‘Nothing,’ Brunetti said, looking down at his watch. ‘It’s almost two.’
‘All right,’ Vianello said, his disappointment audible. ‘Let’s go back.’ He ducked his head into the car and said to the female officer, ‘Call Riverre and Alvise and tell them to follow us back.’
‘What about the man in the car?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Riverre and Alvise drove out with him. They’ll just come out and meet at the car and drive home.’
Inside the car, Officer Nardi spoke on the radio, telling the two other officers that no one had shown up, and they were going back to Venice. She looked up at Vianello. ‘All right, Sergeant. They’ll be out in a few minutes.’ Saying that, she got out of the car and opened the back door.
‘No, stay there,’ Brunetti said, ‘I’ll sit in the back.’
‘That’s all right, Commissario,’ she said with a shy smile, then added, ‘Besides, I’d like the chance to have a bit of distance between me and the sergeant.’ She got in and closed the door.
Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a glance over the roof of the car. Vianello’s smile was sheepish. They climbed in. Vianello leaned forward and turned the key. The engine sprang to life and a small buzzer sounded.
‘What’s that?’ Brunetti asked. For Brunetti, as for most Venetians, cars were alien territory.
‘Seat-belt warning,’ Vianello said, pulling his down across his chest and latching it by the gear shift.
Brunetti did nothing. The buzzer continued to sound.
‘Can’t you turn that thing off, Vianello?’
‘It’ll go off by itself if you’ll put your seat belt on.’
Brunetti muttered something about not liking to have machines tell him what to do, but he latched his seat belt, and then he muttered something about this being more of Vianello’s ecological nonsense. Pretending not to hear, Vianello put the car into gear, and they pulled away from the kerb. At the end of the street, they waited a few minutes until the other car drew up behind them. Officer Riverre sat at the wheel, Alvise beside him, and when Brunetti turned to signal to them, he could see a third form in the back, head leaning against the seat.
The streets were virtually empty at this hour, and they were quickly back on to the road that led to the Ponte della Liberta.
‘What do you think happened?’ Vianello asked.
‘I thought it had been set up to threaten me in some way, but maybe I was wrong and Crespo really wanted to see me.’
‘So what will you do now?’
‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow and see what kept him from coming tonight.’
They pulled on to the bridge and saw the lights of the city ahead of them. Flat black water stretched out on either side, speckled by lights on the left from the distant islands of Murano and Burano. Vianello drove faster, eager to get to the garage and then home. All of them felt tired, let down. The second car, following close behind them, suddenly pulled out into the centre lane, and Riverre sped past them, Alvise leaning out the window and waving happily to them.
Seeing them, Officer Nardi leaned forward and put her hand on Vianello’s shoulder and started to speak. ‘Sergeant,’ she began and then stopped abruptly as her eyes were pulled up to the rear-view mirror, in which a pair of blinding lights had suddenly appeared. Her fingers tightened on his shoulder and she had time only to shout out, ‘Be careful,’ before the car behind them swerved to the left, pulled abreast and then ahead of them, and then quite deliberately crashed into their left front fender. The force of the impact hurled them to the right, slamming them into the guard rail at the side of the bridge.
Vianello pulled the wheel to the left, but he reacted too slowly, and the rear of the car swung out to the left, carrying them into the middle of the road. Another car coming from behind them at an insane velocity cut to their right and slipped into the space now opened up between them and the guard rail, and then their rear slammed into the guard rail on the left, and they were spun in another half circle, coming to rest in the middle of the road, facing back towards Mestre.
Dazed, not aware of whether he was in pain or not, Brunetti stared through the shattered windshield and saw only the radiant refraction of the headlights that approached them. One set swished past them on the right and then another. He turned to the left and saw Vianello slumped forward against his seat belt. Brunetti reached down and released his own, shifted around in his seat, and grabbed Vianello’s shoulder. ‘Lorenzo, are you all right?’
The sergeant’s eyes opened and he turned to face Brunetti. ‘I think so.’ Brunetti leaned down and un-snapped the other seat belt; Vianello remained upright.
‘Come on,’ Brunetti said, reaching for the door on his side. ‘Get out of the car or one of those maniacs will slam into us.’ He pointed through what was left of the windshield at the lights that kept approaching from the direction of Mestre.
‘Let me call Riverre,’ Vianello said, leaning forward towards the radio.
‘No. Cars have passed. They’ll report it to the Carabinieri in Piazzale Roma.’ As if in proof of his words, he heard the first whine of a siren from the other end of the bridge and saw the flashing blue lights as the Carabinieri sped down the wrong side of the bridge to reach them.
Brunetti got out and leaned down to open the back door. Officer Junior Grade Maria Nardi lay on the back seat of the car, her neck bent at a strange and unnatural angle.
Chapter Twenty
The aftermath of the incident was both predictable and depressing. Neither of them had noticed what kind of car hit them, not even the colour or general size, though it must have been a large one to have thrust them to the side with such force. No other cars had been close enough to them to see what happened, or, if they had been, no one reported it to the police. It was clear that the car, after hitting them, had merely continued into Piazzale Roma, turned, and sped back across to the mainland even before the Carabinieri had been alerted.
Officer Nardi was pronounced dead at the scene, her body taken to the ospedale civile for an autopsy that would merely confirm what was clearly visible from the angle at which her head rested.
‘She was only twenty-three,’ Vianello said, avoiding Brunetti’s glance. ‘They’d been married six months. Her husband’s away on some sort of computer training course. That’s all she kept talking about in the car, how she couldn’t wait until Franco got home, how much she missed him. We sat like that for an hour, face to face, and all she did was talk about her Franco. She was just a kid.’
Brunetti could find nothing to say.
‘If I had made her wear her seat belt, she’d still be alive.’
‘Lorenzo, stop it,’ Brunetti said, voice rough, but not with anger. They were back in the Questura by then, sitting in Vianello’s office while they waited for their reports of the incident to be typed out so that they could sign them and go home. ‘We can go on all night like that. I shouldn’t have gone to meet Crespo. I should have seen that it was too easy, should have been suspicious when nothing happened in Mestre. Next we’ll be saying we should have come back in an armoured car.’
Vianello sat beside his desk, looking past Brunetti. There was a large bump on the left side of his forehead, and the skin around it was turning blue. ‘But we did what we did, or we didn’t do what we didn’t do, and still she’s dead,’ Vianello said in a flat voice.
Brunetti leaned forward and touched the other man’s arm. ‘Lorenzo, we didn’t kill her. The men or the man in that car did. There’s nothing we can do except try to find them.’