Doctored Evidence

7

It was almost lunchtime and Brunetti, long familiar with his wife's insistence on knowing how many people would be home for any meal, called to tell her he would not be.

'Wonderful’ she responded.

'I beg your pardon’ he said, not disguising his surprise.

'Oh, don't be a such baby, Guido. The kids are both at friends' houses for lunch, so I can read while I eat.'

'What are you going to eat?' he asked.

'Don't you want to know what I'm going to read?'

'No. I want to know what you're going to eat.' 'So you'll know what you're missing?' 'Yes.'

'And sulk?' 'No.'

There was a long pause and, even down the line, he could all but hear her mind working. Finally she asked, 'If I promise to eat only grissini and cheese and then eat the peach that has the spot on it, will you feel better?'

'Oh, don't be silly, Paola’ he insisted but he did so with a laugh.

'Done,' she declared. 'And in order to reward you for the lunch you miss, I promise to cook you swordfish steaks and shrimp for dinner.'

'In the tomato sauce?'

'Yes. And if I have time, I'll use the rest of the peaches and make ice-cream.'

'And maybe a little less garlic than you usually use?' he asked, taking advantage of what he thought was a strong bargaining position.

'In the ice-cream?'

He laughed and hung up, telling himself to remember when he got home to ask her what she was reading.

That left him free to go over to Signora Battestini's apartment, which he thought would be best done just after lunchtime, when most people would be in their houses, and the heat would have driven the tourists from the streets. As a reluctant alternative to a proper meal, he decided to have some tramezzini, and after serious reflection decided that Boldrin was the best place. Besides, it was more or less on the way if he decided to walk and would get him to the apartment at about one.

Olga, the boy cat, was lying asleep in his usual place on the floor in front of the bar, and Brunetti was pleased to see that his hair had finally grown back, though it lacked the grey silkiness of years before. The illness that had struck down the neighbourhood cat three years ago was already urban myth: one story claimed someone had poured acid on him, while another blamed his shocking baldness on a sudden allergy. Regardless of their belief, many people had helped pay the veterinary bills during Olga's long convalescence, Brunetti among them. Brunetti stepped over him and approached the bar.

Two tramezzini with prosciutto and zucchini, however excellent, and two glasses of white wine could not, even in a moment of delirium, be called lunch, but the thought of their superiority to Paola's bread sticks, cheese and mouldy peach allowed him to consider them as something less rigorous than a penance.

When he reached the address, he saw that the shutters were closed. The single doorbell bore the name 'Battestini', so he couldn't employ his ordinary ruse of ringing a bell at random and saying he was visiting someone else whose name was listed by the bells. If he spoke Veneziano, this always worked. Now, instead, he would have to use the picks. Resisting the urge to look around to check if anyone could see him, he put his hand in the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the smallest of the picks. It was a simple lock and he was quickly inside, again careful not to look behind him as he pushed the door open.

The entrance was pleasantly cool after the heat outside: the walls were freshly whitewashed, and light streamed in from the windows above the door. He started up towards the second floor and found that the walls of the staircase were equally clean, the marble steps gleaming. The door to the apartment had no name beside it, though this would hardly be necessary if she owned the entire building. He bent to study the lock, saw that it was a simple Cisa, a model he'd opened a number of times before. He chose the medium-sized pick this time, inserted it into the lock, closed his eyes to give his full attention to his fingers, and started hunting for the first tumbler.

It took him less than a minute to turn the lock. He pushed open the door, felt on the wall until he found the light, and when he switched it on was at first puzzled that a woman such as Signora Battestini would have chosen to live in such cool simplicity: a pale, machine-made carpet on the floor, two spotless white easy chairs, a dark blue sofa that looked as though it had never been sat upon, and a low glass table with a shallow wooden platter at the centre. He realized then what must have happened: the crime scene tape had been removed, either by complacent police or eager relatives, and the place had been speedily redecorated. He took a closer look at the furniture and saw that what looked like maple was really cheap laminate, the sort of thing a landlord would put in an apartment meant to be rented by the week.

He walked towards the back of the apartment, and in all the rooms he saw the same cool hand at work: everywhere white furniture and walls and always one contrasting dark piece of furniture. Only the bathroom displayed any signs of what the apartment might once have been: new fixtures had been installed, but the pink tiles remained, some of them dull and opaque with age.

He opened closets and found new sheets and towels, some still in their plastic packaging; in the kitchen new dishes and cutlery. He looked under the beds and on the top shelves of the closets, but he found no evidence of the former owner. For fear of alerting the neighbours that someone was in the apartment, he left the shutters closed, and the trapped heat crawled over his body.

He left the apartment and went up the next flight of stairs. Ignoring the door he found at the landing, he climbed on up to the next floor. At the top was a door, the wood dry and splintery with age. Twin flanges were screwed into the door and jamb, and a padlock joined the metal rings on either side. He went back down the stairs and into what had been Signora Battestini's apartment, but no matter where he looked, he could find no tools. Finally he went into the kitchen and took one of the new, apparently unused, stainless steel kitchen knives and went back up to the attic door.

Though the wood of the door jamb was dry, it still took some effort to unscrew the flange and jerk it free. He pulled open the door and looked into the low attic. Luckily, there were two windows, neither very clean, at the other end, and they provided enough light to give some idea of the dimensions of the room and the objects scattered in it.

A double bed with a carved wooden frame, the sort he remembered from his grandmother's home, stood against one wall, beside it a matching marble-topped dresser, a leprous mirror attached to the back. Two easy chairs stood sideways to the wall, looking at one another, with between them a pink Formica clothing hamper.

A number of cardboard boxes were stacked just below the windows; as he crossed the room towards them, grime crunched under his feet. He pulled open the one on top of the first pile, relieved it was not taped shut, and found nothing but old shoes. He lifted it off the pile and set it on the floor, then opened the second. This seemed to hold the detritus of kitchen drawers: a carving knife with a mould-flecked bone handle, a corkscrew, a jumble of unmatched silverware, two dirty potholders, and pieces of metal the purpose of which he could not fathom. The third, heavier than the other two, was filled with small clumps of newspaper. He unwrapped one and saw that the date was from two weeks before. Inside, nestling in the sports pages, was a badly painted statue of the Madonna, appearing displeased that she was destined to spend at least the immediate future wrapped up in the latest cycling drug scandal. Beside her, in the first page of the Economy section of the Gazzettino, he found another triumph of what Paola called 'ChiesaKitsch', a Plexiglas sphere in which snow fell on a plastic Nativity scene. He rewrapped the ball and set the box aside.

The next box contained doilies and antimacassars, all bearing faint stains, cloths that must have come from the kitchen, as well as tea towels he was reluctant to touch. The one below that held a dozen or so cotton shirts, all white and all meticulously ironed and folded. Beneath them were six or seven dark coloured striped ties, each in a separate cellophane envelope. The next box was heavier and when he opened it he found papers of all sorts: old magazines, newspapers, envelopes that appeared still to contain letters, postcards, receipts for bills, and other pieces of paper he could not make out in the dim light. There was no way Brunetti could hope to carry it all away with him, so he had no choice but to sort through it and take what looked interesting.

The heat covered him, pressed against his skin, crawled up his nose, carrying dust with it. He dropped the papers back into the box and started to remove his jacket, which clung to him through his shirt, both of them soaked. Just as he pulled it clear of his shoulders, he heard the sound of a door closing below him, and he froze, the jacket halfway down his upper back.

He heard voices, one high-pitched – either a woman or a child – and the deeper resonance of a man. The voices drowned out whatever noise their feet made on the steps. He tried to remember if he had turned off the light and closed the door to the apartment behind him. It had the kind of lock that clicked shut without the key. He knew he'd left it open when he first came up to the attic and could only hope he'd thought to close it the second time.

The voices grew nearer, each answering the other with sufficient frequency for him to abandon the idea that the first voice was that of a child. He heard a door open, then close, and the voices stopped. He closed his eyes, the better to hear them. He had no idea which apartment they had entered, the one directly below him or Signora Battestini's one floor down. He had not been at all conscious of the noise his feet made on the wooden floor, but now he tested it by shifting minimally to one side and froze again at the protest from the boards.

He pulled his jacket back on and leaned forward to set the papers back in the box. He looked at his watch and saw that it was five minutes before two. At five past, he leaned over to pick up the papers and turned them to the light to try to read them. He soon realized the impossibility of concentrating on the papers, not with two people in the apartment downstairs, so he placed them in the box once more. Before long, his back began to stiffen, and he swivelled around at the waist a few times to relieve tension.

Another quarter of an hour passed before he heard the voices again, the door having opened silently. What story could he give, should they decide to come up the stairs and find him in the attic? Technically, it was still a crime scene, so he could argue his right to be there. But the picked lock and the jemmied door to the attic suggested something beyond regular police procedure and were sure to cause trouble.

The voices remained at the same level for a while, then gradually grew fainter. Finally, he heard the front door close, and as the silence spread through the building, Brunetti took two steps backward and stretched his arms high above his head, catching his right hand in a spider's web. He pulled it back instantly, wiping it on the front of his jacket. He turned and walked to the door of the attic and then back to the boxes, shaking his hands in front of him to rid himself of accumulated stress.

Something caught in his memory, and he went back to the box of kitchen linens, opened it and pulled out a plastic string shopping bag of a kind that had been popular in his childhood but had long since disappeared. He slipped the large round handles over his left wrist, wiped his hands on a towel, and tossed it into one of the boxes.

He went back to the box of papers and quickly sorted through them, leaving behind magazines and newspapers and choosing only what looked like letters or documents. He pulled open the mouth of the bag and put the papers inside carelessly, suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to be free of this enclosed space, this heat, and the permeating smell of dust and unwashed objects.

Outside the attic, he used the kitchen knife to screw the flange back into place, then slipped the knife into the pocket of his jacket. On the landing, he tried the door of the apartment, but it was shut: he didn't bother to use the picks to see if it was double-locked.

Downstairs, he pulled open the outside door and stepped into the full heat of the afternoon sun, soothed by the sense that its rays would burn him clean of the smell and dirt of the attic.

When he arrived at the Questura, shortly after three, the first person he saw was Lieutenant Scarpa, just pulling up in one of the police launches. Because they could not avoid reaching the entrance at the same time, Brunetti prepared some innocuous greeting, keeping the string bag to the side away from Scarpa.

'Have you been in a fight, Commissario?' Scarpa asked with seeming concern when he saw the stains on Brunetti's jacket and shirt.

'Oh, no. I tripped when I was walking past a building site and fell against a wall,' Brunetti said with equally false sincerity. 'But thank you for asking.'

Holding the string bag so that it remained largely out of sight behind him, Brunetti nodded to the guard who opened the door for them, nodded to him in return and snapped out a crisp salute for the lieutenant. Not thinking it necessary to say anything further to Scarpa, Brunetti walked across the foyer and started up the steps. From behind him, he heard the lieutenant say, ‘I haven't seen a bag like that for ages, Commissario. It's just like the ones our mothers used to use,' and then, after a long pause, he added, 'when they could still do the shopping.'

The faltering of Brunetti's step was so slight as not to be evident, as had been the first signs of the madness which had seized his mother a decade ago and still held her prisoner. He had no idea how Scarpa had learned about her, indeed, had no proof that he knew, but then why else the lieutenant's frequent references to their mothers? And why his repeated, and falsely humorous, suggestion that any lapse of memory or efficiency on the part of anyone at the Questura must be a sign of senility?

Ignoring the remark, Brunetti continued up to his office. He closed the door, set the bag on his desk, removed his jacket and held it up to look at the front. Grey linen and one of his favourites, it had broad black stains running horizontally across the front; he doubted that any cleaning could remove them. He draped it on the back of his chair and loosened his tie. It was only then that he noticed how filthy his hands were, so he went down to the bathroom on the floor below and washed them, then splashed water on his face and ran his wet hands around the back of his neck.

Seated at his desk, he pulled the bag towards him, spread it open, and drew the stack of papers from it. Abandoning the idea of trying to sort them into categories, he began to read them over as they lay in the pile. Gas bills, ENEL, water and garbage bills, all paid through her account at Uni Credit: these were clipped together according to utility and arranged in chronological order. There was a sheaf of letters of complaint from neighbours, Signora Gismondi among them, about the noise of her television. They dated back seven years and had all been sent raccomandate. There was a photocopy of her marriage certificate, a letter from the Ministero dell' Interno to her husband, acknowledging receipt of his report of 23 June 1982.

There followed a stack of letters, all addressed to either Signora Battestini or her husband, sometimes to both. He opened them and read quickly through the first paragraph of each, then glanced quickly through the rest of the letters to see if there was anything that might be important. Some were painfully pro forma letters from a niece, Graziella, written in a very unschooled hand, each thanking her for a Christmas gift, though the gift was never specified. Over the course of the years, Graziella's handwriting and painfully simple grammar remained unchanged.

One of the envelopes bearing Graziella's name and return address contained no letter: instead, he found a sheet of paper written in the sharp, spiky letters of a different hand. Along the left margin ran a list of four sets of initials, and to the right of each of them a series of numbers or, in some cases, numbers preceded by or followed by a letter or letters. A voice spoke his name from the door, and he looked up to see Vianello. Instead of a greeting, Brunetti surprised him by asking, 'You like crossword puzzles, don't you?'

Nodding, the inspector came across the room and sat in one of the chairs in front of Brunetti's desk. Brunetti passed him the sheet of paper and said, 'What do you make of this?'

Vianello took the sheet, laid it flat on the surface of his superior's desk, and, propping his chin in both palms, looked down at it. Brunetti continued to go through the other papers, leaving Vianello to it.

After a number of minutes but without taking his eyes from the paper, Vianello asked, 'Do I get a clue?'

'It was in the attic of the old woman who was murdered last month.'

A few more minutes passed and finally Vianello asked, 'Have you got a phone book, sir? The yellow pages.'

Curious, Brunetti bent down and pulled the Venice yellow pages out of his bottom drawer.

The inspector opened the book at the front and flipped through a few pages. Then he picked up the sheet of paper and laid it on top of the open book. He placed his right forefinger on the first item on the list and ran his left down a page of the book which Brunetti could not see. Apparently finding what he was looking for, Vianello moved his right finger to the second, and the left again hunted down the page of the phone book. Satisfied with whatever he was finding, Vianello grunted and moved his right finger. This process continued until he got to the fourth item on the list, at which he looked up at Brunetti and smiled. 'Well?' Brunetti asked.

Vianello turned the book around and pushed it across the desk. On the right-hand page Brunetti saw, in capital letters, BAR, followed by the first few dozen names of the alphabetical listing of the hundreds of bars in the city. Vianello's broad forefinger passed into his field of vision and drew his attention to the left-hand page. He understood instantly: BANCHE. Of course, banks. So the list was a series of abbreviations of their names, followed by the account numbers.

‘I also know a three-letter Cambodian monetary unit beginning with K, sir’ Vianello said.