He’s astonished when Cathy takes an actual step back from him. ‘What?’ she says, her voice just a whisper.

He blushes. He allowed his relief at her knowledge, at how in control she is, to let him run his mouth. ‘You know,’ he stammers, ‘just – a, you know, a nice man to share your life with.’

‘I haven’t not found someone,’ she says, making air quotes.

‘Sorry,’ Joe says uselessly. ‘Ignore me.’

Cathy does. They stare into the distance, the air hazy and shimmering with the heat, both thinking.

Perhaps Will was here before he unthinkingly, unknowingly, walked to his death. What was he doing, walking on that road towards their villa late at night? The man that his sister killed before the mystery could be solved, a man dying with his own secrets intact, like an unopened box sent out to sea.

Cathy breathes out cigarette smoke into the summer air like icing sugar, then turns to look at him. ‘It’ll be okay.’

‘I feel like we need more of a plan,’ he says. He thinks for a second. What would his dad do? What would his dad want him to do? ‘There’s a hotline, isn’t there?’ Joe says. ‘That you can text in.’

‘7070. It was on the news. Why?’

‘What if we said we’d seen him?’

Cathy understands his meaning immediately. ‘But not us,’ she says.

‘Get a pay-as-you-go phone. And text in. Say we saw him today.’

She seems to shiver in the sunlight, her shoulders rising up as she turns away from him and breathes smoke out of the side of her mouth. ‘Up to you,’ she says. ‘I feel like we should maybe leave it for now.’

‘Why?’

‘I just think – the cashpoint stuff … you know? We dodged a bullet there.’

‘Yeah. Maybe. Stop playing with fire,’ Joe says softly, looking at the amber tip of his cigarette, slowly turning to ash, orange to grey like a fast cremation.

‘Exactly. And … I don’t know.’ Cathy scuffs the ground with the toe of her trainer. ‘It’s just – I don’t know. It’s all a bit distasteful, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, I think we’ve really crossed the Rubicon with distasteful,’ Joe says drily.

‘Maybe,’ Cathy says.

They stand in silence for a few minutes more.

‘She said she couldn’t stop,’ Cathy says, so quietly he has to strain to hear.

‘I know.’

They stop speaking, letting the words and the suspicion hang in the air between them.

‘Cath,’ he says quietly now.

‘Yeah?’ She looks up at him, round brown eyes concerned.

‘Would you have done the same for me?’

Cathy waits a beat, still looking at him. ‘Of course,’ she says. She waits a second, seemingly thinking, then adds: ‘Of course I would. I am.’ She doesn’t ask the question back.

‘You are?’

‘I am keeping your crimes a secret,’ she says simply.

Joe takes out another cigarette and offers one to Cathy. She takes it, unlit, holds it until she has finished the previous one. Joe lights them both, then plays with the lighter, pulling and pulling on the little wheel, looking at the small, contained fire that pops up, and is easily put out, over and over again.