‘The place is full of ghosts,’ she mutters.

‘What?’

‘They should do something.’

Daniele regards her from his lofty perch with a gaze as unblinking as the gull’s.

‘Who should?’

Ada shrugs vaguely.

‘The authorities. I’m thinking of calling them, making a complaint.’

Daniele Trevisan waves his hands and sighs.

‘Come up a minute, Ada. Sit down and have a cup of coffee and a chat.’

She looks at him and shakes her head.

‘I must be getting home.’

‘Don’t call the police!’ he implores her. ‘You don’t want to start telling people you’ve been seeing ghosts again.’

‘There was mud on the floor,’ says Ada Zulian, but he doesn’t hear.

‘Keep the police out of it!’ insists Daniele. ‘If you need to talk to anyone, talk to me.’

Ada hefts her bags and goes on her way with a smile and a nod. Why is he so anxious that she should not phone the police? There is no doubt in Ada’s mind that she is dealing with something real. The other time, with Rosetta, there had never been anything tangible. How she would have treasured it, if there had! But she had always known at heart that the little girl she had so desperately called home night after night, until some exasperated neighbour finally denounced her to the police, had never really been there in the first place. That frail and vulnerable figure lurking in the shadows at the edge of her mind had always been as insubstantial as thought, and Ada’s frantic attempts to summon her nothing more than someone crying out in their sleep.

But this is different. She told Daniele two things, but as usual he only heard the one he wanted to hear, the one which fitted his idea of mad old Ada and her ghosts. He completely ignored what she said about the mud. But Ada has seen the mud. She has touched it and smelt it. She knows it’s real, and she also knows that ghosts don’t leave footprints behind them. So they can’t be ghosts, the figures who haunt her house and scuttle along the margins of her life. What, then?