David Hewson - The Lizard's Bite

“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 like 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.”