I ran towards the villa as quickly as I could, cursing the old injuries that slowed me down, dreading what I might find. It was a relief to see the windows at the front of the villa were intact, but in the next heartbeat, I saw that the front door was covered in red paint; an empty can lay on its side in the flower bed. The step and columns and the wall around the door were spattered too and the trunk of the magnolia and the thick old stem of the magnificent creeping rose that wound around the door; the plants looked as if they’d witnessed a gruesome murder. In the centre of all the red, was a black shadow. A crow had been fixed to the door by a nail hammered through its neck. Its head hung limp to one side; one cold, unseeing eye, a long, yellow beak sharp as a blade. Its wings dropped behind its talons; feathers and paint, the plastic white of the quills. The dead bird stank.

I put my hand over my mouth to stop myself retching.

Joe was behind me. He said: ‘It’s okay, Edie, it’s okay.’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘No, it’s not okay! No way is that okay!’

This whole thing, the casual dumping of the litter, the broken bottle, the red paint and the dead bird; all of it was nasty, it felt as if whatever unpleasantness had been following us had been nudged up a notch. The vandalism of the car may have been random. The cat might have been killed accidentally, but this wasn’t random and it wasn’t accidental. This was horrible, gruesome; a deliberate attempt to frighten us.

My heart was in my mouth as we went round to the back of the villa to the kitchen, checking the windows and doors were secure – they seemed to be, although the dining room shutters were open and the lock on the French windows outside that room wouldn’t close properly. They appeared to be shut, but it was possible someone could have gone in and out that way.

Joe unlocked the kitchen door and we went inside together, me behind him, the two of us creeping, turning on the lights as we went, talking loudly, just in case. When all the lights were on, I ran upstairs to check on the kittens – now they were so mobile, we’d taken to shutting them in Anna’s old bedroom because it was one of the few internal doors we could lock. My fingers trembled as I turned the key and entered. The three kittens were in a line inside their box, all looking towards me with their ears pricked and their eyes wide and alert.

‘Hello, babies!’ I whispered, my heart pounding with relief. I went into the room and scooped them up, one by one, checking them over. They were all perfectly all right.