A Sea of Troubles

Brunetti forced himself to say, 'You'd better not do that. The body shouldn't be touched.'

'It's for respect, sir,' the man insisted, though he didn't look down at her. 'She shouldn't be left like that.' He held the blanket draped over one arm, a gesture that conveyed a curious sense of formality.

'I'm sorry, but I think it's better,' Brunetti said, giving no hint of how deeply he sympathized with the man's desire. His refusal to let the man cover Signora Follini lost him whatever sympathy he might have gained by moving the crowd away from the body.

Sensing this, Vianello moved a few steps further towards the village, put his hand lightly on the arm of the woman, and said, 'Is your husband here, Signora? Perhaps he could take you home.'

The woman shook her head, freed her arm from his hand, but slowly and with no hint of having taken or wanting to give offence, and walked away towards the houses, leaving the matter to the men.

Vianello moved closer to the man who had stood next to the woman. 'Can you remember when you saw Signora Follini last, Signore?'

'Some time this week, perhaps Wednesday. My wife sent me to get mineral water.'

'Do you remember who else might have been in the store when you were there?'

The man hesitated a moment before he answered. Both Brunetti and Vianello noticed this; neither gave any sign that they had.

'No.'

Vianello didn't ask for an explanation.

Instead, he turned back to the crowd. 'Can anyone else tell me when they saw her?'

One man said, 'Tuesday. In the morning. She was opening the store. I was on my way to the bar.'

Another volunteered, 'My wife bought the newspaper on Wednesday.'

When no one else spoke, Vianello asked, 'Does anyone remember seeing her after Wednesday?' None of them answered. Vianello pulled his notebook from his back pocket, opened it, and said, 'Could I ask you to give me your names?'

'What for?' demanded the man with the blanket.

'We're going to have to speak to everyone in the village,' Vianello began reasonably, as if taking no notice of the question or the tone in which it had been asked, 'so if I can get your names, we won't have to bother any of you again.'

Though not fully persuaded by this, the men nevertheless gave him their names and, when asked, their addresses. Then they filed slowly away, moving in and out of the circles of light, leaving the pavement to the two policemen and, at a distance, to the woman who lay silent, her blank eyes raised to the stars.

17

Before he spoke, Brunetti moved even farther away from the body of the dead woman. 'When I was in the store with her last week, two men came in. It was obvious they made her nervous. When I called her, I think it was Monday, she hung up as soon as she heard my name. When I called again, later in the week, a man answered, and I hung up without saying anything. Probably stupid.' He thought of what he'd learned about her, that she had been an addict for so many years and had stopped, come home, and gone to work in her parents' store. 'I liked her. She had a sense of humour. And she was tough.' The subject of these observations lay behind them, deaf now to the opinion of others.

'Sounds like you mean that as a compliment’ Vianello said.

Without hesitation, Brunetti answered, 'I do.'

After a pause, Vianello asked, 'And she didn't have any illusions about life in Pellestrina, did she?'

Brunetti looked over at the low houses of the village. A light went out in a downstairs window of one of them, and then in another. Was it because the residents of Pellestrina hoped to get what sleep they could before the fishing fleet set sail or was it to darken their rooms, the better to enable them to see what was going on outside? 'I don't think any of them have any illusions about living here.'

If either of them thought about going to the bar to have a drink while they waited for the scene of crime team, neither suggested it. Brunetti glanced back at the police launch and saw the pilot, sitting in a pool of light on the mushroom-shaped top of the metal stanchion, smoking a cigarette, but he didn't move off in that direction. It seemed little enough to remain with Signora Follini until the others arrived to transform her into a crime victim, a statistic.

The second police launch brought not only the four men of the team but a young doctor from the hospital who worked as a substitute when neither Rizzardi nor Guerriero was available. Brunetti had been at two crime scenes when he had been sent to declare the victim dead, and both times the doctor had behaved in a way that Brunetti did not like, dismissive of the solemnity of the moment. Only five years out of medical school, Dottor Venturi had apparently spent his time acquiring the arrogance, rather than the compassion, of his profession. He had also carefully copied the meticulous dress of his superior, Rizzardi, though the result always seemed slightly ridiculous on his short, stubby body.

The boat pulled in and moored beside theirs; the doctor jumped heavily down and walked towards the forms he knew to be Brunetti and Vianello, but he made no acknowledgement of their presence. He wore a dark charcoal grey suit with just the faintest of dark vertical stripes, a pattern which emphasized, rather than disguised, his rotundity.

He looked down at Signora Follini's body for a moment, then pulled the handkerchief from his breast pocket and dropped it on the wet pavement beside her before kneeling carefully on it. He picked up her hand without bothering to look at her face, felt her wrist, then let it slap wetly back on the pavement. 'She's dead,' he said to no one in particular. He glanced up at Brunetti and Vianello to see how they would respond.

When neither of them spoke, Venturi repeated, ‘I said she was dead.'

Brunetti looked away from the laguna then and glanced down at the young doctor. He wanted to know the cause of her death, but he did not want to watch this young man touch her again, so he simply nodded in acknowledgement and turned back to his contemplation of the distant lights visible on the water.

Vianello signalled to the men who had drawn up behind the doctor as he knelt over the body. Venturi started to get to his feet, but the toe of his right foot slipped on the wet pavement and he stopped himself from falling prone only by putting both palms flat down in front of him. Quickly he scrambled to his feet. He moved away from the body, careful to keep his dirty hands away from his sides, turned to one of the photographers, and said, 'Would you get me my handkerchief?'

The photographer, a man of about Brunetti's age, was busy setting up his tripod. He pulled one of the legs out, screwed it in place, looked over at the doctor and said, ‘I didn't drop it,' and turned his attention to the second leg.

Venturi opened his mouth to reprimand the technician, thought better of it, and headed off in the direction of the launch, leaving his handkerchief on the ground beside the body. Brunetti watched as he walked away, hands held horizontal, and was struck by how much like a penguin he looked. The empty boat bobbed out in the water, at least a metre from the edge of the pier. Neither of the pilots was anywhere to be seen. Rather than haul the boat closer by means of its mooring rope or attempt the broad leap from the pier to the deck, Venturi walked along the pier and sat on a wooden park bench. Brunetti suddenly noticed the heavy evening mist that had settled in, and was glad of it.

He walked back to Signora Follini and knelt beside her, welcoming the momentary distraction of the dampness that began to soak into the knees of his trousers. She wore a low-cut angora sweater, the pile of the fabric swirled into chaotic ridges and whirls by the water in which she had floated. Though he was no pathologist, Brunetti was familiar with the signs of violent death, but he saw none here. The skin of her throat was untouched, as was the fabric of her sweater. With the fingers of his right hand, he lifted the hem of her sweater, exposing her stomach. Seeing nothing but the stretch marks of age, he turned his eyes away and covered her again.

The various technicians busied themselves while Vianello and Brunetti waited. As they stood there idly, Brunetti saw the man with the blanket approach again. He went up to Vianello and said, nodding in the direction of the technicians, 'When they're finished, can you cover her?'

Vianello agreed and took the blanket the man offered.

'I don't need it back, so don't worry about that,' the man said, then walked away from the pier and disappeared into the darkness at the mouth of a small alley that ran between the houses. Time passed. Occasionally, the darkness was punctured by flashes from the technician's camera. Vianello waited until the crime