Free The Lizard's Bite by David Hewson Page B

think.”
    “Not in my family it wasn’t. Still, I’m willing to slum it once in a while. You don’t mind if I string along, do you? It’s been ages since I saw the ladies. I won’t intrude. I promise. The time?”
    “Eight-thirty,” Costa muttered, half rebellious. He hadn’t wanted to share a meal with Peroni and Teresa. He and Emily had spent too little time together as it was. Now with another chair at the table…
    “Good.”
    Falcone took one last, self-satisfied look around the room. Then he caught Costa’s eye. “Two deaths usually mean
two
murders, Nic. Remember that. Always start off from the obvious. Let the unlikely prove itself later. I’ll make a detective of you yet.”
    “
Two
murders?”
    “Exactly,” Falcone said. The keys rattled in his pocket again. “But at least we’ve one of them in the bag.”
     
10
     
    A T FOUR THAT AFTERNOON THE TWO WOMEN SAT ON the waterfront a little way down from San Marco, escaping the crowds and the heat. After the phone call from the men, breaking the bad news, they’d gorged on pasta in a little restaurant under the shadow of the Greci church’s crooked tower, then bought a couple of gelati — a boozy confection of vanilla and brandy-soaked raisins for Teresa Lupo, a lemon water ice for Emily Deacon. Now they slumped, half dozing, a little bored, in the shade made by the prow of a gigantic cruise ship, with just enough room past the white metal for a view of the beautiful and busy lagoon beyond.
    “Venice in August,” Teresa moaned. “We must be mad. I mean, the place even
smells
. I thought that was supposed to be a myth.”
    “Italians complain too much,” Emily declared. “Most of the time it is a myth. Sit back, ignore your nose and enjoy yourself.”
    “In this heat!”
    Teresa Lupo felt as if she could squeeze a bucket of water out of her limp cotton shirt. The humidity was astonishing. It made every step she took an effort, a drain on what reserves of energy she had after the night train. She wasn’t even sure how annoyed she was that Peroni wouldn’t be on vacation with her after all at the end of the day. The city instilled lethargy in her. If he really could take extra time once the case was over, she could rework her own vacation schedule and possibly cut another two weeks. Emily was in the same position. They were livid initially, that went without saying. But it could still work out in the end.
    And, she was out of Rome. Away from the morgue for the first time in months. It was the quiet season there anyway. Silvio Di Capua, her assistant, could surely cope. Silvio was becoming the coping kind more and more each day. Sometime soon she could cast off from the whole show if she liked, and never have to worry — much — about what was left behind. She’d talked the idea over with Peroni, usually when the grappa bottle had materialised after dinner. The two of them quitting the city, moving out to Tuscany. She could work as a rural doctor, stitching up farmers, caring for their fat, pregnant wives. And he could go and try out what he really wanted all along, from when he was a country kid. Raising pigs on some rural smallholding, selling gorgeous roast
porchetta
at the weekend markets in and around Siena. Dreams… They were ridiculous, impossible. They teased her too, if only because, until Gianni Peroni came along, she’d never really had any.
    Emily finished her gelato, then threw her napkin into the nearby bin with an accuracy Teresa wished she could teach Peroni.
    She stared out at the flat expanse of grey water, with its ever-active flotilla of vessels, the ferries and the vaporetti, the speedboats and the transport barges, then sighed.
    “I’m going to have to tell him, Emily. I can’t just not say a thing.”
    The two women had discussed this on the train, huddled close together in a second-class carriage as it rattled through the black airless night. Teresa’s shift hadn’t finished till two a.m. There really wasn’t