There was a long silence. So long that I thought we’d been cut off.

“Lorenza?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I’ll come to your office.”

“No, I’ll come to you.”

Another pause. Then I remembered the exact address, near the Russian church. I took my bicycle and twenty minutes later I was there. She answered the bell almost immediately.

“Second floor,” was all she said.

It was an early-sixties apartment block. Ordinary and a little sad. As I climbed the stairs I could smell home 282odours – food, coffee, washing machines, detergent – as well as dust and a sense of modest, slightly stale well-being. Lorenza was waiting in the doorway. She looked like a frightened little animal.

The apartment was her parents’, and clearly hadn’t changed much since their day: old furniture, old ornaments, old rugs. The place she had run away from when she was a girl and had come back to, the culmination of a sad orbit around her own dreams.

“We can go in the kitchen, if you don’t mind. I’ll make coffee.”

The kitchen was the same as the rest. Old.

“What’s happened?”

I told her. Anyone watching the scene without sound, just looking at her face, wouldn’t have deduced that she was happy: she seemed terrified. She didn’t ask me any questions. When I’d finished speaking she pulled the soft packet of MS Blondes from a pocket of her cardigan, took out a cigarette with a meticulous gesture and put it between her lips. Then she got up and went and threw the packet with all the remaining cigarettes in the rubbish bin. She came back, sat down again, lit the one she had in her mouth and breathed it in almost angrily.

“I’d promised I’d quit smoking as soon as I found out.”

I nodded. It made sense. Maybe I was about to say something, but she didn’t give me time.

“As soon as I found out Iacopo was innocent.”

I took me a while to understand the significance of her words.

She hadn’t said: As soon as I found out Iacopo had been acquitted, or something like that.

No.283

She’d said: As soon as I found out Iacopo was innocent.

But she should already have known that Iacopo was innocent. She had been at home when her son had come in about 7.30, she’d testified to that. The murder had been committed less than twenty minutes later, so it couldn’t have been him.

“I’m sorry, Guido. I’m so sorry,” she said, drawing me from my thoughts.

“What time did Iacopo get home that evening?”

“I don’t know. After eight for sure. Maybe 8.15, 8.20. A quarter of an hour later he went out again.”

“So he would have had time to commit the murder.”

“Yes.”

“Did you decide by yourself?”