‘Where do they usually work?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Who?’ the young man asked cautiously. He didn’t want to be caught again by another trick question.
‘The male whores.’
‘They’re usually along Via Cappuccina, sir. Sometimes at the train station, but we try to stop that sort of thing during the summer when so many tourists pass through the station.’
‘Was this one a regular?’
‘I don’t know about that, sir.’
The car pulled off to the left, cut down a narrow road, then turned right on to a broad road lined with low buildings on either side. Brunetti glanced down at his watch. Almost five.
The buildings on either side of them were further and further apart from one another now, the spaces between them filled with low grass and the occasional bush. A few abandoned cars stood at crazy angles, their windows shattered and their seats ripped out and flung beside them. Each building appeared to have once been surrounded by a fence, but most of these now hung drunkenly from the posts that had forgotten about holding them up.
A few women stood at the side of the road; two of them stood in the shade created by a beach umbrella sunk into the dirt at their feet.
‘Do they know what happened here today?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’m sure they do, sir. Word about something like that spreads quickly.’
‘And they’re still here?’ Brunetti asked, unable to conceal his surprise.
‘They’ve got to five, haven’t they, sir? Besides, if it was a man who got killed, then there’s no risk to them, or I suppose that’s the way they’d look at it.’ The driver slowed and pulled to the side of the road. ‘This is it, sir.’
Brunetti opened his door and got out. Heat and humidity slid up and embraced him. Before him stood a long low building; on one side, four steep cement ramps led up to double metal doors. A blue and white police sedan was parked at the bottom of one of the ramps. No name was visible on the building, and no sign of any sort identified it. The smell that surged towards them made that unnecessary.
‘I think it was at the back, sir,’ the driver volunteered.
Brunetti walked to the right of the building, towards the open fields that he could see stretching out behind it. When he came around to the back of the building, he saw yet another lethargic fence, an acacia tree that had survived only by a miracle, and, in its shade, a policeman asleep in a wooden chair, head nodding forward on his chest.
‘Scarpa,’ the driver called out before Brunetti could say anything. ‘Here’s a commissario.’
The policeman’s head shot up and he was instantly awake, then as quickly on his feet. He looked at Brunetti and saluted. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’
Brunetti saw that the man’s jacket was draped over the back of the chair and that his shirt, plastered to his body with sweat, seemed to be a faint pink, no longer white. ‘How long have you been out here, Officer Scarpa?’ Brunetti asked when he approached the man.
‘Since the lab people left, sir.’
‘When was that?’
‘About three, sir.’
‘Why are you still here?’
‘The sergeant in charge told me to stay here until a team came out to talk to the workers.’
‘What are you doing out here in the sun?’
The man made no attempt to avoid the question or to embellish his answer. ‘I couldn’t stand it inside, sir. The smell. I came out here and was sick, and then I knew I couldn’t go back inside. I tried standing for the first hour, but there’s only this little place where there’s any shade, so I went back and got a chair.’
Instinctively, Brunetti and the driver had crowded into that small patch of shade while the other man spoke. ‘Do you know if the team has come out to question them?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, sir. They got here about an hour ago.’
‘Then what are you still doing out here?’ Brunetti asked.
The officer gave Brunetti a stony look. ‘I asked the sergeant if I could go back to town, but he wanted me to help with the questioning. I told him I couldn’t, not unless the workers came outside to talk to me. He didn’t like that, but I couldn’t go back inside.’
A playful breeze reminded Brunetti of the truth of that.
‘So what are you doing out here? Why aren’t you in the car?’
‘He told me to wait here, sir.’ The man’s face didn’t change when he spoke. ‘I asked if I could sit in the car – it’s got air-conditioning – but he told me to stay out here if I wouldn’t help with the questioning.’ As if anticipating Brunetti’s next question, he said, ‘The next bus isn’t until quarter to eight, to take people back into the city after work.’
Brunetti considered this and then asked, ‘Where was he found?’
The policeman turned and pointed to a long clump of grass on the other side of the fence. ‘He was under that, sir.’
‘Who found him?’
‘One of the workers inside. He’d come outside to have a cigarette, and he saw one of the guy’s shoes lying on the ground – red, I think – so he went to have a closer look.’
‘Were you here when the lab team was?’
‘Yes, sir. They went over it, taking photos and picking up anything that was on the ground for about a hundred metres around the bush.’
‘Footprints?’
‘I think so, sir, but I’m not sure. The man who found him left some, but I think they found others.’ He paused a moment, wiped some sweat from his forehead, and added, ‘And the first police who were on the scene left some.’
‘Your sergeant?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Brunetti glanced off at the clump of grass then back at the policeman’s sweat-soaked shirt. ‘Go on back to our car, Officer Scarpa. It’s air-conditioned.’ Then to the driver, ‘Go with him. You can both wait for me there.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ the policeman said gratefully and reached down to pull his jacket from the back of the chair.
‘Don’t bother,’ Brunetti said when he saw the man start to put one arm in a sleeve.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he repeated and bent to pick up the chair. The two men walked back towards the building. The policeman set the chair down on the cement outside the back door of the building then joined the other man. They disappeared round the side of the building, and Brunetti went towards the hole in the fence.
Ducking low, he passed through it and walked over towards the bush. The signs left by the lab team were all around: holes in the earth where they had driven rods into the earth to measure distance, dirt scuffed into small piles by pivoting footsteps, and, nearer to the clump, a small pile of clipped grass placed neatly to the side: apparently, they’d had to cut down the grass to get to the body and remove it without scratching it on the sharp edges of the leaves.
Behind Brunetti, a door slammed shut, and then a man’s voice called, ‘Hey, you, what are you doing? Get the hell away from there.’
Brunetti turned and, as he knew he would, saw a man in police uniform coming quickly towards him from the back of the building. As Brunetti watched but didn’t move away from the bush, the man drew his revolver from his holster and shouted at Brunetti, ‘Put your hands in the air and come over to the fence.’
Brunetti turned and walked back towards the fence; he moved like a man on a rocky surface, hands held out at his sides to maintain balance.
‘I told you to put them in the air,’ the policeman snarled as Brunetti reached the fence.
He had a gun in his hand, so Brunetti did not try to tell him that his hands were in the air; they just weren’t over his head. Instead, he said, ‘Good afternoon, Sergeant. I’m Commissario Brunetti from Venice. Have you been taking the statements of the people inside?’
The man’s eyes were small, and there wasn’t much in the way of intelligence to be read in them, but there was enough there for Brunetti to realize that the man saw the trap opening at his feet. He could ask to see proof, ask a commissario of police for his warrant card, or he could allow a stranger claiming to be a police official to go
