'Go to hell. Bugger off and bloody get out of here.'

He flicked the cigarette into the middle of the dark grass. He started to turn away.

'Please yourself, I don't beg. You care to live here, you care to spend the rest of your life living here, you care to cross over to the other side of the street when there's something you could do, please yourself. I thought that maybe you had some balls. Pity is that I was wrong.'

'You are, Mr Axel bloody Moen, a total shit.'

'Big words, but you're short of big action. You want to rot here, then that's your problem. Don't talk about this conversation. If you talk about it, you might be responsible for hurting people.'

A small voice. She wouldn't be able to see his face, see the flicker of satisfaction.

She asked, 'Why do you need access to Giuseppe's and Angela's home?'

No sarcasm, and no laugh, and no bullshit, Axel said, 'You get on board and you get told, so think on it. And think also on whether, for the rest of your life, you want to remember crossing over the road to avoid responsibility. Good night, Miss Parsons.

When you've had a chance to think on it, I'll make the contact again. Don't worry, I can see myself out.'

He walked away, back through the darkened dining room, and past the open door to the kitchen, and through the hall. He looked a last time at the photograph of Charley Parsons on the wall above the table with the telephone. He liked the cockiness and cheekiness in her graduation photograph. He let himself out through the front door.

Sometimes he used a driver, most times Mario Ruggerio drove himself. Whether he drove himself, or whether he rode with the driver, he used a mass-produced, factory-production-line saloon car. There was nothing flamboyant, nothing ostentatious, in the life of Mario Ruggerio, nothing to draw attention to him. That evening, if a car of the carabineri or the squadra mobile or the polizia stradale or the polizia municipale or the Guardia di Finanze or the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia had passed the Citroen BX that carried him as passenger, nothing would have seemed remarkable to the police officers of those agencies.