‘I think it should be in a shop,’ he says to her. ‘Use contactless. Choose one with no CCTV or – if you can’t – a crowded one so you blend in. Buy something … a bottle of water, I don’t know. Something mundane.’

Cathy nods quickly, following his logic. She stares up at him for a beat or two.

‘What are you looking at?’ he says curiously.

‘No, nothing,’ she says, turning slightly away from him. She puts the wallet in her handbag. ‘I’ll get the bus,’ she says. ‘We’ll say I was sightseeing.’

‘Unlikely you’d stop working long enough to sightsee.’

‘Well, it’s all unlikely.’

‘Okay. I’ll tell Frannie. She can add it to – to our thing.’ Joe waves a hand, intended to be a substitute for words, and he looks so exhausted, suddenly, that Cathy wants to reach out to steady him.

‘Yeah.’ Cathy begins walking down the track road to the place where she waited for the bus the other day, back when she was a completely different person.

Parked just down from the bus stop is a news van. Excited Italian reporters gather, smoking, making phone calls, and typing on their mobiles. Cathy stares at her feet as she waits for the bus, wishing she weren’t a blusher.

The bus is air conditioned, the temperature of a fridge, and Cathy can’t help but wonder how William is faring. How cold is it seven feet under, in the middle of the day? She can’t bear to think of it. Of him in that way, the healthy, alive man from the market.

Cathy had watched something develop from across the square. The man they now know to be William – wearing a denim jacket and holding a cigarette – had been standing too close to Frannie, who was gesturing with a pineapple she’d bought. Paul was on her hip.

Cathy heard her sister’s voice over the hum of the market.

The owner of the stall offered up the chip-and-PIN machine to Cathy, who paid for a fountain pen she didn’t need. She refused a receipt, said, ‘My sister,’ in English, though she knew he wouldn’t understand her. She weaved her way across the market to Frannie, who was standing alone with Paul next to a towering pile of oranges.

‘What’s going on?’ Cathy said.

‘That man,’ Frannie said, pointing across the market to the dark-haired man, still smoking, then ducking under the awning and leaving, ‘lit up and breathed over – everything.’ She gestured briefly to Paul. ‘Over him.’ She wasn’t indignant, exactly. That wasn’t Frannie’s style. She was just bewildered. So shocked someone could be so rude.

‘Oh,’ Cathy said, nodding quickly. ‘Okay – well –’

Frannie was holding a canvas bag that she’d filled with fruit. ‘Paul breathed loads of it in, and these pears’ – she pointed to the bag – ‘now stink. I don’t understand it. Why you’d …’ She pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear, her hand shaking. Cathy’s gaze lingered on it, on that small window into Frannie’s vulnerability that only she would notice.