no sign of the cabinet-maker’s tools. Mimmo’s father must have retired. Or died. Fixed to the walls were a number of wooden boxes, each of which contained a stuffed bird.
Mimmo saw where I was looking. ‘It’s a hobby.’
‘Only birds?’
‘Didn’t she tell you?’
‘Yes. She told me.’ I faced him across the room. ‘Where is she?’
‘Not far away.’ He removed the cork from a bottle and poured me a glass of wine, then poured one for himself. His hand was as steady as his gaze.
I told him what had happened since Faustina left the city. He listened carefully, and when I had finished he said that no one resembling Stufa had appeared, and that Faustina was safe. The only place to hide her, he added, was in his house.
‘But he’ll search your house,’ I said. ‘He’ll search every house in the village.’
‘He can search all he likes. He won’t find her.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
In the last decade of his life, Mimmo said, his father had become convinced that furniture should combine the functional with the clandestine, and he had begun to incorporate sliding panels and hidden compartments into almost everything he made.
Mimmo pointed to the bed at the far end of the room. ‘One of the better examples.’
I moved towards the bed. Its headboard offered a sea view, with a port on the horizon. A female figurehead leaned out from the foot of the bed, and its sides had been carved in such a way as to suggest a waterline. The frame above the drawers rippled like unfurling waves, like the beginning of a wake, while the drawers themselves, which were below the surface, were decorated with fish, shells, rocks and coral. I had no idea what I was looking for.
Mimmo told me to open a drawer.
‘Think about the depth of it,’ he said, ‘from front to back.’
Suddenly I saw what he meant. Given the width of the bed, the drawers on either side weren’t as deep as they should have been. Beneath the mattress, and running down the middle of the bed, would be a space about the size of a person.
‘You have to lie on your back,’ Mimmo said. ‘If you’re an adult, that is. It’s easier if you’re a child. I used to hide in there a lot. I used to call it “The Hold” –’
There was something of the schoolmaster about him, something self-regarding and pedantic, and I turned from the bed and put my glass down so abruptly that it nearly shattered. For all his absence of bitterness and resentment, for all his understated charm, I knew he must view me as a rival, and, odd though it might sound, and despite his obvious disability, I felt he had me at a disadvantage. He was distracting me, delaying me.
‘I’m wasting time,’ I said.
‘Then go.’
‘You haven’t told me where she is.’
He was by the window at the back of the room, staring out into the night. ‘Can’t you guess?’
I went over and stood next to him. Though it was my first time in the village, I thought it must feel like any other night at the end of winter – the faint, insistent barking of a dog, the air fragrant, almost nostalgic, with woodsmoke – but somewhere out there in the dark was a figure on horseback, a huge, hunched figure with a gash for a mouth, the black flames of his cloak flickering behind him, and I felt the urgency of the situation, and the hopelessness, and a panic twisted through me, fast and incomplete, like a lizard that has lost its tail.
I nearly missed the turning that led out along the ridge. A white track, hemmed in by vines and olive trees. Stars crowding the heavens. And such a stillness that I didn’t feel I was outside at all, but in a space that was enormous yet enclosed – a ballroom, perhaps, or a cathedral. The chink of my horse’s bridle, the scuff and shuffle of her hooves. That dog still barking in the distance. Not much else. A turmoil inside me, though: my heart was making more noise than the rest of the world put together. I came over a rise in the land. A pair of cypresses stood out against the sky. Then the sharp, clean line of a roof. That was where Sabatino Vespi lived.
The track dipped down and veered to the right. A gap opened in a tangled hedgerow. The ghost house appeared below, crouching on cleared ground, the pale,