I’m not sure what to do now. I need to go back, talk to Martelli, see if I can persuade him to follow this up, in the absence of Ruggieri and Biondi, book new flights, get Bee home. I know, already, that Martelli will give that lugubrious shrug that seems so peculiarly Italian, and I can almost hear him telling me that it is out of his hands.

The gulls screech and fight over the scraps of meat from my ciabatta, and I notice something else. It’s small and made of plastic. I pick it up and turn it between my fingers. It’s warm from the sun. Another piece of flotsam and jetsam. I put it in my pocket and haul myself up the rocks in the lee of the cliff. As I trudge back across the beach, I notice rust-red petals, shrivelled by the sun, drifting across the sand in front of me – and then I remember when I was last here. A few feet away is the outline of a small grave. Some of the stones and shells have been kicked or knocked, and the mound of sand – damp when Lotte, Theo and I patted it down – has dried and cracked. The lines from the poem Theo read that night play in my mind.

I will lend you, for a little time,
A child of mine…

There’s something poking through the top. I walk over and crouch down. It’s a hand: a small plastic doll’s hand, with fat, chubby fingers, like a child’s. I pause and remove my sunglasses, rub my eyes.

For you to love while she lives,
And mourn for when she’s dead.

I don’t know how Amy has coped, especially when Matt is so emotionally repressed he makes me look like Oprah. I touch the doll’s fingertips. They’re warm from the sun. I wonder if I should dig her up. Amy had been so upset when she heard we’d buried the doll, but then what will Theo and Lotte think when Pearl rises from the grave? How will that help them understand that Ruby-May will never return?

Ruby-May. Ruby-May. Would I have been happier – would we all have been happier – if she hadn’t lived? If we’d never loved and lost, than never loved at all, as some poem I once read at school goes? Yes, I think, yes, I’d be happier now. But how could I wish away that child’s life? Deny her those three bright, blazing years of existence?

I loved Ruby-May, of course I did, I loved her with all my heart. I also loved what she meant: that I was a person capable of being loved, of being responsible, of being worthy of a small girl’s attention, and that one day maybe I, too, could become a father and not be a monstrous screw-up like my own dad had been.