‘Everyone knew what kind of woman she was. That’s why Anna’s mother liked me to stay here, safe from her depravity. That’s how I came to learn English. Anna’s governess taught the pair of us. It was our own secret language that nobody else understood!’ She paused. Her eyes bright. ‘This was more of a home to me than my real home. Anna’s mother more of a mother to me than my own and Anna and I were closer than sisters. It’s such a shame that such sadness came to the DeLuca family. Tragedy after tragedy; children lost, hearts broken. Local people have long believed that the villa is unlucky. Some even say it’s cursed.’

Joe raised an eyebrow.

I’d been jolted by the ‘children lost’ comment, which I took to be an oblique reference to Daniel – although perhaps Signora Romano had meant the stillborn babies – and for a fraction of a second Daniel was there, on the other side of the living room beneath the mirror, staring at me, wide eyed. I blinked and he was gone.

‘But you still want to buy the villa, Signora Romano?’ Joe asked.

‘I have no children to lose,’ Signora Romano replied. ‘There’s only me and my father. We have nothing to fear.’

‘What happened to your mother, Signora?’ I asked.

‘She fell in the marshes on her way back from an assignation. It was no more than she deserved.’

Something chimed in my memory. I felt as if I’d known this, although I reasoned that I couldn’t have.

‘I want to show you something?’ Signora Romano said suddenly. ‘Upstairs.’ She must have felt fully recovered because she stood up and trotted across the living room in a spritely fashion. At the door to the hall, she turned and beckoned to us. ‘Come on!’

We followed her up the stairs and into the room Joe was using – Anna’s old room.

She went to the bed and leaned against it, pushed. She was slight and the frame was heavy. ‘Help me, please,’ she said to Joe.

He took hold of the headboard and pulled it away from the wall.

‘There!’ Signora Romano cried, triumphant. ‘Look!’

Drawn on the wallpaper were two little female figures holding hands in the style of the old Love is… cartoons. They were enclosed inside a heart. Beneath were the words: Solo la morte ci separerà.

‘Only death will part us,’ Joe translated quietly.

‘That’s how close we were,’ Signora Romano said with satisfaction. ‘That’s what we meant to one another. That’s how much Anna loved me.’

Something else was written underneath, in a fainter, more familiar hand: Anna’s. I leaned down to see and read: E la morte non avrà più dominio. And death will have no dominion – the same words inscribed on the gravestone in the garden.