A range of emotions lashed his face: anger, discomfort, disbelief, and above all, shame. Deceptive patches of grass kept giving way under his feet as he tried to clamber over them, plunging him into pools of clinging mud.

The eyes of countless strangers were upon him. He had just been transferred to this precinct, and this was his new team. That must be his new boss, watching him from the edge of the woods.

The snow, which had previously seemed unsure whether to fall at all, had thickened now. It brushed over his burning cheeks; its weight lingered on his skin and was gone in the time it took to blink.

Massimo willed himself to look up. Superintendent Battaglia was an olive-skinned man in his forties, slightly shorter than Massimo himself, currently observing him with narrowed eyes and a cigarette between his lips. A fellow officer had pointed Massimo in that direction, and he’d immediately set off, ignoring the officer’s shout of warning. He had marched forward in a show of confidence, and only when he’d found himself sinking into the swamp had he realized why the officer had looked so worried.

He would never forget this day for as long as he lived. He’d arrived at the police station a few minutes late that morning, and had sat waiting in a corridor for half an hour until someone had deigned to tell him that his team wasn’t there because they’d been called out for a suspected homicide. No one had bothered to wait for him or leave a message. They’d simply forgotten him.

I was only five minutes late.

At first Massimo thought it was a joke, but the officer had been deadly serious; Battaglia does not have a sense of humor, he’d assured him. Neither do you, thought Massimo, looking at the man’s face.

There were only two things left for Massimo to do: sit and wait for the squad to return to the headquarters, or go out and join them, wherever they were.

Regrettably, he’d chosen the second option.