Donna Leon - A Question of Belief

‘Commissario,’ a voice Brunetti did not recognize said, ‘the Ospedale called. Something’s going on in the lab.’

‘What?’

‘It sounds like a hostage situation, sir.’

‘A what ?’ Brunetti asked, wondering if everyone there had been watching too much television.

‘It sounds like there’s someone locked in the lab, making threats.’

‘Who called you?’ Brunetti demanded.

‘The portiere . He said people escaped from the lab. One of them called him.’

‘What do you mean, “escaped”?’ Brunetti demanded. He covered the mouthpiece and told Vianello, ‘Go down and get Foa. I want a launch.’ Vianello nodded and was gone. Pucetti went out with him.

Brunetti returned his attention to the phone just in time to hear the explanation. ‘The portiere said that’s what the person who called him told him.’

‘What else did he say, the person who called him?’

‘I don’t know, sir. The portiere called 113, but there was no answer, so he called us. That’s all.’

‘Call him back and tell him we’re on the way,’ Brunetti said.

Outside, as he crossed the pavement to get to the launch, Brunetti realized he had left his jacket in his office, and thus his sunglasses. The morning light stunned him, and he jumped on to the boat half-blind. Vianello grabbed his arm to steady him and led him down into the cabin to escape the light. Even though they left the doors open, and Vianello slid open the windows, the heat battered them.

Foa did a three-point turn and took them up towards Rio di Santa Marina. He flicked the siren on and off to warn approaching boats that a police boat was coming the wrong way. He slowed to turn into Rio dei Mendicanti and pulled them up at the ambulance landing of the Ospedale. Brunetti and Vianello jumped on to the dock, Brunetti turned to Foa to tell him to wait for them, and they walked quickly into the Ospedale, trying to look like men in a hurry for medical reasons. The trip couldn’t have taken them five minutes.

Brunetti led the way, along the side of the cloister, then to the left and up the stairs towards the laboratory. The door to the lab stood at the end of a corridor, and in front of the door to the corridor stood five people, three of them wearing white lab jackets and two the blue uniforms of guards. Brunetti recognized one of Rizzardi’s assistants, Comei.

‘What’s going on?’ Brunetti asked him.

The young man’s staring blue eyes stood out alarmingly in his bronzed face. Vacation time was over.

It took him a moment to recognize Brunetti, but when he did, some of the tension disappeared from his face. ‘Ah, Commissario.’ He clutched Brunetti’s arm as if he were drowning and only Brunetti could save him.

‘What happened, Comei?’ Brunetti said, hoping to calm him with his voice.

‘I was in there, and suddenly she started to shout, and then she threw something. Then she knocked everything off her desk: there was glass and chemicals and blood samples. All over the place.’ He stared down at his feet, grabbed Brunetti’s arm, and said, ‘ Oddio . Look, look what she did.’

Brunetti followed his pointing finger and saw a red stain on the front of the technician’s green plastic clog.

‘She’s gone mad,’ Comei said, and a sudden scream that carried down the corridor from the lab gave evidence of that.

‘Who is it?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Elvira, the technician.’

‘Montini?’ asked Brunetti.

Comei nodded absently, as if the name did not matter, and bent down. Gingerly, holding the cloth at the knee, he lifted the cuff of his trousers and exposed his ankle and the top of his naked foot. Four long splashes of blood trailed across the arch of his foot.

The technician leaned heavily against Brunetti. ‘ Oddio, oddio, ’ he whispered, then he pulled himself away from Brunetti and stood motionless, eyes still on the blood.

Brunetti was about to say something when Comei turned and walked quickly towards the central part of the hospital.

Another noise, of something heavy being dropped, came down the corridor.

A woman in a white jacket approached Brunetti. ‘You’re the police?’ she asked them.

Brunetti nodded. ‘Can you tell us what happened?’

She was tall and slender and had an air of competence. ‘I’m Dottoressa Zeno,’ she said, not bothering to extend her hand. ‘I’m in charge of the lab.’

Again Brunetti nodded.

‘About half an hour ago, I asked Signora Montini about a blood sample she tested last week. The results didn’t correspond with results from the same tests done in the hospital in Mestre three days ago, and the patient’s doctor called to find out if the first test had been done correctly because the sudden difference didn’t make any sense to him.’

She paused, then continued.

‘I checked our lists and saw that Signora Montini had done the original test.’ She looked from Brunetti to Vianello. ‘This isn’t the first time something like this has happened or that I’ve had to ask her about it.’

Brunetti tried to look as if he understood.

‘I went to speak to her, but as soon as I told her about it. .’ Her voice lost some of its control as she went on. ‘She grabbed the list of new results from me and ripped it up, then she knocked some things off her desk: vials and a microscope. Comei works beside her.’

Brunetti asked, ‘And then, Dottoressa?’

‘She pushed me away and started screaming.’ As if hearing herself say that, she quickly amended it. ‘Not really pushed me, just sort of put her hands on my arms and turned me away from her. She didn’t hurt me.’

‘Then what, Signora?’

‘Then she picked up one of those cutters we use to open boxes with and started waving it around. She told us to get out. All of us. When I tried to talk to her, she held the cutter up.’

‘Did she threaten you, Dottoressa?’

‘No, no,’ she said in notes that descended into pain. ‘She held it over her wrist and said she’d cut it if we didn’t get out.’

She took a breath and then another one. ‘We all came out here. I called security and someone went down to tell the portiere . Then someone said you were on your way, so we stayed out here, all of us.’ He thought she was finished, but then she said, ‘I called Dottor Rizzardi at home. She always worked very well with him.’

‘Is he coming?’

‘Yes.’

Brunetti exchanged a look with Vianello, told the five people to remain where they were, and pushed open the door to the corridor. It closed softly behind them, trapping them in the clinging heat of the corridor. They could hear some sort of low noise from the lab, like the buzz of a machine left running in a distant room.

‘Do we wait for Rizzardi?’ Vianello asked.

Brunetti pointed towards the door to the lab, a white wooden panel with a single porthole. ‘I want to take a look inside first, see what she’s doing.’

They walked down the corridor as quietly as they could, but as they got closer to the door of the lab the noise grew loud enough to cover any footsteps. Brunetti approached the window slowly, aware that any sudden motion might be seen from inside. A step, another, and then he was there, with a clear view into the room.

He saw the usual ordered clutter: vials held upright in wooden racks; dark apothecary jars pushed against the wall; scales and computers at every work station; books and notebooks to the left of the computers. One table in the centre of the room held no equipment. On the floor surrounding it, like wreckage from a sunken ship, a computer monitor, pieces of broken glass and papers lay in small red puddles.

His eyes followed his ears to the noise. A woman in a white lab coat leaned into one of those deep sinks, her back to him. The noise and steam came from the torrent of running water that must be spilling over whatever she held in her hands. He thought of his children, the Water Police, and how they would reprove the waste of all that hot water and the energy necessary to produce it.