‘Not for a long time, though,’ said Luke, surveying the tangled greenery all around them. ‘And these buildings look deserted.’

They were standing in a secluded courtyard garden surrounded on all sides by four- or five-storey buildings. Like the garden, the buildings were also showing signs of neglect. Most of the windows were boarded up, except for a few cases where the shutters either hung forlornly or had fallen off altogether. The rendering was stained and marked with damp patches.

They stared around them, ready to flee back inside the pod at a moment’s notice, but there were no signs of human activity. Birds sang around them and a small black cat slunk behind a bush with something in its mouth. There were no voices, no sounds of pots and pans, no smells of cooking, just a deep silence.

‘Well,’ said Luke. ‘This isn’t too bad.’

‘No, it’s not, is it?’

‘Typical Roman design,’ said Luke. ‘Big posh house on the ground floor benefitting from the pretty garden and fountain. Cheap apartments above – possibly rented out, possibly for less affluent members of the family. Whoever they were, there’s no one here now.’

They wandered around, getting the lie of the land. This had once been a very pretty garden. Not large, but well planted, and now considerably overgrown. Paths had been laid out once upon a time, shaded by vines now bursting with spring growth. A fountain stood in one corner, minus its traditional nymph, its basin filled with recent rainwater.

They walked around the outside, wending their way around the pillars supporting the covered area that bordered the garden. Empty niches showed where statues had once stood. Jane suspected they’d either been removed for safekeeping or stolen.

They tried all the doors and windows but the house was tightly boarded up – there was no chance of an entrance. Whoever had left – and for whatever reason they had left – their property had been well secured in their absence.

At the far end of the garden, however, opposite the house itself, they found a loose shutter over one window. Peering through, they could see a corridor.

‘Not a part of the house, I think,’ said Luke. ‘Let’s see, shall we?’

He pulled the shutter aside. ‘We can push it back into place and no one will ever know.’

The corridor doglegged out of sight. The floor was of ordinary stone but Jane could see a faded lion painted on one wall. Shabby and water-damaged plaster was flaking away in the damp. The floor was covered in twigs and dirt. Only rats and birds lived there now. And died there too, judging by the occasional tiny skeleton. Jane thought of the cat.

‘It’s perfect,’ she said, determined to be positive. ‘Tempor­arily, anyway.’

Luke was horrified – which, given the normal state of his living quarters, was a trifle hypocritical. ‘Live here?’