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do?’
    â€˜No thanks, I have no children. And father has lived alone for many years.’
    With the yellow ochre light from the street-lamps filtering in through the glazed doors, the modern building looked more than ever like an industrial hangar.
    â€˜Please, if you’re busy, don’t let me keep you.’
    â€˜No, that’s all right. It’s been a long day, I’m just having a hot drink before going out again. Tomorrow I shan’t have time to come and see my father,’ she said, swallowing the last drop.
    â€˜I hear they’ve stopped giving him morphine,’ Salazar ventured to say.
    â€˜Those are the rules,’ she answered sharply.
    â€˜Is he eating?’
    â€˜He has the odd teaspoonful of water. Then there’s the drip…’
    â€˜It could be a long business…’
    â€˜We are in the hands of God,’ the woman broke in as though she wanted to end the matter. Then she sighed, long and deeply, and started looking around nervously for something in the distance on which she could focus her attention.
    â€˜Perhaps it would be better to let them die…’ said Salazar suggestively, his eyes on the woman’s face. She pressed her lips together and looked quickly back at him.
    â€˜But that’s just what we’re doing, isn’t it?’ she said in a low voice. Then she threw the plastic beaker into the bin, smiled coldly and walked away, knotting her blue handkerchief firmly under her chin. Salazar waited a moment or two before going up the stairs. He looked at his watch: a quarter past seven. He ran up to the first floor, took his coat from the coatrack in the sister’s office and went back down to the entrance hall. He had no difficulty in spotting the blue handkerchief among the other heads walking towards the door. There were few people in the overground station. The train coming from Labaro was already pulling in. Salazar hurried on to the platform and just managed to slip into a carriage at the last minute. Chiara Bonardi was seated a few feet away, with her back to him, staring blankly into the middle distance. The lights of Torrevecchia skittered over the train windows. Beneath the flyover the streets all looked the same, with their rows of red and yellow lights, and the windows of the blocks of flats which the train almost seemed to be running into when the railway curved. Raised shutters revealed kitchens and living rooms, lit televisions, corridors and stairs. Salazar looked idly at the headlines in other people’s newspapers. The river Aniene had burst its banks and flooded the railway at Monte Mario; there was a crush at the station on Via Boccea. Chiara Bonardi was now moving towards the door. Salazar waited for her to get out before doing so himself. He followed her through the puddles of a car park in front of a supermarket, then along a road which ran beside a building site. She then went into a wider street which was better lit, and full of traffic. Salazar followed her at a prudent distance, checking his whereabouts on his handheld sat nav. They were a few hundred metres away from what he knew to be her home address. Via Cornelia was the next on the right. The woman crossed the street, stopped in front of the window of a bar and went towards a low, wide block of flats in the middle of a row of garages. She walked up the steps, stopped to look for her keys in her bag and disappeared into the entrance hall. Salazar waited for a moment before going up to check the bells: Bonardi, fourth floor, staircase B. He looked at his watch: it was eight forty-four.
    That evening, when he got back to the Carmelite Convent, it seemed to him that someone had searched his room. Nothing was missing, his pipe was in its place, as was his diary. But somehow it was not quite as he had left it, Salazar was sure of that. He ran his hand over the door posts and the top of the cupboard: strangely, there was not a speck of dust. He