‘The chart said the water’s too shallow for the boat.’
Dantone, who had just pulled himself, and a man’s body, from more than a metre of water, made an exasperated noise and got to his feet. He walked over to Brunetti. ‘I’ll bring the boat,’ he said and started off in the direction from which the sailor had come. When the young man moved to follow him, Dantone stopped and said, ‘Do you have your phone?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Call the Carabinieri and tell them we’ve found him. They can tell the helicopter to go back.’ The officer nodded and started walking again, away from Brunetti and the dead man.
Brunetti looked out across the water, failing to find anything there but emptiness. He bent over the grating but didn’t touch it. Had Casati been trying to toss it overboard in the storm to stop the boat from being carried into deeper water by wind and tide? Had the boat started to move away from shore? If it had happened during the storm, he would have been blinded by wind and rain, perhaps not seen where he put his foot, not seen the rope, coiling around his leg.
It would have happened quickly, but Casati was a fish: surely he would have tried to free himself by uncoiling the rope, even pulling up the anchor? It weighed no more than a few kilos.
Brunetti stared down at his friend, trying to work it out, and failing. All speculation ended there, at that coiling rope.
Brunetti looked over at the wall of the cemetery, where Casati had gone so often to speak with his wife, thinking of possibilities. After speaking with her, he had always returned to their daughter. But what if this time she had asked him to stay?
Dantone’s shout interrupted his thoughts. ‘Guido, Guido. We’re here.’
Brunetti turned towards the voice and saw something that reminded him of a painting he had liked when he was a boy, of the Volga boatmen pulling a barge along a broad canal, a score of them on the shore, all hauling the same length of rope. This time, it was two uniformed sailors, in their long white buttoned jackets and black boots, pulling their boat slowly along the edge of the cemetery island, towards Brunetti and what was soon to be their cargo. The covering at the back of their boat was open, the motor tilted back free of the water. Dantone lay on his stomach on the prow, looking into the water and calling out orders to the two sailors.
When the boat stopped abreast of him, not far from the shore, Brunetti called to Dantone, ‘Could you give me my phone?’
Dantone scrambled back and retrieved Brunetti’s telefonino. He leaned far over the side with the phone in his hand, and Brunetti stepped without thinking into the water to lean out to take it from him. The phone was new, bought for him by Signorina Elettra out of the account for office supplies that she had been pillaging for years. She had spent some time showing him how to use the camera, and he thought he could do it.
Careful now to look where he put his feet, Brunetti went back to shore and approached the boat. He moved around it in a U, taking photos. He knelt and took close-ups from both sides of the rope coiled around Casati’s leg.
Then he had no choice. He bent and removed the handkerchief and photographed Casati’s open-eyed face from both sides and from straight above, then replaced the handkerchief and turned his back on the body to take photos of the disturbed earth, the abandoned grating tied to the end of the rope twisted around Casati’s leg and ankle, the cemetery wall, and the horizon, anything to put new images into the camera and into his mind. He slipped the phone into the pocket of his shirt and looked off at the horizon.
The sailors helped Brunetti lift Casati’s body; with no hesitation, they all stepped into the water and passed the body up to Dantone and the pilot, who lowered it slowly to the deck. Casati weighed far less than Brunetti had expected, as though death had removed something from him other than his life.
Then Brunetti climbed on board. The pilot disappeared into the cabin for a moment and returned with a woollen blanket, then lowered it slowly over Casati’s body, careful to cover his face, from which the handkerchief had fallen. Brunetti nodded his thanks, and the pilot raised his hand to his forehead in salute, either to Brunetti or to the dead man.
Dantone said something to the sailors; Brunetti, standing beside him, heard the words but didn’t know what they meant. The sailors picked up the ends of the tow ropes they’d abandoned on the shore and, after struggling for some time to turn the bobbing police boat around, began to haul it back the way they had come. Brunetti and Dantone remained on board with the pilot.
‘I’ll call the hospital,’ Brunetti said.
Dantone and the pilot exchanged glances, and the pilot said, ‘About ten minutes. Perhaps less. We just have to get back to deep water.’
Brunetti called Foa, the Questura’s chief pilot, and told him what had happened, then asked him to organize a boat to come out to the back of the cemetery island. He described the boat that was dragged up on the shore, told him to bring plastic sheeting with him and, after turning the boat upright, to cover it and tow it back to the Questura, then find a place to keep it until the family could claim it.
‘Are you on duty again, sir?’ the pilot asked.
‘Not really,’ Brunetti answered shortly, repeated his instructions, and told Foa to get to it immediately.
‘Yes, sir,’ the younger man answered, sounding almost happy to be given a job, and was gone.
All this time, the two sailors had been towing the boat, but the scene was now deprived of charm. When they reached a point where the pilot said it would be deep enough for the motor, the men on shore walked to the boat and climbed on board. They lowered the engine into the water. The pilot turned the boat around and headed for the Ospedale Civile.
Brunetti reached over to Dantone’s upturned hat, picked up his watch, and was surprised to see that it was almost six. What a strange thought to have, he told himself: Casati was lying dead at his feet, and he was worried about what time it was.
He found that the phone was still in his hand, found Federica’s number, and called her. The motor drowned out her voice until he went down into the cabin and closed the door. He told her they’d found her father, and he was dead, killed in the storm. He was on the boat that was taking him to the hospital. Yes, he’d wait for her there. Reluctant to tell her that the body would be in the morgue, he told her to ask for Dottor Rizzardi when she got there, and he’d come and find her and take her to her father.
Her voice had fought off tears during their conversation, but at Brunetti’s last words, she lost control and started to sob. ‘Federica, can you hear me?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Come when you can. Come with your husband. I’ll be there.’
‘What happened?’ she asked with false calm.
‘I don’t know. Your father drowned.’