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and opened the fridge to get some butter. She took out the milk and poured herself a large glass, and then put the lot on a tray and left.
    ‘I barely saw her as a child,’ Marinelli said wistfully. ‘It’s like we’re living in this house as strangers, not sure how to treat each other. I think she sees me as a cheap hotel.’
    ‘All children do.’
    ‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘It’s just I’m not used to it. Her mother left soon after the scandal, they went home. I took a job out there coaching when I retired, you know, to be close to her, but she doesn’t even remember it.’ He stared at the wall. ‘You can hardly blame her. I came back here after a year as my mother was dying. In the space of a few years I lost everything.’ He stared at me with a grim, embittered expression. ‘Career, wife, daughter, mother.’
    ‘And it was Mori that took it from you.’
    He looked upwards and sighed. ‘I took it from myself. I threw it away.’ He was shaking his head. ‘That’s what everyone does in their twenties – with money, with love, with whatever. Only most people that age don’t have everything: the children possibly, but not the beautiful wife and certainly not the money. A footballer does, he has it all in his teens if he’s lucky, and it’s all over so soon. I just didn’t know what I had. I threw it away.’
    ‘Mori played his part.’
    Marinelli stared at me and realised I was trying to provoke him. He nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, he was a cunning bastard too. The girl I was with that night, well . . .’ He was looking at the floor, frowning slightly. ‘She went missing soon afterwards.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘She went missing,’ he said it louder, like I was stupid. ‘Anna Sartori was her name. It was all over the papers back in the early nineties. It became quite a story for a while. You know, “nubile escort goes missing”. It kind of spooks me now, to think about it.’
    ‘And? What happened?’
    ‘That was it. She was never found.’
    We sat there in silence for a while. He was staring at the floor, nodding slowly as if he were rerunning his past in his head.
    ‘And you think Mori was responsible?’
    He shrugged without moving his gaze from the matt beige tiles. ‘As far as I was concerned, he was capable of anything.’
    ‘But if he was making money from honey traps, why dispose of the honey?’
    Marinelli shrugged again. ‘They probably fell out. She might have wanted to testify against him. Maybe she knew too many secrets.’
    ‘What was she like, this Anna Sartori?’
    ‘I liked her. She was beautiful, cute. I had no idea she was part of a blackmail scam. And, in a strange way, I don’t think she really knew what was going on. When he started asking me for money, I assumed she had been in on the racket with him. And when I ran into her in a club a few months later, I confronted her and told her what I thought of her. I insulted her pretty colourfully and she didn’t get it. She looked all confused. It turns out she didn’t really understand what was going on herself.’
    I frowned. It seemed improbable. He saw my doubt and explained, closing his eyes as he did so.
    ‘Those kind of parties didn’t have many rules. There could be a couple making out on the sofa next to you. Someone would pull out a bag of cash or gear. It didn’t even seem unusual to me after a while. With all the strobe lights you wouldn’t notice someone taking a flash photo. You wouldn’t think twice about a topless girl sitting next to you. That’s what it was like.’
    ‘So this girl didn’t know someone was snapping away?’
    He put his chin to one side. ‘She knew him, knew that he was taking photos. But she thought it was to promote her, to get her into the papers. That’s what all those girls cared about. They would have done anything, anything to get their left ankle in one of those magazines. So she was free and easy, happy to let Mori snap away as she thought that was the way to the