she threaten you, Dottoressa?’

‘No, no,’ she said in notes that descended into pain. ‘She held it over her wrist and said she’d cut it if we didn’t get out.’

She took a breath and then another one. ‘We all came out here. I called security and someone went down to tell the portiere. Then someone said you were on your way, so we stayed out here, all of us.’ He thought she was finished, but then she said, ‘I called Dottor Rizzardi at home. She always worked very well with him.’

‘Is he coming?’

‘Yes.’

Brunetti exchanged a look with Vianello, told the five people to remain where they were, and pushed open the door to the corridor. It closed softly behind them, trapping them in the clinging heat of the corridor. They could hear some sort of low noise from the lab, like the buzz of a machine left running in a distant room.

‘Do we wait for Rizzardi?’ Vianello asked.

Brunetti pointed towards the door to the lab, a white wooden panel with a single porthole. ‘I want to take a look inside first, see what she’s doing.’

They walked down the corridor as quietly as they could, but as they got closer to the door of the lab the noise grew loud enough to cover any footsteps. Brunetti approached the window slowly, aware that any sudden motion might be seen from inside. A step, another, and then he was there, with a clear view into the room.

He saw the usual ordered clutter: vials held upright in wooden racks; dark apothecary jars pushed against the wall; scales and computers at every work station; books and notebooks to the left of the computers. One table in the centre of the room held no equipment. On the floor surrounding it, like wreckage from a sunken ship, a computer monitor, pieces of broken glass and papers lay in small red puddles.

His eyes followed his ears to the noise. A woman in a white lab coat leaned into one of those deep sinks, her back to him. The noise and steam came from the torrent of running water that must be spilling over whatever she held in her hands. He thought of his children, the Water Police, and how they would reprove the waste of all that hot water and the energy necessary to produce it.

He stepped aside and let Vianello take his place. Though the water made it possible for him to speak in his normal voice, Vianello whispered when he asked, ’Why’s she washing her hands?’

Like the noble Romans, Brunetti thought as he shoved past Vianello and pushed open the door. As he ran by one of the desks, he ripped the receiver from a phone, and then yanked the cord from it. Just as he reached her, the woman slumped forward over the edge of the sink, and he saw the red – pink, really – swirling down into the drain.

He grabbed her, pulled her back and laid her on the floor, then used the phone cord as a tourniquet around her right arm. Vianello knelt beside him with another piece of phone cord, and tied off the left.

The face of the woman on the floor was pale, her hair shoulder length and more white than brown. She wore no makeup, but little could have been done to alleviate the plainness of those heavy features and pocked skin.

‘Get someone,’ Brunetti said, and Vianello was gone. He looked at her wrists: the cuts were deep, but they were horizontal, rather than vertical, which left some room for hope. The tourniquets had stopped the bleeding, though some blood had seeped on to the floor.

Her eyes opened. Her lashes and eyebrows were sparse, the eyes a dusty brown. ‘I didn’t want to do it,’ she said. The continuing rush of the water made it difficult to hear her.

Brunetti nodded, as if he understood. ‘We all do things we regret, Signora.’

‘But he asked me,’ she said and closed her eyes for so long that Brunetti feared she was gone. But then she opened them again and said, ‘And I was afraid he’d . . . he’d leave me if I didn’t do it.’

‘Don’t worry about that now, Signora. Lie quietly. Someone will be here soon.’ They were in the middle of a hospital: why was it taking so long?

He heard footsteps, looked up, and saw Rizzardi. The doctor came over and knelt on the other side of the woman. He sighed, almost moaned, when he saw her there. ‘Elvira,’ he