‘È stato mandato,’ Cathy says.

‘Sorry?’ Joe says.

‘That’s what I can make out, just here …’ Cathy says. She lifts the pieces to show him. Dried blood floats off it, a burgundy grainy sand, and they stare at it. Frannie’s cheeks flush. She stands and wets some toilet paper, wiping it up carefully from the bathroom tiles. Nobody looks closely at the smear of red on the tissue, old blood reinvigorated.

Joe is staring at the pieces of paper. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking at,’ he says. ‘We’ve done this once already. Let’s just forget it.’

‘Joe,’ Cathy says, while Frannie washes her hands. She cocks her head a second, listening out. Joe starts. Is that somebody on the stairs?

‘Look, it’s here,’ she says slowly to him. ‘You’re not being thick, don’t worry.’

‘I didn’t say I was,’ Joe says, though that is exactly what he thought. Cathy traces the words in front of him, looking down at the paper and then up at him, to check he has understood.

‘Okay – and?’ he says.

‘I don’t understand either,’ Frannie says reliably.

‘Well.’ Cathy stands and goes to the window, holding the documents in the light. Frannie catches Joe’s gaze and rolls her eyes. Joe gives a soft half-smile to his ally.

‘Joe?’ Lydia’s voice calls out in the corridor.

‘Shit,’ Joe mouths. ‘Be down in a bit,’ he shouts. He is met with silence. Lydia isn’t replying or moving. ‘Go down – I’ll be down soon.’ God, the last thing Lydia needs is this, the implosion of the closest thing she has to a family as an adult. She will refer to her upbringing casually now to him, but he was with her a few weeks ago, at her work summer party, when some distant lawyer enquired about where she’d grown up. Lydia had been vague and stiff, and had turned to him, sad eyes and shoulders, and said, ‘There is no way to bring up domestic abuse at a summer party without putting everyone on a downer.’ But then he’d watched as she deliberately calmed herself, got another drink, took off her shoes and danced with him, his Lydia. A beautiful flower that grew up through a crack in concrete.

‘Where is everyone?’ she says. He hears Paul say something illegible. Frannie’s gaze goes from indolent to alert, staring intently at the door.

‘Not sure.’

‘Okay, then,’ she says, her footsteps finally retreating.

‘I know what this is,’ Cathy says to Frannie and Joe. She goes back over to them, holding it out. ‘It’s a police document.’

‘I’ll be by the pool, with Paul, then,’ Lydia calls, from further away.

‘Okay,’ Joe shouts in a panic, though he feels bad.

Paul used to cry on walks with Joe, but only if they went at night. He couldn’t work it out. In the day, he seemed to love being walked around the country lanes, but in the night, screams. Joe tried different routes, warmer clothes. Until one day he followed Paul’s gaze and realized: he was terrified of the moon. The fucking moon! Joe had bought Paul a book all about what the moon was and read it to him, and eventually he’d clapped when he saw it, and Joe’s heart became a sunburst, the moon reflecting the light back to Paul, his nephew.