Drawing Conclusions

4

Brunetti closed the door, dissatisfied with his exchange with Rizzardi and disappointed by his own need to make the doctor see things as he wanted him to see them. Before he could speak to Vianello, they heard noise from below: again, a door opening, then an exchange of male voices. Marillo came to the door of the bedroom where he was working with his men and said, ‘The doctor called a while ago for them to come and get her: I guess that’s them.’

Neither Brunetti nor Vianello answered, and the noises of the technicians working in the other room ended. The men in the apartment awaited the arrival of their colleagues who dealt with the dead, their voices and bodies stilled by the magic spell that approached. Brunetti opened the door. The two men who appeared on the landing, however, looked quite ordinary and wore the long blue coats of hospital orderlies. One of them carried a rolled-up stretcher under his arm: all of the men in the apartment knew that a third member of the squad waited downstairs with the black plastic casket into which the body would be placed before they took it outside to the waiting boat.

There were nods and muttered salutations; most of them had met in similar circumstances in the past. Brunetti, who knew their faces but not their names, pointed them down the corridor. After the two men went into the room, Brunetti, Vianello, and Marillo, and behind him the two members of his crew, waited, pretending not to hear, trying not to interpret, the noises from the other room. A short time later, the men emerged with the stretcher, the form on it covered by a dark blue blanket. Brunetti was glad to see that the blanket was clean and freshly ironed, though he knew it made no difference.

With a nod to Brunetti, the two men left the apartment; Vianello closed the door behind them. No one in the room said anything as they listened to the men’s descent. When all sound ended, they took it to mean the dead woman had been taken from the house, but still no one moved. Marillo finally broke the spell by turning away, herding his technicians into the bedroom and back to work.

Vianello went into the smaller guest room, and Brunetti joined him. The bed was neatly made, the white sheet pulled back over a simple grey woollen blanket. They saw no sign of disturbance in the room. It was military – or monastic – in its simplicity. Even the signs that the technicians had checked the room for prints seemed sparse.

Brunetti walked across the room and pushed open the door to the bathroom. Whoever had made the bed must also have ordered things on the shelves here: there were miniature sample bottles of shampoo and a small paper-wrapped bar of soap, the sort one found in hotel rooms; a comb in a plastic wrapper; a similarly wrapped toothbrush. Fresh towels and a washcloth hung on a rack beside the enclosed shower.

A man’s voice called Brunetti’s name. He and Vianello followed the sound into the larger bedroom, where Marillo was standing beside one of the windows. ‘We’re finished here, Commissario,’ he said. As he spoke, one of his men collapsed his tripod, hefted it on to his shoulder, and slipped past Vianello and Brunetti into the corridor.

‘You find anything?’ Brunetti asked, looking around at powder-covered surfaces in the room, almost as if he wanted Marillo to follow his glance and find, just there, whatever it was that would make his search worthwhile and important.

The residue on so many surfaces reminded Brunetti of how hard he found it to believe that any reliable physical evidence could be drawn from the overlying mess of finger and palm prints that covered every surface in every room he had ever searched. Some of the powder had dropped into the bottom drawer, which was open. Faint traces of it could be seen on the silk scarves and sweaters that lay intermingled there.

‘You know I don’t like to talk about that sort of thing, sir,’ Marillo finally answered, speaking with noticeable reluctance. ‘Before I write the report, that is.’

‘I know that, Marillo,’ Brunetti said. ‘And I think it’s the best policy. But I wondered if you could give us some sort of idea about how thorough Vianello and I should be when we…’ he began, then waved his hand around the room, as if asking the handles of the drawers to speak to Marillo about what was to be revealed inside.

The remaining technician, still on his knees beside the bed, looked up from the light he was shining into the space underneath, first at Brunetti and then at his superior. Aware of his glance, Marillo shook his head and turned to walk away.

‘Come on, Stefano,’ the technician said, making no attempt to disguise his exasperation. ‘They’re on our side. And it’ll save them time.’ Brunetti wondered if the technician was simply using a cliché, or if it were now necessary for one policeman to vouch for the integrity of others.

Marillo stiffened, either at being spoken to like this by one of his men in front of his superior or at the thought of having to venture an opinion rather than simply report on what was observed and recorded. ‘All we do is dust the place and take the photos, Dottore. People like you and Vianello have to figure out what the results mean.’ This might have been construed as opposition or obstructionism; in Marillo, it was meant to be simply a declaration of what he took his duties, and theirs, to be.

‘Oh for the love of God,’ the other technician snapped, still on his knees beside the bed. ‘We’ve been in a hundred places, Stefano, and we both know there’s nothing suspicious here.’ He looked as if he was about to continue, but Marillo silenced him with a glare. Some time had passed since Brunetti had been troubled by the sight of the body, and the man’s remark added to his desire to see and interpret facts, not feelings. No thief – at least not the sort that broke into houses in Venice – had been at work here. Anyone in search of gold or jewellery or cash would have pulled out the drawers and dumped their contents on the floor, then kicked them around, the better to separate and see everything. But the bottom drawer, Brunetti realized, looked no worse than his daughter’s after she had hunted for a particular sweater. Or his son’s.

The technician near the bed broke the silence by scuttling across the floorboards to unplug his lamp. Slowly, he got to his feet and wrapped the electric cord noisily around the handle, then slipped the plug under the last loop of cord to anchor it in place. ‘I’m done here, Stefano,’ he said abruptly.

‘That’s it, then,’ Marillo said with audible relief. ‘I’ll give Bocchese the photos and he can check the prints. There’s a lot of them, some of them perfectly clear. He’ll give you a report, sir.’

‘Thanks, Marillo,’ Brunetti said.

Marillo glanced at Brunetti and bobbed his head in an expression that acknowledged his superior’s thanks and his own embarrassment at not having been willing to provide more. The other technician followed him to the door, where the third man stood ready, slipping camera and flash into their case. Together, the three men made quick work of assembling their equipment. When they were finished, Marillo said nothing more than goodnight, and his team, silent, followed him from the apartment.

‘I’ll finish in there,’ Brunetti said, deciding to return to the smaller bedroom. He had noticed when he glanced in before just how simple the room was, but now that he had time to look around, he saw that it was even more modest than he had first observed. There was no covering of any sort on the wooden floor. It was not parquet but the narrow wooden boards of a restoration – and not an expensive one – that must have been done about fifty years before. A low, thick-legged chest stood next to the bed, on it a short lamp with a yellow cloth lampshade from the bottom of which hung a circle of aged yellow tassels. This could have been a room in his grandmother’s house, had he been taken back in a time machine.

In the half-open top drawer of the chest lay a number of plastic-wrapped packets of women’s underclothing: three in each, simple white cotton pants, and in three different sizes. He had never seen Paola wear the like. These were functional pants he assumed a woman would buy at a supermarket, not a lingerie shop, fashioned for utility, not style, and certainly not meant to attract attention. Mixed in with them were unopened packets of white cotton T-shirts, also in three sizes. The packets lay neatly in the drawer in their separate piles, separated by a stack of ironed white cotton handkerchiefs.

He slid the drawer shut, no longer having to be careful about what he touched. The next drawer contained a few unopened packets of women’s tights and six or seven pairs of socks, also unopened, all grey or black, again in different sizes and arranged with military precision. The bottom drawer held sweaters, cotton on one side, wool on the other, though here the two piles had mingled. At least with these the colours were a bit brighter: one red, one orange, another light green, and though all had at one time been worn, they had the look of garments that had been washed and ironed before being placed in the drawer. A pair of freshly laundered and ironed blue flannel pyjamas lay to the right of the sweaters, a packet of lavender-scented sachets behind it.

Brunetti closed the last drawer. He moved closer to the bed and got down on one knee to look beneath it, but the space was empty.

He heard Vianello come into the room behind him. ‘Did you find anything else in her bedroom?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No. Nothing much. Except that she liked nice underwear and expensive sweaters.’

Getting to his feet, Brunetti went back to the chest. He pulled out the top drawer and pointed to the cellophane packets on top. ‘They’re all in different sizes, and nothing’s opened.’ Vianello stepped up beside him and looked into the drawer. ‘Same with the tights,’ Brunetti went on. ‘And there are sweaters – no cashmere there – and a pair of pyjamas in the bottom drawer, and they all look like they’ve just been washed.’

‘What do you make of it?’ Vianello said. He shrugged and confessed, ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Guests bring their own clothing,’ Brunetti insisted. Vianello said nothing. ‘Certainly their own underclothing.’

Brunetti and Vianello went back to the room where the woman’s body had been found. From the doorway, Brunetti saw that the bloodstain had not been wiped away and thought what it would be for the family to come into this room and find it. In all these years of moving amidst the signs left by death, he had frequently wondered how it would feel to wipe away the last traces of a former life, and how a person could bear to do it.

With the woman’s body gone, Brunetti could concentrate enough to study the room for the first time. It was larger than he had at first thought. To the right he saw a sliding door and, beyond it, a small kitchen with wooden cabinets and what looked like Moroccan plates and tiles on the walls.

The kitchen was too small to hold a table, so it had been placed in the larger room, a utilitarian rectangle with four wooden chairs. It took a moment for Brunetti to realize that the room was virtually void of decoration. There was a beige rug of some sort of fibre on the floor, but the only decoration on the walls was a medium-sized crucifix that looked as if it had been mass produced in some non-Christian country: surely Christ was not meant to have such rosy lips and cheeks, nor was there anything much to justify his smile.

A dark brown sofa sat on the other side of the room, its back to the windows that looked out on to the campo and the illuminated apse of the church. There must once have been a door in the wall to the right of the sofa, but during one of the restorations that had been done to this building over the centuries, someone had decided to brick it up. Whoever had done the most recent restoration had removed some of the bricks and plastered over the back of the opening, added shelves, and turned it into an inset bookcase.

A desk with a typewriter stood not far from the sofa, it too facing away from the window. Brunetti stared at it to be sure he was seeing what he thought he was. Yes, an old Olympia portable, the sort of thing his friends had taken off to university decades ago. His own family had been unable to provide him with one. He sat at the desk and placed his fingers above the keys, careful not to touch them. He had to turn his head sharply to see out the window, and after orienting himself with the bell tower of the church, he realized that in the daylight the ignored view from these third floor windows must extend all the way north, as far as the mountains.

From behind him, he heard the sounds of Vianello opening and closing drawers in the kitchen, then the whoosh of the opening refrigerator. He heard the rush of flowing water and the clink of a glass. Brunetti found the noises comforting.

Even though the desk appeared to have been checked for prints, from habit he slipped on plastic gloves and opened the single drawer at the centre, searching for he didn’t know what. He was relieved to find disorder: unsharpened pencils, some paper clips swirling around on the bottom, a topless pen, a single cufflink, two buttons, and a blue notebook, the sort of thing used by students and, like the notebooks of so many students, empty.

He pulled out the drawer and set it beside the typewriter. He bent and looked into the empty space, but nothing was hidden, nor, when he held it up, could he see anything taped to the bottom of the drawer. Feeling not a little foolish and certain that Marillo’s men had already done all of this, Brunetti knelt and stuck his head under the desk, but there was nothing taped there, either.

‘What are you looking for?’ Vianello asked from behind him.

‘I don’t know,’ Brunetti admitted, pushing himself to his feet. ‘It’s all so orderly.’

‘Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?’ Vianello asked.

‘In theory, yes. I suppose,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘But…’

‘But you don’t want to accept that she could have died of a heart attack or a stroke, the way Rizzardi suggested.’

‘It’s not that I want anything,’ Brunetti said tersely, ‘but you saw the mark.’

Instead of answering, Vianello let out a heavy breath, making a noise that could mean anything as easily as it could mean nothing. Brunetti was unwilling to mention the feeling he had had in the corridor for fear that Vianello would dismiss it as foolishness.

‘There’s no sign that anyone went through this place,’ Vianello said. He glanced at the clock that hung beside the refrigerator. ‘It’s almost three, Guido. Could we lock the door and tape it and continue this tomor… later today?’

The name of the hour fell on Brunetti’s shoulders like a heavy garment, bearing him back towards the tiredness he had felt even before his dinner with Patta and Scarpa.

He nodded, and the two men moved through the house, turning off lights. They chose to leave the shutters open, as they had found them: enough light filtered in from the campo to allow them to move through the apartment even after they had turned out most of the lights. Brunetti opened the door of the apartment and switched on the light in the stairway. Vianello pulled out a roll of red and white tape and used it to draw an enormous X across the door. Brunetti locked it and pocketed the keys, which he had taken from the table by the door. They had found no address book. There had been only a simple phone with no stored numbers, and it was now too late to bother the woman upstairs to ask about the dead woman’s family. Brunetti turned away from the apartment and headed down the stairs.

‘The woman upstairs said she was in a hotel in Palermo for five days. I’ll check that,’ Brunetti said.

As they passed the door to the apartment below, Vianello tilted his head towards it. ‘The people in there heard us going up and down, so if they had anything to tell us, they probably would have.’ Then, before Brunetti could comment, he added, ‘But I’ll come back later today and ask them. You never know.’

Outside, the Inspector phoned the station at Piazzale Roma and asked them to send a boat to pick him up at the Riva di Biasio stop. Brunetti knew it would be faster to walk, so he shook hands with his assistant and turned towards home.