‘In Sicily?’

‘Yes.’

‘How was that?’

‘Oh, my father worked there for a few years,’ she said, her uninterested voice telling Brunetti that he had best be equally uninterested, or at least pretend to be.

Obediently, Brunetti veered away from her private life and asked, ‘Do you have any idea who he was talking to?’

‘No, sir, but it was someone he knew well enough to use “Tu” with. And he seemed to be doing more listening than talking.’

Brunetti got to his feet. He picked up some papers she had given him earlier that morning and said, ‘I wanted to show him these. I’ll take them down.’ He waited for her to leave, thinking it might not be a good idea for Vianello to see them coming down the stairs together, as if she had been telling tales out of school.

She smiled before turning towards the door. ‘He didn’t see me, Commissario.’ And then she was gone. When he reached the door to his office, she had already disappeared down the steps.

Brunetti walked down slowly. In the squad room he found Vianello at his desk and still on the phone, half turned away, but Brunetti saw immediately what Signorina Elettra had meant. The Ispettore was hunched over the phone, his free hand rolling a pencil back and forth on his desk. From this distance, it looked to Brunetti as if his eyes were closed.

Again and again, the Inspector rolled the pencil across his desk, not speaking. As Brunetti watched, Vianello tightened his lips, then relaxed them. The pencil never stopped moving. Finally he pulled the phone away from his ear, slowly, with great effort, as though there were a magnetic field between the receiver and his ear. He held it in front of him for at least ten seconds, and Brunetti heard the voice coming through the line: female, old, querulous. Vianello opened his eyes and studied the surface of his desk. Then, slowly, tenderly, as though he were replacing the person from whom the voice was still coming, he set the phone down.