A few more minutes and the wait would be over. The question I had managed to evade for more than two months crept into my thoughts. Did I really believe in my client’s innocence? Did I believe what he and Lorenza had told me? I was almost about to start arguing with myself, hoping to solve the question before I opened my mouth. Then I told myself it was a bad idea.

A very bad idea, given the moment.

So, to dismiss any other doubts, I devoted myself to a dogged and pointless rereading of my notes until everyone came back in and the hearing resumed.

“How long do you think you’ll need for your closing statement, Avvocato Guerrieri?” Marinelli asked me.

“I’ll require more or less three hours, Your Honour.”

He cleared his throat and exchanged a glance and a nod with Valentini. “Very well, Avvocato. Then let’s do it this way: you start; when you’re more or less halfway you decide 250when to break. We resume tomorrow, you conclude your statement, we see if there are any responses, after which the court retires to deliberate. Is that all right for everyone?” he asked, looking first at me, then at Gastoni. Nobody raised any objections.

“Your Honours, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this will be a structured statement, so I shan’t bother with an introduction. I’ll start immediately by referring to the interpretative premise laid out by the assistant prosecutor in her closing statement.

“The prosecution has reminded us that the evidential method, correctly understood, involves a unitary evaluation of the evidence presented. And she’s right. Chipping away at the evidence, examining and refuting each piece of evidence one by one rather than in their totality, is an old technique, or rather, an old device of the defence.

“I want to assure you from the start that this is not the one we will adopt in this case. We shall evaluate the whole picture, in other words, the evidence as considered in the original ruling and the new evidence, irrefutable evidence – and I’m sorry if the assistant prosecutor can’t see that – that has emerged during this hearing. We shall verify if the only hypothesis that explains this evidence, considered as a whole, is the one acknowledged in the assistant prosecutor’s closing statement. Or if, on the contrary, reasonable alternative explanations should be admitted. Which is another way of saying: we shall verify if space exists for reasonable doubts about the prosecution case.

“Let us proceed to a rapid summary of what happened immediately following the murder, then discuss the forensic evidence.251