He and Nando were on their way back to headquarters after having been called to the scene of an alleged burglary out in Villanova. The complainant was a slyly pugnacious electrical contractor whose wife had just left him and gone home to live with her mother, taking their six-year-old son with her. He claimed to have come home after work to find the apartment gutted of just about everything except the plumbed-in washing machine. Since the sophisticated alarm system that he had himself installed had failed to respond, then clearly his estranged spouse, the only other person who knew the deactivation code, must be the guilty party.

It had taken over three hours to take the man’s statement and to question his neighbours, none of whom had noticed anything amiss. Bruno more than half suspected that the electrician had cleaned the place out himself over a period of several days, put the stuff in storage under a false name, and was now making a formal denuncia to back up an insurance claim and ensure that the ‘thankless bitch’ who had made his life hell got a fair ration in return. As far as the police were concerned, it would almost certainly be a total waste of time, demanding wads of completed forms, written reports and lengthy communication with the authorities in Ferrara, and never getting anywhere.

Bruno didn’t care, even though being rostered that night had meant missing Bologna FC’s local derby at Ancona, postponed from shortly before Christmas after the original fixture was cancelled due to a pitch invasion. He was bored and hungry and tired and looking forward to going off shift as soon as they got back to the Questura, but at a deeper level he was still blissed out, even though months had elapsed since the miracle had occurred to cut short his ‘hardship posting’ in the far north of the country and bring him back to Bologna. The young patrolman had stopped going to mass when he left home, but he had recently paid several visits to San Domenico, his neighbourhood church, and on each occasion had set ten euros worth of votary tapers burning before an image of the saint in a chapel where they still provided real sweet-smelling beeswax candles, not the moulded plastic electric bulbs that were replacing them these days and which always reminded Bruno of an amusement arcade.