Plot reminder: After her conversation with Francesco Brancaleone, Mary believed that the remains were those of her father's best wartime friend, Ettore Lo Bianco. It was a theory soon however shot out of the water when, back in Punto San Giacomo, a Google search of the name reveals that Lo Bianco is still alive. A former art restorer, he lives in the northern Italian city of Verona. The mystery thickens further when, over the phone, Lo Bianco refuses to be engaged in conversation of his wartime experiences and abruptly hangs up.

~~~~~

Lucio and I would indeed dine out together that night - a pleasant seafood place on the promenade - but it was far from the relaxed smalltalky goodbye I had envisaged when suggesting the idea. Instead, our conversation was a frowned, perplexed affair, our words as we munched on our marinated octopus and deep-fried squid delivered in the hushed urgency of plotting conspirators. Neither of us, I don't believe, were fully able to grasp the implications of Lo Bianco's refusal to broach the subject of his wartime experiences - a refusal rendered ever blunter by the second quickly hung up call a minute after the first - but at the same time it was clear that something wasn't quite right, that lurking beneath the mystery of the unearthed remains of camp 106a was something even darker and more sinister than could have originally been hypothesised. Some elusive slithering beast of thing.

"We have no other choice," concluded Lucio, refilling my wine glass. "We have to go up there to Verona, confront him face to face."

Thus the story continued. Not only at an investigative level but also our story, Lucio's and mine. His choice of pronoun had been without premeditation, as natural as his smile. 'We' not 'you'. A grammatical confirmation of whatever manner of strange, thrown-together union we'd become.

*

The following morning, Friday, was a frenetic bustle of phone calls, hastily packed cases, the filling up of petrol tanks. After checking out of my B & B, I got in the hire car and - with my right foot a little heavier on the accelerator than I felt entirely comfortable with - followed Lucio to Brindisi airport. Once the vehicle had been returned to Avis, I then lowered myself onto the passenger seat of his Panda. Even by Lucio's somewhat optimistic estimates, we faced a nine-hour drive north. A pair of single rooms had been booked in a hotel a short stroll from Verona's central square, Piazza Bra. Two nights, which was one more than was entirely necessary perhaps, but it would have been cruel - at least this was what I told myself - to have expected Lucio to make such a long and solitary return journey the very next day. I'd meanwhile changed my original travel bookings and was now scheduled to board a Stanstead-bound flight from Verona airport on Sunday morning. As for Dante, he would be well-looked after by one of Lucio's cousins and her family. It was strange, but I had a feeling I was actually going to miss his tongue-flapping canine exuberence.

We could have caught an internal flight perhaps, if not from Brindisi then a little further up the coast in Bari, but I think both of us were enjoying the bizarre road movie our acquaintanceship had become. There's something about travelling long distances overland, something in the slow-shift changes of the landscape, the tilting angle of light, which lends substance to all those passing miles. Whilst a flight is little more than a departure point and a destination with an iffy rom-com film and mini bottle of Chianti sandwiched inbetween, an overland haul is on some level a flag-planting expedition, a gently rolling quixotic escapade.

Before setting off that morning, Lucio had dumped a pile of CDs onto the backseat, the journey thus soundtracked by an eclectic mix of jazz, folk, classical and blues. His literary tastes, my gentle probings would reveal, were equally as varied: Manzoni, of course, but also Steinbeck, Swift, DeLillo, Camillieri. He explained to me the differences between the north and south of his country - those socio-economic of nature, cultural, culinary, the different types of wines. This latter, yes - most especially he talked about wines, embarked on a long discourse about the innate superiority of southern grapes over northern ones, how in his opinion a good wine should be strong, corpulent, fruity; about how you should be able to taste those long unbroken months of Mediterranean sun on your tongue. After books and dogs, wine was, it appeared, his greatest passion in life.

It was at the most ardent, hand-gesturing point of his speech that he reigned himself in, smiled apologetically across at me.

"Boring you Mary, aren't I?"

But he wasn't, not at all. The tone of his voice was as rich and seasoned as some decades-old vintage, those periodic poetic flourishes with which he imbued his words so lilting and musical, that I could have quite happily listened to him reciting the phonebook. At least for a little while perhaps.

He asked me things too of course. Like why we English were such reluctant Europeans? And how we could still allow ourselves to be subjects to an unelected head of state? Of course, I was likewise required to reel off my list of favourite books and authors. Was it so very wrong of me, I wondered, that alongside genuine preferences I also feigned a deep appreciation of writers as stylistically and chronologically diverse as Chaucer, Byron, Harper Lee and Ian McEwan? Don't all of us play the same game? At first, when everything is still to be discovered - still to be decided, acted upon - don't we press our thumbs once more into our own clay, give ourselves a slight touch up, reshape the minutiae? Pretending to be in some way hipper or more erudite than we really are, isn't it the same as covering a blemish with foundation powder or running a liner pencil around one's eyes to highlight their shape and colour? When everything is still to be won or lost, isn't human nature the same as a peacock's? Don't we strut and preen? Show our feathers?

Our conversation was as rolling and unbound as the passing countryside. The rain-starved wildness of Puglia morphed into the billowing contours of Molise, this in turn into the vast heady drama of Abruzzo - the sparkling blue of the Adriatic a constant to our right, the rough-hewn peaks of the Gran Sasso mountain range thrusting skywards to our left. On then to the steep green hillsides of the Marche region, the bright shimmering sprawls of sunflower fields. Around Rimini, the motorway turned inland, the final  jags of the Appenines giving way to the wide swathe of the northern plain just before Bologna. From there, we took a right turn onto another motorway, this directed straight and unflinching towards the distant violet swell of the Alps.

"Mantua," murmured Lucio, nodding towards a passing motorway exit sign.

Some half-remembered detail from English Lit A'Level pinged in my brain. "Wasn't that where Romeo was banished after he killed...er... Killed...?" But the accompanying name, that of Juliet's cousin, refused to step from the cerebral shade.

"Tybalt," Lucio nodded. "Yes, this is the place. One of Italy's many hidden gems. Birthplace of Virgil." He stared grimly at the road ahead, that jagged line of approaching mountains. "It was also my wife's hometown."

My heart skipped a beat. Finally, he was going to tell me about his wife.

Or was he, I wondered? The subsequent silence seemed to stretch out as interminably as that stripe of tarmac we'd spent the last nine hours persuing. Five seconds. Ten.  I needed to know. Whatever his story was, its telling was now due.

I could feel my facial muscles stir, my lips open. A nascent question, its wording still unclear. Something candid, without deliberation.

But in that same precise moment he began to speak.

"It's strange you know. Mantua is about as far from the sea as it's possible to be in Italy, but she was always a much better swimmer than I."

He took a deep breath, similar to the one I myself had taken the day before. That slow laboured exhale of someone about to tell their tale, a chore mountainous in its complexity and heartbreak.

*

Her name was Rossella Ferri, daughter of Michele - a former resident of Punto San Giacomo who like many other young men in the immediate post-war period had become sufficiently disillusioned with employment opportunities in the south to search his fortune in the north, eventually winding up in a ceramics factory in Mantua. Within two years, he'd married a workmate's sister; within three more, was a father of two. Come summer leave each year, the family Fiat would be loaded with the attendent mountain of baggage to groan and chug its way all the way down the same motorway Lucio and I had just groaned and chugged all the way up. Rossella's grandparents, whose flat was thus invaded for the duration of the two weeks, had lived in the same narrow sidestreet as Lucio's own. The pair had first come face to face when Lucio was five and Rossella barely three months.

Michele had qualified as a lifeguard when he was a teenager; as such, he'd been determined that Rossella and her brother make friends with sea straightaway, their very first summers on Earth. Amongst Lucio's earliest memories were those of his future father-in-law dipping the pair up to their necks, laying them onto the Adriatic's rippled, sun-twinkling surface, just the palm of his hand keeping them afloat like a tree branch a sleeping bird. It was little surprise that at five years old, exactly half Lucio's own age, Rossella could swim further and faster than he. By twelve years old, whenever the mood took her and the quick-shifting rhythms of the sea allowed, she could often be spotted in the distance, a steady swirl of arms and gracefully shimmering legs churning her way towards the headland, all the way back again.

Though given the proximity of their respective grandparents the pair had always considered themselves friends, it was natural that their relationship didn't become close until the age difference between them began to relatively flatten itself out. 1967, to be precise, she about to attend the final year of high school, he poised to start a Literature degree at Bari University after having spent four years at a local canning factory to fund his studies. Though not yet blossomed into full blown romance, their common love of books and learning had helped forge enough of a bond that they began to write regularly to each other. It was the following summer - somewhat appropriately, the Summer of Love - that their relationship became physical of nature, their first kiss shared in the glow of a beach bonfire to the musical accompaniment of a Domenico Modugno song at that moment being strummed by a mutual friend. With Rossella enrolled to start a Classics degree in Modena the following September, and thus the seven or eight hours of travel which separated them, their romance seemed doomed. By maintaining their promise to make the effort see each other at least once a month, their relationship would however stand the test of time, the long summer breaks from their studies periods of shared hazy bliss, rucksacks and tent bags strapped to backs. They graduated the same late-spring; within eighteen months, Lucio would be waiting nervously for her at the end of the aisle.

There had never really been any discussion about where they would make their marital home, he said.  The choice had seemed obvious to both: Punto San Giacomo. He was by now assistant to the town's head librarian; Rossella would soon take-up a part-time position teaching latin at a nearby lyceum, her income supplemented by private tutoring. No matter the season, no matter all but the ugliest extremes of weather, their favourite weekend activity was to take long strolls along the beach. It was on one such walk, a blustery Sunday in February, that Rossella had all of sudden halted her stride and, playfully throwing her arms around his neck, whispered into his ear the news of her pregnancy.

"For a man to be told he will be a father is like a newborn bird being told that soon it will fly. I had never been happier. Never so sure that I had made the right decisions in life."

It was three months later that it happened, he went on sombrely, one of those serene May afternoons which deceive and beguile, make a person believe the colder seasons just passed were some less than pleasant dream from which the world has now awoken. The previous days had been windblown, however, the sea a rolling angry broil. The sand had clumped into invisible skulking banks just beneath the surface, the breaks in between causing the water to suck itself into crazed, fast-flowing  rivulets back towards the depths.

Rip tides.

"We were taking one of our usual walks when all of a sudden we heard cries just ahead. Cries of panic, the sort that tear your heart from your chest. Ahead of us, a woman was up to her waist in the water.  Splashing, struggling, screaming. Non so nuotare! Non so nuotare! I can't swim! I can't swim! It was then that we noticed it - the little head swooshing quickly out to sea. The woman's child had been taken by one of the tides."

"Well, I could see Rossella react immediately, run out into the waves. I tried to grab her arm, pull her back. 'I'll go,' I yelled at her. 'There's the baby to think about.' But she just shrugged me aside. 'You're not fast enough Lucio,' she called back. 'I'm the stronger swimmer.' And she was gone, diving full stretch into the water."

For the duration of the story Lucio's gaze had locked itself  on those slowly approaching mountains, now almost upon us. Finally it shifted sideways, momentarily framed my face.

His voice was a frayed, heartbreaking thread.

"They were the last words we would ever speak to each other."

As his eyes turned back ahead, right hand shifted gearstick, the aged vehicle stuttering as it slowed onto the motorway exit road.

"Both she and the child," he whispered. "Our own child there in her womb. The sea, it took all three."

I remembered in the pizzeria two nights earlier, the way I'd noted the intensity of his seaward stare. Now I knew the sad truth. He'd spent the last thirty years waiting for those waves to offer her up once more.

Human language just seems so limited sometimes. So hopelessly inadequate, like trying to open a tin can of one's emotions with a spoon. There were no words, nothing that could come even close to what I wanted to express, so I didn't even try.

Instead, I just brushed my hand to his there on the knob of the gearstick, with a gentle squeeze communicated my solidarity and sympathy. My deepest respect and affection.

The whole string-swirling symphony of emotions I felt for the man.

~~~~~