Uniform Justice (12 page)

Their legal separation, which took place with unseemly haste after her accident, had been a surprise to their friends. They had not divorced, and neither appeared to be involved with another person. There was no evidence that they had contact with one another, and any communication they had seemed to take place through their lawyers.

Signorina Elettra had clipped the article about Ernesto’s death that had appeared in
La Nuova
to the outside of the folder. He chose not to read it, though he did read the caption under the photo of the family, ‘in happier times’.

Federica Moro’s smile was the centre of the photo: she stood with her right arm wrapped around the back of her husband, her head leaning on his chest, her other hand ruffling her son’s hair. The photo showed them on a beach, in shorts and T-shirts, tanned and bursting with happiness and health; behind them the head of a swimmer bobbed just to her husband’s right. The picture must have been taken years ago, for Ernesto was still a boy, not a young man. Federica looked away from the camera, and the other two looked at her, Ernesto’s glance open
and
proud, as who would not be proud to have such an attractive woman as a mother? Fernando’s look was calmer, yet no less proud.

One of them, Brunetti thought, must just have said something funny, or perhaps they’d seen something on the beach that made them laugh. Or was it the photographer, perhaps, who had been the clown of the moment? Brunetti was struck by the fact that, of the three of them, Federica had the shortest hair: boyish, only a few centimetres long. It stood in sharp contrast to the fullness of her body and the natural ease with which she embraced her husband.

Who would dare to publish such a photo, and who could have given it to the paper, surely knowing how it would be used? He slipped the clipping free and stuck it inside the folder. The same number Signora Ferro had given him was written on the outside; he dialled, forgetting what she had told him about letting it ring once and hanging up.

On the fourth ring, a woman’s voice answered, saying only ‘
Sì?
’

‘Signora Moro?’ Brunetti asked.

‘
Sì
.’

‘Signora, this is Commissario Guido Brunetti. Of the police. I’d be very grateful if you would find the time to speak to me.’ He waited for her to reply, then added, ‘About your son.’

‘Aah,’ she said. Then nothing for a long time.

‘Why have you waited?’ she finally asked, and he sensed that having to ask the question made her angry.

‘I didn’t want to intrude on your grief, Signora.’ When she was silent, he added, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Do you have children?’ she surprised him by asking.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘How old?’

‘I have a daughter,’ he began, then said the rest quickly, ‘My son is the same age as yours.’

‘You didn’t say that at the beginning,’ she said, sounding surprised that he should have failed to use such an emotive tool.

Unable to think of anything suitable to say, Brunetti asked, ‘May I come and speak to you, Signora?’

‘Any time you want,’ she said, and he had a vision of days, months, years, an entire lifetime stretching away from her.

‘May I come now?’ he asked.

‘It’s all the same, isn’t it?’ she asked; it was a real request for information, not a sarcastic or self-pitying pose.

‘It should take me about twenty minutes to get there,’ he said.

‘I’ll be here,’ she replied.

He had located her address on the map and so knew which way to walk. He could have taken the boat up towards San Marco, but he chose to walk up the
riva
, cutting through the Piazza and in front of the Museo Correr. He entered Frezzerie and turned left at the first
calle
on his left. It was the second door on the right, the top bell. He rang it, and with no question asked
through
the intercom, the door snapped open and he went in.

The entrance hall was damp and dark, though no canal was nearby. He climbed to the third floor and found, directly opposite him, an open door. He paused, called, ‘Signora Moro?’ and heard a voice say something from inside, so he went in and closed the door behind him. He went down a narrow corridor with a cheap machine-made carpet on the floor, towards what seemed to be a source of light.

A door stood open on his right and he stepped inside. A woman was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, and light filtered in from two curtained windows that stood behind her. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and, he thought, mothballs.

‘Commissario?’ she asked, raising her face to look in his direction.

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Thank you for letting me come.’

She waved his words away with her right hand, then returned the cigarette it held to her mouth and inhaled deeply. ‘There’s a chair over there,’ she said, exhaling and pointing to a cane-seated chair that stood against the wall.

He brought it over and set it facing her, but not very close and a short distance to one side. He sat and waited for her to say something. He didn’t want to seem to stare at her and so he directed his attention to the windows, beyond which he saw, just on the other side of the narrow
calle
, the windows of another house.
Little
light could get in that way. He turned his attention back to her and, even in this strange penumbra, recognized the woman in the photo. She looked as though she’d been on a crash diet that had drawn the flesh tight on her face and honed the bones of her jaw until they were so sharp that they would soon come slicing through the skin. The same process seemed to have pared her body down to the bare essentials of shoulders, arms, and legs contained in a heavy sweater and dark slacks that accentuated her body’s frailty.

It became evident that she was not going to speak, was simply going to sit with him and smoke her cigarette. ‘I’d like to ask you some questions, Signora,’ he began, and exploded in a sudden fit of nervous coughing.

‘Is it the cigarette?’ she asked, turning to the table on her right and making to put it out.

He raised a reassuring hand. ‘No, not at all,’ he gasped but was gripped by another coughing fit.

She stabbed out the cigarette and got to her feet. He started to get to his, doubled over by his coughing, but she waved him back and left the room. Brunetti lowered himself into the chair and continued to cough, tears streaming from his eyes. In a moment, she was back, handing him a glass of water. ‘Drink it slowly,’ she said. ‘Take small sips.’

Still shaking with the attempt to control himself, he took the glass with a nod of thanks and put it to his lips. He waited for the spasms
to
subside and took a small sip, and then another and another until all of the water was gone and he could breathe freely again. Occasionally, puffs of air rushed from his lungs, but the worst was over. He leaned down and set the glass on the floor. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘It’s nothing,’ she answered, taking her place in the chair opposite him. He saw her reach instinctively to the right, towards the pack of cigarettes that lay on the table, and then lower her hand to her lap.

She looked over at him and asked, ‘Nerves?’

He smiled. ‘I think so, though I don’t think I’m supposed to say so.’

‘Why not?’ she asked, sounding interested.

‘Because I’m the policeman, and we’re not supposed to be weak or nervous.’

‘That’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’

He nodded, and in that instant recalled that she was a psychologist.

He cleared his throat and asked, ‘Could we begin again, Signora?’

Her smile was minimal, a ghost of the one on her face in the photo that still lay on his desk. ‘I suppose we have to. What is it you’d like to know?’

‘I’d like to ask you about your accident, Signora.’

Her confusion was visible, and he could understand its cause. Her son was recently dead in circumstances that had yet to be officially determined, and he was asking her about something that had happened more than two
years
ago. ‘Do you mean in Siena?’ she finally asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you want to know about that?’

‘Because no one seemed curious about it at the time.’

She tilted her head to one side as she considered his answer. ‘I see,’ she finally said, then added, ‘Should they have been?’

‘That’s what I’m hoping to learn, Signora.’

Silence settled in between them and Brunetti, having no option, sat and waited to see if she would tell him what had happened. In the minutes that passed, she glanced aside at the cigarettes twice, and the second time he almost told her to go ahead and smoke, that it wouldn’t bother him, but he said nothing. As the silence lengthened, he studied the few objects he could see in the room: her chair, the table, the curtains at the window. All spoke of a taste far different from the casual wealth he had observed in Moro’s home. There was no attempt to suit style to style or do anything more than provide furniture that would meet the most basic needs.

‘I’d gone down to our friends on the Friday morning,’ she said, surprising him when she finally began to speak. ‘Fernando was supposed to get there on the last train, at about ten that night. It was a beautiful day, late autumn but still very warm, so I decided to go for a walk in the afternoon. I was about a half a kilometre from the house when I heard a loud noise – it could have been a bomb for all I knew – and then
I
felt a pain in my leg, and I fell down. It wasn’t as if anyone had pushed me or anything: I just fell down.’

She glanced across at him, as if to establish whether he could possibly find any of this interesting. He nodded and she went on. ‘I lay there, too stunned to do anything. It didn’t even hurt all that much then. I heard noises from the woods that I had been walking towards. Well, not really woods, perhaps an acre or two of trees. I heard something moving around in there and I wanted to shout for help, but then I didn’t. I don’t know why, but I didn’t. I just lay there.

‘A minute or two must have passed, and then, over from where I’d come from, two dogs came running towards me, barking their heads off, came right up to me and started jumping around, barking all the time. I shouted at them to shut up. My leg had started to hurt then, and when I looked at it, I realized I’d been shot, so I knew I had to do something. And then there were these hunting dogs, barking and dancing around me like crazy things.’

She stopped talking for so long that Brunetti was forced to ask, ‘What happened then?’

‘The hunters came. The men whose dogs they were, that is. They saw the dogs and they saw me on the ground and they thought the dogs had attacked me, so they came running and when they got to us they started kicking the dogs away and hitting at them with the ends of their guns, but the dogs weren’t doing anything. They probably saved my life, those dogs.’

She stopped and looked directly at him, as if to ask if he had any questions, and when he said nothing, she went on, ‘One of them used his handkerchief and made a tourniquet, and then they carried me to their Jeep, which was just at the edge of the woods. And they took me to the hospital. The doctors there are used to this kind of thing: hunters are always shooting themselves or other hunters down there, it seems.’ She paused and then said softly, ‘Poor things,’ in a voice so filled with real sympathy that he was struck by how vulgar and cheap his conversation with Signorina Elettra sounded in comparison.

‘Did they ask you at the hospital how it happened, Signora?’

‘The men who found me told them what had happened, so all I did, when I came out from surgery, was confirm what they’d said.’

‘That it was an accident?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ She said the word with no special tone.

‘Do you think it was?’ he asked.

Again, there was a long delay before she spoke. ‘At the time, I didn’t think it could have been anything else. But since then I’ve started to wonder why whoever it was that shot me didn’t come to see what they’d done. If they thought I was some sort of an animal, they would have come to check that they’d killed me, wouldn’t they?’

That was what had troubled Brunetti ever since he’d first heard the story.

‘And when they heard the dogs and then the
other
hunters, they would have come to see what all that was about, if they thought someone else was going to take the animal they’d killed.’ She let some time pass and then said, ‘As I said, I didn’t think about any of this at the time.’

‘And what do you think now?’

She started to speak, stopped herself, and then said, ‘I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but I have other things to think about now.’

So did Brunetti. He was wondering if a police report had been filed of the incident, if the two hunters who found her had noticed anyone in the area.

Brunetti could no longer keep her from her cigarettes, so he said, ‘I have only one more question, Signora.’

She didn’t wait for him to ask it. ‘No, Ernesto didn’t kill himself. I’m his mother, and I know that to be true. That’s another reason why I think it wasn’t an accident.’ She prised herself from her chair, said, ‘If that was your last question …’ and started towards the door of the room. Her limp was slight, the merest favouring of her right leg when she walked, and as she wore slacks, he had no idea of the damage that had been done to her leg.

He let her lead him to the door of the apartment. He thanked her but didn’t offer his hand. Outside, it had grown marginally warmer, and as it was already after noon, Brunetti decided to go directly home for lunch with his family.

12

BRUNETTI ARRIVED BEFORE
the children did, so he opted to keep Paola company while she finished preparing the meal. As she set the table, he lifted pot lids and opened the oven, comforted to find nothing but familiar dishes: lentil soup, chicken smothered in red cabbage, and what looked like
radicchio di Treviso
.

‘Are you bringing all of your detective skills to bear in examining that chicken?’ Paola asked as she set glasses on the table.

‘No, not really,’ he said, closing the oven and standing upright. ‘My investigation has to do with the radicchio, Signora, and whether there are perhaps traces in it of the same pancetta I detected in the lentil soup.’