It took the crew another quarter of an hour to arrive, but when they did, they came in force. Aside from the pilot and Bocchese, there were two photographers and two technicians. The boat glided up to the side of the canal; Brunetti caught the rope and wrapped it around the bollard, then hauled the first man up to the pavement.
Bocchese came on deck and told the pilot to move the boat ahead fifty metres to a stone staircase leading down to the water: he got out there and walked back to Brunetti, leaving it to the crew to unload and move the equipment.
‘Murder?’ Bocchese asked. When Brunetti nodded, the technician added, ‘Rizzardi is on his way.’
‘Where was he?’
‘At home,’ Bocchese said. ‘When I told him you’d called it in, he said he’d come even though that idiot’s on duty.’
Brunetti thought it politic to ignore Rizzardi’s comment about his colleague, who was considered an idiot by everyone at the Questura.
Bocchese went back to the two technicians who were carrying their equipment from the boat. Though he was a head shorter than both of them and at least twenty years older, the younger men looked to him for instruction; their very bearing displayed deference.
When they were all on the landing, Brunetti accompanied them to the green door and into the apartment. He realized then that his morning’s reluctance to go to the Questura had followed him here. He disliked being at the scene of this crime, disliked watching as the camera was set up and photos were taken of the dead man and everything around him, from every angle. Even more did he find the necessity to avoid the dry puddle of blood grotesque. He didn’t want to see the knife, didn’t want to see the way the blood had flowed down the dead man’s body and seeped into his clothing, nor to start calculating how long he could have lived while the blood was still flowing.
Brunetti retreated to the landing, leaving the others to do their jobs, and tried to push his mind away from the thought of what it must be to know that you were dying, that you were wounded beyond recovery, beyond help or hope, and were going to die. He could wish only that alcohol and shock and sudden loss of blood had dulled Cavanis’ mind – for this must be Pietro Cavanis – and lessened his terror.
‘Guido?’ A voice from the door to the street called him away from these thoughts.
He turned and saw Ettore Rizzardi, the pathologist, come to bear witness to the obvious, as was so often his duty. Tall and thin, Rizzardi managed to convey a sense of energy held in restraint.
Brunetti shook his hand and then led him into the apartment; he could think of nothing to say. Brunetti watched the pathologist gaze around the room, and registered the moment when he saw the foot. Rizzardi closed his eyes for a moment, and had Brunetti not known him better, he would have suspected him of saying a prayer.
One of the technicians offered each of them a pair of plastic gloves, but Rizzardi had brought his own. He opened the package and put them on. Brunetti did the same.
Brunetti followed the pathologist into Cavanis’ bedroom and saw the doctor already bent to take the man’s pulse. Rizzardi looked at his watch and took out a notebook. He glanced at Bocchese. ‘Your people finished in here?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, I’ll take a look.’ He stepped back from the corpse and took a surgical mask from his pocket, ripped off the protective paper, and put it on. He handed one to Brunetti, who was glad to do the same. Rizzardi took a heat-sensitive wand from his pocket and placed the tip on the dead man’s temple, then wrote in his notebook. ‘Will you help me, Guido?’ he asked.
Together, they straightened the man’s body and rolled him on to one side. The knife jutted straight into the air.
Brunetti studied the angle of the blade. ‘Killed from behind,’ he observed.
The pathologist nodded. ‘Killer’s right-handed.’
Both of them had learned over the years how best to distance at least a part of themselves from what they were doing: view it as a practical problem, akin to figuring out why the bedside lamp wouldn’t work. Light bulb? Wall socket? Fuse? Look at the evidence and try to find the cause.
The man had been limp when they moved him, and the smell had grown stronger as they got closer to him. ‘A day or two, I’d say,’ Rizzardi observed. He set his knee down in a clean place on the floor and looked more closely at the knife and at the quantity of coagulated blood on the man’s sweater. ‘It must have opened the jugular.’
‘Would it have been fast?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’d think so, yes,’ Rizzardi said and got to his feet. ‘I’ll be able to tell you more once I take a closer look.’
‘When?’
‘Later this afternoon, if possible.’ He turned back to the dead man and asked, ‘Did he drink a lot?’