His father hated Russians, and Brunetti had always thought he did so with good reason, if three years as a prisoner of war is a good reason. For his own part, he had an instinctive distrust of southerners, though it was a feeling that caused him no little discomfort. He was far less troubled by his own distrust of Albanians and of Slavs.

But African blacks? That was an almost entirely unfamiliar category for him, and since he was completely ignorant about them, he doubted that he could have infected his children with his prejudices. More likely it was something, like head lice, that Chiara had picked up in school.

‘Do we sit here and castigate ourselves as negligent parents and then punish ourselves for that by not eating dinner?’ he finally asked.

‘I suppose we could,’ she said, her remark entirely devoid of humour.

‘I don’t like the idea of that,’ he said. ‘Either one or the other.’

‘All right,’ she finally said. ‘I’ve been sitting alone in here a long time, which takes care of the castigating, so I suppose we can at least eat dinner in peace.’

‘Good,’ he said, finishing his wine and leaning forward to take the bottle.

As they ate, some tacit agreement having been made not to discuss Chiara’s remark further that evening, Brunetti told her what was said to have happened in Campo Santo Stefano: two men, though no one seemed to have paid much attention to them, appeared out of the darkness and slipped back into it after shooting the African at least five times. It was an execution, not a murder, and certainly there was nothing random about it. ‘He didn’t have a chance, poor devil,’ Brunetti said.