If anything surprised him, it was to discover that he had been right, and when he realized he felt nothing stronger than that, he tried to trace the cause. He accepted then that he hadn't liked this woman, though the habit of compassion for old people had been strong enough to disguise his dislike and convince him that what he felt was the usual pity and sympathy.
He pulled himself from these reflections and called the Questura, asking to speak to Vianello: he explained what had happened and asked him to organize a crew to come to the apartment.
When Vianello hung up, Brunetti clasped his hands behind his back, embarrassed at having got this idea from a television crime show, and began to walk through the apartment.
He moved towards the back and found that, aside from the room in which she had received him, there was only a bedroom, plus a kitchen and a bath. Both of these surprised him by being spotless, a fact which spoke of the existence of someone who came to clean.
The bedroom walls held what looked like celestial maps, scores of them of all sizes, framed in black and looking as if they came from the same collection or the hand of the same framer. Some were coloured in pastels, some in the original black and white. He flicked on the light to study them better. From knee height to a metre below the very tall ceiling, they hung in disorderly rows. He recognized what had to be a Cellarius, counted the ones above and below it and realized there were two complete sets. Only an expert could put a price on them, but Brunetti knew they would be worth hundreds of millions. There was a single, monk-like bed, a tall
Back in the living room he used a credit card to slide open the bottom drawer of the desk. Then, working up from the bottom, he slid them all open and looked at, but did not touch, the contents. One drawer held neat piles of bills, another what looked like photograph albums, stacked on one another in diminishing order of size; the top one held more bills and a few newspaper clippings.
Brunetti, staring around the room, didn't know whether to call it spartan or monastic.
He went back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. A litre of milk, a piece of butter inside a covered glass dish, the heel of a loaf of bread. The cabinets held just as little: a jar of honey, some salt, butter, tea bags and a tin of ground coffee. Either the woman didn't eat or her meals were brought to her in the same way as were her cigarettes.
In the bathroom there was a plastic container for false teeth, a flannel nightgown hanging on the back of the door, some toiletries, and four bottles of pills in the cabinet. Returning to the living room, he chose not to look at the dead woman, knowing he would have too much of that once the scene of crime team arrived.
He moved to the window and stood with his back against it and tried to make some sense out of what he saw. The room contained, he was sure, billions of lire in art works: the Cezanne that stood to the left of the door opposite him might be worth that just by itself. He studied the walls, looking for a paler rectangle that would speak of a newly empty space. No thief, no matter how ignorant a thief, could fail to see the value of the things in this room; yet there was no sign that anything had been removed, nor was there any indication that Signora Jacobs had died of anything other than a heart attack.
He knew, from long experience, the danger of imposing preconceived notions on to an investigation; it was one of the first things he warned new inspectors to guard against. Yet here he was, prepared to reject any evidence, no matter how persuasive, that suggested accidental or natural death. His bones, his radar, his very soul suspected that Signora Jacobs had been murdered, and though there was no sign of violence, he had little doubt that the killer was the same person who had murdered her adoptive granddaughter. He remembered Galileo and his response to the threats marshalled against him.
Logic dictates that a task should become easier, and its execution faster, the more often it is performed. Thus the examination of the locus of death should be performed with greater speed each time it is necessary, especially in a case such as this, where an old woman lies dead beside her easy chair, with no sign of violence and no sign of forced entry. Or perhaps, Brunetti reflected, the passing of time is a completely subjective experience, and the photographers and fingerprint technicians were moving with great alacrity. Certainly, as he asked them to photograph and dust, he was aware of their unspoken scepticism at his treating this as a crime scene. What could be easier and more self-explanatory: an old woman, sprawled on the floor, a bottle of pills rolled halfway across the room from her?
Rizzardi, when he showed up, appeared puzzled that he, and not the woman's doctor, had been called, but he was too good a friend of Brunetti's to question this. Instead, he pronounced her dead, examined her superficially, said it looked as though she had died the night before, and gave no further sign that he found Brunetti's request for an autopsy strange.
'If I'm asked to justify it?' the doctor asked, getting to his feet.
.'I'll get a magistrate to order it, don't worry,' Brunetti answered.
'I'll let you know,' the doctor said, bending to brush ash off the knees of his trousers.
Thanks,' Brunetti replied, glad to be spared even the doctor's passive curiosity. He knew he could not find the words with which to describe what he felt about Signora Jacobs's death, and he realized how weak any attempt to explain would be.
It could have been hours later that Brunetti found himself alone in the apartment with Vianello, but the light that came in from the windows was still late morning light. He looked at his watch, astonished to see that it was not yet one o'clock and that all of this interior time had passed, and all of these things had happened.
'Do you want to go for lunch?' Brunetti asked, conscious as he addressed Vianello in the more familiar 'tu' of how comfortable it felt. There were few people on the force with whom he would more like to make this grammatical declaration of equality.
'Well, we're not going to eat what's in the kitchen, are we?' Vianello asked with a smile then added, serious, 'Let’s have a look around here first, if you like.'
Brunetti grunted his agreement but stayed where he was, studying the room and thinking.
'What are we looking for?' Vianello asked him.
'I've no idea. Something about the paintings and the other things,' he said, with a broad wave that took in all the objects in the room. 'A copy of her will or an indication of where it might be. Name of a notary or a receipt from one.'
'Papers, then?' Vianello asked, switching on the light in the corridor and placing himself with his back to one of the shelves of books. At Brunetti's muttered agreement, Vianello reached up to the first book on the top shelf and pulled it down. Holding it in his right hand, he flipped it open with the left and leafed through all of the pages from the back to the front, then switched it to the other hand and leafed through it the other way. Satisfied that nothing lurked between its pages, he stooped and placed it on the floor to the right of the bookcase and pulled down the next book.
Brunetti took the papers from the top drawer of the desk through to the kitchen and set them on the table. He pulled out a chair, sat, and drew the stack of papers towards him.
Some time later - Brunetti didn't even bother to look at his watch to see how long it had been - Vianello came into the kitchen, went to the sink and washed a film of dust from his hands, then ran the water until it was cold and drank two glasses.
Neither man spoke. Later, Brunetti heard Vianello go into the bathroom and use the toilet. Mechanically, he read through every receipt and piece of paper, placing them to one side after he had done so. When he was finished, he went back to the desk and took the papers from the bottom drawer and sat down to read. Arranged in precise chronological order, they told the story of the occasional sale of one of the apartments owned by Signora Jacobs, the first more than forty years ago. Every twelve years or so, she sold an apartment. There was no bank book, so Brunetti could assume only that payment had been made in cash and kept in the apartment. He took a letter from the gas company and turned it over. Assuming that the declared price of a house, as was usual, was something approximating half of the real price, Brunetti quickly calculated that the money from the sale of each house should have lasted from eight to ten years, given what he could see of her bills for utilities and rent. He found
