6.

Joe

Joe’s shoulders feel like they’re made of metal, not bone and sinew. He rolls them, trying to relax. ‘We need to think clearly.’

The man was a horrible bloke, according to Frannie. Besides, she didn’t mean to hurt him. It was an accident. A terrible coincidence. This is the hand they’ve been dealt, and now they need to play the cards. ‘We need to think about the evidence,’ he says, staring at the ground. ‘What gets rid of blood?’

‘Fire,’ Cathy says immediately.

‘Fire,’ Joe repeats, nodding slowly. ‘Okay.’ He looks left and right down the track road. It serves only their villa and two others. The site used to be a convent and was converted to villas in the fifties. The private road is supposed to be maintained by the three villas, though they don’t do enough. The grass is scorched yellow, the road not even tarmacked, just hardened mud, cooked by the Italian sun. Joe’s only ever seen cars come down it when they’re lost. Joe briefly wonders why a stranger was walking down this road, alone, in the night …

‘We need to deal with the body first,’ Cathy says. She gets to her feet, hesitating just slightly, then walks on.

Their villa is surrounded by fields, with woods lying beyond. They bought it five years ago on – embarrassingly – a whim. Frannie had been fantasy Rightmoving, as she called it, and the villa had popped up. It was old, shabby and going cheap. What began as a joke became a full conversation, then a budget scribbled on the back of a receipt, then a loan, secured against their business. That first summer they came out here, they couldn’t believe they’d done it. They had thirty bookings for the rest of the year, and they’d paid off twenty per cent of the mortgage already. When they got the statement, they opened a bottle of wine at Frannie’s. She’d raised a glass and said, ‘To not doing things like other people.’

‘There are shovels in the outhouse,’ Joe says quietly. They all pause for just a second in the darkness. They were in there earlier today, preparing for a barbecue. The sun on the backs of their necks. ‘We could … use the woods.’

‘We don’t own the woods,’ Cathy says. She pulls back her dark hair from her face, looking at him intently. She is trying to communicate something, he thinks, but isn’t sure what.

‘But they’re deserted. And the soil is soft,’ he says. Are they really having this conversation? Everything is upside down and unreal, like the sky is suddenly underneath them and the earth above. Joe shakes his head, trying to clear it. He thinks instead of Paul, who just yesterday over the dinner table very seriously handed him a speck of fluff so small Joe had to squint to see it. His resolve strengthens. Paul doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve to pay for his mother’s mistake. He’s so tiny, so innocent.