'Nothing. Just that he was on his way home, and he saw this woman.'

'Did she say anything?'

'She told them she fell down.'

'If I had ten Euros for every time I've heard that one, I could retire,' Rizzardi interrupted to say and asked Pucetti if he'd like a coffee.

Pucetti stared at Rizzardi and did not answer, then said he didn't want a coffee.

Brunetti paid and they left the bar, walked past the courtyard, and back to Pronto Soccorso. This time, Brunetti raised his hand to the man behind the window, who waved back and smiled.

Brunetti opened the door to the room and saw that the woman's eyes were open. But by the time the three men were near the bed, they were closed again.

'Signora,' Brunetti said. There was no response.

Rizzardi, obviously deciding to stay out of this, said nothing.

Pucetti leaned down and said softly, 'Signora Ana. It's me, Roberto.' He placed his right hand on her upper arm. 'Signora, can you hear me?'

Slowly, she opened her eyes and, seeing his face so close to hers, smiled.

'Don't try to talk, Signora. Everything's all right, everything's going to be all right.'

'Could you ask her . . .' Brunetti began.

Pucetti stood upright and turned to Brunetti. 'I think she's had enough, Commissario. Don't you?' Then, including Rizzardi, he said, 'I think we all ought to get out of here and let her rest.'

Brunetti backed away from him and raised his hands, palms open; in the voice of a man struggling to save face or reputation, he added, 'She's had too much. You're right.' He turned and headed for the door. As he passed Rizzardi, he said, 'Come on, Ettore. Pucetti's right.'

The two men went and stood by the door. Pucetti bent down and placed his hand on the woman's arm again. 'Try to get some sleep now, Signora. I'll come back when I can.' When she started to speak, he held up one finger, as if he wanted to place it gently on her lips, and said, 'No, not now. Everything can wait. Just sleep now. And get better.' He gave her arm the gentlest of squeezes and moved away from the bed, very slowly, turning at the door as if to see that she was still all right.

The three men left the room; Pucetti was careful to pull the door closed very quietly.

17.

Brunetti didn't know whether to laugh or to turn away from the young man. He had certainly deceived witnesses during his own career, but he had seldom been this good at it, though he wasn't sure that was the adjective to describe what he had seen Pucetti do. The young man had a genius for deceit, the way another person had a gift for music or golf or knitting. The comparisons left him uncomfortable, if only because those other pursuits were neutral, whereas deceit was not. If this deceit led to an understanding of the circumstances of Signora Cavanella's son's death, it would surely help, and thus it was good. Oh, how very Jesuitical he had become.

He looked at the unlined face of the young officer and wondered where Dante would put him. Among the Evil Counsellors? The Evil Impersonators? Was Pucetti to be enveloped in a tongue of flame or preyed upon and rent to pieces by others like him?

Rizzardi saved him from the need to comment by saying, 'You had me convinced.' Then he added, 'I saw you together this morning, and you were very good to her then.'

Pucetti looked at the floor, pressed his lips together, and said, 'I'm not sure I like being able to do it, Dottore.' He raised his eyes to watch a white-coated woman doctor approach and pass them by, then looked at Rizzardi. 'Most people want so much to believe in what others say that it makes it too easy.' Then, earnestly, 'I'm not just saying this, you know. I really don't like that it's so easy.' He paused, then added, 'And it's not easy to do it with her. He was her only child.'

Listening to Pucetti say this, Brunetti realized how much he wanted to believe him. His thoughts turned to Paola, as deceitful and duplicitous a person as one could hope to find, yet who remained one of the only truly honest people he had ever known.

Rizzardi interrupted. 'I've got to get back. I'll let you pick over this poor woman's bones.' Leaving them with that, he turned and walked away.

Brunetti and Pucetti continued towards the exit. Pucetti took this opportunity to tell Brunetti that the parocco had told him he had been at the parish only six months and had never heard of Signora Cavanella. At the front door, they looked out across the campo. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing, so Brunetti would not need the umbrella. He realized then that he had left it somewhere, either at the entrance to Pronto Soccorso or in Signora Cavanella's room, or in the bar. Where did they go, he wondered, all of those umbrellas he had forgotten on trains, in boats, in offices and stores during all of these decades?

He walked out into the cooler air: autumn had arrived. 'Tell me what happened this morning,' he asked Pucetti. Standing there, feeling the refreshed air, seeing the clouds scuttle west, he had no desire to return to the Questura. He started towards the bridge, heading for home and pulling Pucetti in his wake.

As they walked in front of the school, Pucetti caught up with him and began to explain what had happened. He had arrived on time at Signora Cavanella's home and been careful to be formal and polite, nothing more. But at the second bridge, when she paused before starting up it, he slipped his arm under hers, careful to release it when they reached the other side. Because she had decided to walk, there were many more bridges, and by the time they got to the last one, the one in front of the hospital that he and Brunetti had just crossed, the habit was established that he would help her cross them.

It was she who asked Rizzardi if the young officer could come into the morgue with her, and it was Pucetti who held her arm and kept her from falling when Rizzardi pulled back the sheet that covered her son's face.

Later, he had helped her fill in the forms and had all but sequestered an ambulance to take her home. Brunetti was curious about the reasons for Pucetti's behaviour, but he didn't know how to phrase the question. Without being asked, the young man said, just as they came out into Campo San Bortolo, 'At first, I thought it would be a good idea to win her confidence any way I could, but I ended up feeling sorry for her, Commissario. His death's destroyed her. No one can fake that.'

Brunetti stopped beneath the statue of the ever-dapper Goldoni; he resisted the impulse to point out to Pucetti that he himself had faked a strong emotion, and quite convincingly. Instead, he told the young man he had done well and could call it a day if he wished. But Pucetti decided he'd go back to the Questura. Brunetti raised a hand in an informal farewell and turned right towards home.

The next morning, Brunetti made a special point of arriving at the Questura on time, not that anyone paid any particular attention to when he got there. He had called the hospital from home just after eight and spoken to the nurse in charge of Ana Cavanella's ward. The signora had passed a quiet night; the doctor who examined her had decided to keep her one more day and night before sending her home. The nurse did not know if she had had any visitors, only that another woman had been moved into her room.

Signorina Elettra was in her office, standing at the cabinet beside the door, slipping a file back into place. Seeing her wearing cashmere a rusty orange cardigan after the long pause of the summer, Brunetti had confirmation that autumn had arrived.

'Ah, Commissario, come and I shall tell you mysterious things.'

He followed her back to her desk. Instead of turning on her computer, she pulled out the small chiavetta protruding from the side. 'Shall we use your computer, Signore?' she asked. A quick glance showed him that Patta's door was open, suggesting that he had not yet arrived. Yes, better that Patta's day should not begin with the sight of him in confabulation with Signorina Elettra and her computer.

Upstairs, he left it to her to insert the chiavetta and turn on the computer while he hung his raincoat and scarf in the cupboard. 'Please,' he called over to her; she sat in his chair and ran an affectionate hand over the keys of the computer she had procured for him a year ago. He did not want to know what she had done in order to achieve that, nor how many police offices in Bari were without basic equipment because he had this top-of-the-line computer that was the envy of the younger staff and a source of witless pride to himself. To have somehow had the Ministry of the Interior buy him a Maserati would have been no greater example of conspicuous, and wasted, consumption.

From her smile, it was evident how much she appreciated the machine she was using, which caused him, not for the first time, to wonder why she had had it consigned to him and not to herself. He walked to the desk and pulled one of the guest's chairs around behind it.

'Look,' she said, pointing to the screen. He recognized the double-faced document he saw before him: front and back cover and then the inside pages of a carta d'identita, issued six years before by the Comune di Venezia. The woman's age was given as 53, birthplace Venice, and residence the address in San Polo. Her civil status was 'nubile', not 'sposata', and her profession 'casalinga', a housewife or woman who kept house. She received the minimum state pension.

Signorina Elettra hit a key, and the identity card was replaced by a report from Ulss that gave the woman's name and the same address, and the name of the doctor who had her under his care. His address was in San Polo, as well.

Another key, and Brunetti saw the list of and reasons for her medical visits as well as the diagnoses and prescriptions that resulted from them, at least for the last seventeen years, since the records began to be computerized. Running his eye down them, he saw that she was another of those people who would, as was said of his mother for most of her life, put the doctors out of business. She had visited the doctor six times in the last twelve years, twice for influenza, once for a bladder infection, and twice to get a referral for her Pap test. A year ago, she had received a prescription for a common sleeping pill.

'And the son?' Brunetti asked.

She shook her head. 'Nothing. He doesn't exist. He wasn't born, didn't go to school, never saw a doctor or went to the hospital.' She glanced up at him and said, 'It's the same thing Pucetti found. Or didn't find.'

She typed in 'Davide Cavanella', and the screen showed the name on a document and, across from it, rows of XXXXXXXXXs in place of information. He was never arrested, or issued a hunting or a driver's licence, had no passport, no carta d'identita, never worked for the state or paid into a pension. Nor did he receive a disability allowance. Then, as an afterthought or to show that she had checked every possible category, Signorina Elettra went back to the previous screen and tapped at the listing: 'No carer's allowance for the mother.'

In a country filled with fake blind people, with others collecting the pensions of relatives who had died a decade before, of people declared to be 100 per cent incapacitated who played golf and tennis, here was a genuinely disabled person who had never made any claim on the state.

'Nothing?' he asked, certain that she had looked in other places and not bothered to tell him.

'Nothing. For all the official evidence there is, he does not exist and never has.'

For some time, they sat quietly, looking at the screen. She pushed another key, and it went blank, as if in illustration of Davide Cavanella's life: Brunetti considered the gesture melodramatic, but he kept this opinion to himself.

'And Lucrezia Lembo?' he asked for want of any other possibility.

Signora Elettra's hands returned to the keyboard, and she brought up the files and highlighted one of them. She opened it to show another carta d'identita with a black and white photo of a woman of a certain age looking severely at the camera, as if suspicious of its intentions. Her eyes were light, which suggested that her dark colouring was the result of sun rather than nature, and she appeared to be wearing little or no makeup, so it was impossible

to disguise those wary eyes and a tightly closed mouth. He looked at the inner pages, where he read her date of birth: two years before Ana Cavanella, her parents resident in Dorsoduro. Her height was given as 1.74 metres, her civil state as 'sposata', her hair 'bionda', her current profession 'Direttrice', which, without an indication of what it was she was the director of, could mean just about anything.

'What else?' he asked.

Silently, she showed him Lucrezia Lembo's health records for the last fifteen years, which made heavy reading. She had developed diabetes in her fifties, yet apparently kept it under control with pills; she had been hospitalized twice with pneumonia, and according to her doctor's notes, continued to smoke heavily, which the same doctor noted as a factor exacerbating not only the pneumonia, but the diabetes. There was little evidence that she had yearly tests of any sort: she had apparently never had a PAP test or a mammogram, though her doctor's notes were filled with recommendations that she do so.

She took Avandia for her diabetes, Tavor for anxiety, Zoloft for depression, and in the past had been given Antabuse, a drug he knew was given to alcoholics that made them violently ill if they consumed any alcohol. That prescription had been filled once six years ago, then four years ago, but not since then. Brunetti cast his eye down a long list of the medicines which had been prescribed to her with some regularity and noticed a number of common antibiotics; the others were unfamiliar to him.

She had a passport and over the years had always kept it renewed. There was no indication of where she went with it.

Three years before, she had started to receive a state pension, having worked for twenty-seven years as the Director of Products of Lembo Minerals.

'What does Lembo Minerals do?' he asked.

'They extract ore chiefly copper from mines all over the world and ship it to factories in other countries.'

'That's all?'

'In essence, yes,' Signorina Elettra said. 'At least, from the public information available.'

'Then what would their products be?'

'Large and small pieces of earth, I'd guess, with quantities of metal stuck in or to them.'

'She was Director of Products,' he said, pointing to the words on the form displayed on the screen.

'It was her father's company,' Signorina Elettra suggested.

'Meaning?'

'Meaning we should be glad he gave her a job and she paid taxes and contributed to her pension. Otherwise, he could just have handed it to her, and that was that, and no taxes paid on it.'

'I hadn't thought of it that way,' Brunetti admitted.

Ignoring that, or pretending to, she said, 'Look at this.' She hit a few keys, and the screen exploded in colour. When his eyes adjusted to the change, he saw that he was looking at the cover of a Spanish scandal magazine. The photo showed a Junoesque woman in a bikini she really should not have dared to wear, not any more, with one hand raised to shield her perma-tanned face from the sun. The background was the standard turquoise-floored swimming pool, palm trees everywhere. Beside the pool, a gloriously handsome young man in equally skimpy bathing attire he could wear with panache handed a cigarette to the woman while another much younger couple in thick white cotton beach robes perched, knees pressed together, on the edge of dazzling white plastic chairs, doing their best to look as though they had no idea who those other two people were.

The Spanish caption was easy enough to translate into: 'Lucrezia, the Princess of Copper, and her new companion, enjoy themselves at the home of friends in Ibiza.' Signorina Elettra flicked the pages with a touch of a key: Brunetti was impressed by the way they turned as if in response to the motions of a human hand. The magazine opened to two inner pages containing further photos of all four people. The page on the left had more bathing suit photos, a very unfortunate one of Lucrezia Lembo from the back, not only because of the sad sagging that had begun to assail the flesh at the top of her thighs, but for the sight of the young man's hand slipped under the elastic of her bikini bottom. The captions on the opposite page explained that the two white-clad young people who remained fully covered in every picture in which they appeared were her son and daughter, Loredano and Letizia.

'They seem to like the letter,' Signorina Elettra said.

Ignoring this and pointing at the screen, Brunetti asked, 'How many years ago was this?'

She flicked the screen back to the magazine cover and let him read: twelve years before. Lucrezia would have been fifty, with a face that appeared to have been kept behind for a decade or so. Her children looked in their late teens, so they'd be approaching or in their early thirties now.

'The young man?' he asked.

'Her husband, you mean,' Signorina Elettra said, and Brunetti felt a wave of pathos sweep across him, as if he'd heard of the illness or death of a friend.

Not wanting Signorina Elettra to accuse him of judging people rashly, nor of that equal crime of throwing his compassion around with too liberal a hand, he said nothing, but he did take another look at the face and posture of the young man. His body bristled with confidence: was there a desire that had not been answered? Was there something he still longed to have?

Brunetti forced himself to look away from the photo, troubled that his feelings against this unknown man could be so unreasonably strong. He told himself to stop behaving like a teenage Sir Galahad and said, 'What about the other sister, or sisters?'

'There were three altogether,' she answered. 'Lavinia and Lorenza, and Lucrezia.'

'They were stretching a bit with Lorenza,' Brunetti said, relieved to have so easily rediscovered his ironic tone.

'As it happens, she died.'

'What happened?'

'According to the reports I read, she drowned in their swimming pool,' Signorina Elettra answered. Brunetti's memory fled to the first photo.

'Where?'

'No,' she said, 'not there.' Then quickly, 'I should have explained. They had a ranch in Chile, some kind of finca, it sounds like, and she was found there.' Before he could ask, she said, 'Eight years ago.' Then, soberly, 'She was the baby of the family, only twenty when it happened.'

Brunetti had been busy working out the dates and, when he had finished, he asked, 'Same mother?'

'No. He left the first one after thirty-four years and set up a household with are you ready? the physical therapist who took care of him after he broke his shoulder in a skiing accident. Lorenza was their daughter.'

'How old was he?'

'When he left?'

'Yes.'

'Sixty.'

It was a common enough story and certainly none of his business. It had usually happened to his friends when they were about forty: all Lembo had done was wait a generation. 'He died last year, didn't he?' Brunetti asked. He had a vague memory of reading about his death, but what he remembered most was his surprise that the newspapers would engage in so much hand-wringing over the death of another dinosaur.

'Yes. They were here, but not living in the palazzo.'

'Where? They?'

'He was living on the Giudecca. Not with the physical therapist: she left him after the daughter died. He had a companion and people who came to clean and cook. He wasn't married to the companion.'