‘The Venetians had all these olive trees planted,’ he said. ‘Back in the sixteenth century. Thousands and thousands of them, all over the island. In the summertime, the fireflies flit between the trees in the dusk, and that’s when you know there is an old magic here.’

Hessa was staring at Casey, her eyes wide.

‘I wish my wife could have lived with me in this house.’ Cavendish took a few more steps. ‘We dreamed of it a thousand times. She never enjoyed any of those places. Dusty and chaotic, she’d say. Exhausting, all of it. I should never have taken her away. Not for a lifetime.’

He looked back towards the house, and the jasmine reaching up to the cracked pink tiles.

‘Still,’ he said. ‘I hope I did some good.’

He gazed out to sea, east across the waves, then shook his head. He turned back to Casey. ‘I am sorry not to be able to help you more,’ he said. ‘You must have known I would not be able to tell you anything useful.’

‘We will find out some other way,’ Casey told him firmly.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe not.’

The old eyes met hers steadily. Sir William Cavendish would not tell her, Casey knew. She ducked her head. ‘Come on, Hessa. Let’s go.’

‘Goodbye, Miss Benedict,’ he watched them leave. ‘Good evening.’

‘Some people just won’t.’ Casey sipped at her glass of wine, staring moodily out at the sunset.

‘Will Ross be cross? That we’ve come all the way out here, and got nothing?’ Hessa sounded nervous.

‘I don’t care.’

They were sitting on the terrace of an old hotel, high above the cliffs, a mile or so south of Cavendish’s house. The sun was setting in a blaze of gold scarlet, the cool of the night drifting in.

‘I care,’ Hessa told her lemonade.

Casey contemplated Hessa, remembering her own days as the most junior reporter, terrified of Ross every day. It was difficult, this job. Ordered to override, day after day, the human instinct to be polite, to not intrude, to avert one’s eyes so civilly.

Painful, almost, for someone like Hessa, naturally shy, instinctively courteous. Some reporters – ruthlessly pushy, brutally assertive – never seemed to care. But Hessa would always struggle, Casey thought. The intuition, the perceptiveness, the intelligence: crucial to the undercover work. But they made it harder to approach a witness, or an unwilling source. When the intrusion was unbearable, and every hint of body language was screaming: I am a human being in distress, please leave me alone. Please.

Ross, knowing this, would be brutal. Targeting her, bullying her, kill or cure. Ensuring – quite deliberately – that Hessa was more scared of him than of the questioning. Forcing her through the habit of good manners to extract an answer from anyone.

Two small fisherman’s boats were hurrying around the promontory, heading up the coastline. Casey watched them idly.