‘Perhaps she was hit by a car,’ Joe said, but I could tell that he didn’t believe it.

‘Cars don’t come down here.’

‘Maybe she was hit on the coast road and made her way back.’ He examined the cat by the light of his phone. ‘She’s got kittens.’

‘What?’

‘Look, she’s been lactating. There must be kittens somewhere.’

‘Where? Where are the kittens?’

‘They’ll be too small to have been with her. We’ll find them. In the morning.’

‘That might be too late!’

‘Edie, we can’t do anything about them now.’

The frustration that had been building all evening spilled over. ‘First Francesco, now the kittens! It’s always the same with you, Joe, it’s “not now”, it’s “not the right time” it’s “we wouldn’t work”! You always take a step back and hope whatever problem it is will sort itself out and…’

‘What do you want to do about the kittens then, Edie?’ Joe’s voice was still low, almost a hiss. ‘They’ll be hidden, who knows where. They might be in the gardens or they might be somewhere on the headland, they might be up at the Arnones’ cottage. Where do we start to look in the dark? Huh?’

I glared at him over the body of the cat. I pushed my hair off my face. My skin felt cold and clammy. I heard a noise behind me, close to the villa wall, and I snapped my head round towards it, but nobody was there, or at least nobody I could see. I wanted to get away from this exposed space, into the villa, somewhere where we could lock a door behind us.

I looked back to the poor cat. ‘It looks like she was trying to make her way back into the gardens,’ I said. ‘That means the kittens are probably somewhere close to the villa.’

‘Unless someone put her here.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t see any paw-prints in the dust.’

He targeted the phone’s light at the area around the cat. He was right. There was no sign of the cat walking, or dragging herself, to the spot where we’d found her.

‘Why would anyone leave the cat’s body outside our gates?’ I asked in a whisper. My skin was crawling, sensing those invisible eyes watching us, that hostile gaze.

‘Maybe someone was doing us a kindness,’ Joe replied in the same whisper. ‘Perhaps they found the cat on the beach and assumed she came from here and brought her back.’

I hoped that was true but again I had the sense that Joe didn’t believe what he said.

‘Anyway, we can’t leave her out here,’ Joe said, ‘we need to bury her.’

‘Now?’

He nodded.

I unlocked the gates while he picked up the cat and wrapped her body carefully in a towel that had been in the back of the car.