‘She was very pretty: tall, with long, straight blonde hair and pale blue eyes. She could have been a Scandinavian exchange student, so little did she look like one of us.’ Coming from a light-eyed blonde, this seemed strange to Brunetti.
Paola seemed to drift off. She gave her attention to the night sky, the still-lit campanile of San Marco just visible from this corner of the living room. ‘We couldn’t live anywhere else, could we?’
‘Probably not.’
‘It makes me understand why Demetriana wants to save it. Or at least try to.’
‘Good luck to her, then,’ Brunetti said and went back to work. ‘How did Barbara throw her life away?’
‘The usual way for rich young girls who aren’t very bright: men, some drugs, some more men, lots of parties and lots of trips, and then some more drugs, and then she was twenty-five, and she was lucky enough to meet Teo, who’s really a very nice man, and she married him and had a baby and sort of settled down.’
‘Sort of?’
‘Sort of,’ Paola repeated. ‘Teo finally ran out of patience. Unfortunately for Barbara, he met someone else at the same time, so things were over for her.’
‘You make it sound easy.’
‘I think, for men, it is, especially when there’s enough money and another woman waiting.’
‘And his child?’ Brunetti asked, trying to sound neutral.
‘What judge would give a child to the father, Guido? In Mamma-worshipping Italy?’
‘So he left them?’
‘He left them, but Barbara had someone waiting, too.’ He watched her consider whether to say something and then decide she would. ‘But he didn’t stay around very long.’
‘And Manuela?’
‘According to Demetriana, she was in love with her horse, and that seems to have made life with her mother easier for her.’ Brunetti detected none of the irony or sarcasm he had expected in Paola’s voice. ‘Manuela lived with her, spent a lot of time with her horse, and then she fell into the water, and that was that.’
‘Has your mother ever spoken about Manuela?’ Brunetti asked.
Paola spent a long time looking at the campanile before she answered. ‘Only after she sees her at Demetriana’s. She’s a very sweet girl. Woman.’ She paused, busying herself with her glass, then said, ‘None of us talks about her much.’
‘Don’t you find that strange?’ he asked.
‘Guido,’ she said in a very soft voice, ‘sometimes I don’t understand you.’
Brunetti thought this was because she forgot that he was a policeman but chose not to say anything.
‘We talk about her, of course, because we see her. But we’ve never talked about what happened to her.’ Then, setting her glass down, she said, ‘There’s no other decent way, is there?’
‘No, there isn’t,’ Brunetti said and got to his feet to take the bottle back to the kitchen.
13
As he walked towards the Questura the next morning, Brunetti considered the ways this case differed from the others he’d dealt with during his career: there was an injured person but no evidence that she had been the victim of a crime, and there was no need to hurry the investigation, for, in the absence of both victim and suspect, what need of haste to seek a guilty person?
The whole thing had taken on the feeling of an academic exercise, carried out to allow the wife of the Vice-Questore to rise a few steps up the ladder of Venetian society, and to help an old woman die in peace. Yet Brunetti was incapable of ridding himself of his concern for the girl’s fate.
Ahead of him as he entered the Questura, his colleague Claudia Griffoni was just starting up the steps. She turned at the sound of her name and paused on the third step to wait for him.
‘Are you working on anything important?’ Brunetti asked as he approached.
‘A tourist was mugged and robbed last night,’ she answered. ‘In Calle degli Avvocati.’
Brunetti was surprised: the street was home to a small hotel and a number of people of ample means. He closed his eyes and called up the memory: a narrow cul-de-sac leading off from Campo Sant’Angelo, it ended against the door of a building and was a place where the unwary could be trapped.
‘What happened?’
She pulled a notebook from the pocket of her jacket and opened it. ‘The victim’s Irish; twenty-three years old. I was at the hospital this morning at eight to see him. He was in a bar last night, chatting up a girl. Bought her a few drinks, had a few himself, and then she suggested they go to her home together. When they got to the end of the calle, two men jumped him from behind. He doesn’t remember any more than that.’
‘What time was this?’
She looked at the notebook. ‘About one-thirty. The call came at 1.37.’
‘Who called?’
‘A man who lives in the calle : the noise woke his dog up, and the dog’s barking woke him up. When he saw a man lying in the calle, he called the Carabinieri. But by the time they got there, he was gone; the Carabinieri found him in the campo, propped up against a building. They called an ambulance that took him to the hospital.’