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I paused, trying to think of the tactful way to say it, ‘had trouble with in the past.’
    He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. ‘Who?’
    ‘Fabrizio Mori.’
    His eyes narrowed and he nodded slowly. ‘Mori, eh?’ He lit the gas under the coffee maker and opened a cupboard door to pull out two little white cups. ‘I don’t really see how I can help you. That was a long time ago.’
    ‘I haven’t got much else to go on.’ I held his stare. ‘I’m contacting anyone who might be able to help me find that girl.’
    He nodded. ‘How old is she?’
    ‘Only eighteen.’
    ‘And she’s definitely with Mori?’
    ‘Seems that way.’
    He smiled as if he were in pain. ‘He always was a piece of shit. If I hadn’t taken him on he would still be snapping away, blackmailing anyone with a secret this side of Istanbul. He was the worst sort of hustler.’
    ‘I heard you were one of his victims.’
    He nodded. ‘I was playing for Roma at the time.’ He glazed over, as if he were either bored or nostalgic. ‘I had just broken into the first team and had scored a couple of goals. When that happens, you find that every time you go out there’s a queue of women wanting to throw themselves at you.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘My marriage was over by then anyway. My wife had had a fling with one of my team-mates, a guy from the same part of France as her. Everyone knew about it. So one night I went out and met a girl. She was uninhibited, but like I said, when you’re a footballer, you don’t meet girls who aren’t. She was forward, and we ended up, you know . . .’
    Behind him I could see a huge plasma screen on the wall. He looked like the kind of bachelor who had remote controls for company. The coffee roared its arrival and he poured it out. He took the cups on their little saucers over to a kitchen island and motioned me to sit down on one of the designer stools. It had a small black leather seat and a tiny leather backrest. There was a circle of metal towards the bottom to rest your feet on. It felt like balancing on a toothpick.
    ‘Then what happened?’
    ‘A few weeks later I got a call from a friend of mine. I thought he was a friend. A guy who used to work on one of those glossy mags about the rich and famous. He’d run a couple of decent stories about me in the past, you know, photo shoots of me at home playing the happy family man, touting me as a future captain of his country. You know, really puffing me up. He and I had had a couple of drinks now and then.’ He spooned some sugar into his cup and stirred it slowly, looking at the brown liquid before knocking it back. ‘So he phoned me up and said he wanted to warn me of something they had got hold of. Some photographer was touting around photos of me doing lines of coke with a topless girl. He said he thought I should know and did I want him to put me in touch with the photographer. He suggested I could make a higher bid for the snaps to keep them out of the public domain.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘I got the photographer’s name and took it to the police.’
    ‘That was brave.’
    ‘My marriage was over anyway, and everyone else I knew was doing similar things. I underestimated the hypocrisy. I was sacked and dropped down the leagues.’
    ‘And Mori did time?’
    ‘A bit. He had made enough money to make it worthwhile, from what I heard.’
    ‘Not from what I’ve seen.’
    He looked up at me. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘He’s living in a caravan site a two-hour bus ride out of town.’
    ‘Like I said, this was twenty years ago. I’m sure he’s spent it since then.’
    A young woman came into the kitchen looking like she had just got out of bed. She was wearing a thin cotton nightgown so you could see the silhouette of her perfect figure against the light.
    ‘My daughter,’ Marinelli said under his breath.
    She ignored us, but must have been aware of our presence since she put a hand self-consciously into her slept-on hair. She made some toast