Fed up of traffic lights and pedestrians, I pulled on to the motorway after twenty miles. It was just as straight and boring. It ran between the Via Emilia and the new, high-speed train line between Paris and Rome. East and west, the road was the same: flat fields and crumbling villas, the occasional yard selling cranes or pallets. As the motorway cut through the outskirts of cities, I could see the tents and chickens of the gypsies and drop-outs.

I was thinking about the Anna di Pietro woman. If Riccardo was dead, she was his common-law widow. She must have given up on him long ago. She had married, Franchini had said. Their girl would be a teenager by now.

I came into Rimini on the ring road. It’s a place of wasted beauty in the low season. Long beaches to yourself and the litter. It used to be the place where the stars hung out in the 1950s, but they had left as soon as it had become popular in the 60s and 70s.

By now it looks like any other seaside town that has tried to make money as quickly as possible. It looks like Miami with less beach and more concrete. The grand old hotels have been turned into seedy nightclubs or knocked down to make way for car parks.

I found her road, Via dei Caduti, and parked outside the building. I found her surname and rang the buzzer.

‘Who is it?’ a female voice said.

‘I’m a private investigator…’ I trailed off. It always unnerves people and I let it sink in. ‘I’m looking into Riccardo Salati’s disappearance.’

‘Why?’

‘No one told you?’

‘Told me what?’

The surprise sounded genuine.

‘I would rather talk face to face.’

The line went dead and I took a step back from the citofono. Judging by the plush block it looked like Anna had gone up in the world. It was a long way from the caravan I had heard about. I wasn’t sure she would want to think about Riccardo, let alone talk about him to a stranger.

A minute later a petite woman came out of the front door. She looked overdone: the eyelashes had thick mascara and her lacquered hair looked like it could survive a gale. I guessed there must have been a fair amount of inner turmoil for her to want such solid hair, as if it could offer a bit of stability in a fickle world. As she walked towards the gate, she glanced left and right, at the balconies of the villas next door.

‘We can’t talk here,’ she said. ‘Let’s walk.’

‘What’s wrong with here?’

She looked irritated and lit a cigarette.

‘So no one told you?’ I asked.

‘Told me what?’ She was walking me away from her house.

‘Silvia Salati died on Friday.’

She stopped walking and looked straight at me. ‘I heard. Umberto called on Saturday morning. And I’m sorry,’ she said formally, as if she had to prove it. ‘I’m sorry to hear of anyone’s death. But she never liked me, and I didn’t exactly take a shine to her. She was a severe woman. Is that why you’re here, because she died?’

‘I’m here to find out what happened to Riccardo.’

‘Who hired you?’

‘She did.’

‘Posthumously?’

‘Right. I’ve got to satisfy the conditions of her will and ascertain,’ I paused, realising I was already sounding like Crespi, ‘what happened to Riccardo.’

‘You want to find out about Ricky?’ She gave a snort of derision. ‘I’ve heard that before. Ever since he went missing I’ve had the police, the press, the privates. None of it has made any difference.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, like it was a condolence. That’s what it was because I didn’t believe Riccardo was alive. I’ve seen enough of these cases to know that Riccardo had died within hours or days of his disappearance. The body might be lying around, but the soul was long gone.

‘Listen,’ I said, giving her the ‘tu’, ‘I doubt we’ll find Riccardo. And if we do, I doubt he’ll be living. But there’s an inheritance involved. I need to satisfy myself of certain facts before making recommendations to the executors of Silvia Salati’s will. You with me?’

She was looking at me now as she dropped her cigarette on to the pavement and scuffed it with her shoe. ‘So that’s why you’re here?’

‘I need to ascertain his legal status,’ I said.

‘It’s “missing”. Been that way for years.’

‘And why didn’t you ever apply for it to be changed? An absence that long is more than justification to initiate a “presumed dead” application.’

‘Makes no difference to me. Either way he’s not here, is he?’ She was looking at me, defying me to contradict her. ‘We weren’t married so it’s not as if I had something to gain from him being presumed dead, or presumed alive, or presumed anything.’

‘It makes a difference now,’ I said, holding her stare. ‘There’s money at stake and Elisabetta is Silvia’s granddaughter.’

She was shaking her head. ‘We don’t need her money.’ It didn’t seem like the years had chilled her anger.

‘Why didn’t you ever marry Riccardo?’ I asked, wanting to know the gripe between her and the old Salati woman.

She pulled out another cigarette and lit up. ‘You don’t waste time, do you?’

‘I’m coming to the party fourteen years late, I’m in a rush.’

She inhaled deeply and turned her face to blow away the smoke.

‘What is it exactly that you’re after?’ she asked. ‘Because I doubt you’ll ask me anything I haven’t already been asked, and I doubt I’ll be able to tell you anything more than what I told everyone else every time they came round here.’

‘Maybe not.’

‘Every time this story comes up, it throws my whole family into embarrassment. My husband, my daughter, myself. Ricky’s dead. If you can prove that I’ll thank you for it, I really will. Not because I didn’t love him, but because you’ll allow me to mourn him, and allow me to start a new life at last. Because Giovanni and I feel…’

‘He’s your new man?’

‘Sure.’ She took another drag on the cigarette. ‘Our lives are put on pause every time Ricky is mentioned. If he were dead and buried, it would be different. I’m sorry if that sounds callous, but that’s how it is.’

‘I understand.’

‘Maybe you do,’ she said, ‘maybe you don’t. Maybe you just know the jargon. Closure, they call it.’

‘You still haven’t answered my question. Why didn’t you marry Riccardo?’

She stared at me, looking like she was weighing me up. ‘Why didn’t I marry Ricky?’ She laughed. ‘Because his mother was opposed to it. She didn’t want him to waste himself on a girl who lived in a caravan by the beach.’

‘Silvia Salati was against it?’

‘Sure.’

‘You were both adults.’

‘In age we were, though you wouldn’t have known it. He was her little boy. She was protective in ways that confused him. She manipulated him. Going against her will had consequences. She was helping him out financially. There were all sorts of threats about what she would do if he tied himself to me.’

‘She was lending him money?’

‘Lend was an elastic term to Ricky. She was giving him money, sure. I didn’t even want to get married, but she had made it pretty clear I was to exclude the idea anyway. I stopped going up there altogether. I hadn’t seen her for two years when Ricky went missing.’

‘You seem to have moved up in the world since then,’ I said, casting an eye around her salubrious suburb.

‘It’s called middle age,’ she said.

We had walked towards a small park where a grey-haired woman was pushing a young child on a swing.

‘And what was he like?’ I said softly when she seemed calmed.

She laughed with a wheeze.

‘Ricky? He was all show, just like Umberto. Only he didn’t have his luck. He was a real charmer. He could talk and talk, and make you laugh. But when he went out the room you couldn’t remember a word he had said.’

‘When did you meet him?’

‘When I was a barmaid at the Hotel Palace.’

‘The one on the waterfront?’

She nodded.

‘Doing what?’

‘He was working there for the summer as a lifeguard and poolside assistant. By the end of the second week Ricky was asking if he could fix drinks for the guests. Sometimes he came in wearing only flip-flops and a beach gown, like he owned the place. The manager hated him, but the guests thought he was a hoot. I think it was because he was seventeen and full of dreams. People loved his infectious confidence. We ended up visiting each other’s rooms off duty and you can imagine. By the end of the summer I was pregnant. We were only together properly for a couple of years. At the Palace in the summers, at my caravan in the winters.’