She took a deep breath. “You’re leaving me? For pigs?”
“No!” he objected, shocked by the accusation. “I’d only go if you could get a career break too. Wouldn’t be hard. I know a few people . . .”
“Read my lips. I am not raising pigs.”
“They need doctors everywhere,” he said, shrugging. “You could get a job at the surgery in town. They’re nice people.”
“You checked this?”
“Kind of. But not in a committed sort of way. Not . . .”
He sighed and squeezed her fingers. Fat fingers. They were both very alike in some ways, he and she.
“I thought perhaps it was time to try something different. Leo’s going to be out of it for a few months. Nic’s got ideas too.”
No bodies. No morgue. No budgets. She could rent out the apartment. She could go back to dealing with living people for a while. There were attractions. The trouble was it would take a kind of courage she was unsure she possessed.
“It was just a thought . . . . I should have discussed it with you before I asked for these papers,” he admitted. “I’m sorry. It was stupid.”
“If it worked, Gianni, you know what it would mean? We might never go back. No more Rome. No more Questura. No corpses. No fun.”
“This has been fun?”
“Sometimes. We got one another out of it, didn’t we?”
“Well, yes, but . . .”
“But what? We’re good at this. All of us. It’s just that you three don’t know when to stop. You just walk straight in and take it all head-on. This habit must cease.”
“Maybe we don’t know any other way.”
“Then perhaps it’s time to learn!”
He didn’t object. Peroni was always willing to consider alternatives. It was another of the unpredictable qualities that got to her.
“And if I do that we can both go on a career break?”
She looked into his battered face. “Is that what you really want?”
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “What do you think?”
“I think we should find the dog.”
“You said he was dead!”
“He probably is. But try this thinking-round-problems idea. You haven’t asked the right question. Even though you know and, more to the point, I know it, since you’ve told me every last thing about the animal already.”
He sat there, mute, puzzled.
“Oh for God’s sake,” she sighed. “Isn’t it obvious?”
Teresa Lupo got up and set off for the little shack. She doubted it would be locked. She doubted Piero Scacchi was a man who failed to keep a backup for anything that was important to him.
Gianni Peroni waited obediently at the table, watching her return, enlightenment dawning in his eyes.
When she came back, she placed the old, grubby shotgun in front of him, and kept the box of cartridges she’d found on her side of the table.
“Don’t kill anything on my account,” she said.
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.”