Lucifer's Shadow

by David Hewson

  “What do you want?” Daniel Forster asked.

  “To talk to you.”

  “I’ve nothing new to say.”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps we have something new to say to you. May we come in?”

  He nodded and, with obvious reluctance, opened the door. They walked upstairs into the living room, which overlooked the rio. The dining table was now littered with dirty plates. Two empty bottles of wine stood in the centre. He beckoned them to sit in the deep armchairs by the dead fire.

  “You’re missing your housekeeper, Daniel,” she observed. “This place has the smell of a lonely man about it.”

  He stared at the mess on the table. “True. I still . . .” He glanced around the room as if it were some kind of cruel illusion. “I still find it difficult to believe they won’t come back.”

  She thought about going upstairs, looking to see if the twisted, matted sheets were still there in the large bedroom at the back. There was no need. Nothing had changed in the house since she’d last seen it. In all probability the bloodstains were still on the carpet in the bedroom.

  “The funeral is at San Michele on Friday, I gather,” she said. “Only a few hours before your concert. You must compose yourself for that. The living should allow grief to consume them only so much. If it oversteps itself, it offends the dead. Or their memory, at least.”

  “I thank you for your condolences,” he replied flatly. “I’ll bear them in mind.”

  “Good.” She found herself liking Daniel Forster in spite of his coldness towards her. “Tell me: Who do you think killed your friends?”

  His head cocked to one side as if he were suddenly lost in thought.

  “I thought you told me the answer to that. Laura. You seemed to think it was an open-and-shut case.”

  “No!” she laughed. “I merely reported to you what the housekeeper herself said to us. She told you as much herself when you visited on Giudecca.”

  He cast her a filthy look.

  “You don’t think those guards are deaf, Daniel?” she asked. “They have ears. They can talk.”

  “To hell with you.”

  Biagio—who had, it appeared to her, been intent on keeping out of this conversation as much as possible—wagged an admonitory finger at Daniel Forster.

  “Language,” he scolded. “In front of a lady.”

  She raised an eyebrow at the curiously prudish sergeant. “Thank you, Biagio. I believe I can handle this. For what it’s worth, Daniel, I don’t blame you for feeling aggrieved. You seem to be surrounded by people who have let you down. Who have deceived you.”

  He looked out of the window. It was going to be another hot, airless day. Perhaps, as a foreigner, he felt the temperature more than the locals.

  “Is this going to take long? I was thinking of going out soon.”

  “Not so long,” she replied. “It depends on you. I ask you again. Who killed your friends?”

  His head moved slowly from side to side, as much in despair as anger, she thought. “Why do you keep tormenting me like this? You have Laura. Are you telling me now you no longer intend to charge her?”

  “Not at all!” She waited until this news sank in. “I signed the papers for her release this morning. She’s gone from the jail.”

  “To where?” he asked anxiously. “Where can I find her?”

  “She’s a free woman. I’ve no need to speak to her again. She can go wherever she likes. Perhaps she’s coming here at this very moment. I don’t know.”

  He scowled at her again. “Don’t play games with people I love.”

  “Ah,” she replied, then placed her hands together and stared at her fingers, thinking, saying nothing, waiting for him to force the pace.

  “You said she was responsible,” Daniel Forster declared when he could stand the silence no more.

  “No, Daniel. She said that. Personally, I never believed it for a minute. It would have been possible to charge her with wasting our time. But that would have been cruel. She found these two men she loved on that terrible night, one dead, one dying. She regarded herself as their protector and felt a sense of guilt over their fate, perhaps. But I am a detective. I had to consider another possibility: that she was trying to protect the person who was truly responsible. You, perhaps.”

  He swore again. Biagio shuffled in his chair but was quiet.

  “If you think I’m guilty, arrest me.”

  “No, of course you’re not the one,” she continued. “How could you be? You were in bed with her that night. Why would either of you get up and stab her master and his boyfriend just after you made love? Again, what was the reason?”

  “You’re fishing,” he murmured.

  “No. I merely looked at the sheets, Daniel.”

  He reached for a packet of cigarettes on the coffee table and, with a fumbling hand, lit one, took a couple of puffs, then coughed.

  “Do you enjoy this?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes! Isn’t that obvious?”

  “But why?”

  “Because sometimes—not always, but sometimes—we manage to put things right. We see a kind of tear in the fabric of the world and we manage to mend it. What else should we do? Close our eyes and walk on by? There are so many people behaving like that already, Daniel. Why choose to walk with the crowd?”

  He gave up on the cigarette, stubbed it out, and said nothing.

  “You’re so different from the friend of yours I met that sad morning,” she continued. “You hide here, as if the sunlight were your enemy. All the while Signor Massiter is the man about town. A lunch here, an appointment there. Do you know he dined with the mayor the other day? To move in such circles, yet he has not an iota of your talent, I believe, but merely feeds upon it.”

  “People like Hugo Massiter are . . .” He searched for the words. “A necessary evil.”

  “Of course. And a successful evil too. You know that young violinist? The American?”

  His eyes glinted with interest again. “Amy?”

  “Quite. I happened to be taking breakfast near his apartment in Dorsoduro before I came here. She appeared from there very early. With that look. You know? I think . . . But no. Who is one to judge such things these days?”

  “You’re following Hugo?” he asked.

  “I didn’t say that. I merely happened to see the American girl leave his apartment. She seemed a little dishevelled. Upset, perhaps. I don’t know. You should ask her when you meet.”

  His eyes lost their shine again. “Perhaps.”

  “Do you think Signor Massiter has a taste for young girls?”

  Daniel Forster sighed heavily. “I’ve no idea. For what it’s worth, I don’t really know Hugo Massiter. I never met him until I came here.”

  “He seems to have pursued an interest in . . . Amy? Quite successfully too.”

  “If you say so.”

  The idea did trouble him, she thought, but not in the way she expected. There was no sign of jealousy, simply concern.

  “Tell me,” he asked her. “Who do you think killed Paul and Scacchi?”

  She shrugged. “Someone with a reason, of course. A person who either wanted something from them or felt the requirement to punish them for some perceived misdeed.”

  “I told you about the money he borrowed. You called me a liar.”

  His habit of exaggerating, of straying from the strict truth, was annoying. “No, I said that I had no evidence to support your claim. That does not mean it’s inaccurate. Simply unlikely.”

  “Then who?”

  She waited a moment, so that the question would have some impact. The unsatisfactory interview with Rizzo had established only one thing for certain: that Massiter had been anxiously searching for some musical instrument which had come onto the black market. However hard she pressed him, Rizzo maintained his innocence of the superintendent’s murder—and his attack upon her. Nor did he shed any light on the instrument itself, although, if she was right, Rizzo himself must have taken it from Susa
nna Gianni’s coffin. None of this worried her. Rizzo could not escape her grasp. She would return to him later, time and again, pressing a little harder on each occasion. And one day he would break, bringing the greater prize with him, for it was this that mattered all along.

  “Scacchi handled stolen artefacts from time to time,” she told Daniel. “Were you aware of this? Did you negotiate for any such item on his behalf?”

  His young face reddened slightly. “He told me he dealt in antiques. That’s all.”

  “Such a catchall phrase! But answer my question, please, Daniel. Did you handle any such object for him recently? This may be important. Do not worry. I am not chasing a thief. I wish to catch a murderer.”

  “There were some things in the house which he wished to keep hidden,” he replied obliquely.

  “Are they still here?”

  “I can’t find anything of value anywhere,” he admitted. “I’ve looked high and low.”

  “Why did you do that? Did you hope to sell them?”

  “No!” He fell silent.

  “Then why, Daniel?”

  She cursed her impetuosity. His face had settled into a mask. “For my own satisfaction,” he said. “I am a musician, not a crook.”

  “A musician who rarely goes to see his work rehearsed. Will you be there for the première, even? And the party afterwards?”

  His eyes were on the window once more. “I’ll be there. Have you asked enough questions?”

  “No. Have you provided enough answers?”

  “As many as you deserve,” he replied.

  She looked at Biagio. The sergeant was growing restless. He was on duty at three. The interview was going nowhere.

  “I rather hoped, Daniel, that you killed them. It would have been so neat and simple, and you know how much the police like that.”

  He glared at her. “What?”

  “You are the one person I can find with a verifiable motive. Apart from the housekeeper, that is, and we both know she wasn’t to blame.”

  There was hatred in his eyes. It surprised her.

  “You should deal with matters of the estate more promptly,” she said. “Before trying to drown your misery in wine. I spoke to Scacchi’s lawyer yesterday. The old man divided his estate into three parts. To his lover, to his housekeeper, and to you. The change was made only a week ago. The lover is dead. The housekeeper immediately withdrew her claim once I told her about it. This leaves you as sole beneficiary of the will.”

  Daniel Forster’s eyes widened in disbelief.

  “This house is yours, Daniel,” she continued. “And everything in it. With no debts or charges upon it. Scacchi made you his heir, though he knew you for just a few weeks. Now, why do you think he did that?”

  The redness had gone from his face. At that moment, Giulia Morelli believed, Daniel Forster was full of outrage and anger towards his dead benefactor, as if Scacchi had managed to pull some mysterious trick even from the city morgue, where he now lay.

  “Daniel? Why?”

  His mind was elsewhere, a place she could not begin to guess. Then he turned to gaze at her with a fierceness in his eyes she had not seen before.

  “Tell me,” he said. “When you go home, when your work is finished, do you feel you’ve added to the sum of good in the world?”

  “Naturally. There would be no other reason for us to do this job.”

  “And how do you define that, Captain?”

  “I don’t steal,” she replied immediately. “I don’t take bribes. I don’t invent convictions for those I simply suppose to be guilty, or look the other way for those deemed to be beyond the extent of the law.”

  “So that’s how you define goodness?” he asked. “By what you don’t do?”

  “In this city it is,” she replied sharply, wishing on the instant that she had given the question more thought.

  Daniel Forster folded his arms and smiled. She stood up, glowered at Biagio, and mumbled some excuse about having to leave. Then she threw her card on the table.

  “Talk to me again, Daniel. It would help us both. And on my mobile number only, please. Remember what I said about this city. Remember what company you keep.”

  Outside, the temperature had risen by several degrees. Venice would soon be unbearable. Her mind was unusually confused. Biagio eyed her quizzically.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  He shrugged. “I’d been wondering what it might be like, seeing someone get the better of you.”

  “Now you know. Smart English bastard.”

  “I like him,” the sergeant said. “He seems honest enough.”

  “Enough for what?” she wondered.

  He cast her a harsh glance. “Enough to help us if he can. If he wants to, that is, and has some reason.”

  Biagio was right. She knew it. Without Daniel Forster they were lost. The suspicions that rolled around her head night and day would lose their momentum. She might not even face the option of a desk in Padua.

  “I’ll find a reason,” she muttered.

  But Biagio was in the shadow of a nearby doorway, taking a call on his mobile. The sergeant’s face was flushed, and he was cursing rapidly into the handset. He finished and turned to her.

  “What is it?” she asked, fearing the answer.

  “They found Rizzo this morning. Floating facedown in one of the old docks by the port. Shot once in the head. Last night, probably.”

  She closed her eyes and wished she had acted more swiftly to pump the truth out of the man. “Damn.”

  He remained silent, watching her.

  “I’m going to pull in Massiter,” she said. “Find out what he did last night.”

  “You can’t,” he said instantly. “The case has been assigned. You can’t go near it without telling them what we’ve been doing.”

  “Who’s got it?”

  “Raffone.”

  She was outraged. Rizzo’s murder had been given to the worst detective in the city, and one who was probably corrupt too. “Jesus. Someone really wants a result there. So what do you think we do?”

  Biagio straightened himself up. Giulia Morelli wished she’d sought his opinion before. She took him too much for granted. He nodded back towards Ca’ Scacchi. “You got the Scacchi case. You use that. We find some way of leaning on this kid. If you think about it, there’s nothing else.”

  She looked at Biagio. “You liked him, didn’t you?”

  “Sure,” he agreed. “You didn’t?”

  Daniel Forster had withheld something from her. Of that she was certain. Yet somehow she felt unable to blame him for his actions. It was impossible to believe that some selfish, dishonest motive lay behind them.

  “I liked him,” she conceded. “But if we have to, Biagio, we must break him. If that’s what we need.”

  The sergeant looked at his watch and said nothing. He was probably thinking about going back on shift, starting his real work.

  “Did you tell anyone?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “Rizzo.”

  Biagio glowered at her. “The jerk was in the station. Do you think there are any secrets there?”

  “No,” she replied. There were a million ways the news could have leaked out. She had to learn to trust someone. “I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Biagio said. “Listen. I go along with this for the rest of the week. Then either we have something or we give up. We forget about the whole thing. Is that agreed?”

  “Naturally,” Giulia Morelli lied.

  48

  The demon who escaped my grasp

  Being an excerpt removed from the memoirs of Alberto Marchese, magistrate of the Quirinal quarter, 1713–33, at his request.

  AS YOU, DEAR READER, WILL APPRECIATE BY NOW, THE rogue is a most ordinary species. I have, in my time, despatched more than 200 to the prison and thirty or so to the sca fold. Human nature being what it is, I cannot, I confess, feel much regret for their fates, nor satisfaction, either. Lif
e is much determined by a throw of the die. None of these felons possessed some seed of the Devil in their blood. Born to different parents in another time, they would all have made model citizens, I’ll warrant, except perhaps for old Fratelli, who was as mad as a swineherd’s hound and twice as dangerous. But anyone minded to strangle his wife, then serve up cooked portions of the dismembered corpse for the relatives who arrived for her own birthday feast, must be deemed lunatic, and therefore not fully human in the first place. Even Brazzi, that light-fingered blackguard with a taste for lifting the purses of tourists on the Palatine, had his finer side, quoting wistfully from Petrarch as I set down his appointment with the axe (a little thievery is one thing, but the fellow should never have stuck that chap from Milan—I know these northern types can be annoying, but murder is murder, after all).

  I can think of only one villain I have encountered over the years for whom I feel the word “evil” is truly appropriate, and it is to my eternal shame that he remains, as far as I am aware, a free man. But this was no ordinary criminal. I cannot give you his real name or history. What I do know is that he is surely one of the most wicked creatures ever to have walked this earth, in that his malevolence was both intentional and directed at the innocent in full knowledge of the pain and injury it would cause. Most malefactors fall into their cycle of criminality through laziness, accident, or, let it be said, necessity. The one I describe here indulged in his devilry—there is no other word—because its performance, and its consequences, amused him. Money, influence, power both sexual and worldly . . . all these things were but side dishes for the main course of his pleasure, which was to deceive the world with one face and devour it with another.

  Every other criminal I have encountered in this odd career, I could in one way or another understand. Poverty, lust, greed—read the Good Book, they’re all there—have driven men to bad since Eve first offered Adam a bite of the apple. Yet this one was beyond me, beyond God in all his wisdom, I’d venture. You will suspect I say this because he was a foreigner, an Englishman at that. You are wrong. This fellow—Arnold Lescalier, as I knew him (though I doubt that bears much resemblance to the name he was christened with, if christened he was)—possessed a streak of evil that ran through his soul with the same unbending accuracy of a flaw despoiling a piece of fine marble. It was appropriate, then, that we first met at the Teatro Goldoni, where a passable pack of players was trying to entertain us with a translation of some ancient piece about Faust by the Englishman Marlowe. It was an amusing melodrama, and would have been all the more so had I known that this articulate, entertaining Englishman to whom I was introduced at the interval could have passed as inspiration for the theme. The doomed doctor on his way to Hades, you think? Ah, no. For all his faults, Faust was human throughout. Mr. Lescalier, I believe, had more in common with Mephistopheles, the Devil’s cool and calculating aide-de-camp, who would smile while slitting your throat, then steal your soul as it departs your bleeding carcass and stop it up in a bottle for his master.