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Corinna wonder if the interview was over, then turned on her abruptly.
    ‘The Liminas have already been in contact. With me. Through other channels.’
    Corinna felt her spine tense up.
    ‘What do you mean, “other channels”?’ she demanded. ‘What kind of…?’
    ‘The family lawyer,’ Tondo replied evenly. ‘Dottor Nunzio Lo Forte, a highly respectable figure specializing in civil and commercial law. He phoned me yesterday to arrange a meeting, at which he presented this document.’
    He walked back to the desk and handed Corinna a typed sheet of paper. It was a sworn declaration by Anna Limina, mother of Tonino, to the effect that her son was at present on holiday in Costa Rica, and that she knew him to be alive and well. In evidence, she appended a set of his dental records for forensic comparison with the body found on the train.
    ‘I sent the records over to the morgue immediately,’ the director went on. ‘The pathologist assures me that the dental details do not match those of the victim in any way. This has quite clearly been a case of mistaken identity.’
    ‘But what about the waybill with “Limina” written on it?’ Corinna protested.
    The director raised an admonitory forefinger.
    ‘It wasn’t written, but scrawled, and further examination by a noted graphologist at the University of Catania suggests that the word was in fact limoni , as the railway official Maria Riesi originally thought. In other words, the perishable contents of the wagon in question were simply lemons, which were no doubt off-loaded further down the line. In short, whoever the unfortunate victim of this tragedy may have been, he was not Tonino Limina, and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that there is any Mafia connection at all. That being so, the matter is of no further interest to this department. The file can therefore be closed and the whole business turned over to the normal authorities for routine investigation, leaving you free to pursue your own work on such matters as the Maresi and Cucuzza cases, which by your own account appear to have been languishing of late.’
    He sat down again behind his desk and made a note in his diary. Corinna Nunziatella got up and walked over to the door.
    ‘Did I tell you how lovely you’re looking this morning?’ Sergio Tondo said suddenly. ‘That outfit really suits you, and haven’t you done something to your hair?’
    The words emerged in a rapid murmur, at once acknowledging and dismissing the existence of the director’s former persona, much as one might a twin who had died in infancy. Sad business, of course, but no longer really … relevant .
     
     
     

 
    There was a draught about, faint but perceptible, its hollow chill undermining everything. But where was it coming from?
    A real draught — indeed, fresh air of any kind or origin — would have been only too welcome in the dim recess of the Palace of Justice which Carla Arduini had reluctantly been assigned, its one high window dimmed with grime and welded shut by decades of poor maintenance. Not that conditions would have been any better with it open. On the contrary, the heat outside at this hour threatened to turn the lava paving blocks back to their molten form, while the humidity borne in off the sea swamped the whole city in a miasma of lassitude and passivity.
    But the draught that was bothering Carla Arduini was not real but virtual: a flaw in cyberspace, a seepage of information from the system. Despite this, she sensed it almost physically, rather like the onset of some malaise — an accumulation of minor symptoms, none of them particularly significant in themselves, which together indicated a problem as yet unidentified, but puzzling and potentially serious.
    Most people, including the majority of her professional colleagues, wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong. Although not yet quite ready to be turned over to her clients, the network she was responsible for installing was up and running.