What to make of the unopened packets of cheap underwear in the drawers of the spare bedroom? A woman who bought cashmere sweaters of the quality of the ones in her drawers, regardless of her age, would not wear cotton underwear like that, or else his ideas about women were more mistaken than Paola occasionally said they were.
And why the three different sizes? Niccolini’s daughter, should she visit her grandmother, could hardly be old enough to wear even the smallest size; besides, parents were usually careful to send along the proper clothes when their children spent the night away from home. It might be that friends came to visit or perhaps sent their daughters to stay for a time in Venice. And the unopened toiletries in the bathroom? A person did not prepare for unexpected visits with that kind of thoroughness. It was her home, after all, not a hotel or lodging house.
He left his desk and went downstairs. Over the course of the years, he had discussed many topics with Signorina Elettra, though female lingerie was not among them. She was standing at her window when he came in, arms folded, looking across the canal at the same view that greeted him from his own windows: the façade of San Lorenzo looked no less decrepit from one floor below.
She turned and smiled. ‘Can I be of help, Commissario?’
‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti said and walked over to her desk. He leaned back against it and crossed his legs. Light streamed through the window, not only from the sun but from its reflection on the water in the canal below. He saw her thus in profile and realized that the outline of her features was less sharp than he remembered its being. Her chin was less clear-cut, her skin on her cheekbone less tightly drawn. He noticed, too, the small wrinkles on the outer side of her eye. He looked away and studied the church.
‘Have you any idea what it means if the drawers in the guest room of an apartment hold unopened packages of women’s underwear, but in three different sizes?’ She looked at him, and he saw her brow contract in confusion. ‘And tights and sweaters, also in different sizes.’ Then, recalling who he was speaking to and knowing this detail would make a difference, he added, ‘All plain cotton, the sort of thing you’d buy at a supermarket.’
She unfolded her arms and raised her chin, glancing back at the church. Her attention on the façade, she asked, ‘Is this in a man’s apartment or is it in the apartment you went to last night?’
‘It’s what we found in Signora Altavilla’s apartment, yes,’ he answered. ‘Why do you ask?’
Attention still directed at the church, as if consulting with it to find an answer, she said, ‘Because in a man’s apartment, it would suggest one thing; in a woman’s, something entirely different.’
‘What would it suggest in a man’s?’ he asked, though he suspected he knew.
She turned to face him and answered, ‘In a man’s, it would suggest fresh underwear for a woman – or for the women – he brought home for the night,’ she said, pausing to consider the sound of this. Then she added, sounding less certain, ‘But then it probably wouldn’t be simple cotton, would it? And it wouldn’t be in another room. Not unless he was very strange indeed.’
Presumably, then, she considered it not at all strange for a man to keep women’s underwear in differing sizes in his home, so long as it was expensive and kept in his bedroom. For a moment, Brunetti wondered what other information had been closed off to him by the vows of matrimony. But he confined himself to asking, ‘And in a woman’s?’
‘There’s nothing to preclude the same explanation,’ she said, surprising him with how ordinary she managed to make it sound. But then she smiled and added, ‘But more likely it would suggest she brought the women home for some more prosaic reason.’
‘Such as?’ he asked.
‘Such as to protect them from the sort of men who would invite them home for one night,’ she said in a tone that suggested she might be serious.
‘That’s a puritanical vision of things.’
‘Not necessarily,’ she said levelly. Then, in a more accommodating voice, she went on, ‘It’s more likely she’s helping illegal refugee women, letting them stay with her – safely – while they look for work or find a place to live.’ She paused, and he watched her run through possibilities. ‘Or it could be that she wanted to protect them from other people.’
‘Such as?’
‘Any man who thought he had a right over them. A boyfriend. A pimp.’
He gave her a level look but did not say anything. Brunetti toyed with her idea and, after a while, found that he liked the feel of it. To test it, he said, ‘Do you think she could organize that on her own? After all, where would she find out about them or be put in touch with them?’
As a knight would first swing into the saddle of his horse before lifting his lance, Signorina Elettra returned to the chair behind her computer. She hit a few keys, studied the screen, and hit a few more. Brunetti pushed himself away from the desk and turned to watch. After some time she waved a hand to him and said, ‘Come and have a look.’
He moved behind her and looked at the screen. He saw the usual photomontage of a woman, her face turned away from the viewer, the menacing shadow of a man lurking behind her. A headline declared ‘Stop Illegal Immigration.’ Below it were a few sentences, offering support and help and providing an 800 telephone number. He did not read the full text, but he did take out his notebook and write down the number.
‘You remember what the President said last year?’ Signorina Elettra asked him.
‘About this?’ he asked, indicating the screen and what it held.
‘Yes. Do you remember the number he gave?’
‘Of victims?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘I do,’ she said, and Brunetti could all but hear her adding that she remembered because she was a woman and he did not because he was a man. But she said nothing else, and Brunetti did not ask.
‘Would you like me to do anything, sir? Call them?’
‘No,’ he said too quickly; he saw that she was surprised by the answer as well as by the speed with which he gave it. ‘I’ll do it.’ He wanted to say something more to cover up the force of his response to her proposal, but that would be to draw attention to it.
‘Anything else, Commissario?’ he heard her asking.
‘No, thank you, Signorina. The number’s enough.’
‘As you will, Dottore,’ she said and bent her head over the screen.
Walking up the steps, Brunetti was assailed by uneasiness about his strong rebuff of Signorina Elettra’s offer; she was so obviously superior to most of the people who worked at the Questura that she deserved far better of him. Inventive and clever, she was also well versed in the law and would have been an ornament to any police department lucky enough to hire her as an officer. But she was not, and he should not permit her to present herself as a police officer when asking questions or requesting information on the phone. It was bad enough that he turned a blind eye to the various acts of cyber-piracy in which he knew she engaged; indeed, acts which he encouraged her to commit. There was a line somewhere between what she could and could not be permitted to do: Brunetti’s dilemma was that the line he drew was never straight and was never drawn in the same place twice.
On his desk, delivered there he had no idea how, Brunetti found the autopsy report as well as the one from the scene of crime team. He stacked the papers in the centre of the desk, pulled his reading glasses from their case in his pocket, slipped them on, and started to read.