The Girl of his Dreams

15

The amusement Brunetti would usually have felt at Signorina Elettra's relationship with the clergy was crushed by the lingering weight of the memory of the still unidentified child. In recent years, Brunetti had begun to see the death of the young as the theft of years, decades, generations. Each time he learned of the willed, unnecessary destruction of a young person, whether it was the result of crime or of one of the many futile wars that snuffed out their lives, he counted out the years until they would have been seventy and added up the plundered years of life. His own government had stolen centuries; other governments had stolen millennia, had stamped out the joy these kids might and should have had. Even if life had brought them misery or pain, it would still have brought them life, not the void that Brunetti saw looming after death.

He returned to his office and, to pass the time while he waited for some word of the autopsy, read more carefully through the three newspapers he had brought with him. When he looked up from the last page of the third, all he could remember were the sixty years of life that had been stolen from the girl Vianello had pulled from the water.

Brunetti looked at the surface of his desk, folded the last newspaper and moved it aside, placing it on top of the others. With the tip of one finger, he slid some specks of dust to the edge of the desk and let them drop invisibly to the floor. Maybe she tripped and fell and, unable to swim, drowned in the canal. Even so, as Paola insisted, one did not misplace a child. This was not drawing-room comedy with an infant in a leather handbag, left unclaimed in the cloakroom of Victoria station. This was a young girl, missing, but unmissed.

The phone rang.

‘I thought I'd call,’ he heard Rizzardi say when he answered. 'I'll send a written report, but I thought you'd want to know.'

'Thank you,' Brunetti said, then, unable to stop himself, added, 'I can't shake loose of her.'

The pathologist limited himself to a noise of assent-there was no knowing if he felt the same way.

Brunetti grabbed a sheet of paper and pulled it towards him.

'I'd say she was ten or eleven,' the pathologist began, then paused and cleared his throat. 'The cause of death was drowning. It looks like she was in the water about eight hours.' That, Brunetti calculated, meant she had gone into the water around midnight.

'It could have been longer,' Rizzardi said. 'The water's not the same temperature as the air, and that would change the rate of rigor mortis. I sent one of my men over there to measure the temperature of the water, and perhaps when I calculate it I can get closer to the time’ A pause and then, 'You don't want to know about that sort of thing, do you, Guido?' 'No, not really’

'Close to midnight, then,' Rizzardi said. 'Or if you prefer, you could say an hour on either side of midnight. I can't get closer than that.'

'All right,' Brunetti said, curious now about the reluctance that seeped from every word Rizzardi spoke. He knew he should ask or somehow prod the pathologist, but he was unwilling to do it: he sensed it would be better to let Rizzardi find his own way to whatever it was he did not want to say.

'There's evidence,' the pathologist began and then paused to clear his throat again. 'There's evidence of sexual activity’

This meant nothing to Brunetti. That is, it meant something, but he had no idea what it meant, not in a real sense. He did not know how to ask or what to ask.

'No, not rape, at least not recently. But, er, activity. I don't know what to call it. The child has had sex, though not in the near past, not any time close to when she died. Not hours, that is, probably not even days.'

Brunetti's mind leaped to the first safe place it could find. 'Could she be older?'

'Perhaps, but not by much more than a year, I'd say’

'Ah,' Brunetti said and waited for the pathologist to continue. When he did not, Brunetti asked, 'What else?'

'The scratches on her palms. There were fragments of a reddish material in them. And under her nails. Two were broken off, one of them almost torn away. And the undersides of the toes of her left foot are badly scraped’

'What about her knees?' Brunetti asked. He tried to remember the small body recalled only one knee, the other under the clinging fabric of the skirt.

'One's got scratches. Same thing, a reddish, grainy material; some larger fragments.'

'The other?'

'It must have been covered by her skirt. There's a place on the front of her skirt where the fabric is worn away’

'Anything else?' Brunetti asked.

'Yes,' the pathologist said, cleared his throat, and went on. 'She had a watch, in a pocket sewn into her knickers’ Brunetti had heard of this: at the time, he had not thought to look for anything under those clinging skirts. After some time, the pathologist added, 'And there was a ring in her vagina’

Brunetti had heard this rumour, as well, but had always chosen to dismiss it.

'It looks like a wedding ring’ the pathologist said in a neutral voice. Brunetti said nothing, and Rizzardi added, 'The watch is a pocket watch. Gold’

A long silence stretched out as Brunetti quickly revised everything he had concluded about the girl because of her blonde hair and her light eyes. They had blinded him to the long skirt and to the fact that the skin covered by the strap of her sandal had still been fairly dark.

'Gypsy?' he asked the doctor.

'We call them Rom now, Guido’ Rizzardi answered.

Brunetti felt a flash of belligerence: no matter what we call them, no one can toss them into the water, for Christ's sake. 'Tell me about the ring and the watch’ he asked with forced calm.

'The wedding ring has initials and a date, and the watch looks antique. It's the kind that you have to open to see the face.'

'Is there anything on the inside of the cover?'

‘I didn't open it. I took it out of her pocket and put it in a plastic bag with the ring. Those are the rules, Guido.'

‘I know, I know. Sorry Ettore.' Brunetti allowed the anger to leak out of him and then asked, 'What do you think caused the marks on her hands?'

'That's not what I'm supposed to do. You know that.'

'What do you think caused the marks on her hands?' Brunetti repeated.

If Rizzardi had been waiting for the question, he could have answered it no more quickly. 'The evidence suggests she slid some distance, probably on a terracotta surface. The fabric is worn away down the front of the cardigan, and two buttons are missing. And, as I told you, there's the worn spot on the front of her skirt.'

'So she slid on her stomach?'

'It would seem so. As she went down the roof, she'd try to grab on to the tiles to stop herself: it's natural. That's what cut up her palms and ripped the nails.'

Again, Brunetti waited. Part of him wanted to keep Rizzardi talking about the details in which might be traced the girl's actions as she slid down a roof or from an altana or a terrace. He did not want to have to go back to the other things.

'And what could have happened?' Brunetti asked.

'That's another thing I'm not supposed to do, Guido,' Rizzardi protested.

‘I know. But tell me.'

For some time Brunetti feared he had gone too far and that Rizzardi would hang up, but then the doctor said,

'It could be – but this is only my guess – that she was surprised wherever she was: someone came in, saw her there. She'd try to get away, but if it was a man, he'd be too big and could stop her from getting to the door, if that's how she got in. So the first thing she'd do is try a window, or the door to an altana or a terrace.'

As he listened, Brunetti performed a similar reconstruction of events. Any unwatched street door was fair game to the gangs of thieves who roamed the city. Because they were minors, nothing could be done to them, and, if arrested, they were quickly returned to the care of their parents, or to the people presenting evidence that they were the parents. And then just as quickly the children were back at work.

The classic means of forced entry was the screwdriver, and who would prosecute a child found with a screwdriver in her pocket? Once inside a building, they went to the apartments which, from the outside, had been shuttered or, at night, showed no light. Nothing but una porta blindata could stop them entering, and once inside nothing could prevent them from taking whatever they chose, though usually they limited themselves to money and gold. Wedding rings and watches.

At the same time as one part of his mind was recalling all of this, another was drawing up a list of what had to be done: check the files to see if a child matching her description had ever been arrested; show her photo around the Questura and to the Carabinieri; have Foa check the tide charts to try to figure out where she might have gone into the water eight to ten hours before they found her. He knew it would probably be futile to find out whether anyone had reported a burglary the night of her death: most people didn't bother, and if someone had interrupted her, then they might have seen her go into the water, and that would make it certain they would not inform the police. The way to begin, then, was to trace the ring and the watch.

Rizzardi was no longer speaking, though Brunetti had not noticed when he stopped. Suddenly annoyed with himself for avoiding what he knew he had to address, Brunetti said, 'You said there are signs of sexual activity. Could it be the… could it be the ring?'

'The ring didn't cause gonorrhoea’ the pathologist answered with troubling coolness. 'The lab hasn't had time to confirm the samples, but that's what it is. The results will be back in a few days, but you can be sure that's what they'll say.'

'Is there any other way she…' Brunetti began and let the sentence drift away.

'None. The infection is pretty well established; it's the only way she could have got it.'

'Can you tell when…?' began a reluctant Brunetti.

Rizzardi cut him off. 'No.'

After some time, Brunetti asked, 'Anything else?' 'No.'

'Then thanks for calling, Ettore.' 'Let me know if…' began an equally reluctant Rizzardi.

'Yes. Of course’ Brunetti said and replaced the phone.

He picked it up immediately and dialled the number of the officers' room. Pucetti answered. 'Go over to Rizzardi at the hospital and ask him for a bag with a ring and a watch. Make sure you sign a receipt for it. Take them down to Bocchese and let him check them for prints and anything else he can find on them, and then bring them up to me.'

'Yes, sir’ the young officer said.

'Before you go to the hospital, go down to Bocchese and ask him to send me the photos of the head and face of the girl who drowned. And tell Dottor Rizzardi that I'd like to see any photos he took. That's all.'

'Yes, sir’ Pucetti said and was gone.

Brunetti's mind suddenly filled with a scene from The Trojan Women: the Greek – what was his name, Tal-some-thing? – bringing the shattered body of little Astyanax to his grandmother. As the soldiers with the boy's body passed by the River Scamander, the soldier tells Hecuba, he had let the waters run over the child's body to clean his wounds. What was it she says to him? 'A little child like this made you afraid. The fear that comes when reason goes away' But what to fear from this girl?

Impatience struck him, and he went downstairs to get the photos from Bocchese.

Before taking the photos back to his office, Brunetti stopped and asked Vianello to come with him, explaining to him on the way everything that Rizzardi had told him and talking about what they had to do now. Back at his desk, Brunetti opened the file of photos that the technician had given him and they saw again the face of the dead child.

There were more than twenty photos, and in all of them she lay like the princess in a fairy tale, a halo of tangled golden hair radiating out from her face. That, however, was only a first impression and quickly gone, for it was then the viewer observed the paving stones on which the princess lay and the ratty, greying cotton cardigan bunched around her neck. One photo showed the tip of a black rubber boot; another caught a single moss-covered step, a crushed cigarette packet in one corner. No prince was coming here.

'Her eyes were light, weren't they?' Vianello asked as he set down the last photo.

‘I think so,' Brunetti answered.

'I suppose we should have realized; from the long skirt, if from nothing else,' Vianello said. He wrapped his arms around his chest and stood, looking at the photos on Brunetti's desk. 'There's no way of knowing, though, whether she is or she isn't,' he added.

'Isn't what?'

'A Gypsy’ Vianello said.

Voice coloured by his lingering irritation at the pathologist's words, Brunetti answered, 'Rizzardi said we were supposed to call them Rom.'

'Oh. How very correct of the doctor.'

Regretting that he had said anything, Brunetti changed the subject. 'If no one's reported a burglary’ which had been the case when Brunetti stopped in the squad room downstairs, 'then either the people haven't discovered it yet or, just as easily, they did discover the break-in and chose not to report it.'

Vianello interrupted before Brunetti could add another possibility, saying, 'No one reports a burglary any more.'

Both men had spent their professional lives working for the police and thus had long ago learned the sovereign truth of crime statistics: to the degree that the process of reporting a crime is made difficult and time-consuming, the numbers of reported crimes will diminish.

Brunetti ignored Vianello's remark and stated the next possibility: 'Or they discovered her at it, frightened her off, and saw her fall.'

Vianello turned his head quickly away and stared out of the window of Brunetti's office.

'Well?' Brunetti asked. Its unpleasantness in no way diminished its likelihood.

'There were no marks on her body?' Vianello asked.

'No. Rizzardi didn't mention any'

Vianello considered this for a long time and then asked, 'Do you want to say it or do you want me to?'

Brunetti shrugged. He was the superior officer, so it was probably his responsibility to give voice to the last possibility. 'Or they discovered her at it and pushed her off the roof.'

Vianello nodded and remained silent. 'In either of the last cases, they'd never call us,' the Inspector finally said. 'So what do we do?'

'We see if there's any way to identify the owner of the watch and the ring, and then we go and talk to them.'

‘I’ll go down and ask Foa about the tides,' Vianello said and left to do that.