In a way it was quite understandable that Zen's mother had confused the characters involved with the cast of a film she had seen. Indeed, it was a film that Zen was watching, but a film of a special kind, not intended for commercial release and only available to him, as an officer of the Criminalpol section of the Ministry of the Interior, in connection with the report he had been asked to prepare, summarizing the case to date. He wasn't really supposed to take it home, but the Ministry didn't run to video machines for its employees, even those of Vice-Questorial rank. So what was he supposed to do -Zen had demanded, in his ignorance of the nature of video tape – hold it up to the window, frame by frame?

He sat down on the sofa again, groped for the remote control unit and pressed the play button, releasing the blurred figures to laugh, chat and generally ham it up for the camera. They knew it was there, of course. Oscar Burolo made no secret of his mania for recording the highpoints of his life. On the contrary, every visitor to the entrepreneur's Sardinian hideaway had been impressed by the underground vault containing hundreds of video tapes, as well as computer discs all carefully shelved and indexed. Like all good libraries, Oscar's collection was constantly expanding. Indeed, shortly before his death a complete new section of shelving had been installed to accommodate the latest additions.

'But do you actually ever watch any of them'?' the guest might ask.

'I don't need to watch them,' Oscar would reply, smiling in a peculiar way. 'It's enough to know that they're there.'

If the six people relaxing at the water's edge were in any way uneasy about the prospect of having their antics preserved for posterity, they certainly didn't show it.