Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(24)

‘Yes. If they were in the hospital, then they were safe.’

Brunetti quelled the impulse to question Duso’s certainty that the young women would be safe in the hospital. Instead, he asked, ‘Has Vio tried to call you again?’

‘Yes. He called to say he saw the article.’

‘That’s all?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No. We talked about it, and then he said he thought he hurt himself when he fell in the boat.’

Brunetti decided to return to the reality in this room and said, ‘Avvocato Duso, I’m afraid you’ve forgotten that there are legal consequences to be considered.’ He gave the young man time to answer, but Duso chose to remain silent.

‘As I said before,’ Brunetti continued. ‘There is the failure to report an accident at sea in which passengers were injured,’ he began, ‘but more importantly, there is the failure to provide assist-ance to those persons. That is a crime both on land and at sea.’

‘But we did provide assistance,’ Duso said. ‘We took them to Pronto Soccorso.’

‘Another way to describe what you did would be to say you abandoned them on the dock, Signor Duso,’ Griffoni remarked.

The young man’s face flushed with anger, or fear, that he failed to suppress. ‘That’s not true. Not true at all. I rang the alarm bell beside the door.’

‘Did your friend see you do it?’ Griffoni asked.

After a moment’s hesitation, Duso said, ‘I don’t know. He should have, but I don’t know for sure.’ Then, seeing how hard her face remained, he asked, ‘You don’t think I’d leave them there without ringing the alarm bell, do you?’

Griffoni sat back in her seat and folded her hands in her lap. She looked at her upright thumbs and tapped them together a few times before finally saying, ‘I’m afraid I have no choice but to believe exactly that, Signore.’

‘What?’

‘That you’d leave them there without ringing the alarm bell.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, voice rising towards the end of the sentence.

‘There is no alarm bell at that entrance, Signor Duso. There was, once, until about six months ago, when it was removed.’

All Duso could do was repeat, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘They had too many false alarms, Signor Duso. Especially during the summer. Boats pulled up, usually late at night, someone jumped on the dock and punched the alarm, then got back in the boat, and off they went, and by the time someone got to the door, they were long gone.’

She waited to watch Duso grasp the meaning, and then the consequences, of what she had said, and before he could ask, she went on. ‘I was there yesterday. There is no alarm button. They were found by chance, by someone going out to have a cigarette.’

Both of them could see that Duso was stunned by this. Griffoni continued, ‘They took me out on the dock to show me where it used to be.’

Duso looked confused more than frightened. ‘But I pushed it.’

Brunetti turned to look at Griffoni and saw her thumbs sep-arate as she pulled her hands apart and placed them on the desk. He’d seen the video and tried to summon up the image it had shown. It was taken from above the doors, and thus it looked away from the building and from the alarm.

Griffoni pressed her hands on the table and turned towards Brunetti. He anticipated her movement and said, speaking more loudly than was his wont, ‘Claudia, could I have a moment with you?’

He got to his feet, making sure his chair made a lot of noise scraping on the floor and being banged into place.

Griffoni stood, as quietly as he had been loud, and walked to the door. Duso was caught up in his own thoughts.

In the corridor, Brunetti said, ‘Tell me.’

She looked across at him, shaking her head in obvious confusion. ‘I was in a hurry, Guido. I’m sure there was a sign, but I don’t remember seeing a button.’

He considered this for some time and asked her, ‘Do you have the number for Pronto Soccorso?’

She pulled out her phone and found the number. After she punched it in, he said, ‘Ask whoever answers to go out on the dock and take a photo and send it to you.’

She smiled and nodded. When the phone was answered, she announced her rank and name and said she had a request in relation to the two young women who had been left on the dock during the weekend. All obstacles fell at the mention of the victims, and the photo arrived on Griffoni’s phone within three minutes.

‘Pronto Soccorso’ was printed in red on a white plastic plaque attached to the wall to the right of the automatic doors: a red circle below the words had been X’d out by two pieces of black electrical tape; traces of the red could be seen in the interstices where the two pieces of tape crossed.

She showed the photo to Brunetti, who tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. ‘It could be,’ he said. ‘Night time, confusion, fear.’

Griffoni looked more closely at the photo. ‘It’s anyone’s guess.’ She let some seconds pass and then admitted, ‘If I saw it, I’d probably try to push it.’

‘There’s still not reporting an accident,’ Brunetti said, but he said it lamely, knowing how hard it would be to bring this to court. How long would it have taken an ambulance to get to them and take the young women to the hospital?