“You mean Alberto Tosi or his creepy granddaughter, or whatever other of his relatives got in on the act, have screwed up this evidence completely?”
“Correct first time.”
“Oh great . . .”
“They could have done it deliberately,” he suggested, trying to cheer her up.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Tosi’s not the kind of man who’d play stupid games like that. If he was, he wouldn’t have let me have the stuff in the first place.”
“In that case they’re just plain incompetent. Sorry. That’s all you get.”
“Well, isn’t that just great?” she barked. “So in that case where the hell are these DNA reports from our people across the water? An hour ago they said an hour.”
“Don’t take this out on me! I didn’t spill all that junk on your precious evidence. Besides, an hour ago they said two hours, actually. By e-mail.”
“Screw e-mail,” she fumed, and phoned the company, got straight through to the head of the lab, then performed a brief impersonation of Leo Falcone on a bad day.
Five minutes later the report, still full of spelling mistakes and bad grammar, came through. Sixteen separate tests. A single specimen of male DNA in each.
“Thank God for the Y chromosome,” Teresa murmured. “The only worthwhile thing to come out of the everyday penis since the dawn of man.”
Then she scrolled through the other results, conscious of Silvio leaning in very close to her shoulder. “Eureka.”
Bella was there in four of the vaginal secretions. The next twelve were unknown.
“One day . . .” Silvio murmured, then started his familiar rant. About how the world would be a better and safer place if all of us just got tagged at birth, stored as profiles in some giant computer somewhere, files wheeled out every time a drop of blood or a trace of semen puzzled some slothful police officer who was too idle to engage his brain and go looking for evidence—
“I’ve told you before,” she interrupted, “I’ll tell you again. It’s wrong. You have to leave people a little privacy, otherwise they don’t stay human at all.”
She thought about the wad of tissue that still lay in her handbag, and would soon go where it belonged, into the bin in the street outside. She hadn’t even considered mentioning it to Nic, though a part of her wondered if that was what Emily really wanted: to break the news through another. Even so, he had heard something wrong in her voice. She knew that. Nic didn’t miss a thing.
“No one wants to know everything about everyone. It’s unnatural. It’s . . .”
. . . asking for trouble, Teresa thought. You had to concentrate on what mattered and leave the trivial details to one side.
Something mattered deeply here. Bella had slept with Hugo Massiter. The Englishman was, perhaps, the father of the dead woman’s unborn child. In any normal police investigation these were starting points, pieces of information someone like Leo Falcone could pick up, mull over, then use as a lever to extract other, more damning nuggets of evidence. And, in the end, with some luck, try to put together a picture of what happened. But they hadn’t the resources or the time.
“Try and think like a cop, Silvio,” she ordered. “A woman’s been incinerated in a furnace. What are the key facts you want to know?”
He shrugged. This wasn’t his kind of game. “Temperature. Can we get some more physical evidence from the remains?”
“No, no, NO!” she screamed, and wondered briefly if it would be out of place to slap him on his pale and flabby cheeks. “That’s us thinking. Not them.”
“In that case, I’ve no idea,” he confessed. “How she got there maybe. They always ask that.”
No, they didn’t. Not always. With Falcone out of action, the official version was that Uriel put Bella in the furnace somehow, and since he was dead too the whys and wherefores were unimportant, redundant.
Two violent deaths had occurred without the police ever seeking answers to one of the most fundamental aspects of any murder inquiry. How exactly?
And she’d been around long enough to understand what, in the case of Bella, those answers were likely to be. No one could be forced into a searing furnace against her will. It was simply inconceivable, however strong the assailant, however feeble the victim. To put her into the furnace, Bella had to be rendered unconscious first, and Teresa Lupo’s instincts told her the most likely way that would happen. Not with alchemy but with the oldest killing tool in the book, raw violence that always, always left such familiar stains in its wake.
“Jesus Christ,” she murmured. “I must be losing my mind. We’ve two murders here and no one—not even old Alberto Tosi—has even seen so much as a bloodstain. How often does that happen?”
She glanced at her watch, phoned Raffaella Arcangelo’s number and prayed the woman had abandoned the Ospedale Civile for a while. When she’d called that morning they’d been planning to wheel the unconscious Falcone into an MRI scanner for an hour or so, hoping all those deafening magnets whirring round his damaged head would see something that indicated he’d return to the living world someday soon. Teresa had dealt with MRI units as a doctor. She wasn’t full of optimism. More often than not the best thing they told you was nothing, and the only news was bad.
“Have you heard something?” Raffaella asked immediately. “They said they were doing some test. I couldn’t be there all the time. I couldn’t bear it.”
“It usually takes some hours, perhaps a day, for the results to reach the consultant. Nothing’s changed. I’m sorry. It’s not bad news, though. I was wondering . . .”
She could almost feel the woman’s tension down the line.
“I was wondering if you’d found anything.”
“Sorry, I forgot,” Raffaella confessed.
Teresa wasn’t giving up. “Is there anyone on the island now, apart from you?”
“No. My brothers are with the lawyers. I think they’ll be there a long time. It seems Signor Massiter is changing the terms of the contract. Quite drastically too. Not that we’re in a position to refuse anymore.”
“Would you mind if we came and took a look around? I want to see Bella’s bedroom. Perhaps take away some more samples.”
The bed trick worked for Emily. It was worth trying again, though it still didn’t put Massiter there on the night of the murder.
“Of course.”
“And one more thing. I need you to think hard about this, Raffaella. Did you see anything after they were killed—anything at all—that showed traces of blood? Marks on paintwork or the floor. Spots on a cloth. Something out of place. Anything.”
The other woman was silent. Teresa’s heart skipped a beat.
“Raffaella?”
Teresa could picture her, hand to her mouth, thinking, trying to work out what was wrong.
“You’d best come now,” Raffaella said at last. “I think I’ve been a fool.”
THE THIRTY-YEAR-OLD CESSNA 180 PERFORMED A TIGHT forty-degree right-hand turn low over the shining, mackerel-skin waters of the lagoon, an ungainly red and white bird with high wings and a couple of gigantic Edo amphibious floats jutting out where the undercarriage should have been. Andrea Correr, who owned a couple of hotels on the Lido, two restaurants in San Marco, and one of the biggest tour agencies in town, took the cigarette from his fingers, stuffed it in between his lips, then fought the wheel, trying to remember the water-landing lessons he’d had nine years before on an alligator-infested lake a few miles outside Orlando. Correr liked to think of himself as a good pilot, an amateur, but one who’d built up almost a thousand hours in a decade of flying from the little airfield hidden away at the tip of the Lido. When some young cop came out to the aircraft stand, waving his badge, demanding to be picked up on official business, and offering to pay for the gas too, Correr didn’t have too many hesitations. He didn’t own a professional licence. He’d have to take the money as a contribution towards costs, and wouldn’t, for a moment, dream of giving the cop a receipt in return, not that Correr had mentioned this small catch on the airfield pavement.