We took more care of the vehicles left outside the villa, and the bad luck began to follow our friends home. Items that he hadn’t ordered were repeatedly delivered to Fredi’s elderly father’s house; items that were costly and difficult to return. Someone reported Liuni to the police, they said he was responsible for the theft of a tourist’s camera, taken from the post office in Ragusa. He wasn’t, of course. He had a rock-solid alibi, but the police attention was embarrassing and inconvenient. Every time we saw one of our friends, someone who’d helped us, it seemed something minor but disturbing had taken place. All the incidents were seemingly unconnected, but each time I heard of some small disaster, my blood ran a little colder.

44

One afternoon, after an appointment at the bank in Ragusa, Joe and I found ourselves almost alone in a quiet, shuttered city. The sun was fierce and the shops were closed. The families had gone to the beach; the dogs were snoozing. Even the church bells were silent. It was the very height of summer and it was siesta time.

Joe said he wanted to show me something, and I said okay. We climbed to the top of the city, where the formal gardens, the Giardini Iblei, were laid out: green, shady and quiet. We entered through an avenue of huge old palm trees throwing deep shade across the hot, bright path. Starlings sang in the trees; cats stretched in patches of sunlight. The gardens were flanked by churches; one even stood inside its boundary – an arched door painted green and a saint standing up high beside its tower, one hand raised in benediction, baking in the glare.

As we walked past a monument to the fallen of the war, past pools and benches, dovecotes and columns and flower beds, I experienced the same sensation I had in the villa; feeling the ghosts of the past and the future converging in this space, walking with us as we strolled, pausing by the fountain and trailing their shadows over the surface of the water. At one point, we could smell the sweet apple scent of baking crostata from the panetteria down in the city below; at another, the smell was fried fish; at another, fresh lemons. These perfumes were becoming familiar to me. I was becoming used to Sicily.

‘Cece and I used to come here for picnics with our grandparents,’ Joe told me. ‘We’d play chess with my grandfather and French cricket. Nonna told me it was Anna’s favourite spot.’

‘Anna didn’t come with you?’

‘She never left the villa after we arrived.’

‘What? Never?’

‘No. She wouldn’t go beyond the villa’s walls from the day we arrived in Sicily until the day we left.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know why. It was just how it was. Come over here.’