“Yes. We’ll need to examine everything very carefully. When the papers arrive I’ll have copies made of the ruling so that you, Tancredi and Annapaola can read it immediately. Then we’ll meet and decide what to do.”

“You’ll have to ask Judge Marinelli for an extension, otherwise there won’t be much to assess.”

We parted at the entrance to the courthouse. I went off to handle a couple of exciting trials for fraudulent bankruptcy and she to bring a civil action against a stalker. Consuelo is a defence lawyer, but she has the soul of a prosecutor. It’s a lot of effort for her to defend people of whose innocence she isn’t convinced. So we share the tasks in a fairly natural way: I mostly defend accused people, she defends mostly victims, in particular victims of crimes like sexual violence, stalking and abuse. No defendant and no defence counsel is ever pleased to have her on the plaintiff’s side.

When I got back to the office early in the afternoon, a complete copy of the file relating to the case of Lorenza’s son was waiting for me on my desk. Iacopo Cardace, the young man was called. The surname didn’t mean anything to me, so the father probably wasn’t somebody I’d known when the mother and I had been going out together – going out together? What a banal expression, I thought.

There was also an envelope with a handwritten note. 26

This is the case file. Today I went to see Iacopo and told him to appoint you and revoke all previous appointments. You should get the message from the prison as soon as possible.

Thank you.

L.

The handwriting was sharp-edged, elegant, slightly hard to read.

I went out to have a bite to eat in the health food store with canteen attached near the office, resisting the impulse to also have a glass of wine. Then I paid a brief visit to the Feltrinelli bookshop, which was also close by. I wandered between the shelves, which for me is a kind of sedative, nodded to a few people who were often in the shop in the early afternoon, and bought a volume of Kafka’s aphorisms and fragments after reading some of them. Number thirty-eight said: “A man was amazed at how easily he went along the road to eternity; the fact was, he was rushing along it downhill.”

I went back to the office and drew up a plan of action. I’m very good at drawing up plans in order to buy time and put off the moment when I have to really get down to work.