David Hewson - The Lizard's Bite

“What about him?”

She was pointing down to the quayside where an old, rather shabby boat, with an equally shabby man at the wheel, was docking near the warehouse. A small mountain of grey material occupied part of its meagre hold, alongside a pile of firewood, thin twigs, meagre kindling, the kind they used out in the little shacks of the lagoon. In the bow lay a small black dog, seemingly asleep.

The sight puzzled Tosi. Then he saw the Sant’ Erasmo marking on the stern.

“He’s just a matto making a delivery. Wood and ash, by the looks of things. They use them in the furnace. Not for much longer from what I hear . . .”

She wasn’t listening, which disappointed Tosi, a man not averse to gossip, of which there was plenty at the moment. Instead, Teresa Lupo was on the phone, anxious for some news, disappointed when she seemed not to receive it.

Her eyes had moved to the house. Some figures were walking towards the front door, watched by the shabby boatman. These were the type of men Tosi recognised. Plain-clothed police officers, from elsewhere, not Venice, since Albert Tosi prided himself on the fact that he knew by sight every last person on the city force.

They had two people with them, a man and a woman, dressed in poor rural clothes, like the shabby boatman. Two people who were handcuffed, hands to the front, a cruel and unnecessary action, Tosi thought, since neither showed any sign of resistance.

Teresa turned away and stared at the furnace. It looked like new. The stonework had been cleaned. The long show windows were shiny and spotless. Soon the trinket sellers would arrive, Tosi guessed. Everyone knew what Massiter was like. He wouldn’t allow glassmaking on such valuable real estate for long.

“Did you really sign Uriel’s death off as spontaneous combustion?” she asked, apparently out of the blue.

“No,” he answered with a coy, sly reticence.

“Why not?”

“You made me think better of it. Sometimes we have a tendency to overanalyse. A man burns to death in a furnace consumed by fire. There are unexplained details, but in the end I remained unconvinced by Anna’s efforts. She’s a good girl. A little too enthusiastic at times. The young rely on their imagination too much. Age teaches one to rely on hard fact.”

She was regarding him closely, looking for some emotion, it seemed.

“It could have made things awkward too,” she suggested. “An unusual finding such as that would have attracted attention. Invited others to look, perhaps.”

“I agree,” he said, and raised his glass. “To the unexplained!”

She was, he was coming to believe, a very attractive woman. Not physically, but in her personality. A difficult woman, though. One he would not wish to be around for long.

Teresa Lupo had an important point to make too. He could see that from the sudden serious look in her face.

“I hope you don’t mind me talking shop,” she went on.

“Not at all. Let me do the same. What about that material I gave you? Have you a report back from your magic machine in Rome?”

“No,” she replied grumpily.

“Ah.” He hoped there was some expression of sympathy on his face.

“Those samples you gave me were contaminated when we got them,” she complained. “You should kick a few family backsides in that lab of yours in Mestre.”

He laughed, unsure of her point. “Contaminated with what?”

She paused, as if she were hunting for the name, then said, “Ketone.”

Alberto Tosi pulled a pained face. Some of the chemicals they had to work with these days . . .

“Horrible stuff. Toxic. Highly flammable too, though very good at its job.”

He sighed. Sometimes you had to tell the truth. There really was no point in beating about the bush.

“I must confess something, Teresa. The samples I gave you were just that. Samples. The lab in Mestre did nothing to them. Nothing. As I endeavoured to explain when we first met, this was a closed case. There seemed no reason. What you had was what came straight from the foundry over there.”

She stared at him, astonished, and, it seemed to Tosi, more than a little worried too. “You did nothing to clean away the foam?” she asked.

“Not a thing. Why should we?”

Teresa Lupo was gazing at him with an expression of frank amazement. Alberto Tosi felt lost, unable to offer any comment that would make a difference.

“Then Uriel was murdered,” she said softly, almost to herself. “And I know how,” she added, then excused herself and began to stride towards the house, pushing through the crowd, punching her phone as she went.

HUGO MASSITER STOOD IN FRONT OF THE OCCHIO, the bulging glass eye, surveying the expanse of the lagoon. The three remaining Arcangeli sat in silence at the old family table, surrounded on both sides by lawyers. His. Theirs. Not that the difference mattered. Massiter knew the legal profession better than any fading Murano dynasty. There were, in his view, two kinds of lawyers. Those seeking agreement. And those seeking delay. In his time he’d used both. But only the former had been brought into the negotiations over the island, for him and, with a quiet, subtle stealth, for the Arcangeli too. In truth, a satisfactory conclusion—by which he meant a conclusion satisfactory to him—had never been in doubt.

He cast a cynical glance at the crowd below. Suits and evening dresses, caparisoned cattle come for the free food and drink and the chance to touch the new emperor’s robe. It seemed an age now since the evening of the carnival gala and the death in the palazzo next door. People like these had short memories. As long as the Massiter name was on the way up, they’d be happy clinging to his coattails, hurrahing all the way. Nothing mattered but money and success. With those, a man could act as he liked. As his nature told him.

Then he caught a commotion in the crowd by the door, saw Emily Deacon fighting to push her way through, a fixed, anxious look on her attractive face, and recalled, briefly, the night before, trying to isolate what feelings he had from the practical issues uppermost in his mind. It had been a night of disappointment, if he were honest with himself. He enjoyed only two kinds of women: the averse and the enthusiastic. Either way you got a little fight, which was necessary to his pleasure. Emily fulfilled neither requirement. She was a woman of duty, and duty always bored him.

Nevertheless, he’d hear her out. There’d be some interest there.

Beaming, he turned away from the shining window and its glorious view, turned his smile on the room, even the miserable, mute Michele, with his dead eye and frozen cheek, and boomed, “Oh my! Such long faces! Why? You all have your snouts deep in the Massiter trough now. You’re rich. Millions, Michele. And . . .” He walked round, behind the man, briefly placed a patronising, magisterial hand on his shoulder, keeping it firmly there even as Michele flinched. “ . . . that little lockup in the city, a shop to sell your trinkets to the hoi polloi. What more could a Murano man ask?”

“Don’t push me,” Michele muttered.

Massiter strode to the head of the table—the master’s position—then sat in the high-backed chair there, surveying them, judging them. Miserable Michele. Lost Gabriele. And the woman, Raffaella, who seemed willing to go along with whatever humiliating solution Massiter could extract, provided the family survived, an intact bundle of visible misery.

“I’m only pushing you towards wealth,” Massiter said with half a yawn. “Which hereabouts equates with happiness, naturally. Just a small thank-you wouldn’t be out of place. And here’s one more piece of generosity . . .”