He hadn’t breathed a word about his discovery to anyone. There was no mention of the shadow in any file or description of that unnamed masterpiece of Etruscan art. He’d had copies made of the X-rays and had scanned them on to a couple of files that he could analyse on the computer. But the more he looked at them, the more Fabrizio became convinced that he needed to examine the object itself to get to the root of the mystery, and he had requested permission to analyse the statue itself. He figured that a move to Volterra would make it easier to carry out his research on an intensive basis. What he really wanted to do was an MRI; the results would certainly complete the overall picture and provide the key for explaining the irregularity in the bronze cast.

He’d examined the hypothesis of a flaw in the bronze fusion or a defective weld, but neither made much sense since the area of the statue he was interested in was made of flat, relatively regular surfaces where the liquefied metal would have been free to flow smoothly when the statue was being cast some twenty-four centuries ago.

As he was driving in earlier, he’d stopped at a grocery shop to buy bread, cheese, prosciutto and a flask of Chianti. He went into the big kitchen and sat at a table shiny with centuries of use, opening a book by Jacques Heurgon on Etruscan civilization for company as he enjoyed his makeshift dinner. He’d made up the bed with clean sheets he had brought from home and around midnight he lay down in a room that smelt of fresh plaster, stared up at the ceiling beams and listened to the song of a nightingale rising from the locust trees and laburnums that flanked the little brook.