear came a need for resolution too. This was the dilemma Laura and the Englishman faced, and had yet to conquer.

Running didn’t work. It hadn’t for Laura Conti and Daniel Forster. It wouldn’t for Emily either. What he’d unwittingly made her do already threatened to destroy the remains of their relationship. He’d seen the dead look in her face outside the cathedral, understood instinctively what it probably meant. She was an ex-FBI agent. When it came to getting the job done, nothing, not personal pride, not self-respect, would have stood in the way, and he should have known that all along.

Costa thought of that great glass hall where a stray bullet had changed all their lives, sent Leo Falcone spinning towards a brush with death, despatched the rest of them on a quest for justice that came at a cost he should have understood from the start.

The palazzo scared him a little. It was too full of memories. Emily in her lovely angel’s guise, with the scarlet wound of the
peperoncini
on her feathered wing, falling under Hugo Massiter’s sway. That lost moment at which the two of them could have escaped everything. And Leo Falcone stricken on the ground, blood seeping from his mouth as Teresa fought to staunch the flow.

He looked the Carabinieri major in the eye, liked the sudden flash of interest he found there. “We only need an hour, for God’s sake. Surely we can stall him for that?”

“You’d think…” Zecchini replied. “But how?”

Nic Costa smiled at the man in the dark suit. “We don’t need to arrest Massiter. We just have to keep him away from signing that contract until Silvio gets some results. Then you’ve got a
prima facie
case for taking him into custody on the spot.”

“But
how
?” Teresa wanted to know.

He didn’t like the idea. He didn’t enjoy breaking his word. There had been a time when Nic Costa would never have countenanced what he was considering next, but the more he thought about it, the more he realised he had no choice.

“By giving Hugo Massiter something he wants even more than the Isola degli Arcangeli.”

A
LBERTO TOSI DISLIKED PUBLIC OCCASIONS. ESPECIALLY one where the host had assembled an entire orchestra, placed it on a podium, and ordered it to play background music to the chink of glasses and the banter of idiots. Music deserved better than that. Had Anna not proved so enthusiastic —
insisted
was, perhaps a better word — the old pathologist would have spent this hot high-summer evening on the terrace of his large apartment home on Sant’ Elena, the quiet, somewhat geriatric island beyond the Biennale Gardens and Castello, enjoying a spritz and the breeze off the lagoon.

Instead he was on the Isola degli Arcangeli, watching a couple of hundred members of the city’s finest prepare to stuff their faces from table after table of rich delicacies supplied, doubtless at great expense, by the Cipriani, and all to mark… what? Tosi was unsure of the answer. To honour their own splendour in all probability. This was, he had soon come to judge, an unpleasantly narcissistic gathering.

Anna, to his disappointment, was part of the show. She was now dressed in a rather short skirt and shiny red silk blouse, the skimpiest clothing her grandfather had ever seen her wear. The John Lennon spectacles were replaced by contact lenses, which gave her a rather glassy-eyed look, Tosi thought, not that it stopped the men despatching inquisitive, admiring glances in her direction.

Had he cared, Tosi, in his old dark work suit, might have felt himself underdressed. Everyone else seemed to be as fixated with their appearance as Anna was. Dinner jackets and evening dresses flitted around him in a constant swirl. Half the splendid, chattering dining rooms of Venice would be empty this night. Their owners had gathered on the Arcangeli’s sad little island to raise their glasses to its supposed rebirth and, more importantly, Tosi felt, to the Englishman who had breathed new life back into the venture. A man who was about to become a kind of modern Doge, honorary lord of the city, in all but title, a grandee elevated by his peers in a symbiotic process — one in which gratitude was both given and received — Tosi was coming to understand only too well.

He’d watched the way Massiter strutted through his audience. A puffed-up peacock of a man, quite unlike most of the upper-class English Tosi had known over the years. At one point he’d wished for the courage to walk up to this newly crowned faux-aristocrat, to point out that sometimes the Venetians tore down the princes they had so warmly elected only a little while before. A screeching mob had cut the throat of Orso Ipato, the first Doge. Marino Faliero had been summarily beheaded by his fellow nobles, and at the age of seventy. Not that creatures like Massiter knew or cared about history. It was a subject for old men these days, though that was not the reason Tosi failed to make the point to his unwanted host. Respect and fear went hand in hand in circles such as these, a fact the old pathologist never let slip from his sharp and capacious memory.

Sometimes he wondered what Venice would be like fifty years hence. He was grateful he wouldn’t be around to witness the transformation. The streets would echo to the gabbled tones of English and Russian and Chinese, anything but the gritty vowels of the Veneto that Tosi still liked to speak at home on Sant’ Elena. The place would be an international zone entirely, run by foreigners for foreigners, with only dependent locals still around to hunt for crumbs.

Alberto Tosi believed he was a civilised man, one who had long understood that the world always changed. But sometimes, when he read the local newspaper and the latest plans to bring ever more hordes of tourists into an already over-choked city, he was unable to shake off the impression that progress was merely an illusion, a catchword designed to disguise the cruel trick being played upon the many by the few.

There was precious little space for self-respect in this new Venice, a quality Tosi regarded as essential, a badge of pride to be worn by everyone, from the man who made your coffee in the morning, carefully working the valves and pipes of his Gaggia machine, to an ageing city pathologist who was still more than a little disgruntled about being railroaded around by the authorities when it suited them. Without self-respect, one was simply a wage slave for the faceless figures who seemed to own everything, control everything, pulling the city’s strings from inside their banks and accountants’ offices. Tosi had no problems with the idea of a society divided by class, provided each level had its own reason to survive. This new world unjustly divided its occupants into winners and losers, the few and the many, making a pretence of egalitarianism when, in truth, it was more close and tight and viciously elitist than the ancient regime it sought to supplant with its new cabal of rogues.

Massiter, a master rogue, as all knew and none dared say, played this game like a maestro. The Arcangeli had always been discerning about those they allowed beyond the outstretched arm of their iron angel and its torch, which now burned more brightly than ever. The Englishman decreed that the gates to the island be open, for the first time Alberto Tosi could remember. This evening anyone in Venice was welcome to walk through to admire Massiter’s coronation.

Few, beyond Massiter’s large and growing circle of hangers-on and succubi, seemed to have bothered. Tosi knew what the locals on Murano were like. They hated newcomers. They’d loathed the Arcangeli for decades. Nothing, not money, not influence, would make them feel warm towards Hugo Massiter. This was an adventure beyond them, the arrival of the first speck of canker from across the water that would, one day, consume their impoverished little island and spit out in its place the same gaudy, transient hoopla found everywhere else in the city.