‘But no one would get the chance to listen to her,’ Brunetti said, careful to avoid Griffoni.
‘Of course they would,’ Vittori insisted petulantly. ‘They always believe the woman.’
‘But there’s nothing she could do about it or that we could,’ Brunetti insisted in the face of Vittori’s failure to understand. ‘The statute of limitations,’ he said. ‘It’s ten years, and then no accusation can be made. Even if you had done it, you couldn’t be charged with it now. It’s over. It’s gone.’
Vittori’s face froze. As Brunetti watched, he struggled to open his mouth, but failed. He broke free of his trance and licked his lips, finally managing to force them open, but he produced nothing more than a bleated ‘uh, uh’. The colour had drained from his face, and for a moment Brunetti thought he was going to faint. Time stopped in the room as Vittori tried to force himself back to life.
Brunetti had read that many people, faced with the end of life, see it all pass before them. For Vittori, only the last weeks mattered: Brunetti believed that.
The voice that finally came from Vittori was an old man’s. ‘That can’t be true.’ If a desert could have spoken, it would have sounded like this. ‘No.’
Griffoni spoke. ‘You must be relieved, Signor Vittori. Nothing she says can hurt your honour now. As my colleague has told you: no matter what you might have done to her, it’s over. It’s gone.’
Had Vittori been standing, he would have reeled from side to side. As it was, he imitated Griffoni’s gesture and clasped the seat of his chair. He took one deep breath and then another and then gave an enormous sigh, as at the end of a valiant feat.
Brunetti was tempted to drag this out and give Vittori the chance to say more, but he had never approved of torture, even for someone like the man sitting in front of him, and so he said, ‘But the murder of Pietro Cavanis is still with us, Signor Vittori, and I am both accusing you of that crime and arresting you for having committed it.’
At this point in the interview with Signor Vittori, Brunetti was later to testify during Alessandro Vittori’s trial for the murder of Pietro Cavanis, Commissario Claudia Griffoni got to her feet and left the room.
During that same trial, Signor Vittori testified that Manuela Lando-Continui had begged him to have sex with her but that he had refused because she was underage and he did not want to endanger his job. Two persons who had kept horses at the stable while Signor Vittori was employed there testified that Signor Vittori had, on the contrary, been almost violent in his attentions to Signorina Lando-Continui, who was both troubled and angered by his behaviour.
In the face of Signor Vittori’s repeated protestations of his innocence of the crime of murder, the prosecuting magistrate introduced forensic evidence to the contrary. The DNA sample taken from Vittori’s handkerchief matched that found on the knife with which Pietro Cavanis has been killed. Further, the morning of the murder of Signor Cavanis – and shortly after he had received a phone call made with a phonecard found in Pietro Cavanis’ possession – Signor Vittori had searched the internet and found newspaper accounts of Manuela Lando-Continui’s rescue from the waters of Rio San Boldo, an account which provided the name of Signor Cavanis, who was the only Pietro Cavanis in the phone book and still resident at the address in Santa Croce given in the article.
Unfortunately for him, Signor Vittori had not used the internet to search for the statute of limitations for the crime of rape, which had expired well before Signor Cavanis had phoned him. Had he done so, he might not have been led to murder, for which he was convicted in the first trial, a conviction that is now under appeal.
29
Brunetti, although he knew where they were going, had no idea that they had arrived, so careful had Griffoni been to leave the autostrada well before Preganziol and arrive by a web of small roads well to the north-west of the town, the opposite direction from which one would normally arrive from Venice. Griffoni, who was driving a friend’s car, made sure not to be seen from the house and pulled up on the other side of the property, the main building hidden by the new growth on the trees.
She stopped the car a hundred metres from the fence, turned off the engine, and the three people in it sat and listened to the creaks and cracks as the engine cooled and the metal parts contracted. It was springtime, the leaves were on their way back, but still the day was brisk; even the clouds were busy, scuttling to the north.