Joe and I found Stanley’s body on the compost heap; we recognised him by the missing tail-feathers. Mr Cadogan told us he’d found the bird dead in the shed, but he was lying. Patrick Cadogan was a murderer; Joe knew it and so did I. When Anna saw the starling limp in Joe’s hands, I looked into her eyes and saw that she knew it too. That was one of the reasons Joe changed his surname from Cadogan to DeLuca as soon as he was old enough to legally do so. Patrick Cadogan was a cold, cruel man and Joe wanted nothing more to do with him.

To reach Ragusa city, we had to drive through a tunnel hewn through the mountain. After that, we crossed a ravine on an elevated section of road. The drop on either side terrified me, but Joe was oblivious to my discomfort. He had no idea about the dark places to which my imagination had a propensity to turn, but I read the headlines, clear as anything: Bridge failure – multiple deaths, rogue concrete blamed.

We crossed the ravine without anything terrible happening, travelled a winding road for a while and then at last the old city of Ragusa came into view, clinging to the side of a mountain, materialising like a dream. It was built so high that its apex was wreathed in cloud. It was a fairy tale city; growing out of the landscape like something organic and ancient, one of its faces lit by the sun, the opposite side in shadow. I stared at it, awestruck, trying to imprint the memory in my mind because I’d never seen a city like it.

‘Did you know it was like this?’ I asked Joe. ‘Did you know it was this beautiful?’

‘I’ve been here hundreds of times,’ he replied coldly.

Of course he had. No doubt this view was commonplace to him. I wished I’d kept my enthusiasm to myself.

We found a shady layby at the foot of the city where we could leave the car, before getting out, stretching and staring upwards. Anna would have known I would love this view, she would have known the effect it would have on me, but, even in death, I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. If she had imagined that bringing Joe and me here together would be the prompt we needed to start dismantling the wall we’d built between us, then she’d been wrong. Joe clearly had no interest in making friends with me and the feeling was entirely, one hundred per cent mutual.