As he placed the bag on the floor beside his desk, the guard said, ‘One of your men is upstairs, sir.’
‘Good. More will be coming soon. And the coroner. Has the press showed up yet?’
‘No, sir.’
‘What about the cleaning woman?’
‘They had to take her home, sir. She couldn’t stop crying after she saw him.’
‘That bad, is it?’
The guard nodded. ‘There’s an awful lot of blood.’
A head wound, Brunetti remembered. Yes, there’d be a lot of blood. ‘She’s bound to make a stir when she gets there, and that means someone will call Il Gazzetino. Try to keep the reporters down here when they arrive, will you?’
‘I’ll try, sir, but I don’t know if it’ll do any good.’
‘Keep them here,’ Brunetti said.
‘Yes, sir.’
Brunetti looked down the long corridor that led to a flight of stairs at the end. ‘Is the office up there?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir. Turn left at the top. You’ll see the light at the end of the passage. I think your man is in the office.’
Brunetti turned away and started down the corridor. His steps echoed eerily, reverberating back at him from both sides and from the staircase at the end. Cold, the penetrating damp cold of winter, seeped out from the pavement below him and from the brick walls of the corridor. Behind him, he heard the sharp clang of metal on stone, but no one called out, so he continued down the corridor. The night mist had set in, painting a slippery film of condensation on the broad stone steps under his feet.
At the top, he turned left and made towards the light pouring from an open door at the end of the passage. Halfway there, he called out, ‘Vianello?’ Instantly, the sergeant appeared at the door, dressed in a heavy woollen overcoat, from under the bottom of which protruded a pair of bright yellow rubber boots.
‘Buona sera, signore,’ he said, and raised a hand in a gesture that was part salute, part greeting.
‘Buona sera, Vianello,’ Brunetti said. ‘What’s it like in there?’
Vianello’s lined face remained impassive when he answered, ‘Pretty bad, sir. It looks like there was a struggle: the place is a mess, chairs turned over, lamps knocked down. He was a big man, so I’d say there had to be two of them. But that’s just first impressions. I’m sure the lab boys can tell us more.’ He stepped back as he spoke, leaving room for Brunetti to follow him inside.
It was just as Vianello said: a floor lamp pitched forward against the desk, its glass dome shattered across the surface; a chair sprawled on its side behind the desk; a silk carpet lying in a bunched heap in front of the desk, its long fringe caught around the ankle of the man who lay dead on the floor beside it. He lay on his stomach, one arm trapped under the weight of his body, the other flung out ahead of him, fingers cupped upward, as if already begging mercy at the gate of heaven.
Brunetti looked at his head, at the grotesque halo of blood that surrounded it, and he quickly looked away. But wherever his eye rested, he saw blood: drops of it had fallen on the desk, a thin trickle of it led from the desk to the carpet, and more of it covered the cobalt blue brick which lay on the floor half a metre from the dead man.
‘The guard downstairs said it’s Dottor Semenzato,’ Vianello explained into the silence that radiated out from Brunetti. ‘The cleaning lady found him at about ten thirty. The office was locked from the outside, but she had a key, so she came in to check that the windows were closed and to clean the room, and she found him here. Like that.’
Brunetti still said nothing, merely moved over to one of the windows and looked down into the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale. All was quiet; the statues of the giants continued to guard the staircase; not even a cat moved to disturb the moonlit scene.
‘How long have you been here?’ Brunetti asked.
Vianello shot back his cuff and looked at his watch. ‘Eighteen minutes, sir. I touched his pulse, but it was gone, and he was cold. I’d say he’d been dead at least a couple of hours, but the doctor can tell us better.’
From off to the left, Brunetti heard a siren shriek out and shatter the tranquillity of the night, and for a moment he thought it was the lab team, arriving in a boat and being stupid about it. But the siren rose in pitch, its insistent whine ever louder and more strident, and then it wailed its slow way down to the original note. It was the siren at San Marco, calling out to the sleeping city the news that the waters were rising: acqua alta had begun.
The noise of their actual arrival camouflaged by the siren, the two men of the lab crew set their equipment down in the hall outside the room. Pavese, the photographer, stuck his head into the room and saw the dead man on the floor. Apparently unmoved by what he saw, he called across to the other two, voice raised to be heard above the siren, ‘You want a whole set, Commissario?’
Brunetti turned from the window at the sound of the voice and walked over towards him, careful not to go near the body until it had been photographed and the floor around it checked for fibres and hairs or possible scuff marks. He wondered if this caution served any real purpose: Semenzato’s body had been approached by too many people, and the scene was already contaminated.
‘Yes, and as soon as you’re done with them, see what there is in the way of fibres and hairs, then we’ll have a look.’
Pavese displayed no irritation at having his superior tell him to do the obvious and asked, ‘Do you want a separate set of the head?’
‘Yes.’
The photographer busied himself with his equipment. Foscolo, the second member of the team, had already assembled the heavy tripod and was attaching the camera to it. Pavese bent down and rummaged in his equipment bag, pushing aside rolls of film and slim packets of filters, and finally pulled out a portable flash that trailed a heavy electrical cord. He handed the flash to Foscolo and picked up the tripod. His quick professional glance at the body had been enough. ‘I’ll get a couple of the whole room from here, Luca, then from the other side. There’s an electrical outlet under the window. When I’m done with the shot of the entire room, we’ll set up there, between the window and the head. I want to get a few of the whole body, then we’ll switch to the Nikon and do the head. I think the angle from the left would be better.’ He paused for a moment, considering. ‘We won’t need the filters. The flash is enough to get the blood.’
Brunetti and Vianello waited outside the door, through which burst the intermittent glow of the flash. ‘You think they used that brick?’ Vianello finally asked.
Brunetti nodded. ‘You saw his head.’
‘They wanted to make sure, didn’t they?’
Brunetti thought of Brett’s face and suggested, ‘Or perhaps they liked doing it.’