The Lake Garda Mystery

The Long Way Home · Book One · Robert Hethcoat

Spring 2020. As Italy falls silent under lockdown, Robert and Dale—his former Ministry of Defence Police explosives and firearms detection dog—encounter an old man whose disappearance leads to a deadly mystery of stolen gold, buried secrets and loyalty.

Read the complete opening chapter below. The remainder of the manuscript is not published here.

Chapter One: Cold Water

In the spring of 2020, on a night when the whole of Italy was locked inside its houses, a fortune in stolen gold went into the black water at the bottom of Lake Garda. So did I. So did my dog. Only one of us got himself out again, and it was not me.

That was the end. To tell it right, I have to start in the same water, five weeks before, on a morning when I was happy.

◆

Lake Garda in February is not a place for swimming. Anybody in Peschiera will tell you that. The old men who sit outside the bar on the corner of the harbor will tell you with their hands before they ever open their mouths, a little wave that says crazy, crazy, the Americans are crazy. The woman who runs the bakery will tell you while she wraps your bread. The man at the boat hire, who has nothing to hire out until April, will tell you twice, because he thinks you did not understand him the first time.

Dale did not care what any of them said. Dale has never cared what people say. He cares about three things in this world, and in no particular order they are me, my wife Vasnti, and water.

So at a quarter to seven on the morning of the nineteenth of February, 2020, with the mist lying flat on the lake like a sheet somebody forgot to fold, I stood on the little gravel beach just outside the old town walls and took off my jacket, and Dale stood at the edge of the water and looked back at me over his shoulder.

He was waiting for the word. He always waits for the word.

“Go on, buddy,” I said. “Go get it.”

He went in like he was being paid for it. No hesitation, no testing the temperature with a paw the way some dogs do. He went in chest first and threw up a wall of white spray, and then he was swimming, his head high and his ears flat back, cutting a straight line out toward the mist with that smooth, steady collie stroke. Black and white, he was, mostly black on the back and white down the front and up one side of his face, and a white tip on his tail that he carried like a flag when he was happy. At that moment he was very happy. The tail was going like a rudder.

I stepped in after him and the cold came up through my feet and into my shins and grabbed hold of my knees, and I said a word my mother would not have liked. Then I walked in to my waist, said the word again, and went under.

I am a Marine. We do cold water. That does not mean we enjoy it.

When I came up Dale was turning, ten yards out, swinging around in a wide curve so he could keep his eye on me. That was Dale. He would swim all day, but he would not swim away from me. Out, turn, check, and back again. Long before he came to live with me, he’d searched buildings for explosives and firearms with the Ministry of Defence Police. The work had taught him to pay attention. The way he kept checking on me was something else. That was simply Dale.

We swam for maybe ten minutes. That was all the cold would allow. I went out to the line of the old wooden posts where the fishermen tie up in the summer, and Dale swam a loop around me, and then the two of us came back in together, him ahead, me behind, both of us blowing like steam engines. On the beach he shook himself from nose to tail and soaked me all over again, which I had seen coming and could do nothing about.

“Thank you,” I told him. “That was real thoughtful.”

He sat down on the gravel and grinned. A collie can grin. Anybody who tells you different has not spent enough time with one.

◆

Before the roadblocks, the deserted streets and the men in white suits, there was an old man I hadn’t met yet. And there was a white van I should have paid more attention to.

It begins with a cold lake and a happy dog and a town that did not know yet what was coming for it.

Peschiera del Garda sits at the bottom of the lake, at the very southern tip, where the water spills out and becomes the River Mincio and runs off south toward Mantua and the great flat farmland of the Po. The old town is an island. That surprises people. They drive in off the road from Verona expecting a lakeside village, and instead they find themselves crossing a bridge over a canal and then another bridge over another canal, and they pass through a great stone gateway cut into walls that are thirty feet high and as thick as a house is long. The Venetians built those walls in the fifteen hundreds, when the Republic of Venice ruled all of this country, and they built them star-shaped, with sharp angled corners called bastions sticking out so that cannon could fire along the face of the walls and catch anybody trying to climb them. The water runs around the whole thing like a moat. You could hold that town against an army. People did.

Dale and I had been staying there off and on for most of that winter, in a small apartment on the second floor of a yellow house that looked straight across the inner canal at the old Venetian walls. In the summer the canal is full of little boats, and the bars put their tables right out to the edge of the water, and the whole town smells of sunscreen and grilled fish and spritz. In the winter it is different. Half the hotels close. The ferry stops running most days. The streets belong to the people who actually live there, and to the cats, and to the fog that comes up off the lake in the evening and turns every streetlamp into a soft yellow ball.

I liked it better in the winter. So did Dale. In the winter nobody told him to get off the beach.

My wife Vasnti was home in England that month, which is why it was just the two of us. She had family things to take care of, and I had guiding work in Italy that I could not turn down. That is my trade, guiding. I take people around places I know well and I tell them the stories that the guidebooks leave out. That winter most of my clients were American families from the Army base at Vicenza, an hour east along the autostrada. They were young soldiers mostly, with young wives or husbands and young kids, a long way from home and wanting to see the country they had been sent to before their tour was up. On weekends I would take them to Venice or Verona or out to the lake, and I would show them where to eat and what to look at and how not to get robbed, and Dale would come along and the kids would fall in love with him, which was half the reason they booked me.

The plan was simple. At the end of that week, Dale and I would drive over to Vicenza, where I had rented an apartment in the old center for the spring. I had a full book of tours from March through May. Vasnti would fly out to join us on the twelfth of March. We would have a spring in the Veneto, and then in the summer we would see.

That was the plan. I am telling you so you can laugh, the way I do now.

◆

After the swim, I dried Dale with the old green towel I kept in the truck, dried myself a good deal less carefully, and we walked back into town through Porta Verona, the big gate on the western side. High on the gate was the winged lion of Saint Mark, the symbol of Venice, with a book beneath its paw. Napoleon’s troops had destroyed the old lion. A new one had been put back in its place only the year before, in 2019. It looked newly settled on a gate that had seen centuries of men coming and going.

Dale walked beside me through the gate the way he always walked, close on my left, his shoulder about level with my knee. Never on a lead. Not once in his whole life. He wore his old police collar, the brown leather one with the brass plate, and his black working vest with the patches that said POLICE on one side and MINISTRY OF DEFENCE POLICE on the other, and that was all he needed. People in Italy would look at the vest and then look at me and then look back at the vest, trying to work out what kind of policeman I was. I would smile at them and let them wonder.

The truth is that Dale had served as an explosives and firearms dog with the Ministry of Defence Police before he came to live with me. After he retired, I took him in, and the two of us became a team of our own. I was a retired Marine; he was a retired working dog. The vest was something he liked to wear. He stood a little taller in it, as if someone had given him a job again. He had been exceptionally good at the work, too. At a reunion more than a year after his retirement, the man in charge of the unit came across the room, shook my hand, and asked whether there was any way they could have him back. I told him no. Dale had already found his new job.

Dale was mine and I was his. We had settled that between us a long time ago.

We went to the bar on the harbor for breakfast. It was called the Bar al Ponte, because it sat right by the bridge, and it was the kind of place that had been there so long nobody remembered it opening. Zinc counter, a coffee machine as big as a car engine, a glass case full of brioche that the owner’s mother baked every morning in the back. The owner was a heavy, gentle man named Sandro who wore a white apron over a sweater and had a gray mustache that he combed with his fingers when he was thinking. He had decided the very first week that Dale was his friend, and he kept a bowl of water and a little dish by the end of the counter just for him.

“Ecco,” said Sandro, when we came in. “The swimmers. You are both still alive. I am surprised.”

“Morning, Sandro.”

“You know the water is nine degrees? Nine. I read it on my telephone.” He held up the phone as proof, though he did not show me the screen. “Nine degrees is for fish. For fish, and for Americans.”

“And for English police dogs,” I said.

“Ah, no. Dale is not a crazy person. Dale only goes because you go. If you had sense, he would have sense.” He put a cappuccino on the zinc in front of me without my asking, and a brioche with apricot jam inside it, and then he came around the end of the counter and bent down and put a little piece of plain bread in Dale’s dish. Dale took it very politely. He has good manners about food. He was trained that way, and he never lost it.

There were three other people in the bar. Two old men at the table by the window, arguing about football in the soft, quick dialect of the lake, which is different from the Italian you learn in a classroom. And a woman in a quilted coat, reading the newspaper at the far end of the counter. The paper was folded open to an inside page, and I could see the headline over her shoulder. It was something about China. Something about a city called Wuhan, and a new illness, and the number of people who were sick.

I did not think anything of it. That is the truth. Nobody did. China was far away, and there had been scares before. SARS, bird flu, swine flu. They came on the news and then they went off it, and life went on. I drank my coffee and ate my brioche and watched the light come up over the canal, and I did not think about China at all.

◆

On the way back to the apartment we cut along the outside of the walls, down by the main harbor where the bigger boats are kept. In the winter most of them sit under blue covers, shrink-wrapped like groceries. But a few are in the water all year, and that morning there was one I had not seen before. It would have been hard to miss.

It was a motor launch, long and low and handsome, maybe forty feet, with a hull of polished dark wood that shone like a piano and a white cabin trimmed in chrome. The kind of boat you see in old films about rich people on the Riviera. Italians have been building boats like that on these lakes for a hundred years, and they still do, by hand, and they cost more than a house. It was moored stern-in against the stone quay, and its name was painted on the back in gold letters: ALBA. Dawn.

Two men were loading it. They had a white van backed up to the edge of the quay, a plain van with no markings, and they were carrying wooden crates from the back of the van and handing them down onto the deck of the boat, where a third man took them and stacked them in through the cabin door. The crates were not big. About the size of a case of wine. But the men were carrying them one at a time, with both arms, and the third man was taking each one with his knees bent, the way you take something heavy.

I would have passed them without a second glance if they hadn’t stopped talking when Dale and I came near.

Dale noticed something too.

We were maybe twenty yards away, walking past on the path, when he slowed down. Not stopped. Slowed. His head came up and turned toward the van, and his nose went to work. You can see it, if you know what you are looking at. The nostrils flutter. The mouth closes. The whole face seems to lean forward ahead of the body. He took three or four steps that way, slow, with his head pointed at the van like a compass needle, and then he looked up at me.

It was not a full alert. Dale’s trained signal was simple: find the source, sit, and stare until released. No barking. No scratching. Just that fixed, unmistakable gaze. I’d seen it enough times to know the difference.

This was not that. This was something smaller. This was a dog who had caught a whisper of something on the wind and wanted me to know about it, but was not sure enough to say so.

I stopped and looked at the van and the boat and the men.

One of the men had seen us. He was the one on the quay, a big man with a shaved head and a black puffer jacket, and he had a crate in his arms and he had stopped with it halfway to the boat, and he was looking at Dale. Then he looked at me. It was not a friendly look. It was not an unfriendly look, exactly, either. It was the look of a man who is working out whether you are a problem.

I smiled at him and raised a hand. “Buongiorno.”

He did not say anything. He turned and handed the crate down to the man on the deck and went back to the van for the next one.

“Come on, buddy,” I said quietly to Dale. “Heel.”

Dale came around to my left side and we walked on. I felt the man’s eyes on my back for twenty more yards. When I glanced back at the corner, he was standing by the van with his hands on his hips, still watching us.

I told myself it was fireworks. Carnival was coming that weekend, and every town on the lake would have fireworks, and fireworks have black powder in them, and a dog like Dale could smell black powder through a wall. That was probably all it was. A rich man’s boat being loaded with fireworks for a rich man’s party.

I told myself that, and I mostly believed it.

But I also took my phone out of my pocket as we went around the corner, and I turned and took a picture back along the quay, as if I were taking a picture of the walls. The van was in it. The back of the boat was in it, with the gold letters. The big man was in it, small and blurry, with his hands on his hips.

I did not look at that picture again for almost a month.

◆

That evening I called Vasnti, the way I did every evening when we were apart. She was at her sister’s house. I could hear the television in the background and somebody’s kids arguing over it.

“How’s my boy?” she said. She always asked about Dale first. I had made my peace with that years ago.

“He went swimming.”

“In February? Robert.”

“He went in by himself. I just went in after to make sure he was all right.”

“I’m sure that’s how it went.” I could hear her smiling. “Was it cold?”

“It was nine degrees. Sandro read it on his telephone.”

“Sandro is a sensible man. You should listen to him.” She paused, and the television in the background got louder for a moment and then quieter, as if somebody had closed a door. “Are you watching the news over there?”

“Not much. Why?”

“There’s this virus thing. In China. It’s all they’re talking about here. They’ve shut down a whole city. Millions of people. Nobody allowed in or out.”

“I saw something in the paper.”

“There’s people sick on a cruise ship too. In Japan. They won’t let them off.” She was quiet for a second. “It’s probably nothing. I’m just saying. Keep an eye on it.”

“I will.”

“You won’t, but thank you for saying it.”

I laughed. She knew me. We talked for a while about her family and about the weather in England, which was wet, and about the apartment in Vicenza, which I had seen pictures of and she had not. I told her it had a little balcony where she could sit with her coffee in the morning and look out over the rooftops, and she said that sounded like heaven, and that she had already bought a new pair of shoes for walking on cobblestones.

“Three weeks,” she said.

“Three weeks.”

“Give Dale a kiss for me.”

“I’ll give him a biscuit for you. He’d like that better.”

After I hung up I sat by the window with Dale’s head on my foot, watching the fog come down over the canal, and I thought about nothing much at all. I thought about the tours I had booked. I thought about where we would eat when Vasnti came. I did not think about China, and I did not think about the boat called Alba.

◆

The next two days were quiet ones. Dale and I swam again on Thursday, though only for five minutes, because there was a wind coming down the lake from the mountains in the north and it put a chop on the water that slapped you in the face every time you came up for air. On Friday we did not swim at all. I packed the truck instead, and cleaned the apartment, and settled up with the landlady, a small fierce woman in her eighties who had never in her life been seen without lipstick. She gave Dale a whole slice of ham on our last morning, which she had never done before, and told me he was the only gentleman she had met in thirty years.

On Friday evening, the twenty-first, I went down to the Bar al Ponte one last time to say goodbye to Sandro.

The bar was full. I had never seen it like that in the winter. Every table was taken and there were people standing at the counter two deep, and nobody was talking. That was the strange thing. An Italian bar full of people and nobody talking. They were all looking up at the television that hung in the corner over the door to the kitchen.

On the screen there was a reporter standing in front of a hospital. It was night where she was, and there were ambulances behind her with their blue lights going, and the words along the bottom of the screen said CODOGNO, and then they said something I had to read twice.

Primo caso italiano. The first Italian case.

A man in his thirties, in a town in Lombardy, southeast of Milan. He had not been to China. He had not been anywhere near China. Nobody knew how he had caught it. He was in intensive care.

And then, while we were all watching, the picture changed. They cut to a different reporter in a different place, a small town in the hills with a church tower lit up behind it, and the words along the bottom changed too.

VO’, PADOVA.

The Veneto. Our region. Two men had been taken to hospital from a little town in the Euganean Hills, south of Padua, and both had tested positive. One of them was seventy-seven years old. The reporter’s voice was very calm and very serious, and the people in the bar were so quiet I could hear the coffee machine ticking as it cooled.

Sandro came along the counter to me. He did not put a cappuccino down. He did not say anything about crazy Americans. He just leaned on the zinc on his folded arms and looked at me.

“Vo’,” he said. “Do you know where is Vo’?”

“South of Padua.”

“Forty minutes from Vicenza.” He shook his head. “Maybe less.”

“You think it’s serious?”

He looked up at the screen, where they were showing a map now, with red circles drawn around the two towns, one in Lombardy and one in the Veneto, and a long gray line between them that was the autostrada.

“My father,” Sandro said, “used to tell me about the Spanish flu. His mother lost two sisters. In one week, two sisters. He said nobody believed it, at the beginning. Everybody said it was a cold. A strong cold.” He straightened up and wiped his hands on his apron, though they were already clean. “I don’t know if it’s serious. I know that nobody in Rome knows either. That’s what worries me.”

He reached under the counter and came up with a small paper bag and handed it to me.

“For Dale,” he said. “For the road. Brioche. Plain, no jam. He likes plain.”

“Sandro, you didn’t have to.”

“I know.” He came around the counter, which he almost never did, and bent down to Dale, who had been sitting at my feet the whole time, and took Dale’s face between his two big hands and looked him in the eye. “You,” he said to Dale, in Italian, very seriously. “You look after this crazy man. Va bene?”

Dale licked his nose.

“Va bene,” Sandro said, and straightened up, and that was our goodbye.

◆

We left Peschiera at seven the next morning, Saturday the twenty-second of February.

The road from the lake to Vicenza runs east along the A4, the big autostrada that goes all the way across the north of Italy from Turin to Trieste. It goes past Verona, with the hills rising on the left and the flat plain opening out on the right, and then past the turnoff for Soave, where the white wine comes from, with its castle on the ridge above the vineyards, and then on through a long stretch of factories and warehouses and car dealerships and fields of bare winter vines, until you come over a rise and see the hill of Monte Berico ahead of you, with the great church on top, and you know you are almost in Vicenza.

Dale rode in the back seat of the truck with his chin on the console between the front seats, the way he always rode, so he could keep an eye on the road and on me at the same time. He had his blanket and his water bowl and Sandro’s bag of brioche, which I had put in the glovebox so he would not be tempted.

I had the radio on. I do not usually. I like to drive in quiet, or with some old music. But that morning I had it on the news, and every station was saying the same things.

The man in Codogno was still in intensive care. They had found more cases in Lombardy, in the towns around his. Fifteen. Then sixteen. His wife was sick. A friend of his was sick. People he had played football with. People he had eaten dinner with. Nobody could find the one who had given it to him.

And in Vo’, in the hills south of Padua, the seventy-seven-year-old man had died in the night.

He was the first. The first person to die of it in Italy. The first in Europe, the radio said, or near enough. A man who had gone to play cards at the bar in his village, the way he had every afternoon for years, and had come home with a fever.

I turned the radio off for a while after that.

Past Verona the traffic was normal. Trucks heading east, families heading out for the weekend. A tractor in the slow lane. I watched the fields go by and I thought about that old man in Vo’, and about his bar, which I imagined was a lot like Sandro’s, with a zinc counter and a television in the corner and the same faces every afternoon. I wondered who he had played cards with. I wondered whether they were sick.

Dale sighed and shifted his chin on the console.

“I know, buddy,” I said. “Me too.”

About twenty minutes outside Vicenza, I saw the first convoy.

It was coming the other way, on the westbound side, heading toward us and past us. Four army trucks, the big green ones with canvas backs, and two jeeps, one in front and one behind. Then a little gap, and then three Carabinieri cars, dark blue with the red stripe down the side, their lights going but no sirens. They went by fast. I watched them in the mirror until they were gone.

And a few minutes after that, as I came down the last stretch toward the Vicenza exit, the radio, which I had turned back on without really meaning to, said the words that I suppose were the real beginning of everything that came after.

They were closing Vo’.

The whole town. Nobody in and nobody out. The army and the Carabinieri were setting up roadblocks on every road into the village, and three thousand people were going to be sealed inside it. The same thing was happening around Codogno, in Lombardy, to ten towns at once. Fifty thousand people. The government had a name for it, and the radio said the name over and over, until it got into my head and stayed there.

Zona rossa.

The red zone.

I came off the autostrada at Vicenza Ovest and drove into the city, past the station and around the old walls, and parked the truck in the side street behind my new apartment. Then I sat there for a minute with the engine off, listening to it tick as it cooled.

Dale lifted his chin off the console and looked at me. He wanted to get out. He wanted to see the new place and smell all the new smells. He did not know anything about red zones.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go see where we live.”

I opened the door and he jumped down onto the cobblestones and stood there with his nose up, reading the wind. It was a cold, bright morning in Vicenza, and the bells of the cathedral were ringing for something, and the street smelled of coffee and wet stone and somebody’s woodsmoke.

Forty minutes away, the soldiers were putting up their barriers.

We did not know it yet, Dale and I, but we were about to spend the strangest spring of our lives walking through a city that had stopped. And one of the people we would meet in that stopped city would be dead inside of a month.

Not from the virus.

From something a great deal older than that.

© 2026 Robert Hethcoat. This free chapter is shared by the author as a preview of The Lake Garda Mystery. All rights reserved.

Full paperback edition with 30 illustrations — publication details to follow.