Joe pointed to the far headland, no more than a hundred yards away as the crow flies. I could see the wall that surrounded our villa, with trees behind it, thickly bunched together, the black tips of the cypresses. I couldn’t see much of the building, only one edge of the roof, but the location from this viewpoint was like something from a film; the wall, the trees, the sea almost enclosing it.

‘It looks mysterious,’ I whispered.

‘Mysterious?’

‘Don’t you think it does?’

‘The locals think it’s haunted,’ said Joe.

‘Really?’

‘The waiter told me this morning. He said, if you stand here, at night, sometimes you can see lights inside the walls.’

I laughed uneasily.

‘People always make up stories about abandoned buildings,’ I said. It was an attempt to disguise my disquiet about what Joe had just said and at the same time convince myself that my sense of the villa being occupied was pure imagination.

‘He said he and a group of friends were fishing close to the villa one night and they saw a woman drifting through the gardens.’

‘Drifting?’ I struggled to keep my voice steady.

‘They were convinced it was a ghost. They said she almost looked human, but when she raised her head, she had no face.’

The woman standing beside Anna in the picture on the memorial wall didn’t have a face either.

I looked at Joe from beneath the rim of my hat. He was staring at the villa. I thought he might have been teasing, but he wasn’t smiling.

Before Daniel’s death, neither Joe nor I believed in life after death or any other concept that Joe liked to term ‘superstitious nonsense.’ We weren’t unsympathetic, but used to feel something akin to pity towards those who did. Back then, of course, neither of us had experienced the shock and the ensuing black hole of grief that came with losing the person you loved most, the one you were supposed to protect, the one who gave meaning to your own life. After Joe and I separated, although I felt guilty about it and sometimes faintly ridiculous, I’d found myself drawn towards tarot cards and mediums, standing stones and old churchyards, anything that might bring me closer to Daniel. He had to be somewhere, I reasoned, at least his spirit did. A soul so vital, so loving and bright and energetic couldn’t just disappear. If I looked hard enough, for long enough, I would find him. I was convinced of it.

‘Did your grandparents ever mention anything about the villa being haunted?’ I asked.

‘No. But…’

‘What?’

‘When they’d had a drink or two, they used to talk to their ancestors as if they were still there. They said the DeLucas never really left the villa, even the ones who moved away.’

‘Even the ones who died?’

He nodded.