It was the woman in the pool, who stood peering up at us, her chin on her hands, hair dripping. She caught my gaze and her dark-stained lips curved into a smile.

‘Thank you, Lillian,’ said Langham. ‘Bouzid, what do you have to say about all this?’

The man who held my arm shrugged a little. ‘I do not know, monsieur.’ He hesitated. ‘It is true Monsieur Hubert arranged his own food delivery.’

‘Well,’ Langham said to his guests. ‘I’d be a poor host if I let you all go hungry. Shall it be trial by fire? Shall we give the boy a chance? Shall he cook us a midnight feast?’

Glasses were raised, people cheering in agreement. At the edge of the crowd I saw Lady Bailey, frowning at us. When I looked back, it was straight into Langham’s eyes as he smiled.

Tangier

July 1978

‘Hello?’

Sam stopped, one hand resting on a peeling wooden gate. It was open, which he hadn’t expected. Derelict buildings were usually boarded up. Unless it wasn’t derelict … But there were no signs of life, and the entrance had been overgrown. Still, he hesitated, staring at the curling iron name. Dar Portuna.

Once he stepped through the gate, he would be walking into reality, rather than the world of his imagination. Isn’t this what you wanted, he asked himself, looking down at the cracked stone threshold, where A might once have stood. The true story?

He snatched up the writing case from the dust, and stepped inside.

Green filled his eyes, a wilderness of green. He took a step forwards and smelled mint, crushed beneath his shoe. Weeds swarmed over a once-white path. Sun-baked grass hissed around old lavender plants. He pushed through them, past a fountain that stood, dry and silent.

He stopped to listen to the brief, questioning notes of birdsong, the drone of insects. It felt a thousand miles from the hot, dust-clogged streets of Tangier, and yet the casbah was just beyond the wall; if he listened carefully, he could hear the faint buzz of a moped, the blast of a ship’s horn, down in the harbour.

Pushing beneath the branch of an old, drooping lemon tree, he came face to face with the house.

It stood amongst the wilderness, surrounded and protected by it. Vines draped the doorframes, a rose bush had exploded from its bed to reach the windows. On one side, trees grew higher than the roof, shielding the house from any who might look over the walls. It must have been beautiful once, and to Sam, it still was, the perfection of the past in every line.