The Lizard's Bite

THERE WAS A SUBSTANCE ON THE APRON,” FALCONE explained. “An industrial solvent. One used in laboratories everywhere. And in some manufacturing processes too. Sometimes in glass foundries. It’s called ketone. Have you heard of it?”

She shook her head. “It’s been a long time since I dealt with chemicals.”

“There must be an inventory for the foundry. We could look.”

Raffaella Arcangelo glowered at him. “Why? Uriel and Bella are dead and buried. The world thinks it knows who killed them. Aldo Bracci. Nic has other ideas. He believes it was Hugo Massiter, and feels he knows Massiter’s reasons too. Either way . . .” She shrugged. “They’re beyond us all now.”

“Undoubtedly,” he said, nodding in agreement. “Nevertheless, think of those reasons. Bella was pregnant. Not by her brother. I don’t believe that for a moment. It was Massiter. At least Bella thought so, and she was probably causing trouble for the Englishman. Blackmail, I imagine. Threatening awkwardness over signing the contract. I have the impression Bella knew a man’s weak points.”

She nodded. “You’re right, as usual.”

“Thank you. But it’s the means that matter. Bella was killed, or at least rendered unconscious, in her own bedroom by simple force, then dragged to the furnace for disposal. Brutal, but scarcely unusual. Uriel on the other hand . . .”

He stared down at the grave. She folded her arms and looked at him.

“I don’t understand the first thing you’re talking about.”

“It’s as if we have two different crimes by two different people. Uriel’s death, that tainted apron, is tentative, halfhearted, almost as if it weren’t quite deliberate. From what I’ve read of Teresa’s notes it had only a slim chance of succeeding in any case. Even with the burners to the furnace locked so that the temperature was unnaturally high, the chances of fabric impregnated with that substance actually igniting were slim. Uriel was deeply unlucky there. It’s possible the presence of alcohol precipitated what happened. We’ll never know. Nevertheless, it’s as if whoever perpetrated that act was unsure whether he wanted to commit the crime in the first place. He was leaving it to chance, letting fate decide whether to ignite the apron and condemn the person locked inside the room to what could, from external appearances, be seen as an accidental death. Had that actually occurred and Bella not been killed also . . .”

“Then?”

“Then it would have gone down as an industrial fatality. No doubt about it. Which was why, in the beginning, I believed Bella must have been complicit in some way. All the same . . .”

He’d worked so hard to try to understand. Even now he was still struggling to grasp every last detail. Leo Falcone was aware that his mind no longer worked as efficiently, as ruthlessly, as it once had.

“I don’t see the problem,” Raffaella said.

“The problem is that the contrast with Bella’s actual death could scarcely be greater! That was swift, decisive and bloody. Deliberate, predictable. Normal, if such a word can be used of murder.”

She glanced back towards the exit. “We don’t want to be left here. Will this take long?”

“No.”

“Good. And your solution?”

“It was simple, once I thought about it. All those keys. All those ribbons. You’re a family that misplaces items. People who pick up one thing when it belongs to another.”

“We’re human,” she said pointedly.

“Quite. And, being human, Uriel took the apron meant for Bella that night, and she his. Which she wore in the furnace, wondering why the place was so hot and the burners so difficult to control. Coming to no harm whatsoever, not until she returns to the house, puzzled, sensing, I imagine, that something’s wrong.”

Raffaella signalled her tentative agreement with a raised forefinger. “This could have happened, I suppose.”

“It did. And when she gets back, our reluctant killer, someone who wanted Fate to make the decision over whether Bella lives or dies, is faced with a choice. To acquiesce or to act? To finish the job or pretend nothing has happened? It must have been difficult. There would have been a little planning in advance, of course. But the act . . . That had to be decided one way or another in a matter of moments, which is why, when violence was the course of action taken, it was so sudden. Her death had to be achieved quickly, before any doubts crept in. This was no longer a cerebral, detached event. It required strength, determination. Those bloodstains on the bedroom wall . . .”

“From what I saw,” she observed, “Hugo Massiter was a strong and determined man.”

“Undoubtedly. But something unexpected has happened too. Before she’s murdered, Bella has decided to call Uriel, who’s half drunk, half sleeping in the office next door. She’s told him there’s something wrong with the furnace. It’s overheating. Perhaps she wants to meet him there. So he goes in a little earlier than normal, finding the door ajar, since that was the way it habitually fell, and closing it behind him. The furnace is out of control now. The trap which was laid for Bella falls shut upon him, which was the last thing that was intended.”

He watched the way she glanced at the grave and then turned away, a lost, sad cast in her eye.

“I said it was an accident all along,” she murmured.

“You did. As far as Uriel’s concerned I’ve no doubt you’re right. I’m sorry that’s no comfort to you. I wish there were some other interpretation I could place on events. I really do.”

To his surprise, she smiled.

“You were the only one with a kind word, you know. From the outset. It struck me from the start that you have a peculiar and rather touching interest in other human beings, Leo, yet very little in yourself.”

He gestured at the wheelchair. “I’ve time to change. I’ll try to think like everyone else. Not like a police inspector.”

“Is that what you do? I was rather under the impression you thought like a criminal.”

It was a perceptive observation. Up to a point.

“If you look for explanations . . . it’s important to see events from both sides of the fence. The perpetrator’s. The victim’s. Criminals interest me. I admit it. I’ve never been much of one for believing they’re made at birth. Something happens. Something forms them. If I can understand what that something is, then . . .”

“Then you become a little like them.”

It was an observation, not a question. He wasn’t minded to argue.

“This is the job I do. It would be surprising if something doesn’t rub off along the way. But you’re missing my point. Criminals are made, not born. Even a man like Aldo Bracci.”

Her face lit up with astonishment. “Aldo Bracci was a brute and a thief! He slept with Bella all those years ago! You know that!”

“He was a Bracci,” Falcone declared. “Wasn’t he doing precisely what was expected of him?”

She was silent. Then Raffaella sat down on the bench next to the grave, glanced at her watch, and said, “We need to be going. The last boat leaves soon.”

“I’m nearly done. Aldo Bracci brings me almost to the close. Why do you think he came to Massiter’s party that evening? Carrying a gun and Bella’s keys?”

She shook her head, puzzled. “Nic told me he believed Commissario Randazzo placed the keys in Bracci’s pocket after he shot him. From what I recall, that was certainly possible. Randazzo was in Massiter’s pay. Isn’t it obvious? The commissario was trying to make sure Bracci would be blamed for his sister’s murder to get Massiter off the hook.”

Falcone scowled. “Nic is young and clever but he still has much to learn. I spoke to Randazzo that night. He barely had sufficient presence of mind to seize the opportunity to kill Bracci. Nothing more. Aldo had those keys. Someone, perhaps Massiter himself, perhaps someone else, gave those keys to him. In an anonymous letter, say. One suggesting they’d been found in Massiter’s yacht, or that apartment on the island, proof that Bella, his own sister, was murdered by the Englishman because she was pregnant. Bracci was already drunk. It could have been enough to set him off.”

“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.