The Third Shadow

Eight

Wednesday the 28th dawned as bright and blue-skied as the human soul could wish for; to Sarah and Olivia opening up the bedroom shutters that morning, it must have felt like an insult. And there already gathered beyond the front gate, a gaggle of cameramen and journalists were waiting for them.

The throng numbered a score or so when I arrived at around half past nine that morning. As I jostled my way through them, I realized they weren't all just local hacks either. "Who's that?" one voice asked in a broad cockney accent. "Eh, grandad," another called behind, "get 'em to come out would ya? Quick statement for the press. Getting bleedin' 'ot out 'ere ya know." A little further up the street I noticed the TG5 logo emblazoned across a parked van, this the most popular of the national news bulletins here in Italy.

At the time I remember being surprised - quite taken aback really - that the story had attracted such a high media profile. The fact of the missing passport could still very much be filed under 'circumstantial', and in any case hadn't yet been made public; officially speaking, this was a missing persons' enquiry, nothing more. According to Foreign Office figures, there are at any given time around one hundred and fifty unresolved cases of Britons missing abroad. Apart from certain tragic examples involving children, how many of these make it onto the national bulletins? Very few, if any at all. That I had stumbled across something extraordinary - perhaps even unprecedented in the annals of case history - was starting to become clear.

"Can't do any harm," I reasoned a few minutes later as the sisters-in-law picked laboriously at the brioches I'd bought on the way over. "Might even help." And so it was that later the same day millions of TV screens across Italy and the UK were briefly filled by two moist-eyed women, both in turn pleading for their husbands to please get in touch or for anyone with any information not to hesitate to contact the authorities. More attentive viewers might also have noted a certain grey-haired old codger lingering a little behind, gently ushering them back along the garden path.

In the short term it could be considered a success, the press pack soon dissipating like sated wolves. In the longer term however, I wonder if I might have made a terrible mistake. By thrusting them there directly into people's living rooms - those two beautiful, heart-rending women - they became as much a form of public property as a reality or soap star. As the days and weeks wore on, so the press coverage - and I should specify particularly on the British side - lurched increasingly from crime chronicle to intrusive sensationalism. It got to the point that the fate of the brothers became secondary, almost as if - whether dead or alive - the tabloids hoped they'd never be found.

*

The story's inclusion in the Italian national bulletins that same morning heralded a second spate of hotline calls. As the evening before, most would ultimately prove useless drains on time and resources. In compensation, Nuzzo was however to receive exactly the one he'd been hoping for.

Another motorist, a signor Giacchino Russo, had also been travelling south-westwards along the Francavilla Fontana to Punto San Giacomo road in the early hours of Monday. A shift worker on his way home from the food processing plant where he was employed, it was calculated that he'd been two or three kilometres behind the ambulance. As with the paramedics, the vehicle which had passed in the opposite direction was the only one he'd encountered on his journey. Similarly, he too was able to describe a lone, baseball-capped figure at the wheel. What was more, he was certain of the model: a Peugot 206, yes - he'd once owned one himself.

Whilst only a licence plate match could constitute a cast-iron certainty, the combined testimonies of signor Russo and the paramedics were enough to justify full investigative focus. Although nobody was saying it out loud - although not yet quite explicit - what we dealing with was nothing less than a manhunt.