“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.
IT HAD BEEN THREE DAYS BEFORE THE QUESTURA HAD let Costa and Peroni out of their grip. Then they let go in an instant, brushing the pair of them out of the building with an admonition never to return. There would be no reprisals. Cases like Hugo Massiter’s had to be buried in their entirety or not at all.