Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [35]
‘You remember what the President said last year?’ Signorina Elettra asked him.
‘About this?’ he asked, indicating the screen and what it held.
‘Yes. Do you remember the number he gave?’
‘Of victims?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘I do,’ she said, and Brunetti could all but hear her adding that she remembered because she was a woman and he did not because he was a man. But she said nothing else, and Brunetti did not ask.
‘Would you like me to do anything, sir? Call them?’
‘No,’ he said too quickly; he saw that she was surprised by the answer as well as by the speed with which he gave it. ‘I’ll do it.’ He wanted to say something more to cover up the force of his response to her proposal, but that would be to draw attention to it.
‘Anything else, Commissario?’ he heard her asking.
‘No, thank you, Signorina. The number’s enough.’
‘As you will, Dottore,’ she said and bent her head over the screen.
Walking up the steps, Brunetti was assailed by uneasiness about his strong rebuff of Signorina Elettra’s offer; she was so obviously superior to most of the people who worked at the Questura that she deserved far better of him. Inventive and clever, she was also well versed in the law and would have been an ornament to any police department lucky enough to hire her as an officer. But she was not, and he should not permit her to present herself as a police officer when asking questions or requesting information on the phone. It was bad enough that he turned a blind eye to the various acts of cyber-piracy in which he knew she engaged; indeed, acts which he encouraged her to commit. There was a line somewhere between what she could and could not be permitted to do: Brunetti’s dilemma was that the line he drew was never straight and was never drawn in the same place twice.
On his desk, delivered there he had no idea how, Brunetti found the autopsy report as well as the one from the scene of crime team. He stacked the papers in the centre of the desk, pulled his reading glasses from their case in his pocket, slipped them on, and started to read.
Rizzardi, a quiet man and not at all given to vanity or boasting, could not resist the temptation to show off in two fields: his dress and his prose. Understated, subtle in colour, his suits and overcoats, even his raincoat, were of such a quality as to make Brunetti suspicious of his sources of income; his prose was of a grammatical precision and inventiveness of expression Brunetti despaired of finding in any of the other reports he read. It was not unusual for the pathologist to describe an organ as being ‘captive within the tendrils of small veins’, or to describe the ‘starburst’ of cigarette burns on the back of a victim of torture. Indeed, the report of the first autopsy Rizzardi had done at Brunetti’s request had described the slash marks on the victim’s stomach, from which he had bled to death, by saying, ‘The wounds are reminiscent of Fontana when he worked in red.’
There were no flourishes, however, in his report on Signora Altavilla. He described the condition of her heart, making it clear that the cause of death had been uncontrollable fibrillation. He described the injury to the vertebrae and surrounding tissue and described the cut on her forehead, saying that they were not inconsistent with a bad fall soon before her death. Brunetti put his report aside long enough to open the technicians’ report, where he found reference to the presence of blood and skin tissue on the radiator in the sitting room, blood of the same type as Signora Altavilla’s.
Rizzardi also described ‘a grey mark,’ 2.1 centimetres in length and close to the left of the collarbone of the dead woman. The marks on her shoulders were ‘barely visible’, as banal an expression as Brunetti had ever known the pathologist to use.
He read quickly through the rest of the report: signs of her having given birth at least once, the seam left by a broken left wrist, a bunion on her right foot. Rizzardi presented the physical information without comment.