Una questione di principio - A matter of principle

A group of unusual visitors has arrived in Bardonecchia. They are the full cast and crew of an adult film production — actors and technicians who have rented a large villa and locked themselves inside. Lieutenant Elettra Keita, who has commanded the local Carabinieri station for only a few months, discovers that a massacre has taken place inside the villa. All fifteen occupants are dead, each killed by the same weapon, fired by the same hand. No witnesses. No gun. Forensic units, investigative specialists, the medical examiner, and the Susa Command are all mobilized — but Elettra investigates her own way, trusting her instincts over procedure and her judgment over the chain of command. She doesn't play by the rules. For her, it's a matter of principle.

My name is Elettra, and I'm about to surprise you.

I'm telling this story in the first person, and I can promise you — a lot happened. So if I forget a detail here and there along the way, you'll forgive me.

It's a general strike. The kind nobody has seen in years. Marches, rallies, squares packed so tight that even the television networks had no choice but to cover it. The feeling in the air is that people have simply had enough.

Almost everything has ground to a halt — including the trains, obviously — and the chaos is so complete that you could board a high-speed train in Rome and end up in a parallel dimension, where time and space work differently from anything you've ever known.

Piero — back from a trip to the capital to promote his latest novel, which, God help me, is apparently being turned into a film — has begged me to come down to Turin, scrape what's left of him off the platform at Porta Susa station, drive him back to Bardonecchia and his grandmother's house, chain him under the shower, and check back in a couple of hours to make sure he's still breathing.

You know that feeling when the arrivals board updates to tell you the train from Rome is running another hour late? You know that when the total delay climbs past two hours, any reasonable person would be justified in firing a shot in the air and calling for the Red Cross, the fire brigade, or divine intervention?

Piero, apparently, is stuck somewhere near Rondissone — a name that means nothing to you, but which, he says, inspires the kind of rage that makes you want to hit something. If they'd only let him off the train, he could find a taxi and finish the journey himself. But he's sealed in there with a carriage full of other stranded lives, the windows hermetic, the doors locked shut.

The story began last weekend — a Sunday that was frantic, loud, overloaded, and more intense than anything Bardonecchia had seen in years. I'd only been in command of the local Carabinieri station for five months. Up to that point, I'd handled a couple of road accidents, the theft of a tractor — later claimed by the self-styled Friends of Borgo Tre Case Liberation Front — one or two late-night brawls, a petty thief who fancied himself Arsène Lupin but managed to sever his own finger trying to break through the back door of a shop, a failed apartment burglary foiled by the neighbour's dogs, and a false alarm domestic disturbance that turned out to be a group of football fans screaming at the television.

We had also arrested half a dozen drunk Englishmen who had smashed a shop window with rocks, vomited in the corridor of the Carabinieri station, and then paid double the cost of the damage to avoid being formally charged. Small things, all of them. Nuisances, light-years away from the cases that still visit my dreams — uninvited — in the middle of the night.

As for illegal immigration and drug trafficking through the Fréjus Tunnel, the French Gendarmerie and the State Police had that covered.

Every platform has its cast: someone shouting about a corrupt government, someone else resigned to waiting, someone pacing back and forth along the yellow tactile strip meant for the visually impaired, checking the time on their phone every thirty seconds. A girl has memorised the entire vending machine menu and is turning a coin over in her fingers — then thinks better of it and walks away. At platform seven, a boy with a guitar has just snapped a string hammering out the riff to Should I Stay or Should I Go by The Clash.

The smell of the brakes is exactly as I remember it.

I was going to say there were no Boy Scouts — but there they are, patient as ever, clustered around a mountain of backpacks stacked against a pillar under the canopy of platform three, wearing the inevitable short trousers.

One thing I've always loved about big railway stations: you can be as strange, eccentric, or outrageous as a drag queen at a parish charity fundraiser, and nobody will look twice.

Not wanting to be late, I'd jumped in the car in full uniform after issuing a rapid-fire series of orders to Valeria Ridolfi — a Marshal in her first year of service, a novice, with kind eyes, a pleasant face, an impressive figure barely contained by her uniform, and the expression of someone terrified of reaching the end of the day without having done anything right.

Nobody here gives me a second glance. The only interesting thing that could happen is the arrival of a train. Even the student sitting next to me on the bench — dishevelled, with a questionable relationship with deodorant — doesn't bother to look up. In my rush, I forgot to bring a book. But I have plenty to think about. Starting from the very beginning of this story.

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