“This isn’t mentioned in the case file,” I said out loud, though talking more to myself than to him.

“Could it help?”

“It might. Do you know the officer’s name?”

He did, and he told me.

“How can this help us, if they didn’t even write it down?” he asked.

“That’s just it – the fact that they didn’t write it down.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The prosecution case is based, among other things, on the fact that they can place you in the vicinity of the crime scene, at about the right time, thanks to the testimony of the woman in the cafe. The implication is that, if they hadn’t identified you by questioning this woman, they wouldn’t have known.”

“Of course! I told them I’d been at Mino’s place of my own free will. Which means I had nothing to hide.”

“Put that way, it’s a little too neat, but it’s true. Calmly admitting, even if informally, that you’d been at Gaglione’s place that afternoon doesn’t exactly tally with you being responsible for the murder. It would have been natural for you to deny it.”

Iacopo straightened on his chair. I’d already thought I noticed a new liveliness in his eyes the time before, but now Cardace seemed the older, more mature brother of the arrogant, apathetic street punk I’d met the first time.

“You mean, if I were guilty, I wouldn’t have come out and said I’d been with Gaglione just before he died?”150

“Precisely.”

“But if it isn’t written anywhere, how do we bring it up?”

“You can mention it when you testify in court. But I’d also like to call the police officer and ask him. It isn’t the done thing in terms of procedure, but we’ll see.”

But the most significant event of that period was some hours spent with my friend Ottavio at his Osteria del Caffellatte, which despite its name is a bookshop. With a somewhat rare feature: it’s only open at night.

It happens for no particular reason. Or at least for no reason I can pin down. It seems an evening like any other, I do more or less the usual things: I leave the office, go home, maybe exercise a little, then go back out for dinner or make myself something, watch a series on television, read a book. All normal. And yet just as I’m about to go to bed I realize – I know for a fact – that I won’t be able to sleep that night. It’s like a small electric shock that goes through my skin and into the spaces between my thoughts. Like an entity – an alien but very familiar entity – that usually goes about its own business, but which sometimes takes up a position next to me and decides we have to stay awake together.