The Lizard's Bite

THE TWO OF THEM HAD RUN INTO THE BROAD, BUSY main street of the Via Garibaldi, threaded their way past the vegetable seller’s boat, out into the back alleys of Castello and over the footbridge to the deserted island of San Pietro. She had to scream at the Murano boat to hold it at the jetty. Twenty minutes later they were in Raffaella Arcangelo’s laundry room, looking at an old enamel bowl stained pink with bloodied water, a tangle of cotton just visible.

“I didn’t think it was important. Everything’s been so busy I never even got around to looking at the laundry baskets until yesterday. It seemed irrelevant somehow.”

“What seemed irrelevant? Calm down, Raffaella.”

“Oh God. I’m so stupid! I, I, I . . .” She looked distraught at the idea she’d missed something. Raffaella had made that promise to Leo. From what Teresa could see, it still counted.

“Slowly, please. And calmly.”

She sighed. “Uriel had an accident in the foundry five or six years ago. An awful accident. He was lucky he wasn’t hurt more. All the same, it damaged his hearing. I felt so sorry for him. It also meant he had a bad sense of smell and nosebleeds from time to time. Terrible nosebleeds. There was nothing he could do but sit there with a cold wet cloth and wait for it stop. After a while, when it was happening two or three times a week, I never thought about it anymore. He was a man. It was just more washing. He just threw anything with blood on it straight into the laundry basket without thinking. He didn’t know how hard it was to get those stains out. I told him. But . . .”

Teresa looked again at the bowl. “You found a shirt with blood on it?”

“It was nothing unusual! It was just like I’d seen before!” Raffaella gazed back at them with sad, apologetic eyes. “I can’t believe I could have been so stupid.”

“No problem,” Teresa said.

“But it’s been soaking there since yesterday.”

Silvio Di Capua was eyeing the object in the water confidently. “You could put that in a drawer for the next twenty-five years as it is and we’d still be able to get DNA out of it. And in twenty-five years . . .”

“Heel, boy,” Teresa cautioned.

Silvio couldn’t stop babbling. “More than that too. If this was part of the killing, you can bet there’s evidence on there we can’t even see either. Sweat from his hands. Saliva. We can get them both.”

“Both?” Raffaella asked, blinking.

“Oh, you bet!” Silvio went on, eyeing the shirt greedily. “If that doesn’t ID the victim and the culprit, it’s going to be very unusual indeed.”

Teresa had to leap forward to stop Silvio from snatching the wet shirt from the bowl. She got a grumpy glance for her pains.

“Let’s deal with this one step at a time,” she said firmly. “Can you show me where you found this, please?”

They went up one flight of stairs and followed her down one of the mansion’s dark, dank corridors, to a large bedroom that must once have seemed regal. Now the wallpaper was old and peeling, the bed still roughly made from the last time anyone had slept in it.

“I haven’t been able to get round to doing anything in here,” Raffaella told them. “It didn’t seem right somehow . . . .”

“That makes it all the better for us,” Teresa replied, walking round, staring at the walls, checking the old raffia laundry basket that was now empty.

She stopped by the window, which looked out onto the rusting corrugated iron roof of one side of the foundry. Then she reached for the latch, threw up the glass, let some welcome air into the room and leaned as far out over the windowsill as she dared.

With one hard push she got herself back inside and turned back to look at the adjoining wall. In an ordinary investigation this would have been the first place to start. But this case was closed before anyone got round to opening it. Even Leo hadn’t seen fit to take a closer look, but perhaps he was distracted by other matters, personal and intellectual.

“Here . . .”

She pointed at some faint, tiny mark on the wall, something so indistinct Silvio and Raffaella had to come close and squint to see it.

Then Raffaella gasped, fell back onto the bed, hands to her mouth, eyes filling with tears and shock.

“Don’t pass out on me, please,” Teresa pleaded. “I need you. This is very standard minimal blood spray consistent, at this height, with a single blow to the head. Hard instrument, maybe a small hammer. My guess is . . .”

She moved Silvio in front of her, mimicking, in her own mind, the position she believed Bella must have taken when attacked.

“ . . . Bella was here, standing, when he came for her. One powerful blow to the skull.”

She swung the imaginary weapon with her hand, landing it softly on the side of Silvio’s head where fringe met bald scalp, just behind the ear.

“If he hit her repeatedly, we’d have had much more blood than this. One would be enough to render her unconscious anyway. If he did it well, there’d be no noise either. Who else was in the house?”

Raffaella raised her head, her eyes wet with tears. “I was here all that night. Michele and Gabriele too. It’s not possible. We would have heard something. We would have woken up.”

“Everybody thinks that. You’d be amazed how often people in the next room sleep through murder. If there’s no fighting, no gun . . .” This was a big, old cavern of a place. Dark, with plenty of places to hide. He could have waited for her in the bedroom, pounced with that one crashing blow, then carried her downstairs without anyone knowing. It wouldn’t have been hard. “If he planned it, everything could have happened very quickly. Without a struggle, or there would have been signs. Then he moves on to Uriel and finds himself a scapegoat.”

“All the same . . .”

“Trust me,” Teresa insisted, then went back to the window. “You need a ladder, Silvio. Out there, at the very end of the corrugated iron, you’ll find some kind of tool. I can’t work out what it is. Something from the furnace, I guess, some kind of spike or maybe a hammer. He must have thrown it through the open window thinking it would reach the water. It was dark. He had no way of knowing it never got there. Now let’s look at that shirt.”

They followed her back to the kitchen. Teresa Lupo went to the sink and carefully poured off the liquid, leaving the fabric lying in a damp, wrinkled heap in the base of the bowl.

Then she looked at Silvio. “I want you to take this and the hammer, or whatever it is, over to the lab in Mestre straightaway, tell them to drop everything else and run rapid DNA tests on anything they can find. Not just blood. Sweat. Saliva. Urine. Anything. And you stay there breathing down their necks until there’s an answer. I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care who you have to yell at.”

“The pleasure’s all mine,” he said.

“It will be, once you’ve been up on that roof. And after that,” she continued, glancing at Raffaella, “you and I are going to visit Leo. He should be out of that machine by now. I can probably get a sneak look at the scans.”

She was unravelling the damp material with a slow, surgical care. Then she stopped.

Men were arrogant bastards sometimes. They were like dogs. They felt they had to leave their mark on everything.

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