Frannie stares at the door with big, wet eyes. She turns to Joe. ‘You’re going to have to tell Lydia. She’ll – she’ll figure out something is up.’

‘Frannie,’ Joe snaps.

‘What?’ Frannie says, her eyes round and hurt, staring at him.

‘Just – we’re already trying to fix this mess,’ he says tensely. ‘Stop adding to the chaos.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Just grow up,’ he says tightly.

‘Excuse me?’ Frannie says. Joe ignores her.

‘Listen,’ Cathy says, a rare urgency imbuing her voice. She holds out the pieces of paper in front of her. ‘Look at this, on this one. È stato mandato, right? The edge of a seal, up here in the corner, maybe like a local police office or something? And down here, on this one – what do you make that out to be?’

She hands it to Joe. It feels like an exam. He reads it slowly. Then again. Then a third time.

‘It says Plant,’ he says, as confused as if Cathy has sprouted another head right there in the hideous bathroom. ‘It says Plant?’

‘What?’ Frannie says, standing too.

‘It says Plant, and you can just make out 03/07, under the seal, 3rd of July,’ Cathy says. ‘It’s a warrant. It’s a warrant.’

‘What?’ Joe says.

Cathy’s gaze swivels to Frannie. ‘This cop had a warrant for our arrest.’

20.

Joe

‘Whose arrest?’ Frannie says, frowning, and Joe is pleased she is as confused as he is, that maybe he isn’t as thick as he feels.

‘I don’t know. I can only make out Plant.’

‘Maybe it isn’t to arrest. Maybe it’s just to search?’ Joe says. ‘I don’t know, we have a lot of people in the villa over the year … maybe one of them did something.’

‘Right.’

‘You met him for the first time in the market?’ Cathy asks Frannie.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s got a warrant dated three days before that.’ Cathy’s words hang in the air around them. She’s staring at both of them in turn, her eyes wide.

The messy truth is dawning on Joe. They have buried a policeman who had a warrant for one of them. ‘Frannie, who have you killed?’ he says hoarsely.

But it is Cathy who gets to the centre of the issue. ‘Warrants aren’t issued in a vacuum,’ she says. ‘The police will know. They will know he was coming for us – for whatever reason.’

‘Shit,’ Joe breathes. Downstairs, he hears a commotion. More than just Lydia. There’s somebody else there. Somebody is knocking.

Joe stops in the hallway. He’s so aware of every part of his body. What his hands are doing, his shoulders, his facial expression. He’s going to give himself away; he’s not an actor. He’s not cut out for this.

It’s the police, the Carabinieri. Joe can see that through the glass window in the heavy wooden door. A black hat, black suit, red stripes down his trousers. There is something frighteningly official about it. The pomp and circumstance, the military undertones. He’s only glad that it is not the Polizia di Stato. That it is not the people who threatened him outside the bar on that first night.