A Question of Belief

blood trailed across the arch of his foot.

The technician leaned heavily against Brunetti. ‘Oddio, oddio,’ he whispered, then he pulled himself away from Brunetti and stood motionless, eyes still on the blood.

Brunetti was about to say something when Comei turned and walked quickly towards the central part of the hospital.

Another noise, of something heavy being dropped, came down the corridor.

A woman in a white jacket approached Brunetti. ‘You’re the police?’ she asked them.

Brunetti nodded. ‘Can you tell us what happened?’

She was tall and slender and had an air of competence. ‘I’m Dottoressa Zeno,’ she said, not bothering to extend her hand. ‘I’m in charge of the lab.’

Again Brunetti nodded.

‘About half an hour ago, I asked Signora Montini about a blood sample she tested last week. The results didn’t correspond with results from the same tests done in the hospital in Mestre three days ago, and the patient’s doctor called to find out if the first test had been done correctly because the sudden difference didn’t make any sense to him.’

She paused, then continued.

‘I checked our lists and saw that Signora Montini had done the original test.’ She looked from Brunetti to Vianello. ‘This isn’t the first time something like this has happened or that I’ve had to ask her about it.’

Brunetti tried to look as if he understood.

‘I went to speak to her, but as soon as I told her about it. .’ Her voice lost some of its control as she went on. ‘She grabbed the list of new results from me and ripped it up, then she knocked some things off her desk: vials and a microscope. Comei works beside her.’

Brunetti asked, ‘And then, Dottoressa?’

‘She pushed me away and started screaming.’ As if hearing herself say that, she quickly amended it. ‘Not really pushed me, just sort of put her hands on my arms and turned me away from her. She didn’t hurt me.’

‘Then what, Signora?’

‘Then she picked up one of those cutters we use to open boxes with and started waving it around. She told us to get out. All of us. When I tried to talk to her, she held the cutter up.’

‘Did she threaten you, Dottoressa?’

‘No, no,’ she said in notes that descended into pain. ‘She held it over her wrist and said she’d cut it if we didn’t get out.’

She took a breath and then another one. ‘We all came out here. I called security and someone went down to tell the portiere. Then someone said you were on your way, so we stayed out here, all of us.’ He thought she was finished, but then she said, ‘I called Dottor Rizzardi at home. She always worked very well with him.’

‘Is he coming?’

‘Yes.’

Brunetti exchanged a look with Vianello, told the five people to remain where they were, and pushed open the door to the corridor. It closed softly behind them, trapping them in the clinging heat of the corridor. They could hear some sort of low noise from the lab, like the buzz of a machine left running in a distant room.

‘Do we wait for Rizzardi?’ Vianello asked.

Brunetti pointed towards the door to the lab, a white wooden panel with a single porthole. ‘I want to take a look inside first, see what she’s doing.’

They walked down the corridor as quietly as they could, but as they got closer to the door of the lab the noise grew loud enough to cover any footsteps. Brunetti approached the window slowly, aware that any sudden motion might be seen from inside. A step, another, and then he was there, with a clear view into the room.

He saw the usual ordered clutter: vials held upright in wooden racks; dark apothecary jars pushed against the wall; scales and computers at every work station; books and notebooks to the left of the computers. One table in the centre of the room held no equipment. On the floor surrounding it, like wreckage from a sunken ship, a computer monitor, pieces of broken glass and papers lay in small red puddles.

His eyes followed his ears to the noise. A woman in a white lab coat leaned into one of those deep sinks, her back to him. The noise and steam came from the torrent of running water that must be spilling over whatever she held in her hands. He thought of his children, the Water Police, and how they would reprove the waste of all that hot water and the energy necessary to produce it.

He stepped aside and let Vianello take his place. Though the water made it possible for him to speak in his normal voice, Vianello whispered when he asked, ’Why’s she washing her hands?’

Like the noble Romans, Brunetti thought as he shoved past Vianello and pushed open the door. As he ran by one of the desks, he ripped the receiver from a phone, and then yanked the cord from it. Just as he reached her, the woman slumped forward over the edge of the sink, and he saw the red — pink, really — swirling down into the drain.

He grabbed her, pulled her back and laid her on the floor, then used the phone cord as a tourniquet around her right arm. Vianello knelt beside him with another piece of phone cord, and tied off the left.

The face of the woman on the floor was pale, her hair shoulder length and more white than brown. She wore no makeup, but little could have been done to alleviate the plainness of those heavy features and pocked skin.

‘Get someone,’ Brunetti said, and Vianello was gone. He looked at her wrists: the cuts were deep, but they were horizontal, rather than vertical, which left some room for hope. The tourniquets had stopped the bleeding, though some blood had seeped on to the floor.

Her eyes opened. Her lashes and eyebrows were sparse, the eyes a dusty brown. ‘I didn’t want to do it,’ she said. The continuing rush of the water made it difficult to hear her.

Brunetti nodded, as if he understood. ‘We all do things we regret, Signora.’

‘But he asked me,’ she said and closed her eyes for so long that Brunetti feared she was gone. But then she opened them again and said, ‘And I was afraid he’d. . he’d leave me if I didn’t do it.’

‘Don’t worry about that now, Signora. Lie quietly. Someone will be here soon.’ They were in the middle of a hospital: why was it taking so long?

He heard footsteps, looked up, and saw Rizzardi. The doctor came over and knelt on the other side of the woman. He sighed, almost moaned, when he saw her there. ‘Elvira,’ he said, ‘what have you done?’ Brunetti noted that he used the familiar ‘tu’ when speaking to her. He sounded like a parent, disappointed in a child who has failed at something.

‘Dottore,’ she said and opened her eyes. She smiled. ‘I didn’t want to cause trouble.’

Rizzardi leaned down and placed one of his hands over hers. ‘You’ve never caused a moment’s trouble, Elvira. Quite the opposite. The only reason I have any faith in this lab is because you’re here.’

She closed her eyes again and tears trickled from the outer edges. They spurred Rizzardi to say, ‘Don’t cry, Elvira. Nothing’s going to happen. You’ll be all right.’

‘He’ll leave me,’ she said, eyes still closed and tears running into her ears.

‘No, once he knows what you’ve done, he’ll want to help you,’ Rizzardi said, then glanced at Brunetti, as if to ask if he were saying the right lines.

‘He won’t be able to use the lab results now,’ she said. ‘People won’t believe he helps them.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, then looked up at Rizzardi. ‘But he does, Dottore. He really does.’ She smiled, and for an instant her face was transformed into something approaching beauty. ‘He helped me.’

There was a great deal of noise behind them. Brunetti looked up and saw three green-jacketed aides blocking the door with a wheeled stretcher. They banged it repeatedly against the sides of the door until one slipped around to the front and guided it through. Two of them came quickly over to the woman on the floor and the men kneeling beside her, forcing them aside with the press of their bodies.

Brunetti and Rizzardi got to their feet. Almost maddened by its sound, Brunetti took two steps to the sink and turned off the water. Vianello, who had come in with the attendants, went to stand beside Rizzardi. The third aide came over, pushing the stretcher. He did something with a lever and the stretcher sank almost to the ground, then he joined his colleagues and together they lifted the woman on to it. Another motion of the switch raised her slowly to waist height. The first one took a tube running from a bottle of clear liquid hanging above the stretcher and inserted the needle into a vein in her arm.