Painting Death

You ask me to send you a full account of my movements in the month leading up to my arrest and imprisonment, to help you in my defence. I shall do my best and just hope you won’t mind if I digress now and then. Solitary confinement is solitary indeed and without phone or Internet I may as well pass the time this way as any other. Then what appears to be digression may actually turn out to hold the key to the case, who knows; to date I remain as bewildered as anyone else as to who could have carried out such a strangely brutal, yet, in a curious way, as I felt at once when I discovered the body, beautiful murder.

A month before my arrest takes me back to where? 22 March? I don’t have my diary with me, so I might get a few days mixed up. Do you want to hear how I got my honorary-citizen’s scroll framed and was all set to hang it on the wall when I discovered they’d spelt ‘imprenditore’ wrong, with a double ‘t’ ‘imprendittore’? I was with my daughter trying to nail the thing up over the piano and she laughed and said they must be taking the mick out of my accent because I always got the doubles wrong, not pronouncing them when they were there and introducing them when they weren’t. Actually, I don’t think that’s the case at all. I’ve always taken great care over the pronunciation of double letters, which alas the English in their general linguistic slovenliness ignore and simply pronounce as one letter. And no, Carla, this is not one of the digressions I was warning of. I’m not digressing at all. I mention the language issue because it has frequently occurred to me that I am always considered the first suspect for a crime because I am a foreigner, I have an accent, or, even worse, because I have only the very slightest of accents. We’ve all seen in recent years how easy it has been for the police to accuse blacks, Arabs and Slavs whenever there’s some violent street crime, or even a perfectly ingenuous American like Amanda Knox, and how satisfied the public always is to suppose that a foreigner must be responsible for every ugly calamity on Italian soil. You should definitely ask yourself if this isn’t an issue in the way I’m being treated. A murder occurs within a relatively closed community— a state-run museum—in which there is just one foreigner, and what’s more a foreigner who more than any other has camouflaged himself as one of us, has demanded our approval for his achievements, has become a major benefactor of all kinds of civic institutions, has distinguished himself, we could say, as exactly the kind of cultural product we would wish our own nation to produce, if only we educated our children properly. Damn him! He puts us to shame. Obviously he is guilty! I should say here that the first time I met Dottor Volpi he made his distaste for foreigners, and in particular Anglo-Saxons (he appeared unable to distinguish between Americans and English) all too evident, passing the most disparaging remarks about a respected English novelist who had curated a prestigious art exhibition in Florence and criticising out of hand all foreigners who wrote about Italy in any way, as if they were somehow terrorists and should be repatriated at once. That, Carla, is the kind of cultural context that Morris Duckworth has always had to contend with in Italy. I shall elaborate on this a little further when we come to the matter of my son’s trial. However, right now I have my break for some prison-yard exercise. Just fifteen minutes and completely alone. Under the rain by the looks of it. Why they need to keep me away from the other prisoners I can’t imagine. Perhaps they think I will crack sooner this way. The Italian judiciary always spends more time trying to persuade people to confess than actually building a solid case against them. I suppose it’s cheaper and easier. Of which more after my break. I shall let some rain run down my cheeks and imagine the drops are tears. The truth is I’m beyond crying. The world is too absurd. I must be the only man who ever lived to have been wrongly accused of murder twice. Perhaps—I return to my pen to scribble a last word—having given me that honorary citizenship, they had to find some way of marking me out as foreign again. Having given me the freedom of the city, they felt obliged to put me in gaol. I was set up for a fall.

To the Mayor of Verona

Egregio sindaco, onorevole Dottor Lunardi,

Forgive me for writing to you out of the blue, not the vast and wonderful blue of God’s heavens either, but the deep mental indigo of this suffocating prison cell. I have time on my hands.

Forgive also the miserable quality of this notepaper and biro. It is all I have.

I write first and foremost to thank you, for the honour you conferred upon me in granting me the freedom (!) of the fair city of Verona, for your solicitousness in coming to my son’s trial, and, more generally, for having run the city so well over the past five years, facilitating the work of businessmen like myself who, without your attention to efficient infrastructures and your abhorrence of red tape, would be even more hard-pressed than we already are.

Congratulations are also in order, I believe, and I extend them gladly. It is not easy for me to get news here in solitary confinement, but a guard was kind enough to confirm that you have indeed been re-elected, and at the first round of voting. Frankly, I would have been immensely surprised by any other result; nevertheless it was a relief to hear that a man of your stature and wisdom remains in Palazzo Barbieri and I can only send you my warmest compliments. Your success is richly deserved.

I won’t deny of course that I write as a petitioner and I appreciate at once that very likely my plea may not and perhaps cannot be granted. As you know, I am being held on charges of murder. The injustice of my arrest seems so evident that I struggle to enter into the mentality of one who needs to argue his case. I write, then, simply to beg you, as you prepare for your second term of office, aware of course of the many pressing demands upon your time and energies, to pay a little attention to my plight. What grieves me most about being in gaol is not so much the physical constriction and mental loneliness, which I hope I bear with dignity, but the fact that my being here prevents me from comforting my wife at a time when our daughter has left home leaving only the briefest of notes and no indication of her whereabouts. If the police show as much incompetence in their search for her as they have in their investigations of this murder, I fear we may never see her again. There is also the simple fact that once out of here I can set to work to find the real murderer and so clear my name. Any influence you can wield in encouraging the magistrates to grant me bail would be most welcome.

I remain your humble servant,

Morris Duckworth (an honorary citizen dishonoured)

Carla, I’m back. It’s pouring out there. So much for spring. Where was I? The truth is that last month I was distracted by a situation that had been developing with my daughter. Do you remember Massimina? I think I brought her along once many years ago when we had to defend ourselves against those fanciful claims that we were adulterating our Cabernet with methanol. Remember? She was a charming ten-year-old at the time, all giggles, ribbons and curls. Now she’s a young adult studying art at university. I was in two minds about allowing her to do this. Not that she doesn’t have talent. There’s definitely a creative streak in the Duckworth psyche (excluding my son I’m afraid). But I was worried that she might be forced to experience my own disappointment of approaching the artistic life only to be expelled from it, denied access, forced to apply my creativity to the rather more prosaic world of wine-making and provincial real estate. I say this so you get a sense of how important this art exhibition at Castelvecchio is for me. Doubtless the prosecution will say, Duckworth killed because he was deeply, pathologically attached to this pet project which the victim was threatening to deprive him of.

Anyway, since February or so I had become concerned because Massimina, who is usually very lively and always out seeing people, clubbing, dancing and so on, had fallen to staying indoors, draping herself moodily on one chair or another, paying exaggerated and morbid attention to the cat, or simply wriggling on the floor, and texting all the time. Antonella supposed that she must be in love. The girl is twenty after all and tolerably pretty, as Jane Austen would have put it. She has an indolent, teenage coltishness, between innocent and femme fatale, always showing too much midriff and cleavage. I know we men are not supposed to notice such things, but it is rather hard not to worry for one’s daughter when she all too readily lets her parents’ male friends glimpse her knickers or even nipples. There was an occasion when a friend of ours, Stan Albertini, had come to dinner and Massimina turned up in her bathrobe, slumped on the sofa and was so busy with her text messages she wasn’t even aware of how much she was showing, top and bottom, without knickers on this occasion. Stan is in his mid-fifties, but anyone can see the kind of frustrated old goat he is. Maybe the police would have a real murder to accuse me of if Stan ever laid a finger on my daughter.

I said to Antonella, if it is love it seems to me an unhappy, possibly sick love and we should do our best to warn or help. I began to quiz the child a little more about her college and teachers and eventually evinced, in the kind of teeth-pulling conversations one has with one’s teenage children, that she was rather taken with her art history professor, who, on further questioning, turned out to be none other than Professor Zolla.

This is rather extraordinary, is it not? I mean, that I could have been dealing with a man for some months without appreciating that he was also my daughter’s art history professor. I often wonder how many tie-ups there are in our lives that we know nothing of and that might completely alter the scenery for us if we did learn about them. What, for example, if it turned out that one’s partner, brother or sister, or even oneself, were, without knowing it, the natural offspring (unbeknown to the legal father of course) of some high-flying personage, a cardinal, say, or a politician, or a business magnate—the sort of plot Dickens loved to dream up—and that this notable fellow were keeping a watchful and protective eye on the family, from a safe distance; one would thus tend to have a positive view of the world as rather benign and generous, because everything would tend to go well with this man tirelessly pulling the strings for you. Alternatively, one could imagine an implacable enemy one knows nothing about, a powerful public figure who wishes you ill for reasons that lie beyond your ken, or perhaps began long before you were born. In my case that would explain so much.

But back to Massimina and Zolla. I found it hard to understand how a lively girl like my daughter could entertain an attraction for this boring, besuited, bureaucratised academic. To test the water, I put it to her that her art history professor, my co-curator, was an utter nobody without a shred of imagination, citing, as proof, his decision not to request Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac for our murder show merely because ‘Abraham didn’t actually go through with the killing.’ Can you imagine such literalism? She seemed indifferent to my indignation, remarking that she was glad the painting wouldn’t be shown because the story of Abraham and Isaac was too obscene for words. At least Zolla, she said, was always modest and sweet and didn’t see himself as God. Unlike a certain celebre impredit-tor-re.

I was astonished. Under the pretext of being concerned as to the real extent of her artistic talents (though of course I am extremely concerned), I asked Zolla directly what he thought of my daughter, her performance and prospects. This was perhaps a week after I had caught the man sobbing in Dottor Volpi’s office but two weeks before the hasty and ill-advised announcement from Volpi that I was to play no further part in an exhibition that I myself had conceived and devised. But I’m running ahead of my story. Thus quizzed, Zolla made an entirely unconvincing show of

My feeling is that it is impossible not to be aware of Massimina, however many students there are in the class. The way she dresses simply forces two very generous breasts on every male beholder. ‘She speaks very highly of you,’ I told him. ‘I think she may have a crush on you.’ He smiled with dimpled false modesty and said that amazing as it might seem at least half of the students had a crush on him, a story so improbable I let it pass without comment. The man is an amoeba. In any event, at this point I felt it imperative—it had now been more than a month since my daughter had ceased all activity except messaging—to get into her mobile phone.

And I did. I took her with me one day, forced her to join me I should say, if only to get her out of the house, to look at a Last Judgement in a rather remote village called Gorgusello (near Sant’Anna). I’d started thinking that a good way to close Painting Death and send people home with something to think about would be an image of the Just being separated from the Damned, something the subject of murder naturally inclines one to think about.

I persuaded her to drive, since she only got her licence last year and needs practice, and to drive of course she had to stop texting and put her phone in her handbag. Since the bag was between us as she drove and she was concentrating on the road, it wasn’t hard to slip a hand in the bag, pull the phone out and drop it into my jacket pocket. The things we do for love! I tell you all this, I suppose, Carla, to give you a sense of how completely preoccupied I have been with my family, how utterly unlikely it is that I would have found the time, never mind the mental energy, for murdering anyone (do people realise what hard work that must be?). We got out of the car to go into the church, little more than a barn really, but with this extravagant three-metres-by-four image of fiery demons poking forks up the backsides of the good burghers and merchants and, yes, priests of the early sixteenth century, when suddenly Massimina lets out a yell because her phone is missing. I told her it must have fallen between the seats in the car and she slithers off on her heels to find it. Finally I had time to see what these messages were.

There were none. She must cancel each one as it arrives. Who does that? But just as I was slipping the thing back in my pocket a message arrived. I knew that if I opened it and left it in the phone she would realise something was up. But there was no time to reflect. I opened the message. The name of the sender was Gio. The text read. ‘Ahhhhhhhh, how I miss you!’ I read it and cancelled it, relieved that it was the kind of contentless ejaculation that didn’t require or deserve a response. I had been lucky.

I had already slipped the phone back in my pocket when it occurred to me that Dottor Volpi sometimes called Angelo Zolla, Gioletto (Out of affection? An-gioletto? Or ironically? Because of his being such a dandy? I don’t know.) Of course Gio would normally be Giovanni, or even Giovanna, but there was an outside chance that Angelo actually liked to be called Gioletto. The thing to do would have been to check the number to see if it corresponded to Zolla’s mobile. But in my anxiety not to be discovered I had cancelled the message and the number with it. I could perhaps have checked the calls made and received but Massimina was already coming back into the church in a panic because she hadn’t found her phone. I gave a last glance at the Devil opening his fiery mouth to chew on women disfigured by syphilis and hurried out to the car where, in a grand flurry of search and concern, I eventually produced the phone from under the maps in the glove compartment. Grudgingly, Massimina accepted she must have slipped it there herself. ‘Who else, if not?’ I ribbed her and got her to drive me back to Sant’Anna.

I mention Sant’Anna because, as you know, I had asked one of my subcontractors to ask one of his subcontractors to dig the foundations there for the prefab school that the Christian Democratic Union had promised to voters in order to stay in power. I had to visit Sant’Anna because not only was there an issue of a damaged war memorial, but it now turned out that an underground stream passed right through the site, so we had to assess the feasibility and cost of moving it, or alternatively shifting the whole project two hundred metres up the hillside, filling in what we had dug so far and starting from scratch.

I pointed out to the priest, a rather splendid man, tall, austere, moody, a real man of God, that the monument (one of those fifties bathroom-mosaic-on-cheap-cement things) was so ugly that they should have thanked me, or rather the dozy dozer man, for giving them this golden opportunity to replace it. But the reason I mention all this to you is that, looking into the foundation excavations, then boiling with muddy water after the spring rains, it occurred to me that if ever anyone wanted to hide a body, then this was the place to do it. It could be buried four metres deep where no one would ever suspect anything. Why I should have thought such a thing I cannot imagine. A presentiment perhaps. All this anyway to underline the fact that the police must be mad to imagine that someone of my extensive resources would kill a colleague in the hole-and-corner way this murder was carried out without disposing properly of the body. Only a loser sticks a knife in a man in an empty building and runs for his life. Can’t the police understand that if someone of my wealth, knowledge and proven organisational abilities had decided to commit murder then there would have been no trace of a body and no leads at all to go on? A little respect, please!

So much for Sant’Anna. I suggested to the priest that if he wanted a new monument, perhaps my daughter, who was an artist, could design one for him, something more in line with the way young people now saw these things. When we got back to the car, Mimi said, ‘You must be completely crazy, Papà,’ and insisted I drove because she had some messages to send.

Then about five minutes out of Sant’Anna she shouts, ‘Stop, stop the car.’

‘What’s the point,’ she says, ‘of coming out into the country, if we don’t take a walk, Dad?’ Suddenly, she was full of warmth and pleasantness.

We took a path to the right of the road that looked down over the Valpolicella towards the cliffs of Rivoli. All very beautiful. I had just started to explain Napoleon’s crushing tactics at the battle of Rivoli—there’s a marvellously melodramatic painting by Philippoteaux—and then to reflect that like ’em or hate ’em the French might have done a better job of unifying and running Italy than the Italians ever did, when she asked, ‘Papà, tell me, why did you come to Italy in the first place?’

Her voice was rather dreamy and friendly. I sensed a new openness. What was that message she had received?

I hesitated. You must have wondered yourself, Carla, why I came to Italy, why anyone comes. The truth is this was the fatal decision of my life. Had I stayed in Acton I can’t imagine I would ever have found myself charged with third-degree murder.

We were on a path that ran along the hillside, a tall white stone wall to our left and the dramatic drop to the river as it plunges into the Rivoli gorge on our right.

‘I’m thinking of leaving,’ she said. ‘Italy that is.’ She sounded rather solemn.

I thought about this. The logic of the conversation was that she was about to tell me that she was leaving Italy for/with a boy, or man, and had been looking for an instance in my own past that would soften any eventual criticism I might have had for such a move.

She didn’t answer for a while. And here comes one of the reasons why I’m telling you this. There were trees overhanging the wall to our left and sunlight was dappling through the leaves. Cobwebs kept catching my face. Then because of this dapple of sunshine and shade I finally noticed that they weren’t just cobwebs. There were tiny worm things hanging from threads. They were caterpillars, small green caterpillars dangling like so many hanged convicts right at eye level. Just as when I had looked into the excavations an hour or so before, I felt a powerful shiver of presentiment.

Massimina had noticed them too. ‘They do it to escape a predator,’ she said. ‘They’re baby moths. They drop off a tree when something’s trying to eat them and dangle on a thread.’

From being very chipper, Massimina suddenly turned gloomy. ‘Actually I wouldn’t mind being able to do that,’ she said. ‘Dangle a while.’

The change of mood surprised me. ‘I thought you were telling me you were in love and planning to run off with some handsome boy.’

‘As you know,’ I told her, ‘I was once married to your mother’s younger sister, and some time after that I married your dear mother. Which is about it for me.’

She waited a moment. ‘Isn’t that a bit weird, three sisters in the same family?’

‘Not at all,’ I told her. ‘I imagine you know your Svevo. Zeno was in love with three sisters.’

What do you make of that, Carla? It really threw me. I had no idea at all what to think. In fact I begin to wonder now if I’m not wasting your time telling you all this. I should get back to the hard facts. Yet I feel there is something here that has to do with it all, some important connection, or imminent. Or perhaps it’s just the solitary confinement getting to me.

‘Being attached to three sisters,’ I tried, thinking of Zolla, ‘is not so strange as falling in love with someone twice your age.’

She was clearly trying to decide whether to tell me the truth. ‘You mean like Forbes,’ she said, ‘and his little boys?’

Again I was taken aback. ‘You hardly need to think of a perverse old goat like that to imagine a man with someone half his age. Do you?’

She bit her lip. ‘Let’s go back, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’ve got stuff to do at home.’

In the car she put her headphones on and spent the whole trip texting. I drove in silence and felt sure I was right. She was having a love affair with an older man. Most likely Zolla. My task must be to make sure that she stayed on the rails and completed her studies without undue distraction.

To His Eminence Cardinal Rusconi

Dear Cardinal Rusconi,

Forgive me, Your Eminence, for occupying a little space in your mailbox and a moment of your precious time. I’m not unaware of the pressures on a Father of the Church charged with the care of so large and needy a flock.

I had been meaning to contact you before this little catastrophe of mine (you will have heard, no doubt, of my farcical arrest for a crime I could not even imagine committing). The fact is that the building project in Sant’Anna has run into serious trouble. I don’t know if you have been informed, but a stream was discovered about two metres below ground running diagonally across the site. I must say it does seem odd to me that the architect was unaware of this geological feature.

I am willing of course to have the foundations re-dug elsewhere, but we will need precise instructions. I will do my best to cover the cost through Fratelli Trevisan, though I’m not entirely sure given the present financial crisis how feasible that will be.

May I, in the meantime, be so impertinent as to ask two favours, something I do only because I know what a generous man you are, and because I am truly in need. First, as you know, my spiritual guide Don Lorenzo is seriously ill and hence I have no one to whom I can turn in my present moment of discomfort. My question is, how can I avoid bitterness and resentment, Your Eminence? What prayers can I pray, what part of the Bible should I read? I see the danger of falling into a deep pit of bile. I fear for my soul.

Second, I would be very grateful if you could take my wife into your pastoral care. I’m not sure if you are aware but our family has also been struck by a second catastrophe, the disappearance of my twenty-year-old daughter. These are extreme circumstances and I am concerned for my wife’s sanity.

As for my own legal position, I ask nothing, knowing that any help with attaining bail is beyond the mandate of the Church.

All I can say is that I am glad to have met you, Your Eminence, when I was at the zenith of my career and can only beg forgiveness if I write to you now from my nadir.

The humblest member of your flock,

Morris Duckworth

Carla. What next? (I just took a rather arduous toilet break. No, don’t worry, I shan’t trouble you with a description of the lavatory facilities here, not unlike the Last Judgement in Sant’Anna.) Anyhow, slow going though it may be, I hope I am building up for you an idea of my mental state in the weeks immediately preceding the murder. As we get nearer the fatal day I will give you all the necessary details about the painting of San Bartolomeo, the presence of the two young Libyans, and exactly how it was that I came to discover the corpse. But first we must spend a moment on my father’s funeral and of course my son’s trial. Again, the picture I am seeking to establish is that of a man so overwhelmed with duties and preoccupations that he simply would not have had time or interest to carry out such a primitive and senseless crime. Why, by the way, was the knife thrust in so deep, and actually left inside the body? I cannot remember such a circumstance in all the crime stories, fact or fiction, that I have read over the course of my fifty-five years. Imagine the violence that struck such a blow! I do not think I would be capable of it.

To recap. In early March I had, as I told you in our interview, the strange encounter in Castelvecchio with Volpi, Zolla and a third, unseen person, who laughed, offstage as it were, in the most sinister fashion. I remain convinced that whatever was going on in that room is central to the murder. Yet when I tried to explain this to the police they refused to pay attention. They had already made up their minds in response to the two or three pieces of ‘evidence’ they have—the fingerprints, the timing, my being in the basement, the traces of blood on Zolla’s keyboard, and so on. All the merest coincidence and easily explicable with a quite different narrative than the one they have so morbidly constructed.

Shortly after that incident in Volpi’s office, then, despairing of the way Zolla was organising the show, I wrote emails to all the prospective lenders for Painting Death, explaining both the philosophy behind the show and specific accounts of the importance of each single item in the topical mosaic of the whole. It was three days’ intense, creative work, but it was immediately rewarded by the first affirmative answers. From the National Gallery, the Frick, the Met. I was overjoyed and felt vindicated, to the point, I confess, that I thought no more of the scene in Volpi’s office, or my daughter’s strange behaviour, and was even beginning to assent to the general serenity surrounding Mauro’s trial when I received—I believe it was a Sunday afternoon—the news that my father had died and my presence was required in London for the funeral. This meant I would miss the opening morning of the trial. In fact it was while I was in the taxi driving to the funeral from Gatwick, that, in order to see if my wife had emailed me about the hearing, I checked for messages on my iPhone and found a mail from Volpi. Just four lines:

‘Signor Duckworth, given your devious, disloyal behaviour and your unwillingness to work in line with standard museum procedures, it has been decided you can have no further role in the organisation of the exhibition Painting Death. This decision is irrevocable.

You can imagine my sense of injustice. I was being turned away for having taken the initiative and made the show possible! Obviously they were embarrassed by their inefficiency. Perhaps Volpi had never believed that Zolla would be able to persuade the serious museums to give him the paintings. He had been humouring me. Now all of a sudden the permissions were arriving and the show would have to go ahead.

A word about my father and the funeral. I shall keep it brief. My first memories are of a small, wiry, violent man slapping my mother. I remember her pallor, her quiet courage, her prayers. He smelled: of drink, of factory clothes, of, forgive my crudity, farts. Mother instead had an aura of wilting flowers. She manipulated me with a terrible pathos that intensified, never to be dispersed when she was killed—I was fifteen—by a drunk driver who lost control of his Jaguar and crushed her against the wall of Lloyd’s bank. I wasn’t allowed to see the body. Dad remarried in no time, a woman more than twenty years younger than himself, only five years older than me. I took all Mum’s old things, even her underwear, her perfumes, and doted over them for years. Later, when I became a successful businessman in Verona, I invited him to stay with us in Via Oberdan. By this time his second wife had left him, though he didn’t seem unduly concerned. He said Italy was too hot and the beer crap. He knotted a handkerchief on his head and wore socks with his sandals. The only thing he enjoyed was taking Mauro to the stadium. So in just a few weeks, he managed to pass on to my son the curse of his violent ways and his inexplicable vocation for the mob. I should have broken off with the man altogether. But I find it hard to break with people. Even the dead I keep talking to. I offered to buy him a nice place in Chelsea, but he refused and went of his own accord to an old people’s home in Willesden. When I visited, which I did religiously every time I was in the UK to visit customers for our wines, he invariably made fun of my clothes and scars and insisted on pouring me Johnnie Walker Red Label (I hate Red Label) from a bottle hidden in his bedclothes.

I had expected to be alone at the funeral and instead the church was packed. Shabby and malodorous, all kinds of ancient creatures offered their bony handshakes and told me in croaking voices what a wonderful, gentle man my father was, and how he had always spoken well of me and excused my not visiting because I was such an important, busy person. Of this I believed not a syllable. Clutching walking sticks and Zimmer frames, they tottered up the chancel steps to make fulsome speeches about this extraordinarily kind man who had so loved the cats in the old folks’ home he might have been St Francis of Assisi. And how patriotic he was! He would have gone to Afghanistan himself, on crutches, if they had let him. Someone told a Good Samaritan anecdote about how Dad always bought the Big Issue from him. They used to stand together on the corner of Acton Vale, rain or shine, Saturday morning doing the pools and drinking Scotch from Dad’s hip flask. He was the soul of the community.

Then out of the blue the vicar asked me if I wanted to say something before we committed the body to the flames. It’s hard to feel nostalgia for the Italian priesthood, but an Anglican clergyman can do it for you. The man had that stooped, thin-nosed sanctimoniousness they can never caricature enough in soaps and sitcoms. Having reached the top of the steps and turned to the congregation I didn’t know what to say. I’m usually quite resourceful in these situations, accustomed to speaking at board meetings and Rotary Club dinners, but of course when I do that, in Verona or Milan, it’s in Italian. All at once, facing this English public, I was struck by a powerful awareness that my real centre of gravity now is Italy, my real language, however much it plagues me still, Italian. Words of pomp and circumstance just won’t come to me in my native tongue. I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Below me the rabble of pensioners were expecting me to speak. Coffin fodder, I thought, gazing down on their wrinkled faces, grey hair, grey eyes, grey teeth. I tried to speak but couldn’t. I realised that if words did begin to flow they would be about Mother. You killed her, I was thinking. You bastard. You shit. You killed my poor mother long before the drunk driver did. Sarah Ann Duckworth née Winchester is gone and utterly forgotten by everyone but her obedient boy Morris. I am my mother’s son. Quite likely you’re not my father at all. I never wanted you to be my father. I . . .

I opened my mouth and closed it. The coven of crones and codgers beneath me had begun to murmur. The clergyman took my elbow and said, ‘Mr. Duckworth, these are difficult moments, if you don’t feel up to it, we do understand.’ Then I simply yelled. ‘Dad! Daaaaaad!’ It was blood-curdling. The sound bounced off the stone walls. I felt the air vibrate and my chest quivered. ‘Daaaad!’ As I stumbled down the steps towards the shiny coffin a dozen pairs of arms enfolded me. The women were crying. The men were croaking, ‘Good on you, lad.’ Overwhelmed by foul breath, I fainted.

Is that the kind of man who could plunge a knife into a fellow human being, a man who faints at a funeral?

To Mauro Duckworth

Dear Mauro,

You are too young for the tasks I am about to place on your inexperienced shoulders, but if, despite my hectoring in the past, you have any affection for your much aged and misunderstood father, can I beg you to see to the following:

1) First, take care of your mother. She is a strong woman, but these are hard times indeed. Should you see any signs that she is unable to cope, be in touch at once with Dr Bagnoli who has prescribed tranquillisers in the past.

2) Please be in daily contact with Alvise Bersi who will be overseeing Fratelli Trevisan. Normally I would ask your mother to do this, but she will be too worried about Massimina to look after company affairs. I know it will be impossible for you to grasp everything about the many projects that are ongoing but try to get a sense of whether anything untoward is happening in my absence. When the cat is away, the mice will play.

3) Above all, I need your help over my legal situation. The single thing most likely to bring about a rapid end to my imprisonment would be the identification of the real murderer. I am convinced that Professor Zolla, an art historian who works at Castelvecchio, and two young Libyans (‘friends’ of the murdered man) Samira and Tarik Al Zuwaid, who live at Via Dietro San Zeno 21, apartment 5, know more about the death than they have told the police. Perhaps you and your many Hellas friends could keep an eye on those Libyans. Since Zolla is also Massimina’s art history professor at the university and since he knew her and she professed privately to me to have a crush on him, there is just a chance that he has information as to her whereabouts. I leave it to you to decide how to proceed.

So, Mauro, that is the situation. You are being asked to grow up rather quickly. I can only pray that you will show the same courage and wisdom now that you showed in the witness box at your trial. I also beg you to close your ears and eyes to all the ludicrous speculation and accusations that are no doubt being made against me in the press. Be assured that they have no foundation.

Your much maligned father,

Morris

Sorry, I broke off for the afternoon there, Carla. Sheer depression. Sometimes I feel I should just let them condemn me to however many years it will be and the hell with it. But enough self-pity. Onward. So, the morning after the funeral, flying back to Italy, I felt determined to establish better relations with my children and to be kinder and more attentive to Antonella. Come hell or high water, Mauro must be saved from gaol, I thought, and given his chance in Fratelli Trevisan. I would not let the family I have struggled for all these years go to pieces. As for the email I had received from Volpi, I decided to ignore it and continue as before. The museum needed my sponsorship. All the trustees had stressed their support for the Painting Death initiative. I would simply smile at Volpi as if pretending not to have noticed an unpleasant smell.

Speaking of which, Carla—I know you’ll forgive me—the diet here, at least for the vegetarians amongst us, is truly awful. All I get is beans. Raw, boiled, baked, fried. No wonder I’m suffering from wind. Is there anything you can do to help? Are prison systems sensitive to lawyer’s complaints?

I flew back from England just in time to see my son cross-questioned by the prosecution. The big surprise, as you can imagine, was the presence of the mayor. He was in jeans and an old sweater, looking more like a defendant than the town’s first citizen; all the same I thought it was a generous gesture on his part, obviously undertaken with the intent of putting political pressure on the judge, showing his willingness to defend a citizen of Verona against the brutal Brescia police.

I took my seat between Massimina and Antonella and tried to hold my wife’s hand to comfort her, but she seemed perfectly relaxed, chatting away to Don Lorenzo on the other side of her about the Sunday flower arrangements.

‘Mauro Dackwert, do you accept,’ the prosecutor began, ‘that on the evening of so and so on the corner of so and so and so and so in the town of Brescia, in the company of etc., etc., etc., you attacked six policemen identified as etc., etc., etc.?’

My son pronounced an emphatic no. I was thrilled. He has decided to lie, I thought. He has a chance! However, when the prosecutor then read out the boy’s original statement confessing that he had ‘purposefully and deliberately attacked the police’ and asked him if this ‘no’ meant he was retracting that confession, my son replied:

‘Not at all, but you have taken the word “attacked” out of context. You forget that we boys, all seventeen years of age, were attacked first by twenty and more heavily armed grown men. If you repeat the question with the word “counter-attacked” I will reply in the affirmative.’

I must say, mad as it was, I was rather impressed. Perhaps Tonbridge had had some positive effect after all.

‘Counter-attack is considered a legitimate form of defence by the United Nations,’ Mauro added.

As you can imagine the prosecuting lawyer was taken aback. He had been expecting a cretin, had reckoned without the Duckworth gene(ious). The mayor actually clapped out loud. I hadn’t realised clapping was permissible in a court of law.

‘Is it or is it not true that you and your fellow thugs were armed with sticks?’

Mauro seemed to think for a moment. He had slipped off his jacket, probably he was sweating, and you could see his thick shoulders and bull neck. He said coolly. ‘I am not a thug and do not keep company with thugs.’

The boy actually smiled. ‘I wonder if the court is aware that regulations for flag-bearing poles brought into football stadiums require that they be no longer than one metre and be made from flexible polythene weighing no more than eighty grams.’

‘Mauro Dackwerth please limit yourself to answering the question. Were you and your companions armed with sticks, or not?’

‘I’m sorry, but in that case I need a definition of the word “sticks.” Meantime, I take the word “armed” to be ironic. As in, “armed with a toothbrush.”’

There was some laughter in court. The lawyer appealed to the three presiding judges, a man and two women. They consulted. The middle judge, an elderly man in a red gown eventually said: ‘Avvocato Falletti, I think it has been established that the defendants were carrying flexible polythene poles intended for flag waving and weighing eighty grams. Whether we refer to them as sticks or not is beside the point.’

‘Grazie, Signor Giudice.’ The prosecuting magistrate cleared his throat. He didn’t seem as upset as you might have expected by this lack of judicial support. ‘Is it true,’ he continued, ‘that you and your fellow Hellas Verona “brigades” so called—I hope you are not going to deny that you are a member of the brigades, Signor Duckworth—share a deep hatred of the police?’

‘I am proud to be a Hellas fan,’ Mauro said very seriously. ‘There is no formal membership of the brigades, but we are a tight-knit community with a strict code of honour. We do not hate the police. But we reserve the right to defend ourselves and counter-attack against discrimination and violence whatever quarter they may come from.’

There was a general murmur of approval. What I was thinking was this: if my son was capable of such lucidity and articulation, such effective timing too, and even irony, why had he never bothered to display these qualities in my presence? Why hadn’t he joined the debating society at Tonbridge? Antonella was smiling quietly. It was as if she were watching something unfold exactly as she had expected. Massimina glanced up, shook her head and went back to her texting.

‘If we had intended to do serious harm,’ Mauro was saying, ‘we could have armed ourselves with stones, or bottles, could we not? Our plan was just to show them they hadn’t intimidated us with the beating they gave us as we left the stadium. Two of our friends had been taken to hospital. We felt we would be letting them down if we didn’t make some statement.’

It was a tough story to swallow, but the boy did have a chubby adolescent charm about him. My own feeling was that the prosecuting magistrate was incompetent. He kept leaving long spaces between questions, reading through his notes as if he’d never seen them before. It was during one of these embarrassing pauses that I noticed that the main presiding judge had red hair. Oh, not flaming red like Mauro’s. More a sort of coppery brown. But curly too. I turned to Antonella and saw she was watching with shining eyes. However, since, from where we were sitting, Mauro in the witness box and the judge on the dais fell into the same rising line of vision, it was impossible to tell who she was looking at, the boy or the man, both red-haired.

But enough. I really am wasting your time now. The more I write the more I realise I am paranoid, deeply paranoid. It was probably inevitable that the little hooligans would be let off with a caution. Elections were imminent and the mayor needed to grab some xenophobic consensus by painting the picture of a Verona besieged by the malice of jealous neighbours. Hence my honorary citizenship. The trial of these stupid kids fitted his plans perfectly. Two of the other boys turned out to be sons of a leading banker and a top urologist (a useful man for an ageing elite). Why should the judges make themselves unpopular? There was probably never any doubt the young thugs would win their case, and certainly no need for some kind of Jesuit conspiracy to fling open the prison doors. Which doesn’t mean there wasn’t a Jesuit conspiracy. The only downside to an acquittal was that my son had been somewhat encouraged in a life of lawlessness. After consultation with Antonella I decided to act at once to get him involved in the company, if only to keep him out of trouble. I urged him to accept a worker’s position full-time in our bottling factory and report back to me after a month with ten cost-free measures to improve productivity.

But I have wearied you and you are eager to hear about the events leading up to my discovery of the body.

To Signora Antonella Trevisan

Carissima Anto, mio amore,

My heart bleeds. It is only now that I’ve been away from you for so long, cara, that I appreciate how much I count on you for companionship and wisdom. Forgive me if I have been a less than attentive husband in recent years. There is nothing like a spell of enforced loneliness and silence to alert one to one’s multitudinous shortcomings. As for the legal situation, I have a good idea who might be responsible for the murder, but as long as I’m in prison, what can I do? Paradoxically I cannot get it out of my head that all this has happened to us because we have been too good for too long. Do you know what I mean? We have, as it were, defied the gods with our goodness. Perhaps a little transgression on our part would have spared us this ordeal. It’s a strange thought. Such is the effect of solitary confinement.

Has there been no news at all of Massimina? When the magistrates start allowing it, please visit at once. I miss your eyes and the reassuring purr of your voice.

Do give my regards to Stan. Hopefully he is offering you some support through this difficult time. Has he made any progress with his search for Forbes? I’m eager to hear of any new details.

Un abbraccio appassionato,

Your Morris

PS, trouble with constipation and haemorrhoids again. The food is awful and I am not getting enough exercise. I shall take advice about suing for damages when they let me out.

With the trial over and having spent a couple of days in Fratelli Trevisan and on various construction sites, I went to see Zolla to discuss progress with the loans for the show. Judging from the faces of the museum staff as I walked through the offices, they had no notion that my role had changed in any way. I was admitted at once to Zolla’s office, he rose and shook my hand and commiserated me on the tragic loss of my father. I asked him how the loan requests were coming on and he said the confirmations had been flowing in ‘theeck and faster.’ He seemed completely unaware of the email Volpi had written to me.

We sat down to a discussion of which paintings should go where and how exactly the space should be divided and designed. The walls might be re-clad in a satiny black, I thought, to have the strong red pigments of the blood stand out. Or perhaps we could have different cladding for different sections in line with the themes they featured, fratricide, infanticide, uxoricide. I must say I found it all very exciting to be working on the details of the show at last. I asked him if I could move a painting we were planning to use from a church in San Briccio into the museum storeroom because the storage situation in San Briccio was primitive to say the least, and he said, why not. (This is an important detail, Carla!)

Well, I must admit that the combination of my father’s funeral and Mauro’s trial had rather led me to take my eye off the ball as far as Massimina was concerned.

‘The fact is that she hasn’t been present at any classes since Christmas. I just wanted to be sure that you were aware of that.’

‘Naturally I was aware that she is mainly at home, these days,’ I said, ‘though she appears to be in constant communication with the world, via her iPhone.’ I tried to make the remark as pointed as I could.

‘It’s a plague,’ Zolla agreed. ‘Students text all the time during the lessons.’

‘Would you have any idea why she is not coming to lessons?’ I asked him. ‘Especially since she spoke so, er, enthusiastically about you.’

Zolla shook his head. ‘These young people are very unpredictable. With their love lives and so on.’

‘They fall in love,’ he sighed. ‘And they fall out of love. They take it badly perhaps and lose heart.’

Then he added: ‘Why don’t you tell her to come and discuss the matter with me in my tutorial hours. Tuesdays at 4.30. Perhaps I can help.’

Was the man now trying to use me as a go-between to patch up an affair that she had wisely pulled out of, but at the expense of her university career? I decided to confront the matter head on with Massimina. However, when I went to dinner that evening I found that we had a guest, Stan Albertini.

I must explain in a few words my relationship with Stan. Stan was the sort of unofficial leader of an ‘alternative’ English-speaking hippy community in Verona back in the eighties when I arrived and briefly courted Massimina Trevisan before her unhappy disappearance. Later, when I was married to Paola Trevisan, he was teaching English privately to Antonella and her then husband, sadly deceased of course. Stan also became close friends with a man called Michael Forbes, an Old Etonian whom I had helped to set up a summer school in the Valpolicella for English public-school boys. Forbes was a good amateur painter and after the school was closed I kept him alive financially by commissioning copies of paintings from him. Then some six years ago, Forbes left, leaving no contact details. However, it turned out that Stan, who had long since returned to the USA, had been keeping up a regular correspondence with Forbes, and having taken an early pension he came back to Italy shortly before Christmas, in part, it seems, to look up Forbes. He was so upset not finding him, particularly as he’d lent him a considerable sum of money, that he had insisted on reporting him as missing to the police.

Forgive me, Carla, but once again I’m having difficulty keeping my account short and to the point. One of the problems is working on paper. If I had my computer here I could do a bit of editing. Instead I’m condemned to scribbling in these school exercise books. Never mind. The fact is that the very evening I had planned to speak to Massimina, Stan came over to complain that in the month since he’d reported Forbes’s disappearance the police had done—surprise surprise—absolutely nothing. He wanted to ask us if we knew anyone who could pull a string or two.

A visitor at table meant meat for dinner, which in turn meant the children were present. Mauro and Massimina love their steak and both seemed extremely pleased to see Stan. They’re too young to appreciate how superficial he is. He cultivates an easy Californian manner and cracks lots of innocuous little jokes in his atrocious Italian, sexual innuendos more often than not. They love it. I notice they never correct him the way they do me. After a third or fourth glass of wine, he started to tell us he was convinced the police knew more than they let on but wouldn’t take action because Forbes had been implicated, along with various members of the cloth, in molesting little boys.

‘It’s not a country for faint hearts,’ I told him. I really couldn’t understand why he was pursuing the matter so insistently. I had already told him that if he was out of pocket over the matter, I was willing to come to his assistance.

Antonella was just saying it was too easy to imagine all priests were paedophiles, when who should hobble into the room but our spiritual adviser, Don Lorenzo. On hearing what we were talking about he immediately seemed troubled; he went white in fact. We had to help him to the sofa and find some quality port. Finally he said that given the kind of confession he had heard from Forbes shortly before his disappearance, he was sure Stan had done the right thing going to the police. ‘Though it was wrong,’ he added, ‘to imagine it had anything to do with priests.’

For my own part, I think if confessions are to be confidential, then frankly they should be so one hundred per cent, without the confessor tossing out hints and titbits left and right. I don’t know why—and again, you will see now the point in my telling you this—but at that moment, hearing Don Lorenzo reflecting that Stan had done well to go to the police, I had a blisteringly clear foreboding that very soon I would be arrested for murder. It’s crazy isn’t it, but whatever goes wrong I feel that people are always going to point the finger at me. This is what Italy has done to me, Carla. It must be a syndrome.

Anyway, I was so paralysed by all this unpleasantness, and frankly rather disgusted with the overheated way my children were chattering about these deeply distasteful matters as if they were the merest entertainment, that I forgot to pursue the question of Zolla with Massimina and by the time I remembered she and Mauro had been spirited off by our Californian calamity to listen to live music in some hip/cool pub he’d discovered in, of all miserable places, the sad suburb of Chievo—Stan was always one for the music scene, f lowers, love, dope and multiple partners (perhaps he had more in common with Forbes than he lets on). After the noisy brigade departed I remember Antonella enthusing to Don Lorenzo, who still seemed extremely troubled, how nice it was to see Mimi in such a good mood again; she must invite old Stan more often, she said. He had really cheered the girl up.

To Stanley Albertini

My dear Stan,

I do hope this missive finds you. I remember Antonella telling me you were staying at the Piccolo Hotel.

How strange life is, no? Once again I have been arrested for murder. I wonder if I’m fated, or if some evil spirit moves in my vicinity, commits crimes and arranges for me to carry the can. I just wanted to ask you as you seemed to be getting on so well with Massimina recently. I know you went out for a drink with her and Mauro a couple of times. It’s not possible, is it, searching hard in your memory, that you could find some clue as to where she might be? I don’t know why I write this, since of course Anto will already have asked, but there you are. A control obsession, no doubt.

How long are you planning to stay in Verona now? Perhaps you have already departed. Have the police finally come up with anything on Forbes? Again allow me to thank you for looking after me when I fainted on you in the church attic that morning. Un apostolo del soccorso, no less! You know I still can’t remember how I got down the stairs. No recollection at all. Very strange. The French tourists must have thought we were ghosts.

Let me know your news, if you can. I’m afraid it’s rather lonely here.

Your old pal,

Morris

However, Carla, one aspect of these recent months is how I have never been allowed to get myself properly scalded by one hot potato before another is tossed at me. One moment I was elated about the progress of the show, the next anxious for my daughter, the next unsettled by vague talk of police and missing paedophiles. In short, a couple of days later I had just concluded a fruitful discussion with Zolla about the local paintings that we had decided to bring in alongside the international masterpieces, to give the show Veronese roots as it were, when Mariella, Zolla’s rather sweet secretary, tells me Volpi wants to see me in his office. I was glad. It was time the old bitterness between us was cleared up once and for all.

Here then is the crucial conversation on which, or rather (this is important) on Volpi’s preliminary notes for which, my police persecutors base so much of their case. As you will see, those notes do not at all match what actually took place between us.

It’s true that Volpi started by telling me he wanted me out of the building that minute and for good. So his intention was as indicated in those notes. However, far from leaving I sat myself down, uninvited, on a sumptuous swivel chair, confronting him across his preposterously large desk.

Volpi, as was his way, tried to use his obscene bulk and a sort of unfocused intemperance, to intimidate me, sprawling backward on his chair and pushing up his mountainous paunch.

After a few moments’ awkward silence I pointed out that the success of the museum in the immediate future was not unconnected with the Duckworth Foundation. There were four paintings to restore for the show, work that I had pledged to pay for.

Volpi had a strange way of playing with his lips, as if it helped him to think, pouting and popping and puffing. Suddenly he hauled himself up, planted his plump elbows on the desk and made me an offer. My name, he said, would appear as co-curator and sponsor for the show, I would get the credit; in return, however, I must agree to have nothing more to do with the practical organisation of the event and to keep away from Castelvecchio until the show itself opened. He pointed out that I had never been formally invited to curate the show and had no contract to do so.

I had no idea how to respond to this provocation. Playing for time, I pointed out that a number of canvases from my own private collection would be in show and I wished to have a say in their arrangement. A Gentileschi, two Sickerts and an anonymous baroque Jezebel Defenestrated. If there was no contract, I said, it was because I had generously foregone any fee. I hesitated. At the very least he owed me an explanation for his extraordinary animosity in my regard.

‘Delving into one of the institution’s computers is not acceptable,’ he said bluntly. ‘You are poison, Duckworth. You have been writing behind our backs and in our names to important representatives of foreign museums.’

Zolla had protested that I must have illegally accessed his email to get hold of the addresses of the people responsible for lending us the paintings. Naturally, it took me no more than a minute to refute such a mad accusation. I explained that I had long had a friendship with a member of staff at the Fitzwilliam, a museum in Cambridge, England, and this man had forwarded to me a round-robin email that Zolla had sent to all the museums involved in our requests; he, the Fitzwilliam friend, wanted to know whether this was the show I had mentioned to him when recently in Cambridge to visit my alma mater. It was true that, having come into possession of these addresses, I had then taken the liberty of sending on some supplementary explanation of the show to the various museums rights’ departments, but I did this only after long discussion with Zolla. ‘With all respect, Dottore,’ I wound up, ‘it seems to me that our Angelo is a little . . .’—I hesitated—‘sometimes a little . . .’

‘I just wish he had raised the matter with me before complaining to you. With me he’s been acting as if all was well. Frankly, I don’t understand. There seems to be a lack of trust, and a lack of sincerity. Perhaps we should call him in here now.’

Volpi then leaned forward across the desk and, popping his lips again, asked me why I thought Zolla had been weeping in his office that day.

I told him I had no idea and that I didn’t concern myself with matters that were none of my business. I was only interested in the show.

He looked at me. ‘Signor Duckworth,’ he began, but I suddenly found myself interrupting to say that what I had thought intriguing that morning was the panel on the wall, which I hadn’t noticed before, about the Bianchi scourging themselves on their pilgrimages.

Volpi grunted and sat back. The panel was still there, on the right as one came in the door, and we both turned to look at it.

Now he laughed. ‘Mice also,’ he said, ‘have a great ability to change direction when being chased, Signor Duckworth.’

When I refused to respond to such a pathetic provocation, he said: ‘The Bianchi were a religious confraternity. On their pilgrimages, they dropped the stoles from their backs, so that they hung on the cord round their waists, then whipped themselves repeatedly with . . .’—he hesitated, smiled, then opened a drawer and with evident relish pulled out what looked like a black stick about eighteen inches long with half a dozen barbed leather lashes attached to one end—‘something like this.’ Raising his eyes and flaunting a fat smile he lifted his hand abruptly to his shoulder so that the lashes fell down on his back where they presumably made contact with his damp shirt.

I honestly didn’t know what to say. Either the scourge was a museum piece, in which case it had no place in his desk, or it was something modern, of the variety I can only presume people purchase from shops dedicated to the enhancement of erotic pleasure. Why was Volpi showing this to me? Was it an invitation of some kind?

‘Fascinating,’ I finally agreed. To cover my embarrassment, I remarked how interesting it was that the official Church had entirely discontinued this penitential practice.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ he said drily. Then very abruptly he demanded: ‘Signor Duckworth, why were you in the museum storerooms without permission? How do I know you are not planning to, er, supplement your personal art collection from ours?’

This again indicated such an extraordinary lack of trust that I could only put it down to the man’s being raised in Naples. I explained to him that, as agreed with Zolla, I would soon be collecting, for the show, a painting of San Bartolomeo (flayed) from a church in the village of San Briccio. It was precisely to avoid anyone’s imagining that I was appropriating the painting for myself that I had organised with Zolla that we would house the work in the storeroom here in Castelvecchio. ‘I had not realised I needed permission to check the conditions down there,’ I concluded.

Volpi watched me. In retrospect, I realise he must have feared I had stumbled on some kind of activity going on in the storeroom. Why else would he have been willing to recognise me as co-curator so long as I stayed away from the museum?

‘It appears communications between yourself and Zolla are not what they might be,’ I threw in.

He didn’t answer. So then I said I needed his advice about San Bartolomeo. Here things get a trifle complicated, and again you will have to bear with me. I had been alerted as to the existence of this painting and its possible suitability for the show by the young Libyan woman Samira Al Zuwaid, who presently works in the archive of the Cultural Heritage Department. I should say for the record that I was familiar with Signorina Al Zuwaid because she previously did an internship with Fratelli Trevisan. As you know, Carla, I have always had a policy of employing immigrants where possible since I feel I share with them a common and thorny destiny here in Italy. However, rumours that I have been having an affair with Signorína Al Zuwaid are ridiculous and frankly more damaging to her than to me. On her suggestion, then, I had gone—with my son (if someone is eager to check up on all these facts)—to look at this and other paintings. But the priest at San Briccio pretended he knew nothing of the canvas and it was only my perseverance that eventually allowed me to discover it, unbeknown to the priest, in a church that had fallen into disuse. I had explained all this to Zolla and now I explained it again to Volpi and asked him for guidance. My plan, I said, was to send a team to remove the painting, if possible without saying anything to the priest, since very likely the cleric was hiding the picture with the intention of selling it, one of the more common if less opprobrious of the priesthood’s vices.

Pertinently, Volpi pointed out that it would not be possible to use the museum’s regular removal organisation since they would require complete documentation in advance, thus giving the priest all the time in the world to have San Bartolomeo disappear, skin and bone, for good. He asked how many people would be required to remove the painting. I told him three. There was the problem of a narrow wooden staircase with rotten steps. The painting would have to be lowered with a rope.

‘Obviously, you will need to go with someone from the Cultural Heritage Department,’ he said, ‘but it must also be someone who can guarantee maximum confidentiality.’ He tipped his face to the ceiling and stroked his jowls reflectively with fat fingertips. I had the impression that it was a pleasure for him to think about little problems like this and I must say that for the first time my heart began to warm to him. ‘Since Signorina Al Zuwaid already knows about the painting,’ he decided, ‘perhaps she could be present.’

I appreciate that in retrospect this conversation hardly seems credible. Why didn’t Volpi suggest someone from the museum, someone with the required expertise? Moving heavy old paintings can be a tricky task. As for this brother of Signorina Al Zuwaid, Tarik he is called, I was aware of his existence, in part because his sister had mentioned him when she was working as my intern, but also because quite recently, when I had spoken of getting a Moslem, or at least an Arab, to comment on some of the biblical paintings we were planning to exhibit, Volpi had proposed that we invite Tarik. Quite how a museum director might have got to know two Libyan immigrants I really have no idea and certainly didn’t think about it at the time. I presumed that his dealings with the Heritage Department inevitably led to his meeting Signorina Al Zuwaid from time to time. In any event, when he said ‘Take her brother’, I was so delighted that we were finding common ground in these arrangements and that he had stopped talking about breaking off our relationship, that I immediately said OK.

The conversation had thus been turned on its head. Walking into Volpi’s office I had been confronted by a man determined to be rid of me (as indicated in his preliminary notes); now I was walking out with an understanding that I would secure a painting for the show that we both believed to be at risk and bring it to the storeroom beneath the museum, whence it would go to a restorer as soon as possible. What’s more, I had a very strong impression that Volpi was now intending to draw me in to whatever was secret in the museum, rather than keep me out. Some balance of power had shifted and I, rather than Zolla, who was my real enemy, and who he now understood had lied about me, was to be the privileged one.

‘How soon do you think you can get the painting?’ he asked, ‘Because the restoration work will have to be scheduled at once. Also, it’s important to know when you’ll be accessing the storeroom so someone can be there to receive the painting.’

We talked about it. I was feeling elated. He reflected very reasonably that the only time one could be sure that the priest would not interrupt would be when the man was saying Mass in the village’s new church. I thus suggested I pick up the painting the following Sunday morning.

‘Sometime you and I should explore the storeroom together, Signor Duckworth,’ Volpi told me, offering his hand as I stood to leave. At the time I felt absolutely sure that he meant it.

To Professor Zolla

Dear Angelo,

How are you and all my friends at Castelvecchio holding up? It must be hard for you all to carry on normally in these distressing circumstances.

You will also be aware of my arrest. I am not allowed to see newspapers or television here but no doubt they are full of lurid speculation in my regard. I did not, as I’m sure you understand, do the deed. Indeed, I write this letter to appeal to you from the bottom of my heart to do all you can to find out who is responsible. I did wonder if perhaps the two Libyans, Samira and Tarik Al Zuwaid, might not be involved. They seemed extremely wary of coming into Castelvecchio when we brought San Bartolomeo that morning; they spoke of having had ‘a rough night’ and suddenly invented a lunch appointment they couldn’t miss.

Meantime, are you proceeding with arrangements for the show? I hope it hasn’t been called off. I can imagine one’s first reaction in such circumstances is just to say, a show on murder, forget it. Yet, as you know, art is never more appropriate than when close to reality. Have you taken a look at San Bartolomeo yet? What do you think? Quality? Condition? Extent of restoration required? If you are in doubt about anything, I have every aspect of the show very clearly in my head. When other thoughts oppress me here between these narrow walls, I let my mind wander, and indeed wonder, over those fantastic images, moving in my imagination through the exhibition rooms, observing the excitement of visitors from all over the globe as they see how the old masters understood the marriage of terror and spectacle.

With my warmest regards,

Morris

So much then, Carla, for the situation at Castelvecchio. Here, hour by hour, is the fatal day of Sunday 29 April.

Antonella and I rose early, shortly after six, she to spend some time in quiet prayer, I to sit and meditate in The Art Room where I love to commune with my paintings and reflect on the many tumultuous circumstances of life that they so beautifully express. We dressed for church and then, observing the Eucharistic fast obviously, as is our wont, set out to walk across Piazza Bra to San Nicoló. It was now around seven-forty and it would be hard to express the charm of the piazza in that moment, the air still fresh, but not too cool to sit out, the morning blissfully calm, yet full of airy promise, the cobbles, stone and stucco so decorous and settled in time, yet truly alive and present now, echoing to footsteps, young and old, brisk and plodding, the jingle of bicycles, the clattering of early morning crockery in a dozen delightful cafés. Forgive me this purple prose, Carla, but I mean, would I really have been able to notice these things if I had just carried out a brutal murder? I think not.

Arm in arm, my wife and I proceeded to early Mass at San Nicolò where to our amazement and consternation Don Lorenzo did not appear. We had been coming to San Nicolò for nigh on thirty years and this must have been the first time that Don Lorenzo was not present to say Mass. The few good folk who attend early service sat in attitudes of prayer, then when the delay became significant began to exchange whispers of concern. Only after half an hour or so did his perpetua turn up to explain that the good Don had been taken to hospital in the early hours after some kind of collapse.

Obliged to leave San Nicolò without partaking of the host, my wife found a taxi and rushed off to visit the sick man. I promised I would visit in the afternoon, after my mission to San Briccio. It was thus around nine when I arrived at the Al Zuwaids’ apartment in San Zeno. Since I was early, I accepted their offer of a coffee; they had had a late night they said, an ordinary thing for such young folk, I suppose, and had only just dragged themselves out of bed. In fact, they were not yet properly dressed.

After some discussion of the logistics of our mission, we left the apartment around ten. We drove to the Trevisan headquarters where I exchanged the Alfa Romeo for a company van; then Tarik drove us out to San Briccio. As we arrived in the village it was evident from the cars double-parked outside the new church and blocking all but one lane of the main road that Mass was under way.

A few minutes later we parked ourselves, or tried to, in the small square outside the now disused and deconsecrated Santa Chíara in Ecstasy and here ran into an unexpected problem. The fact is I always reckon without the Italian love of Sunday sporting events. Not only were a group of cyclists showing off their shiny machinery and embarrassingly elastic outfits as they assembled in the space outside the church, but another, larger rabble had gathered for the annual Palo della Cuccagna contest in the laghetto. They had already erected the pole, or rather tree trunk, a good six metres of it, coated it in an ugly orangey soap and planted in I don’t know what slimy mud in the middle of the filthy pond. Already the local hunks were stripping to their tattoos to swim out and scale it. This would all have been excellent fun of course—a deafeningly loud PA system was making ironic dialect announcements and there was a smell of sausages in the air—if it hadn’t meant that we had to park fifty metres away from our goal and then positively muscle our way through the mob to the church door where a trickle of water was gurgling steadily over the ancient flagstones. However, since we were doing nothing wrong and indeed operating on the express and explicit instructions of a local museum director, I decided to go ahead anyway.

We had brought a bolt cutter and I invited Tarik to break the padlock on the door, something he did with disquieting competence and without raising the slightest interest from the crowd squeezed between church and lake. With their backs towards us, people were intent on watching the first poor fools try to climb the pole. There were so many yells, curses, splashes, oohs and ahs and raucous remarks on the goose-pimpled flesh of prettily shivering maidens as they tumbled into the water that I realised we were actually less likely to be noticed than if the area had been deserted. Once inside we lit our torches and bolted the door behind us.

It was at this moment that I received a phone call from my son to tell me that Massimina had not come home the previous evening. How was I supposed to respond to this? In the end it’s not unusual in this day and age for a twenty-year-old girl to stay out on a Saturday night. But Massimina, as I have explained, had hardly been out of the house for the last month and was apparently in a state of, if not depression, then some intense internal conflict. What was particularly surprising, however, was that her oafish brother should show such real concern as to his elder sister’s whereabouts, as if he knew something I didn’t. I decided that if Massimina was not at home by the time I returned, I would find out where Zolla lived (with his mother and grandmother it seems) and drive straight round to demand an explanation.

I had moved to one side to speak to my son, idly playing my torch over a Deposition that left much to be desired. Turning to the others, then, it was to find Christ’s dead face, luminous in its affliction, floating in the air not a yard away. My heart skipped a beat and my jaw must have dropped because Samira immediately burst out laughing. It was Tarik playing the torch over his face. The likeness to the Semitic features in the ugly old painting was remarkable. Delighted that they had made a fool of me, the two of them flashed their torches around poking fun at the Christian images on the walls and cackling together in a most unpleasant way. For some private reason that had to do with their late night, they were in extremely high spirits. I was anxious that if we didn’t go about our task with a little more decorum we might come to grief in some way.

Behind the altar of Santa Chiara there is a small vestry with a rotten wooden staircase leading up to a low attic. Tarik and I picked our way up the stairs with a length of rope. The paintings, five of them, were at the far end, each about a metre fifty square. Since on my first visit here I had hidden San Bartolomeo at the back of the stack we now had to move the others aside. To tell the truth I almost lost my temper with Tarik who insisted on making rude remarks about the devotional images just about visible through thick plastic sheeting. The Miracle of the Fish, in his estimation, was a capitalist fantasy of exploiting natural resources beyond all sustainability. The Road to Emmaus was about gay threesomes, Mary Anointing Jesus’s Feet was pure fetishism. When we got to San Bartolomeo I asked him rather sourly what smart-ass remark he was going to make about a man willing to undergo pain beyond belief for his faith. ‘Beyond belief!’ he laughed. ‘You said it, Boss.’ That ‘Boss’, I thought, was especially uncalled for.

We were still standing with our torches shining at the plastic sheeting, so that the flesh laid bare on the saint’s chest looked rather like meat under cellophane. Tarik sighed. ‘Let’s get moving,’ he said. But as we were turning the painting round, he remarked matter-of-factly that it was a good job I was so enthusiastic about martyrs because I could expect to see a lot more of them in the near future.

‘Look,’ I told him, ‘I don’t know what your problem is, young man, because everyone here in Verona is being extremely nice to you.’

‘Volpi is another,’ Tarik said harshly. ‘And Zolla. They’ll get what’s coming to them.’

I asked him what in God’s name he was on about, but he just laughed, and when I asked him how he knew Zolla, he said anybody who knew Volpi inevitably knew Zolla.

I told him I didn’t understand. He said if that was really the case I was more autistic than he had imagined.

‘Planning to start a jihad, are we?’ I enquired as we began to tie the rope round the frame at the top of the stairs.

Out of sorts as I was, I kept in mind that the only important thing right now was to get Bartolomeo’s flayed flesh safely down the stairs, and off to the museum. Leaving Tarik at the top, I picked my way over the rotten planks to Samira and the two of us prepared to receive the painting as it was lowered slowly down in its rope cradle. In the event, everything went very smoothly. We got the painting to the porch, unbolted the door and pushed out into the crowd. It had started to rain and people were jostling their umbrellas trying to get a glimpse at the idiots whose efforts on the slippery pole had now washed the soap off the first six feet or so. Fortunately the cyclists had gone to test their synthetics against sweaty saddles. With some effort we lifted the martyred saint into the van where I had put foam sheeting on the floor to receive his tortured remains.

There was silence. We were sitting side by side up front. I was between the other two.

After a few minutes, Samira said: ‘I thought we were taking it to your house.’

A little later, Tarik said: ‘The trouble is we can’t leave the van parked outside the museum blocking all the buses on Via Cavour, can we?’

I said I would phone ahead. The museum was open to visitors on Sunday and one of the guards could open the gate for deliveries at the side of the building beside the river. Obviously I had informed the director and they were expecting us.

‘There’s below-ground storage,’ I explained, though of course Samira would know this, doing the job she did. In any event, it’s only in the last few days that I have begun to wonder about all those questions the Libyans put to me during the trip from church to museum. They seemed unnecessarily anxious. And Tarik had seemed extremely belligerent in Volpi’s regard.

At a certain point, Tarik said to Samira, ‘The trouble is we’ll be late for . . .’ and he mentioned a name I have forgotten. Apparently they had arranged a lunch with an uncle who had recently come over from Libya.

At this point I was feeling more relaxed. ‘Let’s do this,’ I said: ‘we get the painting to the service lift and I’ll take it from there. If you’re running late for your appointment, by all means use the van.’

As we approached Verona I phoned the museum. On arrival we found the barrier guarding the delivery bay already lifted and the big double door unlocked. We slid the painting along the corridor to the service lift, pushed it inside, and said our goodbyes. Of course I have not seen them since, but all I can say is that as we parted I remember noting a very peculiar look on Tarik’s face: it was as if to one side of his nose there was a most sinister, Machiavellian grin, while the other side was a mask of the childish innocence. Samira on the other hand was entirely natural, apparently already focused on their meeting with this uncle, who, she had been explaining in the van, was in some kind of political trouble with the new regime in the country. But then women, as is well documented, are far better at dissembling than men, I suppose because they enjoy so much more sexual opportunity than we do.

Dear Samira,

No doubt you will have heard of the bizarre fate that has fallen me. I write to you from gaol where all my post is being strictly monitored. I just wanted ask you if, from the vantage point of your position in the Cultural Heritage Department, you could focus your mind on everything to do with Castelvecchio and this terrible murder. The fact is that I have heard rumours that the storerooms in the museum were being used as warehouses in an extensive art-trafficking business that was also part of the Camorra’s endless need to launder dirty money. If that is the case then it seems quite likely that the murderer was some hit man from the world of organised crime. Again I appreciate that it’s unlikely that you would have any pertinent information, but my present situation obliges me to clutch at straws.

With all best wishes and my deep gratitude for our past collaboration and friendship,

Yours sincerely,

Morris Duckworth

Still without having seen any museum staff, I took the lift down to the storage rooms, slid out the painting and leaned it against the nearest wall, as previously agreed with Volpi and Zolla. My task was now complete and had I had an ounce of good sense, I would have left at once. There was, after all, the question of my daughter not having returned home the night before, a matter of some concern, if not yet alarm. On the other hand, I was naturally excited to have secured the painting and thought it would be a good idea at least to have a quick look at it and check whether it would be useable, once restored. It then occurred to me that if by chance Volpi or Zolla were in their offices, they would also like to come and see it. They knew I was bringing the painting, after all. In fact, it was surprising that they hadn’t arranged to have a member of staff on hand to meet me as agreed. In any event, my best chance for working harmoniously with them was to appeal to our shared enthusiasm for art.

Rather than take the lift back to the service entrance, I started to walk through to the other end of the storeroom where a staircase leads up to the museum and the offices. At once I had the impression, if not certainty, that a number of objects had been moved since I was last down there some weeks before. In particular there was a small upright bronze which had been standing then and was now on its side, almost blocking the corridor of free movement among the objects stored. This struck me as odd, since it would have been impossible to knock such a thing over without being aware of it, in which case why wouldn’t you take the very short time and effort required to turn it upright again?

The storeroom at Castelvecchio is actually something of a labyrinth; it spreads out in all directions around the old bulwarks and dungeons with doors here and there leading into rooms that might be no bigger than a cupboard or as large as a whole apartment. I reached the stairs and went up to the museum. Again I was struck, finding the door open, at the lax security in the place. A member of staff did nod to me, an elderly lady who knows me by sight. The statuary room was full of Asians surreptitiously photographing things they didn’t understand. I hurried up to the offices, to see if by chance Zolla and Volpi were there. In parenthesis, I must say, I noticed the police found this part of my story particularly hard to take. They could not imagine that I really supposed anyone might come into his office on a Sunday. I could only plead with them that, to my shame, I often work on the Lord’s Day. Morning and afternoon. After Mass of course.

All the doors were open, but nobody was around. I walked through the open-plan section to Zolla’s room. I know the police claim that I turned on his computer, but this is not true. I did glance at the papers on his desk, though, among which were insurance documents for the shipping of Titian’s Cain and Abel. This cheered me up no end.

I took the corridor at the end of the open plan and went to Volpi’s office. This was closed. Remembering what had happened on my previous visit, I knocked and waited. I knocked again. Nothing. Why, then, the police asked me, did I go in? And once in, having seen that there was no one in the room, why did I go to Volpi’s desk? The answer, at least as far as entering is concerned, is simple. Habit. One knocks, one tries the handle, one enters. I make no apologies. It was not a bedroom. I opened the door and at once saw the office had been turned upside down. It is not true that I turned it upside down myself. Why would I do such a thing? Searching for what? My only interest at Castelvecchio was the organisation of the exhibition Painting Death. Sometimes I think the police just don’t use their heads, but I thought the same throughout the Amanda Knox case which I followed quite closely. They get excited by whatever lurid solution has popped into their skulls, then move the facts around so as not to be disappointed.

Seeing the room in disorder, I naturally went to the desk as if there might be some explanation there of what had happened. In the event there was nothing but scattered papers. A low hum alerted me to the fact that, though the screen was blank, the computer was on. I went round the desk and pressed the space bar. After the usual delay the screen came to life. It was a video platform. I looked but couldn’t understand at first what I was looking at. Only after perhaps thirty seconds did I appreciate that it was an anus seen from close up. I mean two or three centimetres. I was appalled, but for some reason I found the mouse and clicked replay. I hardly need describe what I saw. The police have stored the video as an exhibit. I stopped the film and it was then, as I moved away from the desk to head back towards the entrance, that I noticed faint footprints on the stone floor.

One says footprints, but the truth is they were barely stains and I only related them to my feet because they occurred at regular intervals crossing the room, though quite long intervals, since it turned out it was only my right foot that was involved. At first, I didn’t realise it was blood. I thought I had brought in some dirt on my shoes, perhaps from the wet gravel outside the church. So it was entirely natural that my first thought was to wipe them off so as not to dirty the office of the museum director. There was a pack of tissues on the desk and I crouched down. It was as I was wiping the third or fourth print that it occurred to me that this must be blood. I smelt it. Yes. At that point I simply cleaned off my shoe, just my right shoe, as I said, and with a growing anxiety retraced my steps, through the open plan, and into Zolla’s office, then back downstairs and through the museum.

You will no doubt want me to explain my reasoning and my actions at this point, but I honestly can’t. On the one hand I just wanted to clean up behind me, like anyone who feels guilty of making a mess. This is the way I was brought up. On the other, I was aware that that blood must have come from somewhere. There was also the problem that I could hardly go down and start cleaning the museum floor with all the Asians touting their cameras and the museum attendants trying to pretend the rules weren’t being broken. Undecided, I froze for some minutes.

Then as if to avoid the issue—but who knows why we act as we do?—I took out my mobile and called my son.

‘It just says, Dear Mamma e Papà, I’m going away for a while, don’t worry about me, Mimi.’

My wife, he said, or rather, his mother, was upset about Don Lorenzo. The priest was in a coma. Mauro hadn’t wished to make matters worse.

At this point I felt extremely eager to get home where my family needed me. I decided to identify the source of the blood, make sure it was nothing serious, then leave at once. The idea of a murder, or even a crime of any kind, still hadn’t occurred to me. I was more concerned about having made a mess or being accused of trying to get inside people’s computers when they weren’t in their offices. Seeing a pack of wipes on Mariella’s desk, I hurriedly cleaned up all the prints first in the office, then the corridor. Here it is truly hilarious that the police accuse me of having committed the murder, then tried to eliminate these traces, as if, having knifed a man to the most violent of deaths, I wouldn’t be aware that modern forensics is more than equal to a quick scrub with a Kleenex Moisty Wipe. The fact that I behaved in a way entirely natural for someone who has merely brought in a little dirt from the street is rock-solid proof that at this point I knew nothing of the murder.

At the same time it occurred to me now that when the other Massimina, Antonella’s younger sister, had left home with such fatal consequences many years ago, she too left a note in which she said she was going away for a while and not to worry about her. That thought changed my mood drastically. From this point on I was, to put it mildly, in a frenzy of concern for my daughter.

Coming out of the lift and re-entering the museum, I lost patience with cleaning the prints, elbowed my way through the tourists, pushed open the service door and hurried down to the storeroom. Turning on all the lights it was evident that there were patches of blood all over the place. I must have been blind not to see them earlier. The stains grew darker the more you moved to the far wall. I followed them and eventually found a door I hadn’t noticed before, perhaps because it stood behind two or three ugly stone statues from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Opening the door, which I noticed had a large key in the lock on the inside, I found myself in a corridor with other doors leading off either side. Again it was all too easy to see where the blood was coming from since the handle of the second door on the right was thickly smeared with red. I was so breathless to get to the bottom of it I simply put my own bare hand on the handle and opened.

You’ve seen the photos, Carla, so there’s not much point in describing the scene. What I rather have to explain, I suppose, is my response. I would like to tell you that I was totally disorientated, and in a way I was. But there was also a way in which I was terrifyingly orientated: I mean, I knew exactly where I was; it was a scene I was familiar with.

You must remember that for twenty years I have been collecting paintings showing scenes of murder. This has been my specialisation, the way some philatelists collect stamps showing flowers, others wildlife, others famous public buildings. And of course I had been thinking about these representations of lethal violence much more intensely in recent months as I selected the exhibits for the forthcoming show. Among the biblical murder scenes, one that is rarely depicted but extremely quaint is the murder, or rather political assassination, of the Moabite King Eglon by the Jewish hero, Ehud. There is a nineteenth-century woodcut of the scene by Ford Madox Brown which appears in Dalziel’s illustrated Bible (published in the 1880s), a copy of which I had procured through an Internet auction room only the month before, having decided to lend it to the museum for the show. What makes it relevant is that King Eglon was hugely fat and the Bible speaks of the long knife that Ehud used sinking right into his belly, to the point that the haft disappeared. Madox Brown’s woodcut shows Eglon in his oriental finery sitting on a handsome throne, just before Ehud attacks.

What can I say? I suddenly felt an extraordinary wave of heat welling up, as if my bowels were on fire. It was the throne that most struck me. What had this room been furnished for, with its antique chests and tables, its gilt chaises longues, its plush drapes, its lush and obscene tapestries, its bizarre oriental symbols and strange instruments (I recognised at once the scourge Volpi had shown me in his office and various weapons from the museum’s collection). This must be the place the director had been concerned I might discover, I realised, when he objected to my visiting the storeroom. And there he was on his throne, or a least a huge regency armchair, naked but for the red robe on his shoulders, and with that deep gash in his lower stomach. I took a step towards him and became aware of the smell. The room stank. Because out of his belly had come not just blood but faeces. I made the mistake of taking a step closer, seeing the intestines and just the tip of the haft thrust right into the deep blubber. Immediately I wanted to be sick and indeed I was. I retched on the red carpet already thick with blood (would a murderer do this?). It was as I was trying to wipe my mouth that I realised there was a sticky redness on my hand. From the door. With terrible clarity I knew then I was going to be charged with this murder that I had not committed.

This must be the reason why I delayed informing the police. The moment I told them, I felt sure they would arrest me. It was a mistake, but I wasn’t thinking. I panicked. How had Volpi come to such a brutal end? Who had done this terrible thing? Why did it correspond so closely to an image on a woodcut I had recently bought, and a copy of which I had emailed to both Zolla and Volpi, but also, come to think of it, to the Arab, Tarik who had been invited to write some captions for the show? One can see a million paintings, read thrillers and watch horror films, but the real thing is different, it’s impact incomparably greater. Yet the fact that this real corpse did seem to have come out of one of those paintings, or even in a strange way to be the painting, somehow made things even worse, both real and unreal. Most awful of all was the way Volpi’s small eyes were open, amazed; the head lolled back, with a strange expression of bewildered lust about the slack lips. I couldn’t stop looking at him. The blood must have drained down through his naked body so that the fat feet, on the gold footrest, were a dark bruised blue. The chromatic effect was most curious. On instinct, I took out my mobile and snapped a couple of shots. What was I thinking of? Then somehow the idea of death reminded me of my daughter. I turned, walked out of the room, along the corridor, took the service lift to the back door, and with blood still on my hand walked back to our house in Via Oberdan.

Antonella was lying on the sofa with a perfumed silk scarf over her face. Having washed my hands and drunk some water to clean the taste of vomit from my mouth I drew up a chair and sat beside her in respectful silence.

‘Poor Don Lorenzo,’ she murmured. She reached out and took my hand and we sat, or I sat and she lay, in silence.

‘It seems he went out late to visit a dying patient. He was too old for such duties. When he came back he fainted and struck his head. Who knows if he will ever wake up? I hope he flies straight to Paradise. I know Purgatory terrified him. Oh poor Lorenzo.’

I couldn’t help feeling this was rather an overreaction to the plight of a man who was surely old enough and pious enough to be ready to meet his Maker. All the same I felt the same difficulty my son had had in announcing Massimina’s disappearance. I squeezed my wife’s hand and went looking for my son, but he was nowhere to be found. Then I remembered it was Sunday afternoon. He must have gone to report at the police station as he is obliged to whenever there is a home match. After which, no doubt, he would go straight to the stadium to catch the second half of the game.

I went into the kitchen and found a saucepan with a mix of lentils, ginger and vegetables on the cooker. I heated up a few mouthfuls, washed down my meagre lunch with a glass of Cabernet and retired to The Art Room. Here I sat for an hour and more contemplating my paintings and reflecting on what I had seen at Castelvecchio. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. All too soon of course the police were banging on the door. In less than an hour I was in a cell.

That’s it, Carla. I’m exhausted. I have written into the early hours. Every ten minutes the guard peers in to check that I am not trying to commit suicide. They do well. During the day I sketched a Madonna. I’ve been praying to her that Massimina may be found. So now a last plea to the Almighty, then sleep.