The noise was the one made by the little girl: something prevented him from referring to it as her voice. The other was the strangely parallel conversation he had had with the grandmother: he spoke of threats, and she said they were meaningless, nothing, all the while suggesting that De Cal was a potentially violent man. He tried to remember everything they had said and could come up with only one alternative interpretation: it was Tassini who had made the threats, perhaps provoked into them by De Cal’s violence. If not this, then the old woman was talking nonsense, and that was something Brunetti was convinced this particular woman would not do. Lie, perhaps; evade, certainly; but she would always talk sense. His phone rang, and when he stopped walking to answer it he heard Pucetti’s voice asking, ‘Commissario?’ ‘Yes. What is it, Pucetti?’ ‘You had lunch yet, sir?’ ‘No,’ Brunetti answered, suddenly reminded that he was hungry. ‘Would you like to go out to Murano and talk to someone?’ ‘One of your relatives?’ Brunetti asked, pleased that the young man had worked so fast.
What do You think about Through A Glass Darkly (2009)?
