‘Remind me, how long have you been in Tangier, Bet?’ he asked in the end, raising his voice over the start of the Bowie record, with its trumpets and squelchy notes. She looked at him steadily, and in the dimness of the bar, in the pungent cloud of cigar smoke, the voice from the record player seemed to be coming out of her blue eyes, singing of dead-end streets.

‘Long time,’ she said, tapping the cigar into the tray.

‘But how long?’ he pressed. ‘What year?’

She frowned at him. Information was a currency, in Tangier.

‘1951, or thereabouts,’ she said eventually. ‘After I was demobbed from the Wrens and nearly went out of my mind with boredom in Plymouth. A girlfriend got a job on a pleasure boat here, serving drinks, said I should join her.’ Bet puffed on her cigar. ‘It was the International Zone then. Anyone and everyone came here. You couldn’t move for embassies and freight companies, French, Spanish, American, Dutch, Italian, it didn’t matter. I wanted to sail so it worked for me.’ She showed a few gold teeth. ‘All those charts and radar plotting during the war, I could’ve sailed from here to Gib with my eyes closed. Fat lot of good it did. No one willing to hire a female pilot, in those days. But eventually I met … a person who ran an import-export concern.’ She slid a glance at Sam. ‘They gave me a job. Said I was the best they’d ever seen. We worked together for years after that.’

Sam smiled, trying not to let his disappointment show, but Bet caught it anyway. She laughed, blew out smoke. ‘Not what you wanted to hear?’

‘Yes, I did,’ he hurried. ‘It’s just, I found something the other day, from the late 1920s …’

As the bar grew more crowded, he found himself telling her about his trade with Abdelhamid, about the Hermes and the old writing case, the calendar in it and the letter he’d written, which – he was sure – had been taken at the café.

‘There was an old man,’ he said, over the sound of a few young Moroccan guys calling greetings to Roger from the stairs. ‘He was watching me in the mirror.’

Unlike Norton, Bet didn’t roll her eyes. She only frowned. ‘Old man,’ she repeated. ‘How old? What did he look like?’

‘Hard to say. Seventy, maybe? He was wearing dark glasses, big ones, and an old-fashioned hat. Western clothes, a suit, I think.’

Bet tapped her empty glass on the table. ‘Done something you shouldn’t have, Sam?’

The ease with which she asked it shocked him. Another reminder I’m not from her world, he thought.

‘No. I’ve not been doing anything. Apart from smoking kif.’

She snorted. ‘Well then. You’ll just have to wait until you see him again, won’t you?’