‘But probably not during my lifetime.’

‘Eh, eh, eh!’

They walked down the steps and along a narrow passageway that led into a cavernous space filled with dim hulks kept vague by the thin whey of light from open barred windows at pavement level above. Selecting another key from the bunch he carried, Fulvio unlocked a door in the end wall. He switched on a feeble light and they passed through into another subterranean vault, similar in shape and size to the previous one but this time smelling strongly of coal. The floor crunched beneath them as they crossed towards a set of steps in the corner leading back up into the building above.

They were about halfway there when the light went out. The intolerable memory of the shrieks and pleas and curses surged up in Gabriele’s mind. ‘You’d scream like that if it was happening to you,’ he’d thought at the time. That had been the worst aspect of it, the way they had reduced Leonardo — ‘the young priest’, Nestore had jokingly dubbed him, because of his seeming lack of interest in women — to the lowest common denominator of the human animal. People could be destroyed even before they were killed, and he had been an accomplice to such a destruction, as well as to the killing itself. There had never been any hiding from that horror, only forgetting. But forgetting was no longer an option, for the others involved would not forget.

‘ Dottore? ’

The echoes lent Fulvio’s voice an unwonted authority, but the only reply was a wheezing respiration which reminded the janitor of the bellows they’d used to blast the furnace back when he’d started as an apprentice at the foundry. He groped around in his pocket, found his cigarette lighter and clicked a flame.