Donna Leon - Doctored Evidence

After he had sat at his desk for several minutes, his better self reached for the phone and called down to the officers' room, where a nervous-sounding Pucetti, after a long hesitation, told him Vianello was not there. Brunetti put the phone down, thinking of Achilles, sulking in his tent.

His phone rang and, hoping it would be Vianello, he reached out quickly to answer it.

'It's me, sir,' he heard Signorina Elettra say. 'I've got her phone calls.'

'How did you do that?'

'They decided to keep his wife in another day, so Giorgio went into the office.'

'Is there anything wrong?' asked the uxorious Brunetti.

'No, nothing. Her uncle is the primario there, and he thought it would be better if she stayed another day.' He heard it in her voice, the attempt to soothe away his concern for a woman he had never met. 'She's fine.'

Signorina Elettra waited a moment in case he had further questions, and when he said nothing, then went on, 'He found my email and checked her number. In the month before her death, she called the central number for the school board – it was the only call she made -and the next day she had a call from the same number. There was only one other call, from her niece. Nothing else.'

'How many days did he check?'

The entire month up until she was killed.'

Neither of them commented on the fact that, in her eighty-fourth year, Signora Battestini, who had spent all of those years living in the city, had received only two phone calls in the course of a month. Brunetti recalled that there had been no books in the boxes stored in her attic: her life had been reduced to a chair placed in front of a television and a woman who spoke almost no Italian.

He recalled the boxes, how hurried his examination of them had been, and, thinking of this, he missed the next thing Signorina Elettra said to him. When he tuned back in, he heard her say,'… the day before she died'.

'What?' he asked. ‘I was miles away.'

'The call that came from the school board was the day before she died.'

Her tone revealed her pride, but Brunetti could do little but thank her and hang up. While he had been speaking to her, an idea had slipped into his mind: the objects in Signora Battestini's attic needed closer attention. Blackmail had not presented itself as a motive until after he had taken his hurried look through them, but now, with blackmail as an anchor, he might pause and take a more leisurely trawl through them. Even if he still didn't know what he was looking for, he at least knew that there might be something to find.

He reached for the phone to call Vianello to ask if he would go along with him to the Battestini house, but then he remembered

Vianello's departure and his absence from the officers' room. Pucetti, then. He called down and, giving no explanation, asked the young officer to meet him at the front entrance in five minutes, adding that they would need a launch.

The last time he had slipped into Signora Battestini's home like a thief, and no one had seen him: this time he would arrive like the very personification of law itself, and no one would question him, or so he hoped.

Pucetti, who was waiting just outside the door to the Questura, had learned over the years not to salute Brunetti each time he saw him, but he had not yet learned to resist the impulse to stand up straighter. They climbed on to the launch, with Brunetti determined not to ask about Vianello. He told the pilot where to take them, then went down into the cabin: Pucetti chose to remain on deck.

No sooner was he seated than the long passage describing Achilles in his tent returned to Brunetti, and memory supplied the bombastic catalogue of the offences and slights the warrior insisted he had suffered. Achilles had suffered the slights of Agamemnon: Brunetti had been slighted by his Patroclus. Brunetti's contemplation of Homer was interrupted by an expression Paola had picked up in her researches into American slang: 'dissed'. She had explained that this was the past tense of the verb 'to dis', a term used by American Blacks to refer to 'disrespect' and denoting a wide range of behaviour which the speaker perceived as offensive.

Under his breath, Brunetti muttered, 'Vianello dissed me’ He gave a quick guffaw, and he went out on to the deck, his good spirits renewed.

The launch pulled up to the riva, and they were quickly in front of the building. Brunetti glanced up and saw that both the shutters and the windows of Signora Battestini's apartment were open, though ho televised sound poured out. He rang the bell and saw that her name had been replaced by Van Cleve.

A blonde head appeared at the window above him, and then a man's head appeared beside the woman's. Brunetti stepped back from the building and was about to call up to them to open the door, but -apparently the sight of Pucetti's uniform sufficed, for a moment later both heads disappeared, and the door to the building clicked open.

The man and the woman, equally blonde and equally pale skinned and eyed, stood at the door to the apartment. Looking at them, Brunetti could not stop himself from thinking of milk and cheese and pale skies perpetually rilled with clouds. Their Italian was halting, but he managed to make it clear to them who he was and where he wanted to go.

'No chiave’ the man said, smiling, and showing his empty hands to reinforce the message. The woman imitated his gesture of helplessness.

'Va bene. Non importa’ Brunetti said, turning from them and starting up the stairs to the attic.

Pucetti followed close behind. At the first turning, Brunetti looked back and saw the two of them still standing outside the door to what was now apparently their apartment, staring up at him, as curious as owls.

When he reached the top of the steps, Brunetti pulled out a twenty-centesemi coin, sure he could use it to unthread the already-loosened screws in the flange. But as he reached the door, he found that the flange was hanging at an angle, loose from the jamb. The two screws he had so carefully turned back in place were also loose, and the door stood open a few centimetres.

Brunetti put out a cautionary hand towards Pucetti, but he had already noticed and had moved to the right of the door, his hand reaching for his pistol. Both men froze, waiting for some sound from inside. They stood that way for minutes. Brunetti put his left foot in front of the bottom of the door and rested his full weight on it, thus blocking any attempt that might be made to push it open from the inside.

After another few minutes, Brunetti nodded at Pucetti, moved his foot, reached forward and pulled the door open. He went in first, calling out, 'Police’ and feeling just the least bit ridiculous as he heard himself say it.

The attic was empty, but even in the dim light they could see signs of the passage of the person who had been there before them. A trail of scattered objects told of curiosity turning to frustration and that in its turn transformed into anger, and then rage. The first boxes stood neatly unstacked near where Brunetti had left them, their flaps pulled open, contents set on the ground next to them. The next lay on their sides, their flaps ripped open. The third pile, where Brunetti had found the papers, had been pillaged: one box had been ripped in half, and a wide semicircle of papers arched over to the next pile. The last boxes, which had held her collection of religious kitsch, had suffered martyrdom: the bodies and limbs of saints lay strewed about in positions of impossible and ungodly promiscuity; one Jesus had lost his cross and stretched for it with open arms; a blue Madonna had lost her head in crashing against the back wall; another had lost her infant son.

Brunetti took it all in, turned to Pucetti, and said, 'Call them and tell them to send the crime team. I want fingerprints taken of everything’ He placed his right hand on Pucetti's arm and pushed him towards the door: 'Go down and wait for them,' he said. Then, in violation of everything he had ever learned or taught about the need to preserve a crime scene from contamination, he added, 'I want to have a look before they get here.'