David Hewson - The Lizard's Bite

“He said that himself,” Peroni pointed out.

“Exactly,” Falcone agreed amiably. “Which is one reason to believe he’s telling us the truth. Now we know what he is, let’s just concentrate on the case we do have. I ran Piero Scacchi’s name through the station records. Not a thing, except for some noncommittal interview when his cousin got killed. About all that reveals is the fact the two of them apparently weren’t close enough for the old man to leave Piero anything in his will. Everything went to Forster. It was probably forged. Is there an officer on the island we could pump?”

Costa shook his head. “Not a soul. Apparently Sant’ Erasmo doesn’t merit a police presence.”

Peroni laughed. “You’re kidding me. This place is huge.”

“Yes,” Costa agreed. “But the population’s just a couple of hundred people. I guess there’s no point.”

“My kind of town,” Peroni said.

“We’ll have to make up our own minds then.” Falcone looked disappointed. “Here’s one other piece of information I got out of records this morning, while you two were taking breakfast in bed. Bella’s brother has a record.”

Costa thought of Aldo Bracci, miserable as sin, in his grubby little factory, getting eaten up by poverty and resentment.

“I would be lying if I said I was surprised,” Peroni observed.

“So what’s your guess?” Falcone asked. “Thieving? Violence?”

“Either,” the big man answered. “Or both.”

Falcone pulled himself upright. It was a struggle. He looked old under the bright lagoon sun, somehow. Nic Costa couldn’t help but wonder whether the cunning inspector, a man who’d taught him more about police work than anyone he knew, was his customary self.

“Both,” Falcone declared. “And one more. A long time ago, so much it may be quite irrelevant.”

The two cops waited. A semblance of doubt was buzzing around Falcone’s head, like some unwanted, unrecognised insect wondering whether to bite.

“Aldo Bracci got interviewed for sexually assaulting his sister. When he was nineteen and Bella was four years younger. It never went anywhere. Cases like that rarely did in those days. But the file suggests it was the real thing. With at least some acquiescence on Bella’s part. It was a neighbour who filed the report, not someone from the family.”

“Nice family,” Peroni grumbled.

“But is it anything more than that?” Costa asked.

“We don’t know,” Falcone admitted. “But think about this. Bracci would surely have had access to Bella’s keys. He’d have known that island. His only alibi is in the family. The opportunity’s there. Bella and Aldo could have conspired to kill Uriel. Then Aldo turned on her. But why?”

He frowned and stared towards the island. The launch was heading for a rickety old jetty fronting a dusty path that led to a small farmhouse. They were still on the Venice side of Sant’ Erasmo, but far from any other sign of habitation. Costa could just make out the familiar yellow sign of a vaporetto jetty near a low church and some houses a good kilometre or more north. Then there was the sound of a dog’s bark, a lively, amusing sound, not the aggressive threat one might have expected out in this backwater.

Peroni leapt off the boat first, with surprising agility given his bulk. Costa followed him. Falcone ordered Goldoni to wait with the vessel until they returned.

A black spaniel was bounding down the path, wagging its tail. Peroni, always a sucker for animals, bent and chucked the creature under the muzzle, beaming into its dark, watery eyes.

“What a dog,” he sighed, admiration written all over his ugly face. “They’ve got ones like this back home. Not pets, mind. Working dogs. Hunting dogs. Those dogs could find anything, anywhere.”

“Shame it doesn’t do police work,” Falcone sniffed, keeping a safe distance between himself and the animal.

A man was walking down the path now, someone just a little less heavy than Peroni, a few years younger too. He wore a torn white shirt and grubby black trousers. He had a full head of black, slightly greasy hair, a round, expressionless face, and, in his left hand, a shotgun, broken, held loose and low as if it were a familiar item, one as happy in his grip as a household tool.

“Piero Scacchi?” Costa asked.

Peroni was still clucking over the dog, stroking its sleek black head with a gigantic, gentle hand.

“That’s me,” the man said. He could see they were looking at the gun. “It’s duck season soon. I was cleaning it.”

He nodded at Peroni, surprised by the dog’s warm welcome.

“He likes you.”

Costa flashed the card. “Police.”

Piero Scacchi scowled down at the animal.

“And I thought I’d taught you well,” he told it.

THE CITY MORGUE WAS A LOW, ONE-STOREY EXTENSION to the main Questura behind Piazzale Roma, a grey, unmemorable building that made Teresa Lupo pine for her own offices in the centro storico . Alberto Tosi, the pathologist, had a view. The double windows of his room gave onto the factories and refineries of Mestre bristling across the channel of water separating Venice from the mainland, ugly, out-of-place accretions that pumped dirt and smoke into the atmosphere constantly. Cars and buses crawled up the nearby ramp that led to the terminus of the road system once it worked its way over the bridge next to the railway line. The vista was uniformly glum, even in the bright summer sun. On balance, Teresa Lupo thought, recalling the simple expanse of plain courtyard outside her own office, she had the better deal.

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.