Drawing Conclusions

3

Brunetti found Vianello and Rizzardi waiting in front of the door to the apartment. Vianello and he exchanged nods, having seen one another only that afternoon, and Brunetti shook hands with the pathologist. As always, the doctor was turned out like an English gentleman emerging from his club. He wore a dark blue pinstripe suit with the conspicuously invisible signs of hand tailoring. His shirt looked as though he had put it on while starting up the stairs to the apartment, and his tie was what Brunetti vaguely classified as ‘regimental’, though he had no certain idea of what that meant.

Though he knew the doctor had recently returned from a vacation in Sardinia, Brunetti thought Rizzardi looked tired, which he found unsettling. But how to ask a doctor about his health?

‘Good to see you, Ettore,’ he said. ‘How…’ Brunetti started to ask, quickly changing his question to the less intrusive, ‘… was your vacation?’

‘Busy. Giovanna and I had planned to spend our time on the beach, under an umbrella, reading and looking at the sea. But at the last minute Riccardo asked if we’d like to take the grandkids with us, and we couldn’t say no, so we had an eight-year-old and a six-year-old.’ Brunetti saw pass across his face the look common to people who had suffered violent assault. ‘I’d forgotten what it’s like to have children around.’

‘And there went sitting under the umbrella and reading and looking at the sea, I assume,’ Brunetti said.

Rizzardi smiled and shrugged it away. ‘We both loved it, but I feel better if I pretend we didn’t.’ Then, idle chat over, the doctor adjusted his tone and asked, ‘What is it?’

‘The woman upstairs came home from vacation, didn’t find her post left out for her, so she came down and let herself in to look for it and found the woman in the apartment dead.’

‘And she called the police and not the hospital?’ Vianello interrupted.

‘She said she saw blood: that’s what made her call,’ Brunetti explained.

The door, Brunetti noticed, was an old-fashioned wooden one with a horizontal metal handle, the type of door seldom seen any more in this theft-beleaguered city. Though Signora Giusti’s entry would certainly have damaged or destroyed any fingerprints on the handle, Brunetti was still careful to open it by pressing his open palm against the end of the handle to push it down.

Entering, he saw a table against the wall to his left, with a set of keys lying on top of some envelopes. Light came in from an open door on his right and from another at the end of the corridor, at the front of the apartment. He walked to the first of them and leaned into the room, but all he saw was a simple bedroom with a single bed and a chest of drawers.

Habit made him open the door on the opposite side of the corridor, careful again to touch only the end of the handle. Enough light filtered past him for Brunetti to see a smaller room with another single bed, a bedside table next to it, and a low chest of drawers. The door to a bathroom stood ajar.

He turned and continued towards the room at the end of the corridor, vaguely conscious that the other men were glancing into the rooms as he had. Inside, the woman lay on her right side, back to him, blocking the door with the side of her foot, one arm outstretched, the other trapped beneath her. She looked no bigger than a child; surely she couldn’t weigh fifty kilos. There was a patch of blood a bit smaller than a compact disc, dry and dark now, on the floor beside her and partially covered by her head. Brunetti stood and took in the short white hair, the dark blue cardigan made of thick cashmere, the collar of a yellow shirt, and the thin sliver of gold on her ring finger.

Brunetti considered himself the least superstitious of men and took pride in his intense respect for reason and good sense and all the virtues he associated with the proper functioning of the mind. This, however, in no way prevented him from accepting the possibility of less tangible phenomena – he had never been able to find a clearer way to express it. Something that, though unseen, left traces. He felt those traces here: this was a troubled death. Not necessarily violent or criminal: only troubled. He sensed it, though vaguely and fleetingly, and as soon as the sensation rose to the level of conscious thought, it vanished, to be dismissed as nothing more than a stronger than usual response to the sight of sudden death.

He quickly scanned the room and registered furniture, two floor lamps, a row of windows, but his intense awareness of the woman at his feet made it difficult for him to concentrate on anything else.

He returned to the corridor. There was no sign of Vianello, but the pathologist waited a few steps away. ‘She’s in here, Ettore,’ Brunetti said. As the doctor approached, Brunetti was distracted by the sound of footsteps from below. He heard men’s voices, a deep one followed by a lighter tone, and then a door closed.

The footsteps continued towards the apartment, and then Marillo, the assistant lab technician, appeared at the open door, two men close behind him carrying the cases of their trade. Marillo, a tall, thin Lombard who seemed incapable of understanding anything save the simple, literal truth of any statement or situation, greeted Brunetti then came into the apartment, moving forward to allow his own men to enter behind him. The last man closed the door and Marillo said, ‘Man downstairs wanted to know what all the noise was about.’

Brunetti greeted the men, but when he turned back to where Rizzardi had been, he realized the pathologist had gone into the other room. He told the men Vianello would tell them where to begin photographing and dusting for prints. He found Rizzardi bent over the woman’s body, his hands carefully stuffed into the pockets of his trousers. He stood upright as Brunetti approached and said, ‘It could have been a heart attack. Perhaps a stroke.’

Brunetti pointed silently to the small circle of blood, and Rizzardi, who had been in the room long enough to take a careful look around, pointed in his turn to a radiator that stood below a window not far from where the woman lay.

‘She could have fallen against it,’ Rizzardi said. ‘I’ll have a better idea when I can turn her over.’ He took a step back from the woman’s body. ‘So let’s get them to take the photos, all right?’ he asked.

With any other doctor, Brunetti might have lost patience at his refusal to read the bloodstain as a sign of violence, but he was familiar with Rizzardi’s insistence that he concern himself only with the immediately evident physical cause of death and only when he saw it or could prove it for himself. On occasion, Brunetti had managed to get the doctor to speculate, but it was no easy task.

Brunetti allowed his attention to drift away from the doctor and the woman at his feet. The room seemed to be in order save for two sofa cushions on the floor and a leather-bound book lying face down beside them. There was a wardrobe, but both doors were closed.

The photographer entered, saying, ‘Marillo and Bobbio are dusting for prints, so I came down here to do her first.’ He walked past Brunetti, towards the body, right hand fiddling with a knob on his camera.

Brunetti left him to it. He heard the low murmur of Rizzardi’s voice behind him but ignored it as he walked back along the corridor.

In the larger bedroom, Vianello, wearing thin plastic gloves, stood in front of the open drawers of the chest. He was leaning forward to examine some papers that lay on the top of the chest. As Brunetti watched, Vianello slid the top sheet to the side with the tip of his finger, then read the one below before shifting it aside to read the last one.

Reacting to Brunetti’s silent presence, Vianello said, ‘It’s a letter from a girl in India. “To Mamma Costanza.” Must be one of those organizations that let you sponsor a child.’

‘What does she say?’ Brunetti asked.

‘It’s in English,’ Vianello answered, waving at the papers. ‘And it’s handwritten. From what I can make out, she’s thanking her for the birthday gift and telling her that she’ll give it to her father so that he can buy rice for the spring planting.’ Nodding to the papers, Vianello added, ‘She’s included her school report and a photo.’

Carefully, Vianello patted the sheets of paper back into place. ‘You think they’re legitimate, all these charities?’ he asked.

‘I hope so,’ Brunetti said. ‘Or else a lot of money has been going to the wrong places for a long time.’

‘Do you do it?’ Vianello asked.

‘Yes.’

‘India?’

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, feeling something close to embarrassment. ‘Paola takes care of it.’

‘Nadia does, too,’ Vianello said hastily. ‘But why we’re giving money to places like India and China is something I don’t understand. Can’t pick up a newspaper without reading how powerful they are economically, how the world is going to belong to them in a decade. Or two. So what are we doing, supporting their children?’ Then Vianello added, ‘At least that’s what I ask myself.’

‘If Fazio is to be believed,’ Brunetti said, naming his friend who worked for the Frontier Police, ‘what we shouldn’t be doing is buying their clothing and toys and electronic equipment. Doesn’t hurt to give a couple of hundred euros to send a kid to school, though.’

Vianello nodded. ‘Kids there still have to eat, I suppose. And buy books.’ He stripped off the gloves and put them into the pocket of his jacket.

Just then the photographer came to the door and told Brunetti that Rizzardi wanted to see him. The dead woman had been turned on to her back, both arms at her sides: looking at her, Brunetti could not recapture the feeling conveyed to him by the first sight of the body. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open, her spirit fled. There could be no hope that a spirit still lingered near this body. One might choose to debate where it had gone, or even if it had ever existed, but there could be no question about the absence of life here.

Above the corner of her right eye, just above the eyebrow, Brunetti saw a cut, the flesh around it swollen and discoloured. The cut had leaked a dark paste, similar in consistency to sealing wax, into her hair and was obviously the source of the blood on the floor. Her cardigan was unbuttoned, and her yellow shirt had been pulled to one side when she was turned on to her back, exposing an oblong smudge on the outer left-hand side of her collarbone.

Unconsciously, Brunetti moved his hands close together in front of his thighs, fingers bent, to measure the distance between his thumbs. When he glanced at Rizzardi, he saw that the doctor was staring at his hands.

‘Her eyes would be bloodshot,’ Rizzardi said, reading the message of violence in his hands.

From behind him, Brunetti heard someone let out a long stream of breath. He turned to see Vianello, whom he had not heard arrive. The Inspector’s face wore a look of practised neutrality.

Brunetti looked back at the dead woman. One of her hands was clenched tight, as if frozen in the act of trying to keep her spirit from leaving: the other lay open, the fingers loose, encouraging the spirit to depart.

‘Can you do it tomorrow morning?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you take a look at everything?’

Rizzardi’s response was a sigh, followed by ‘Guido,’ said in a low voice, in which could be heard an effort at patience.

Rizzardi looked at his watch: Brunetti knew the doctor had to put the time she was declared dead on the death certificate, but the pathologist seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time deciding. He finally looked at Brunetti. ‘There’s nothing more for me here, Guido. I’ll send you the report as soon as I can.’

Brunetti nodded his thanks, saw that it was already almost 1 a.m., and thanked the doctor for coming, even though he knew Rizzardi had no choice in the matter. The doctor turned to leave, but Brunetti moved closer to him, placed his hand briefly on his upper arm, saying nothing.

‘I’ll call you when I’m finished,’ Rizzardi said. He moved away from Brunetti’s hand, and left the apartment.