He left his Mini Cooper — a personal toy that Andreina didn’t appreciate, but which Irene certainly did — in the Swiss Federal Railways car park and went off to feed the machine at the entrance. The Swiss might be happy to let the residents of Campione pay virtually no taxes whatever, but God forbid you shouldn’t pay for your parking ticket.

A thickset man with a spectacularly broken nose was sitting on a bench at the end of the mainline station. A huge jaw, ratty eyes set too close together, jug ears, shaven head. Black suit, narrow rectangular shades. Not Swiss, Nestore thought idly, returning to place the ticket on the dashboard of the Mini. He prided himself on being able to spot people’s nationality at a glance, sometimes even their profession.

He walked across the metre-gauge rails embedded in the roadway to the bar opposite, with its typical lakeside array of lindens, palms and dwarf pines. Here he checked the timetable for the mountain railway and then ordered a large espresso and a glass of kirsch. He was going to need a bit of fortification before his appointment with Alberto. Amazing, he thought. Of all the stupid things he’d done, and there had been plenty, this was the last that he had ever imagined would come back to haunt him. On the very rare occasions when he thought about it at all, he’d always imagined it to be as dead and buried as Leonardo himself.

Anyway, apparently the corpse had turned up. So now what? ‘We need to talk.’ Meaning of course that Alberto need¬ ed to talk. And what would the talk amount to? That they were all in this together, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, all for one and one for all, etc, etc. That would be about the extent of it, and it was all perfectly obvious, but it was only too much like Alberto to seize this heaven-sent opportunity to bore him to death.