A Question of Belief

15

Later, as he sat on the train carrying him back to Venice, Brunetti reflected upon the way human nature could still surprise him: the young people had insisted on helping them carry their luggage to the connecting train, a conductor having met them and told Brunetti that the train to Venice would be delayed another ten minutes. When his family was aboard, the two young people disappeared, asking nothing about his mysterious reason for returning immediately to Venice. Brunetti kissed Paola and the children, promised he would come north again as soon as possible, and stood back from their train as it carried them off to Merano, to the mountains, and to the delights of sleeping under eiderdowns in the middle of August.

His own train back to Venice gave the same sensation, but intermittently, for the air conditioning was working only when it pleased, alternating blasts of tropical air with those more accurately described as arctic. The windows in the new trains did not open, so he and the other three people in the first-class compartment to which the conductor had taken him sat as if on some means of transport that alternated stops between Calcutta and Ulan Bator. Brunetti had sent his suitcase, and thus his sweaters, along with the family, so when the train was anywhere near Ulan Bator, he was forced to flee into the corridor, which was at least consistent in temperature, however elevated that temperature might be.

For the moment therefore, he could neither read in peace nor think calmly of the situation in Venice and what it might be necessary to do when he got there. He finally went down to the dining car, where the air conditioning was working perfectly, and sat and read the newspaper while drinking two coffees and a bottle of mineral water.

When the train pulled into Mestre, he called Griffoni’s number and was glad to hear that she would meet him at the railway station with a launch.

‘Vianello?’ he asked, knowing his friend was on vacation but hoping that Griffoni would have thought of phoning him.

‘I called him after I spoke to you. He knows someone in the Guardia Costiera, and they’ve got permission to enter Croatian waters to pick him up and bring him back.’

‘Who does he know?’ Brunetti asked.

‘All he said was that it was someone he went to school with,’ she explained.

‘Good. Thanks.’

The train started to move out of the station, and Brunetti broke the connection. As they crossed the bridge, his attention was distracted by enormous patches of seaweed clogging the surface of the water on both sides. The higher tide of the early morning had obscured them, but there was no hiding them now. They spent minutes travelling past them, and still they did not end. A few plastic bottles bobbed in the flat green mass which spread out relentlessly on both sides and which appeared to extend beneath the bridge, as well. Boats steered clear of it. No floating water birds went anywhere near it. Like a neglected patch of eczema, it grew.

He saw the police launch moored directly in front of the station and hastened down the steps towards it. So comfortable had he become in the dining car that it took him a moment to recognize the sensation of invasive heat. His shirt was stuck to his back before he reached the boat, and he was annoyed to realize he had packed his new sunglasses and left them in the suitcase that had, by now, arrived at an altitude of 1,450 metres on the Alp above Glorenza.

He nodded to the pilot, Foa, stepped on board, and took Griffoni’s hand. Her tan made her hair seem even blonder, and her short skirt showed an expanse of bronzed leg. She looked like anything but a commissario di polizia on duty. Foa unmoored the boat and went back into the cabin. He started the engine.

‘Vianello?’ Brunetti asked.

‘He’s back already. Waiting for us at the victim’s home. It took him less than three hours.’

Brunetti smiled. Even if it ruined Vianello’s vacation plans to have to return to Venice, to do so on a Coastguard patrol boat at full throttle across the Adriatic was some compensation. ‘I bet he loved it.’

‘Who wouldn’t?’ she asked and he heard the envy in her voice.

The boat turned left into the Canale di Cannaregio, passed at moderate speed under both bridges and out into the laguna. Griffoni explained that she had spoken with Dottor Rizzardi, who said he would try to get back from his house in the Dolomites by that evening. If he could not, then it would be the following morning.

Griffoni had not seen the body, which had been taken to the morgue before Scarpa called her to tell her about the crime. Brunetti asked carefully about Scarpa’s behaviour and his response to the news that both he and Vianello were returning from vacation to take over the case.

‘I didn’t tell him,’ Griffoni said.

‘So he thinks the case is his?’ Brunetti asked.

‘His and mine, but since I’m only a woman, I obviously don’t count.’ They had chosen to stay out on the deck in the hope of catching the breeze created by their motion, so the wind carried some of their words away. Brunetti took another look at her. Though she was decidedly a woman, Brunetti would never preface that noun with the adjective ‘only’. ‘So my arrival will surprise him,’ Brunetti said, not without satisfaction.

‘I hope it upsets him, too,’ she said with the sort of malice that acquaintance, however brief, with Lieutenant Scarpa so often provoked.

The water in this part of the laguna was surprisingly choppy, and both of them were forced to grab the railing to keep from being tossed about. Foa nevertheless put the boat to full throttle in the open water, drowning out other sound and the possibility of conversation. Brunetti glanced to the left, his eye hopping from Murano to Burano and to the bell tower of Torcello, barely visible in the muggy air.

They turned right, passed a canal and turned into the next. Brunetti saw the man leading the camel and asked, ‘What are we doing in the Misericordia?’

‘His home is up ahead, on the left.’

‘Oddio,’ Brunetti exclaimed. ‘It’s not Fontana, is it?’

‘I told you his name when I called,’ insisted Griffoni.

Brunetti remembered the clicks and noises on the phone line and said, ‘Yes, of course.’

‘You know him?’ she asked, interested.

‘No. But I know about him.’

‘Worked at the Tribunale, didn’t he?’ she asked.

Feeling the boat begin to slow, Brunetti said only ‘Yes’, before moving forward to take the mooring rope. Foa stopped on the right side of the canal, and Brunetti stepped up to the pavement and tied the rope to a metal ring. He extended a hand to Griffoni and helped her from the boat; Foa said he would find a bar to get out of the sun and told them to call him when they were finished.

She led the way: down to the first bridge, across it and up the calle to the first right. Then the third house on the right: a large brown portone with a panel of names and bells beside it.

Griffoni had a key and let them in to what turned out to be a large courtyard filled with potted palms and bushes, the far side already shady in the late afternoon. Motion there caught his eye. A young officer, one of the new recruits, jumped to his feet and saluted the two commissari. Brunetti noticed then that scene of crime tape divided the courtyard into two parts, in the farther of which stood the young man. He and Griffoni slipped under the tape and approached. ‘Where was he?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Over there, Commissario,’ the young officer said, pointing back towards the stairway that led up to the door to the building.

Brunetti and Griffoni walked over to the steps; Brunetti’s eyes were drawn to a bloodstain on the pavement that looked as if it had been formed around three sides of a rectangle. The chalk-drawn figure of a man emerged from the stain, its feet pointing towards them. From the angle at which Brunetti saw it, the figure looked surprisingly small.

‘Where’s the statue?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Bocchese had it taken to the lab,’ Griffoni said. ‘It was only a nineteenth-century marble copy of a Byzantine lion.’ The remark confused Brunetti, but he chose not to ask about it.

He looked back at the portone that opened into the calle and saw that the bloodstain was about fifteen metres from it, so someone could have been waiting in the courtyard. Or Fontana could have been pushed inside. Or he had gone inside with someone he knew.

‘What time did it happen?’ Brunetti asked Griffoni.

‘No one’s sure. We haven’t questioned the people in the building yet, but one man told Scarpa he and his wife came home just after midnight, and didn’t see anything.’ Waving her arm back at the portone and sweeping it in a line that ended at the bloodstain, she said, ‘There was no way they could not have seen him. So: some time after midnight.’

‘Until seven-thirty,’ Brunetti said. ‘Long time.’

Griffoni nodded in agreement. ‘That’s one of the reasons I wanted Rizzardi to do the autopsy.’

‘What did Scarpa tell you?’ asked Brunetti.

‘He said the wife of this couple told him Fontana lived with his mother. She’s very religious, goes to Mass every day and out to the cemetery once a week to tend her husband’s grave. That her son was devoted to her and it’s such a pity that he should be cut off in the prime of life. Usual story: once a person is dead, people start falling over themselves saying what a fine person he was and what a loss to the world, and how wonderful his entire family is.’

‘Which means, according to you?’

Griffoni smiled and answered, ‘What it would mean to anyone who pays attention to what people are really saying when they’re talking about how wonderful other people are: that she’s a dragon and probably made her son’s life a living misery.’ They were some distance from the young recruit and spoke in low voices; Brunetti regretted this, for it would delay the young man’s exposure to one of the basic truths his profession would eventually reveal to him: never trust anything that is said about a dead person.

Brunetti took another look at the scene of the crime, the tape, the chalked figure. He called over to the young officer, ‘Did you come with Lieutenant Scarpa?’

‘No, sir. I was on patrol over by San Leonardo and got a call telling me to come here.’

‘Who was here when you arrived?’

‘There was the Lieutenant, sir. Scarpa. And Officers Alvise and Portoghese. And three technicians from the crime squad. And the photographer.’ His voice trailed off, but it was obvious that he had not finished.

‘Who else?’ Brunetti said in an encouraging tone.

‘There were four people who lived in the building, or who acted like they did. One of them had a dog. And then some people standing over by the portone.’

‘Did you get their names?’

‘I thought about it, sir. But I figured, since there was a ranking officer and two other officers who are senior to me, well, I figured they’d already done that. And it didn’t seem my place to ask if they had.’

Brunetti took a closer look at the young man. He glanced at his nametag: ‘Zucchero,’ he read. ‘Are you Pierluigi’s son?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he answered.

‘I never met your father,’ Brunetti said, ‘but everyone here speaks of him with respect.’

‘Thank you, sir. He was a good man.’

‘Ispettore Vianello?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Upstairs talking to the mother, Commissario. He got here about half an hour ago.’

Brunetti stepped back from the young man and turned in a circle to study the inside of the courtyard. One wall ran along the street; opposite it, on the other side of the scene of crime tape, stood three doors made of metal grillework, all of them closed.

‘What are those?’ Brunetti asked, pointing to the doors.

‘The storerooms for the apartments, sir.’ Then Zucchero pointed to a fourth grillework door on one of the side walls, also closed, half hidden behind a line of potted palms. ‘There’s another one over there, sir.’

‘Let’s have a look,’ Brunetti said.

The three of them walked over to the single door, which stood in the shade cast by two of the palms. Brunetti noticed that a metal chain had been run through the bars of the door and through a metal hasp that had been nailed into the wooded door frame. ‘Lieutenant Scarpa had all the padlocks replaced, sir. But I’ve got the keys.’ Moving past Brunetti, Zucchero stuck his hands through the bars and switched on a light which allowed them to see inside.

The room was empty, the floor swept clean, but not recently, for tiny patches of powdered stucco had fallen since the last cleaning and stood out like dusty islands in a cement sea. The walls were entirely bare, save for the occasional patch where the whitewash was flaking off.

Brunetti reached in to switch off the light, and they crossed the courtyard to the first of the other doors. The sun reached halfway up the wall and, falling through the grating at an angle, brightened the first metre of the pavement. Made from large terracotta tiles, the pavement was raised two steps above the surface of the courtyard, reducing the humidity and perhaps protecting against the risk of acqua alta. Zucchero opened the lock and pulled open the door. Brunetti lowered his head and stepped inside, found the light and switched it on.

In contrast to the stark emptiness of the other, this storeroom exploded with things: boxes, suitcases, knapsacks, old paint tins, plastic buckets with rags erupting from them, empty jam and pickle jars. At the end, he read the history of childhood: a collapsible wooden baby cot, its plastic bottom sheet draped across it so that only the round metal castors and the bottom of the legs were visible. A hanging mobile of animals and bells had crash-landed on a bookcase. Two cardboard boxes contained a zoo of soft animals, all the worse for wear. Two unopened boxes of Pampers stood beside the mobile, perhaps awaiting the arrival of another child.

Brunetti stepped back and bumped into Griffoni. He apologized, standing back so she could leave, then he switched off the light, and Zucchero saw to closing the door.

Griffoni chose not to go into the third storeroom when Zucchero removed the chain and opened the door. It was identical in size to the other, about three metres in width and extending at least five towards the back wall. Inside, shelves holding boxes ran from floor to ceiling on both sides. The boxes were all the same size and made of plain brown cardboard: these were boxes meant to store things, not boxes brought home from the supermarket and pressed into service. Each bore a neat hand-printed label in the centre of the side that faced out from the shelf. ‘Zia Maria’s Tea Set’, ‘Handkerchiefs’, ‘Winter shoes’, ‘Woollen scarves’, ‘Araldo’s books’. And so it went, the detritus of life ordered and sealed in boxes and nothing to be discarded if it might some time be used or needed again.

Brunetti turned away from the room and the life it held, switched off the light, and followed Zucchero to the fourth storeroom, Griffoni again close behind them, all of them silent.

When Zucchero let them into the last, Brunetti switched on the light and saw that it was the same size as the previous storeroom and had similar shelving. It too gave evidence of many lives or, at least, that many lives had passed through the hands of the owners. Most of the shelves on the left side held empty bird cages, at least twenty of them. They were wooden and metal, all sizes, all colours. Some of them still held their water bottles, dry now, with dark stains showing the level of water when they had been placed in the storeroom. All of the doors were closed, and none of the little wooden swings moved. They had been wiped clean, but the dusty, acid smell of bird filled the space. There was one stack of boxes, these too the sort one bought to store things in. Labelled in a different hand, they contained ‘Lucio’s sweaters’, ‘Lucio’s boots’, and ‘Eugenia’s sweaters’.

The other side held wine racks; not shelves, racks that began about thirty centimetres from the ground and ran almost to the ceiling. Brunetti walked over and read the labels; he recognized and approved of some of them, saw that others had detached themselves from the bottles and hung loose. Griffoni asked, ‘In this humidity, with that other smell?’

Brunetti put out a finger and rubbed one of the corks, which had herniated the metal foil. A rough white film covered the top of the cork. He pulled out the bottle. ‘Nineteen eighty,’ he said, and slid the bottle back, both of them wincing at the sound of glass scraping on metal.

At the far end of the room they saw a sofa and at one end a standard lamp that must have fallen victim to redecoration. Over the back of the sofa was draped a hand-knitted afghan in violent reds and greens, and at the other end stood a square table with a greying crocheted doily in the centre.

Without bothering to comment on any of the things, Brunetti said to Griffoni, ‘Let’s go up and see how much Vianello has got out of her so far.’ This would have sounded — to anyone unfamiliar with the Ispettore’s uncanny ability to lure even the most recalcitrant witness — slightly menacing; but it was merely what anyone who knew Vianello would expect him to have achieved.

Brunetti nodded to Zucchero, who saluted and moved back into the shadow.

‘It’s on the second floor,’ Griffoni said, leading him up the stairs to the main entrance, which was open. Inside, they paused at the bottom of the oval staircase that led to the upper floors. The steps were marble, broad and low, at the top a skylight: nothing else would explain the light that flooded down, illuminating and heating the area around them.

‘Were you up there before?’ Brunetti asked, staring at the skylight.

‘No, Scarpa went up to talk to her when he found out that Fontana lived with his mother. He didn’t call me until after he’d spoken to her.’

Brunetti nodded, and the young officer left them, staring back across the courtyard. Turning to Griffoni, Brunetti asked, ‘Why do you think he waited so long?’

‘Power,’ she answered, then more reflectively, ‘So long as he can control or limit what other people know, he knows more than they do and feels as if he has power over them or what they do.’ She shrugged, adding, ‘It’s a common enough technique.’

‘I’d say in some places it’s standard operating procedure,’ Brunetti added and started up the stairs.

The landing of the second floor had only two doors; a policeman stood outside one of them. He saluted when he saw Brunetti and Griffoni and said, ‘Ispettore Vianello is still inside.’

Brunetti indicated the other door, but the officer said, ‘That side of the building’s not been restored, sir. All three apartments are empty.’ Then, before Brunetti could ask, he added, ‘We checked them, sir.’

Brunetti nodded his thanks and tapped on the door twice, but when he saw it was ajar he pushed it open and went into the apartment. The light evaporated, and all he saw was a dim glow at the end of what must have been a long corridor. Unconsciously, Griffoni took a step closer to him until her arm was touching his in the near-darkness. They stood still until their eyes adjusted and they could begin to make out the objects lining the corridor. Brunetti saw the outline of a door on his right and opened it, hoping to allow some light to filter into the corridor, but the room was dark, and all he could make out were four thin vertical bars of gold. It took Brunetti a moment to realize they were cracks of light at the edges of the shutters closed over two windows. Here, as well, he saw the dim shadows of objects standing about in the room, but it was impossible to distinguish what they were.

He pulled the door closed and began to pat the wall of the corridor in search of a light switch. When he found one and pressed it, the difference was minimal, for it illuminated only a single overhead light halfway down the corridor. The objects emerged closer to visibility: narrow tables, low trunks, a few standing lamps, a suitcase — all crowded back against the walls.

They heard the murmur of a voice, perhaps more than one, from the end of the corridor, and both of them set off at the same moment. They passed another door on the right and another on the left. Ordinarily the darkness would have provided some relief from the heat, but that was not the case here. If air be stagnant, then stagnant air grew in that hall. It pressed itself against them as they moved, reluctant to let them pass and interested only in adding to their discomfort. The dampness wrapped itself around them and stroked their exposed flesh.

They stopped in front of a door which was ajar, and Brunetti was about to call Vianello’s name when he recalled that the woman was a widow, had lived alone with her only son, who had just been killed. ‘You call him,’ he told Griffoni softly.

‘Ispettore Vianello?’ Griffoni said into the crack between the door and the jamb.

Her voice was answered by the sound of a chair scraping on the floor, and Vianello appeared at the door and pulled it fully open. Like Brunetti, he was dressed for vacation, in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. Whatever his clothing lacked in seriousness was more than made up for by the expression on his face and by the voice in which he said, ‘Commissario Griffoni. Commissario Brunetti. I’d like to present you to Signora Fontana, the mother of the victim.’ The Inspector’s voice grew softer with the final word.

He stepped slowly back from the doorway and turned towards two chairs that sat in the middle of the room, both with their backs to what appeared to be a row of windows obscured by maroon velvet curtains.

The apartment had prepared Brunetti to see a woman of some austerity: he had imagined grey hair pulled tight in a small bun at the back of her head, stick-like calves under a long dark skirt. Instead, the woman sitting in the centre of the room was plump and so short that, even with her feet resting on a velvet-covered hassock, her head did not reach the top of the back of the chair. She had short curly hair, the standard dark red chosen by women of her age. She needed no makeup: her cheeks were rosy with good health, the skin as smooth and soft as that of a young woman. Her eyes, when Brunetti got close enough to see them, seemed to be the eyes of a different person entirely or to belong on a different face. Hooded, deep-set, angled down at the corners, they looked at the world, and at Brunetti, with a sharpness that was evident nowhere on her body.

He moved up behind Griffoni, who bent over the woman and said, ‘Signora, I would like to extend my condolences at this terrible time.’ The woman extended her hand and allowed Griffoni to press hers, but she said nothing.

Brunetti bent down then and said, ‘I join my colleague in extending my sympathies, Signora.’ The hand she gave him was soft as a baby’s, the skin smooth and unblemished by age spots. She exerted no pressure on his hand, merely allowed hers to be held for a few seconds and then removed it from his grasp.

She looked at Vianello and asked in a soft voice, ‘Are these the colleagues you were telling me about, Ispettore?’

‘Yes, Signora. Commissario Brunetti and I have worked together for years, and Commissario Griffoni, because of her exemplary conduct at another Questura, has been assigned here.’ This was not strictly the truth. In fact, it was a lie. Claudia Griffoni, Brunetti had discovered only after she had been at the Questura for almost a year, had been sent there because she had been too active in her investigation of the business activities of one of the politicians of the party currently holding the majority in Parliament. Her questore had warned her, as had two magistrates who were working on the same investigation. Both of them had told her to be less obvious, not to speak to the press, but the press had not been able to resist a story in which the conflicting parts were played by a convicted criminal and a very attractive female police commissario, who just happened to be blonde, and whose father had been seriously wounded in a Mafia attempt on his life two decades before.

A week after a story appeared, stating that the politician was the subject of a police investigation, Griffoni had found herself transferred to Venice, a city not famed for active interference in the doings of either the members of the political class or the Mafia.

Brunetti was pulled back from these reflections by the voice of Signora Fontana, who said to Vianello, ‘Ispettore, perhaps you could bring chairs for your colleagues?’

When the four of them were sitting in a rough circle, Brunetti said, ‘Signora, I realize this is going to be a terribly hard time for you. Not only have you suffered an unbearable loss, but you will now have to suffer the invasion of the press and public.’

‘And police,’ she said instantly.

He gave an easy smile and nodded. ‘And the police, Signora. But the difference is that we are interested in finding the person who did this: the press has other goals.’

Vianello sat up straighter and turned to Brunetti. ‘Signora Fontana has already had an offer from a magazine. To tell her story. And her son’s.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said, turning to the woman. ‘What did you tell them?’

‘The Ispettore spoke to them for me,’ she said. ‘And told them I was not interested, which I am not.’ She brought her lips together in an expression of prim disapproval, but her eyes were careful to watch for Brunetti’s response.

He nodded in open approval, giving her what he thought she wanted.

‘It won’t change what they write,’ Vianello interrupted to say, ‘but of course they won’t be able to use family photos.’

‘At least not from my side of the family,’ Signora Fontana said with more than a touch of asperity.

Brunetti let it pass as though he had not heard and asked, ‘Have you any idea who might have wanted to hurt your son, Signora?’

She shook her head furiously, but not a single lock of her permed hair fell out of place. ‘No one could want to hurt Araldo. He was such a good boy. He was always a good boy. His father raised him that way, and then when his father died, I tried to do the same.’

Griffoni placed her hand on Signora Fontana’s arm and said something Brunetti could not hear, but it had no effect whatsoever on the woman. Indeed, it seemed to spur her on. ‘He was hard-working and honest and devoted to his work. And to me.’ She put her face in her hands and her shoulders moved convulsively, but for some reason Brunetti was not persuaded of the sincerity of her grief until she took her hands away from her face and he saw the tears. Like Saint Thomas, he was convinced then that she did mourn her son, but still he was left uneasy by the manner in which she showed it, as though the round-faced part of her was being instructed by those guarded eyes to behave in a fashion that would persuade.

When she had stopped crying and her handkerchief was clutched in her left hand, Brunetti said, ‘Signora, was it unusual for your son not to return home in the evening?’

She gave him an offended look. Had not her tears washed away the possibility that she would have to answer such questions? ‘I never knew when he returned home, Signore,’ she said, either having forgotten, or choosing to ignore, Brunetti’s rank. ‘He was fifty-two years old, please remember. He had his own life, his own friends, and I tried to interfere as little as I could.’

Griffoni muttered something appreciative of suffering motherhood, and Vianello nodded in approbation of Signora Fontana’s self-sacrifice.

‘I see,’ Brunetti said, then asked, ‘Did you usually see one another in the morning, before he went to work?’

‘Of course,’ she insisted. ‘I wouldn’t let my boy go off in the morning without caffè latte and some bread and jam.’

‘But this morning, Signora?’ Vianello asked.

‘The first thing I knew was Signor Marsano, banging on the door and telling me something was wrong. I was still in my nightgown so I couldn’t go out, but by the time I was dressed the police were here and they wouldn’t let me go down.’ She glanced at the circle of sympathetic faces surrounding her and said, ‘They wouldn’t let a mother go to her only son’, and again Brunetti had the feeling that the whole thing was being orchestrated for some purpose he could not understand.

When Signora Fontana seemed a bit calmer, Griffoni asked, ‘Did he tell you where he was going last night, Signora?’

The woman looked away from the question and from the person who had asked it and addressed Brunetti. ‘I go to bed early, Signore. Araldo was here when I did. We’d had dinner together.’

None of the police officers said anything, so she suggested, ‘He must have gone out for a walk. Perhaps he couldn’t sleep in this heat.’ She glanced at their faces in turn, as if to see which one of them believed her.

‘Did you hear him go out?’ Griffoni asked.

Signora Fontana looked stricken. ‘Why do you ask me all these things? I told you: Araldo had his own life. I don’t know what he did. What else do you expect me to tell you?’ Her voice had reached a point familiar to Brunetti, perhaps to all three of them, where the person being interviewed begins to see himself as a victim of persecution. It was but a step from there to anger and from anger to a truculent refusal to answer more questions.

Turning to Griffoni, Brunetti said, in a voice into which he pumped the tones of reprimand, ‘I think the Signora has answered more than enough of your questions, Commissario. This is a moment of unbearable grief, and I think she should be spared more questions.’

Griffoni, no fool, lowered her head and said something contrite.

Then, quickly, before Signora Fontana could respond, Brunetti addressed her directly, saying, ‘If there is anyone from your family you’d like to have here with you, Signora, please tell us and we’ll do what we can to contact them for you.’

The old woman shook her head, and again her curls did not move. As if barely able to force out the words, she said, ‘No one. No. I think to be alone is what I want.’

Brunetti got quickly to his feet, followed by Vianello and Griffoni. ‘If there is any way we can be of help to you, Signora, you have only to call the Questura. And, speaking personally, I join my prayers to yours that il Signore will help you find the way to get through this terrible time.’

He led the other two — who had the good sense not to say anything — from the room and out into the corridor.