‘Photographs of who?’

‘He didn’t say anything except they were suspects and had I seen them one particular Saturday night.’

I pulled out the photograph I had knocked off Tonin’s mantelpiece.

‘He show you either of these two?’

He looked very briefly, but looked at me with tiredness. ‘This was many, many years ago. I see thousands of faces every day. I see millions in a year…’

It was useless. I would have to ask Franchini if he had ever got this far, whether he had ever got as far as the Tonin link.

I decided to take the train back to Rimini. I had a box of photocopies of Riccardo and walked up and down the train distributing them.

The carriages had corridors down one side with little rooms of six seats off to the other. My arm was soon tired from having to yank the doors open, leaning away from the handle to pull with my chest as well as my arm.

In each I handed out the photocopies. People either looked at young Riccardo’s face in silence or else started asking too many questions. There was no middle ground. I answered them all patiently, telling them what little I knew.

‘I remember reading about this. I can’t believe it was fourteen years ago, it feels like three.’

‘That so?’ I said and let another door suck itself shut.

I had walked up and down the train before it even pulled into Modena. I changed at Bologna, but the connecting train was late. I sat on the platform wondering what percentage of trains were late. When I finally got into Rimini it was already past midday. As soon as I stepped out of the station the air smelt of seaweed and salt. There were fat gulls swooping on to the pavements to take any spare crumbs that the pedestrians left in their wake.

I walked over to Via dei Caduti. The di Pietro woman clicked the gate open after a little protest about wanting to be left alone. I walked up the short path towards the front door of her block of flats. She was on the third floor, a door half-ajar at her back.

‘What is it now?’

‘I wanted to ask you a couple more questions. Has anyone ever tried to contact Elisabetta, someone claiming to be a relative?’

She shook her head.

‘No one? No calls or letters out of the blue…?’

‘You think Ricky has tried to contact her?’

‘No, not Ricky. I fear the only person he’s talking to now is his maker. I was thinking about someone from a different generation. Her paternal grandfather.’

‘Ricky’s father?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But he died in 1995.’

‘Massimo Tonin was Ricky’s father.’

She looked at me as if it were a wind-up. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Never sure about anything. But he didn’t deny it this morning.’

She stared blankly over my shoulder and considered the implications. I guessed that her first thought would be dismay that there might exist yet another man to destabilise her daughter. But when she spoke she seemed only piqued by the hypocrisy of the Salati woman. Her lips were pursed.

‘So all that time she was criticising the way we were living, she was lying to all and sundry. She must have known this might have something to do with Ricky’s disappearance, and yet she never…’ She looked into the distance and then stared at me. ‘You’re sure about this?’

I nodded.

‘Nothing surprises me any more,’ she said dreamily. ‘All the stability we construct around ourselves collapses sooner or later. I’ve had so much collapse that I don’t bother trying to construct anything any more.’

Except your hair, I thought to myself. ‘You said Tonin came round here looking for Ricky that week after he disappeared…’

She nodded.

‘What happened exactly? He came round to your caravan?’

‘Sure.’

‘And did he go inside?’

She shut her eyes. ‘I can’t possibly remember.’

‘Think about it. It’s important.’

She shook her head and looked at me. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t know.’ Witnesses were unreliable at the best of times, but fourteen years later they’re as good as useless.

‘Did you ever get the impression he was looking for anything other than Riccardo?’

She shook her head and frowned, not sure what I was implying.

‘Is Elisabetta in?’ I asked.

‘I’m not going to allow you to slip a hand grenade like this into her life. She’s unstable enough as it is right now. She’s barely recovered from what happened yesterday.’ She tried to stare at me with anger, but it was all burned out now. ‘I think she’s mourning her grandmother and her father and her childhood all at once, and this would only confuse her further. Let her sleep.’

The phone started ringing inside and she held up a finger and went in to answer it. I followed her into her flat and whilst she was still talking on the phone I started opening the doors. I found the girl in a small bedroom with the blinds down. She was propped up on pillows and was staring at the ceiling.

‘Elisabetta?’ I said quietly. ‘It’s Castagnetti. We spoke on the phone yesterday.’

She moved her eyes rather than her head to look at me.

‘Your mother seems to think I’m to blame for upsetting you yesterday.’

‘My mother’, she said with her eyes shut, ‘will always blame anyone except herself.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘She thought I had got overexcited by the thought of… you know, the thought that you were going to find my father.’

‘I told you, I don’t think he’s still alive.’

‘Yeah,’ she said like she was high and couldn’t care less, ‘I know.’

I felt sorry for her, but I didn’t want to be accused of building up her hopes. Ricky was dead, I felt sure.

‘I don’t think he’s alive. But I’ll try to find out what happened.’ It was my standard speech. It was what the bereaved normally wanted most. If they couldn’t have their loved one back, alive and well, they wanted to know, that was all. They yearned for what they most feared. They wanted, just once, to see the kill, because it couldn’t possibly be worse than what they had imagined.

‘You need some sleep. I’ll be back again one day when you’re better and we can talk about what’s come up.’

She just nodded and followed me out with her eyes.

As I was walking down the corridor it struck me that I couldn’t understand how a man could resist contacting his granddaughter. Surely he would want to write to her, arrange to see her, try to claim her as his own whatever the consequences. It didn’t seem natural to me. Tonin appeared to be a pretty cold-blooded customer, and it was true that he had kept his distance from his son all those years. But there didn’t seem any good reason not to reach out to a granddaughter, especially since his wife knew everything anyway. It didn’t make sense to me.

I was still in the narrow corridor when the di Pietro woman came back. ‘What are you doing in here?’ She took me by my collar and dragged me to the door. She pushed me towards the stairs and waved me away. ‘Leave her alone. Can’t you understand? I’m trying to look after her.’

I waved her goodbye with over-zealous politeness and walked down the steps.

I could understand her. Protecting a girl made more sense than ignoring her, that was for sure. If it was really the girl she was protecting. My mind started going paranoid. I began to wonder why she wouldn’t want me to talk to her daughter. It hardly seemed like little Elisabetta could be a threat to anyone. A toddler can’t keep a secret. That was Tonin’s speciality.

As soon as I walked into the hotel it felt wrong. Almost all the lights were off and there was no one at the front desk. I walked through to the bar, but it was empty.

‘Lo Bue?’ I asked to the empty room. I was just reaching under my arm for the rod when I was smacked across the shoulders by a metal pole. My cheek caught the corner of a glass table as I went down.

A couple of kicks were aimed at my stomach and head. I put my hands up to protect my face and I rolled over into a ball, but the kicks kept coming against my spine.