this detail would make a difference, he added, ‘All plain cotton, the sort of thing you’d buy at a supermarket.’
She unfolded her arms and raised her chin, glancing back at the church. Her attention on the facade, she asked, ‘Is this in a man’s apartment or is it in the apartment you went to last night?’
‘It’s what we found in Signora Altavilla’s apartment, yes,’ he answered. ‘Why do you ask?’
Attention still directed at the church, as if consulting with it to find an answer, she said, ‘Because in a man’s apartment, it would suggest one thing; in a woman’s, something entirely different.’
‘What would it suggest in a man’s?’ he asked, though he suspected he knew.
She turned to face him and answered, ‘In a man’s, it would suggest fresh underwear for a woman – or for the women – he brought home for the night,’ she said, pausing to consider the sound of this. Then she added, sounding less certain, ‘But then it probably wouldn’t be simple cotton, would it? And it wouldn’t be in another room. Not unless he was very strange indeed.’
Presumably, then, she considered it not at all strange for a man to keep women’s underwear in differing sizes in his home, so long as it was expensive and kept in his bedroom. For a moment, Brunetti wondered what other information had been closed off to him by the vows of matrimony. But he confined himself to asking, ‘And in a woman’s?’
‘There’s nothing to preclude the same explanation,’ she said, surprising him with how ordinary she managed to make it sound. But then she smiled and added, ‘But more likely it would suggest she brought the women home for some more prosaic reason.’
‘Such as?’ he asked.
‘Such as to protect them from the sort of men who would invite them home for one night,’ she said in a tone that suggested she might be serious.
‘That’s a puritanical vision of things.’
‘Not necessarily,’ she said levelly. Then, in a more accommodating voice, she went on, ‘It’s more likely she’s helping illegal refugee women, letting them stay with her – safely – while they look for work or find a place to live.’ She paused, and he watched her run through possibilities. ‘Or it could be that she wanted to protect them from other people.’
‘Such as?’
‘Any man who thought he had a right over them. A boyfriend. A pimp.’
He gave her a level look but did not say anything. Brunetti toyed with her idea and, after a while, found that he liked the feel of it. To test it, he said, ‘Do you think she could organize that on her own? After all, where would she find out about them or be put in touch with them?’
As a knight would first swing into the saddle of his horse before lifting his lance, Signorina Elettra returned to the chair behind her computer. She hit a few keys, studied the screen, and hit a few more. Brunetti pushed himself away from the desk and turned to watch. After some time she waved a hand to him and said, ‘Come and have a look.’
He moved behind her and looked at the screen. He saw the usual photomontage of a woman, her face turned away from the viewer, the menacing shadow of a man lurking behind her. A headline declared ‘Stop Illegal Immigration.’ Below it were a few sentences, offering support and help and providing an 800 telephone number. He did not read the full text, but he did take out his notebook and write down the number.
‘You remember what the President said last year?’ Signorina Elettra asked him.
‘About this?’ he asked, indicating the screen and what it held.
‘Yes. Do you remember the number he gave?’
‘Of victims?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘I do,’ she said, and Brunetti could all but hear her adding that she remembered because she was a woman and he did not because he was a man. But she said nothing else, and Brunetti did not ask.
‘Would you like me to do anything, sir? Call them?’
‘No,’ he said too quickly; he saw that she was surprised by the answer as well as by the speed with which he gave it. ‘I’ll do it.’ He wanted to say something more to cover up the force of his response to her proposal, but that would be to draw attention to it.
‘Anything else, Commissario?’ he heard her asking.
‘No, thank you, Signorina. The number’s enough.’
‘As you will, Dottore,’ she said and bent her head over the screen.
Walking up the steps, Brunetti was assailed by uneasiness about his strong rebuff of Signorina Elettra’s offer; she was so obviously superior to most of the people who worked at the Questura that she deserved far better of him. Inventive and clever, she was also well versed in the law and would have been an ornament to any police department lucky enough to hire her as an officer. But she was not, and he should not permit her to present herself as a police officer when asking questions or requesting information on the phone. It was bad enough that he turned a blind eye to the various acts of cyber-piracy in which he knew she engaged; indeed, acts which he encouraged her to commit. There was a line somewhere between what she could and could not be permitted to do: Brunetti’s dilemma was that the line he drew was never straight and was never drawn in the same place twice.
On his desk, delivered there he had no idea how, Brunetti found the autopsy report as well as the one from the scene of crime team. He stacked the papers in the centre of the desk, pulled his reading glasses from their case in his pocket, slipped them on, and started to read.
Rizzardi, a quiet man and not at all given to vanity or boasting, could not resist the temptation to show off in two fields: his dress and his prose. Understated, subtle in colour, his suits and overcoats, even his raincoat, were of such a quality as to make Brunetti suspicious of his sources of income; his prose was of a grammatical precision and inventiveness of expression Brunetti despaired of finding in any of the other reports he read. It was not unusual for the pathologist to describe an organ as being ‘captive within the tendrils of small veins’, or to describe the ‘starburst’ of cigarette burns on the back of a victim of torture. Indeed, the report of the first autopsy Rizzardi had done at Brunetti’s request had described the slash marks on the victim’s stomach, from which he had bled to death, by saying, ‘The wounds are reminiscent of Fontana when he worked in red.’
There were no flourishes, however, in his report on Signora Altavilla. He described the condition of her heart, making it clear that the cause of death had been uncontrollable fibrillation. He described the injury to the vertebrae and surrounding tissue and described the cut on her forehead, saying that they were not inconsistent with a bad fall soon before her death. Brunetti put his report aside long enough to open the technicians’ report, where he found reference to the presence of blood and skin tissue on the radiator in the sitting room, blood of the same type as Signora Altavilla’s.
Rizzardi also described ‘a grey mark,’ 2.1 centimetres in length and close to the left of the collarbone of the dead woman. The marks on her shoulders were ‘barely visible’, as banal an expression as Brunetti had ever known the pathologist to use.
He read quickly through the rest of the report: signs of her having given birth at least once, the seam left by a broken left wrist, a bunion on her right foot. Rizzardi presented the physical information without comment. Brunetti knew that, in a police department led by Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, physical evidence this inconclusive was likely to lead to the conclusion of natural death.
Brunetti placed the technicians’ preliminary report on top of Rizzardi’s and read through it carefully this time. He noticed a certain willingness to cater to Patta’s preference for non-interpretation. Aside from the blood on the radiator, the examination of the house suggested nothing beyond ‘normal domestic use’.
Then, on the last page, came a hammer blow to any hope Brunetti might have had of conducting an investigation. Propafenone was found in the medicine cabinet in Signora Altavilla’s bathroom. Thus proof of a pre-existing condition validated Rizzardi’s posthumous diagnosis of death by heart fibrillation.
Brunetti set the report on top of Rizzardi’s and carefully tapped at the sides of the papers until they were aligned. He folded his hands and placed them in the middle of the top sheet. He studied his thumbs, noticed that the right-hand cuff of his shirt was beginning to fray, then looked away from it and out the window.
The reports would please Patta: that was a given. But they would also please – Brunetti was equally certain of this – Niccolini. No, that was the wrong word: too strong. Slowly, as though it were a film he could view at will and at leisure, Brunetti played over his meeting with the veterinarian.
