'About the girl?'
'No, I don't mean that, sir. Did you say anything that might have
given her mother the opportunity to mention her?'
Brunetti tried to recall his conversation with Signora Moro. 'No,
nothing that I can remember.'
'Then it's possible she wouldn't have mentioned her, isn't it?'
For almost two decades, Brunetti had shared his home with one, then
both, of his children, and he could not recall a single instant when
physical proof of their existence had been absent from their home:
toys, clothing, shoes, scarves, books, papers, Discmen lay spread about
widely and chaotically. Words, pleas, threats proved equally futile in
the no-doubt biological need of the young of the human species to
litter their nest. A man of meaner spirit might have considered this
an infestation: Brunetti thought of it as one of nature's ways to
prepare a parent's patience for the future, when the mess would become
emotional and moral, not merely physical.
'But I would have seen some sign of her, I think,' he insisted.
'Maybe they've sent her to stay with relatives,' Signorina Elettra
suggested.
'Yes, perhaps,' Brunetti agreed, though he wasn't convinced. No matter
how often his kids had gone to stay with their grandparents or other
relatives, signs of their recent habitation had always lingered behind
them. Suddenly he had a vision of what it must have been for the Moros
to attempt to remove evidence of Ernesto's presence from their homes,
and he thought of the danger that would remain behind: a single, lonely
sock found at the back of a closet could break a mother's heart anew; a
Spice Girls disc carelessly shoved into the plastic case meant to hold
Vivaldi's flute sonatas could shatter any calm. Months, perhaps years,
would pass before the house would stop being a minefield, every cabinet
or drawer to be opened with silent dread.
His reverie was interrupted by Signorina Elettra, who leaned forward to
place the file on his desk.
'Thank you,' he said. 'I have a number of things I'd like you to try
to check for me.' He slid the paper towards her, listing them as he
did so.
*34
'Find out, if you can, where the girl goes to school. If she's living
here or lived here with either of them, then she's got to be enrolled
in one of the schools. There are the grandparents: see if you can
locate them. Moro's cousin, Luisa Moro I don't have an address for her
might know.' He thought of the people in Siena and asked her to call
the police there and have them find out if the child was living with
them. She ran her finger down the list as he spoke. 'And I'd like you
to do the same for his wife: friends, relatives, colleagues,' he
concluded.
She looked at him and said, 'You aren't going to let this go, are
you?'
He pushed himself back in his chair but didn't get to his feet. 'I
don't like any of it, and I don't like anything I've heard. Nobody's
told me the truth and nobody's told me why they won't.'
'What does that mean?'
Brunetti smiled and said it gently. 'For the moment, all it means is
that I'd like you to get me all the information I've asked for.'
'And when I do?' she asked, not for an instant doubting that she would
find it.
Then perhaps we'll start proving a negative.'
'Which negative, sir.'
'That Ernesto Moro didn't kill himself.'
Before he left the Questura, he made one more call to Signora Moro's
number, feeling not unlike an importunate suitor growing ever more
persistent in the face of a woman's continued lack of response. He
wondered if he'd overlooked some mutual friend who might put in a good
word for him and realized how he was returning to the tactics of former
times, when his attempts to meet women had been animated by entirely
different hopes.
Just as he was approaching the underpass leading into Campo San
Bartolomeo, his mind on this unsettling parallel, he registered a
sudden darkness in front of him. He looked up, still not fully
attentive to his surroundings, and saw four San Martino cadets
wheeling, arms linked, as straight across as if on parade, into the
calk from the campo. The long dark capes of their winter uniforms
swirled out on either flank and effectively filled the entire width of
the calle. Two women, one old and one young, instinctively backed up
against the plate glass windows of the bank, and a pair of
map-embracing tourists did the same against the windows of the bar on
the
