Falling in Love: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery (Commissario Brunetti) by Donna Leon

Author:Donna Leon [Leon, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2015-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

17

Flavia leaned forward, rested her elbows on the dressing table, and lowered her head into her hands. Brunetti heard her mutter something but couldn’t make out the words. He waited. From beside her, he saw her shake her head a few times, and then she sat up and looked at him. ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’ She closed her eyes and bit her lower lip, then looked at him and said, voice not as steady as it had been, ‘That’s just cheap melodrama, isn’t it? Of course I believe this is happening: that’s what’s so horrible.’

Brunetti, much as he would have liked to offer her comfort, refused to lie to her. The brief conversation between Flavia and Francesca, containing nothing more than a compliment about the girl’s talent, was perhaps the link to the attack on the bridge. ‘È mia.’ Did a polite compliment lead to this assertion of absolute possession, and was any person in whom Flavia showed interest to be put in danger?

Brunetti had been fortunate in his career in that, regardless of how many bad and very bad people he had been forced to encounter in his years of police work, he had rarely had to deal with the mad. The behaviour of the bad made sense: they wanted money or power or revenge or someone else’s wife, and they wanted them for reasons that another person could understand. Further, there was usually a connection between them and their victims: rivals, partners, enemies, relatives, husband and wife. Find a person who stood to gain – and not only in the financial sense – from the death or injury of the victim and put some pressure on that connection or start to wind in the connecting line, and very often the returning tug would lead to the person responsible. There had always been a line: the secret was to find it.

Here, however, the reason might have been nothing more than a casual conversation, a bit of praise, a bit of encouragement, the sort of thing any generous-spirited person would give to a young woman at the beginning of her career. This appeared to have provoked rage against the girl sufficient to cause violence.

‘What do I do?’ Flavia asked at last, and Brunetti withdrew from his speculations to return to her. ‘I can’t live like this,’ she said, ‘trapped between this little room and my apartment. I don’t want to be afraid of everyone I see coming close to me on the street.’

‘And if I said you’re not likely to be in danger?’ Brunetti asked.

‘My friends are, anyone I speak to is. Isn’t that the same thing?’

Only to the purest of Christian spirits, Brunetti thought, but did not say. Over the years, he had seen diverse reactions to physical danger. So long as it is speculative, we respond as heroes, lions; in the face of real physical danger, we become mice.

‘Flavia,’ he began, ‘I don’t think this person wants to harm you; he or she wants to love you.

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