but then looked away, and Brunetti decided to risk saying, ‘I think you know the answers to both those questions, Dottore.’

Only a man with the habit of honesty or one sufficiently ingenuous to be deceived by Brunetti’s air of certainty would have found that a satisfactory answer to his questions.

‘Ah,’ escaped Fulgoni’s lips in a single long breath, the sort of noise a swimmer makes when hauling himself out of the pool at the far end, race over. ‘Would you tell me again what my wife said?’ he asked in a voice he struggled to keep calm.

‘That you went out for a walk with her to escape the heat in your apartment, and that when you came back, you realized you had dropped your sweater, and that you then went out for about half an hour and came back with it.’

‘I see,’ Fulgoni said. Looking directly at Brunetti, he asked, ‘And do you think this would have been enough time for me to go downstairs and kill Fontana? To have beaten his head in against that statue?’

With no hesitation, Brunetti said, ‘Yes,’ and added, ‘There would have been time enough.’

‘But that doesn’t mean I did it?’ Fulgoni asked.

‘Until there is a motive, your killing him would make no sense,’ Brunetti answered.

‘Of course,’ Fulgoni said, ‘and how – what’s the English word, “sporting?” of you to tell me.’

Brunetti was more surprised by the sentiment than by Fulgoni’s use of the word.

‘Would those samples you say you’ve found supply a motive?’ Fulgoni asked.

‘Yes, they would,’ Brunetti answered, intensely conscious of Fulgoni’s phrasing: ‘you say you’ve found’.

Fulgoni startled Brunetti by getting suddenly to his feet. ‘I think I don’t want to be in the bank any more, Commissario.’

Brunetti rose but remained silent.

‘Why don’t we go to my home and have a look, then?’ Fulgoni suggested.

‘If you think that will help things,’ Brunetti said, though he had no idea, not really, of what he meant by that.

Fulgoni reached for his phone and asked that a taxi be called for him.

The two men stood side by side on the deck, not speaking, as the taxi carried them up the Grand Canal and under the Rialto. The day was sun-bright, but the breeze on the water kept them from feeling the heat. In Brunetti’s experience, tension drove most people to talk, and the tension that filled Fulgoni was easily read in the white of his knuckles as he grasped the taxi’s railing. But anger just as often kept them silent as they used their energy to run over the past, perhaps seeking the place or time where things went wrong or flew out of control.

The taxi pulled up at the same place Foa had used the day the body was discovered. Fulgoni paid the driver and added a generous tip, then stepped on to the embankment. He turned to see if Brunetti needed a hand, but he was already beside him.

Still not speaking, they walked down the embankment and over the bridge. They stopped at the portone and Brunetti waited while Fulgoni pulled out his keys and opened the door.

Fulgoni led the way to the storeroom that held the birdcages and drew up sharp in front of the padlocked chain. ‘I assume it’s there that you found your samples?’ he asked, pointing inside.

Brunetti had thought to get the keys from the evidence room and pulled them from his pocket. He fitted the various keys in the lock until he found the right one, removed the lock and opened the door. It was almost noon, so the sun beat down squarely upon them and cast no light into the storeroom. Fulgoni reached inside and switched on the light.

Ignoring the birdcages, he walked straight to the boxes piled beside them. Brunetti watched as he read the labels, though his body blocked Brunetti from reading them. At last he reached up and slid one out, creating a small avalanche as the boxes above it collapsed to fill the space. He placed it on a small round table with a scratched surface that Brunetti had overlooked. Fulgoni picked at the tape, dry and difficult to remove, that sealed the box and pulled it loose in a single long strip. Turning to Brunetti, he said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to open it, Commissario.’

He moved past Fulgoni and pulled back the first flaps, then the next two. A grey turtleneck sweater lay on the top.

‘I think you have to look deeper, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said and then gave a dry laugh in which there