Renzo's end.

Annabel smoked loudly as she stood back to take in a view of the Doge's palace. It was as if smoking loudly was the most natural thing to do if you were a Portuguese lady of generous girth and of a certain age and your hairdresser had just been stung to death by a swarm of hornets. She had become bored sitting by the pool waiting for the police to finish investigating the murderous attack; there was to be no time lost in tracking down a new hairdresser, a new father for the children she still hoped to have and also for those she had never yet had and probably never would.

She walked through the thick afternoon air with no purpose other than to forget, but Annabel soon remembered that lunch had been a long time before and hunger immediately set in. She tried to forget the number of her hotel room: it was forty six, the number of years that had passed since her mother had given birth to her. What she also remembered was that she had filled the pockets of her dressing gown with biscuits at breakfast, so she dug deep in her pocket and shared what she found among the fluff and old bus tickets with Froukje her Dutch companion.

They sat on a bench to eat. They kicked off their shoes. Pigeons circled the two female persons who had become subjects of interest. The scavengers circled then came in to land close to the big female feet. Annabel wondered aloud about which would be better, being stung to death by hornets or pecked to death by pigeons. Froukje reminded her quietly that the hairdresser was too dead to help her make a proper comparison and Annabel started once more to long to have his children.

Inspector Cupo acted quite firmly towards Annabel and her lady companion when they returned to the Hotel Select long after sunset. They had been absent from the scene of Renzo's demise for six hours so he raised his request that they should not leave the confines of the hotel from the level of a polite suggestion to that of an unmistakeable imperative. Froukje's gaze fell to the floor for the shame of being admonished by a policeman: Annabel's reaction was to immediately forget who Renzo had been and to easily shift her hopes and affections to the inspector. Here was a man who could take charge of more than just her hair. He was half her age and half her weight, but those were mere statistics to be recorded by some clerk in a dusty office on the fourth floor of the town hall, details of interest only to researchers from a not-yet-lived era who would have to apply for permission to peruse them.

Permission granted, permission denied. To be recorded also were the number, the very precise number, of hornets involved in the attack on Renzo. Was he done to death by fifteen hornets, or by sixty-three or by twelve? Who cares, the hotel manager asked inaudibly, but Cupo heard the manager's eyes rolling in their sockets. It mattered to the Inspector. On Renzo's body there were forty-six sting sites, one for every year that Annabel had sucked air to sustain her life on this earth. The Inspector counted every sting and circled it with the ink of his green pen. But can a hornet sting more than once? Was this the work of a single, very angry repeat-stinger hornet, or the work of forty-six separate hornets? Only one dead hornet was found floating in the lavatory in Renzo's room.

When the inspector was satisfied that Renzo was indeed beyond redemption he spent a good while gazing out across the Grand Canal at the dirty, dark beauty of Venice, his elbows leaning on the sill of an open window with a series of cigarettes taking their turn to hang from his lip. He smoked as silently as Annabel smoked loudly. He was a thoughtful, romantic smoker who never smelled like an ashtray. He loved inspecting the city and everything else that came within the scope of his responsibility.

His title suited him - Inspector. With the inspection of the gloomy city complete the inspector turned his attention to the dead body sprawled at his feet. He inspected it once more. He inspected the clothes laid out on the bed, the lifeless hair, hands and face and all the other bits. He inspected the contents of the man's pockets, inspected every corner of the room. Every drawer was examined, every scrap of paper read. The stairs were inspected and the toilet bowl yet again, the well in which the dead hornet had presumably met its end. Nothing ever escaped the examining gaze of Cupo's cold eyes - his wife complained that dinner at a restaurant was like a forensic expedition rather than a romantic night out. (Yes Annabel, he's married.) With all his inspecting of crime scenes, the cityscape and his family's appearance and their activities, there was no time left for him to inspect the most important object in any room, he never inspected himself. Never once did he peer into the murky depths of his own sad, sick soul. He had an acute sense of the tiniest speck in the eyes of others, but no sense of the whacking great plank in his own eye.

Annabel would never have considered herself as a suspect in the death of her hairdresser: that, however, was exactly how Alessandro Cupo viewed her. He had concluded, incorrectly, that the no-longer-young Portuguese lady who took a Dutch lady companion and her personal Italian hairdresser on holiday with her probably had a romantic interest in one or other. It seemed likely to him that an overture to the young Renzo had been rejected, possibly in ridiculing fashion, and that the rich, prematurely-aging and quite erratic Annabel had taken revenge.

But where would she have procured the murder weapon, the hornets? Froukje Dejong seemed too virtuous to be party to such a scheme, although in the employ of a benefactress she might not have had the ability to stand firm on matters of principle. Cupo mulled while he smoked while he observed the city. After his inspections and examinations only one hypothesis (which was based on the intimate location of most of the forty-six stings) held sway. Furthermore, the hypothesis didn't unsettle his water, the litmus test for all such conclusions.

Cupo posited that when the unfortunate Renzo undressed for bed he took the opportunity to void his bowels. As he lowered himself onto the potty and made his deposit, he disturbed several hornets who had made themselves at home on the surface of the water. In their great indignation at having been dumped upon, they rose to attack the enemy bomber - Renzo's buttocks and dangly bits. Their persistent injection of venom into the receptive flesh above them triggered an allergic reaction, closing down Renzo's airways. The unfortunate hairdresser collapsed on the bathroom floor gasping for air and expired soon after.

Ever since that day Inspector Cupo has always checked his toilet for hornets before making a deposit, as so ought we all.