Four days passed before Joe and I were on our own again. The villa hadn’t looked as good as it did then since the day we arrived in Sicily; the interior no longer smelled of smoke but of fresh paint, soap powder and wood polish. The windowpanes were clean, the floors shone, cobwebs, dust and ash had been cleared from the coving and pelmets, even the shutters had been painted. It had been an exhausting and exhilarating few days and so much had been achieved. The clean-up and repair project wasn’t finished by a long stretch, but our friends promised to return to complete jobs and to bring us replacements for items that had been irreparably damaged. They promised to stand by us. They told us we weren’t alone.

In the afternoon of the fifth day since the fire, Joe went for a swim and I went up to Anna’s bedroom with the diary I’d saved from the flames. I propped her portrait on the bed beside me so she could sit with me while I pried into her past. I wanted to find out the truth about her relationship with the young Gabriele Arnone.

Now I knew that he was the young man in the photographs, a whole new range of scenarios was opening up; possible reasons why Anna might have decided to leave Sicily, reasons why she might have married Patrick Cadogan. Maybe she hadn’t been rejected or betrayed by her young lover, as I’d imagined. Maybe she’d found out that he was a killer and had fled from him, in fear of her life. That would explain why she never left the villa when she came to visit in her adult years – to avoid any possibility of running into Gabriele Arnone; because she was so afraid of him or because he still had some kind of hold over her. It must have been horrendous for her, him living just up the hill where he could spy on her.

Or maybe it wasn’t Anna’s choice to leave Gabriele. Maybe her parents had realised what was going on between the two of them, and they’d forced them apart. Maybe they’d sent Anna to live in England to get her well away from Gabriele. Both versions made sense to me.

I retrieved Anna’s old vodka bottle from the wardrobe, unscrewed the lid and took a drink. It tasted fine and I enjoyed the burn in my throat.

‘Here we go, Anna,’ I said quietly.

I opened the diary and skimmed through entries that grumbled about boarding school food and little intrigues between Anna and her classmates until I came to this:

It’s happening. We’re going to do it. G sent me a book, with the places marked. It’s all planned. We’re going to go somewhere where we’ll never be found, where we can be together, where we can be free.