He selected a few of the chunks of mortadella and cheese sculpted into letters that had formed part of the dish ‘Edible Words’, from which all the guests were supposed to eat their own names, then walked through to the former housekeeper’s office. This is where he paid his bills, kept his domestic files, and checked his emails. There were very few of the latter today, only twenty-eight new messages. He skimmed through the titles, opening some and deleting others unread. An offer for Lithuanian rights to two of his books, a request from the BBC for him to contribute to a documentary on the cultural significance of professional sport, an invitation to give a series of vapid but very highly-paid lectures in Japan, plus a selection of the usual academic tittle-tattle sent or forwarded by his friends and admirers all over the world.

He clicked open the last unopened email message. The subject header was blank and the ‘From’ box contained only a Hotmail address consisting of a string of apparently random numbers. As for the message itself, there was no text, just a line drawing-an engraving, rather-of a male hand, the thumb and index finger almost joined to form a circle.

Ugo gazed at it for some time, then walked through to his library, located in the former living and reception rooms of the villa, now knocked through to form one vast and tranquil space. Here he opened a drawer in a handsome rosewood cabinet and consulted the well-thumbed handwritten index cards inside. A minute or so later he had located the position of the volume and, having hauled over the wheeled ladder used for accessing the higher of the eight rows of shelves, was leafing through Andrea de Jorio’s classic 1832 text about southern Italian gestures and their origins in classical antiquity.