‘I’m just fine.’

‘Was it a good flight? He knows you don’t like flying, and he’s worried about that.’

‘Tell him it was a nice smooth flight.’

His voice became muffled as he turned away to say, ‘She says it was a nice smooth flight.’

Matti answered, ‘Aaaah!’

‘He says he’s very pleased,’ Ruggiero passed on.

‘Give him my love.’

‘Why don’t you tell him yourself? Here, Matti. Put it to your ear-like that.’

‘Aaaah!’ he said.

‘Is that you, darling?’ she asked.

‘Si, si, si, si, si.’

‘You’ve learned another word. How clever you are.’

‘Aaaah!’

‘He says he loves you,’ came Ruggiero’s voice. ‘He wants you to say it too. Here, Matti.’

‘I love you,’ she said softly. ‘Matti?’

‘He slid off my lap and went to Mamma,’ Ruggiero said.

‘It’s time he was in bed.’

‘She’s just about to take him.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ll be there, too.’

‘Good. I must go now. Goodnight.’

‘Ciao!’

‘Ciao!’

She put down the phone and sat quietly in the dusk, until there was no light left.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THERE’S a letter for you,’ Hope said, putting it in Ruggiero’s hand. ‘From England.’

Conscious of his parent’s eyes fixed eagerly on him, he pulled open the envelope. Inside was a letter and a photograph, showing a small headstone in a graveyard. Beneath it was the name of the church and the village.

I found this when I got home. One day Matti might like to have it. Talk to him about her. Remember what I told you-that she was a good mother and she loved him with all her heart, until the last moment of her life. Think of her like that, and try to forgive her the rest.

It was signed, ‘Your affectionate Bossy-Boots.’

‘She talks as though she wasn’t coming back,’ Hope observed.

‘I don’t think she is,’ Ruggiero said heavily.

‘And you’re just going to accept that?’ Hope demanded, outraged. ‘Why didn’t you ask her to marry you?’

‘Have you forgotten that she’s engaged?’

‘Poof! Don’t tell me you’re going to let yourself be put off by a trifle like that?’

‘Mamma,’ he said with a faint grin, ‘sometimes I think you’re completely immoral.’

‘I can remember when, if you wanted a woman, you’d have elbowed a whole army of fiancés out of your way.’

‘Well, perhaps it’s time I stopped doing such things. Other people have rights.’ He gave a grunt. ‘I guess I finally learned that.’

‘Not from me. I tried but I failed there.’

‘No-from her. It’s odd,’ he said softly, ‘but when I think of all the things I learned from her it really makes her seem like Nurse Bossy-Boots. And yet…’ He paused and smiled faintly, as though he barely realised he was doing so. ‘She wasn’t a bit like that.’

‘What was she like?’ Hope asked, her gaze fixed fondly on him.

He shook his head. ‘I can’t tell. Even to me she’s-I don’t know.’

‘But what does she say on the phone? You call her every night.’

‘Matti calls her every night,’ he corrected fondly. ‘They talk and I put in the odd word. I’m not sure she’d talk to me as easily. Now she’s with her fiancé again…’ Ruggiero sighed. ‘Heaven knows what kind of man he is, but she seems very set on him.’

‘She told you that?’

‘No, she gave me only bare details. If I ventured onto that territory I got ordered off.’

‘Hmm!’

‘Mamma, you can put more meaning into that one little sound than anyone I know.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you that this man may not exist? That he may be simply a device she has found useful?’

He nodded. ‘At the start I wanted her to keep Matti, but I had to give up when she mentioned the fiancé, and it did cross my mind that she’d invented him to silence me. But when she returned from England with you he called her.’

‘She said so?’ Hope demanded sceptically.

‘No, but I heard her say something about a hospital. And since he works in one-’

‘That could have meant anything. Her friends had to return Matti early because their daughter had been rushed to hospital. Perhaps she was talking to them?’

‘But you told me she went out to see him while you were there.’

‘I said she went out for a couple of hours. I don’t know who she saw.’

‘But he was there when I called her the other night.’

Hope turned, thoroughly startled now. ‘She actually told you that?’

‘No, but I heard him in the background, asking where she kept the glasses.’

She breathed again.

‘And it didn’t occur to you that if he were her fiancé he’d have known that without asking?’

‘You think-? No, there could be many things to account for it.’

‘You won’t know unless you go to find out.’

Unwittingly, she’d touched a nerve. Suddenly he was back in London, searching uselessly for someone who wasn’t there, turning corner after corner, always hoping that he would find his dream around the next one. An icy dread went through him at the thought of doing it again.

He didn’t call her that night, hoping she would call him. But the phone was silent. And when the next night came he found that he couldn’t force himself to call. The silence of the evening before held him in a grip of dread. The next night he admitted to himself that he was afraid, and the admission was a kind of release, so that he snatched up the receiver and dialled her home number.

The phone was dead.

There was still her cellphone, but that had been switched off. He called it repeatedly over the next twenty-four hours, but it was always off.

She had vanished into thin air.

Hope had given Ruggiero the address. All he had to do was take a taxi from London Airport to the building where her tiny apartment was situated. He arrived in the late afternoon. As he got out he looked up at the window on the second floor, which Hope had said was hers. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw the curtain twitch.

Seeing someone come out of the front door, he took the chance to slip inside, and began to climb the stairs. There was only one door on the second floor and he knocked at it.

It was opened by the most handsome young man Ruggiero had ever seen.

He was in his late twenties, with tousled hair and a cheerful face. He was also wearing a towelling robe, as if he’d just got out of the bath.

‘Hi, can I help you?’ he asked.

Ruggiero felt himself engulfed by hell. It was the voice he’d overheard on the telephone, and this young man was built like a god.

‘No, thank you,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I think I’ve come to the wrong place.’

‘Maybe not. I’ve only just moved in, so perhaps you’re thinking of-Coming, darling.’

He called this over his shoulder. Ruggiero knew he had to get away fast.

‘Who is it, darling?’ A female voice floated from within.

But it wasn’t her voice. Suddenly his legs were paralysed with relief.

A young woman, also in a bathrobe, appeared. She was nothing like Polly.

‘I’m looking for Polly Hanson,’ he managed to say.

‘Oh, you mean the woman who lived here before?’ the girl said. ‘She moved out a few days ago.’

‘It was very sudden,’ the young man said. ‘She wanted to move, and we needed somewhere quickly, so we dropped in one evening to look the place over.’

‘You mean-you’re not Brian?’

‘Brian? No, my name’s Peter. I don’t think I’ve heard of Brian. Polly didn’t mention a Brian, did she, Nora?’

‘Not that I heard.’

The hell that had engulfed Ruggiero retreated very slightly.

‘Did she leave a forwarding address?’

‘She only mentioned a hotel,’ Nora said. ‘The Hunting Horn, I think it was. Not far away.’

A taxi took him to the hotel. He sat in the back, telling himself not to be fanciful. Just because she’d vanished and he was looking for her at a hotel, like last time, that didn’t mean-

She was no longer at the Hunting Horn.

‘She stayed just three days,’ the pretty receptionist explained. ‘No, I’m afraid she didn’t say where she’d be after that.’

Now his forehead was damp, and desperation was growing inside him. History was repeating itself, drowning him again.

‘Try St Luke’s Hospital,’ the receptionist. ‘She said she worked there once, and she might be going back.’

‘Thank you,’ he said frantically.

Another taxi. Another desperate journey. Trying to tell himself that this time it would be different. There was the hospital, a huge building, just up ahead. He leapt out and almost ran inside.

For a moment he thought he was in luck. The man on the desk remembered Polly.

‘She was here a few days ago. You might try-’ He named a ward and directed him to it.

As he approached the ward a nurse in her mid-thirties emerged and halted him.

‘I’m afraid visiting isn’t until this evening,’ she said, in a voice that was pleasant but firm.

‘Please, I’m not visiting. I’m looking for Polly Hanson.’

‘She’s not here.’

Darkness again, blanking out everything except the road ahead that wound around endless corners, leading to nothing.

‘I was told she worked here,’ he said, his mouth dry.

‘I hope she soon will be. I called her in Italy and tried to persuade her to come back here-because we really need nurses like her-but she said she had something urgent to do before she finally made up her mind.’

‘You know her, then?’

‘I’m an old friend. My name’s Kyra Davis, and I got to know her very well the last time she was here.’

‘She worked in this part of the hospital?’

‘Yes, but I meant when her cousin was dying. Oh, dear-maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this. I don’t know who you are.’

‘I’m the father of her cousin’s child.’

‘You mean Matthew? She used to bring him in to see his mother in the last days. We managed to find a little side ward for her, so that they could all be together in peace.’