Francesco was keen to take his mother for a drive in the Alfa Romeo, but Valentina was too tired to contemplate any such outing.

‘You go,’ she said to Francesco, ‘you and Joe. I’ll stay here with Edie while you’re gone.’

I was longing to get back to Anna’s diary and the photograph albums, but I couldn’t abandon Valentina, so the two of us found a shady spot in the garden where we could sit well away from the graveyard. I didn’t want any DeLuca bad luck rubbing off on Valentina or her baby.

Valentina hooked her bag over the branch of a tree beside us.

‘Don’t let me forget it,’ she said. ‘My phone and my birthing plan are in there.’

‘I won’t.’

We talked of inconsequential things at first and then, somehow – probably because she was so much on my mind – the conversation moved back to Anna. Valentina was an easy person to talk to and I found myself baring my soul about the way I’d treated Anna after Daniel’s death. I told Valentina how I’d blamed her for everything; how I’d hated her.

Valentina was sympathetic. ‘Wasn’t she supposed to be looking after Daniel when he went missing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it’s no wonder you were so angry with her.’ She looked at me carefully. ‘What happened? Can you talk about it?’

I wasn’t sure if I could, but once I started, it wasn’t so difficult.

‘There’s not much to tell. Daniel was almost six. He was playing in the back garden of Anna’s house in London. She went inside to fetch herself a drink and he slipped out of the gate.’

‘Oh.’

‘We didn’t know he could open the gate by himself. There was a complicated latch and… well, he must have watched us and figured it out. He knew he wasn’t supposed to go out of the garden, but there was a building site just round the corner and he couldn’t resist the diggers.’

‘Francesco was the same,’ said Valentina. ‘Lorries, cranes, they were like a drug to him.’

‘It was raining,’ I said. ‘Joe and I had gone into town. When we got back to Anna’s house, it was empty. She’d already called the police.’

I’d never talked about this before, about the awful, mundane details of the day Daniel died, although I’d often ranted about Anna’s alcoholism or her carelessness. It was odd to speak of the events in a normal tone of voice, to report them objectively rather than through a mirror of hatred.

‘You must have been so frightened,’ said Valentina.