A great deal depended on the painting being recovered. Without it, I knew Joe and I would struggle to hold onto the villa, let alone restore it. I hoped the police would be successful, but even if they weren’t, even if the Madonna del Mare never came home, it wouldn’t stop Joe and me from doing our best. We would still be together.

41

While the police launched their search for the Madonna del Mare, Joe and I concentrated on the villa. One morning, when we were on our way back from the DIY hypermarket, Signora Romano called. I answered reluctantly and she asked what was happening about the villa and once again I felt waves of guilt about having raised her hopes for a sale. I suggested we meet to talk ‘face-to-face’ and she agreed that was exactly what we should do.

We offered to drive to her father’s house, but instead she gave directions to a restaurant-bar close to the electricity station on the other side of the Porta Sarina marshes.

Joe knew it well, but it was a part of the far headland I hadn’t been to before. To get there, we had to continue past the Intimissimi billboard and join the road that led down to the industrial area entirely hidden from the tourist part of Porta Sarina. The land was low, at sea level. A raised track led across the marshland to the electricity station. Stubby grasses and thistles grew out of the marshes and old mattresses and bags of litter had been fly-tipped; as if the area wasn’t ugly enough already. We passed the putrefying body of a dead cat at the side of the road, black crows pulling at its flesh.

‘You know the woman you said Gabriele Arnone murdered?’ I asked Joe. ‘You said she was found in the marshland. Was it here?’

‘Somewhere round here.’

‘Do you think it could have been Matilde Romano’s mother?’

‘Oh Jesus! Yes, of course! Must have been!’

‘Do you think Matilde knows her mother was murdered?’

‘Surely not. She was only a kid. They’d have told her some story.’

I recalled Signora Romano’s bitterness when she spoke of her mother and the contempt with which she’d described her. I thought that maybe she did know but perhaps she thought her mother deserved her awful fate.

We drove on in silence, past the huge electricity station, and Joe pulled up in a car park separated from a wooden building by a boardwalk. A sign was erected at one end of the car park with pictures of the restaurant’s dishes: Specialità Pesce.

‘I can’t believe there’s a restaurant out here,’ I said.

‘I’ve heard the food’s good. It serves the electricity workers and the guests staying with the nuns.’

‘Nuns?’

‘There’s a little convent round the corner that takes in paying guests.’