Joe’s always been this way. Sympathetic to all animals and only some people. He took in a stray cat when he was nine, a ginger tom that sneaked in through his bedroom window, his hips so bony, his fur matted. He fed it leftovers for a week before he told his parents. His mother wanted to put up a sign at the vets’, but Joe wouldn’t let her. He kept the cat, named it Peanut. He slept on Joe’s pillow every night for a decade, his first pet. He looked at him one night, his spotty stomach more rounded, his fur glossy, and thought, I want to be a vet. Not because of his mother, but because of that little Peanut that slept in his bed.

‘We need your consent to tow it away,’ the Blackpool donkey says. She gestures down the road. A red tow truck is coming. Joe’s shoulders drop. ‘Not safe at all to drive,’ she adds with a smile. He keeps watching. Behind the tow truck is a police car. He squints at the horizon, trying not to look guilty.

‘There’s nothing else?’ he says.

The woman nods and he leans into the hot car, checking, checking again, but it’s empty. He’s just paranoid.

The woman taps the paper when he comes back. He signs his name again, this time with a shakier hand than before. He looks at the two signatures, patchy blue biro, side by side, panic inscribed within them, then pulls his gaze back to the police, who have pulled up outside the building. They’re sitting in the car now, two dark-haired men, just watching the world. And watching him.

Joe heads back to the villa to retrieve the wallet from Cathy. Another thing to sort. He doesn’t mind the sorting. Like Lucie the greyhound, he doesn’t trust anybody else to do it. He’s the head of this family now, really. It’s up to him.

‘I can’t believe you crashed the car,’ she says to him. They’re in her room.

He laughs softly, a dark little laugh. ‘What a great metaphor a car crash is,’ he says, and Cathy smiles wanly.

‘Now I need to do what you were supposed to,’ he says, but he says it mildly. He can understand why she didn’t use William’s card. She places the wallet into his outstretched palm. Something about it reminds him of their childhood. Some transaction that once took place. A pact, a secret, the details of which are lost to the past.

‘You’re sure it’s sensible?’ she asks.

He pauses. ‘I think so,’ he says. ‘We need to – we need to throw people off the scent.’ He winces as he says it. Cathy’s face is expressionless, but, as he walks down the stone corridor away from her room, he thinks he might be able to hear her heave a deep, sad sigh.

In Verona, Joe inches into a stuffy alleyway and stares at the wallet in his hands. On the underside, in a disused flap, he sees the distinctive curl of a piece of paper in there. He inches it out slowly. Written on it, in pen, are four digits: