‘What are we doing in the Misericordia?’

‘His home is up ahead, on the left.’

‘Oddio,’ Brunetti exclaimed. ‘It’s not Fontana, is it?’

‘I told you his name when I called,’ insisted Griffoni.

Brunetti remembered the clicks and noises on the phone line and said, ‘Yes, of course.’

‘You know him?’ she asked, interested.

‘No. But I know about him.’

‘Worked at the Tribunale, didn’t he?’ she asked.

Feeling the boat begin to slow, Brunetti said only ‘Yes’, before moving forward to take the mooring rope. Foa stopped on the right side of the canal, and Brunetti stepped up to the pavement and tied the rope to a metal ring. He extended a hand to Griffoni and helped her from the boat; Foa said he would find a bar to get out of the sun and told them to call him when they were finished.

She led the way: down to the first bridge, across it and up the calle to the first right. Then the third house on the right: a large brown portone with a panel of names and bells beside it.

Griffoni had a key and let them in to what turned out to be a large courtyard filled with potted palms and bushes, the far side already shady in the late afternoon. Motion there caught his eye. A young officer, one of the new recruits, jumped to his feet and saluted the two commissari. Brunetti noticed then that scene of crime tape divided the courtyard into two parts, in the farther of which stood the young man. He and Griffoni slipped under the tape and approached. ‘Where was he?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Over there, Commissario,’ the young officer said, pointing back towards the stairway that led up to the door to the building.

Brunetti and Griffoni walked over to the steps; Brunetti’s eyes were drawn to a bloodstain on the pavement that looked as if it had been formed around three sides of a rectangle. The chalk-drawn figure of a man emerged from the stain, its feet pointing towards them. From the angle at which Brunetti saw it, the figure looked surprisingly small.

‘Where’s the statue?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Bocchese had it taken to the lab,’ Griffoni said. ‘It was only a nineteenth-century marble copy of a Byzantine lion.’ The remark confused Brunetti, but he chose not to ask about it.

He looked back at the portone that opened into the calle and saw that the bloodstain was about fifteen metres from it, so someone could have been waiting in the courtyard. Or Fontana could have been pushed inside. Or he had gone inside with someone he knew.

‘What time did it happen?’ Brunetti asked Griffoni.

‘No one’s sure. We haven’t questioned the people in the building yet, but one man told Scarpa he and his wife came home just after midnight, and didn’t see anything.’ Waving her arm back at the portone and sweeping it in a line that ended at the bloodstain, she said, ‘There was no way they could not have seen him. So: some time after midnight.’

‘Until seven-thirty,’ Brunetti said. ‘Long time.’

Griffoni nodded in agreement. ‘That’s one of the reasons I wanted Rizzardi to do the autopsy.’

‘What did Scarpa tell you?’ asked Brunetti.

‘He said the wife of this couple told him Fontana lived with his mother. She’s very religious, goes to Mass every day and out to the cemetery once a week to tend her husband’s grave. That her son was devoted to her and it’s such a pity that he should be cut off in the prime of life. Usual story: once a person is dead, people start falling over themselves saying what a fine person he was and what a loss to the world, and how wonderful his entire family is.’

‘Which means, according to you?’

Griffoni smiled and answered, ‘What it would mean to anyone who pays attention to what people are really saying when they’re talking about how wonderful other people are: that she’s a dragon and probably made her son’s life a living misery.’ They were some distance from the young recruit and spoke in low voices; Brunetti regretted this, for it would delay the young man’s exposure to one of the basic truths his profession would eventually reveal to him: never trust anything that is said about a dead person.

Brunetti took another look at the scene of the crime, the tape, the chalked figure. He called over to the young officer, ‘Did you come with Lieutenant Scarpa?’

‘No, sir. I was on patrol over by San Leonardo and got a call telling me to come here.’

‘Who was here