‘Anyone else?’ the man says to Lydia now.

‘Frannie, Joe, Cathy. All the Plants. I’m here with them – the whole family. Three siblings.’

‘Okay. Thanks. Do not worry. I bet they are fine – I will check.’ He leans over to the other policeman as she leaves, feeling relieved, and whispers something that she can’t hear. She pauses for just a second before walking away.

11.

Joe

‘Where have you been?’ Lydia says to Joe when she arrives back in their room. She’s holding Paul, obviously pissed off.

‘Uh …’ Joe towel dries his just-showered hair, stalling for time. He had got his story straight in his mind, but he’s forgotten it. His brain feels fractured, his thoughts, feelings, chemicals put through a centrifuge and spun out into disparate pieces.

Lydia has croissant flakes down her t-shirt. Only two. They’re minuscule. Joe’s eyes keep straying to them. How many minuscule bits of evidence have they left down there? Something rises up through him. Some misguided, over-the-top urge to rush back to the scene of the crime and obscure it further so that nobody can ever get to the bottom of what happened there. To detonate a bomb, to set the entire forest alight. To make such a mess that theirs is eclipsed.

‘Have you been fighting?’

‘No,’ Joe says testily, resenting the assumption. He almost tells her, right then. It’s Frannie you should be worried about, not me. He rakes back his hair and looks at her. ‘Sorry, I went earlier,’ he says.

‘To breakfast? Where’s Frannie?’

‘She went too. Yeah. I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to wake you.’

‘Well – does she want Paul back or not?’

Joe looks at Lydia dumbly, thinking of the blood that Frannie is probably washing off her body.

‘I’m sure she does. Look – I’ll text her.’ He brandishes his phone. It doesn’t matter if Lydia’s mad at him, he thinks. He’s protecting her from knowledge she’d rather not have, if she could choose. Rather a cold husband than be privy to a killing.

‘Right,’ Lydia says faintly. She looks like the same Lydia he went to high school with, today, here in the Italian sun. She’s hardly aged. She has a face he sometimes sees places – on the news, on friends of friends. Wide-set eyes. Full cheeks. A snub nose. The kind of face people think they know. That’s how it felt to fall in love with Lydia: familiar, warm, like turning over in the sun. Each day at work, he looks forward to going home to her. She is always home before him, and always doing mad things. Potting loads of plants she bought on a whim, cooking wearing crazy pyjamas with feet. Just a few weeks ago, she had tried to do her own gel pedicure and had stuck her toes together. ‘Okay, we have a situation,’ she’d said, when he walked in from work. He’d used a spare scalpel to remove the hardened gel while they’d giggled.