‘No,’ she said immediately and fiercely.
Brunetti decided to leave that for the moment. ‘Contessa,’ he said, using much the same voice he employed when the children were being evasive with him, ‘fifteen years have passed. I can’t go back and try to look at this unless I have a reason or a place to start looking.’ He would also need some sort of legal justification for looking, but he decided to tell her nothing about that.
He picked up his glass, too long ignored, and rolled it between his palms. ‘I’m afraid that whatever suspicions you might have aren’t enough,’ he said – forcing himself to refer to ‘suspicions’ instead of ‘vague suspicions’ – ‘to justify an investigation.’
‘She didn’t fall into that water,’ the Contessa insisted with the truculence of age and the sense of certainty peculiar to wealth.
He took a sip and then another and kept his glass in his hand, suspecting he might need it. ‘Contessa, there are possibilities you haven’t considered,’ he began, voice tentative, as he prepared to suggest to this woman that neither her love nor her wealth had been sufficient to stop her granddaughter from going into the water drunk or drugged. But how say it? What words to use?
‘Manuela didn’t try to kill herself, and she didn’t drink or use drugs.’ Had she read his thoughts?
‘You sound very certain.’ He was a man with two children who had recently been of that same volatile age. They were happy kids to whom the idea of suicide was from some other planet and drugs, he hoped, were unlikely, but these were beliefs common to most parents. How well did Manuela’s grandmother understand a girl two generations younger than she? Youth and age, and their respective problems, lived in different worlds.
‘Nothing could have made Manuela jump into the water. No matter what happened to her, if Manuela had got within two metres of the riva, she would have been lying on the ground, vomiting with fear. I saw that happen twice. Once we were on a vaporetto and people crowded suddenly to one side, and it tipped a bit. She started to scream and grabbed the woman next to her and vomited all down her back.’
Brunetti tried to speak, but she talked over him, half rising from her chair. ‘Another time, when she was about eleven, one of the boys in her class waited for her after school. He knew she was afraid of water – miserable little sadist – and when she was walking across Campo Santa Marina, he and a friend grabbed her and pulled her down towards the canal and told her they were going to throw her in.’
Brunetti waited.
‘She had something like an epileptic seizure. Luckily, it’s near the hospital, and two men carried her there. She was there for two days.’
Brunetti found himself incapable of speech at the horror of it and at her rage, twenty years on.
‘And you know the worst part of it, Signor Brunetti?’
He shook his head and set his glass back on the table, suddenly not interested in its contents.
‘How to get her home.’ She saw his expression and went on. ‘A taxi?’ She laughed the idea to scorn. ‘Think of the vaporetti and where they go: how do you get to Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini from the hospital? Take the boat around the back of the island to the train station and then walk along the open riva to change from one boat to another? Looking at all that water?’ She stopped, and he thought she was asking him to suggest a solution to this trick question.
‘What did you do?’
‘They put her in one of those chairs that Sanitrans uses to carry people up and down stairs, and two of them, well, four of them because they had to take turns, they carried her home from the hospital.’
Brunetti pushed at his glass with one finger and slid it to the side of the tray. He could think of nothing to say.
‘Think of that for an eleven-year-old girl with her eyes shut tight: being carried across the city in an open chair, like a crippled old woman, or some sort of lunatic being taken to Palazzo Boldù, and everyone you pass on the street looking at you and wondering what’s wrong with you.’ She gave him a few moments to consider what she had said. ‘That’s why I know Manuela didn’t jump into the water, Commissario.’
Brunetti decided not to say that the possibility still remained that she had been drunk or drugged when she fell into the water.
She looked across the table at him. Her face was stripped of expression, allowing Brunetti to see it as a structure of eyes, nose, mouth, jaw, chin. The expanse of years between the time she would have been a beauty and the present surprised him: he would still have been a child, she a woman with children his age or older.
‘It’s not only her fear – phobia, if you will – that makes it impossible that she fell in,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’