A man sitting behind a grey, old-fashioned till greeted Joe in a long Italian sentence, and he shrugged his shoulders apologetically and said hello in English. He reached into one of the cabinets and pulled out a Nokia. Black. It easily fit in the palm of his hand. He took it to the man and paid for it.

‘A second phone for the second woman!’ the man said. ‘Very private.’ He had a knowing smile. Joe left in a panic, his hood up, the area checked for CCTV, out into the blazing orange sunset.

It was, he reasoned, better to take the risk and lessen their chances of getting caught. Better to do x than y. Better to risk a than b. Joe’s life had become a series of bad situations, of rocks and hard places, and he was tired of it. He was so tired of it he could have sat down right there in the street and cried. He could have almost walked right over there to the police station and handed himself in. Handed in his whole family. Bought a gun from a similar shop to this and shot himself in the head.

Instead, Joe went into a dingy side alley with the phone and powered it up. Good. It had ten euros on it. Joe could hardly work it. It was so old, the keys made sounds as he pushed them, an electronic, retro sound like playing Tetris. He typed out the message into Google Translate, then checked it over. God, he wished Cathy had come.

I served the missing man this morning. I work in a bar in Padua.

Ho servito l’uomo scomparso questa mattina. Lavoro in un bar a Padova.

Before he could talk himself out of it, he had pressed send.

On the way back, he bought three Italian pastries. Whenever he’s stressed, he eats, always has done. He usually mitigates this by counting calories on an app he’s too embarrassed to admit he uses. But he scoffed these, all one thousand calories of them, as though the butter and the sugar could fill him up, could cover up his secrets, could squash them down and suffocate them completely.

30.

Cathy

Cathy is no stranger to moping, though nobody knows it. She is sitting at the kitchen table, alone, as she does often in England, only this time with a different brand of tea. Manuel. Italian tea. It doesn’t taste the same.

She is thinking about Lydia’s stricken face and wondering what sort of husband her brother is being at the moment. How Lydia must feel. So in the dark. Knowing, surely, that something is happening, but not what. It is strange to consider her brother in this way. As a spouse and not as a sibling.

She sat just like this at home, in the early spring, drinking Tetley. She’d been on a date with the owner of a giant house rabbit called Leonard. In the second consult, when she’d diagnosed the dacryocystitis – blocked tear ducts – the owner had asked for her number.