Sentry huts, men in uniform, guns at their hips. They were stopping every person who tried to cross, men with mules and wagons, women on foot, even children.

‘What’s this?’ I croaked, my throat thick with road dust.

‘Border,’ one of the sunburned men in the back yawned. ‘They’re checking papers.’

Papers. I had none. But worse than that: what if the news from Córdoba had arrived ahead of me? What if the soldiers had been ordered to keep watch for a young woman of my description? The driver released the brake on the van, and it began to roll forwards.

‘Gracias,’ I gabbled, and the next thing I knew I was jumping from the back of the van. I landed badly, half-sprawling in the grit on my knee. I got up immediately and began to walk without looking back, though the men behind me called out, ‘Sister!’

I didn’t know where I was going. I just wanted to be away from the soldiers and the uniforms, and their sharp eyes. And so, I made for the sea, for my new love, washing at the edge of the beach like the brightest silk coverlet ever sewn.

The sand beneath my boots made me start but it did not slow me down. When I reached the shallows, I dipped my hands and brought them to my face. The water was fierce, it stung my sunburned skin and bruised nose and it burned my tongue. It made my eyes stream, as if the salt in my body wanted to greet its long-lost cousin.

When I straightened, I found that I could barely stand, could barely keep my eyes open in the heat. It was exhaustion that made me lie down in a strip of shade, concealed between two fishing boats. There, surrounded by the strange mineral reek of drying seaweed and crusted barnacles, I slept.

Tangier

July 1978

Sam hurried along the Rue Dar-el Baroud, his throat raw from running. A wind had picked up, scudding across the city, bearing its load of grit and sand towards the Mediterranean. The night sky was tinged pink, bloody at the edges and in his sudden fever he felt as though some djinn was whirling around him. A night for wild schemes, he thought.

He’d passed the Hotel Continental many times but, like the El Minzah, had never been in. It stood at the very edge of the casbah, past the Grand Mosque, built out of the old city walls, staring seaward like a grand dame decked in jewels, her face turned away from the shabby city at her heel.