‘It sounds like an amazing opportunity,’ Zia returned with automatic enthusiasm, stifling annoyance that she now couldn’t return to Italy until Tuesday. They chatted for a while then Zia was finally able to search out a ready meal from her freezer and put it in the oven. While she waited for it to cook, she decided to call Lucia to ask if she was any better.

It was Durante who picked up Lucia’s phone. ‘She’s sleeping,’ he said in a worried whisper. ‘This pain, it wakes her many times in the night.’

‘Has she seen a doctor?’ Zia asked.

‘She says it is something bad she ate and this is why she shivers and feels sick,’ he reported, sounding aggrieved. ‘She does not like doctors.’

He didn’t have much more to say apart from to call Lucia stubborn so Zia rang off, wandered out of the kitchen and picked up a pile of mail shoved aside on the hall floor, apparently ignored by Ursula and Stephan as they acted out their stranger-sex fantasy. For Ursula’s sake she was glad they were enjoying a full relationship again. Making use of her actual bed was a bit yuck but she supposed the spare, which had been Ursula’s for a few months, was only a single. It was still a gross abuse of her hospitality, though, she thought as she sorted through junk mail and brochures, which made it even more irritating that Stephan must have let Brendon know she was in town literally the moment her back was turned.

The only good thing about the evening proved to be Piero calling her from his upper terrace where he said he was lying looking at ‘Italian stars’.

She wasn’t sure if what happened next qualified as phone sex but it certainly stopped her thinking about anything else. Even the secrets that might be revealed the following day.

The morning was a different matter. Without the distraction of Piero, Zia woke at 5 a.m. and lay awake, obsessively running scenarios as to how Vicky’s old friend Harry would react to her uninvited visit. She dredged up memories of how he and Vicky had interacted on his long-ago visits and wondered how Tori fitted into it. That freckly English rose frozen in Lucia’s photographs must have been a flesh-and-blood person to him; he’d have known her voice and the way she’d moved and laughed and cried. As far as she knew, Harry was the only person alive who’d properly known the two Victoria Chalmers – Vicky and Tori. She prayed he hadn’t lost his memory.

Ursula picked her up at 10 a.m. A sea breeze chasing puffy white clouds around a china blue sky, they drove slowly along the teeming seafront, turning right in Hove and left onto Old Shoreham Road, passing the cemetery and homes crowding every street.