‘Is that where he met the woman?’ Brunetti asked, having for some reason thought she was someone who worked in his practice.
‘Yes. I don’t know what she does there: I wasn’t interested in what her job was.’
‘Do you know her name, Signora?’
‘He had the grace never to use it,’ she said with badly withheld anger. ‘All he said was that she was younger.’ Her voice turned to iron on the last word.
‘I see,’ he said, then asked, ‘How did he seem, the last time you saw him?’
He watched her send her memory back to that meeting, watched as the emotions from it played across her face. She took a deep breath, tilted her head to one side to look away from both of them, and said, ‘It was about ten days ago.’ She took a few more deep breaths, and her arm again moved across her chest to anchor her hand on her shoulder. Finally she said, ‘He’d had Teo for the weekend, and when he brought him back, he said he wanted to talk to me. He said something was bothering him.’
‘About what?’ Brunetti asked.
She released her hand and joined it to the one in her lap. ‘I assumed it was about this woman, so I told him there was nothing he could say to me that I wanted to hear.’
She stopped, and both of them could see her recall saying those words. Neither of them spoke, however, and she eventually went on, ‘He said there were things that were going on that he didn’t like, and he wanted to tell me about them.’ She looked at Vianello, then at Brunetti. ‘It was the worst thing he did, the most cowardly.’
There was a noise from somewhere else in the house, and she half rose from her chair. But the noise was not repeated, and she sat down again. ‘I knew what he wanted to tell me. About her. That maybe it wasn’t going well and he was sorry. And I didn’t care. Then. I didn’t want to listen to it, so I told him that anything he had to tell me, he could say to my lawyer.’
She took a few breaths and went on. ‘He said it wasn’t really about her. He didn’t use her name. Just called her “her”. As if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to talk to me about her. In my home.’ She had been looking between the two men as she spoke, but now she addressed her attention to the hands she kept folded in her lap. ‘I told him he could leave.’
‘Did he, Signora?’ Brunetti asked after a long silence.
‘Yes. I got up and left the room, and then I heard him leave the house, heard his car drive away. And that was the last time I saw him.’
Brunetti, who was looking at her hands, was startled by the first drop. It splashed on the back of her hand and disappeared into the fabric of her skirt, and then another drop, and another, and then she got to her feet and walked quickly from the room.
After some time, Vianello said, ‘Pity she didn’t listen to him.’
‘For her reasons or for ours?’ Brunetti asked.
Surprised by the question, Vianello answered, ‘For hers.’
16
THERE WAS NOTHING for them to do but wait for her to return. Keeping their voices low, they discussed what she had said and the possibilities it created for them.
‘We need to find this woman and see what was going on,’ Brunetti said.
Vianello’s look was easily read.
‘No, not that,’ Brunetti continued with a shake of his head. ‘She’s right: it’s a cliche, one of the oldest ones. I want to know if he was bothered by anything other than the affair he was having with her.’
‘You don’t think that’s enough to worry a married man?’ Vianello asked.
‘Of course it is,’ Brunetti conceded. ‘But most married men who are having affairs don’t end up floating in a canal with three stab wounds in their back.’
‘That’s true enough,’ Vianello agreed. Then, with a backward nod towards the door Signora Doni had used, he said, ‘If I had her to contend with, I think an affair would make me very nervous.’
‘What would Nadia do?’ Brunetti asked, not sure how much criticism of Signora Doni lay in Vianello’s question.
‘Take my pistol and shoot me, probably,’ Vianello answered with a small grin from which pride was not entirely absent. ‘And Paola?’
‘We live on the fourth floor,’ Brunetti answered. ‘And we have a terrace.’
‘Crafty, your wife,’ Vianello said. ‘Would she leave an unsigned note in the computer?’
‘I doubt it,’ Brunetti said. ‘Too obvious.’ Entering into the puzzle, he gave it some thought. ‘She’d probably tell people I’d been depressed for months and had recently talked about ending it all.’
‘Who would she persuade to agree with her and say they’d heard you say the same thing?’
‘Her parents.’ Brunetti spoke before he thought about it, then quickly amended this: ‘No, only her father. Her mother wouldn’t lie.’ Something occurred to him and he said it, his pleasure evident in his face and voice. ‘I don’t think she’d lie about me. I think she likes me.’
‘Doesn’t her father?’
‘Yes, but in a different way.’ Brunetti knew it was impossible to explain this, but he was much cheered at this sudden recognition of the Contessa’s regard.
They heard Signora Doni’s steps in the corridor and stood as she came back into the room. ‘I had to check on Teo,’ she said. ‘He knows something big is wrong, and he’s worried.’
‘You told him we were policemen?’ Brunetti asked, though the boy had told them so.
She met his gaze directly. ‘Yes. I thought you’d come in uniform, and I wanted him to be prepared for that,’ she said too quickly, as if she had been waiting for his question. Perhaps encouraged by their silence, she finally got to it: ‘And I was afraid when you asked about Andrea. He usually called once or twice during the week. But I hadn’t heard from him since he left.’ She placed her palms on her thighs and studied them. ‘I suppose I knew what you were going to tell me.’
Ignoring this, Brunetti said, ‘You told us that his behaviour changed after he started the other job.’ Brunetti knew he had to go carefully here, find a way to work himself through the tangle of her emotions. ‘You said that you and he were close, Signora.’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘Do you remember how soon after he began to work there he showed signs of being worried?’
He read in the stiffness of her mouth that she was close to the end of what she would accept and answer. She started to speak, coughed lightly, then went on: ‘He hadn’t been there long; maybe a month. But by then the disease had grown worse.
‘He’d started eating less to try to lose weight, and that made him cranky, I’m afraid.’ She frowned at the memory of this. ‘I couldn’t get him to eat anything except vegetables and pasta, and bread and some fruit. He said that would work. But it didn’t do any good: he kept getting bigger.’
‘Did he ever talk about a problem?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Other than the disease.’
She had grown visibly restless, so Brunetti forced himself into a more relaxed posture, hoping it would prove contagious.
‘He didn’t like the new job. He said it was hard to do both, especially now that the disease had got worse, but he couldn’t leave because we needed the extra money.’
‘That’s quite a burden for a man who isn’t in good health,’ Vianello offered sympathetically.
She looked at him and smiled. ‘That’s the way Andrea was,’ she said. ‘He worried about the people who worked for him at the clinic. He felt responsible and wanted to keep it open.’
Brunetti left this alone. Years ago, less versed in the ways of emotions, he might have pointed to the dissonance between her behaviour towards her husband and these remarks, but the years had worn away his desire to find consistency, and so he never assumed it nor questioned its absence. She was aboil with emotions: Brunetti suspected the most powerful of them might be remorse, not anger.
‘Could you tell us where his clinic is, Signora?’ Brunetti asked. Vianello pulled a notebook from his pocket.
‘Via Motta 145,’ she said. ‘It’s only five minutes from here.’ Brunetti thought she looked embarrassed. ‘They called me yesterday and told me Andrea hadn’t come in. I told them I didn’t… didn’t know where he was.’ In the
