Joe’s friends, my friends now, came to the villa. They brought us food and drink and did little jobs around the place while they were there. Children came; old people. Everyone had their own skills. I loved to hear the laughter, the footsteps on the stairs, music. It was wonderful to know the villa was being brought back to life.

Now the source of the malevolence we’d experienced in the villa had been removed, it was a happier, more relaxed place. I was conscious of the DeLuca ghosts but I never resented them; they seemed to me like friends. I never spoke again of what happened to me on the marshland or how I was saved but I liked to hope that Anna’s spirit was around somewhere, taking care of the lost children, making sure that Daniel was never alone.

One last thing. I did some research into Patrick Cadogan’s background and discovered he had been Head Psychiatrist at the Grey House Clinic in Holland Heath in London at the same time as Anna was with her father in Rome. For some years, the clinic specialised in the care of young patients with ‘emotional and personality disorders’. I found a prospectus from that era reproduced online and was disgusted that people who called themselves medical professionals could inflict such crude and cruel ‘treatments’ on young men and women who ‘suffered from hysterical outbursts, depression, eating disorders and/or homosexual tendencies’. The clinic assured the wealthy parents of such young people that, with the correct therapies, all of these ‘afflictions’ could be corrected. The clinic had closed some years earlier and now a new business had taken over the premises. It carried out cosmetic surgery procedures.

I couldn’t be 100 per cent certain that Anna had met Patrick at the clinic, that he was the psychiatrist employed to look after her, or that he abused his position to take advantage of her, but it seemed likely. So did the possibility that she, in her vulnerable state, having been told, no doubt, that Gina had left for Australia without her, was coerced into marrying Patrick. I wondered if Patrick treated Anna so badly because he could not forgive her for never loving him the way she had loved Gina. Did she inadvertently make him feel so insignificant that the only way he could make himself feel big again was to humiliate her?

Whatever had happened, it must have been a terrible time for Anna. It filled me with sorrow to think that Anna had spent her whole life believing that Gina had gone away to Australia without her. God knows what lies she was told by her parents, by Matilde. There was nothing to suggest that Anna’s parents knew what had become of Gina, but they must have been relieved she had disappeared from their lives.