Plot reminder: Over dinner Mary's father works out the possible identity of one of the men who had waited in murderous ambush for Ettore Lo Bianco, a name which in turn leads her to conclude the identity of Irene's murderer. After composing another anonymous letter to Inspector Kubič she summons the courage to knock on the door of Lucio's hotel room...

~~~~~

We awoke several hours later to a bright and auspicious dawn, kissed each other from our slumbers. Giggled like teenagers as Lucio craned his neck out of the door, with a rolling hand gesture indicated that the coast was clear and that I could dash back along the corridor in my nightie without suffering public ignominy.

Breakfast was a blissful affair, our mutual gazes incredulous, almost inebriated, our juice glasses and coffee cups and spreading knives wielded awkwardly in one hand, the other stretched out across the table, our fingers entwined. This I thought. All those songs and poems, all those sprawling Victorian novels with their obstinate and courageous heroines, the Catherine Lintons and Tesses and Jane Eyres... This was what they were about - that skipping unprececented floatiness of my heart. The night just passed, it seemed in its giddy tumble and roll to have regaled me some breathtaking new sense of perception. A colour-blind person slipping on corrective glasses, for the first time experiencing the true vivid depth of the world which surrounded them.

That kind, bookish man there across the table, I had to hand it to him. Quite some trick he'd managed to pull off.

Finally, regretfully, he unlinked fingers from mine, checked his watch.

"Come Mary," he murmured sadly. "You'll miss your plane."

*

The flight was over in a finger-click, two hours reduced to a second, one of those temporal mind tricks provoked by deep and necessary slumber. It was the invasive ding of the seatbelts on bell, the rasp of the pilot's voice announcing the beginning of landing procedure, which dragged me back into the here and now. Outside the window, the East Anglian fields lay drab and sunless; far from a welcoming smile they seemed more to darkly scowl. Every one of those thousand miles which had just jet-engined by, I could feel them like jabbing pin pricks in my heart. Further, ever more distant, from the one place in the world I longed to be: right there by Lucio's side.

I bought a first class stamp from the newsagents in arrivals, stuck it to the lilac envelope addressed to Inspector Kubič as I stopped for a quick coffee. The overstay charge at the carpark proved eye-poppingly excessive, but I found myself handing over my credit card to the woman behind the desk with barely a half-hearted whimper of protest. Maybe that was what it meant to be in love, I reflected as I fitted ignition key into the slot. That you had a healthy sense of perspective, were able to roll with the punches.

About half an hour south out of Stanstead I took a slight detour off the main road, stopped briefly in the first random commuter belt town I chanced upon. The slipping of the letter into postbox felt disconcertingly casual somehow. I almost wished I was of a religious persuasion, could have projected some articulately worded prayer to the Lord. That letter, it represented my mother's only chance of justice. And although on an official level that first long-ago victim would remain unidentified, in many ways it represented Ettore Lo Bianco's only chance of justice too.

It was late afternoon by the time I made it home, the act of opening up front door hampered by half a week's worth of accumulated mail. The Mary Rice who stepped over the threshold was a profoundly different one, I realised, to that which had closed the door behind her just four days earlier. No longer that unbound entity darkly riding the turbulence, but once more grounded, comfortable in her own skin.

The sifting through of the mail could wait. So too the unpacking of my case. No sooner was I  inside the hallway than I had grabbed landline from its cradle, was tapping in Lucio's mobile number from the scrap of paper he'd scribbled it onto.

"Is that you Mary?"

His voice was projected above the low murmuring swoosh of the motorway, the first time I had heard it bounced off satellites, squeezed through the insides of a phone. Different somehow, like hearing a recording of your own voice, the way everybody else hears it. Unmistakable though. *Lucio*. It was my Lucio.

"Yes, it's me," I replied. "I just wanted to tell you that I got home sa---"

"I miss you," he interrupted.

At that precise moment in time it was the most profound line of poetry he could have uttered. The purest, the most musical. He felt it too, that yearning hollowness in his heart.

"I miss you too Lucio," I murmured back. "Lord how I miss you."

*

It was a couple of hours later, the light beginning to seep from the June evening, that I checked my Nokia. I'd put it on charge around an hour earlier; having forgotten to pack an adaptor, it had been dead since my arrival in Italy.

Now sufficiently reanimated, I was surprised to see notice of a large number of missed calls. A couple of these were from school, another from my deputy's mobile. The overwhelming majority however - more than a dozen - were from an unknown number. Hitting recall, I was even more surprised to hear a familiar voice hiss into my ear.

"Ah, Ms Rice! Finally you've returned my call."

Kubič.

It was Detective Inspector Kubič.

The shock was such that I was reduced a pitiful stammer.

"But I... I mean... how...  how have you---"

No doubt sensing my utter perplexity, the inspector attempted an explanation.

"It was the squiggle that gave you away. The softener over the last letter of my surname. Remember?  That morning I saw you at the building site with John Simmonds, I made a point of telling you about the squiggle so you'd get my name right in your article. It's a pet hate of mine see. I've spent my whole life telling everyone about that damn squiggle but nobody ever remembers. Not my subordinates nor my superiors. Bills and bank statements, no squiggle. Not even George Shreeves at the Echo ever bloody remembers." He took a breath, gulped back down the wave of genuine anger the subject seemed to have raised. "So the next morning when I was looking through my work mail and came across that pastel-shaded envelope addressed to Detective Inspector Kubič with the squiggle over the 'c', well I supppose you might say something in me clicked."

Damn me for being so ruddy precise, I thought, stepping out of the patio doors. The sky was mottled several threatening shades of grey, but for now things were still dry. From the other side of the garden fence came the squeals of the neighbours' children at play; every few seconds, the top of a trampoline-bouncing head came into vision. As I pulled up a chair at the patio table I felt an unpleasant sinking feeling. Was I in some kind of trouble, I wondered?

"So, the first thing I did," the inspector continued, "was to phone Simmonds, ask him for your number. Tried it quite a few times over the course of that morning. There being no answer, I then had DC Rawlins have a quick scoot around hotels and B & Bs. Didn't take him long - Ravensby's not exactly bloody Brighton. There had been a Mary Rice registered at The Ash View on West Road two nights earlier, the description the landlady provided matching the figure I'd seen next to Simmonds the previous morning. The mobile number that had been registered in the visitor's log, that matched too of course."

I recalled the inspector's face, that disarming mix of both the boyish and the rough-hewn, the way it had brought to my mind the actor Robert Mitchum. I wondered where he was speaking from. His voice sounded slightly blurred, as if he'd been drinking. In the background I could make out a faint but  excitable voice, the low roar of a crowd. Sunday evening, would be off duty I supposed. Was at home watching some football most likely, a beer in hand.

He went onto to recount other details, most of which I had already surmised. How the landlady of the B & B had told them I'd stayed there before, five or six times in total over the last couple of years. How it had seemed strange that a national level journalist would find themselves in such an un-newsworthy place as Ravensby so frequently, and how, in fact, the landlady had subsequently informed them that I'd once told her I was a primary school headmistress based somewhere in the south.

"So," Kubič continued, his matter-of-fact tone incongrous to the seriousness of the subject matter, the thudding crescendo of my heartbeat. "I get to thinking: why would a primary school headmistress from down south have on a number of occasions visited a nowhere place like Ravensby, and on her most recent visit have lied that she was a journalist? More to the point, why would she know or care so much about the possibly suspicious death of a former Land Girl?"

There was a pause, one in which I imagined him take a swig of his beer, squint his eyes at a brief passage of play in the match he was watching.

"And well," he finally continued, "the answer was quite obvious really."

The answer to the central mystery will be revealed in the next chapter. Following that will be an epilogue which will tie up the novel's various subplots.