The Lizard's Bite Part 8

Costa thought of Aldo Bracci, miserable as sin, in his grubby little factory, getting eaten up by poverty and resentment.

"I would be lying if I said I was surprised," Peroni observed.

"So what's your guess?" Falcone asked. "Thieving? Violence?"

"Either," the big man answered. "Or both."

Falcone pulled himself upright. It was a struggle. He looked old under the bright lagoon sun, somehow. Nic Costa couldn't help but wonder whether the cunning inspector, a man who'd taught him more about police work than anyone he knew, was his customary self.

"Both," Falcone declared. "And one more. A long time ago, so much it may be quite irrelevant."

The two cops waited. A semblance of doubt was buzzing around Falcone's head, like some unwanted, unrecognised insect wondering whether to bite.

"Aldo Bracci got interviewed for s.e.xually a.s.saulting his sister. When he was nineteen and Bella was four years younger. It never went anywhere. Cases like that rarely did in those days. But the file suggests it was the real thing. With at least some acquiescence on Bella's part. It was a neighbour who filed the report, not someone from the family."

"Nice family," Peroni grumbled.

"But is it anything more than that?" Costa asked.

"We don't know," Falcone admitted. "But think about this. Bracci would surely have had access to Bella's keys. He'd have known that island. His only alibi is in the family. The opportunity's there. Bella and Aldo could have conspired to kill Uriel. Then Aldo turned on her. But why?"

He frowned and stared towards the island. The launch was heading for a rickety old jetty fronting a dusty path that led to a small farmhouse. They were still on the Venice side of Sant' Erasmo, but far from any other sign of habitation. Costa could just make out the familiar yellow sign of a vaporetto jetty near a low church and some houses a good kilometre or more north. Then there was the sound of a dog's bark, a lively, amusing sound, not the aggressive threat one might have expected out in this backwater.

Peroni leapt off the boat first, with surprising agility given his bulk. Costa followed him. Falcone ordered Goldoni to wait with the vessel until they returned.

A black spaniel was bounding down the path, wagging its tail. Peroni, always a sucker for animals, bent and chucked the creature under the muzzle, beaming into its dark, watery eyes.

"What a dog," he sighed, admiration written all over his ugly face. "They've got ones like this back home. Not pets, mind. Working dogs. Hunting Hunting dogs. Those dogs could find anything, anywhere." dogs. Those dogs could find anything, anywhere."

"Shame it doesn't do police work," Falcone sniffed, keeping a safe distance between himself and the animal.

A man was walking down the path now, someone just a little less heavy than Peroni, a few years younger too. He wore a torn white shirt and grubby black trousers. He had a full head of black, slightly greasy hair, a round, expressionless face, and, in his left hand, a shotgun, broken, held loose and low as if it were a familiar item, one as happy in his grip as a household tool.

"Piero Scacchi?" Costa asked.

Peroni was still clucking over the dog, stroking its sleek black head with a gigantic, gentle hand.

"That's me," the man said. He could see they were looking at the gun. "It's duck season soon. I was cleaning it."

He nodded at Peroni, surprised by the dog's warm welcome.

"He likes you."

Costa flashed the card. "Police."

Piero Scacchi scowled down at the animal.

"And I thought I'd taught you well," he told it.

THE CITY MORGUE WAS A LOW, ONE-STOREY EXTENSION to the main Questura behind Piazzale Roma, a grey, unmemorable building that made Teresa Lupo pine for her own offices in the to the main Questura behind Piazzale Roma, a grey, unmemorable building that made Teresa Lupo pine for her own offices in the centro storico centro storico. Alberto Tosi, the pathologist, had a view. The double windows of his room gave onto the factories and refineries of Mestre bristling across the channel of water separating Venice from the mainland, ugly, out-of-place accretions that pumped dirt and smoke into the atmosphere constantly. Cars and buses crawled up the nearby ramp that led to the terminus of the road system once it worked its way over the bridge next to the railway line. The vista was uniformly glum, even in the bright summer sun. On balance, Teresa Lupo thought, recalling the simple expanse of plain courtyard outside her own office, she had the better deal.

Tosi had greeted her as if she were some visiting academic, an honoured guest in his humble premises. It was all a little-and Teresa was shocked to find this word entering her head-creepy. Not because it was a morgue. Morgues were places she could walk into any day without a second thought. The problem lay with Tosi, a stiff, erect pensioner type with half-moon gla.s.ses and a white nylon coat so bright it must have been changed every day, and the waiflike girl, no more than twenty-one, surely, and similarly dressed, though with John Lennon spectacles, who acted as his a.s.sistant. The two of them were inseparable. More than that, they seemed almost to operate as one, exchanging thoughts and ideas in a random, open way, answering questions in turn like identical twins testing out their telepathic powers.

Then, in response to her questioning, Tosi revealed the secret. Anna was his granddaughter. This small operation-most of the work went to a bigger place on terra firma, Tosi said-was a family affair. Its big brother in Mestre was, naturally, run by his son, Anna's father. Teresa was, briefly, speechless. The Tosis seemed to be running their own pathologists' guild, taking upon themselves the role of sorting and categorising the region's dead, then pa.s.sing the task on to their offspring. She had to ask the old man, even though she knew the answer. His father had been a pathologist too, and his grandfather a surgeon in the city who specialised in postmortems before the job of pathologist became official.

Venice, she thought, then forced her mind to focus on the task at hand.

"I don't wish to intrude," she insisted, sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair opposite the two of them, both perched birdlike next to each other behind a large shiny desk.

"You're not intruding," Tosi replied with a smile.

"Not a bit," added the granddaughter. "It's a pleasure."

"An honour, honour," Tosi added.

Teresa silently cursed Leo Falcone for talking her into this.

"It's just that spontaneous combustion . . ."-it was hard even to say the words-" . . . seems such an unusual unusual finding." finding."

"Unheard of," agreed Tosi the elder.

"Hereabouts," junior corrected him. "There are plenty of antecedents."

"Anna . . . ?" he wondered. "Could you possibly show Dr. Lupo the computer computer?"

He spoke the word with near-religious veneration.

The girl got up and walked across the office to the single old and very dusty PC that sat on a tiny, cheap desk.

"That contraption is quite astonishing," Tosi revealed. "I expect you have more than one. Here . . . it's not necessary. Wasted expense and we never never spend more than is absolutely necessary. Mind you, I don't know what we'd do without it. Did you know that in Milwaukee in 1843 there was a doc.u.mented case of spontaneous combustion in an iron foundry? Very like our own." spend more than is absolutely necessary. Mind you, I don't know what we'd do without it. Did you know that in Milwaukee in 1843 there was a doc.u.mented case of spontaneous combustion in an iron foundry? Very like our own."

"People catching fire in foundries . . ." She didn't want to annoy the old man. He'd surely clam up if that happened. "It's not that hard to fathom really, is it?"

"These cases are," Anna interjected, tapping slowly at the keys with one short, slender finger. "For instance, in Arras, northern France. October 1953. A private house, body on the floor, no sign of fire elsewhere. Same in London, six years later . . ."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Teresa said, fighting back her temper. "Details I can read for myself anytime. Can you just zip those files and e-mail them to me?"

Two very young, very innocent eyes blinked at her from behind the anachronistic round gla.s.ses.

"Zip?" Anna repeated.

"Watch me."

Teresa pulled her chair up to the desk, elbowed the girl out of the way, hacked manically at the keys with her stubby fingers, bundled the pile of doc.u.ments the girl had there into an attachment, then forwarded the lot to her own private e-mail address, one she could access later through Nic's computer, Peroni being as allergic to the things as Tosi elder apparently was.

The Tosis glanced at each other in awe, as if a creature from the future had walked into the room.

"Bodies," Teresa declared firmly, wishing she'd never given up smoking as part of the if-it-hurts-it's-bound-to-make-you-pregnant routine. "I can't think without seeing one. Can we start there, please?"

"Whatever we have is yours to behold," Tosi elder avowed, and got up after he'd finished scrawling a single word on his notepad: Zip! Zip!

They walked along the corridor, into a tiny white room with a single shining table and a collection of equipment so old most of it belonged in a museum. Teresa wondered if she couldn't get rid of the Tosis for a while, maybe by entering them for a game show called "Name That Century." She didn't want to try to think straight under the gaze of the pair.

"What about forensic?" she asked.

Tosi smiled.

"Let me guess," she sighed. "Mestre."

"They have things there . . ." he said, wide-eyed.

"What did those things tell you?"

Anna went to a tiny wooden desk and took out two reports which were, if Teresa's eyesight wasn't playing tricks, typed. typed.

"Nothing much about Bella Arcangelo," the girl declared, spreading three pages on the tabletop. "There wasn't a lot to look at really."

"Remains," Tosi senior mouthed gloomily, walking to one of the refrigerated compartments, then pulling it open to reveal a box-a cardboard box no less-marked "Arcangelo, Bella." "What can you do with remains?"

Usually lots, Teresa thought, then stared at the skull, with its tapering stump of spinal cord. It sat on a bed of surgical cotton wool, surrounded by a few unidentifiable objects. She ran through the report. Plenty of traces of bone fragments, shattered by the heat, incapable of a.n.a.lysis to show how the woman died. A small amount of gold. No other metal. Nothing else at all. Maybe Tosi was right.

"How hot does a gla.s.s furnace run?" she asked. She was unable to take her eyes off the familiar shape, burnt a bleached-out white.

"At that time of the morning . . ." Tosi mused. "Say fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred centigrade. Around what you'd find in a modern crematorium. It's a fascinating process. I've studied it a little. You should see a gla.s.s furnace for yourself sometime. I could arrange that. A modern one, though, not the ridiculous antiques the Arcangeli insist on using. Gas and and wood, for pity's sake . . ." wood, for pity's sake . . ."

"Why was just the skull left, not . . ." she began to ask.

"It was in a cooler part of the chamber," Tosi replied quickly, proud he could second-guess the question. "If the woman was placed in the furnace headfirst . . ."

He held up his hands, mimicking the movement of sliding an object off a trolley or the wheeled table Falcone said was there.

" . . . that's what would happen. The hottest part is in the centre. The head would surely fetch up at the edge, where the temperature would be lower in a furnace of that age and nature. I spoke to our local crematorium. They think a woman of this size would reach such a state of dissolution in an hour, possibly less, at this temperature. Am I doing all right so far?"

She gave him a smile that was meant to say: impressed. impressed.

"Exactly the conclusion I would draw," she admitted, and meant it too. Calling up the crematorium to get some practical knowledge was precisely what she'd have done herself. "But since I lack your knowledge of gla.s.smaking, I imagine it would have taken me longer."

Tosi waved a hand in her direction, smiling. "Romans," he said. "See, Anna. So self-deprecating. No matter what people say . . ."

Teresa looked around the room. There was no sign of any other work. The Tosis had all day to chat about their wonderful discovery. Presumably everything else was getting shipped off to Mestre.

"You're too kind. Now the man."

Anna went to a second compartment and slid out the drawer. Teresa Lupo took a very good look at what lay there and wondered if, perhaps, she wasn't going crazy.

Uriel Arcangelo was half cadaver, half charcoal stump. From the waist down the man looked like someone who'd been dumped in a giant inkwell, then left to dry. The fabric of his clothing-suit trousers and what looked like the remains of a work ap.r.o.n-was charred. Most of the flesh beneath, revealed by some of the Tosis' exploratory incisions, seemed unexceptional, not that it would have much to tell. But above the belt the man had been transformed. The entire upper half of his body had been consumed by fire, incinerated into a black ma.s.s, shrunken in on itself, composed princ.i.p.ally of bones and a few carbonised pieces of flesh. His skull was now turned to one side, the mouth open in that familiar expression of agony, one which, on this occasion, was doubtless warranted. Teresa Lupo was familiar with fire victims. Either half of Uriel's body fitted the picture she recognised. People were consumed, or they died asphyxiated, little marked by the fire itself. It was unheard of for a corpse to share both characteristics.

"Now let me get this straight," she demanded. "You're saying there was no direct combustion on the body? Everything from the chest up somehow happened without the application of any external flame whatsoever?"

"That's what we understand from the fire department," Tosi confirmed. "He was a good five metres from the furnace."

"Photos?" Teresa asked.

The girl walked over to a filing cabinet and withdrew a file. There were just five, Teresa was astonished to learn, pretty poor quality too, as if they came from an instant camera. The prints depicted Uriel Arcangelo's corpse surrounded by what appeared to be a black pool of charred material. Teresa looked more closely. The heat around the upper torso had been so strong it had actually burned a s.p.a.ce in the wooden flooring beneath the man.

"What's this hole?" she wondered. "How big was it? What kind of condition was the floor in?"

Tosi appeared bemused. "I didn't actually go to the scene. The police took notes and those photos. Then we sent an attendant for the body."

She bit her tongue. The lack of care, of any kind of formal procedure, was astonishing. It was, she guessed, a question of supply and demand. Venice was a small place, more a receptacle for pa.s.sing tourists than a real, living city. Tosi clearly had little experience of dealing with violent death. And, she reminded herself, there was the a.s.sumption all along that they were dealing with an open-and-shut case.

"There has has to be more," Teresa insisted. "What about the autopsy?" to be more," Teresa insisted. "What about the autopsy?"

Tosi sighed. "What you see is what we have."

"a.n.a.lysis . . . Don't tell me. It's in Mestre. Is there nothing more?"

"Such as what?" Anna asked.

"Such as how a man can die like this! Even in a furnace, it's not . . . possible."

"Spontaneous combustion," Tosi declared resolutely. "As we said."

"But how how?"

Tosi smiled and nodded at his granddaughter. "There are various theories," the girl said. "The most promising seems to be that, at a certain temperature, perhaps under prolonged external heat, the abdominal fat may ignite. The deceased was somewhat overweight. Not much. But perhaps it was enough."

Teresa shook her head, unable to accept they could believe this. "Enough to consume half his body? Then burn a hole in a timber floor?"

"Apparently," Tosi observed, and displayed, for the first time, a little impatience with her doubts. "Do you have an alternative explanation? I would, naturally, like to hear it."

"His clothing," she suggested. "What did forensic make of that? Was there something flammable there? Gasoline perhaps? Alcohol?"

Tosi glanced at the lower half of the corpse. "The fire crew used an astonishing amount of foam. It was everywhere. It's not easy trying to extract material in those circ.u.mstances. Besides . . ." His old creased face wrinkled even further with displeasure. "I hate trying to do the work of the police, as I'm sure do you, Dr. Lupo. One would have to ask oneself, though. What kind of a man would walk into an overheating foundry with gasoline on his clothes?"

An idiot. A drunk. Someone suicidal because he'd murdered his wife an hour before, shoved her in the furnace, and started to get maudlin. There were plenty of alternatives. It was just that this pair didn't want to look for them.

"It is," Tosi added, "difficult to accept that a human body may burn of its own accord. But consider the idea that we may, in fact, be candles inside out. A candle has the wick in its centre and draws the fuel to it as it burns. A body such as Arcangelo's may be considered to have sufficient fat to act as fuel, and clothing as an external wick. Once the clothing catches fire, the fat is drawn to it and continues to feed the flames. This is not strange science, I feel. Rare, but not implausible."

So one fine day you drop a match on your shirt and burn up from the inside. It was a theory, Teresa thought. Along with alien abduction and the idea some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds got reborn as aardvarks.

"Unless, of course," he finished, "you have other ideas."

"Not really," she said. "I don't have problems with the combustion. It's that spontaneous part I'm struggling with. But I would like to think about it. I'm sorry. I should have asked. Does this bother you?"