‘Why don’t you look in your room for your iPad, and I’ll see if it’s here?’

How can you possibly lose a neon-pink, rhinestone-encrusted iPad? She searches the sitting room and the kitchen, tossing aside the cushions and crouching down to peer under the sofa. She sorts through the games on the bookshelves and checks it’s not caught up in the tousled rugs and throws.

Chloe slouches back in. ‘It’s definitely not in my room or Auntie Bee’s.’

‘It’s not in our bedroom, and Lotte and Theo haven’t got it,’ says Matt. He sounds more normal now, and he rubs his hair as if he’s embarrassed. ‘It’s not likely anyone else here would have taken it.’

‘It’s not in my room or Dad’s,’ says Nick coming in. ‘I overheard,’ he adds. ‘Hard not to.’

He’s clearly been having a lie-down after the run; his cheek is creased from the sheets. Joe had tactfully joined Luca in their apartment when the argument started, but he reappears and says that he and Luca have searched their rooms too.

‘It’s been stolen!’ Chloe says.

‘Are you sure it’s not by the pool? Did you take it to the beach?’

‘No! I left it right here. It could easily have been pinched. None of you lock the house. There’s people coming and going all the time – you never know who’s here and who isn’t. Anyone could walk in! This place is weird. I feel like there’s someone watching me, at night, when I’m sleeping.’ She bursts into tears again.

Amy has a vivid image of Chloe lying on a sun-lounger by the pool: a slice of her thigh, the white of her bikini bottoms, viewed from between the cypresses at the end of the garden by the shed; the blank space of Chloe’s ground-floor bedroom window, which anyone could stare into from that side of the house. The person watching Chloe by the pool. She’d thought it had been Joe or Bethany.

‘You’re overreacting. It’ll be here. No one could steal it,’ Matt says. ‘We’re in an olive grove in the middle of nowhere!’

Matt’s probably right, she thinks. They’re safe here – it’s a tiny island with a handful of Italians. And who locks the doors when they’re on holiday? Or wears much, when they’re wandering round a private pool.

‘Maybe we should call the police,’ Nick says. ‘I mean, if you can’t find the iPad, at least you’ve got the report, in case you need to make a claim on your insurance.’

What about all the photos on the iPad? Amy thinks. If someone gets hold of pictures of her stepdaughter and starts putting them on the Internet…