David Hewson - The Lizard's Bite

“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.”

ALBERTO 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.