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woman said “Thank you, Avvocato” I knew I could address her as lei without any fear of not being understood.
    When I asked her what the problem was she handed me some stapled sheets headed “Office of the Magistrate in Charge of Preliminary Investigations, Order for Precautionary Detention”.
    Drugs, was my immediate thought. Her man was a
pusher. Then, almost as quickly, that seemed to me impossible.
    We all of us go by stereotypes. Anyone who denies it is a liar. The first stereotype had suggested the following sequence: African, precautionary detention, drugs. It is usually for this reason that Africans get arrested.
    But straight away the second stereotype came into play. The woman had an aristocratic look and didn’t seem like a drug-pusher’s moll.
    I was right. Her partner had not been arrested for drugs but for the kidnap and murder of a nine-year-old boy.
    The charges stated were brief, bureaucratic and blood-curdling.
    Abdou Thiam, Senegalese citizen, stood accused:
    a. of the offence as under Art. 603 of the Penal Code for having deliberately deprived of his personal liberty Francesco Rubino, the latter being under age, inducing him by subterfuge to follow him and thereafter restraining him against his will.
    b. of the offence as under Art. 575 of the Penal Code for having caused the death of the said minor Francesco Rubino, exercising on him unascertained acts of violence and subsequently suffocating him by means and methods equally unascertained. Both offences committed in the rural district of Monopoli between 5 and 7 August 1999.
    c. of the offence as under Art. 412 of the Penal Code for having concealed the body of the minor Francesco Rubino by throwing it down a well.
    Polignano Rural District, 7 August 1999.

    Francesco, nine years old, had disappeared one afternoon while playing football on his own in a yard in front of the seaside villa of his grandparents in Monopoli, to the south of Bari.
    Two days later the boy’s body had been found at the bottom of a well some twelve miles further north, in the countryside near Polignano.
    The police doctor who had performed the autopsy had been unable either to confirm or to exclude the possibility that the child had been subjected to sexual violence.
    I knew that police doctor. He wouldn’t have been up to saying whether a child – or even an adult or a senior citizen – had been subjected to sexual violence even if he had been eyewitness to the rape.
    The investigations were in any case based from the first on the assumption of murder with a sexual motive. The paedophiliac track.
    Four days after the discovery of the body the carabinieri and the public prosecutor had triumphantly announced at a press conference that the case was solved.
    The culprit was Abdou Thiam, a 31-year-old Senegalese pedlar. He was in Italy with a valid residence permit and had a few previous convictions for dealing in counterfeit goods. In other words, apart from regular wares he sold fake Vuittons, fake Hogans, fake Cartiers. In summer on the beaches, in winter in the streets and markets.
    According to the investigators, the evidence against him was overwhelming. Numerous witnesses had declared that they had seen him talking on the beach to little Francesco on more than one occasion and at some length. The owner of a bar very near the house belonging to the child’s grandparents had seen
Abdou pass on foot only a few minutes before the boy disappeared, and without his usual sack of more or less fake merchandise.
    Questioned by the carabinieri, the Senegalese who shared lodgings with Abdou had stated that during those days – he was not able to say on exactly which day – the subject under inquiry had taken his car to be washed. As far as he remembered, that was the first time it had happened. Evidently, the prosecution considered this useful evidence: to eliminate every possible trace, the man had had his car washed with a view to frustrating the investigation.
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