Suffer the Little Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

gave Marvilli a glance severe enough to stop him from speaking.
    â€˜I suppose so,’ she said slowly. ‘Come with me, please.’ She rose from her chair. As they walked past her desk, Brunetti saw that the screen of the computer showed a scene from a historical film, perhaps
Gladiator
, perhaps
Alexander
.
    He followed her down the corridor, aware of Marvilli’s footsteps behind them. She stopped at a door on the right, knocked, and in response to a noise Brunetti did not hear, opened the door and put her head inside. ‘A policeman’s here, Dottore,’ she said.
    â€˜One of them’s in here already, damn it,’ a man’s voice said, with no attempt to disguise his anger. ‘That’s enough. Tell him to wait.’
    The nurse drew her head back and closed the door. ‘You heard him,’ she said, all pleasantness fled from her voice and from her face.
    Marvilli looked at his watch. ‘What time does the hospital bar open?’ he asked.
    â€˜Five,’ she answered. Seeing the face he made in response to this, her tone softened and she said, ‘There are some coffee machines on the ground floor.’ She left them without another word and went back to her film.
    Marvilli asked Brunetti if he wanted anything, but Brunetti declined. Saying he would be back soon, the Captain turned away. Brunetti immediately regretted his decision and was about tocall after his retreating back, ‘
Caffè doppio, con due zuccheri, per piacere
,’ but something restrained him from breaking the silence. He watched Marvilli pass through the swinging doors at the end of the corridor, then went over to a row of orange plastic chairs. Brunetti took a seat and began to wait for someone to emerge from the room.

4
    WHILE BRUNETTI WAITED, he tried to make some sense of what was going on. If the assistant chief of neurology had been called in at three in the morning, then something serious had been done to this Dottor Pedrolli, despite Marvilli’s attempts to downplay the situation. Brunetti could not understand the excessive use of force, though it was possible that a captain who was not part of the men’s command unit might not have been able to control the operation as effectively as would someone more familiar with his men. No wonder Marvilli was uneasy.
    Could it be that Dottor Pedrolli, as well as having illegally adopted a baby himself, was more deeply involved in whatever traffic was going on? As a paediatrician, he would haveaccess to children and, through them, to their parents, perhaps to parents who wanted other children, or even to those who could be persuaded to part with an unwanted child.
    Or he might have access to orphanages: those children must have as much need of a doctor’s services – perhaps more – than children living at home with their parents. Vianello, he knew, had been raised with orphans: his mother had taken in the children of a friend, but she had done it to keep them from being sent to an orphanage, that atavistic terror of his parents’ generation. Surely things were different now, what with the involvement of the social services, of child psychologists. But Brunetti was forced to admit that he didn’t know how many orphanages still existed in the country and, in fact, even where any of them were.
    His mind flashed to the early years of his marriage to Paola, when the university had assigned her to teach a class on Dickens, and he, with the solidarity of a new husband, had read the novels along with her. He remembered, with a shudder, the orphanage where Oliver Twist was sent, but then he recalled the passage in
Great Expectations
that had most chilled his blood at the time, Mrs Joe’s admonition that children should be ‘brought up by hand’, a phrase neither he nor Paola could ever decipher but which had nevertheless unsettled them both.
    But Dickens had written almost two centuries ago, when families, by