User Reviews

This episode opens with a naked and badly injured young woman getting into a car and driving to Vigata. Here she gets out and makes her way to a buildings courtyard where she is found dead the next day. Nobody who lives in the building admits to knowing her but after an appeal is made she is identified as 'Vera' a Ukrainian who had been working as a prostitute. The post mortem suggests that she had suffered multiple rapes and Montalbano is determined to get everybody involved. Meanwhile an elderly gentleman is walking past Montalbano's home each morning; it turns out he is a retired judge who is obsessing over his past cases worried that he might have got something wrong.

The main story is quite dark for this series; especially the start where we see Vera driving to Vigata and it looks as if she might survive but doesn't. As details of what happened emerge it gets more shocking. The mystery of who she is leads to a welcome reappearance from Salvo's friend Ingrid, who knows a friend of the dead girl, this in turn leads to an amusing moment where Salvo finds Ingrid talking to Livia and pretends not to know the former woman despite being friends for years. It was great to see Isabell Sollman return as Ingrid; just a pity we didn't see much of her character. There is a pretty tense moment when Salvo is confronted by gunmen who work for a Mafia family that wasn't happy about being linked to the girl's death. Overall this was a good story with plenty of intrigue, tension and the required lighter moments.

The main plot-line of this episode concerns the murder of a young woman, and the opening sequence is quite powerful, as she, alone and naked in a cold large place, at night, struggles up and tries to make her way somewhere -- which turns out to be an apartment building. Development of this story-line takes us through many twists, introducing us to many of the quintessential Sicilian characters that so enrich this series.

As with so many Montalbano episodes, this episode also features a second plot: in this case, a very formally-dressed old man who walks the beach in front of Montalbano's house. He is new to the area, and speaks very little, until Montalbano gets him to open up. Who is he, and why has he come there?

It is this second plot that my review focuses on. The man, Attard, is a retired career judge of criminal cases, and his conscience has driven him to focus on whether he, as a judge, ever allowed his personal feelings and problems of any given moment to affect his judgments in the cases he decided during those times. He calls this "to soil the white page" due to distractions by his own life events. Attard says "The brutality we see in others is actually in ourselves, and comes out in most unexpected ways." In fact he is so obsessed with his that he has spent a fortune to have all the records in all his cases copied, and he has moved to Vigata to take a house and fill it with these files -- the house is packed with them. He spends his days reviewing the record of case after case, keeping in mind what he personally was going through at the time of the case.

Judge Attard quotes to Montalbano from Montaigne's Essay on Vanity (Book III, Chapter 9) "I see often that we have theories of life set before us which neither the proposer nor those who hear him have any hope, nor, which is more, any inclination to follow. Of the same sheet of paper whereon the judge has but just written a sentence against an adulterer, he steals a piece whereon to write a love-letter to his companion's wife. She whom you have but just now illicitly embraced will presently, even in your hearing, more loudly inveigh against the same fault in her companion than a Portia would do; and men there are who will condemn others to death for crimes that they themselves do not repute so much as faults."

Eventually, Judge Attard finds that he has done what he feared: in a case from 15 years earlier, at a time in his life when, due to personal problems, he was very much not inclined to believe anyone's claims of innocence, Judge Attard rejected the claim of innocence made by a defendant, and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. The man died in prison after 12 years. In reviewing the file now, Judge Attard believes that the facts show that the man was innocent, and that Judge Attard, due to allowing his personal problems to affect his professional judgment, inflicted an unjust conviction on the man, condemning him to spend the rest of his life in prison, and dying with his name and character publicly ruined. To atone for this, Judge Attard sets fire to his own house, with himself in it, and so commits suicide, while also destroying his life's work (the records of all his cases).

Every law-court judge should see this episode several times. And all of us who are inclined to judge others, and speak aloud our judgments of others, ought also see this episode.