‘This is the strange part,’ she said quite calmly, as though she were sharing a puzzle with him, asking him what he thought of it. ‘I don’t remember what happened. No, I know that he left, but I don’t remember what I said to him or he said to me. I stayed with Alex that night.
‘Later, days later, he told me that Alex had had a nightmare.’ She laughed in disgust and disbelief. ‘That’s all he said. We never talked about it. I sent Alex to her grandparents. To school there. And we never talked about it. Oh, how modern we were, how civilized. Of course, we stopped sleeping together, and stopped being with each other. And Alex was gone.’
‘Do her grandparents know what happened?’
A quick shake of her head. ‘No; I told them what I told everyone, that I didn’t want her schooling interrupted when we came to Venice.’
‘When did you decide? To do what you did?’ Brunetti asked.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. One day, the idea was simply there. The only thing that was really important to him, the only thing he really loved, was his music, so I decided that was the thing I’d take away from him. At the time, it seemed fair.’
‘And does it now?’
She considered this for a long time before she answered. ‘Yes, it still does seem fair. Everything that’s happened seems fair. But that’s not the point, is it?’
To him, there was no point in any of it. No point, and no message, and no lesson. It was no more than human evil and the terrible waste that comes from it.
Her voice was suddenly tired. ‘What happens now?’
‘I don’t know,’ he answered honestly. ‘Do you have any idea where he got the cyanide?’
She shrugged her shoulders, as though she thought the question irrelevant. ‘It could have been anywhere,’ she said. ‘He has a friend who is a chemist, or it could have been one of his friends from the old days.’ When she saw Brunetti’s puzzled glance, she explained. ‘The war. He made a lot of powerful friends then, and many of them are important men now.’
‘Then the rumors about him are true?’
‘I don’t know. Before we were married, he said they were all lies, and I believed him. I don’t believe it anymore.’ She said this bitterly, then forced herself back to her original explanation. ‘I don’t know where he got it, but I know it would have been no problem for him.’ Her sad smile returned. ‘I had access to it, of course. He knew that.’
‘Access? How?’
‘We didn’t come down here together. We didn’t want to travel together. I stopped in Heidelberg for two days on the way down, to see my former husband.’ Who, Brunetti recalled, taught pharmacology.
‘Did the Maestro know that you were there?’
She nodded. ‘My first husband and I remained friends, and we hold property together.’
‘Did you tell him what happened?’
‘Of course not,’ she said, raising her voice for the first time.
‘Where did you see him?’
‘At the university. I met him at his laboratory. He’s working on a new drug to minimize the effects of Parkinson’s. He showed me through the laboratory, and then we went to lunch together.’
‘Did the Maestro know this?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I might have told him. I probably did. It was very difficult for us to find anything to talk about. This was a neutral topic, so we were glad to have it to talk about.’
‘Did you and the Maestro ever talk about what happened?’
She couldn’t bring herself to ask what he meant; she knew. ‘No.’
‘Did you ever talk about the future? What you were going to do?’
‘No, not directly.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘One day, when I was coming in and he was going to rehearsal, he said, “Just wait until after
Either way, Brunetti realized, she was trapped. There was evidence that she had been planning a separate future, even before he died. And now she was a widow, and enormously rich. And even if the information about her daughter was made public, there was evidence that she had stopped on the way to Venice to talk to the girl’s father, a man who surely had access to the poison that had killed the Maestro.
No Italian judge would convict a woman for what she had done, not if she explained about her daughter. Given the evidence Brunetti had—Signora Santina’s testimony about her sister, the interviews with the doctors, even the suicide of his second wife at a time when their daughter was twelve years old—there was no court in Italy that would bring a charge of murder against her. But all of this would hang upon the testimony of the girl, upon the tall girl Alex, in love with horses and still a child.
Brunetti knew that this woman would never let that testimony take place, regardless of the consequences if she did not. Further, he knew that he would never allow it to happen, either.
And without the testimony of the daughter? There was the obvious coolness between them, her easy access to the poison, her presence in the dressing room that night, wildly out of keeping with what they had always done.
