David Hewson - The Lizard's Bite

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

HE 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?”

AN 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.”