The scrabbling intensified, as if the birds had been gripped by some sort of savage euphoria. Lucia rolled over in bed and saw where the light was coming from: the shutters were wide open, though she was sure she’d closed them before going to bed. She drew the covers aside and put her feet on the cold floor. She quickly pulled on her wool socks and covered herself up as best she could with her flannel undershirt which always bunched up around her waist while she slept.

The crows were engaged in an aerial dance of twirls and nosedives over the snow-capped lawn, letting out shrill, hoarse squawks as they flew. Lucia moved closer to the window. There were dozens of them, she’d never seen so many, and they seemed to be drawn to the house. One of the birds made straight for her and crashed into the windowpane, making her jump. She watched the bird writhing on the ground, its wings ruffled, until it regained its balance and took flight once more. It had left a smear of blood on the window and a smattering of barbules that swayed in the wind.

Lucia brought her face to the glass to look at the world through that crimson stain; the snow looked like a carpet of pink sugar paste. A dark, uneven smear cut through it. A thin trail of blood. She followed it with her eyes. It stretched all the way to the foot of her window, where the bowl of milk stood empty. Something was dangling from the corner of one of her shutters.

When she realized what it was, Lucia screamed.

-15-

-15-

The archives at the police headquarters were kept in a cellar of reinforced concrete on the lower ground floor, illuminated by neon lights and populated by dust and endless parallel rows of steel shelves.

Even the elevator didn’t quite reach all the way down there, as if the basement were a world apart and didn’t belong with the rest of the building. You had to go down a flight of stairs where the lights never worked properly; sometimes they flickered like strobe beams, but most of the time they were black fissures that served no purpose whatsoever. The handyman blamed it on humidity; he said it spoiled the light bulbs. But others went as far as to suggest, seemingly without a trace of self-consciousness, that it was all down to some kind of supernatural presence that was evidently averse to the notion of archives.

The place was also known as Purgatory, for it was there that you were usually dispatched to when you’d done something you needed to atone for.

And it was there that Teresa had sent Massimo Marini, instructing him to look through the physical records and the digital archives for comparable murder cases.