when you arrived?’
‘There was the Lieutenant, sir. Scarpa. And Officers Alvise and Portoghese. And three technicians from the crime squad. And the photographer.’ His voice trailed off, but it was obvious that he had not finished.
‘Who else?’ Brunetti said in an encouraging tone.
‘There were four people who lived in the building, or who acted like they did. One of them had a dog. And then some people standing over by the portone.’
‘Did you get their names?’
‘I thought about it, sir. But I figured, since there was a ranking officer and two other officers who are senior to me, well, I figured they’d already done that. And it didn’t seem my place to ask if they had.’
Brunetti took a closer look at the young man. He glanced at his nametag: ‘Zucchero,’ he read. ‘Are you Pierluigi’s son?’
‘Yes, sir,’ he answered.
‘I never met your father,’ Brunetti said, ‘but everyone here speaks of him with respect.’
‘Thank you, sir. He was a good man.’
‘Ispettore Vianello?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Upstairs talking to the mother, Commissario. He got here about half an hour ago.’
Brunetti stepped back from the young man and turned in a circle to study the inside of the courtyard. One wall ran along the street; opposite it, on the other side of the scene of crime tape, stood three doors made of metal grillework, all of them closed.
‘What are those?’ Brunetti asked, pointing to the doors.
‘The storerooms for the apartments, sir.’ Then Zucchero pointed to a fourth grillework door on one of the side walls, also closed, half hidden behind a line of potted palms. ‘There’s another one over there, sir.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ Brunetti said.
The three of them walked over to the single door, which stood in the shade cast by two of the palms. Brunetti noticed that a metal chain had been run through the bars of the door and through a metal hasp that had been nailed into the wooded door frame. ‘Lieutenant Scarpa had all the padlocks replaced, sir. But I’ve got the keys.’ Moving past Brunetti, Zucchero stuck his hands through the bars and switched on a light which allowed them to see inside.
The room was empty, the floor swept clean, but not recently, for tiny patches of powdered stucco had fallen since the last cleaning and stood out like dusty islands in a cement sea. The walls were entirely bare, save for the occasional patch where the whitewash was flaking off.
Brunetti reached in to switch off the light, and they crossed the courtyard to the first of the other doors. The sun reached halfway up the wall and, falling through the grating at an angle, brightened the first metre of the pavement. Made from large terracotta tiles, the pavement was raised two steps above the surface of the courtyard, reducing the humidity and perhaps protecting against the risk of acqua alta. Zucchero opened the lock and pulled open the door. Brunetti lowered his head and stepped inside, found the light and switched it on.
In contrast to the stark emptiness of the other, this storeroom exploded with things: boxes, suitcases, knapsacks, old paint tins, plastic buckets with rags erupting from them, empty jam and pickle jars. At the end, he read the history of childhood: a collapsible wooden baby cot, its plastic bottom sheet draped across it so that only the round metal castors and the bottom of the legs were visible. A hanging mobile of animals and bells had crash-landed on a bookcase. Two cardboard boxes contained a zoo of soft animals, all the worse for wear. Two unopened boxes of Pampers stood beside the mobile, perhaps awaiting the arrival of another child.
Brunetti stepped back and bumped into Griffoni. He apologized, standing back so she could leave, then he switched off the light, and Zucchero saw to closing the door.
Griffoni chose not to go into the third storeroom when Zucchero removed the chain and opened the door. It was identical in size to the other, about three metres in width and extending at least five towards the back wall. Inside, shelves holding boxes ran from floor to ceiling on both sides. The boxes were all the same size and made of plain brown cardboard: these were boxes meant to store things, not boxes brought home from the supermarket and pressed into service. Each bore a neat hand-printed label in the centre of the side that faced out from the shelf. ‘Zia Maria’s Tea Set’, ‘Handkerchiefs’, ‘Winter shoes’, ‘Woollen scarves’, ‘Araldo’s books’. And so it went, the detritus of life