Mauro steered the Hispano-Suiza off the dirt track on to an even more primitive trail, which wound its way over rocks and stones between the scrubby vegetation down the side of the hill towards the sea. The car swayed wildly from side to side and James was bounced out of his seat. He began to wonder whether they would make it at all, but Mauro must have driven this way many times before and didn’t seem at all fazed, although James noticed that he now had both hands on the wheel.

When they at last arrived James felt like they had been driving for hours. He was stiff and bruised and caked with dust, and the back of his neck felt burnt.

Mauro parked the car under the shade of some umbrella pines, switched off the engine and got out. Then he grabbed James’s suitcase and strode off without saying anything. James shook his head and followed him down a flight of winding steps cut into the rock. As they came round a corner they arrived at a large open doorway set into a short white wall. James could see little more of the building, which nestled, hidden, among the rocks. He could see enough, though, to tell him that it didn’t follow the lines of an ordinary house and appeared almost to have grown out of the landscape.

Through the door was a long snaking corridor, which twisted and turned as it led deeper into the villa.

They came out into an unexpectedly large room with an undulating curved roof and a wide sweep of floor-to-ceiling windows that led out on to a terrace.

The room was neither square nor circular; like the rest of the building it was organic in design, with odd little hidden corners and holes cut into the walls of all shapes and sizes, some leading to the outside, others to rooms within the villa itself.

If the room was unusual, what was in it was extraordinary. It was filled with paintings and statues and odd, incongruous objects. The paintings were unsettling and nightmarish. One gigantic canvas took up almost all of one wall – it showed an octopus floating in the air, crushing various objects in its tentacles; naked women; an animal that looked like a hairless cow; and a car that seemed somehow fleshy and alive. Then there was a bronze statue that consisted of nothing more than the lower half of a man, wearing trousers, and standing next to it was a stuffed giraffe whose neck went up through a hole in the ceiling. Another painting showed a woman with no face stabbing a crucifix into a human-sized beetle. The largest fish tank James had ever seen held a variety of exotic fish swimming in and out of a pile of animal skulls.

James suddenly realised that he had lost sight of Mauro, who had gone off with his suitcase down one of the several corridors that radiated from the room. He tried one but it opened into a small inner courtyard, where a semi-naked young man with a shaved head was posing in front of a mirror. James wasn’t sure if this was real at first, and wondered whether it might not be another of the strange art objects that filled the place. But then the man moved. He picked up an iron bar with weights on either end. He looked at James without saying anything as he lifted the bar above his head, his sharply defined muscles bulging.