The woman looked at me and, for the first time, looked guilty. It was clear she hadn’t even told her daughter yet.

I took the camera back and sped through the photographs. ‘Tell me if you see Tonin.’

‘Go slower.’

My thumb kept clicking the shift. People got larger on the screen as they got closer.

‘That’s him.’

It wasn’t what I had expected. He was a tall, thin man with white hair. He had an overcoat with large shoulders, which only made his legs look thinner. The photograph showed him walking on his own. His face was a long way off, but it looked set against the world. A hard, marble face with a long, thin nose.

‘You sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Family?’

‘Don’t know.’

I nodded. I had to talk to Tonin. I could make an educated guess about what had been going on, but it was no more than a guess. Silvia Salati’s husband had died in 1995 and suddenly another man was getting close to young Riccardo. Someone was setting him straight financially.

‘How old is Elisabetta now?’

She shot a defensive stare at me, as if she wanted her daughter kept out of it. ‘Fifteen.’

‘And you’ve got other children?’

‘A boy. I married a few years ago.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said, sounding insincere. ‘When exactly?’

‘A year or two after all that.’ She shrugged.

‘I heard it was just a year.’ It might have come out more mean than I intended, because she pointed a finger at me and sneered.

‘There was no overlap.’

I leaned across her to open the door. ‘I’ll be in touch. If you think of anything, call me.’ I held out one of my cards. She took the card but didn’t move. She sat there for a few seconds, thinking. She looked at me as if sizing me up. ‘If you’re going to drag us through all this again I implore you, for the sake of my family, do it quickly.’

I nodded and started up the engine.

The Hotel Palace was dead in winter. In the foyer two boys were playing football with a screwed-up piece of paper. Their uniforms were unbuttoned and they looked like schoolchildren in a playground. They stopped when they saw me and one of them went behind the front desk.

‘Any grown-ups around?’ I asked.

The boy pointed through a doorway. It led through to a windowless box of a room. A man was pulling glasses out of a cardboard box and lining them up behind the bar.

‘Can I get a drink?’

The man grunted. ‘What do you want?’ The accent was Calabrese.

‘Give me a malvasia.’

The barman grunted again as he bent down to the fridge and pulled out a bottle. As he uncorked it, he spilt some on to his knuckles. He wiped his fingers on his oily apron, then picked up the bottle again and poured the yellow fizz into a flute.

‘Three euros.’

I passed him a twenty. ‘Keep the change.’

The man looked at me with tired eyes. ‘What are you after, Mister?’

‘Call it research. I’m trying to track down a character who used to live in Rimini in the early 1990s.’ I pulled out the photo. ‘He used to work here. Name’s Riccardo Salati. Had a woman from around here called Anna. Anna di Pietro.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Castagnetti. I’m an investigator.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to talk to the manager. Or preferably someone who worked here in the early 1990s.’

‘The manager’s not around.’

‘What’s his name?’

The barman made a tutting sound with his tongue as if even this much was confidential. I looked over his shoulder and read the licence granting the bar permission to sell alcohol. The name said Lo Bue.

‘Is the manager Lo Bue by any chance?’

‘Rings a bell.’

‘How long has he been here?’

‘Longer than me.’

‘Far back as ’95?’

‘How would I know?’

‘And where is he?’

‘He’s not around. He doesn’t show much during winter.’

‘And if you’ve got to phone him, where do you call?’

‘He doesn’t like to be disturbed.’

‘Say someone tells you to call him,’ I pulled out my pistol and placed it gently on the bar. ‘What number do you dial?’

The man opened his palms and put his hands upwards. He was staring at me with scorn. I kept one hand on the gun and pulled out my phone with the other. As the man said the numbers, I punched them in. I listened to the silence of connecting satellites.

‘Sì.’ A voice came on.

‘Lo Bue?’

‘Who is this?’ He was even thicker Calabrese than his heavy.

‘Castagnetti. I’m a private investigator.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to talk to you about Riccardo Salati.’

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds and then: ‘Who gave you my number?’

‘Father Christmas. So how about it? I hear he used to work for you back in the early 90s? Him and his woman, Anna di Pietro.’

‘I remember him. He was the lad that went missing.’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Come to the hotel tomorrow. Come for lunch.’

‘Sure.’ I snapped the phone shut and looked at the barman.

‘What time’s lunch in your part of the world?’

‘Eh?’

‘Never mind.’ I put the ironmongery back in its holster. ‘Sorry about that. I get impatient sometimes.’

The drive back was dull and I started thinking about my bees. A few months ago I had had to burn three of my hives. They were all infested with varroa. Dirty little parasitic mites. It took a couple of minutes to burn years of hard work. Theirs, not mine.

I like them because there’s never any risk of me getting attached to one in particular. There are no names and no emotions. I said as much to Mauro a while back, and he laughed, and said that was why I had problems with women. But I like the bees because they are so different to humans. They believe in hard work and hierarchy, for one.

I had got into bees way back. When I was a boy and my parents had died, I went to live for a while with my uncle somewhere in the mountains outside Turin. He had a farm. One summer there was a swarm, a nasty blob of noisy bees like a furry tear-drop just able to cling to the branch. It was throbbing like a hairy heart.

A few hours later an old man arrived and dropped the swarm into a basket. There was something about the way he did it that impressed me. Maybe it was because he was French and the exoticism of the foreigner excited me. But I wanted to have that skill, to show a child that something terrifying could actually be beautiful and productive.

I forgot all about it until I found another swarm a few years back in a hollow tree up near Fornovo. I built a hive out of some old planks Mauro had and mail-ordered the rest. I had beginner’s luck for a while. The first year I got twenty-eight kilos of wonderful honey. I almost doubled it the next. I was hooked. I didn’t mind getting stung. No worse than a few nettles on a country walk. It cost next to nothing. You didn’t need more than half a dozen tools and a box of matches.

There was something peaceful to it. Maybe because they could so punitively defend themselves, there was a pact of gentility. If they had to sting, they died. If they stung, you were sore. So you were careful and respectful. You took their honey, but you fed them in winter, you kept them free of diseases. Or I did, until last summer.

The mites were everywhere. I tried being soft and hard. I used sucrocide and then chemicals, but nothing worked. In the end, I dug a hole in the ground, chucked the lot in there, and threw a match on top.

My phone started dancing on the dashboard. I put it to my ear and heard a young girl’s voice. ‘This the detective?’ The voice sounded soft and uncertain.

‘Sure, who’s this?’

‘My name’s Elisabetta di Pietro. You were with my mother this afternoon.’

I couldn’t work out how she had my number and then remembered. ‘And you found my card in her handbag?’

‘Her coat pocket actually.’ She laughed nervously. ‘Why is my mother hiring a private detective?’