He drove round the tight bends by the old church, then out along the suburban street leading to the elegant Fascist-era boxed arch of black and white stone marking the confines of this tiny Italian enclave in the Ticino; ‘a tiny bubble of Italian air trapped in the thick Swiss ice’, as Nestore thought of it.

No formalities of any sort at the border, of course. You simply drove across an invisible line and were, equally invisibly, in Switzerland. Politically Italian, financially Swiss, but to all intents and purposes offshore, Campione was a useful anomaly which attracted many sophisticated and wealthy foreign residents such as himself. The principal amenity it had to offer, although not to Italian citizens, was its negligible rate of income tax, the assessment for which was at the discretion of the local authorities, but almost equally important to Nestore was the fact that Lugano was just a short drive or ferryboat ride away across an unsupervised frontier. That made various things so much easier, notably banking.

There were many fine establishments in Lugano, but he favoured the UBS, partly for the discretion and professionalism of their staff, and partly because it came raccomandata by no less a figure than Roberto Calvi, who before being found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London had paid a seven million dollar backhander to the Socialist party leader Bettino Craxi through that very bank. Nestore reckoned that what had been good enough for the late lamented Dr Calvi would be good enough for him.

Despite its international flavour, due not least to the casino whose profits provided all the municipal income, thereby abolishing all other rates and taxes, Campione was geographically a dead end, almost forty kilometres from the country of which it was nominally a part. The one way out reflected this, a narrow unimproved country road running between nineteenth- century villas set in huge walled gardens above the lake, then ducking underneath the huge swathe of the autostrada up to the San Bernardino and Gotthard tunnels, before trickling into the insignificant village at the head of the lake.