Inspector. He was little more than a kid, and looked like he’d just stepped out of a fashion magazine. Teresa had smelled his cologne from yards away. He struck an unseemly note in that narrow mountain moor now filling up with snow and with blood washing off the moss and into the soil—the blood of a man who had been killed in a manner even police officers would rarely see in the course of their careers.

Massimo Marini had a handsome face veiled by a thin shadow. He hadn’t shaved. Something must have gone wrong for him that morning. Perhaps more than one thing, judging by his appearance. He hadn’t gotten off to the best of starts; the young man’s attempt to seem determined had backfired rather spectacularly. But everyone deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt, Teresa thought, even when it seems like a lost cause.

She wondered why he had requested a transfer from a big city to this small provincial precinct. What was he so eager to leave three hundred miles behind?

We run away from what scares or hurts us—or from what holds us captive.

Perhaps it was a failed relationship that he hadn’t quite gotten over. But his face bore no signs of anguish or sleepless nights—only tension, the cause of which was Teresa, and not some blushing maiden. There must be something else that had driven him away.

He stood still as snowflakes began to gather on his shoulders, more stooped now than when he’d first arrived.

Teresa suppressed a smirk. She delighted in stretching newcomers’ nerves to breaking point, and she wasn’t about to make an exception now. There had been something almost pitiful in the way he’d looked at her, like a lost puppy. Teresa knew that for a moment, he’d been scared—scared that he would be reprimanded, scared that he’d been rude, scared that he might have come across as an amateur when he’d wanted so much to impress everyone with his confidence.

She took no more notice of him, and turned to address Parisi, resuming the discussion that had been interrupted by the inspector’s arrival.

“We should search the canal, too, through the vegetation down there,” she said.

The officer nodded.

Teresa glanced at Marini. She wondered where he’d left his coat, or whatever it was that he normally wore to shield himself from the cold. She refrained from asking the question.

“Will you take a look, Inspector?” she said instead.

He looked aghast for a moment. But he didn’t ask for help; he lowered himself into the canal, clinging onto the overhanging branches so as not to tumble into the stagnant water.

Teresa shook her head. What was the use of an ego that size, other than for making life harder?

He did go straight in, though. We didn’t have to ask twice.