Caution entered Zia’s brown eyes. She said to Piero, ‘Lucia said you’ve been told that because she and Durante need to use Il Rifugio’s drive to reach their place, whoever owns the land can stop them gaining access.’

Piero nodded. He wasn’t sure how deeply Lucia had gone into things with Zia but he wasn’t sure he liked it. Salvatore and Emiliano could appear in a bad light. From the outside, it might be hard to see how family members could desire completely different things yet still love each other.

Zia frowned. Rather than making her look older, as it had Lucia, it emphasised her thoughtful intelligence. ‘I think the reverse is true. I worked for a company dealing with leaseback and often the real estate concerned was in Italy or Spain.’

Durante’s brows lowered. ‘What’s “leaseback”?’ He stumbled over the word.

Zia shifted her gaze to him. ‘My company would buy, say, an Italian supermarket – but just the property, the real estate. The supermarket would then have the proceeds of the sale to inject into their business while continuing to trade from the premises, for which they paid us rent.’

‘Providing the return on your company’s investment,’ Piero clarified.

She nodded. ‘I worked on a purchase that was complicated by an easement of passage issue – diritto di passaggio – and, putting it simply: Italian law allows people to get on and off their property.’ As Durante was still frowning, she repeated it in Italian, making a pretty good job of it too. When she’d termed herself ‘not fluent’ it had been verging on false modesty.

Durante drained his beer and slapped the glass on the table. ‘Then why did the lawyers tell us whoever owns Piero’s land can make ours worthless?’

‘Because it’s what they want us to believe!’ Lucia cried, her lips trembling. She gripped the edge of the table as if ready to hurl it at someone. ‘We will take them to court and fight.’

Noticing increasing unease shadowing Zia’s face, Piero assumed the voice of reason. ‘Let’s not get carried away. Zia makes sense but we’ve been given the complete opposite information – though we don’t have much experience with the law firm in question.’ For Zia’s benefit he added, ‘It was thought our local firm wouldn’t have the expertise to handle such a complex situation so someone recommended these guys to my father.’ Someone called Graziella, who said the same lawyers had acted for her and her ex-husband when they sold their hotels to a bigger chain. A spectre of uneasiness loomed in his mind.

Zia’s eyebrows still held a thoughtful quirk. ‘How long ago did you buy your land?’

He calculated. ‘I was twenty-two, so sixteen years. Lucia and Durante a little earlier.’

‘So, what do the ownership papers say about the access?’ Her gaze was still on Piero.