Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [12]
‘Oh for the love of God,’ the other technician snapped, still on his knees beside the bed. ‘We’ve been in a hundred places, Stefano, and we both know there’s nothing suspicious here.’ He looked as if he was about to continue, but Marillo silenced him with a glare. Some time had passed since Brunetti had been troubled by the sight of the body, and the man’s remark added to his desire to see and interpret facts, not feelings. No thief – at least not the sort that broke into houses in Venice – had been at work here. Anyone in search of gold or jewellery or cash would have pulled out the drawers and dumped their contents on the floor, then kicked them around, the better to separate and see everything. But the bottom drawer, Brunetti realized, looked no worse than his daughter’s after she had hunted for a particular sweater. Or his son’s.
The technician near the bed broke the silence by scuttling across the floorboards to unplug his lamp. Slowly, he got to his feet and wrapped the electric cord noisily around the handle, then slipped the plug under the last loop of cord to anchor it in place. ‘I’m done here, Stefano,’ he said abruptly.
‘That’s it, then,’ Marillo said with audible relief. ‘I’ll give Bocchese the photos and he can check the prints. There’s a lot of them, some of them perfectly clear. He’ll give you a report, sir.’
‘Thanks, Marillo,’ Brunetti said.
Marillo glanced at Brunetti and bobbed his head in an expression that acknowledged his superior’s thanks and his own embarrassment at not having been willing to provide more. The other technician followed him to the door, where the third man stood ready, slipping camera and flash into their case. Together, the three men made quick work of assembling their equipment. When they were finished, Marillo said nothing more than goodnight, and his team, silent, followed him from the apartment.
‘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