It struck me that although Cardace looked like a petty criminal (which is what he was), he was well spoken. He 74even had a beautiful voice, a detail I hadn’t noticed at first. If I’d talked to him on the phone, I would have imagined him looking completely different.

As he spoke I kept looking for some resemblance to his mother. The colouring was his father’s, whoever that was. Lorenza’s hair was dark, or rather, it had been – now it was an opaque grey. There: opaque was the adjective that described her, in general. She was opaque, like the characters in a fantasy novel, beings who have lost their consistency and gradually become more and more evanescent. In other words, the exact opposite of the girl I’d known all those years ago. The creature of the past had been a luminous entity, who had seemed to glitter with her own almost tangible light.

Cardace’s mouth was similar to his mother’s. The ears, too, a little larger than average. And as I listened to him speak, there was every now and again an inflection that seemed to have landed from a different place and a distant past.

“You didn’t mention these things in your statements. Why?”

“Avvocato Costamagna told me not to. He said it was all too vague, that the judges wouldn’t believe me, that they’d think it was an attempt to muddy the waters. They’d consider it completely irrelevant. And on the other hand, if a Mafia family really was involved, it was best not to alarm them with a statement that wouldn’t be of any use to me in court anyway.”

Costamagna’s advice sounded terrible, but in itself wasn’t devoid of sense. Alluding to a possible connection with organized crime in order to suggest a narrative different from that of the prosecution, as followed in the ruling, was worthless from a procedural point of view. It would have been too easy, in order to instil the idea of reasonable doubt, to maintain 75in general terms – without giving any more specific indication about people and context – that a murder victim feared reprisals from organized crime. Putting forward alternative hypotheses without any basis in fact, without any indication of individuals who might have been involved – both of which are indispensable if such hypotheses are to be considered by the judges – is pointless, if not counterproductive.

And Costamagna was right on the second point, too. Assuming Gaglione really had aroused the avenging fury of some Mafia boss, and assuming that the murder was the result of that, there was a real risk that the mafiosi in question would feel threatened by the mention of a possible alternative lead that involved them.