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before lunch, but only just. By tacit adult agreement, they asked Chiara no more questions about Signora Trevisan and her daughter. Throughout the meal, much to Paola's disapproval, Brunetti continued to reach an occasional, sudden hand out to Chiara, in her usual place beside him. Each motion brought on new peals of gleeful fear and left Paola wishing she had suffi cient authority to send a comm issario of police to his room without lunch.

9
    A well-fe d Brunetti left the house directl y after lunch and walked back to the Questura, stopping along the way for a coffee in the hopes that it would pull him out of the sleepiness induced by good food and the continuing warmth of the day. Back in his office, he pulled off his coat and hung it up, then went over to his desk to see what had arrived during his absence. As he hoped, the autopsy report was there, not the official one but one that must have been typed by Signorina Elettra from notes dictated over the phone.
    The pistol that killed Trevisan was of small calibre, a .22 target pistol, not a heavy weapon. As had been surmised before, one of the bullets had severed the artery leading from Trevisan's heart, so death had been virtually instantaneous. The other had lodged in his stomach. It would appear, from the entrance wounds, that whoever shot him had been standing no more than a metre from him and, from the angle, it would seem that Trevisan had been sitting when he was shot, his killer standing above him and to his right.
    Trevisan had eaten a full meal shortly before he was killed, had drunk a moderate amount of al cohol, certainly not enough to f uddle his senses in any way.
    A bit overweight, perhaps, Trevisan appeared to have been in good health for a man of his age. There were no signs of his ever having had a serious illness, though his appendix had been removed, and he had had a vasectomy. The pathologist saw no reason why he would not have lived, barring serious illness or accident, at least another twenty yean.
    'Two decades stolen,' Brunetti said under his breath when he read that and thought of the vast expanse of things a man could do with twenty years of life: watch a child mature, even watch a grandchild grow; achieve success in business; write a poem. And Trevisan would now never have the chance to do any of these things, to do anything at all. One of the most savage elements in murder, Brunetti had always believed, was the way it mercilessly cut off possibility and stopped the victim from ever again achieving anything. He had been raised a Catholic so he was also aware that, to many people, the greatest horror lay in the fact that the victim was prevented the chance to repent. He remembered the passage in the Inferno where Dante speaks to Francesca da Rimini and hears her tell him how she was 'torn unshriven to my doom'. Though he did not believe, he was not untouched by the magic of belief, and so he realized what a fearful prospect this would be for many men.
    Sergeant Vianello knocked on the door and came in, one of the Questura's plain blue folders in his right hand. 'This man was dean,' he said without introduction and placed the folder on Brunetti's desk. 'As far as we're concerned, he might as well never have existed.
    The only record any of us has for him is his passport, which he renewed-' Vianello began and then opened the folder to check the date. 'Four years ago. Aside from that , nothing. ’
    In itself, this was not surprising: many people managed to go through their entire lives without ever coming to the attention of the police until they became the occasional victims of random violence: drunk drivers, robbery and assault, the panic of a burglar. Few of them , however, were ever the victims of what appeared so strongly to be a professional murder.
    ‘ I have an appointment to speak to his widow this afternoon,' Brunetti said. 'At four.'
    Vianello nodded. There's nothing on the immediate family, either.'
    'Strange, wouldn't you