As he became accustomed to the quiet, he heard what he thought was the sound of someone talking in hushed tones in one of the adjoining bedrooms. He switched on the bedside light and sat up, and turned his head one way and then the other, trying to work out from which side of the room the voice was coming. He threw back the bedclothes and got to his feet and walked across to the wall that separated his room from Katie’s. The sound was coming from her room. He pressed his ear against the wall, and then immediately took a couple of paces back. He stood, scratching a finger thoughtfully down the side of his face as he fixed his eyes on the spot where his ear had been. Katie wasn’t talking. She was crying.

He sat for a full quarter of an hour on the edge of his bed, listening to her intermittent sobs and wondering whether he should do anything about it. Maybe she was still asleep. Maybe she would wake up in the morning and she wouldn’t know anything about it. Then he heard a definite change to the pattern. He stood up and went back to the wall and listened. The volume was fluctuating, sometimes distant, sometimes close to the wall that separated them. He knew then that Katie was awake and was moving about in the room.

He went into the bathroom and took one of the white toweling dressing gowns from the back of the door. He put it on and walked out of his bedroom into the corridor, knotting the tie on the dressing gown as he went. He stood outside Katie’s door, listening intently, his knuckle raised to knock. He thought for a moment that she had stopped, and he was about to turn and go back to his room when he heard her sobs of despair much clearer than he had done before. He gave two quiet taps on the door.

“Katie?” he whispered.

There was no reply.

“Kate, it’s Dan.” He knew as soon as he had said it that he shouldn’t have done so. He had only called her Kate because it sounded softer and less likely to disturb the other hotel guests. But it was Patrick who called her that. No one else.

The door flew open and Katie appeared and she threw her arms around him. The action opened up the top half of his dressing gown and she pushed her spiky brown hair against his bare chest.

“Oh, Dan! Oh, Dan!” she said in a voice that echoed down the corridor.

Dan glanced around him. “Ssh, Katie. You’ll wake everyone up.”

She reached a hand behind his neck and pulled his face down towards her and kissed him on the mouth and he felt her tongue trying to prise open his mouth. He flinched away.