Plot reminder: After an online search, Mary and Lucio have traced one of the fellow prisoners mentioned in Vincenzo D'Ambra's wartime letters home - a wine producer called Francesco Brancaleone from the region of Campagna around Naples.

~~~~~

And thus fifteen minutes later I found myself bouncing along in the passenger seat of Lucio's ancient Fiat Panda, an excited Dante fidgeting around behind us, trying his best to clamber over handbrake and gearstick and join us in the front. As for Lucio's promise that we'd be there by four o'clock - a four-hour drive thus reduced to a little over three - he seemed to be doing his best to make good on it. For my own part, I fought against my natural inclination for order and measure. Just took a deep breath and tried to - what was that expression? - go with the flow. Wasn't I fifty per cent of this, after all? Half of a reckless, exuberant southern Italian? Four of those eight pints of blood squirming along my veins, weren't they tied to this dry, rock-strewn landscape we were rattling through? I was a one-woman testament to the dominance of nuture over nature, that sociological maxim which states that a prince brought up amongst wolves will be far more wolf than prince. My biological grandfathers had been a Liverpool docker and a Puglian fisherman, and yet I, by way of a stuffy middle class upbringing, had become a stuffy middle class woman. Aloof, bound only to my work. But there jerking and lurching along in Lucio's rusty tin can of a car, Dante licking at the back of my ear, I came to realise that maybe the war had not yet been lost after all. For sixty-three years my true self had been subdued, pushed to the cowering shadows, but for all this she was still alive, not quite beaten into subsmission. I could feel her beginning to stir, could almost hear the crack of her limbs as she stretched herself awake.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked.

Lucio waited until he'd navigated another screeching white-knuckle ride of a roundabout before casting me a sideways glance.

"Doing what Mary?"

I swept out a hand, a gesture both vague and yet all-encompassing at the same time. "This. Helping me out."

For me it was a mystery as inexplicable as the workings of a telephone, how it was possible to hear someone's voice on the other side of town, the other side of the world.

From the toss of his shoulders, it seemed it might equally have been as much of a mystery to him too.

"Perhaps I feel I need to have an adventure. The Lord knows it's been a long time since the last one."

I found myself wondering what he meant by adventure exactly? The specific youthful folly of jumping in the car and embarking on a six- or seven-hour round journey without any guarantee of further leads being unearthed? The more general context of this strange little amateur investigation I'd been conducting? Or something else entirely? Something amorphous, as yet to be defined. A faint distant sparkle amidst our mutual darkness.

He nodded sombrely to himself. "My good friends always say I live my life through books. Feel things only as an echo." There was another sideways glance across at me. "So I'm trying to live my own story. Feel the full force of things."

I found myself wondering once more about his wife. About whether I should just come out and ask him about her. Maybe that was what was expected of me. As computers, how to discuss personal matters was something I'd never really got the hang of. There wasn't even an instruction manual one could refer to, a technician to call.

He'd turned his eyes back to the road ahead, his smile discernable from that spray of creviced ridges at the corner of his eye.

"And Dante, I think he likes having adventures too."

Oh yes, I was in absolutely no doubt about this. Yet again, I could feel that moist slimy tongue behind my ear, was forced to push snout away with my palm.

He would tell me when he was ready, I concluded as I rooted around shoulder bag for a packet of handwipes. His marriage. His life story. Whatever dark secrets a former head librarian might have. His whole self, it would at some undefinable point in time be recounted to me.

In the meantime, might it not be an idea were I the one to start first? It was funny, but the idea had never occured to me before.

The beginning, I thought to myself. For clarity's sake, I would need to start at the very beginning.

I took a deep breath, listened like a stranger as the words began to flood from my mouth...

*

We stopped at a service station somewhere near Benevento: a panino and coffee at one of the outside picnic tables nestled in the merciful shade of an olive grove. When Lucio rose to make a quick visit to the gents, I found myself in the unprecedented position of being alone in charge of a dog. Perhaps like class 3B when confronted by a young supply teacher in the art room that regrettable afternoon, Dante could sense my lack of status and experience, could almost smell the opportunity for wreaking havoc. Thus I found myself dragged off in search of whatever unimaginably foul odours they are which excite canine nostrils so. There lurching along after that manically swinging tail, the dappled sunshine equally as playful in its rapid pulsing of light then shade, St Joseph's Primary seemed a world away. Seemed a solar system away. An entire galaxy.

Over the course of the previous two hours, I'd told Lucio everything. Had just started talking and like a tightly wound clockwork toy had been unable to stop. The tragic circumstances surrounding my birth. That slow-drip realisation that my parents weren't my biological ones. My adoptive father's increasing indifference, even coldness, in my regards. The way I'd thrown myself into my studies; like a frightened snail, snuggled myself ever further into my shell. Then at university, the charade that was the only long-term relationship I'd ever had - a business undergraduate called Hugo who was as socially inept as I, as manically career-focused as I, as psychologically scarred as I, and who I had unceremoniously dumped at his first merest hint of marriage, children, some kind of grimly bound future together. Those endless solitary decades which had followed. The twelve-hour working days, each approaching weekend a thing of black dread, the last day of summer term the entrance to some infinite underground tunnel. Those periodic trawls through the lonely hearts column when the solitude threatened to press down on me, squash me into a grey melancholy pulp. Nothing ever longer than two or three dates, an inelegant collision of mutual long-denied needs.

I told him too how in the aftermath of my adoptive mother's death I'd traced Irene. How my joy had been tempered by the fact I remained some shameful, unutterable secret, an illegitimate outcast. How within two and a half years she died too, her funeral just forty-eight hours earlier. I recounted the accompanying horror of what had appeared my biological father's tragic and untimely death, what seemed still almost certain to prove my biological father's tragic and untimely death. My conversations with George Shreeves, John Simmonds, Peter Harvey. How my conclusions and hypotheses had been folded inside an envelope and posted to Inspector Kubič. How I'd then sat in my car across the road from my half-sister's house, a mute spectator to the familial embraces and farewells. Especially that, yes. A detailed psychological description.

All of which Lucio had listened to attentively, gravely, like a citizen to a declaration of war delivered over the radio. His interruptions had been infrequent, and these always pertinent - a series of searching, murmured questions, enough for me to know that as far as another human being was able he'd been trying to absorb my words. To comprehend them.

And then, when I had finished, there had been silence. Not one of those empty periods of wordlessness which grind and croak and embarrass, but a constructive silence, the sort during which ideas might be formed, lines of poetry take shape.

*

"Here, let me take him off you," came Lucio's sudden voice behind me.

It was a relief at last to be liberated from Dante's full straining weight.

"Would pull your arm of if you let him."

As the three of us stepped back towards the car, I could sense an air of resolution, as if the words Lucio had been searching for had now been found. Indeed, no sooner had we filled the tank up with petrol and spluttered back out onto the cross-peninsula motorway than he spoke them out loud.

"You know, I think you're wrong about something Mary. Irene didn't give you away, she just loaned you out, that was all. Like a private collector might loan a work of art to a public gallery so that more people may look and experience and marvel at it."

Loaned, not given away. It was little more than a lexical subtelty perhaps, but one I'd never considered before. Crucially, it made sense, bore the gloss of validity. I remembered Irene's smile that April day there at her front door. Oh yes love, I know who you are. Almost as if my sudden appearance all those decades later had been expected somehow. An inevitability long ago foreseen. Part of the deal she'd struck with the Lord that heartbroken spring of'44.

Maybe it was the comfort the thought provided, or the endless nature of the day, the constant motion of the wheels beneath me - probably a combination of all three - but I could feel my eyelids grow heavier.

Soon, they would close completely.

*

When I opened them again around an hour later the scene which awaited me was a strangely familiar one. Straight rows of vines tumbled down a hill, a pretty villa nestled halfway down in their midst. Beyond stretched the flat wide stripe of the sea - a sea so perfectly blue it took a moment to locate the line dividing it from the cloudless Mediterrannean sky which arched above. The same view which had featured on the website.

We'd arrived.

"Ten past four," winced Lucio ruefully, glancing at his watch. "Almost made it in time."

Waiting for us at the end of the driveway was the granddaughter - a gracious young woman of around thirty who introduced herself as Cosima. As she led us through the blissfully cool interior of the villa towards rear terrace, she explained that her grandfather's role in the business was now a purely advisory one, her father for the last couple of decades having taken over the day-to-day running of the business. The summer months would still see her grandfather up at the crack of dawn, however. She described how his hobbling silhouette would still be visible out among the vines, every so often a doddery hand plucking off a grape, tongue squishing its juices, testing the balance of acidity and sweetness. The correct moment to harvest - any time between mid-August and late September - was the most fundamental decision of a vintner's year, one as family patriach he still claimed the right to  make.

Seated at a wrought iron table, Francesco Brancaleone would prove similarly as striking as the view which the terrace looked out on. Though the muscles had inevitably sagged and waned over the decades, the ex boxer was still traceable in the broad shoulders, the steely set of the jaw. Perhaps even more impressive was the full head of brushed back hair, a pure blinding white rather than grey, a brightness lent stark contrast against the sun-scorched face.

As Lidia sorted Dante out with a bowl of water and some leftovers from lunch, the old man began his story, one analagous in many ways to my father's. Called up in 1940 aged nineteen, he too had been sent to North Africa, only for he and his platoon to be quickly captured; El Alamein in his case. They'd subsequently been forced to suffer a long sea-voyage to India, only to have to suffer it again in reverse as the inglesi sought to exploit such a ready swell of manpower in their chronically undermanned agricultural sector. First Dorset, then Wales, and from there a brand new camp in Lincolnshire, number 106a.

As Salvatore D'Ambra earlier that day, the old man spoke not in standard Italian but a thick local dialect - in his case that of the tough Neapolitan neighbourhood of Forcella. Lucio seemed relieved when Cosima returned from the kitchen with a tray of coffees, pulled up a chair with us. Thus we proceeded, a strange multi-round game of Chinese whispers, grandfather to grandaughter to Lucio to me, then all the way back again in reverse order.

The inglesi worked them hard, Francesco recounted, but honest toil was something he'd learnt to have no fear of; the rain aside, was something he'd actually rather enjoyed. It was there in the British countryside, back bent to the soil, that he'd vowed never to return to Forcella. Never again the dirt and the hunger, the height of a young man's ambition that of becoming paid muscle at the service of the Camorra mafia. And so it had proven. Upon his rimpatria in '46 he'd returned to his childhood home just long enough to drag his sweetheart - Cosima's grandmother - out of there. Pooling their meagre savings, they'd bought a three-hectare plot of stone-strewn soil a little further along the coast, a handful of falanghina vines. He'd known little about grape cultivation, less still about wine production, but had soon learned. Within ten years those three hectares had become fifty; within twenty, five hundred.

"Three things," he expounded, his pride in his own achievements undiminished even after so many decades. "All is possible if a man put there three things." A fist banged passionately in turn against each of the listed bodily zones. "'U cor, 'a schen e 'a capa." The heart, the back and the head.

A shake of this latter seemed then to pull him back into the here and now. "But you haven't come all this way to talk about me. You want to know about Michelangelo, right?"

Michelangelo?

"We prisoners all had nicknames," he explained. "Vincenzo's was Michelangelo, on account of the altar he was painting."

His gaze was engaged, still-lucid despite his age. One he turned first on Lucio, then towards me.

"So tell me, what is it you need to know?"

~~~~~