He broke off to take one of the pastries from the plate on the bar.

‘We searched the whole place from top to bottom,’ he continued, his moustache white with icing sugar from the pastry he had selected. ‘Even put a man outside the front door. No one came or went, yet the woman still claimed she was being persecuted. It’s a clear case of hysteria and attention-seeking.’

Zen took a bite of a flaky cream-filled croissant.

‘I’m sure you’re right. It’s always the hopeless cases who want a second opinion. I’ll just go through the motions and then endorse your conclusions. It’s a total waste of time, but what do I care? There are worse places to spend a few days.’

He washed the pastry down with a gulp of coffee.

‘So, what’s been happening round here?’

Valentini shrugged.

‘Bugger all, as usual. Mestre and Marghera see a reasonable amount of action, particularly in drugs, but we just don’t have a big enough slice of the mainland for it to add up to anything much. As for the city itself, forget it. Criminals are like everyone else these days. If you can’t drive there, they don’t want to know.’

Zen nodded slowly.

‘What about that kidnapping that was all over the papers a few months back? Some American.’

‘You mean the Durridge business?’

Zen lit a cigarette.

‘That must have livened things up a bit.’

‘It might, if they’d let us near it,’ Valentini retorted shortly.

‘How do you mean?’

‘The Carabinieri got there first, and when we applied for reciprocity we were told the files had been returned under seal to Rome.’

He shrugged.

‘Christ knows what that was all about. Once upon a time we could have pulled a few strings of our own and found out, but these days…’

He pointed to the headline in the newspaper lying on the counter. THE OLD FOX FIGHTS FOR HIS POLITICAL LIFE, it read, above a photograph of the politician in question.