I kept going and found more pictures of Anna as she grew older, and then another character joined the cast at the villa; the young Matilde Romano. For several years, Anna and Matilde were the only children to regularly appear in the pictures, but later, probably around the time of Matilde’s mother’s death, a third girl started to appear. She was taller than Anna and Matilde and she was not conventionally beautiful, but there was something compelling about her; she wasn’t looking directly at the camera in any of the images, but always slightly beyond, as if her thoughts had already moved onto something else; her chin was raised in a haughty, playful manner, one hand often on her hip. The face of the third girl made me smile. She looked as if she would be fun. She looked like a rebel.

I was certain they were the same three girls from the picture on the memorial wall, the picture where the face of the third girl had been scratched out.

I pulled a photograph from the album and turned it over. Written on the back were the names Anna, Matilde & Gina. Here was a picture of them in their swimsuits, by the pool; the old, rectangular pool, Anna posing like a film star in a pair of her mother’s sunglasses, while the taller girl crouched, pretending to take a picture of her. Matilde was hanging back, looking at someone off camera.

Here was another image of the three girls, dressed up, standing behind the puppet theatre we’d found in the cellar. Each girl was holding the handles of a puppet. Anna had a female marionette, similar to the one Matilde had given me, the taller girl, Gina, had a knight – perhaps the same puppet we’d found on the floor of the cave beyond the cellar – and Matilde had some kind of animal, a wolf perhaps, or a bear. It was a charming picture. I removed that, and a couple of other pictures, to give to Matilde when we next saw her – I thought it would be a kind gesture and one she might appreciate. It might make up, in part, for us letting her down over the villa.

Another picture caught my eye. The teenage Anna was standing beside Gina and with them was a young man; a grinning, self-confident Sicilian, older than the girls, wearing an open-necked shirt and holding a cigarette between two fingers. He was wearing a hat that shadowed his eyes, but he was desperately good-looking and the pose, the physical confidence, showed that he knew it.

Who was that? I wondered.

Here was a whole chapter of Anna’s life about which I knew nothing. What had happened in the months and years after this picture was taken to bring her away from Italy to England? What was it that had gone so wrong that she’d left her family and friends and this beautiful Sicilian man behind?