He dropped his cigarette and crushed it into the soft earth with his toe, walked down the fence a few metres, then bent low and crept through a large hole, careful of the jagged, rusty barbs of metal that encircled him. Straightening up, he walked back towards the shoe, now a pair of them and perhaps salvageable because of that.

‘Roba di puttana,’ he muttered under his breath, seeing the heel on the first shoe, taller than the pack of cigarettes in his pocket: only a whore would wear such things. He reached down and picked up the first shoe, careful to keep from touching the outside. As he had hoped, it was clean, had not fallen into the oily puddle. He took a few steps to the right, reached down and wrapped two fingers around the heel of its mate, but it appeared to be caught on a tuft of grass. He lowered himself to one knee, careful to see where he knelt, and gave the shoe a sharp tug. It came loose, but when Bettino Cola saw that what he had pulled it loose from was a human foot, he leaped back from the bush and dropped the first shoe into the black puddle from which it had survived the night.

Chapter Two

The police arrived on the scene twenty minutes later, two blue and white sedans from the Squadra Mobile of Mestre. By then, the field at the back of the slaughterhouse was filled with men from inside the building, brought out into the sun by curiosity about this different kind of slaughter. Cola had run drunkenly back inside as soon as he saw the foot and the leg to which it was attached and gone into the foreman’s office to tell him there was a dead woman in the field beyond the fence.

Cola was a good worker, a serious man, and so the foreman believed him and called the police immediately without going outside himself to check and see that Cola was telling the truth. But others had seen Cola come into the building and came to ask what it was, what had he seen? The foreman snarled at them to get back to work: the refrigerated trucks were waiting at the loading docks, and they didn’t have time to stand around all day and gabble about some whore who got her throat cut.