Brunetti had no idea what the other man meant, no idea of what might be hidden in the envelope. Some relic of her father? Some evidence that would prove he had taken his own life?
‘What is it?’ Brunetti asked.
His question startled Massimo. ‘Didn’t you send it? They said they were returning your photos to you.’
‘The police sent it?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I don’t know who sent it, but a police boat delivered it.’
Brunetti opened the envelope and pulled out a pile of photos. He set them on the table. On top was one of the upside-down puparìn, then one in which he recognized his sneaker-clad foot beside the boat, and he realized they were the photos he had taken and asked Signorina Elettra to send to Rizzardi.
Massimo cleared his throat again. Brunetti moved the photos aside one by one with the tip of his finger and saw Casati’s left hand, the skin puffy and white, the ring and watch visible, the ring cutting into the white flesh. Brunetti slid the photo aside after looking at it. There followed the photos of Casati’s swollen face from every angle. As he looked at them, Brunetti’s mind clouded over with horror, as it had when he had taken them. He glanced quickly through them and looked up at Massimo. ‘Yes, I took them,’ he said. ‘But I don’t understand why they sent them back to me.’
Massimo tapped insistently at one of them. Brunetti saw the familiar iron grating that Casati had used as an anchor, the rope that had circled and trapped Casati’s leg snaking towards and tied to it.
‘Don’t you see it?’ Massimo demanded.
What in God’s name had he come for? Brunetti wondered. Was he going to claim they’d sent back the wrong ring, the wrong watch, the outlines of both of which he could see at the bottom of the envelope?
‘I don’t understand, Massimo,’ Brunetti said, striving for calm. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
‘But you row, don’t you? You’ve been on boats.’
Brunetti looked at the photo again and saw what he had seen the first time: the grating, the knot, the rope. He moved the photo a few centimetres closer. ‘I’m sorry, Massimo. I still don’t understand.’
Massimo poked at the photo again. ‘Look at that.’ He left his finger on it, obscuring whatever it was Brunetti was meant to see. When he removed his hand and put it in his lap, Brunetti saw that the other man had been pointing at the knot that tied the rope to the grating.
‘That’s not a boatman’s knot,’ Massimo said with complete certainty. ‘No man who works on boats tied that. It’s a landman’s knot; it’s nothing.’
Brunetti looked more closely. No, although the knot was double, it wasn’t the double bowline he’d seen Casati tie. When he studied it, the knot looked like something one of his children would tie: two simple knots, one on top of the other, as if the person who tied it wanted to make sure it could not be easily untied. As it had not been.
‘You think he didn’t tie this?’ Brunetti asked.
Massimo punched his finger on to the knot again. ‘For God’s sake, Guido, Davide couldn’t tie this. It’s a mess; no sailor could make it. It’s stupid, useless.’ In disgust, Massimo pushed the photo away from them; it slid over and stopped just at the edge of Brunetti’s desk.
He looked across at Massimo. ‘Where’s the grating?’
‘It was in the boat when they towed it back to us.’
‘And the knot?’ Brunetti asked.
‘They’d untied the rope at both ends and coiled it in the bottom of the boat.’
Brunetti stared at the photo and imagined showing it to Patta or to a magistrate and trying to persuade them that this knot had been tied by someone other than the dead man, and that the small wound on the man’s forehead had resulted from a blow, after which the rope had intentionally been coiled around his leg and …
Then Brunetti considered the response of judges to that hypothesis – he dared not call it evidence – and realized that there was no way this photo would ever make its way into a courtroom.
Nor would Bianchi ever be asked to risk his comfort by repeating his story, and who could question the largesse of the Maschietto family? Had they not given a church to their village?
The justice system had been looking into what had gone on in Marghera for decades, both before and after the so-called ‘pianificazione’. Sooner or later, they might have a look at GCM Holdings and its part in the clean-up. Or they might not.
Brunetti’s speculations turned to Casati. Maybe he was somewhere, talking to his wife, taking care of his bees. Brunetti’s mother would have liked this scenario; she was a woman who liked happy endings, even though she had seen few of them in her own life.
He looked across at Massimo. ‘Did Federica see this photo?’
‘No.’
Brunetti closed his eyes. Casati continued to speak with his wife, that small woman with large dark eyes. And his bees continued to explore the barena – why not make it a barena in which there was no poison, no death? – and bring back pollen and nectar and transform them by the magic of bees into honey, that sweetest of all things.
Brunetti opened his eyes and looked at Massimo. ‘Good,’ he said.