Doctored Evidence

'I'm afraid I don't understand’ she said, but she was talking now and not getting ready to cry.

'With what sort of things did she trust you?'

'Oh, nothing really, not then. A cousin had left her husband an apartment on the Lido, and some years after his death, when she wanted to sell it, there was a dispute about ownership of the garden.'

'Disputed ownership of property’ he said, rolling his eyes towards heaven, as if he could think of no crueller fate. 'Was that the only problem she had?'

She started to speak but stopped herself. 'Before I answer any more questions, Commissario, could you tell me why you're asking them?'

'Of course’ he agreed with an easy smile, recalling that she was a lawyer. 'It would seem that the crime has been solved, and we want to close the case formally, but before we do that we would like to exclude any other possibility.'

'What does that mean, 'other possibility'?'

'That there might have been someone else responsible for the crime.'

'But I thought the Romanian woman…' she began, and then sighed. ‘I honestly don't know whether to be happy or sad at the idea’ she finally admitted. 'If she didn't do it, then I can stop feeling so guilty about it.' She tried to smile, failed, and went on, 'But is there any reason why you, that is, the police, think that it might have been someone else?'

'No,' he said with the facility of the accomplished liar, 'not really.' Then, using Patta's favourite argument, he added, 'But in this climate of press suspicion of the police, we need to be as sure as we can be before we declare a case closed. The stronger the evidence, the less likely it is that the press will call our decisions into question.'

She nodded, understanding this. 'Yes, I see. Of course I'd like to help, but I don't really see any way I can.'

'You said you helped her with other problems. Could you tell me what they were?' When he saw her hesitation, he said, ‘I think her death and the circumstances surrounding it, Dottoressa, allow you to speak to me without worrying about your responsibility to your client.'

She accepted his argument. 'There was her son, Paolo. He died five years ago, after a long illness. Maria was… she almost died from grief, I think, and she was incapable of doing anything for a long time afterwards. So I took care of the funeral for her and then of his estate, though that was all straightforward: everything went to her.'

Hearing her use the expression, 'a long illness', Brunetti realized how seldom he had ever heard anyone say that another person had died of cancer. It was always 'a long illness', 'a tumour', 'a terrible disease', or simply 'that disease'.

'How old was he when he died?' 'Forty, I think.'

The fact that his estate passed to his mother presumably meant he was not married, so Brunetti asked only, 'Did he live with her?'

'Yes. He was devoted to her.'

Brunetti's language receptors filed that one in with 'a long illness', and he made no comment.

'Are you at liberty to reveal the contents of her will?' he asked, changing the subject.

'It was all completely standard,' she said. 'Her only living relative is a niece, Graziella Simionato: she inherited everything.'

'Was it a large estate?' he asked.

'Not particularly. There was the house in Cannaregio, another one on the Lido, and some money Maria had invested at the Uni Credit’

'Have you any idea how much?'

'I'm not sure of the exact amount, but it's about ten million,' she said, then immediately corrected herself, 'old lire, that is. I still think in lire and have to translate.'

‘I suppose we all still do,' Brunetti confessed, then added, 'One final thing, about this matter of the television. Can you tell me anything about that?'

She smiled and shook her head. ‘I know, I know. I received a number of letters from people in the neighbourhood, complaining about the volume. Every time I'd get one, I'd go by and talk to Maria and she'd promise to keep the volume down, but she was old and she'd forget, or she'd fall asleep with it on.' She raised her shoulders in a sigh of resignation. 'I don't think there was any solution, not really.'

'Someone told us the Romanian woman kept the volume turned down,' he said.

'She also murdered her’ the lawyer shot back with real anger.

Brunetti nodded in acknowledgement and acceptance of the reprimand. 'I'm sorry’ he said, 'my remark was thoughtless.' Then, 'Could you give me the address of the niece?'

'My secretary has it’ Marieschi said in a voice that had suddenly grown cooler. 'I'll come with you and ask her to give it to you.'

That seemed to leave Brunetti no option but to leave, so he got to his feet and leaned towards the desk. 'Thank you for your time, Dottoressa. I hope none of my questions has disturbed you.'

She tried to smile and said in a lighter voice, 'If you had, Poppi would know it and wouldn't be asleep like a baby down there.' A sweep of the tail possibly belied the statement that Poppi was asleep, and Brunetti found himself distracted by the question of whether Chiara, if he told her about this scene, would ask if this were a sleeping-dog-lie.

He held the door open for the lawyer, waited while the secretary wrote down the address of Signora Battestini's niece, thanked them both, shook hands with the lawyer, and left.

11

To walk back to the Questura along the Riva degli Schiavoni at this hour would have melted him, so he cut back into Castello in the direction of the Arsenale. As he passed in front of it, he wondered, as he usually did whenever he looked at the statues, whether the men who had carved them had ever seen a real lion. One of them bore a greater resemblance to Poppi than it did to any lion he had ever seen.

The water in the canal in front of the church of San Martino was exceptionally low, and Brunetti paused to glance down into it. The slopes of viscous mud on either side gleamed in the sunlight, and the stench of corruption rose towards him. Who knew the last time the canal had been dredged and cleaned?

When he got to his office, the first thing he did was to open the window to let some air into the room, but what came in seemed only to bring humidity and made no difference to the temperature. He left the window open in the hope that some passing zephyr would find it and slip through it. He hung up his jacket and took a look at the papers on his desk, though he knew Signorina Elettra would never leave anything on his desk save the most innocuous material that could be read by anyone. The rest would be kept in her desk or, more securely still, in her computer.

On the boat going down to Castello that morning, the Gazzettino had informed him that the judge in the airport case had ruled that the tapes from the hidden cameras in the baggage hall did indeed constitute an invasion of the privacy of the baggage handlers under accusation and thus the videos could not be produced as evidence against them. Reading the story, Brunetti had been swept by the absurd desire to go into the Questura, collect all of the witness statements that had been carefully accumulated during recent months and carry them off to the paper garbage drop at the Scuola Barbarigo. Or even more dramatically, he pictured a funeral pyre on the dock of the Questura, with blackened scraps of carbonized paper carried up into the air by those same reluctant zephyrs he had been wishing for.

He knew what would happen: the judge's ruling would be appealed, and then the whole thing would start again and drag on and on, rulings and counter-rulings until the statute of limitations expired and the whole thing was sent to the archives. His career had been spent watching this same slow gavotte: so long as the music could be played slowly enough, with frequent pauses to change the members of the orchestra, then sooner or later people would get so tired of listening to the same old tune that, when time was called and it stopped, no one would notice.