David Hewson: The Lizard's Bite

“The Braccis are a violent family. They always settle their scores in the end.”

Falcone concurred. “Which everyone would know, of course. And if Aldo turned up at an event like that, dead drunk, the keys in his pocket, screaming nonsense, against Hugo Massiter of all people, who would have believed him? It would be one more piece of evidence against the brother, however much he’d try to protest. His class, his character, would convict him from the outset. It’s a clever trick. To turn a man’s own anger and reputation against himself. It was unfortunate that he saw you first. That you were the one he chose.”

“I was by the door. The first person he met. You seemed preoccupied at the time. Inattentive, I might say.”

“I’m sorry. I wish I’d spent more time with you. I honestly do.”

She asked, “Is that it? Can we go now?”

“Keys,” he murmured, seeing again the image of the cabin in the mountains. “Or more accurately, a single key. Uriel’s for the fornace door. That was what puzzled me all along. That was what tricked me and I doubt I would ever have seen past it either, not without . . .”

A meeting with his younger self, in a place of their own joint imagination, returning to the pivotal event that had made Leo Falcone who he was.

“Keys are pieces of metal,” she said. “You’re better with human beings.”

“Part of it was filed down,” he went on. “Did I mention that?”

Raffaella looked hard at her watch and said, “Leo. The boat.”

“The boat can wait. It was filed, and I couldn’t understand why. Or rather I saw only one reason, viewed everything from a single direction. Uriel was dead inside a locked room. The only key he owned had been tampered with to ensure it didn’t work. It seemed so obvious. This was done to keep him in. There could be no other reason. Yet . . .”

“Leo!” she shouted, tapping her wrist.

“I was so stupid.”

He looked her full in the face, knowing now he couldn’t be wrong, that in this deserted graveyard, with Uriel Arcangelo’s corpse a metre deep in the earth beside him, there would be a resolution of a kind, though he was not sure whether it was one he wanted, or where, in the end, it might lead.

“The key was filed to keep him out, Raffaella,” he said, his voice rising unintentionally. “It was Bella you wanted dead. Not Uriel. Never Uriel. You hoped to send her into the fornace, where the burners were fixed to rise and rise, with an apron that would catch fire if Fate decided. You had to make sure Uriel couldn’t get in if he tried. So you filed the key. Uriel, if he found his way there, would blame the lock or the drink. Then he’d look for Bella’s keys, and fail to find them. Eventually he’d wake the person closest to him. His sister. You’d stall, I imagine. You’d an idea how long it would take for the furnace to do its job. And by the time you arrived to open the door, Bella would be dead. Victim of an unfortunate industrial accident no one would ever be able to explain entirely, but one that carried no suspicion of wrongdoing at all.”

She leaned back on the bench and closed her eyes, saying nothing.

“But Bella, or Uriel, picked the wrong apron. The furnace was in worse condition than you knew. From there, everything else followed. Bella’s return to the house and your inevitable response. Your need to place the blame on Aldo Bracci, first. Then, when matters were beyond your control, Bracci’s murder and that of Gianfranco Randazzo. Massiter’s murder too, which happily occurred after the sale of the island you hate so much. So many deaths from such a simple mistake which no one, least of all you, could have foreseen.”

A trio of gulls screamed overhead, fighting over some scrap of food. Then there was silence. The two of them were, he knew, alone now in the cemetery, forgotten by any distant caretaker huddled in his watch house, charged to guard this island of the dead after the sun fell.

“Do they haunt you, Raffaella?” he asked.

IT HAD BEEN THREE DAYS BEFORE THE QUESTURA HAD let Costa and Peroni out of their grip. Then they let go in an instant, brushing the pair of them out of the building with an admonition never to return. There would be no reprisals. Cases like Hugo Massiter’s had to be buried in their entirety or not at all.

So Nic Costa bade farewell to Venice and, with a weary sense of acceptance, caught the first flight to Rome, one he chose because it landed at Ciampino, the small city airport, not far from the old Appian Way.

A place he both missed and feared, not knowing what would greet him at the old farmhouse that had, during their too-brief time together there, felt like home once more.

She was outside, working on the grapes that hung in black and green festoons over the terrace, when the cab deposited him at the drive. A wicker basket full of fruit stood by the door. Emily was dressed in jeans and an old cotton tee-shirt, her blonde hair tied back to reveal her face, which was now a shade paler than he recalled in Venice.

He dumped his bags on the old paving stones and thrust out the bouquet he’d picked up at the airport: roses and freesias and anything else that smelled sweet. She looked at them and laughed.

“That’s the second bouquet I’ve had in a couple of weeks,” she said. “Are you trying to spoil me?”

“I don’t . . .”

He shook his head. She pointed to the timbered inner terrace. The bunch of peperoncini Gianni Peroni had bought from Piero Scacchi on Sant’ Erasmo hung there, the flesh of the peppers slowly wrinkling, preparing for winter.

Emily nodded at the basket of fruit, then sat at the table, where Costa joined her. “I thought I’d better pick them. There are so many. Those vines need attention. You can’t just leave things to grow the way they want, year after year. What do you do with all these grapes anyway?”

“My father used to make wine. Just vino novello . Simple farmer’s wine. It’s beautiful for three months and then it’s vinegar. He never had time to show me how. Or I never had time to learn. One or the other. I can’t remember which.”

“You’ve still got two weeks’ leave. You could learn.”

No. He’d thought this through already.

“I promised you a vacation. Anywhere. Tuscany. I don’t care. Just tell me.”

“Here,” she said immediately. “Nowhere else. This is where we need to start, Nic. I need you to show me the places you knew when you grew up. I want a couple of bikes so you can take me cycling along the Appian Way. And now I want to learn to make wine. Is that OK with you?”

He wanted to hold her and didn’t dare. He wanted to tell her what he was thinking and couldn’t find the words.

“I didn’t know if you’d still be here,” he said. “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d gone.”

Emily Deacon let her head roll back, untied her hair and shook it free. “You obviously don’t quite know me well enough yet,” she said softly. “I am not, nor will I ever be, in the habit of leaving a man quietly. If I go you will hear screaming and language you have, previously, never associated with a woman of my upbringing. Do I make myself clear?”

He took her hands across the table.

“Good,” she added. “Would you have hated me? If I’d left?”

“I’d have missed you. I’d have hated myself.” He peered into her sharp, inquisitive eyes. “I’m so sorry. I never realised we were in so deep. Or what I was asking. Can you ever forgive that?”

There was a faint, wry smile. “Forgiving you was never going to be the problem, Nic. It’s me. I don’t know when or if I can forgive myself.”