David Hewson - The Lizard's Bite

Ten minutes later, over a strong double macchiato, she passed the bag to Teresa Lupo, who looked at her, worried, short for words. Emily couldn’t remember a time when the two of them had been like this, uneasy in one another’s company, unable to make even a scrap of small talk.

She handed over the memory pod.

“Tell the Carabinieri I didn’t have a chance to look at them but I don’t think Massiter’s smart enough to have encrypted anything. He doesn’t seem that sophisticated when it comes to computers. Also I suspect he feels he’s inviolate when he’s in that little room of his. I’ll take another look around later.”

She checked herself. Overconfidence was a habitual mistake in the business she was trying to relearn. In truth, Hugo Massiter seemed to regard himself as inviolate most of the time.

“Will do.” Teresa nodded. “Are you OK?”

“Fine. And you? Any news from Nic?”

“They’re getting somewhere, I think. He sounded positive. They’re leaving the Carabinieri to it for a while. Chasing something else.”

“That’s good.” She glanced at the carrier bag. “Some of that’s old. Do you think we might have Bella there?”

“We’ve got good lab facilities. Silvio found them. Costing a fortune but this is the private sector. I can get results faster than I could back home. It’s amazing what money can do.”

“It surely is.”

The thought had been nagging her all along. “And you’ve DNA for Bella?”

Teresa nodded vigorously. “From the house. It’s unmistakable.”

“And anything else? If there were other women?”

She shrugged. “It would be handy to have a database of every last woman of screwable age in Venice, of course. That would speed things up no end. But for now I guess we’ll just have to try to factor them out. It would only tell us about his habits, of course. Bella’s the only other sample we’ve got.”

Emily Deacon thought about this. Actions had consequences. None of them knew what they would be at that moment. She’d been taught to think ahead, to put markers in place that could be recovered later, used to prove who you were, what you’d done.

She took a clean tissue out of her pocket, put it to her mouth and carefully deposited a ball of saliva there. Then she held the tissue out in front of her.

“Give me an evidence bag. Then you can factor out that.”

TOURISTS RARELY STUMBLED ON SAN FRANCISCO DELLA Vigna. The church lay in a small campo close by the Celestia vaporetto stop, just a couple of minutes away from the hospital. But even Gianfranco Randazzo, who had never set foot in the place, and regarded this backwater of Castello as a quartiere well beneath his standing, was surprised by what lay behind Palladio’s severe white frontage. This was a Franciscan monastery still, more than five hundred years after its foundation. Beyond the gloomy interior, with its Lombardo sculpture cycle and canvases by Veronese and Bellini, lay a connected pair of quiet cloisters formed by two storeys of cells and offices. It was a community that seemed to come from another world, one untouched by the pressures of modern life. Doves flitted through the bars of shade made by the angular lines of columns. Flowers grew around the statue of Saint Francis that stood in the sun at the centre of the first cloister, opposite the cell they’d allocated him. Here, during the brief moments he was alone in the tiny bare room or seated in the shade of the colonnades, was a kind of peace, some guarantee of anonymity. The Questura had left him with no choice in the matter anyway. Someone had been pulling strings to keep him out of the way. He would remain in San Francisco della Vigna until the internal investigation, which he’d been promised would deliver nothing more than an admonition, was complete.

The worst part was the company. Two Questura jokers, Lavazzi and Malipiero, men he’d learned to despise over the years for their laziness and casual insolence, were deputed to be close by most of the time during the day, and were replaced by a changing cycle of equally dull drones each evening. Now, with Randazzo unable to pull rank, their efforts at insubordination took new directions. Randazzo had grown tired of their vicious personal cracks after just a couple of hours. The prospect of a long stay in the monastery with these two was inconceivable. He would, before long, go over their heads and demand some new companions. But not just yet, because Gianfranco Randazzo had, in his days inside the monastery, failed to answer satisfactorily a question that had been haunting him since he’d been forced into this temporary exile. Were this duo here to keep him safe from the outside world? Or did the miserable pair really see themselves as jailers, ordered to keep him close in case Randazzo felt like fleeing?

The last was ridiculous. Randazzo was aware of how many important men, Massiter above all, he had served that night in the palazzo. It was inconceivable such men wouldn’t repay the favour. Venice ran on rules, private, unwritten rules, but rigid ones nevertheless. Without rules, the place would descend into chaos. And one rule was inviolate. Debts were repaid in the end, always.

Malipiero had just spent an hour or more complaining about the fact that the Franciscans didn’t have a single TV set in the place.

Randazzo looked at him and asked, “Why don’t you try reading?”

“Huh!”

He looked as if the very idea itself were poisonous. Randazzo had managed to get through a couple of books in his time in the cell. Dry volumes on some arcane aspects of Italian law that he’d made a note to read once they told him what was happening. The books made him feel better, and contained some awkward truths he could throw back at a few city men should they need reminding of what he was owed. This entire episode was a necessary diversion in his career. He appreciated that. It didn’t mean he couldn’t profit from the experience.

“Books can help you get on,” he told Malipiero.

“Helped you a lot,” Lavazzi sneered.

The two men—Lavazzi and Malipiero—looked remarkably alike, almost like brothers. Both were around thirty-five, a little on the short side, running to fat, their corpulent frames now squeezed inside cheap dark blue suits. They were the kind of men who ruined a decent commissario’s statistics, until he turned on them, kicked them back out on the streets with orders to get some work done. Then the petty crooks didn’t stop coming through the door, guilty and innocent, until Lavazzi and Malipiero got bored again and returned to drifting from bar to bar, bumming beers and panini.

“Why don’t you two just go for a walk?” Randazzo suggested. “It’s ridiculous being here all the time.”

“Those Bracci brothers are very pissed off,” Lavazzi replied. “You blew away their old man, in front of all those people. Can you blame them?”

Randazzo felt his temper begin to flare. “I put down an animal who’d taken a woman hostage and was waving a weapon about. It was prudent. If I’d done nothing, who knows what would have happened?”

Malipiero waved a sweaty palm at him. “Don’t want to hear. Don’t want to know. This is not for us to judge. We’ve just been told to stick with you and that’s what we do. I can’t believe a man of your rank would suggest we disobey orders.”

“Incredible,” Lavazzi replied, shaking his head. “Makes you wonder what the world’s coming to. No discipline. That’s the problem.”

“This is boring . . .” Randazzo began.

“You’re telling me!” Lavazzi yelled.