‘“Not inconsistent”?’ Brunetti asked.
Ignoring this, Rizzardi asked, ‘You remember the cardigan she was wearing?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered.
‘It would have cushioned a lot of the force: that could explain why the marks are so diffused.’
‘Could it be anything else?’ Brunetti asked, wondering if Rizzardi’s caution was like an accent, and he would never lose it.
‘In the mouth of a clever defence attorney, those marks on her back,’ Rizzardi began, his speculation about a possible court case sufficient to tell Brunetti how convinced he was that Signora Altavilla had been the victim of violence, regardless of how unwilling he was to say it directly, ‘could have happened when she fell against a radiator, or she had been trying to give herself a back massage and squeezed too hard, or she lost her balance and fell against the door when she was letting herself into the apartment-’
Brunetti cut him off. ‘Ettore, don’t tell me what it could be. Tell me what it is.’
Rizzardi behaved as if Brunetti had not spoken and went on, ‘I know lawyers and you know lawyers who would argue she fell against the door five times, Guido.’
Unable to bridle his anger, Brunetti snapped, ‘I can figure out for myself what could have happened. For God’s sake, just tell me what did happen.’ There followed a long pause, during which Brunetti considered that he might have gone too far. People did not talk to Rizzardi that way.
‘Someone grabbed her from the front, and it’s possible they shook her,’ Rizzardi said with a clarity that surprised Brunetti. No hesitation, no rhetorical self-protection, no compromise. When had the pathologist ever been this clear?
‘Why do you say that?’
‘There’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘There’s a very faint injury to her third and fourth vertebrae. And some haemorrhaging in the muscles and ligaments around them.’
Brunetti refused to ask, bent on forcing Rizzardi to say it.
‘So someone could have shaken her.’
‘Or?’
‘Or it could have happened when she fell. The blow to her head was very hard, and she hit the radiator. I saw that last night.’
‘Or she was pushed,’ Brunetti said.
‘I can’t say that,’ Rizzardi told him.
Brunetti felt as though Rizzardi had a ration of frankness, and now he had used it up.
Finally the doctor said firmly, ‘Nothing is going to change the fact that the cause of death was a heart attack.’ Again, a pause that Brunetti did not interrupt, and then Rizzardi said, ‘Her heart was in bad shape, and a shock of any sort could easily have sent her into fibrillation.’
Brunetti was aware of Vianello at his side, unable to disguise his curiosity.
‘Did your men find propafenone in her apartment?’ the doctor asked.
Brunetti had not seen a written report of the results of the search, so he avoided answering and asked, ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s used for fibrillation; which is what killed her. A shock would bring it on.’
If you burn down a house and don’t know there’s a person inside, are you guilty of murder? If you kidnap a diabetic and don’t give them insulin, are you responsible for their death? And if you frighten a person with a weak heart? Rizzardi was right, this was a defence lawyer’s playground.
‘I’ll check. They will have listed everything,’ Brunetti said, though that was never a sure thing. ‘Anything else?’
‘No. Aside from the heart, she was healthy for a woman in her mid-sixties.’ Rizzardi paused for a long time. ‘But it was a ticking bomb, so maybe it didn’t matter how healthy she was.’ Brunetti heard a click, and the doctor’s voice was gone.
Brunetti switched off his phone and put it in his pocket. Turning to Vianello, he said, ‘She died of a heart attack. But he found signs that someone might have shaken her. That might have caused it.’
Vianello gave him an appreciative look. ‘You got Rizzardi to say that?’
Ignoring him, Brunetti said, ‘So we take a closer look at her life.’
Sounding almost angry, Vianello said, ‘She sounds like a decent person, not the sort who’d get threatened or shaken. Or killed. Good people shouldn’t be killed like that.’
Brunetti thought about this for some time, and then said, ‘Would that that were true.’
10
When he got to his office, Brunetti found nothing. That is, he found nothing from the crime squad: no photos of Signora Altavilla, no photos of the apartment or list of the objects found in it. He sat at his desk and thought about some of those objects, trying to find a way to see them as reflective of her life.
The apartment and the things in it had given no clue to her financial status. There had been a time, decades ago, when a mere address might resolve any doubt. San Marco and the
Brunetti ran his memory through the rooms. The furniture had been of good quality, all of it from some epoch between the old and the antique. There had been few books, few decorative objects: he could not remember a single painting. The whole place spoke of simplicity and of a pared-down life. What lingered most strongly in his memory was the placement of the sofa and the table: what sort of person would turn away from the view of the church and the mountains? Not only for herself but for guests who came to the apartment? He knew not everyone was addicted to beauty, but to choose to look at that boring room instead of both man-made and natural beauty made no sense to Brunetti and made him uneasy about a person who would make such a choice.
What to make of the unopened packets of cheap underwear in the drawers of the spare bedroom? A woman who bought cashmere sweaters of the quality of the ones in her drawers, regardless of her age, would not wear cotton underwear like that, or else his ideas about women were more mistaken than Paola occasionally said they were.
And why the three different sizes? Niccolini’s daughter, should she visit her grandmother, could hardly be old enough to wear even the smallest size; besides, parents were usually careful to send along the proper clothes when their children spent the night away from home. It might be that friends came to visit or perhaps sent their daughters to stay for a time in Venice. And the unopened toiletries in the bathroom? A person did not prepare for unexpected visits with that kind of thoroughness. It was her home, after all, not a hotel or lodging house.
He left his desk and went downstairs. Over the course of the years, he had discussed many topics with Signorina Elettra, though female lingerie was not among them. She was standing at her window when he came in, arms folded, looking across the canal at the same view that greeted him from his own windows: the facade of San Lorenzo looked no less decrepit from one floor below.
She turned and smiled. ‘Can I be of help, Commissario?’
‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti said and walked over to her desk. He leaned back against it and crossed his legs. Light streamed through the window, not only from the sun but from its reflection on the water in the canal below. He saw her thus in profile and realized that the outline of her features was less sharp than he remembered its being. Her chin was less clear-cut, her skin on her cheekbone less tightly drawn. He noticed, too, the small wrinkles on the outer side of her eye. He looked away and studied the church.
‘Have you any idea what it means if the drawers in the guest room of an apartment hold unopened packages of women’s underwear, but in three different sizes?’ She looked at him, and he saw her brow contract in confusion. ‘And tights and sweaters, also in different sizes.’ Then, recalling who he was speaking to and knowing
