Drawing Conclusions

key was on the ring, too, and that’s when she said that, about its being a safe place to keep it.’ She looked at each of them in turn, searching for some sign that they found this as puzzling as she did.

‘Did she know where you kept them?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Of course. I’ve kept them in the same place for years, and she knew where that was,’ she said, pointing towards a room that was probably the kitchen. ‘There. In the second drawer.’ Brunetti stopped himself from saying that was precisely where a competent housebreaker would look.

‘Do you have storerooms on the ground floor?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Is one of them hers?’

She shook the idea away. ‘No, they belong to the appliance store near the pizzeria and to one of the restaurants in the campo.’

He noticed that Vianello had silently managed to take out his notebook and was busy writing.

‘Could you give me some idea of the sort of life she led, Signora?’

‘Costanza?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was a retired teacher. I think she retired about five years ago. Taught little children. And now she visits old people who are in rest homes.’ As if suddenly aware of the dissonance between events and the present tense, she put her hand to her mouth.

Brunetti let the moment pass and then asked, ‘Did she have guests?’

‘Guests?’

‘People who came to stay with her. Perhaps you met them on the stairs, or perhaps she told you that you would see strangers coming in, just so you’d know and not be concerned.’

‘Yes, I’d see people on the steps, occasionally. They were always very polite.’

‘Women?’ Vianello asked.

‘Yes,’ she said casually, and then added, ‘Her son came to see her.’

‘Yes, I know. I spoke to him yesterday,’ Brunetti answered, curious about her reluctance to discuss the female visitors.

‘How is he?’ she asked with real concern.

‘When I spoke to him, he seemed battered by it.’ This was no exaggeration; Brunetti suspected it stated the reality that lay behind Niccolini’s reserve.

‘She loved him. And the grandchildren.’ Then, with a small smile, ‘And she was very fond of her daughter-in- law, too.’ She shook her head, as if at the discovery of some exception to the rule of gravity.

‘Did she speak of them often?’

‘No, not really. Costanza – you have to understand – was not by nature a talkative person. It’s only because I’ve known her for years that I know any of this.’

‘How many years?’ Vianello interrupted to ask and held up his notebook as if to suggest he was simply doing what the pages told him to do.

‘She was living here when I moved in,’ she said. ‘That was five years ago. I think she’d been here for a few years before that, since her husband died.’

‘Did she say why she moved?’ Vianello asked, eyes on what he was writing.

‘She said the old place – it was near San Polo – was too big, and that once she was alone – her son was married by then – she decided to find somewhere smaller.’

‘But stay in the city?’ Vianello asked.

‘Of course,’ she said and gave Vianello a strange look.

‘Let me go back to something,’ Brunetti said. ‘About her guests.’

‘Guests,’ she repeated, as if she had quite forgotten having been asked the question before.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said with his easiest smile. Then he went on, ‘Well, perhaps you wouldn’t be so much aware of them, up here. I can ask the people downstairs: they’re more likely to have noticed.’ He cleared his throat, as if preparing to change the subject and ask another question entirely.

‘As I told you, occasionally people did stay. Women,’ she said. ‘Occasionally.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said, sounding only faintly interested, ‘Friends?’

‘I don’t know.’

Vianello looked up and said, with an easy smile, ‘Everyone wants to come and stay in Venice. My wife and I are always being asked if the sons or daughters of friends can stay, and our kids always have friends they want to invite.’ He shook his head at the thought, as though he were the concierge of a quiet bed and breakfast in Castello – conveniently located out of the crowded city centre – and not an ispettore di polizia. The news of these requests surprised Brunetti. Considering the young age of his children and the fact that all of Vianello’s friends lived in Venice, what the inspector said was very unlikely, but, apparently convinced by his own story, Vianello went on to conclude, ‘That’s probably who they were,’ and bent his head over his pages.

‘Perhaps,’ Signora Giusti said uncertainly.

Sensing her hesitation, Brunetti abandoned his casual tone and spoke with the seriousness he thought this matter warranted. ‘Signora, we simply want to understand what sort of woman she was. Everyone we speak to says she was a good person, and I have no reason not to believe it. But that doesn’t give me any real understanding of her. So anything you can tell me might help.’

‘Help what?’ she asked with a sharpness that surprised Brunetti. ‘What is it you’re really asking about? You’re the police, and nothing good ever comes of getting mixed up with you. Since you came in here, you’ve been mixing truth with what you think I want or need to hear, but what you’ve never said is why these questions are important.’

She paused, but it was not to try to calm herself, nor to listen to anything either one of them might try to say. ‘I looked at the newspapers, and they’re saying she died of a heart attack. If that’s true, then there’s no need for you to be here, asking these questions.’

‘I can understand your concern, Signora, living in the same building,’ Brunetti said.

She raised both hands to her temples and pressed against the side of her head, as if there were too much noise or too much pain. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it. Either tell me what’s going on or get out of here, the two of you.’ By the time she finished, she was almost shouting.

Training warred against instinct; Brunetti’s experience of human nature came up against his feelings of human sympathy. Caution won. Once someone knew something, you were no longer in control of it, for they were free to do with it what they pleased, and what they pleased need not be what pleased you, and often was not.

‘All right,’ he said, forcing his body to relax into an easier posture, one reflective of honesty. ‘The cause was a heart attack; there’s no question of that. But we would like to exclude the possibility that someone might have created conditions favourable to it.’

She bristled at the jargon and said, ‘What does that mean?’

Calmly, as though he had not noticed her reaction, he went on, ‘It means that someone might have…’ and here he paused and gave every appearance of pausing to assess her trustworthiness before he went on, ‘frightened her or threatened her.’

More calmly, she asked, ‘Is this an official investigation?’

He lapsed into the truth. ‘No, not really. Perhaps it’s for my peace of mind, or her son’s. But I’d like to exclude the possibility that she was… that she was forced or frightened into death. I want to know if someone menaced her in any way, and I thought you might know something.’

‘Does it make a difference?’ she asked instantly.

‘To what?’

‘Legally,’ she said.

Without telling her about those small marks on Signora Altavilla’s neck and shoulders, Brunetti had no answer to give her.

She got up and went over to the front window that looked into the campo and at the thrusting church. Back still to them, she said, ‘From down on the ground, when I go out the door, I see the church, and it looks one way: heavy, locked into the ground. But from up here, it looks almost as if it had wings.’ She paused for a long time; Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a glance.

‘Same church. Different angle,’ she said and again lapsed into silence.

‘Like Costanza,’ she said after a long pause, and Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a quicker glance. ‘When I first saw the women on the stairs, I had no idea who they were. I knew they weren’t cleaning women because we