there. He finally went down to the dining car, where the air conditioning was working perfectly, and sat and read the newspaper while drinking two coffees and a bottle of mineral water.

When the train pulled into Mestre, he called Griffoni’s number and was glad to hear that she would meet him at the railway station with a launch.

‘Vianello?’ he asked, knowing his friend was on vacation but hoping that Griffoni would have thought of phoning him.

‘I called him after I spoke to you. He knows someone in the Guardia Costiera, and they’ve got permission to enter Croatian waters to pick him up and bring him back.’

‘Who does he know?’ Brunetti asked.

‘All he said was that it was someone he went to school with,’ she explained.

‘Good. Thanks.’

The train started to move out of the station, and Brunetti broke the connection. As they crossed the bridge, his attention was distracted by enormous patches of seaweed clogging the surface of the water on both sides. The higher tide of the early morning had obscured them, but there was no hiding them now. They spent minutes travelling past them, and still they did not end. A few plastic bottles bobbed in the flat green mass which spread out relentlessly on both sides and which appeared to extend beneath the bridge, as well. Boats steered clear of it. No floating water birds went anywhere near it. Like a neglected patch of eczema, it grew.

He saw the police launch moored directly in front of the station and hastened down the steps towards it. So comfortable had he become in the dining car that it took him a moment to recognize the sensation of invasive heat. His shirt was stuck to his back before he reached the boat, and he was annoyed to realize he had packed his new sunglasses and left them in the suitcase that had, by now, arrived at an altitude of 1,450 metres on the Alp above Glorenza.

He nodded to the pilot, Foa, stepped on board, and took Griffoni’s hand. Her tan made her hair seem even blonder, and her short skirt showed an expanse of bronzed leg. She looked like anything but a commissario di polizia on duty. Foa unmoored the boat and went back into the cabin. He started the engine.

‘Vianello?’ Brunetti asked.

‘He’s back already. Waiting for us at the victim’s home. It took him less than three hours.’

Brunetti smiled. Even if it ruined Vianello’s vacation plans to have to return to Venice, to do so on a Coastguard patrol boat at full throttle across the Adriatic was some compensation. ‘I bet he loved it.’

‘Who wouldn’t?’ she asked and he heard the envy in her voice.

The boat turned left into the Canale di Cannaregio, passed at moderate speed under both bridges and out into the laguna. Griffoni explained that she had spoken with Dottor Rizzardi, who said he would try to get back from his house in the Dolomites by that evening. If he could not, then it would be the following morning.

Griffoni had not seen the body, which had been taken to the morgue before Scarpa called her to tell her about the crime. Brunetti asked carefully about Scarpa’s behaviour and his response to the news that both he and Vianello were returning from vacation to take over the case.

‘I didn’t tell him,’ Griffoni said.

‘So he thinks the case is his?’ Brunetti asked.

‘His and mine, but since I’m only a woman, I obviously don’t count.’ They had chosen to stay out on the deck in the hope of catching the breeze created by their motion, so the wind carried some of their words away. Brunetti took another look at her. Though she was decidedly a woman, Brunetti would never preface that noun with the adjective ‘only’. ‘So my arrival will surprise him,’ Brunetti said, not without satisfaction.

‘I hope it upsets him, too,’ she said with the sort of malice that acquaintance, however brief, with Lieutenant Scarpa so often provoked.

The water in this part of the laguna was surprisingly choppy, and both of them were forced to grab the railing to keep from being tossed about. Foa nevertheless put the boat to full throttle in the open water, drowning out other sound and the possibility of conversation. Brunetti glanced to the left, his eye hopping from Murano to Burano and to the bell tower of Torcello, barely visible in the muggy air.

They turned right, passed a canal and turned into the next. Brunetti saw the man leading the camel and asked,