Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [8]
‘And there went sitting under the umbrella and reading and looking at the sea, I assume,’ Brunetti said.
Rizzardi smiled and shrugged it away. ‘We both loved it, but I feel better if I pretend we didn’t.’ Then, idle chat over, the doctor adjusted his tone and asked, ‘What is it?’
‘The woman upstairs came home from vacation, didn’t find her post left out for her, so she came down and let herself in to look for it and found the woman in the apartment dead.’
‘And she called the police and not the hospital?’ Vianello interrupted.
‘She said she saw blood: that’s what made her call,’ Brunetti explained.
The door, Brunetti noticed, was an old-fashioned wooden one with a horizontal metal handle, the type of door seldom seen any more in this theft-beleaguered city. Though Signora Giusti’s entry would certainly have damaged or destroyed any fingerprints on the handle, Brunetti was still careful to open it by pressing his open palm against the end of the handle to push it down.
Entering, he saw a table against the wall to his left, with a set of keys lying on top of some envelopes. Light came in from an open door on his right and from another at the end of the corridor, at the front of the apartment. He walked to the first of them and leaned into the room, but all he saw was a simple bedroom with a single bed and a chest of drawers.
Habit made him open the door on the opposite side of the corridor, careful again to touch only the end of the handle. Enough light filtered past him for Brunetti to see a smaller room with another single bed, a bedside table next to it, and a low chest of drawers. The door to a bathroom stood ajar.
He turned and continued towards the room at the end of the corridor, vaguely conscious that the other men were glancing into the rooms as he had. Inside, the woman lay on her right side, back to him, blocking the door with the side of her foot, one arm outstretched, the other trapped beneath her. She looked no bigger than a child; surely she couldn’t weigh fifty kilos. There was a patch of blood a bit smaller than a compact disc, dry and dark now, on the floor beside her and partially covered by her head. Brunetti stood and took in the short white hair, the dark blue cardigan made of thick cashmere, the collar of a yellow shirt, and the thin sliver of gold on her ring finger.
Brunetti considered himself the least superstitious of men and took pride in his intense respect for reason and good sense and all the virtues he associated with the proper functioning of the mind. This, however, in no way prevented him from accepting the possibility of less tangible phenomena – he had never been able to find a clearer way to express it. Something that, though unseen, left traces. He felt those traces here: this was a troubled death. Not necessarily violent or criminal: only troubled. He sensed it, though vaguely and fleetingly, and as soon as the sensation rose to the level of conscious thought, it vanished, to be dismissed as nothing more than a stronger than usual response to the sight of sudden death.
He quickly scanned the room and registered furniture, two floor lamps, a row of windows, but his intense awareness of the woman at his feet made it difficult for him to concentrate on anything else.
He returned to the corridor. There was no sign of Vianello, but the pathologist waited a few steps away. ‘She’s in here, Ettore,’ Brunetti said. As the doctor approached, Brunetti was distracted by the sound of footsteps from below. He heard men’s voices, a deep one followed by a lighter tone, and then a door closed.
The footsteps continued towards the apartment, and then Marillo, the assistant lab technician, appeared at the open door, two men close