Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [13]
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