We went onto the beach. A thin but steady stream of fans turned up to take photographs of one another standing in front of the balcony at the back of Montalbano’s house.

We spread our towels on a rocky patch of ground. I pulled my dress over my head, folded it into my bag and sat on the towel. The shadows should have been lengthening, but the sky was peculiar that evening. Everything was a heat haze. Everything was close and sticky, choking.

Joe took off his shirt and squatted on his heels behind me. He lifted the hair from my neck and kissed the top of my spine.

‘You’ve got a tattoo,’ he said, when he found the little bird-in-flight just beneath my hairline.

‘Yes.’

‘Is it for Daniel?’

‘Yes.’

‘I might get one the same.’

‘That’d be nice,’ I said. I felt terribly sad all of a sudden. It was being here without Daniel. I was missing him. I had a sudden craving to be back in the villa, where I felt closest to him.

Joe said he wanted to swim.

‘You shouldn’t,’ I said, ‘not after all you’ve eaten.’

‘That’s an old wives’ tale.’

‘Don’t expect me to rescue you if you pretend to drown.’

Joe laughed. He ran into the sea, diving forward as soon as the water was deep enough and disappearing, emerging seconds later, deep in the bay.

I stayed on the beach and watched the light catching the water displaced by his arms. I’d only been half joking about the drowning; I was actually afraid that he might run into trouble, or get cramp and disappear under the surface of the sea, and that if I didn’t watch him, I might not notice he was gone and I might lose him again, but this time forever.

The sun slid down from a sky so hot it was white-grey, and the heat haze so intense it was difficult to differentiate between the sea and the sky. It was as if the sky had melted as the sea steamed in the heat and now they were melded into each other, obliterating the horizon.

I could still smell the marshland in the crook of my arms. Death and putrefaction was stuck to the tiny, pale hairs. I rubbed sand onto my arm to scrape away the smell.