A full minute passed in silence. The woman looked at her cup, mirrored her husband’s gesture in pushing it away, looked back at Brunetti, and said, ‘It’s not easy to describe him, sir. He was wearing a hat, one of those hats men wear in movies.’ To clarify the description, she added, ‘The kind of thing they wore in movies in the Thirties and Forties.’

She paused, as if trying to visualize the scene, then added, ‘No, all I remember is a sense that he was very tall and very big. He was wearing an overcoat; it might have been grey or dark brown, I really don’t recall. And that hat.’

The waitress set Brunetti’s coffee in front of him and moved away. He left it untouched, smiled across at her and said, ‘Go on, please, Doctor.’

‘There was the overcoat, and he had a scarf; maybe it was grey and maybe it was black. Because there were so many people standing around, all I saw was the side of him.’

‘Could you give me an idea of his age?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Oh, I couldn’t be sure of that, no more than to say he was an adult, perhaps your age,’ she said. ‘I think his hair was dark, but it was hard to tell in that light, and with his hat on. And I wasn’t paying much attention to him at that point, not really, because I didn’t have any idea of what was going on.’

Brunetti thought of the victim and asked, conscious of how it would sound, ‘Was this man white, Doctor?’

‘Oh yes, he was European,’ she answered, then added, ‘but my sense of him was that he looked more Mediterranean than my husband and I do.’ She smiled to show she meant no offence, and Brunetti took none.

‘What, specifically, makes you say that, Doctor?’ he asked.

‘His skin was darker than ours, I think, and it looked like he had dark eyes. He was taller than you, officer, and much taller than either one of us.’ She considered all of this and then added, ‘And thicker. He wasn’t a thin man, officer.’