Donna Leon - Drawing Conclusions

‘I’ll finish in there,’ Brunetti said, deciding to return to the smaller bedroom. He had noticed when he glanced in before just how simple the room was, but now that he had time to look around, he saw that it was even more modest than he had first observed. There was no covering of any sort on the wooden floor. It was not parquet but the narrow wooden boards of a restoration – and not an expensive one – that must have been done about fifty years before. A low, thick-legged chest stood next to the bed, on it a short lamp with a yellow cloth lampshade from the bottom of which hung a circle of aged yellow tassels. This could have been a room in his grandmother’s house, had he been taken back in a time machine.

In the half-open top drawer of the chest lay a number of plastic-wrapped packets of women’s underclothing: three in each, simple white cotton pants, and in three different sizes. He had never seen Paola wear the like. These were functional pants he assumed a woman would buy at a supermarket, not a lingerie shop, fashioned for utility, not style, and certainly not meant to attract attention. Mixed in with them were unopened packets of white cotton T-shirts, also in three sizes. The packets lay neatly in the drawer in their separate piles, separated by a stack of ironed white cotton handkerchiefs.

He slid the drawer shut, no longer having to be careful about what he touched. The next drawer contained a few unopened packets of women’s tights and six or seven pairs of socks, also unopened, all grey or black, again in different sizes and arranged with military precision. The bottom drawer held sweaters, cotton on one side, wool on the other, though here the two piles had mingled. At least with these the colours were a bit brighter: one red, one orange, another light green, and though all had at one time been worn, they had the look of garments that had been washed and ironed before being placed in the drawer. A pair of freshly laundered and ironed blue flannel pyjamas lay to the right of the sweaters, a packet of lavender-scented sachets behind it.

Brunetti closed the last drawer. He moved closer to the bed and got down on one knee to look beneath it, but the space was empty.

He heard Vianello come into the room behind him. ‘Did you find anything else in her bedroom?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No. Nothing much. Except that she liked nice underwear and expensive sweaters.’

Getting to his feet, Brunetti went back to the chest. He pulled out the top drawer and pointed to the cellophane packets on top. ‘They’re all in different sizes, and nothing’s opened.’ Vianello stepped up beside him and looked into the drawer. ‘Same with the tights,’ Brunetti went on. ‘And there are sweaters – no cashmere there – and a pair of pyjamas in the bottom drawer, and they all look like they’ve just been washed.’

‘What do you make of it?’ Vianello said. He shrugged and confessed, ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Guests bring their own clothing,’ Brunetti insisted. Vianello said nothing. ‘Certainly their own underclothing.’

Brunetti and Vianello went back to the room where the woman’s body had been found. From the doorway, Brunetti saw that the bloodstain had not been wiped away and thought what it would be for the family to come into this room and find it. In all these years of moving amidst the signs left by death, he had frequently wondered how it would feel to wipe away the last traces of a former life, and how a person could bear to do it.

With the woman’s body gone, Brunetti could concentrate enough to study the room for the first time. It was larger than he had at first thought. To the right he saw a sliding door and, beyond it, a small kitchen with wooden cabinets and what looked like Moroccan plates and tiles on the walls.

The kitchen was too small to hold a table, so it had been placed in the larger room, a utilitarian rectangle with four wooden chairs. It took a moment for Brunetti to realize that the room was virtually void of decoration. There was a beige rug of some sort of fibre on the floor, but the only decoration on the walls was a medium-sized crucifix that looked as if it had been mass produced in some non-Christian country: surely Christ was not meant to have such rosy lips and cheeks, nor was there anything much to justify his smile.

A dark brown sofa sat on the other side of the room, its back to the windows that looked out on to the campo and the illuminated apse of the church. There must once have been a door in the wall to the right of the sofa, but during one of the restorations that had been done to this building over the centuries, someone had decided to brick it up. Whoever had done the most recent restoration had removed some of the bricks and plastered over the back of the opening, added shelves, and turned it into an inset bookcase.

A desk with a typewriter stood not far from the sofa, it too facing away from the window. Brunetti stared at it to be sure he was seeing what he thought he was. Yes, an old Olympia portable, the sort of thing his friends had taken off to university decades ago. His own family had been unable to provide him with one. He sat at the desk and placed his fingers above the keys, careful not to touch them. He had to turn his head sharply to see out the window, and after orienting himself with the bell tower of the church, he realized that in the daylight the ignored view from these third floor windows must extend all the way north, as far as the mountains.

From behind him, he heard the sounds of Vianello opening and closing drawers in the kitchen, then the whoosh of the opening refrigerator. He heard the rush of flowing water and the clink of a glass. Brunetti found the noises comforting.

Even though the desk appeared to have been checked for prints, from habit he slipped on plastic gloves and opened the single drawer at the centre, searching for he didn’t know what. He was relieved to find disorder: unsharpened pencils, some paper clips swirling around on the bottom, a topless pen, a single cufflink, two buttons, and a blue notebook, the sort of thing used by students and, like the notebooks of so many students, empty.

He pulled out the drawer and set it beside the typewriter. He bent and looked into the empty space, but nothing was hidden, nor, when he held it up, could he see anything taped to the bottom of the drawer. Feeling not a little foolish and certain that Marillo’s men had already done all of this, Brunetti knelt and stuck his head under the desk, but there was nothing taped there, either.

‘What are you looking for?’ Vianello asked from behind him.

‘I don’t know,’ Brunetti admitted, pushing himself to his feet. ‘It’s all so orderly.’

‘Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?’ Vianello asked.

‘In theory, yes. I suppose,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘But…’

‘But you don’t want to accept that she could have died of a heart attack or a stroke, the way Rizzardi suggested.’

‘It’s not that I want anything,’ Brunetti said tersely, ‘but you saw the mark.’

Instead of answering, Vianello let out a heavy breath, making a noise that could mean anything as easily as it could mean nothing. Brunetti was unwilling to mention the feeling he had had in the corridor for fear that Vianello would dismiss it as foolishness.

‘There’s no sign that anyone went through this place,’ Vianello said. He glanced at the clock that hung beside the refrigerator. ‘It’s almost three, Guido. Could we lock the door and tape it and continue this tomor… later today?’

The name of the hour fell on Brunetti’s shoulders like a heavy garment, bearing him back towards the tiredness he had felt even before his dinner with Patta and Scarpa.

He nodded, and the two men moved through the house, turning off lights. They chose to leave the shutters open, as they had found them: enough light filtered in from the campo to allow them to move through the apartment even after they had turned out most of the lights. Brunetti opened the door of the apartment and switched on the light in the stairway. Vianello pulled out a roll of red and white tape and used it to draw an enormous X across the door. Brunetti locked it and pocketed the keys, which he had taken from the table by the door. They had found no address book. There had been only a simple phone with no stored numbers, and it was now too late to bother the woman upstairs to ask about the dead woman’s family. Brunetti turned away from the apartment and headed down the stairs.