salt and pepper shakers: both tall men and very thin, the doctor had white hair and pale skin, while the lawyer, Filippo Boscaro, had dark hair and a thick black moustache.
Brunetti asked the reason for the hospitalization, and the doctor, who stood in the interview room with a protective hand on Signora Ford's shoulder, said that his patient was obviously suffering from shock and was hardly in a position to answer any questions.
At this, Signora Ford glanced up at him, then at her husband, who knelt beside her, his hands wrapped protectively around hers. 'Don't worry, Eleonora,' he said, I'll take care of you.'
The woman leaned towards him, whispered something Brunetti could not hear. Ford kissed her softly on the cheek and she looked up at Brunetti, her face aglow with vindicated love. Brunetti said nothing, waiting to see what Ford would suggest.
The Library Director got awkwardly to his feet, unable to use his hands, which were still as much the captives as the captors of his wife's. When he was standing, he helped her to her feet and then put a supporting arm around her. Turning to the doctor he said, 'Giulio, will you take her?'
Before the doctor could answer, Brunetti interrupted, 'I'm afraid she can't leave unless a police woman goes along with her.' The doctor, the librarian and the lawyer competed in displaying their umbrage at this, but Brunetti opened the door to the corridor and told the officer standing there to see that a woman officer be sent up immediately.
The lawyer, whom Brunetti recognized but about whom he knew little more than he was a criminal lawyer, said, ‘I hope you realize, Commissario, that anything my client might have said during the time she was here is hardly to be admitted as evidence’
'Evidence of what?' Brunetti asked.
‘I beg your pardon?' the lawyer said.
'Evidence of what?' Brunetti repeated.
At a loss, all the lawyer could think of to say was, 'Of anything.'
'Could it be used as evidence that she had been here, do you think,
‘I don't know what you're talking about, Commissario,' Boscaro said,
Brunetti, who was forced to agree with him, turned to the doctor. 'Could you tell me your name, Dottore?' he asked.
'Giulio Rampazzo,' the white-haired man said.
'And you are Signora Ford's regular doctor?'
'I'm a psychiatrist,' Dr Rampazzo said.
'I see,' Brunetti answered. 'And has Signora Ford been a patient of yours for some time?'
Her husband lost his patience here. Tightening his arm around his wife he led her towards the door. ‘I don't see the sense of any of this. I'm taking my wife out of here.'
Brunetti knew better than to oppose him, especially when the man had both a doctor and a lawyer in tow. He was glad, however, to see a uniformed woman officer appear just outside the door. 'Officer, you're to accompany this woman.'
She saluted and said, 'Yes, sir,' without bothering to ask where she was to go with the woman or what she was meant to do in her company.
'Which hospital are you taking her to, Dottore?' Brunetti asked. Rampazzo hunted for an answer, trying not to look at Ford for a clue. Seeing this, Brunetti said, 'I'll have a launch take you to the Ospedale Civile, then.' Nodding to the officer who was still there, he sent him off to call for the launch.
As he walked in front of them down the steps towards the entrance of the Questura, Brunetti thought of the best way to handle this. With a doctor there, insisting that the woman was in shock, Ford would get her out of the Questura; Brunetti knew it was useless to oppose that. But the more normal and peaceful her departure was made to seem, the more weight would be given to the validity of her confession, during which she had certainly remained perfectly calm and coherent.
In front of the building, the police launch was waiting, motor throbbing idly. Brunetti stopped at the door and did not follow them from the building. The same uniformed policeman helped the two women and then the three men on board, then stepped on deck after them. When the launch moved off, Brunetti went back inside to make the phone calls he hoped would ensure that Signora Ford did not escape the bureaucratic labyrinth into which her confession had placed her.
Intermittently during the next months the attention of Venice was focused on that labyrinth and the slothlike progress - if that is not too wildly energetic a word - through it of the cases of Claudia Leonardo's murder and Hedwig Jacobs's possessions. Both had burst upon the public attention like comets, lighting up the front pages of local and national newspapers. All talk of other crimes or complexities was driven to the bottom of the front page by the sensational confession to murder by the daughter of one of the best known notaries in the city and the discovery of a patrimony in paintings and other art pieces in the modest home of a poor old woman.
Speculation ran rife about the first case: jealousy, passion, adultery; as to the second, the purported emotions were more muted: loyalty, love, devotion. Both stories soon shifted with their principals: Signora Ford was returned to her home, and her story moved to the inner pages; Signora Jacobs's story was buried, as she had been buried in the Protestant cemetery, but not before Brunetti had come to regret his error in believing her to have been murdered. Claudia's death had killed her, not Claudia's killer.
The case, sometimes called the Leonardo case and sometimes the Ford case, chugged on. The confession was called into question, accused of being yet another example of the stormtrooper mentality of the authorities, but finally after six months of legal wrangling, was admitted as valid. But by then Doctor Rampazzo and his colleagues had argued that this was a woman driven beyond herself by jealousy. Not only beyond herself, but beyond all possibility of responsibility. Boscaro proved to be a man worthy of his reputation, and no doubt of his fee, by presenting this argument to a board of judges, who declared that Signora Ford was indeed in a position of diminished responsibility when she went to speak to Claudia Leonardo. What had happened then... As Signor Ford had told his wife: human flesh was weak and people did things they did not want to do.
Brunetti, caught up in another case, this time of even more corruption at the Casino, followed Claudia's murder in the papers and by means of his friends in the magistracy, knowing himself helpless to effect any change in the way things would play themselves out.
The objects in the Jacobs case were inventoried again, this time by representatives of the Ministry of the Treasury and the Sovrintendenza delle Belle Arti. Claudia's mother was declared Claudia's legal heir, and that in turn made her heir to Frau Jacobs's possessions. Her continued absence, however, led to the opening of a waiting period of seven years, at the end of which she would be declared legally dead and possession would pass to the state. The paintings and ceramics, and the famous drawings that had, or had not, once belonged to the Swiss Consul and which now did or did not belong to Claudia's mother, all were taken to Rome. There, they were placed in storage and the seven years of the waiting period began to count themselves out.
One night, as they sat in the living room, Paola looked up from her book and said, surprising him, 'Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce.'
'What?' Brunetti asked.
She met his glance, her eyes slightly magnified by the lenses of her reading glasses. 'Nothing, really’ she said. ‘It’s something in a book’
Six months after that, Gianpaolo Filipetto died quietly in his sleep and, having been a parishoner of the church of San Giovanni in Bragora, he was buried there with all the pomp and ceremony due to his advanced years and his stature in the city.
Brunetti arrived late and missed the Requiem Mass, but he was on time to mingle with the people who emerged from the church and stood, respectful and silent, waiting for the coffin and the mourners to appear. Six men carried the dark mahogany coffin, its lid buried under an enormous blanket of red and white roses. The first to emerge from the dimness of the church was the pastor, a man bent under the weight of years almost as heavy as those of Filipetto. Behind him came Filipetto's daughter, released from house arrest to attend the funeral, her right
