Wilful behaviour

Начало книги

I dubbi, i sospetti Gelare me fan.

Doubts and suspicions Turn me to ice.

Mozart

Le Nozze di Figaro

I

The explosion came at breakfast. Brunetti's position as a commissario of police, though it made the possibility of explosion more likely than it would be for the average citizen, did not make the setting any less strange. The location, however, was related to Brunetti's personal situation as the husband of a woman of incandescent, if inconsistent, views and politics, not to his profession.

'Why do we bother to read this disgusting piece of garbage?' Paola exploded, slamming a folded copy of the day's Gazzettino angrily on to the breakfast table, where it upset the sugar bowl.

Brunetti leaned forward, pushed the edge of the paper aside with his forefinger and righted the bowl. He picked up a second brioche and took a bite, knowing that clarification would follow.

'Listen to this,' Paola said, picking up the paper and reading from the headline of the leading article on the front page:' "Fulvia Prato Recounts her Terrible Ordeal."' Like all of Italy, Brunetti was familiar with Fulvia Prato, the wife of a wealthy Florentine industrialist, who had been kidnapped thirteen months before and kept in a cellar for that entire time by her kidnappers. Freed by the Carabinieri two weeks before, she had spoken to the press for the first time the previous day. He had no idea what Paola could find especially offensive in the headline.

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