Meanwhile, I had to abandon my work on the swimming pool for a more pressing task. At Joe’s request, I passed the afternoon looking through old photograph albums in search of an image showing the Madonna del Mare in situ that we could give to the police. It was an interesting and pleasant task and soon I was engrossed in old photographs of the DeLuca family. I turned thick card pages to see century old pictures of family groups taken in the villa gardens; be-whiskered men and short, corseted women, posing with gaggles of children, all beautifully dressed in stockings and pinafores and pantaloons, and later on, smaller, but more relaxed groups, the women now in sunhats and looser fitting dresses, the men without jackets, braces pinning their shirts to their chests, the children barefoot, no longer standing to attention but posing with toys and animals. Almost all the pictures had been taken outside.

As the chronicles of the family moved forward, I found photographs of Anna’s mother at various stages of pregnancy; it was painful to think of how much grief she must have endured each time she lost a child. But eventually there were pictures of a live baby and then a little girl, Anna. There she was, unmistakably Joe’s mother, her hair as dark as her mother’s, her skin as dark as her father’s, some lucky combination of genes giving her the most attractive features of them both. In one of the pictures, Anna, aged five or six, was posing beside a swimming pool in the villa garden – not the same pool that was there now, but an older, smaller, rectangular version. The photograph was black and white, and she was grinning broadly, several of her milk teeth missing. Her hair was cut short and everything about her, from her skinny chest to her out-turned feet, the saggy swimsuit, her thin little legs and her arms held above her head as if she were about to dive, reminded me of Daniel. The resemblance was so strong, it made the hairs on my arms stand on end. Neither Joe nor I as children had looked as much like Daniel as Anna did. They could have been twins, if it weren’t for the fifty years that separated them. Had Anna realised, I wondered, how alike they were? When she looked at Daniel, did she see herself? Did she wonder where her life had gone off track? How had she felt when we lost him, when she lost him, when it was all her fault?