Donna Leon - Drawing Conclusions

‘I touched the back of her hand. It was cold,’ she said. She pressed her lips together. Looking at the floor, she went on. ‘I put my fingers under her wrist. To feel her pulse. But there was nothing.’

‘Signora, when you called, you said there was blood.’

‘On the floor near her head. When I saw it, I came up here to call you.’

‘Anything else, Signora?’

She raised a hand and waved it towards the staircase behind him, as if pointing to things in the one below. ‘The front door was open.’ Seeing his surprise, she quickly clarified this by saying, ‘Unlocked, that is. Closed, but unlocked.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. He was silent for some time and then asked, ‘Could you tell me how long you’ve been away, Signora?’

‘Five days. I went to Palermo on Wednesday, last week, and just got home tonight.’

‘Thank you,’ Brunetti said, then asked solicitously, ‘Were you with friends, Signora?’

The look she shot him showed just how bright she was and how much the question offended her.

‘I want to exclude things, Signora,’ he said in his normal voice.

Her own voice was a bit louder, her pronunciation clearer, when she said, ‘I stayed in a hotel, the Villa Igiea. You can check their records.’ She looked away from him in what Brunetti thought might be embarrassment. ‘Someone else paid the bill, but I was registered there.’

Brunetti knew this could be easily checked and so asked only, ‘You went into Signora Altavilla’s apartment to…?’

‘To get my post.’ She turned and walked into the room behind her, a large open space with a peaked ceiling that indicated the room had – how many centuries before? – originally been an attic. Brunetti, following her in, glanced up at the twin skylights, hoping to see the stars beyond them, but all he saw was the light reflected from below.

At a table she picked up a piece of paper. Brunetti took it from her outstretched hand: he recognized the beige receipt for a registered letter. ‘I had no idea what it could be and thought it might be something important,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow to find out, so I went down to see if the letter was there.’

In response to Brunetti’s inquisitive glance, she continued. ‘If I’m away, she gets my post, and then leaves it out when I come home, or I go down and get it from her.’

‘And if she’s not there when you get home?’ Brunetti asked.

‘She gave me the keys, and I go in to get it.’ She turned to face the windows, beyond which Brunetti saw the illuminated apse of the church. ‘So I went down and let myself in. And the letters were where she always put them: on a table in the entrance.’ She ran out of things to say, but Brunetti waited.

‘And then I went and looked in the front room. No reason, really – but there was a light on – she always turns them out when she leaves a room – and I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me. Though that doesn’t make any sense, does it? And I saw her. And touched her hand. And saw the blood. And then I came back up here and called you.’

‘Would you like to sit down, Signora?’ Brunetti asked, indicating a wooden chair that stood against the nearest wall.

She shook her head, but at the same time took a step towards it. She sat down heavily, then gave in to weakness and leaned against the back. ‘It’s terrible. How could anyone…’

Before she could finish her question, the doorbell rang. He went to the speaker phone and heard Vianello announce himself, saying he was with Dottor Rizzardi. Brunetti pushed the button to release the downstairs door and replaced the phone. To the seated woman he said, ‘The others are here, Signora.’ Then, because he had to ask, he said, ‘Is the door locked?’

She looked up at him, confusion spread across her face. ‘What?’

‘The door downstairs. To the apartment. Is it locked?’

She shook her head two, three times and seemed so unconscious of the gesture that he was relieved when she stopped it. ‘I don’t know. I had the keys.’ She searched the pockets of her jacket but found no keys. She looked at him, confused. ‘I must have left them downstairs, on top of the post.’ She closed her eyes, then, after a moment, said, ‘But you can go in. The door doesn’t lock on its own.’ Then she raised a hand to catch his attention. ‘She was a good neighbour,’ she said.

Brunetti thanked her and went downstairs to find the others.

Brunetti found Vianello and Rizzardi waiting in front of the door to the apartment. Vianello and he exchanged nods, having seen one another only that afternoon, and Brunetti shook hands with the pathologist. As always, the doctor was turned out like an English gentleman emerging from his club. He wore a dark blue pinstripe suit with the conspicuously invisible signs of hand tailoring. His shirt looked as though he had put it on while starting up the stairs to the apartment, and his tie was what Brunetti vaguely classified as ‘regimental’, though he had no certain idea of what that meant.

Though he knew the doctor had recently returned from a vacation in Sardinia, Brunetti thought Rizzardi looked tired, which he found unsettling. But how to ask a doctor about his health?

‘Good to see you, Ettore,’ he said. ‘How…’ Brunetti started to ask, quickly changing his question to the less intrusive, ‘… was your vacation?’

‘Busy. Giovanna and I had planned to spend our time on the beach, under an umbrella, reading and looking at the sea. But at the last minute Riccardo asked if we’d like to take the grandkids with us, and we couldn’t say no, so we had an eight-year-old and a six-year-old.’ Brunetti saw pass across his face the look common to people who had suffered violent assault. ‘I’d forgotten what it’s like to have children around.’

‘And there went sitting under the umbrella and reading and looking at the sea, I assume,’ Brunetti said.

Rizzardi smiled and shrugged it away. ‘We both loved it, but I feel better if I pretend we didn’t.’ Then, idle chat over, the doctor adjusted his tone and asked, ‘What is it?’

‘The woman upstairs came home from vacation, didn’t find her post left out for her, so she came down and let herself in to look for it and found the woman in the apartment dead.’

‘And she called the police and not the hospital?’ Vianello interrupted.

‘She said she saw blood: that’s what made her call,’ Brunetti explained.

The door, Brunetti noticed, was an old-fashioned wooden one with a horizontal metal handle, the type of door seldom seen any more in this theft-beleaguered city. Though Signora Giusti’s entry would certainly have damaged or destroyed any fingerprints on the handle, Brunetti was still careful to open it by pressing his open palm against the end of the handle to push it down.

Entering, he saw a table against the wall to his left, with a set of keys lying on top of some envelopes. Light came in from an open door on his right and from another at the end of the corridor, at the front of the apartment. He walked to the first of them and leaned into the room, but all he saw was a simple bedroom with a single bed and a chest of drawers.

Habit made him open the door on the opposite side of the corridor, careful again to touch only the end of the handle. Enough light filtered past him for Brunetti to see a smaller room with another single bed, a bedside table next to it, and a low chest of drawers. The door to a bathroom stood ajar.

He turned and continued towards the room at the end of the corridor, vaguely conscious that the other men were glancing into the rooms as he had. Inside, the woman lay on her right side, back to him, blocking the door with the side of her foot, one arm outstretched, the other trapped beneath her. She looked no bigger than a child; surely she couldn’t weigh fifty kilos. There was a patch of blood a bit smaller than a compact disc, dry and dark now, on the floor beside her and partially covered by her head. Brunetti stood and took in the short white hair, the dark blue cardigan made of thick cashmere, the collar of a yellow shirt, and the thin sliver of gold on her ring finger.