David Hewson: The Lizard's Bite

He didn’t believe that to be true. His injuries were temporary, something to be overcome, not resented. Besides . . . “Forget about me, Raffaella. I was interested in you. What will happen now?”

She glanced at Michele and Gabriele. Her brothers were already on the jetty, waiting for the next boat.

“They have their share of Massiter’s money. I have mine. They have the property he wrote into the contract too. The offer of premises. A shop, not one in the best part of town, but now they have the funds to change that. They’ll try to make glass again. I don’t think anything can stop them.”

Nothing short of bankruptcy, he thought.

“And you?” he asked.

She turned to face him, frank, wise, concerned. “I don’t know. What do you suggest?”

The question threw him. “You can do what you want, surely?”

“I can,” she replied, nodding. “For the first time in my life. And yet . . . I don’t know. I’ve spent so long trying to hold the family together on that damned island. Now it’s gone. I’m free. The trouble is freedom doesn’t feel quite how I expected.”

The boat had arrived. Her brothers were getting ready to board, not even bothering to look back.

“Let’s catch the next one, shall we?” she said, watching them. “They don’t need me anymore. Or that’s what they think.” A thought occurred to her. “I could travel, I suppose.”

“Will you?”

She was staring at him again, a look that made Leo Falcone restless, unsure of himself. “Probably not. I . . .” This seemed difficult for her to say. “I’ve been trying something new,” she confessed. “Thinking about myself for a change. Not them. Not the island.”

“You make it sound a crime. It isn’t.”

“I know that. But it still prompts awkward thoughts.”

Her dark eyes seemed torn between watching for his reactions and being afraid of what he might notice. “I realise now that I’ve never been wanted. That’s all. Never on the island. There was nothing there for any of us but duty. Not love. None of us ever had that, even in the beginning, I think. We were part of Angelo’s dream, a dream that was about him alone. About making the Arcangelo name immortal somehow. He was a stupid, cruel old man. I know I shouldn’t say that of my own father, but it’s true. He was willing to sacrifice our lives for his. And look where it got us. Michele and Gabriele still chasing some phantom. Me an old maid.”

He had to laugh. It was such a ludicrous idea. “I don’t think anyone would describe you as that.”

“I wasn’t talking about how people saw me,” she said immediately. “I was talking about how I view myself.” She hesitated. “I want to be wanted, Leo. I want to be loved. Just for me. Nothing else at all. Now that’s selfish.”

He grimaced. “I’ve never been much of an expert at love,” he confessed.

“That makes two of us,” she said.

There was a faint hue on her cheek. Makeup perhaps. Or the hint of a blush.

“You’ll need help,” she pointed out. “You may not like that idea but it’s a fact. I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ve never seen much of Rome. I certainly don’t want to stay here. We could just call it friendship. Nothing more. Unless . . . People change with time. Who knows?”

It was a temptation, more enticing than any Hugo Massiter could ever have thrown on the table.

But the child’s screams rang around his head.

“You could go back to university,” he suggested. “You said you loved Paris.”

“I did,” she answered, blushing openly now, worried, perhaps, she’d overstepped the mark. “Not now. University is for the young, I think.”

“But what a person learns . . .” he mused. “That stays with you. All your life.”

It was criminology in his case. Leo Falcone had never been in any doubt about his own future career.

“You studied chemistry, I believe?” he asked.

The question took her by surprise. “Did I tell you that?”

He spoke to the child inside him, then waited, satisfied by its sudden silence.

“No,” Leo Falcone said. “I checked. It’s easy to discover facts about people. The difficulty lies in understanding what they mean.”

She gazed down at him, puzzled, a little annoyed perhaps by the way he’d turned the direction of the conversation.

“You have so much spare time at the moment, Leo. I’m flattered you should spend some of it on me.”

“Was it an easy career choice? I can’t quite see you as a chemist.”

“I was an Arcangelo,” she said. “We were all supposed to be a part of my father’s plan. I would have preferred to have studied literature. He was implacably opposed, naturally. What use are books or poetry when you’re staring into a furnace?”

“You were a good student, I imagine. A conscientious one. A talented one too.”

She nodded, flattered. “I’d like to think so. But I never completed my degree. Paris was expensive. The money wasn’t there. Why are we discussing this? Is it relevant?”

“I think I know how your brother died,” he said. “Would you like to hear?”

She stared at him, mournful, disappointed. “Haven’t we given the grave enough of our time today?”

“It won’t take long.”

“Fine,” she snapped. “But if we’re to speak about the dead, let’s at least allow them to hear for themselves.”

Before he could protest, she took hold of the wheelchair handles and propelled him back toward the graveyard, beyond the line of cedars, rapidly reaching Uriel’s plot, with its too-white marble headstone.

The place was deserted. There was not so much as a single grave-digger working on one of the neat brown plots. Falcone recalled what she had said about the vaporetti. The service stopped at the end of the afternoon. The cemetery island had no need of night visitors.

TERESA LUPO SAT AT THE BATTERED TABLE FEELING cold and stupid. They’d been all over the island. Hours of searching, calling, hoping. Now they were back where they always started: Piero Scacchi’s deserted and depressing picnic area. And for what?

For a dog. An animal that thought it could swim the breadth of the lagoon to escape the madness on the Isola degli Arcangeli. Only, if it survived, to find its master missing, missing for a long time, it seemed to her. There were, as far as the papers appeared to know, no extenuating circumstances, no mitigation Scacchi could plead. A matto from the lagoon had shot dead one of the city’s leading citizens at the moment of his apotheosis, with half of Venice’s prosecco -swilling glitterati looking on. It was impudent. Downright bad taste. Scacchi, being a lunatic from the edge of the lagoon, would be lucky to see fresh air in less than ten years, however much the young couple, Daniel Forster and Laura Conti, pleaded on his behalf. At least they seemed to have escaped prosecution. Teresa was glad about that. They looked like people who’d suffered, unjustly for the most part. From what she’d read they’d never recover what they’d lost. Massiter’s lawyers had seen to that. But no one seemed much interested in activating the warrants that had been issued for their arrest. That would upturn too many old stones long settled into the dirt, with plenty of unwanted creatures lurking underneath. The pair were, at least, free to start their lives anew.

“Dog! Dog! Xerxes!”

Peroni was muddied up to his knees from wandering through the fields and the marshy land, bellowing for the animal. She wondered what he expected might happen. Would the creature suddenly march out of the lush grass wilderness at the lagoon’s edge, wagging its tail?