'I'd always heard that Count Ghirardini had a real reputation for being eccentric. He was famous for his game hunts in Africa and other exotic places. I don't know much more than that, other than that he was quite private and reputed to be very strange.'

'I'd say there's little doubt about that. Anyway, this is Reggiani's dream: seeing that animal pumped full of lead and filled with straw in some museum.'

Francesca leaned closer to illuminate the creature with her candle, but all of a sudden, part of the fur caught on fire. She cried out and Fabrizio tore off his jacket and hit the animal's side hard to put out the flames.

'Careful with that thing! This whole place might have burned down!' he said.

Francesca held out her hand for the torch and shone it at the scorched coat to see how bad the damage was. She looked astonished at what she was seeing. 'Will you look at that . . .'

'Look at what?' asked Fabrizio.

'It's fake.'

'That's not possible.'

'Look for yourself' She tapped her knuckles against the animal's side. 'It's wood. It's not an animal at all. It's an extremely realistic sculpture. As if Ghirardini, or whoever it was, had wanted to reproduce something that he'd seen but couldn't have in his collection. If we had the time to search through here, I'll bet we'd find sketches, drawings, notes. I'm sure of it.'

'So Ghirardini saw it too,' he said, raising his eyes to Francesca's. 'The animal has to be somehow connected to this place.'

'Do you want to scare me to death? Come on. Let's get out now. The little boy's not here, Fabrizio.'

She hadn't finished saying that when they heard a noise, in the distance, followed by a louder, sharper one.

'What was that?' asked Francesca.

'I don't know. It sounded strange.'

'Is it coming from outside?'

'No, it's coming from inside. From upstairs, maybe . . .'

'Fabrizio, it's definitely coming from outside. I can tell. Let's get out of here.'

'No, I was wrong. It's coming from downstairs. Hear that?'

'But there is no one downstairs a you saw that for yourself.'

'Maybe we didn't look closely enough.'

'Yes, we did. I want to leave, now.'

'To leave we have to go back downstairs, don't we? We can't just walk out of the front door.'

Francesca gave in. 'All right, then. Let's go downstairs to see. At least I won't have to look at these revolting animals anymore.'

They descended the stairs to the first floor and then went down the narrow steps leading from the corner of the main hall to the floor below. The sound was becoming sharper and more distinct. Hammering, against something hard: the ground, perhaps, or a wall.

'See! I told you it was coming from down here,' said Fabrizio.

'I really am scared now.'

'Come on. Nothing's going to happen. Maybe someone else fell through the hole, ended up somewhere down below and is just trying to get out.'

'Fabrizio, there's nothing but an empty, doorless room down there, cut into the tufa,' said Francesca, grabbing on to his arm as he continued to descend slowly.

'So that's all we'll see,' replied Fabrizio, setting his foot on the last step.

A slight luminescence shone from the room below, like the light of a candle. Fabrizio put his head around the corner as the noise stopped abruptly and directed the torch beam at the middle of the room. He stood gaping open-mouthed at what he saw.

It was Angelo, covered in mud from head to toe, and he was holding the missing bronze fragment in his hand. A candle stub at his feet let off a tiny glow.

The child smiled as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

'See?' he said. 'I know how to be an archaeologist. So, can I stay with you now?'

15.

FABRIZIO DREW CLOSER carefully, slowly, as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing, as if that vision might vanish from one moment to the next. Angelo was standing hunched over in front of him, bowed under the weight of what for him was a very heavy bronze slab. He didn't seem frightened or upset, or even uncomfortable, in that dark underground chamber. He looked like he had been biding his time, waiting for this very encounter.

'Do you want to . . . give it to me?' asked Fabrizio, holding out his arms.

The boy nodded and handed over the slab.

Fabrizio took it as he nodded to Francesca. 'This is Angelo.'

'It's a pleasure, Angelo. I'm Francesca,' she said, extending her hand.

Fabrizio noticed a pickaxe at the corner of the room, along with a pile of freshly dug earth, and asked, 'How did you know where it was? Do you know who put it here?'

But the child seemed suddenly alarmed, as he strained to hear sounds that the others were unaware of. 'We have to get out of here before she finds us. Hurry. This way, fast . . . She's coming.'

He was frightened now. He had taken Francesca's hand and was tugging her towards the staircase. She gave Fabrizio a look and all three of them started up the steps. They reached the main hall and moved towards the front entrance. Angelo stood on tiptoe to push back the latch of the secondary door and Francesca immediately went forward to give him a hand, but it was stuck and would not move. Fabrizio had no better luck: the door had been bolted from the outside.

Angelo seemed paralysed for an instant, then looked up at his companions and said, 'This way. Come on a follow me.'

He turned back and retraced his steps until he was halfway down the hall, then opened a side door and started to run down a long, dusty corridor filled with cobwebs.

Fabrizio was weighed down by the slab and was having trouble keeping up, but Angelo kept turning to say, 'Hurry! We have to get out.'

He moved easily through that sinister place, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms leading into each other like a strange set of dominoes. Rats and beetles, the denizens of those abandoned halls, would start at the sudden intrusion and the wildly aimed torch beam, racing for shelter under rickety, worm-eaten furniture and behind old picture frames leaning up against the walls. All at once, while running through a larger room, the boy stopped for a moment to glance at a big canvas that depicted a man who appeared to be the master of the house standing alongside a large desk bearing a marble bust of Dante Alighieri. Jacopo Ghirardini, perhaps?

'Do you know who that is?' asked Fabrizio, panting.

The boy didn't answer, hurriedly taking off down a very narrow final corridor, more of a passageway between two solid stone walls, at the end of which a milky light appeared to be filtering through from the outside. A thick iron grating covered an aperture of about fifty centimetres by one metre, secured by a bolt. Angelo slid the bolt open and pushed but nothing happened.

'You push,' he said to Fabrizio. 'You're stronger. Maybe there's something outside blocking it.'

Fabrizio set the bronze slab down and applied all his strength, but the grating did not budge. He stuck his hand through and his fingers curled around a chain closed with a heavy padlock.

'Damn. There's a chain. Didn't you know it was there?' he asked Angelo.

The little boy shook his head with a baffled expression. That curious air of confidence had completely vanished.

'The cellar,' said Fabrizio to Francesca. 'We'll go back down to where we got in and I'll push you up on my shoulders. Once you're out, you can help Angelo out too and I'll get out somehow as well. We have to hurry. I'm afraid the torch batteries are running down and we won't get anywhere if we can't see.'

Their haste and the child's bewilderment had made them frantic, as if the building itself were about to collapse around them from one moment to the next. They descended underground and stumbled back along the path they'd taken, but when they got to the air vent they saw that the grating had been returned to its original position.

'Damn! That's all we need,' swore Fabrizio. 'We're trapped.'

'Wait! Maybe not,' said Francesca. 'Maybe a policeman or night watchman came by and pushed the grating back in place so that no one would fall in. Help me get up there. I'll bet you it's still loose.'

Angelo was becoming more and more nervous. He kept checking behind him and begging, 'Hurry, please. We have to get out of here.'

When Fabrizio had put down the slab, Francesca took off her shoes and climbed on to his shoulders. She could easily reach the grate and gave it a big heave, but it didn't budge a centimetre.

Fabrizio heard her sigh, 'Oh, my God, no . . .'

'It's locked, isn't it?'

'It is,' she replied, dropping from his shoulders. 'From the outside. What do we do now?'

'We stay calm,' said Fabrizio. He switched off the torch to save on the batteries and continued: 'I really hate to look so stupid, but we have no choice. I'm calling Reggiani.'

He switched on his mobile phone but there was no signal.

'This is not looking good,' said Francesca in a tone that could not mask her rising panic.

'All right. If we can't get out from down here or from a side entrance, well get out from above. I'll go up that damned spiral staircase to the attic. There's got to be a skylight or dormer or something. We'll get out on to the roof, call Reggiani and have him come to get us.'

'That sounds good,' said Francesca without much enthusiasm.

'You and Angelo wait here. There's no sense going together. But I'll need the torch. You don't mind being in the dark for a while, do you?'

Francesca replied that she wasn't afraid, but he could see she was terrified. Fabrizio held her close and kissed her, then gave Angelo a pat and was off.

He made his way back to the main hall, looking carefully in every direction before starting up the spiral staircase. At each floor he was greeted by a spectacle similar to or worse than the one before: long rows of stuffed animals of every description a vultures and wide-winged condors, cats, skunks and weasels with sharp little teeth glinting in the pale beam of the torch, martens and wolves, dogs and foxes and even snakes, huge pythons, boas and anacondas, gape-jawed cobras immobilized in the act of pouncing on imaginary, unsuspecting victims.

He climbed the last ramp to the top-floor landing, opened the little door that led to the attic and shone the light inside. His heart jumped into his throat at the nightmare scene in front of his eyes: there were human beings in the attic, stuffed like the exotic animals downstairs. Tribal peoples from distant lands, nude males and females gripping spears, frozen in obscene expressions and wizened smirks. Fabrizio backed up and pulled the door shut, but then decided that he had to overcome his repugnance at that infernal vision and push on. He took a long, deep breath to restore a normal beat to the heart leaping about inside his chest, then opened the door and walked into that forest of mummies. Many had been gnawed at by rodents and their bones were showing. They all had glass eyes, like the foxes and vultures below.

He inspected the roof thoroughly without finding any exit a not a skylight, dormer or window of any sort. Between one beam and the next, the ceiling was completely lined with lead sheeting and he was unsurprised to realize that he couldn't get a phone signal up there either. The place was sealed shut. The whole huge building was as airtight as an intact tomb. When he returned to the cellar to give them the bad news he was wheezing and covered with cobwebs.

'You look terrible,' said Francesca. 'What else did you see up there?'

Fabrizio did not answer. He knelt next to the child and grasped him by the shoulders. 'Listen carefully, Angelo. Are you sure there is no other way out? I remember clearly that I saw you going into that little door at the front.'

'I watched where she put the key and when she didn't leave it, I got in and out that way, like today,' he said, pointing at the closed grating.

'What can we do?' asked Francesca. 'Unfortunately, no one even knows we're in here.'

'We'll wait until dawn and start yelling.'

'If there's anyone out there to hear us.'

'Right. Someone has to hear us.'

'Wait! Maybe I have a better idea.' Francesca switched on her computer again and started hitting the keys.

'What are you trying to do?' asked Fabrizio.

'I just remembered that there's an email I downloaded a couple of days ago but never got around to reading. It might be the updated map of underground Volterra incorporating the eighteenth-century Malavolti survey information. The topographical centre has been working on it for some time and they usually send me an update at the end of the month. So, let's take a look . . . See, here, if we're lucky . . .'

Fabrizio had turned off the torch and the only light in the underground chamber came from the glow of the computer screen, where Francesca had found what she wanted and was now exploring patiently, searching for an escape route.

Fabrizio turned to the child, who was trembling with cold and fear. He chatted quietly in an attempt to distract him: 'When I saw you slipping through that door the other day, I couldn't help but wonder why you were here, what you could be doing in a big old empty place like this all on your own. So, will you tell me now?'

'I come to see my father.'

'Where is your father?'

The child motioned upwards with his eyes.

The painting?'

Angelo nodded.

'You're Jacopo Ghirardini's son?'

The little boy nodded again.

'Are you sure?'

Angelo began speaking in a strange little voice. 'My father is in here, I know he is. I come to visit him whenever I can. Without letting my stepmother know, or she beats me.'

'How do you get around in the dark?'

'With a torch.'

'A torch like this one?'

Another nod.

'You've got one in here?'