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small rectangles of parquet flooring. ‘He’s always been in trouble. Always.’
    ‘What kind of trouble?’
    He shrugged. ‘Money trouble. Women trouble. Career trouble. Trouble seems to follow him around as surely as his shadow. Even when we were at school he would get into scrapes. I was nine when he was born so I remember it all. He kept us up all night when he was a baby and he’s kept us up ever since.’
    I was surprised how respectable the man looked, how formal he seemed. He looked an unlikely sibling of a kidnapper. He looked up at me as if he had read my thoughts and shrugged.
    ‘We may look alike, but we had different fathers. After she was widowed my mother was briefly married to a man. I knew he was a thug. My mother found out pretty fast too, but by then she was pregnant with Fabrizio. The man left before he was even born, which is why he ended up with the same surname as me. Mother tried to wipe the man from her memory, but every time Fabrizio got into trouble she was reminded of her mistake.’
    ‘What kind of scrapes?’
    He snorted, a sort of regretful laugh. ‘It would have been easier to keep a cat in a pool than keep Fabrizio in a classroom. Every day the school would phone up to say he was absent. “But I took him into the classroom myself,” my mother would say. But he had gone to the loo and not come back. Or had gone to a bar and not returned. In the end the school forgot about him and the authorities started taking an interest. He was shoplifting, drinking. You know, the normal alternatives to education.’
    The wife came in, bring a tray of small cups and a plate of thin biscuits.
    ‘What’s his line of work?’ I asked as I spooned sugar into the coffee.
    The woman rocked her head to one side, as if to suggest it was an optimistic question.
    ‘He calls himself a photographer.’ The man did a slow-motion blink as though he didn’t believe it.
    ‘Where?’
    ‘He’s self-employed. More self than employed.’
    ‘So how does he earn money?’
    The wife was being quiet, clearly not wanting to insult her brother’s family, but her disdainful expression was eloquent enough.
    ‘He doesn’t,’ the older brother said. ‘He gets by doing wedding snaps, doing portraits of kids, that sort of stuff. But hardly anything. I would say he gets a commission once a month, if that. And his reputation unfortunately goes before him: that he takes the money and runs. Or that he will only get round to producing the photos when the happy couple already have three children.’
    ‘You said he sometimes does kids’ portraits. Has he ever been in trouble with children?’
    ‘How do you mean?’ The man’s honest eyes looked beady.
    ‘The girl who has gone missing is a very young woman. I don’t understand the motive for her abduction as yet, but I’m looking at all the options.’
    The man was still staring at me. I could see his wife out of the corner of my eye shaking her head.
    ‘Fabrizio,’ he said wearily, ‘is lazy, naïve, greedy, even dishonest. That’s all true.’ The brother was holding his coffee cup at an angle to peer at the remains. ‘But he’s not that sort. He’s never been in trouble with children.’
    I nodded, letting him know I trusted his word. ‘So what kind of trouble has he been in? And I’m not talking truancy.’
    ‘It would be quicker to say what trouble hasn’t he been in.’ He gave me a long list of petty offences. It all made Fabrizio Mori sound small fry, the sort of person who didn’t have the will or the head to go straight, but didn’t have the guile or skill to avoid arrest. He was, like most I had met, in that large middle ground occupied by incompetent crooks.
    As Massimo, the older brother, was talking I slowly realised how Fabrizio’s troubles had hurt him. Not just the money borrowed and never returned, or the trust betrayed, or the night-time phone calls from various tight spots or holding cells. It was as if having Fabrizio as his younger