‘Perhaps,’ Signora Giusti said uncertainly.
Sensing her hesitation, Brunetti abandoned his casual tone and spoke with the seriousness he thought this matter warranted. ‘Signora, we simply want to understand what sort of woman she was. Everyone we speak to says she was a good person, and I have no reason not to believe it. But that doesn’t give me any real understanding of her. So anything you can tell me might help.’
‘Help what?’ she asked with a sharpness that surprised Brunetti. ‘What is it you’re really asking about? You’re the police, and nothing good ever comes of getting mixed up with you. Since you came in here, you’ve been mixing truth with what you think I want or need to hear, but what you’ve never said is why these questions are important.’
She paused, but it was not to try to calm herself, nor to listen to anything either one of them might try to say. ‘I looked at the newspapers, and they’re saying she died of a heart attack. If that’s true, then there’s no need for you to be here, asking these questions.’
‘I can understand your concern, Signora, living in the same building,’ Brunetti said.
She raised both hands to her temples and pressed against the side of her head, as if there were too much noise or too much pain. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it. Either tell me what’s going on or get out of here, the two of you.’ By the time she finished, she was almost shouting.
Training warred against instinct; Brunetti’s experience of human nature came up against his feelings of human sympathy. Caution won. Once someone knew something, you were no longer in control of it, for they were free to do with it what they pleased, and what they pleased need not be what pleased you, and often was not.
‘All right,’ he said, forcing his body to relax into an easier posture, one reflective of honesty. ‘The cause was a heart attack; there’s no question of that. But we would like to exclude the possibility that someone might have created conditions favourable to it.’
She bristled at the jargon and said, ‘What does that mean?’
Calmly, as though he had not noticed her reaction, he went on, ‘It means that someone might have…’ and here he paused and gave every appearance of pausing to assess her trustworthiness before he went on, ‘frightened her or threatened her.’
More calmly, she asked, ‘Is this an official investigation?’
He lapsed into the truth. ‘No, not really. Perhaps it’s for my peace of mind, or her son’s. But I’d like to exclude the possibility that she was… that she was forced or frightened into death. I want to know if someone menaced her in any way, and I thought you might know something.’
‘Does it make a difference?’ she asked instantly.
‘To what?’
‘Legally,’ she said.
Without telling her about those small marks on Signora Altavilla’s neck and shoulders, Brunetti had no answer to give her.
She got up and went over to the front window that looked into the campo and at the thrusting church. Back still to them, she said, ‘From down on the ground, when I go out the door, I see the church, and it looks one way: heavy, locked into the ground. But from up here, it looks almost as if it had wings.’ She paused for a long time; Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a glance.
‘Same church. Different angle,’ she said and again lapsed into silence.
‘Like Costanza,’ she said after a long pause, and Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a quicker glance. ‘When I first saw the women on the stairs, I had no idea who they were. I knew they weren’t cleaning women because we use the same one, Luba. But I couldn’t ask Costanza. Because she was such a private person. But they’d be there, and I’d see the same ones a few times. In the beginning, as I said, I really didn’t notice them. And then I did, but they never caused any trouble, were always very polite, so I just sort of got used to them.’
‘Until?’ Brunetti asked, sensing that he was meant to ask and that she needed help to tell this story.
‘Until I found one of them on the steps, well, on the landing in front of Costanza’s door: I was coming up the steps, and there she was. Costanza wasn’t home – I rang her bell – and this girl was lying there. At first I thought she might be drunk or something. I don’t know why I thought that; they’d always been very quiet.’ She looked away, and Brunetti could see her thinking about what she had just said. ‘Maybe it’s because they’d all looked poor, and it was my bourgeois prejudice coming out.’ They watched her shoulders rise in an unconscious shrug. ‘I don’t know.
‘I couldn’t just leave her there, so I tried to help her get up. She was moaning, so I knew she wasn’t unconscious. That’s when I saw her face. Her nose was pushed to one side, and there was a lot of blood down the front of her coat. At first I didn’t notice it because the coat was black and I hadn’t really seen her face until I got her to sit up.’
Signora Giusti turned around and folded her arms across her chest. ‘I asked her what had happened, and she said she had fallen on the street. So I said I was going to call an ambulance and take her to the hospital.’
‘Was she Italian?’ Vianello asked.
‘No, I don’t know where she was from. The East somewhere, I’d say, but I’m not sure.’
‘Did she speak Italian?’
‘Enough to understand what I said and to tell me about falling. “Cadere. Pavimento.” That sort of thing. And enough to understand “ospedale”.’
‘What did she do?’
‘When she heard me say that, she panicked. She grabbed my hand and said “Prego, prego,” again and again. “No ospedale.” Things like that.’
‘What happened?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I heard – we both heard – the door open. The front door downstairs.’ She closed her eyes, remembering the scene. ‘The woman – she was really still a girl. Couldn’t have been much more than a teenager, really – she panicked. I’ve never seen anyone do this, just read about it. She crawled over to the corner and pushed herself into it. She pulled her coat up over her head as if she thought that would hide her or make her invisible. But she kept moaning, so anyone would know she was there.’
‘And then?’
‘And then Costanza came up. She didn’t say anything, just stopped at the top of the steps. The girl was moaning again by then, like an animal. I started to say something, but she held up a hand and said the girl’s name, Alessandra or Alexandra, I don’t remember which, and then she said that everything was all right and there was nothing to be afraid of, the same sort of thing you’d say to children when they wake up in the night.’
‘And the girl?’ Vianello asked.
‘She stopped moaning, and Costanza went over and knelt down beside her.’ She looked at them, surprised to be remembering something now. ‘But she didn’t touch her. She just said her name a few more times and told her everything was fine and not to worry.’
‘Then what?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I stood up and Costanza said, “Thank you,” as though I’d just given her a cup of tea or something. But it was clear that she was telling me to leave, so I did. I went back up to my apartment.’
‘Did you ever see the girl again?’
‘No. Never. Then, after a few months, there was another one, but I never spoke to any of them again – there might have been two or three more that I knew about.’
‘Did Signora Altavilla ever refer to it or say anything to you about it?’