WHY ARE YOU PURSUING THIS, LEO?”
It seemed a curious question.
“Because it’s what I do.”
“Without asking yourself the purpose? Or the price?”
She sat on the bench, still, confident. He heard the blast of the vaporetto’s horn as it departed the quay on the far side of the island.
“It’s what I do,” he said again.
“But why? The Venice Questura won’t listen to you. No one will. Not even your own men, I think. Have you told them?”
“No,” he admitted. “I wanted to discuss this with you first.”
“Always the gentleman,” she said with a brief smile.
“There is evidence,” he pointed out. “You provided it yourself. The shirt with Massiter’s monogram and Bella’s blood on it. The second DNA sample there, which is primarily sweat, lacks the Y chromosome. Teresa found out shortly before Massiter was killed, too late to be of use unfortunately. It’s female DNA. We don’t have a sample of yours but I’d put good money on it being a match.”
“I washed everything in that house, some of it by hand,” she said, half smiling. “Would that be such a surprise?”
“Then . . .”
Leo Falcone had, to his dismay, never considered this. He was now abruptly aware that he had lost more of his sharpness in hospital than he’d appreciated. There was one plain fact outstanding, though.
“I asked Teresa to bring the shirt to me. It appeared to me that the monogram was hand-stitched, which would be unusual for a man who would buy his shirts in bulk, even from the best of tailors. Also the cut was poor. More the kind of thing Uriel would have worn than a wealthy Englishman.”
She continued to look at him, bemused, saying nothing.
“You stitched the letters on Uriel’s bloodied shirt yourself when you saw the way Nic’s mind was working. If the blame was to shift from Bracci, you needed to ensure it went to Massiter, though not in time to ruin the contract, naturally. Forensic could clarify all this . . .”
“You’re a man in a wheelchair, Leo. Not an inspector in charge of a murder inquiry. Badly cut shirts? Hand-stitched letters? Do you think anyone will listen to these ramblings except me?”
He wasn’t sure he cared anymore.
“I was pleased by this discovery,” Falcone went on. “Had the shirt really been Massiter’s it could only have meant you’d stolen it beforehand, with the idea of killing Bella in mind. That what I was dealing with was a matter of forethought, not some desperate improvisation after the fact. I was very glad not to be wrong on that matter.”
Raffaella Arcangelo waited, watching his discomfort at having to make such a personal confession. “Men never consider these things, do they? Washing. Cleaning. Sewing. All the dreary work. All the drudgery. It just happens somewhere else, performed by unseen hands. None of my brothers noticed. Not even Uriel, who was the nearest to being a true human being among them. I was simply one more element in the mechanism of that household. Like a machine or some menial from outside.”
“You sound as if you hated them,” he said, surprised.
She sighed and glanced at the line of cedars separating them from the pale brick perimeter wall and the lagoon. The trees rustled in the growing breeze stirred by the coming change in the season.
“Sometimes I did. Not often. Mostly I felt nothing. Nothing at all. I was the woman. I had to sit there listening to Michele dream up his ridiculous, harebrained schemes to make us rich again. I had to watch Gabriele turn out glass that would never sell when, with a few changes, with an ear that listened to the outside world, we could have made a little money at least.”
“Michele thought that was the job of the capo.”
“Quite! And a woman’s never going to fill those shoes, is she?”
“I’m sorry.” Falcone was genuinely shocked. “I rather imagined there were simpler issues here.”
He hesitated to go on but the bafflement in her face made it impossible to remain silent.
“I wondered if Bella was Massiter’s only conquest in the household. Whether perhaps jealousy was involved.”
She laughed out loud, then let her face fall in her hands. When she returned to look at him there were tears in her eyes, tears of mirth and amazement.
“You thought I would sleep with that creature, Leo? Oh my . . . How could you be so blind? And you’re such an observant man in so many other matters! You really do astonish me sometimes.”
Yet it had been easy to be blind. There had been a small fire of jealousy sparking the condition. Leo Falcone understood that. Feelings complicated everything, and had done throughout.
“I’ve never slept with anyone,” she said. “I’m a forty-seven-year-old virgin who has spent her entire life chastely wed to a single belief. That the Arcangeli are the greatest glassmakers in the world, and we must simply wait, like insects trapped in amber, until the rest of you come around to acknowledging that fact. Which was never going to happen, and none of them realised it but me. Whatever Hugo Massiter offered us for the island . . .”—her brown eyes suddenly blazed at him—“ . . . we would take. I wasn’t going to see that last opportunity go to waste. Certainly not over a little slut like Bella, who’d sleep with anything, then call back with her price afterwards.”
“She told you about the pregnancy?”
“Of course she did! Are you listening to a single word I say? I was the menial. The servant who washed and cooked and cleaned, while Bella put in her hour or two in the furnace every other night and slept her way round Venice the rest of the time. She told me because it didn’t matter. All that pressure she was putting on Massiter. Threatening to bring the sale down around his head. She believed Michele’s dreams, that Massiter needed us more than we needed him. The woman was too stupid to understand that what she was really jeopardising was our own future.”
“You could have convinced her.”
“You’re still not listening,” she replied with a sudden unexpected bitterness. “Servants convince no one. If Bella had died as she should, we would all have been better off. As it was . . . Yes! I sent Bracci that note and the keys. I expected he’d make a fool of himself in public, nothing more, and if he took the blame, so be it. Or it could be Massiter, if Nic wished to persist with his obsession. Provided we had his money first.”
She peered at the grave, with its fresh earth and the raw headstone with the newly carved name. “When she came back to the house, I killed her. Then I went to bed and slept. What else was there to do? Poor Uriel never could get anything right. He was always walking into the wrong room, picking up the wrong piece of equipment. I saved him so many times. I couldn’t be there every minute of the day.”
She put out a slender hand to the white marble and traced his name with a long index finger.
“Do they haunt me?” she asked. “Not anymore. Life is a series of decisions. Some good. Some bad. Most irreversible. I’m not going to look back, Leo. There’s nothing there to see. Uriel’s death was a tragic accident. The rest of them were criminals of a kind, with no great fondness for humanity. My main regret . . .”—her hand moved away from the headstone, and stretched out to touch his own—“ . . . is what happened to you. It was so undeserved, and for such a selfless act. I regret that bitterly. When I saw the state Bracci was in, that he had the weapon, I tried to stop him. You saw what happened.”
Her fingers tightened on his hand, her eyes peered into his.
“And you tried to protect me, Leo. I told you how desperately sorry I was so many times in that hospital. When I looked at you and didn’t know whether I’d ever see that spark in your face again. Now that could have broken me. Nothing else. I almost resented that, you know. I thought I was too old and too worn down to be touched by anything. You proved me wrong.”