I slid my legs out of the bed, stood up and went to the window, easing the stiffness from my joints. The kittens gambolled to my feet, jumped on them, biting my toes. I unlatched the shutter, letting in a slice of morning light. It illuminated Anna’s portrait, propped against the wall. It was a lovely picture. I wondered why nobody had ever bothered to frame it and why such a beautiful object had been left hidden inside the wardrobe. Perhaps Anna didn’t like it. Perhaps she thought the portrait wasn’t a good likeness (it was) or that it didn’t flatter her (it did).

Or perhaps it was just that she couldn’t bear to look at herself, to remind herself of how happy she once was.

Joe and I returned to the tool hypermarket to buy new locks for the gates and doors. On our return, we met Gabriele and Irma Arnone halfway up the track between the villa and their cottage. Irma had one arm around her husband and was persuading him up the hill. The old man was disorientated.

Joe slowed the car and leaned out of the window. He spoke to Irma and she answered his questions curtly. They had a brief conversation and then Joe drove on. He told me Gabriele had walked down to the villa on his own while Irma was inside the cottage bottling tomatoes. Apparently he was drawn to it like a magnet; she was forever having to run down the hill to fetch him back.

Joe and I exchanged glances.

‘You don’t think it’s him, do you?’ I asked, as we drew away from the old couple.

‘It can’t be, he’s not well enough.’

Still, something Joe had said to me earlier, something about the things that had happened to us, small things that messed with our minds being the way ‘they’ operated, made me think the mafia might still, in some way, be behind the campaign being waged against us.

After the crow and the puppet, I thought it would take a long while for me to feel okay about being in the villa again, but the house had a way of making me calm, and the gardens and the sea beyond worked their therapeutic magic. Daniel was more present and, soon enough, Joe and I fell back into our routine. I showed Joe the graveyard; he knew about the babies but had forgotten they were buried in the villa grounds, and he agreed we should restore the area, and the path to it, although we’d keep its surrounds untended for the benefit of the wildlife.

The woman police officer dropped by to say they’d been tipped off about a Reni painting being touted for sale on the black market in America. Their US colleagues were going to investigate. There was a slim chance it might be our Madonna, but we were not to hold our breaths.