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suicide?’
    Venturi’s long pause made it obvious that he wanted to exchange discourtesies with Brunetti, but when Santini turned to him and said, ‘Well?’, the doctor answered, ‘I won’t have any idea until I can take a look at his insides.’ Then, directly to Santini, ‘Was there a chair, something he could stand on?’
    One of the other technicians called over, ‘A chair. It was in the shower.’
    ‘You didn’t move it, did you?’ Venturi demanded of him.
    ‘I photographed it,’ the man answered, speaking with glacial clearness. ‘Eight times, I think. And then Pedone dusted it for prints. And then I moved it so it wouldn’t get in his way when he dusted the shower stall.’ Pointing with his chin to a wooden chair that stood in front of one of the sinks, he added, ‘That’s it, over there.’
    The doctor ignored the chair. ‘I’ll have my report sent to you when I’m finished,’ he said to Brunetti, then picked up his bag and left.
    When Venturi’s footsteps had died away, Brunetti asked Santini, ‘What does it look like to you?’
    ‘He
could
have done it himself,’ the technician answered. He pointed to some marks that stood out from the darker grey of the coating on the walls of the shower. ‘There are two long swipes across the wall here, at about shoulder height. He could have done that.’
    ‘Would that have happened?’
    ‘Probably. It’s instinct: no matter how much they want to die, the body doesn’t. ‘
    Pedone, who had been openly listening to this, added, ‘It’s clean, sir. No one had a fight in there, if that’s what you’re wondering about.’
    When it seemed that his partner wasn’t going to add anything, Santini continued: ‘It’s what they do, sir, when they hang themselves. Believe me. If there’s a wall near them, they try to grab it; can’t help themselves.’
    ‘It’s the way boys do it, isn’t it, hanging?’ Brunetti asked, not looking down at Moro.
    ‘More than girls, yes,’ Santini agreed. His voice took on an edge of anger and he asked, ‘What was he – seventeen? eighteen? How could he do something like that?’
    ‘God knows,’ Brunetti said.
    ‘God didn’t have anything to do with this,’ Santini said angrily, though it was unclear whether his remark called into question the deity’s charity or his very existence. Santini went out into the hall, where two white-coated attendants from the hospital waited, a rolled-up stretcher leaning against the wall between them. ‘You can take him now,’ he said. He remained outside while they went in, put the boy on the stretcher, and carried him from the room. When they were abreast of Santini, he put up a monitory hand. They stopped, and he leaned down to pick up the end of the dark-blue military cloak that was dragging on the ground behind the stretcher. He tucked it under the boy’s leg and told the attendants to take him out to the boat.

5
    RECOGNIZING IT AS the temptation of moral cowardice, Brunetti pushed aside the desire to join the others on the police boat to the hospital and from there to the Questura. Perhaps it was the flash of terror when he first saw the boy’s body, or perhaps it was Brunetti’s admiration for the elder Moro’s inconvenient honesty, but something there was that urged Brunetti to get a more complete picture of the boy’s death. The suicides of young boys were ever more frequent: Brunetti had read somewhere that, with almost mathematical regularity, they increased in times of economic well-being and decreased when times were bad. During wars, they virtually disappeared. He assumed his own son was as subject to the vagaries of adolescence as any other boy: carried up and down on the waves of his hormones, his popularity, or his success at school. The idea of Raffi’s ever being driven to suicide was inconceivable, but that must be what every parent thought.
    Until evidence suggested that the boy’s death had not been suicide, Brunetti had no mandate to question