We bumped around a hairpin bend and headed steeply downhill. The concrete track had disintegrated in places and was full of potholes. The car lurched as the wheels struggled with the uneven terrain. I braced myself against the dashboard, tried to stop my body bumping against Joe’s. I could see the headline: Estranged couple drown after cliff plunge. Inheritance trip ends in horror. Was aged Mafioso to blame for British couple’s death?

‘We could leave the car here and walk down,’ I suggested.

‘We’re nearly there.’

And then suddenly the view of a perfect concave bay opened out before us. In the far distance, the sea and sky merged in a shimmer. Closer in, the sunlight caught the tips of small, innocuous waves whose only purpose, it seemed, was to add some sparkle to the perfectly blue water that reflected the perfectly blue sky. Fishing boats were silhouetted on the waves, disappearing into the glimmer and then reappearing. I could see a swathe of beach and, beyond that, lines of villas built above the beach road and amongst the trees that covered the hill.

We carried on downwards, still bumping but at a shallower angle, the track eventually flattening out into an area lined with stumpy bollards.

Joe turned off the engine and pulled on the handbrake. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘We’re here.’

9

We climbed out of the car and stood beside the ticking engine, looking up at an old stone wall eight feet high and topped with metal spikes. In its centre, two enormous wrought-iron gates were chained shut. My eye followed the line of the wall, high and solid, built to keep people out – or to keep them in. Plants tumbled over as if trying to escape the garden inside: bougainvillea competed with wild rose; thousands of flowers running wild. Drainage gargoyles had been built into the wall at intervals; plants crept between the lips of their gurning mouths and ivy clung to the stone. The scent was intoxicating; the buzzing of insects amongst the blooms deafening.

The shadows were lengthening. The sun was blazing towards the horizon, and the promise of evening hung around us. I breathed in air perfumed by jasmine, pine, resin and ozone.

‘I didn’t realise…’ I began, but I tailed off, because I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know about the villa and what it was like. The year we lost Daniel, the year we were supposed to come here, I’d asked lots of questions about the villa and Anna had shown me photographs, even some old cine-film. In the wake of everything that happened after, I’d let those memories fade but being here now for the first time, I had a sense of having been here before. It was as if I knew the villa; as if it had been waiting for me to come.