A plane to Bologna. Matty hired a car and drove to the hills outside Rimini. There was a smudge of wariness in Nonna’s eyes when she pulled back after their hug. She wouldn’t say anything first of all, feigned vagueness, busied herself with dinner. Wept at the details of the funeral. It was hard to bring him up.

Nonno was still laid up in bed, his voice a little weaker. Crossword book on the side and a man singing dolorously on the radio. He didn’t know, he’d said. Not very much. Rosa only spoke to Nonna. Non si chiedono queste cosa. Better not to ask about these things.

Classic, Joe had said, the quiet inner-ear voice. Absolute bloody classic.

During the middle of the second night there, Matty rifled through the old dresser in the living room, looking for something. Anything. He must have written. Left an address. The lamp had suddenly come on. Tesoro mio, Nonna had said, the light showing the shape of her old, slight body through her nightgown, before she sat down on the arm of the corner chair.

Your mother did not want you to know about your father, she said, her words simple. He called, but I did not tell him where you were. Your mother asked us not to. He was a bad person. It was best for him not to be in your lives. The shame. Your mother never got over it. Nonna had broken down again, picking up the photo of Rosa aged twenty or so, half-sitting on the bonnet of a car with large sunglasses on her head, bright-red lipstick, her shoulder awkwardly thrust forward.

The next morning Matty had tried again, gentle questions over drying the dishes. When did he call? Where had he called from? The answers were always the same. Non lo so, gioia. È stato così tanto tempo fa. A long time ago. The stubbornness that her youngest daughter had inherited. It was only when she opened the box of Rosa’s jewellery again, the golden chains spooling through her hands, that she’d said, not England. He had not been in England when he called. Where, then? A tired shrug was the only answer.

A kiss to Nonno’s cheek, and Matty left, without a goodbye to her. Back to the airport, and London, and a world in which Joe now existed.

Chapter 3

A grey day. Clouds skidding across the sky. Shifty’s windscreen wipers scraped lopsidedly alongside the beats of an old Public Enemy tape. Matty sat in the camper, shuffling the pack of cards, mentally rehearsing the lines by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. Chuck D. Imagining him right there.

The garage was over the road, a single-storey building with three vans outside. One of them had its bonnet up.