Plot reminder: Mary and Lucio have driven to the region of Campagna to visit Francesco Brancaleone, a former prisoner of camp 106a. The three are seated at a table overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. With them is the old man's granddaughter, Cosima.
During the journey across the peninsula, Mary told Lucio her life story.

~~~~~

The nodding of the old man's head was slow at first, then grew ever more effusive. It was as if an image had swept itself through the fog of the decades, was now there before his eyes, as clear and irrefutable as a photograph.

"Irene, si. I remember Irene. Michelangelo's girl. The second prettiest of all the Land Girls." The final two words were delivered in English, his lips curved in wry, nostalgic smile. "The only diamond which shone brighter than Irene was my Rose." He raised his eyes skywards in heartfelt plea, right hand criss-crossing chest in genuflection. "If you're up there listening Mariangela, then per favore, you must forgive me. It was the only time in all our years together that I betrayed you, I swear."

There was a glance then towards his granddaughter - fleeting, embarrassed. In response, Cosima brushed a hand against his. Though hearing one's grandfather admit to some ancient disloyalty towards one's late grandmother was far from an everyday occurrence, she seemed more moved than scandalised, as if viewing her grandfather from some new angle, in a different quality of light. Confronted by their obstinacy and forgetfulness and ever increasing list of ailments, it's easy sometimes to forget that elderly relatives were once young. That at eighteen, twenty, twenty-five, they were every bit as urgent and reckless as oneself.

"You must understand, we were young men, had been away from home for three years." His gaze was mellowed by the irrestible swell of nostalgia. "Blonde hair, big blue eyes. Said she came from Nottingham, like Robin Hood."

"Can you remember her surname?" I pressed hopefully.

He observed the sun-sparkled Tyrrenean beneath us for some moments, as if it might be written in the gentle swelling of the waves. Finally, there was a regretful shake of the head.

"No, no I can't. Too many years have passed." A sudden frown then corrugated brow. "But I don't understand. Why are you asking about Irene? What's she got to do with those bones they found?"

*

I gave him the abridged version, just two chapters - the first and most recent. Skipped over that long, dense middle section I'd earlier that afternoon narrated to Lucio. Pruned down the details to the most factual and case-pertinent, left out the stodge, all that was personal and psycho-analytical. Kept things lean, in short. Pared down. Hemingway rather than Manzoni.

Less is sometimes more, don't they say? The implicit more powerful than the explicit. A narrator's skill is inherent not so much in what he or she chooses to say, but in what he or she chooses not to say.

Thus it was that halfway through my account the old man reached for my hand across the table, enveloped it for several moments in the roughened leatheriness of his own. Cosima meanwhile scraped back chair, wrapped an arm around my shoulder, squeezed tight. Even Dante had curled himself up at my feet as if volunteering himself to the role of personal guard and protector.

Dogs and Italians, I thought - both were unhindered in spontaneous acts of sympathy. Of emotional solidarity.

As touching as Francesco and Cosima's gestures were, this wasn't why Lucio and I had driven all that way however. Answers. As the only person I was ever likely to meet who had been present inside the coiled perimeter ring of barb that long-ago September, I was hoping Francesco Brancaleone might be able to provide me with answers. Flick some kind of match flame into the impenetrable darkness.

*

Of the thirty shillings Irene had lent my father, the old man knew nothing nor was able to hypothesise.

"Not a gambling debt though," he assured me. "Of that I'm certain. Cards were about the only distraction most of the men had: scopa, briscola, poker. That thrill of pushing a week's ration of cigarettes into the pot before the final reveal. Some ended up owing more than they possessed, could ever possibly hope to possess. Not Michelangelo though. Don't think I ever saw him play a single hand. Too busy working on that altar of his, every free minute he had."

As for the last time he'd seen my father, his answer was as categoric as it was immediate.

"The Saturday night, lights out. His bunk was across the hut from mine, two or three down to the left."

"How did it work exactly?" I asked. "He and Irene? Their private encounters. When and where did they meet to be alone?"

It was a question which I'd never put to Irene of course: how many of us wish to know the precise details of our conceptions, after all? Until forty-eight hours earlier, the logistics of their covert trysts had been of little interest to me, a detail my mind had been happy to gloss over.

There had been copse of trees, Brancaleone informed me. Yes - I remembered it from two days before as John Simmonds and I had stood and surveyed the scene: a thick cluster of ashes behind the site portacabin. A section of the perimeter barb had been set a little more loosely than the rest, the old man continued. With a modicum of care and poise, a man might wriggle himself through with little more than a couple of scratches. At two hundred metres from the wire, the trees were far enough to be out of earshot but close enough to be just a thirty-second dash away.

"And that particular Saturday night, do you think my father and Irene had planned to meet?"

"I don't think Mary. I know." He lent foward a little, as if in conspiracy. "Those trees, we're not talking some great forest. Private enough for one couple, si, but not for two. We took it in turns you see, one Saturday night Rosie and I, the next Michelangelo and Irene, and that particular Saturday night happened to be their turn. As my Rose, Irene would sneak out of her farmhouse, pedal along the country lanes on the farmer's wife's bicycle."

At that stage I sought not to absorb the mounting tide of details, attempt to shape them into some kind of watertight hypothesis. That would come later, the long drive back across the Italian peninsula. The days and weeks and years which would follow. For now, I felt like I was on some strange kind of supermarket dash, my hands grabbing blindly out, throwing whatever they snatched into my investigative basket.

"What can you tell me about Sergeant Reynolds?" I asked next.

At the mention of the name, Brancaleone clamped hand dramatically to heart, followed this by an equally theatrical genuflection. "It's a name that stirs my memory, Mary. Bad memories." His gaze fixed itself on the distant horizon, brow slightly lowered, brooding. "I never liked the English much." Realising this may have seemed offensive, he glanced back at me, sought to qualify his statement. "Not those in uniform, anyway. They thought themselves superior to us Italians, like we were just their idiot slaves. But Sergeant Reynolds, he was the worst of all. It wasn't just the usual arrogance with him, but pure hatred. Must have been in his fifties, a first world war veteran they said. They said too a couple of years earlier he'd lost a son to one of our bullets at the Battle of Bardia. You could see it in his eyes. Not fire exactly, more a dense fog." He nodded grimly to himself. "The alcohol, you could smell it on his breath. Driving the truck back to camp at the end of the day. Sometimes on the way out in the morning too."

"I don't suppose you remember if was on guard duty that night?"

This provoked a bitter smile. "Then you suppose wrong, Mary. I remember, I remember. The end of that summer had been hot, unusually so. Muggy enough that we left the windows of the hut open. The windows of the guard house must have been open too. I remember before I fell asleep, I could hear him and another officer singing away, drunk as hell. Never without a bottle of gin, Sergeant Reynolds."

Several seconds were then spent in silent contemplation of the sea, head gently nodding to himself, reeling the memory in.

"Normally they allowed us sleep a little longer on Sunday, but not that Sunday. Crack of dawn they came barging into the hut, bayonets fixed on rifles. Well, first thing I did was look over towards Michelangelo's bunk. Empty of course. I never for one second thought he'd tried an escape though. We'd become pretty good friends for one thing, and I'm sure he would have told me if was planning something like that. Then for a second thing he still had the altar painting to finish. Would never have left it half done like that." The horizon-scanning gaze grew in intensity. "In the meantime the inglesi were barking at us like dogs, 'you grab your things now wop, time for a little trip'. Outside, there was chaos, trucks kicking up a storm of dust."

"There was no roll call?"

"No roll call, no. Just shoved us out of the door and onto the waiting trucks. I remember shouting out that Michelangelo had gone to meet his girl but hadn't returned. Trying to get the word out to as many of the men I could before the trucks set off." There was a shake of the head, one tinged by an anger that sixty-four years had been unable to subdue. "I remember rattling around in the bed of that truck till almost midnight. First one camp, kicked two or three of us out, then onto the next, another two or three. I ended up in some place called Cheshire I think it was. Just a few days, no more than a week, then moved me on again. Scotland this time. Rained even bloody more up there!" The memory prompted a weak smile, one which faded quickly. "By this point I was on my own. Not a single comrade from camp 106a left. I reckon they feared a riot, but separated like that there was nothing to be done. Many men may shout, one alone can only whisper." His gaze shifted from horizon, focused once more on me. "But the most disturbing thing of all I have yet to tell you. As their bayonets were prodding me onto the truck that morning, another shout was going around the men. A second bunk had been empty that morning too. The Monk's."

"The Monk?"

He nodded. "Like I said, we all had nicknames. And that was what we called Ettore."

Ettore, I thought. A name which had featured on numerous occasions throughout my father's letters home.

"Michelangelo's best friend," the old man confirmed. "A shy boy from Lecce. Ettore Lo Bianco was his name."

~~~~~